That just means you need to change your business model to one where the longer people stay, the more they spend. In the case of services around EV chargers, the sweet spot is about 30 minutes. You want to structure your offerings so that it takes a half hour to consume most of your amenities. Have a few extra options for people who might stay longer, but 30 minutes is the target.

So, what do you offer people who are traveling (other than fuel)? Bathrooms, obviously, but that only takes five minutes and you can't charge any money for it (not in the US, anyway; people expect bathrooms to be free for paying customers). If you're selling them gasoline, there's not much time left after the bathroom break, so you offer them snacks and sodas. If you're selling them electricity, you still have them for 25 minutes, which is just about right for a fast food meal plus some snacks for the road.

Your advantage with EV chargers is that your customer base is more "captive". With gasoline cars, they'll often stop for gas, then head to a restaurant a few miles down the road, maybe in the next town. But with EVs, they eat within walking distance of the chargers. They'll often do some shopping, too, if you can find the right goods.

One option to exploit this is to build amenities around your chargers, the "travel plaza" model. Another is to find a location with good travel amenities and put your chargers there, getting local businesses to pay you for the customers you bring them.

I hope that you either find peace, or that otherwise that your inevitable suicide is painless.

The comments here demonstrate a lot of AI Effect, to the point that most of it is clearly wishful thinking plus lack of experience with current-generation LLMs.

This whole debate is a little weird to me, because unassisted suicide is very easy, and cheap. Out of an abundance of caution I'll refrain from describing common cheap, painless, easy methods, but the information is very easy to obtain online. So it seems to me that the issue really only arises if the patient is already severely debilitated by their illness, such that they lack either physical capacity to carry it out. Those situations occur, of course, but they're far less common that the scope of the debate would seem to imply.

Thus, I think the first step any regulation should apply is to ask the question "Is the patient physically capable of unassisted suicide"? If the answer is yes, then no one may assist, except to provide information. This alone should filter out nearly all of the "greedy relatives" cases. If there's a case of an individual who says they want to die, and is physically capable of doing it but just can't bring themselves to... IMO that's a case of someone who hasn't really decided they want to.

Remember back in the early days when they were pretending that they weren't an illegal taxi service, but rather were just normal people "sharing a ride" to where they wanted to go anyway, and so called it "rideshare" to avoid prosecution?

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Happy to: It has NO VALUE.

The problem here is that your definition of "value" is invalid. Your claim is equivalent to saying that shares of Apple stock have value because we have built systems to ensure that ownership of them is unique and non-duplicable, and that the supply is finite. But that is not what makes shares of Apple stock valuable. What makes them valuable is that they represent partial ownership of a company that produces and sells hundreds of millions of useful devices every year, among other things, and generates hundreds of billions in profits.

Shares of stock, dollars and bitcoins are all non-duplicable, finite-quantity tokens, but the shares of stock and dollars are tokens that represent something in the real world, while bitcoins represent nothing beyond proof that some electricity and some hardware was diverted to create them and transact them, rather than put to a productive purpose.

Yes, it's true that the guarantees of the non-duplicability and finite quantity are stronger for the coins than the others, which could theoretically make bookkeeping easier and reduce the need for auditing of transactions, but it turns out that the cryptoasset guarantees are hugely more expensive than the old way of bookkeeping and auditing, and the non-reversibility of crypto transactions is a fatal flaw for serious real-world use (though it's a boon for scams). If cryptoassets were easier and cheaper to exchange than traditional methods, and if there were a good way to address the reversibility gap, it would make sense for countries and companies to switch to using crypto-tokens rather than audited database entries. Maybe someday someone will invent a crypto-token design that achieves that, and then we'll trade shares of Apple stock by exchanging tokens on a blockchain (or similar). But even if we do that, it will still be the case that it's the ownership of a productive enterprise that provides value, not the token, no matter how elegant the cryptography.

Note that I'm not saying this because I don't understand the cryptography behind cryptoassets. I'm a mathematician and a professional cryptographic security engineer; this stuff is literally my day job, and has been for most of my 35-year career. I deeply understand the (actually quite simple, though cleverly assembled) cryptography and precisely what it does and doesn't do. It strongly ensures that there is a limited supply and that coins cannot be double-spent, and it does this in a decentralized way. That's it. The limited supply and non-duplicability are properties required of any asset, but aren't what give an asset value.

My level of pessimism about things like regrowing limbs has declined a lot in recent years. I mean, there's literally a treatment to regrow whole teeth in human clinical trials right now in Japan, after having past clinical trials with mice and ferrets.

In the past, "medicine" was primarily small molecules, or at best preexisting proteins. But we've entered an era where we can create arbitrary proteins to target other proteins, or to control gene expression, or all sorts of other things; the level of complexity open to us today is vastly higher than it used to be. And at the same time, our level of understanding about the machinery of bodily development has also been taking off. So it will no longer come across as such a huge shock to me if we get to the point where we can regrow body parts lost to accidents, to cancer, etc etc.

Whether someone is "curable" or not doesn't affect the GP's point. A friend of mine has ALS. He faced nonstop pressure from doctors to choose to kill himself. Believe it or not, just because you've been diagnosed with an incurable disease doesn't make you suddenly wish to not be alive. He kept pushing back (often withholding what he wanted to say, which is "If I was YOU, I'd want to die too."), and also fighting doctors on his treatment (for example, their resistance to cough machines, which have basically stopped him from drowning in his own mucus), implementing extreme backup systems for his life support equipment (he's a nuclear safety engineer), and the nonstop struggle to get his nurses to do their jobs right and to pay attention to the warning sirens (he has a life-threatening experience once every couple months thanks to them, sometimes to the point of him passing out from lack of air).

But he's gotten to see his daughter grow up, and she's grown up with a father. He's been alive for something like 12 years since his diagnosis, a decade fully paralyzed, and is hoping to outlive the doctor who told him he was going to die within a year and kept pushing him to die. He's basically online 24/7 thanks to an eye tracker, recently resumed work as an advisor to a nuclear startup, and is constantly designing (in CAD**) and "building" things (his father and paid labour function as his hands; he views the world outside his room through security cameras).

He misses food and getting to build things himself, and has drifted apart from old friends due to not being able to "meet up", but compared to not being alive, there was just no choice. Yet so many people pressured him over the years to kill himself. And he finds it maddening how many ALS patients give in to this pressure from their doctors, believing that it's impossible to live a decent life with ALS, and choose to die even though they don't really want to.

And - this must be stressed - medical institutions have an incentive to encourage ALS patients to die. Because long-term care for ALS patients is very expensive; there must be someone on-call 24/7. So while they present it as "just looking after your best interests", it's really their interest for patients to choose to die.

(1 in every 400 people will develop ALS during their lifetime, so this is not some sort of rare occurrence) (as a side note, for a disease this common, it's surprising how little funding goes into finding a cure)

** Precision mouse control is difficult for him, so he often designs shapes in text, sometimes with python scripts if I remember correctly

Most people fundamentally don't believe in markets. Look at how they react when prices rise due to a supply bottleneck or similar. They shout "Greed, we're being gouged!", even when there's plenty of competition to keep prices down and rising prices is actually the optimal solution to suppress demand in the short term and encourage increases in supply in the long term. Conservatives are worse than liberals these days, since conservatism/liberalism has evolved to be divided in large part by education level, and market mechanics are really non-obvious and counterintuitive unless you've had at least some level of formal (even if auto-didactic) education in basic economics.

I think markets are, to a first approximation, the ideal solution for every problem that involves optimization of large-group human behavior. Only when markets clearly don't or can't work should you even start to think about non-market alternatives, such as direct regulation, or even subsidies.

But shockingly few people agree. Carbon pricing immediately makes them want to know who's getting the money and why they should get it, even though that question is irrelevant to the primary goal.

I have great confidence in market-based solutions to rapidly move us toward optimal solutions to the climate problem. I have near-zero confidence that it's what we'll do. Heavy-handed, imprecise and mildly counter-productive regulation is the strategy we'll take, if anything.

More like 80% for me. I use Rust.

(In Rust, an expression without a semi-colon at the end of a block -- including at the end of a function -- is the return value for that block. This is used heavily in idiomatic Rust, which means there are lots of lines that do not end with semi-colons. The more you use short, single-purpose functions and the more you program in a functional style, the fewer semi-colons you use.)

I'm also a fan of market solutions. Most people aren't, though, and they're especially challenging with an international problem, so I don't think carbon taxes or warming fees is how we'll do it.

I think you present a false dichotomy. Several of the proposed geoengineering schemes are relatively inexpensive, though of course a lot of investment will be needed to demonstrate their practicality and effectiveness. I expect that geoengineering will be much cheaper than getting to net zero.

However, that doesn't mean we don't also need to get to net zero, because the geoengineering proposals only address warming, not the other effects of high atmospheric CO2. Ocean acidification and whatever is downstream of that is probably the biggest one, but there are others.

Geoengineering should be viewed as a short-term mitigation strategy, not a long-term solution. I think we'll need that mitigation, though. Assuming AI doesn't kill us all and render the whole question moot :-).

I don't think there's anything wrong with those sorts of general observations (I mean, who remembers dozens of phone numbers anymore now that we all have smartphones?), but that said this non-peer-reviewed study has an awful lot of problems. I mean, we can focus on the silly, embarassing mistakes (like how their methodology to suppress AI answers on Google was to append "-ai" into the search string, or how the author insisted to the press that AI summaries mentioning the model used were a hallucination, when the paper itself says what model was used). Or the style things, like how deeply unprofessional the paper is (such as the "how to read this paper"), how hyped up the language is, or the (nonfunctional) ploy to try to trick LLMs summarizing the paper. Or we can focus on the more serious stuff, like how the sample size of the critical Section 4 was a mere 9 people, all self-selected, so basically zero statistical significance; that there's so much EEG data that false positives are basically guaranteed and they talk almost nothing about their FDR correction to control for it; that essay writers were given far too little time for the task and put under time pressure, thus assuring that LLM users will be basically doing copy-paste rather than engaging with the material; that they misunderstand dDTF implications; the significant blinding failure with the teachers rating the essays being able to tell which essays were AI generated (combined with the known bias where content believed to be created by AI gets rated lower), with no normalization for what they believed to be AI, and so on.

But honestly, I'd say my biggest issue is with the general concept. They frame everything as "cognitive debt", that is, any decline in brain activity is treated as adverse. The alternative viewpoint - that this represents an increase in *cognitive efficiency* by removing extraneous load and allowing the brain to focus on core analysis - is not once considered.

To be fair, I've briefly talked with the lead author, and she took the critiques very well and was already familiar with some of them (for example, she knew her sample size was far too small), and was frustrated with some of the press coverage hyping it up like "LLMs cause brain damage!!!", which wasn't at all what she was trying to convey. Let's remember that preprints like this haven't yet gone through peer review, and - in this case - I'm sure she'll improve the work with time.

Yeah, I figured that. My point was just that "fixed" is just an accurate description of my income/budget (and probably yours) as it is of hers. I knew what you meant, I was just pointing out that the terminology we use doesn't make sense.

The price of a cryptocurrency reflects those things. It's value is zero. Period. There is nothing behind it.

No, fiat currencies are backed by debt, meaning that real people and companies have made enforceable legal commitments to do real work to generate the value backing the dollars or whatever. Without getting into the details, every time a dollar is created, that creation is balanced by the creation of a dollar of debt, the commitment of some productive entity to produce value to repay that debt (and thereby destroy that dollar). As a common example, when you borrow money to buy a house, the bank doesn't lend you money [*] that other people deposited, it creates that money out of thin air at the same instant you sign an enforceable contract to repay it, meaning you commit to do some sort of value-producing work to generate the value of those dollars.

Derivatives represent specific legal contracts to perform some action, e.g. buy a fixed amount of stock from the derivative seller on or by a specific date for a specific price, and those contracts get their value from the underlying security. That underlying security can also be some sort of contractual obligation rather than a hard asset, but if you keep digging down the layers you always get to something real. It's always possible, of course, that the layers of repackaging make the actual value hard enough to see that its price becomes divorced from that value (and stock pricing also gets divorced from underlying value to various degrees), but at bottom there must be something of actual substance. Further, if markets were perfectly efficient, it would not be possible for the price to move away from the value.

None of this is true with cryptoassets. Their true value is zero (arguably, negative, since proof of work is a pure sink that generates no utility), so any price above zero represents market inefficiency/insanity.

[*] It used to be that the bank created most of the money under the fractional reserve system, but for quite a while now most of the developed world has abandoned the reserve lending requirements, enabling banks to effectively create all of the money they lend. This might seem like a crazy system, but it's actually pure genius because it allows the money supply to expand and contract with the economy, which along with Keynsian fiscal policy massively reduces the boom and bust cycles we regularly experienced before we switched from metallic to fiat currency.