The reason we don’t have onion futures is that in 1955, Vincent Kosuga and Sam Siegel cornered the onion market. They bought up almost every onion in Chicago, then flooded the market and crashed prices to 10 cents a bag. Onion farmers went bankrupt, and in 1958 Congress banned onion futures altogether. It’s still illegal today. Kosuga himself was something else. He carried a .38 and a billy club everywhere, raced stock cars, survived a plane crash after running out of fuel mid-flight, and gave enough to the church to get private audiences with three popes. When critics called what he did reckless gambling, he said, “If it’s against the law to make money... then I’m guilty.” The funny part is that onion prices were actually most stable back when futures were legal.

Super sayan

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A few other federally recognized national "days" include: - National Ice Cream Day (1984) - National Catfish Day (1987) - Professional Photography Week (1965) - National Tap Dance Day (1989) - Loyalty Day (1958) - Law Day, U.S.A. (1961) - Frozen Food Day (1984) - National Microfilm Week (1972) - National Ski Week (1965–66) - National Farm-City Week (1956) - National Patriotism Week (1980) - National Family Week (1972)

Most commemorative "days" are bullshit. Almost none of them are official. Congress used to pass commemorative bills for these until the House banned them in 1995 because they were eating up floor time. Now the Senate passes symbolic resolutions with zero legal force. The rest are where someone just declared it. National Donut Day was started by the Salvation Army in 1938 to honor the volunteers who handed out donuts to soldiers in WWI. Today there's a self-appointed registry, the National Day Calendar, founded in 2013 in North Dakota. It gets thousands of applications a year and approves a handful. After that, it's just brands piling on until it feels real.

Your pilot has probably seen something weird and been told to keep quiet about it. H.R. 5231 would change that. H.R. 5231, the Safe Airspace for Americans Act, would let commercial pilots report UAP sightings to the FAA without fear of retaliation. The reported data then goes straight to the Pentagon's UAP office.

In 1915, Michigan passed a law that put a 10-cent bounty on rats to help control the rodent population. It stayed on the books for the next 85 years before finally being repealed during a purge of the state's outdated laws in 2000. Other laws removed from the penal code during this session include: - A 1978 law licensing weather modification experts - A 1931 law banning immoral advertising including treatments for venereal diseases and "lost manhood" - A 1931 law prohibiting the use of images of dead presidents to advertise liquor

ICYMI, California just signed the "No Robo Bosses" bill (SB 947) into law. Starting in July 2027, an employer can't fire or discipline employees primarily based on what an algorithm says.

E-bikes have quickly become an urgent topic for regulators across the U.S. In just the past two years, at least 19 states have passed laws related to defining or regulating e-bike classes. California was the most recent state to pass e-bike legislation by signing SB 1167 into law. If an e-bike hits motorcycle speeds, the law treats it like one. That means mandatory labels showing class, speed, and wattage, battery safety standards, and police authority to pull it off the road.

After Nick Saban's testimony before Congress back in June, the Protect College Sports Act (S.4668) just passed the Senate 77-22. The bill sets federal rules for college athletes' NIL deals, caps agent fees at 5%, requires athletes to report NIL payments over $600, and gives schools/conferences a limited antitrust exemption to pool media rights. Now it heads to the House.

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>be me >discover effective altruism >apparently normal charity is inefficient >why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing >fair enough >buy mosquito nets >save lives >numbers look good >feel powerful >couple years later >someone asks an innocent question >why only count people alive today >huh >future people matter too >obviously >my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet >reasonable.jpg >keep following logic >what about their grandchildren >also yes >what about people in 500 years >sure >5000 years >why not >500 million years >starting to get weird but morality is morality >open calculator >humanity could survive for an astronomically long time >could colonize galaxy >could have trillions upon trillions of descendants >maybe digital people too >maybe simulated civilizations >maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds >calculator starts smoking >realize currently living humans are rounding error >8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta >future contains potentially 10^something people >can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets >new moral priority unlocked >protect the long-term future >stop thinking in units of "people helped" >start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved" >malaria? >terrible >but only kills existing humans >AI extinction could delete the entire light cone >nuclear war could permanently derail civilization >bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years >someone invents wrong constitution in 2140 >quadrillions suffer >better fund governance workshop now >friend says maybe we should improve hospitals >explain opportunity cost >friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people >explain scope sensitivity >friend stops inviting me to dinner >need to decide what to fund >easy >expected value >suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction >sounds tiny >but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives >multiply >mother of god >$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies >charity evaluation complete >someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from >expert judgement >which expert >us >how calibrated >extremely thoughtfully >reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative >still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude >epistemic robustness achieved >someone says maybe project doesn't work >assign 20% chance >still astronomical >maybe project makes problem worse >assign 5% chance >still astronomical >why 5 >because 30 felt pessimistic >publish 46-page report >contains seventeen sensitivity analyses >every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign >critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities >yes >that's literally why it's important >critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical >make probability smaller >critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong >make probability smaller again >critic begins rubbing temples >discover AI safety >perfect longtermist cause >AI might kill everyone >or create utopia >or seize galaxy >or tile universe with paperclips >or create billions of conscious software minds >finally a problem with numbers big enough for me >start AI safety nonprofit >mission: prevent dangerous AI >hire smartest people available >smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI >interesting >we must understand capabilities to understand safety >we must scale models to study alignment >we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first >we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong >we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous >outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies >complicated field >company releases stronger model >very concerned >company begins training even stronger model >extremely concerned >company raises $14 billion >concern reaches unprecedented levels >need to influence government >future is at stake >normal democratic process too slow >politicians don't understand exponential curves >public doesn't understand x-risk >experts must guide them >who counts as expert >people who understand x-risk >who understands x-risk >our friends >someone objects that this seems politically convenient >explain we're representing future generations >future generations unavailable for comment >develop concept of value lock-in >terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever >therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in >whose values >let's circle back >begin with impartial morality >end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want >beautiful arc >meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things >voting wrong >having parochial attachments >loving family more than strangers >caring about local community >getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible >evolutionary biases everywhere >explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted >except intuition that future digital people count >and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad >and intuition that our probability estimates are sane >and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future >those intuitions survived peer review >someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter >inefficient >could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher >think of all the simulated people you just killed >okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly >PR team says "future generations deserve a voice" >much better >journalist asks what longtermism means >say "future people matter" >everyone agrees >great >journalist asks what follows from that >well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures >journalist raises eyebrow >return to "future people matter" >motte has entered the chat >critic: of course future people matter >me: glad we agree >critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them >me: why do you hate our grandchildren >eventually notice uncomfortable implication >if future value dominates everything >then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future >education matters because future institutions >health matters because future productivity >democracy matters because future trajectory >human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy >see starving child >feel compassion >check spreadsheet >child's direct welfare contribution negligible >but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality >compassion restored >tell myself this is impartial altruism >one day assistant asks obvious question >"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?" >silence >open spreadsheet >increase column width >add confidence interval >assistant asks again >"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?" >stare into cosmic light cone >10^50 people staring back >none of them exist >none of them can tell me >none of them can falsify my assumptions >realize I have invented the perfect constituency >infinitely important >completely silent >and always represented by me

State Affairs Co-Founder @evanburns talks about how Predictions Markets companies made a strategic error that they are only now correcting. He explains that proactively building a strategy around the regulatory environment is critical to do as soon as a company achieves product-market fit — if the state-level folks had gotten ahead of this early on, they’d be in a much better position today. “If you think your product is better and you’re entering an entrenched industry, those entrenched industries have regulatory capture, they have the relationships, they know who’s in the back room at the right time and who to grease the palm of… Because now they’re having to do it. They’re building massive organizations, they’re deploying tons of money into lobbying. They’re getting banned in some states. The cost is extreme. If that had been a core component of the business from day one, I think they would be a lot more successful. I think they’ll get there, just with a lot more pain.”