"You already know" advice amplifies your existing belief. It's about taking a 60% confidence guess to a 95% confidence guess. Stated like that it becomes obvious that it's appropriate if someone vaguely suspects the correct thing, but dangerous if they vaguely suspect the wrong thing.

>A bunch of radioactive stuff together is basically the definition of a nuclear reactor though.

It really isn't.

A pile of radioactive waste isn't a reactor. Marie Curie's notes are famously contaminated with radioactive materials but they aren't a reactor. This is about as close as the boy scout got.

The Oklo fossil reactor is unique because it happened to form in the right circumstances to produce a fission chain reaction, which does make it a reactor. Not every uranium mine is a reactor, in fact this is the only one known.

Also note that due to isotope decay in the ore, a natural reactor is no longer possible. From the wikipedia article:

"A key factor that made the reaction possible was that, at the time the reactor went critical 1.7 billion years ago, the fissile isotope 235U made up about 3.1% of the natural uranium, which is comparable to the amount used in some of today's reactors. [...] the current abundance of 235U in natural uranium is only 0.72%. A natural nuclear reactor is therefore no longer possible on Earth without heavy water or graphite."

Another fascinating detail from the article, due to our understanding of fission, we can get some incredible results:

"The concentrations of xenon isotopes, found trapped in mineral formations 2 billion years later, make it possible to calculate the specific time intervals of reactor operation: approximately 30 minutes of criticality followed by 2 hours and 30 minutes of cooling down"

Indeed. I said a bunch and I meant a bunch. Trace amounts is not a bunch.

I can think of ways to deal with that. I think the threat is serious enough that I won't post about those ways publicly.

Apple is first and foremost an affordable luxury brand that makes sleek hardware.

And theranos did that too? Theranos, a medical company, was an affordable luxury (??) brand that makes sleek hardware? In fact the hardware was not sleek at all, since it didn't function.

Naively, I would deal with this by deciding how many cells I want to kill each day and then figure out a dosing schedule that achieves that. Or maybe it's better to do one dose every few days. But yeah either way.

> I would deal with this by deciding how many cells I want to kill each day

Yes, this is an approach. This starts to exceed my understanding of the problems the teams are facing - but there are concerns about the efficacy of Cas12a2-based approaches fading. Not because the cells adapt, but because your immune system starts acting funny in the presence of the payload.

I don't recall the specifics but there seems to be a window of opportunity for these things.

Only if you see the world in black and white and those pesticides being an absolute evil. But if you see it as a complicated tradeoff where whats right for one country can be wrong for another then it's unproblematic.

> But if you see it as a complicated tradeoff where whats right for one country can be wrong for another then it's unproblematic.

How can anyone entertain that belief unless:

a) they think people in other countries have a different biology

b) profits matter more than the health of people in other countries (mostly former colonies of Europe)

They can believe that:

Capitalism is the most effective driver of progress known.

Capitalism has lifted enormous numbers of people out of absolute poverty and is a great positive for the world.

Inequality is an unavoidable side-effect of capitalism.

The optimal risk:benefit tradeoff depends on the resources you have available.

It can be rational behavior for a poor person to take greater risks with their health than a rich person, because the value of wealth has strongly diminishing returns. I personally believe we should have state-enforced wealth redistribution to limit this scenario to a reasonable minimum, but I'm not so naive as to think eliminating it entirely would be the globally optimal solution. In practice, "everybody gets identical protection from pesticides" means "everybody is poor".

In other words, “yes, definitely”. But they won’t because €€€€€.

It helps set expectations for the fix. "The bug was in an external system that has now been fixed" means we it's probably fine going forward. "The LLM got tricked but we are gonna train it super hard not to do that again" means it will break again and again as people find new angles to convince it.

You raise an interesting point. What about the rules change regarding the free float made for SpaceX? That was something I considered a bigger problem than the express listings, and for me the express listings kinda got tainted by association with that.

There is economic inefficiency in many aspects of real world markets, so while a perfect world might be better, we don't have access to that. The problem with "restricted" float is that all the demand for investment (in that company, in that sector) cannot be met except by price inflation. But the market will respond by setting a market price for the investment and a market weight for that investment, and we must assume that includes skepticism and risk of dilution factored in, and from that point MPT says you want that weight in your portfolio, even though there might hypothetically be more desireable scenarios that are not available.

(now, large growing companies need public investment in order to grow, so it might be said that there is some value to regulations as a cudgel, "no access to public capital markets if you don't open yourselves up more," but again, we can still rely on market pricing once decisions like that are made)

NVIDIA is something like 8% of the S&P 500, and these companies are projected to be higher: you can't ignore sectors like that if you believe in diversification to squelch unrewarded risk

If you try to buy more shares than are available, then price will go to infinity which is clearly disastrous. That's in theory. But maybe it wasn't that bad in this particular situation?

I think the way to adjust the boglehead philosophy for this scenario is to construct a shadow index which would be the same as the normal index except with the grifts removed or at least underweighted. And then buy stock to track the shadow index.

I assume not all indexes will make this deal with the devil, as Nasdaq is doing. At least, not immediately. But, given how lax regulation has become and how corruption and lies from the biggest companies has become commonplace, I have to assume it will be harder to not let Elon Musk have a taste of everything just because he's too rich for anyone to ever say no to him.