For anyone else who was gonna check: yes, it’s the fifth circuit.

Thanks for the reminder! I had switched to Lawnchair, but I just realized I had forgotten to uninstall Nova. Fixed!

Doesn’t even need to. He’s been frequently citing polls carried out by CPAC, which show him having a 93% approval rating. Why bother with troublesome reality?

It’s also worth noting that the decision explicitly addressed the question of corruption, and concluded that unlimited spending on campaigns could not create corruption, or even “the appearance of corruption.”

There was precedent that even if actual corruption was not happening, just things seeming corrupt could erode faith in our institutions and in democracy. So they had to address this and claim that unlimited campaign contributions in exchange for favorable treatment by the new administration wouldn’t even appear corrupt. They did that by redefining corruption to mean only an explicit quid pro quo, where what each side would do was spelled out, and not just a general “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” arrangement, which under this new definition would be totally fine. So the government could openly cater to the needs of moneyed special interests instead of those of the people, and that definitely wouldn’t make the public feel that government no longer represented their interests.

Talk about “egregiously wrong from the start.”

Yeah. OP’s alternate scenario, where there’s not supposed to be a way to get the million, is a lot more fragile, since then there’s a huge incentive to get the intelligence to screw up its prediction.

In the original setup, where you can choose either the jackpot box or both the jackpot and $1000 boxes, that incentive basically goes away. Like, maybe you successfully change the odds to 25% $1M, 25% $1.001M, 25% $1000, and 25% $0 (assuming the intelligence’s ability to predict the coin flip is no better than chance). But in the original problem, depending on your analysis, you’ve either got a 99.999% chance of $1M (based on the one-box camp’s analysis of taking one box), or you’ve got a 100% chance of getting $1000 more than you would by taking one box (based on the two-box camp’s analysis of taking two boxes). It doesn’t seem to me that a 25% chance of getting $0 would seem like an improvement to either of those camps.

So yeah. The scenario OP describes would be a lot more broken, because people’s behavior would be much more chaotic.

I mean, this was my first question as well. If you say “I don’t trust that guy with my kids,” then you also should not be leaving that person alone with your kids. If you do leave him alone with your kids, people aren’t wrong to say that you very much are trusting him with them.

So I think it’s legitimate to ask whether they mean they “don’t trust Chinese and US firms with their data” in the sense that they do not provide their data to them, or just in the sense that they do give them a bunch of data, and then feel misgivings about it.

Which, y’know, it’s something you have a limited degree of control over, certainly, and we don’t want to fall too much into blaming the victims. But as someone who didn’t manage to actually get off Facebook until last year, I definitely felt for a long while before that like I was complicit in my own exploitation, and contributing to a societal problem. I think even the people still there know that cancelling it is the low-hanging fruit in terms of reducing the amount of data in the hands of dubious firms.

I think the idea is that this particular drug isn’t suitable as birth control, but having identified that this mechanism/biological pathway can work for birth control, they can look for a less toxic compound to achieve the same effect.

I dunno if that’s always the case. I still love The Phantom Tollbooth.

On the other hand, I remember being really frustrated by a phrase from another book. (I think it was “Kneeknock Rise”? I remember exactly nothing else about this book, though, so it might not be that.) It was a description of a scene, and it said the dog was asleep, “arms and legs akimbo.” Now, I was in… maybe third or fourth grade, so I had never encountered the word “akimbo” before, and asked my parents what it meant. They explained that “arms akimbo” was basically the only phrase in which it’s used, and it means having your arms out to your sides with your elbows bent and your hands on your hips. But this just confused me further, because the book said “arms and legs akimbo.” I had no idea what it was trying to describe, and could not picture it. I tried to draw a picture of what it seemed to be describing, and continued to find it baffling. My parents agreed that was odd, and suggested I talk to my teacher about it. The teacher was very dismissive, though, saying “well, obviously you’ve never had a dog, or you’d know exactly what they’re talking about.” Which…what? Why would you even say that to a curious kid? Couldn’t you at least draw a doodle of what it looks like?

So yeah, being forced to stick with a book you don’t like does leave a very strong negative impression.

Extreme solopsist?

The song of my people.

That would be the short story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut.