Is there data on what the payload actually was?

This wasn’t an interception. The devices were designed and manufactured by Israeli intelligence. They just licensed out brandnames through shell companies, and convinced Hezbollah to buy models from their agents by conventional spycraft.

Well, they had to make room inside for the high explosive charge, so it was never going to be a slight change to an off-the-shelf product. There’s not typically a lot of dead space in a pager.

Y’know, by the standards of a military assault, this one was actually pretty targeted. So far there’s a handful of children in thousands of casualties, who mostly fit the profile of a military or military-adjacent individual. Compare that to a ground assault of your choice, by any military anywhere.

Let’s shit on them for all the actual atrocities they’ve done.

And you actually think housing speculation doesn’t happen on a wide scale? Like… what? Again, have you heard people talk about economics before? You said you understood a good amount of it, but you’re denying that housing speculation is real?

Speculation happens, sure. I don’t buy that it drives things way out of equilibrium in the long run. As far as I can tell from a skim, neither do your sources.

And do you really think supply & demand isn’t taught as a law? We hear the phrase “the law of supply & demand” bandied about whenever anyone does any pop-economics. Do you seriously not encounter that?

I also hear about “Murphy’s law”, which is self-evidently not (literally) true in all cases. If you’re teaching an actual Econ 101-type course and you don’t mention market failure, you’re teaching it badly.

The 2008 recession was literally a housing speculation bubble.

Not exactly. A drop in housing prices triggered it IIRC, but the actual chain of dominoes played out on paper in financial instruments.

In an ideal market the big banks would have just been replaced with new ones who take less risks of that sort, but they were too big to fail. That’s definitely a problem, but I don’t really know enough to comment on what the fix should be intelligently; banking economics is on a whole other level.

Also, in Canada, your tradespeople are swamped but there are about 1.3 million empty houses.

The total shortfall is in the neighborhood of 3.5 million units.

There’s always some, just because people move unpredictably - a “frictional” amount. I’m sure someone somewhere is sitting on an empty house for no good reason, but they’re losing money, so I doubt it’s a lot by comparison to the frictional amount.

Homeless people aren’t let in for a really sad reason that has nothing to do with necessity: few voters care and nonprofits can’t raise enough money - or alternately donated space - without government help. A lot of those people have “high needs”, and are at risk of causing damage or just leaving a mess, so it’s not like it’s free to let them stay in a building until the next tenant shows up.

The lab politics doesn’t come from nowhere. Sciences advance in a way that is exploitable by capital. When someone discovers a new kind of technology usually it can be turned into a profit. Often the details are obscured by charlatans looking to make a quick buck - see any tech hype cycle for an example of this - but interfering with the scientific process is usually going to be detrimental to the aims of capitalists.

Capitalism is neither necessary nor sufficient for politics. Look at the USSR and all the various times they flip-flopped on whatever issue or person. Or Republican Spain and it’s many warring factions, if that’s more your idea of non-capitalism.

It’s true that some scientists are on the hook to say things convenient for a sponsor. The nice thing is that a valid observation will stand the test of time regardless of who makes it. Marx made a huge impact on social sciences, and you don’t have to agree with him on any particular thing (left or right wing - he was still a Victorian white man) to appreciate economics as a driver of history. The same goes for marginalism and friends.

Based on the latest this morning, these were devices manufactured by someone mysterious (Israeli intelligence) and just licenced to use a known brand name through a shell company in Budapest. They presumably had a small explosive charge built in.

I’m not sure what you mean about the sombrero potential only being partially observed. It is a principle only, and you could observe it fully by simply making a sombrero shape and putting a ball in the middle and observing how it falls multiple times.

You can see the model do that, but not the actual quantum fields. The transition is supposed to have happened irreversibly once in the instants following the big bang.

The difference is that supply & demand is presented as a foundational and ubiquitous law to high-school students, whereas the sombrero potential is presented honestly.

It was never taught where I went, but that could be. High school teachers should knock it off, if so. It seems to work exactly as theorised in most sectors, bulk commodities being a common example, but there’s definitely other sectors that are broken, some of which I mentioned.

I’m a fan of regulation to address that. So are both orthodox and most heterodox schools, to various degrees.

Either they don’t exist, or your story about that isn’t complete.

I’m sure someone is dumb enough to try it, but I’m actually not convinced it’s widespread. In Canada, we literally just don’t have enough houses for a first-world nation of our population - which has been measured - and all of our tradespeople are swamped. (Sorry if I brought that up already, this has been a long-running thread)

However I’ve never heard of a scientific discipline where there is an “orthodox” school, except in economics. It’s the orthodox school that I have a problem with. Supply & demand is just emblematic of that issue.

Hmm, now that is a good point. There’s various small offshoots of anthropology and psychology, some of which are questionable (there’s people that still use Freud), but nobody really divides it up like that. Alright, you’ve sold me on economics probably having especially bad lab politics.

Yeah, it would be hard to get a vote that the sky is blue by 96%.

Boeings that don’t get built are safer.

OMG, I hadn’t heard of that.

TBF if it looks like paste as opposed to a murder victim you’re less likely to DNA test it in the first place. It’s moot because it was the spouse in this case, though, and I’m skeptical he got that far with just a hand blender. (Unless he moved to a real one afterwards?)

Or they got a confession, I guess.

TIL people use it in English.

Yeah, it’s news to me that it wasn’t technically illegal. They still believe in the reefer madness shit and act like it.

Cashing out the entire S&P 500 is very different from cashing out one billionaire. Most of the people who buy stocks already own stuff on the S&P 500, so it’s unclear who that trade would be with, exactly. Same exact thing for real estate: if you sold the entire continental US (again, whatever that means) it would probably exceed 45 trillion, but I’m still pretty comfortable saying if you own 100 billion worth of Manhattan real estate, you actually have 100 billion dollars, and could reasonably pay a 90 billion dollar bill given enough time.

Careful is good when it comes to policy, I definitely agree with that.

It’s not like you can buy too much of an earning stock. I’m pretty sure elasticity approaches zero quickly if someone is dumping a well-known, profitable company. It might induce some paranoia, but big investors don’t get to where they are by panicking often.

By the way, TSLA has a P/E ratio in the 60’s so it’s not exactly a great deal anyway.

Depends. Amazon doesn’t even have one; tech stocks are often driven by future potential. I wouldn’t buy a car from them though.

Nobody actually beats the market. I’m pretty sure the insanity was there all along; he just got lucky several times in a row.

If he tried to sell all his shares it would cause the stock price to collapse

Why? If the fundamentals are there, there should be a hard floor on stock prices. It would take a while for the market to absorb that much Twitter and SpaceX, but I see no reason it’s impossible. Actually, I bet Twitter’s (off-book) cap would go up if Musk was leaving.

If you’re trying to defend capitalism (whatever that means to you), keep in mind that you’re basically suggesting stocks have no actual, intrinsic value here.

Billionaires don’t actually do this, though, because liquid cash doesn’t earn.

Right now, if he were able to convert all of his $241.8B to cash, then distribute it evenly among all of the employees at all of his companies, he could give each of his 146,000 employees $1.6M.

Fun fact that this doesn’t work for every billionaire. Tech companies don’t employ very many people compared to their revenue.

If you go by by profits returned to owners as opposed to sale value it’s even more stark. Amazon still hasn’t paid out anything; it’s all been plowed straight back into expansion.

I don’t necessarily think that billionaires should be abolished,

To piss off the remaining side of the political spectrum: Why not?

Investment-wise, luck. If you had 100 billion and put it all on one risky stock, you too could fail upwards, around half the time.

Public persona-wise, he’s basically a professional media villain. He’s invited to comment and interview on things because it will always get clicks, even if they’re hate clicks.