I know enough (thanks to everyone who kindly replied) to know that everyone in the world save for those directly involved in the court case can safely assume Trump wanted a loan when he a applied for a loan. Sure, it’s an important step for the lawyers, but it’s so obvious that it’s only newsworthy if they couldn’t establish it.

The article is a waste of time.

Of course? That’s why he was talking the the lenders in the first place. He was trying to get a loan. If he intentionally falsified the information is another question, but of course he was trying to get a loan.

That’s actually where democracy came from. When guns came along, it became extremely cheap and easy to turn every random peasant into a soldier. This meant that you essentially always had to have the will of the people on your side.

Except the big bang is the start of both space and time, so nothing in the universe could be older than the universe because there’s no time to speak of (not to mention the space for it to exist).

The moment after the big bang is called the Planck epoch. I just learned this from Wikipedia “In this stage, the characteristic scale length of the universe was the Planck length, 1.6×10−35 m, and consequently had a temperature of approximately 1032 degrees Celsius. Even the very concept of a particle breaks down in these conditions. A proper understanding of this period awaits the development of a theory of quantum gravity.”. I don’t really understand this, but it seems the early universe wasn’t conducive to particles. Even if it was, they wouldn’t be atoms. They’d just be quarks.

All of our physics breaks down at the singularity before the big bang, so assuming quarks that are around today existed then is just that, an assumption.

Photons are an exception (at least, in as much as that they are a particle), and you can make new particls from energy, but definitely there’s a limit to how old a particle can be. No particle is older than the universe (as far as the big bang is concerned).

We’ll never forget him.

Even ones that actively celebrate rape and murder? Even ones that will oppress women?

Does this even count as a ‘progressive’ movement if it institutes an intensely religious dictatorship?

That’s the biggest barrier to peace then. The whole article’s a waste of time without that bit.

Anyone know what Hamas says? Do they say they want peace between them and Israel?

AI ought to be called abominable intelligence/abominable intellect.

Thanks for explaining all this. It didn't really make sense to me that JP would react like that to such an innocuous tweet, but almost everyone else seemed to believe it.

That’s a remarkably interesting link, thanks for sharing.

One valid use of government power is punishing people who murder, and I’m not exactly sure what power cartels have outside of that.

I googled it and the Wikipedia page said they’re inherently unstable, but I don’t know how reliable that is.

In any case, I don’t see how my second example isn’t a cartel itself. All the bread companies are colluding to set the price of bread artificially high. The problem is there isn’t much to stop new competitors (or to stop members defecting).

I think everything I said applies to stupid people as well.

There’ll always be people who need to rely on charity, but if even a guy in a wheelchair can make a good living and has more opportunities than he can count I’d say that’s a really good sign.

If one company decided that the average bread should cost 50 bucks then I’m going to buy someone else’s bread and that company loses a lot of money.

If every company decided that the average bread should cost 50 bucks, that’s an extraordinary opportunity for a new competitor to come in with reasonable prices.

Save for pay for delay, all of those rely on patents and copy-rights, which are government intervention.

According to the first source, it also looks like competitors are entering and offering lower prices, including open source methods (though I have no idea how that really works). One of the biggest problems for all of them is the government saying “no, you can’t do this or that for whatever reason”. Sometimes it’s good for the government to intercede, but it seems like in this case it’s helping perpetuate monopolies.

If none of the winners offer you a job, make your own, or acquire some marketable skill. You have options and opportunities.

There aren’t as many options for housing as I’d like honestly. I’d prefer less regulation to allow for lower quality, cheaper housing. As it stands though, you still have options and the ability to improve your living conditions.

Insulin prices would be a lot lower if more people were allowed to produce and sell it.

Monopolies are pretty dangerous, and I’d like to avoid then as much as possible.

I think that they’re generally created and sustained by government intervention though. Bailouts, legal fees, red tape, price controls, exceedingly long copyrights, they all hurt new competitors more than established ones.

That leads to a beauty of capitalism though. People prioritize profit, yes, but with competition, the way to make a profit is to be appealing to people. You make a profit by providing the best good or service at the best price. This means that the people who have the goal of profits also have the goal of pleasing their customers.

There’s a quote from somewhere that goes something like this “capitalism takes the most ambitious, selfish, and capable people and forces them to stay up at night thinking about what everyone else wants”.