How do you expect that to work? Automatic reporting is impossible, you have to rely on individuals to arrive there, open the app and take a guess. Then by the time you see the report the line is long gone (or tripled)
> Due to the federal funding lapse, this airport has temporarily suspended wait time reporting. Allow significantly more time at security and check with your airline for flight status.
Ideally the TSA at each airport would measure it and release it. They should be measuring it anyway since they should both have efficiency targets for how much of a delay they introduce, and also so that they can show data about how much or little inconvenience they cause when DOGE finally comes to cut one of the actually utterly useless government expenditures.
Since the TSA doesn't seem to be releasing this data though, apple or google could spy on GPS and motion data for individuals to estimate when people entire the line and pass through security, and derive a better-than-nothing estimate. It does seem like the government refusing to do something, and apple/google stepping in and doing a government-like thing is a norm, so even though I'm joking I wouldn't even be that surprised.
Fascinating first principle to thinking about Kalshi 90% of it is sports betting - I assume a lot of their revenue is gambling law regulatory arbitrage atm
These platforms actually seem like a great way to run sports betting to me. Much better than what the actual companies are doing trying to write their own books and risking arbitrage.
It's a tech story wrapped in a soap opera wrapped in one of the all time finest soundtracks ever played by an incredible group of actors and written by artists - it is singular!
PS - Christopher Cantwell - one of the writers and showrunners - has written a library of wonderful comic books worth investigating
From first principles public pension funds are broken.
The "Safe Withdrawal Rate" assumed by many private individuals planning for their own retirement assumes a withdrawal rate in the 3 - 4% range based on the "trinity study" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_study
Meanwhile, American public pensions are structurally engineered around a 7%+ SWR - this was recently confirmed again by the median goal by the National Association of State Retirement Administrators.
The perpetual "under funded" nature, and all the return hunting etc in pension fund management can be explained by that disconnect.
But this then belies a very uncomfortable acknowledgement which is that we cannot afford the government workforce currently in place requiring us to either:
Individuals saving for retirement must deal with the risk that they live to an old age and their savings must last for decades. Pension plans have a higher safe withdrawal rate, because people on the average have average lifespans. When a plan member dies early, their remaining contributions can be used (partially or in full) to fund other members' pensions.
But mortality credits (pooling) don't solve the math of the discount rate - they add 100 - 150 basis points of reduction so retarget to 5.5% vs 4% if generous
So they are still structurally designed where they HAVE to allocate towards risk to meet their targets which is at core of issue
It feels like you're missing the whole point of the whole article, which is that treating public pensions like a bunch of 401ks misses the opportunity to invest all that money in something that benefits the retirees collectively. I'd rather retire on 4% from a bond to improve the school my grandkids go to than 5.5% from a PE firm that intends to "more efficiently manage" the retirement home I live in.
Only taxpayer funded defined benefit pension plans get to use 7%+. Because they have the power to use future taxpayers’ money to pay for underfunding/underperformance/corruption from the past. And obviously, politicians that would choose to increase taxes today for something that could but punted to the future would lose elections.
The Pension Protection Act of 2006 mandates that non taxpayer funded defined benefit pension plans use discount rates from high grade corporate bond yield curves, which are much lower.
Yet that is the modus operandi of governments worldwide that need to secure the votes of the old. There is no reason the US explicit has different rules for taxpayer funded and non taxpayer funded defined benefit pensions. They are the same liabilities, the same cash flows, the same probabilities, just different political entities on the hook.
Even some non taxpayer funded defined benefit pension plans are more privy than others, depending on the political power of their beneficiaries.
Yup, this is the real problem. What he's talking about isn't the real problem. The real problem is we have gone to a "model" of fund less, pretend we can make it up by increasing risk. And rather than face a big problem it gets swept under the rug until it can't be any more.
We also have the problem that paying pensions becomes somebody else's problem. Thus in contract negotiations pushing benefits into pensions rather than current wages becomes attractive. You can agree to more without breaking the current budget.
The old rules worked better because limiting what pension funds could be in also limited the shenanigans that were possible.
Well we tried the "burn it all down" approach with DOGE and the BBB and we got... -2 trillion in savings? Really? Wow, okay.
The truth is nobody wants to solve the deficit. It's a self eating beast at this point and simply cutting funding for a bunch of shit won't solve it. A lot of these things are fundamentally the federal governments concern, whether people admit it or not.
What does it mean for something to be broken from first principles? I would expect some that just cannot work on a fundamental level, like faster-than-light travel or a lightbulb that powers it’s own via solar panel.
3% vs 7% doesn’t seem broken on principle, just, a tuning parameter is off.
> But this then belies a very uncomfortable acknowledgement which is that we cannot afford the government workforce currently in place
It's not just the government. It's all of the other stuff seniors buy. It used to be that you just kind of stuck around and retired in the area where you had worked. You had paid off that house, so you retired in it. Maybe you went to the Shriners' hall and played bingo with a core group of friends until you couldn't anymore. Then you moved into a retirement home and they found activities for you to do there until Father Time came to collect his due. Maybe you spoiled yourself with a Buick or Lincoln sometime between getting your gold watch from the plant manager and croaking.
Now, that's not enough. We need entire retirement communities hundreds of miles away in warmer climes where they can play golf several months out of the year. We need cruises and travel packages. We need cosmetic procedures to look younger. We need more advanced surgeries that extend life, though not participation in the workforce. And of course, now that Lincoln is a Mercedes.
And that's great, because we've told everyone that they deserve it after a long, hard career. There's only one problem: we never addressed where that retirement income was actually coming from. They're coming from that 7% SWR, which must be funded somehow. Otherwise the retirees might have to stay in-town, be cold during the winter, and provide childcare for the grandkids because preschool now costs as much as a year of college tuition. And that makes them cranky and they start calling investment advisors and politicians demanding answers.
"Teleoperation makes this even stranger. . . There are people in one country sitting at desks, driving forklifts in another country . . . It feels like immigration without immigrants."
This is a fascinating point - if Neo / Tesla deliver a teleoperated hybrid at their <$30k price point the low-skill US labor force is going to be significantly disrupted on a shorter timeline than I would have previously estimated.
These are being pitched as "home robots" but clearly corporations will go all in - 24/7 operation (with multiple remote operators), no labor law / healthcare / pensions, spin up / down at will.
I'm not so sure. The tech to do this has been around for ages, and it still hasn't happened. So I'm thinking there's something else preventing companies from going this direction.
My uneducated guess is that if a remote operator has a bad day, there is nothing stopping them from doing damage on potentially sensitive and expensive assets and then disappearing in a country with lax enforcement.
Also, after a certain point, you need to deal with the angry, hungry mob right outside your factory.
I disagree. The advent of high-speed internet in poorer countries is only something that has taken place in the past 10 years and it's only going to get worse.
This is almost like a second stage of the manufacturing revolution that happened with the advent of computer numerical control and generally the digitization of the so-called engineering "stack"
Right now, the pipeline is looking super gross for anyone apart from hyper-capitalists, but then again what meat is left to pick off the bone? Pretty much everything is overseas nowadays anyways
- Engineering Prototype is done domestically
- Verification is offshored to low-rate engineers
- Final CAD drawings are offshored
- Final Assembly instructions are offshored
- Production line is designed domestically
- Production line is assembled offshore
- Production is manufactured and shipped domestically at the lowest rate
- Said product is handled in a warehouse that is operated by offshored teleoperators
- Customer support for the end user is offshored
- RMA process is non-existent therefore replacement is offshored
>My uneducated guess is that if a remote operator has a bad day, there is nothing stopping them from doing damage on potentially sensitive and expensive assets and then disappearing in a country with lax enforcement.
Can't people already do massive amounts of damage to a company truck/van by driving it into the water, or dumping gas on it and igniting it? Doing it remotely only makes marginally easier, but most people won't do it because they don't want to be on the lam just to send an anti-capitalist message.
I'm saying if your remote operator in some southern hemisphere country causes damages, you might have less recourse for punishment than if the operator was local and under your jurisdiction.
Years ago Marvin Minsky gave a talk before 2001: A Space Odyssey played. He casually mentioned that if NASA (or was it DARPA?) had invested in tele-robotics like he insisted, your house would be cleaned by someone in Africa right now.
"When I was a kid, science fiction was off in the future somewhere. . . now it’s kind of science fact. . . AI and social media and all these influences are driving progress so quickly, at a pace that I think many of us, as human beings, are having a hard time keeping up with."
This is a quote from Alex Proyas (director of Dark City, irobot, the crow etc), he has long observed that humans are biologically under-adapted for a modernity of silicon-fueld complexity
Maybe both are guilty. One is guilty and trying to remove the other from office because of the other's guilt, though.
That is, maybe both are guilty. Maybe both should be removed from office. But Trump's guilt (actual convictions, in fact) leave him no room for saying that someone should be removed from office on the basis of mere accusations.
This boths sides stuff is such bullshit, we have armed goons disappearing people on the streets, there's only one side doing this. There were no armed goons disappearing people in the streets last year, it is very clear that both sides are not the same.
>This boths sides stuff is such bullshit, we have armed goons disappearing people on the streets,
When people used to say "disappearing people off the streets", they were trying to paint a picture out of Orwell's 1984, where the secret police not only drag someone off never to be seen again, but no one can or will acknowledge that they were ever born in the first place.
When people today say "disappearing people off the streets", they mean illegal aliens are being detained to be deported to their home countries, but not actually deported because it takes forever for the court cases to slowly roll onward. But these same people also confused and hysterical why only rabid Democrats are alarmed by this.
Go to Los Angeles, and see all the missing posters hanging around everywhere. It's haunting. Many of them are legal residents and not criminals. I know of a neighbor that has been missing for over a month with no word, and was a green card holder. It seems like your sources are pretty biased and unaware of what is actually going on. You can be faulted for that, I guess, despite the ample video evidence to the contrary, but not really for the arrogance of this comment.
What does this even mean? I’ve one single anecdote in the post you’re responding to, and the rest you’ve ignored. There’s plenty of media coverage on this same topic if you care to verify. Facts aren’t biased, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here, is it?
> they mean illegal aliens are being detained to be deported to their home countries
Are you sure about this? Didn't the Supreme Court recently decide these people can be sent to a third-party nation? [1]
> When people used to say "disappearing people off the streets"
Disappearing happens in real life, not just in "1984". It doesn't mean everyone pretends the person never existed, just that their current status and location is completely unknown. This kind of "not knowing" seems really common with the current administration, with lawyers mentioning being unable to find or talk to their clients. [2]
> but that the detention centers get honest-to-god marketing names ("Alligator Alcatraz")
Just because you know of a detention location ("Alligator Alcatraz") does not mean you know who is there and for what reasons. Without that transparency, bad shit can get ignored or swept under the rug.
> When people used to say "disappearing people off the streets", they were trying to paint a picture out of Orwell's 1984, where the secret police not only drag someone off never to be seen again, but no one can or will acknowledge that they were ever born in the first place.
I don't know which people you are talking about who did that, but people I’ve seen doing it were more likely to be implicitly (or, fairly often, explicitly) referencing historical real-world authoritarianism like Pinochet’s Chile, not dystopian fiction like 1984, when they talked about governments disappearing people off the streets.
Though common to all three (authoritarian history, dystopian fiction, and the present American regime) is concealment of the fact of detention, the location of the detained, and sometimes the fact of the detained’s death
>but people I’ve seen doing it were more likely to be implicitly (or, fairly often, explicitly) referencing historical real-world
Covered by my short phrase "out of".
>Though common to all three (authoritarian history, dystopian fiction, and the present American regime) is concealment of the fact of detention,
Yes, which is why only you and I can talk about it. No one else here even knows about the detentions, since they're so concealed. Have you not noticed that not only are they not concealed, but that the detention centers get honest-to-god marketing names ("Alligator Alcatraz")?
GPT-5 feels like cost engineering. The model is incrementally better, but they are optimizing for least amount of compute. I am guessing investors love that.
I agree. I have found GPT-5 significantly worse on medical queries. It feels like it skips important details and is much worse than o3, IMHO. I have heard good things about GPT-5 Pro, but that's not cheap.
I wonder if part of the degraded performance is where they think you're going into a dangerous area and they get more and more vague, for example like they demoed on launch day with the fireworks example. It gets very vague when talking about non-abusable prescription drugs for example. I wonder if that sort of nerfing gradient is affecting medical queries.
After seeing some painfully bad results, I'm currently using Grok4 for medical queries with a lot of success.
Of course this is not indicative of actual performance or quality per $ spent, but according to my own testing, their performance does seem to scale in line with their cost.
O5-pro is available through the ChatGPT UI with a “Pro” plan. I understand that like o3 pro it is a high compute large context invocation of underlying models.
I wonder how that math works out. GPT-5 keeps triggering a thinking flow even for relatively simple queries, so each token must be a magnitude cheaper to make this worth the trade-off in performance.
I’ve found that it’s super likely to get stuck repeating the exact same incorrect response over and over. It used to happen occasionally with older models, but it happens frequently now.
Things like:
Me: Is this thing you claim documented? Where in the documentation does it say this?
GPT: Here’s a long-winded assertion that what I said before was correct, plus a link to an unofficial source that doesn’t back me up.
Me: That’s not official documentation and it doesn’t say what you claim. Find me the official word on the matter.
GPT: Exact same response, word-for-word.
Me: You are repeating yourself. Do not repeat what you said before. Here’s the official documentation: [link]. Find me the part where it says this. Do not consider any other source.
GPT: Exact same response, word-for-word.
Me: Here are some random words to test if you are listening to me: foo, bar, baz.
GPT: Exact same response, word-for-word.
It’s so repetitive I wonder if it’s an engineering fault, because it’s weird that the model would be so consistent in its responses regardless of the input. Once it gets stuck, it doesn’t matter what I enter, it just keeps saying the same thing over and over.
Anybody have a good solution that's utilizing actual traveler data vs the (non existent atm) TSA data?
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