And you insist you’re an adult.

Hmm, very childish.

You sound like a child who is so desperate to sound like an adult that they obsess over meaningless things like using the correct emojis.

It’s not Eel Jelly. It’s actually Jellied Eel. The difference is that with a name like “Eel Jelly” it would seem to be a dish made by adding Eel to Jelly. But Jellied Eel is actually eel cooked in such a way that it becomes jellied. Eels are naturally high in collagen, so you don’t need anything special to make them jellied.

Back in the day that was a bonus because eels were poor people food, and the fact they became jellied resulted in a bit of natural preservation, which was important for poor people’s food in the days before refrigeration.

As for the spices used, I imagine before colonization it was whatever naturally grows in the UK for the peasants, and whatever grows naturally in Europe for the nobility, who were often tied to or from European noble houses. Here’s an article on some of the things that can be foraged in the UK. I imagine that a lot of the spices that used to be used are no longer used. They were probably replaced with better spices that don’t have a bitter aftertaste, or have a stronger pleasant taste.

Not “Public Domain”. That has a specific meaning in copyright law. It’s about creative works that are owned by the public and not subject to copyright.

What the judge decided is that their outputs are Public Records: “qualified as public records subject to the state’s Public Records Act”.

Put a license plate reader indoors?

Are people also using eggplants improperly? And, you’re proud to never have said thank you?

You can also type “thanks” or “please”. Both of those show the hands together emoji.

Unless that man was on call and was paged because something broke.

On a somewhat related note, people may know that Pittsburgh is one of the top places in the US for medical research and treatment. It’s the home of Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, and many others. It has “the second-most hospitals and second-most doctors per capita of any in the nation”.

But why would the “Steel City” have such good medical care? It turns out that for a while, steel worker unions were really powerful, and one of the main benefits the unions fought for was good health care for their members. Now the steel industry is long gone, but what remains is a great medical system that was essentially founded by those unions.

Moral of the story? If you’re a worker in a dirty, dangerous industry, you can either vote for someone like Trump who will gut your healthcare and strip you of government protections, or you can form a union and get the protection you deserve.

We may have to wait for another three years.

Which is also a clue that he isn’t short selling.

There are two ways of making money when a stock goes down. One is to sell the stock short. The other is to buy a put option.

A short sale is extremely risky. Say the shares are at $50 and you think they’re going to go down, so you sell 1000 shares you don’t own (short selling) and agree to buy them back by some date in the future. If you’re right and the stock tanks to $20, you can buy the shares and pocket $30,000. But, if the stock doesn’t sink, you might have to buy the shares for $60 each, so you lose $10 per stock, or $10,000. If there are tons of people shorting the stock, you can get a short squeeze, where everybody needs to buy shares to close out their short position, and because everybody needs to buy, the stock price rockets up, so you get people having to buy a stock that used to be $50 for $200, leading to $150,000 in losses for a 1000 share short where the maximum possible gain was only $50,000.

An option is much safer. There you’re buying the option to sell the shares at a certain price at some time in the future. Say you think a stock is going to crash. It’s currently trading at $50/share. You can buy 1000 put options at a strike price of $40 with a date 1 month in the future. It will cost you something to buy those options, say $1 per share, so $1000. If the stock goes up or stays at $50, your bet didn’t work out. You don’t have to sell the shares, you just tear up the options contract. You’re out whatever you paid for the option, say $1000 here. But, say the stock tanks and it’s now at $20/share. Now your bet did pay off. You can buy 1000 shares at $20 each for $20,000, then immediately exercise your option and sell them for $40,000, netting you $20,000. With put options the upside is significantly smaller, but the potential downside is tiny. It’s just the cost of the options.

Someone predicting a crash within 3 years isn’t going to short sell the shares. Between now and then the shares could continue to rise for a while, and they’d be on the hook for a huge payout in that case. If they buy options the down side is much smaller. They may have to re-buy new options a bunch of times. But in the worst case they just have to let the options expire unused and eat whatever cost they paid for them.

For the coming AI crash, I don’t think it will be very soon. I think there will be a crash. But, I think the government will try to keep the bubble from bursting. Too much of the US economy is now invested in AI. So, even under Biden, or Harris, or Obama they’d try to prevent a catastrophic crash by using taxpayer money to prevent the most damaging bubble burst. With Trump, there’s going to be even more government interference in the market. His backers are crypto bros. They’re the ones making him billions on his meme coins. They bankrolled JD Vance’s political career. If they demand that he rescues their failing companies, he’ll do it. And, since the GOP does whatever Trump wants, they’ll just fork over literal trillions in taxpayer dollars to keep things from crashing. But, eventually there will have to be a crash, because there’s just not a sustainable business model in any of this, at least not at anything like the current scale.

Also, the way short positions work is that the people who are most successful at shorting a stock are the ones who have a megaphone to announce they’ve shorted the stock. They go on as many podcasts, news shows, interviews, etc. as possible to say things are going to crash. Because, the more people who hear about it, the more hesitation there will be to invest, which means the more chances of their prediction coming through.

So, he’s not just some guy who is betting on the bubble bursting, he’s a guy who is now heavily incentivized to cause the bubble to burst so he can make his investors a lot of money.

but it never spilled over into politics quite to this degree.

Sure. But, look at the media environment. From the founding of the US to the invention of radio, there were newspapers. Sure, there was a strong element of yellow journalism, but to print a newspaper you still needed a printing press so it wasn’t a free-for-all. Then with radio, and then TV in the 50s there were only a handful of sources of information for everybody to follow. It’s only really since the 2010s that the media environment has been a free-for-all with anybody able to put up their own podcast, or put up videos on YouTube, or have their own blog, or post on Twitter, or whatever.

Politicians used to be able to do backroom deals. Those used to get a bad name, but to a certain extent it was a good thing, because at least they were dealing, instead of causing things to come to a deadlock. Now, if anybody dares to talk to someone on “the other team”, they get raked over the coals.

Russia was found to be sponsoring the NRA

Sure, they spent some money, and had some success. But, they hardly needed to push. The NRA’s goals were already aligned with Russia’s. The NRA has over 5 million members, and they were hardly upset with the direction Russia was pushing.

the rise of evangelicals as a voting group seems to be a co-ordinated world-wide phenomenon.

Not to me. There doesn’t seem to be much coordination there. There are just grifters seeing an opportunity.

I’d argue that those same elites thrived more under stable economic growth than an unstable one

It’s hardly the first time that an elite and powerful group tried to use a movement or a politician to further their interests and then found out that they couldn’t control what they’d unleashed.

I think you’re overestimating the influence of Russia and China and underestimating the dysfunction in the US.

Civilization is doing pretty well outside the US. If the US disappeared tomorrow, the rest of the world would do significantly better. I don’t know how the world will deal with climate change, but without the US it would be easier to make progress. The tech firms blowing up the AI bubble, and invading our privacy are nearly all American. A lot of the private equity firms destroying the world are also American. If the US could hurry up and finish collapsing, the rest of the world’s civilization could just move on.

Which bubble was that?

AFAIK none of the previous AI bubbles really had much investment. There was hype, but it was hype within the computer science, or cognitive science fields. But, maybe there’s a financial bubble bit that I’m missing.

Uber used accounting tricks to hide their true losses for years. They’ve only recently managed to become profitable by squeezing both drivers and passengers at the same time. Is that sustainable? Almost certainly not, but, for the moment, they’re getting away with it.

That’s the only reason I don’t think it will pop in the next 6 months or so. Even Biden or Obama would have stepped in to try to prevent the economy from crashing. But, there’s the Trump factor. First of all, some of his biggest backers are from the AI “industry”. His VP is tied to Peter Thiel, his biggest donors are Crypto and AI bros. The vast majority of his own personal money is tied up in the current Crypto bubble. In addition, he’s obviously so easily bribed. Even if he he wasn’t interested in intervening otherwise, he could easily be bribed to intervene.

Because of Trump, and the fact that the house, senate and judiciary are all Trump lackeys, I think the bubble will survive until at least the 2026 midterms. If the Democrats take back control of the House and Senate they could take control over spending from Trump, which might mean the bubble is allowed to pop. But, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Trump hand over literal trillions in taxpayer dollars to keep the bubble inflated.

Comparing the coming crash to the dot com crash is like comparing a rough landing to the various crashes on Sept 11th, 2001.

The dot com crash was mostly isolated in high tech. Because it was lead by the Japanese economy starting to fail, and followed by the Sept 11th attacks, the various combined crashes resulted in the S&P 500 falling by about 50% from its peak to the bottom, but it was already back up to the peak value in 2007, then the global financial crisis hit.

This bubble is much bigger. Some analysts say the AI bubble is 17x the size of the Dot Com bubble, and 4x the size of the 2007/08 real estate bubble. AI stocks were 40% of all US GDP growth in 2025, and 80% of all growth in US stocks.

Nvidia’s stock price has gone up 1700% in just 2 years. OpenAI is planning to go public on a valuation of $1 trillion despite losing vast amounts of money. Just 7 US tech companies make up 36% of the entire US stock market, and they’re all heavily betting on AI.

At least when the dot com bubble popped, it left some useful things behind, like huge amounts of dark fibre. But, the AI processors are so specialized they can’t be used for much of anything else. They also wear out, sometimes within months. The datacenter buildings themselves can maybe be repurposed to being general purpose datacenters, but, a lot of the contents will have to be thrown out.