As stated in the previous comment:

There is risk, of course, but it is not market risk

I understand and agree with everything you said.

I meant to say profit-to-effort. I fixed it

This is not investing. I did not ever hold significant amounts of cryptocurrency. People would ask me to sell them crypto and then I’d buy it on a crypto exchange and then sell it to them.

I do not believe holding cryptocurrency qualifies as “investing”. It is much closer to gambling as the entire valuation is purely speculative. I get that all investing is gambling to some extent, but it’s not the same as stocks, for example, because holding stocks gives you voting rights for a company’s board of directors and entitles you to a portion of the company’s profits in the form of dividends.

There is risk, of course, but it is not market risk.

Ah yes. How to get by without a job:

• Fraud (false warranty claims)
• Theft (stealing coins from vending machine)
• Gambling (crypto)
• Literally just self-employment (starting a drop shipping business/flipping things on eBay)

You can make significant money by trading crypto peer-to-peer. It is incredibly risky but you can make around 6-7% profit after fees. I made around 2,000-3,000 USD monthly, moving around 40,000 USD in volume. The main risks are chargebacks and account closures.

It wasn’t free money, of course. But the profit-to-effort ratio is pretty high once you figure out how to weed the good clients from the bad (scammers who will pay, receive crypto, and then dispute the payment).

Do not ask me how to do this and do not reply to anyone who comments below claiming to know how, because they’re probably a scammer.

I think there might’ve been some pressure from the top. If William Barr was Attorney-General and Trump was President, then I’m sure they’d have thrown the book at him.

Deadliest other animal. There were 602 homicides in England and Wales in 2022/23.

It’s so easy for billionaires to buy popularity. All they have to do is act normally and not be the greediest person on the planet. But people likely to act that way are also less likely to be billionaires, it seems.

If I were a billionaire, why wouldn’t I pay my staff double the market rate, tip $100 to every server at every restaurant I go to, and donate money to charity like crazy? It’d ensure that I’m well-liked everywhere I go and the cost would be chump change to me.

What motivation would the mongoose have to prevent the basilisk’s creation?

A more complete argument would be that an AI that seeks to maximise happiness would also want to prevent the creation of AIs like Roko’s basilisk.

How is this dystopian?

That doesn’t do the same thing, I guess the goal is really how to draw the outline of a circle

* Sénat

Also another French history fact—that line (“I am the Senate”) may be inspired by something supposedly said by French king Louis XIV. Louis XIV ruled at the height of royal power in France and was also sometimes known as the “Sun King” due to his power. While addressing the Parlement of Paris, he supposedly said:

L’État, ç’est moi!

…which means “I am the State”. This saying is often considered a symbol of absolute monarchy and dictatorship in France.

The reason is because it supposedly creates a moral hazard. This is the logic behind pricing for all sorts of medical resources (such as co-pays and deductibles). If there is a nominal cost involved to obtain the resource, then you will be incentivised not to use more than you need. But if it is free or costs too little, then you (and others) may choose to use a lot of the resource, far more than you actually need.

For example, suppose there is a $50 co-pay (a co-pay is essentially a fee) to see the doctor, and you figure you should go once a year for a check-up. In this case, you will not schedule an excessive number of appointments because you know it is not necessary and it will cost you money each time you do. If scheduling doctor’s appointments were free or costs very little, like $1, you may instead choose to schedule two or three appointments per year, because why not? Or maybe you will go see the doctor for every minor cold or stuffy nose. It’s not like it will cost you a significant amount of money. Or so their thinking goes, anyway.

Remember, the $50 you pay isn’t all that it costs. For every $50 you pay, the insurance company is probably paying the doctor $150.

Similarly, suppose a drug costs $100, but the insurance company pays $90, and you have to pay a $10 co-pay. You buy one vial, which is good for one month. The fear is that if the insurance company pays for all $100, since the drug is now free for you, you might decide to get two vials instead, just in case. After all, they’re free for you, right? This means the insurance company has to pay $200 for two vials of the drug but the benefit to you is actually pretty small. Again, this is how insurance companies think.

Now, whether this logic is sound or not, I leave that part up to you.

Fun fact: this event and those succeeding it (Napoleon III dissolving the Republic and declaring the Second French Empire with himself as emperor) served as inspiration for the Star Wars prequels.

It’s more complex. In Photoshop, it’s a single tool. In GIMP, you make a circular selection, convert it to a path, and then stroke the path.

Not only is this more convoluted, it’s bewilderingly unintuitive to beginners and is definitely one of GIMP’s shortcomings.

It sucks, but honestly we have to pick our battles and I don’t think a three-to-six month delay is really worth fighting to the death over

No, it doesn’t lol. The art of rhetoric is completely lost on you

Why do you suppose I included this sentence at the end of that bullet point?

This statement is made without implying anything, it is a statement about formal logic.

…and why did you, having read that, assume I made that implication anyway?

I’m pretty sure there’s a GIMP plugin that does that if that is all you care about

I doubt that GIMP will ever overtake Photoshop. Adobe has the money to employ (and does employ) hundreds of experts in their fields to work on Photoshop for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year. Although GIMP is very impressive as an open-source project and a massive testament to how far the free software model can go, it is still, at the end of the day, made by a ragtag band of (mostly) amateurs volunteering their time. Adobe, by brute force, can deliver a higher-quality product just by having the resources to employ the best people to work for them.

I love GIMP. I use it for all my image editing needs and would never consider giving a dime to Adobe. But I don’t do it for a living and I respect the opinions of those who do when they say that GIMP isn’t a good replacement for Photoshop.