Though it took my dad a bit longer, he managed to quit for good when I was a kid. Still died of lung disease at 80, but I have to think it would likely have been much sooner if he'd never quit. Anyway, watching him struggle with it when I was young definitely make me repulsed by cigarettes (and most other addictive substances) such that I've certainly never been tempted to try them.

Back in 2012 I switched almost entirely from bookmarking to web clipping into Evernote, which has been great. Evernote itself has gone downhill, and at some point soon I'll probably migrate my collection to Obsidian (which has its own web clipper), but I'm still a big advocate of the general practice. It is indeed great to have a searchable record of stuff you've bookmarked vs just a tree of links that you'll soon forget exist.

The trouble with running a trade deficit is that you have to "borrow" to finance it, so you issue bonds. But once the bonds become due you need to issue more bonds to replace those that expired. BUT the new issue is the original bond + its interest rate. So the deficit you are financing with bonds is growing effectively at the interest rate of the bond. It gets to the point where the debt is self sustaining, regardless of what you do in the "real" economy. The only way to stop the spiral is devalue the currency (the market wont let the fed do that they just bid up the dollar - its has become a global currency) so the next way to do it is force interest rates down...but that causes inflation because people can borrow and waste more without the increase in productivity, that normal investment should produce. Someone has to pay for all this political stupidity and it will almost certainly be the poorest in society and the small businesses.

That's true in a sense of the overall trade deficit, but not in terms of specific trade deficits with individual countries, which seems to be Trump's focus.

Even looking at the overall case though, there is an alternate way of looking at it, which is that the trade imbalance must be equal to the imbalance between domestic savings and investment. There was a NY Fed article last year that was discussed on HN and covered this well: https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2025/05/why-do... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44040407

So again, I think the domestic imbalance plays a larger part than this analysis gives credit. (And per my original comment, the government portion of national saving is made up of, basically, taxes minus government spending, so - while the effect is complicated because taxation also affects private spending and investment - increased taxation could be expected to reduce trade deficits.)

Basically I don't think there's an economic justification for tariffs as a solution to trade imbalances, overall or (especially) bilateral. (Bilateral trade imbalances really shouldn't be seen as a problem at all. As the saying goes, I have a trade deficit with my grocery store, but that's not a bad thing.) There are situations where they can make sense in order to strategically protect specific industries for security or long-term growth reasons, but that's a separate issue, and the key word there is strategically, something I'm not seeing a lot of.

Yes, the US started this scrapping of de minimis exemptions.

Problem is I don't want a spiritual successor. I want an actual successor that would build on the Starcraft universe, but in an RTS.

If you're a fan of single player checkout the mod scene. It's very good. UED First Light is excellent.

Per mile driven I expect it's true, just given their greater experience than most drivers. Not that I disagree with you that many Uber drivers are not actually great at driving, but neither is the average driver in North America. I expect we just notice rideshare drivers' mistakes more, and get exposed to them at a greater rate.

There's probably some sort of bias here when you observe someone else driving - it's like that joke - if someone drives slower than you - just curl up and die already boomer, and if they are driving faster than you - what an absolute psychopath.

I do agree that Lambert's coverage of Tesla appears to be pretty one-sided, and that the company has provided significant benefits to the world, but I also think there's a reasonable case to be made that Musk himself is a uniquely deleterious figure, even if the harm he brings isn't with his bare hands.

That may be true, but I feel that is a separate conversation (whether Elon Musk and his companies, taken whole, have had net good or net bad contributions to the world) from Lambert's coverage, which seems to pick any single _event_ and select the most heinous, corrupt, version full of malicious intent when often unwarranted, extremely bad faith and never adds informational value to that larger debate.

I can't speak for everything the author has written about Tesla, but I don't see any intent stated or implied in this particular article. Instead it seems to mostly be accurately describing an action taken by Tesla that doesn't cast the company in an especially good light. That's not bad journalism just because some people might like Tesla or Musk and want to give them the benefit of the doubt or downplay anything negative they might do.

It's there via omission. Others have said in these threads that the concept of an HVAC company or others investing in a particular manufacturer, does cost them money, and that can change over time. It's not unique to Tesla, but the writing, by way of omitting this.

"That is the bind Tesla’s certified installers are in: dependent on a brand that just walked away from a product line they built a business around, while still needing to sell its remaining hardware."

there is _nothing_ unique about that situation. That could happen with any company.

It's the cost of doing business. training your workforce, etc. Clearly these companies are happy to sell other Tesla products to the point where they don't want to jeopardize those relationships.

Having the generator as backup means you need a lot less battery though, so it saves weight overall.

I would bet that llms have talked plenty of people both into and out of suicide at this point. That nitpick aside, I think that's an excellent list. Especially being able to articulate what it does and doesn't know, or how confident it is. That's something that naively sounds pretty simple, but clearly isn't. And it's something humans aren't great at either (see: Dunning-Kruger), but so far LLMs don't even really have the capability to attempt it.

If the culture shifted such that people were skeptical of original results but excited about replication, replication would be the big news and people would want to do it. How to get there, I don't know.

I seem to remember a lot of hype about room-temperature superconductors, that croaked upon [lack of] replication. That wasn't too long ago.

Before that, cold fusion.

We still have the ion drive that doesn't require fuel. I don't think it has ever been successfully replicated, but I think that it also hasn't been successfully repudiated, either.

This kind of thing has been going on for a long time. I suspect that not all of it is deliberate fraud, but rather, people wanting their preconceived bias to be satisfied.

Replicating superconductor experiment gives you the conductor and the skill.

Both of them are useful as is.

Replicating a social experiment, when successful, don't give you anything new.

No, that would never happen. People would just be skeptical of most findings until they see replications (where we are headed in the social sciences, anyway). If people see replications the original discoverer will get all the accolades, not the (several) replications.

Or maybe we shouldnt call anything "science" until it assumes replication of foundational results.

Physics solved this quite some time ago.

Then it "replication" becomes a target and thus would be gamed instead.

This is a constant tug of war..