> In fact, here's a much better get-rich app / scheme: use AI to find regulatory situations that are both easy to break and profitable to break and where enforcement is usually just done to poor people.

How about a less cynical alternative: Use it to find ways to defeat regulatory capture so that you can enter a large market which is currently locked up by incumbents, or make more in an ancillary market from doing "commoditize your complement" on the one which is currently captured.

> However, part of doing that is facing the consequences of breaking those laws; being arrested, etc.

This form of civil disobedience is effective against bad laws that nevertheless assign punishments proportional to the nominal offense. If "demonstrations without a permit" is punished by a week in jail and they won't give you a permit then you do the demonstration and spend the week in jail. A week later you're back out there demonstrating again. MLK Jr. was arrested 29 times in a span of 11 years.

It doesn't really work in the modern system which is tuned for coercing plea bargains and full of three strikes laws, because then "pissing off the government" is an aggravating factor that causes them to stack more charges until you're facing years instead of days. Then you're not making a point through a willingness to spend a few nights in a cell before your next press conference, you're getting taken off the board.

It also never really worked against bad economic rules because the nature of bad economic rules is to make good economic behavior uneconomical, like converting units to types in higher demand or funding new construction. The deleterious effect of the rule is that instead of it costing $50,000 to add a housing unit, it costs $500,000. But doing civil disobedience by building it anyway would catch you >$500,000 in fines and penalties, or carries penalties like demolition of the structure. So the bad law acts as an extremely effective deterrent against doing the good thing by making it uneconomical regardless of whether you follow the law or you don't. A bankrupt company can't continue to advocate for change or serve as an example of doing something good.

And if they actually did pay the fines then instead of people saying "that's not real civil disobedience" they would be saying "look at these lawless corporations paying token fines as a cost of doing business" and arguing for the penalties to be increased to a level that would bankrupt them wherever that isn't already the case.

So the remaining option is to break the law and then argue that the law is harmful and shouldn't be enforced.

If gambling is legal but using violence against debtors is illegal then the legal casinos out-compete the illegal ones but cut you off when the banks won't extend you any more credit instead of giving you a loan with a lien against your kneecaps, and the money goes to companies that aren't using it to fund the expansion of protection rackets etc.

If gambling is illegal then the profits go to organized crime and they don't follow any of the other laws either.

> but in the Fentanyl age I see people dropping like flies all around me

Fentanyl is a response to prohibition. If you have to smuggle something it's a lot easier to move 10 kg of fentanyl and cut it with something near the point of sale than to move 10,000 kg of codeine from the point of manufacture.

But then you have street dealers cutting it with who knows what in who knows what amount. They may use a 1000:1 ratio of unspecified hopefully-inert powder to fentanyl but don't mix it evenly so some customers get a 10000:1 ratio and others get 100:1 and become addicted or overdose. Or a dealer has one supplier who was already cutting it 50:1 so they were used to only cutting it another 20:1 so their customers don't complain, but then they start wanting larger quantities and find a new supplier without realizing they just bypassed the one who was pre-cutting it and are now getting uncut fentanyl.

None of that happens if anyone can buy codeine at Walmart. Or for that matter if they can buy fentanyl and know exactly how much they're getting.

Exactly. Legal drugs get weaker because you can exchange information about minimum required dosages (saving money) without risking arrest.

Illegal drugs get stronger for exactly the reason you stated in your first paragraph.

> The converse is also true, for example legalizing cannabis in Canada has significantly increased demand for it

The relevant thing that link actually says is that more survey respondents admitted to cannabis use after legalization, the obvious problem being that before legalization they would be admitting to a crime, which will suppress response rates.

The same link also points out that the legalization happened right before COVID and then you have a major confounder because even if cannabis use is actually up, you don't know if it's because of legalization or people turning to cannabis over stress from COVID. Moreover, the reported usage increased during COVID but started to decline in 2023. This implies that either the apparent spike was COVID, or that it was something like media reports about recent legalization acting as temporary free advertising and causing a temporary increase in usage. Neither of those is evidence of a sustained increase in demand.

Meanwhile legal options do cause people to prefer legal sources over the black market, and then you get fewer people becoming addicts because the thing they thought they were buying was spiked with something significantly more addictive by a black market seller. Or the black market products have higher variation in the dose and then customers can't predict how much they're getting and occasionally take more than expected, leading to a higher rate of overdose and stronger dependency-inducing withdrawal.

>Meanwhile legal options do cause people to prefer legal sources over the black market

In the case of cannabis it's been showing to lead to less underage use too. If it's a crime, then selling to anyone of any age is still just a crime. But if it's only a crime to sell to under 18/21 then legal shops will avoid selling to the under age to avoid revocation of their license.

> If it's a crime, then selling to anyone of any age is still just a crime. But if it's only a crime to sell to under 18/21 then legal shops will avoid selling to the under age to avoid revocation of their license.

That isn't true; crimes can have aggravating factors and selling drugs to a minor could aggravate the crime of selling drugs.

I don't think the laws were written that way, but they could have been.

There is an incentive to commit a crime when the benefit of committing the crime exceeds the penalty times the chance of getting caught plus the cost of measures taken to avoid getting caught.

This is why increasing penalties have extremely fast diminishing returns. As the penalty goes up, the relative cost of measures to avoid detection goes down, and the penalty needed to counter them becomes exponentially larger.

If the benefit of doing the crime is a million dollars and the penalty is a 50% chance of a year in prison then you have a problem, because plenty of people would be willing to take the risk. But it's actually worse than that, because spending $100,000 on countermeasures might lower the risk of getting caught to 1%, and they're still making $900,000. That might not be worth it when the penalty is a year -- maybe $100,000 in profit is worth a 50% risk of one year? But if you set the penalty to 20 years then it is. Then the gain is $900,000 but the expected penalty has actually fallen to 1% of 20 years, i.e. expected cost of 2.4 months instead of 6. To deter someone with a $900,000 profit who values a year at $120,000 with a 1% chance of getting caught, you would need the penalty to be 750 years, which you can't do because people don't live that long. And spending even more on countermeasures might lower the risk of getting caught even more. If spending $500,000 makes it 0.1%, that may not be worth doing when the max practical penalty is ~70 years, but the option for it means that even 750 years would be insufficient even if it was possible.

This is why there are things it's very difficult to deter. The profit from doing them is more than the cost of making the probability of detection small and then the size of the penalty can't be made large enough to be a deterrent.

That all changes when you legalize most of the market. Now the profit isn't a million dollars, it's $100,000, because anyone can enter the market so increased competition drives down margins. Moreover, $90,000 of the profit was from selling to adults. So now the profit from selling to kids is only $10,000. Not worth spending $100,000 to lower the risk of getting caught. And then you can easily assign a moderate penalty that acts as an actual deterrent.

That seems like the only sensible path forward, if you assume that the only lever a society can pull to make punishment harsher is “longer prison sentences”.

What if the penalty for selling drugs to kids was death?

It seems like that would change the risk/reward calculation pretty substantially.

>could aggravate the crime

For dealers this would mean almost nothing when the punishment for dealing already lead people to do things like get in shootouts with police.

Meanwhile legalization of some drugs has directly shown that it decreases youth usage.

> For dealers this would mean almost nothing when the punishment for dealing already lead people to do things like get in shootouts with police.

I think you're getting at something valid, but it isn't quite what you think.

The punishment for dealing drugs is, as I understand it, mostly applied to major distributors. In this sense, selling drugs wasn't a crime before anyway.

If you're too low-level for prosecution to be much of a concern, it doesn't take much to guide you away from fundamentally similar crimes where prosecution is a real concern.

And there is an obvious reason for this. Murder is very illegal. You therefore don't need short selling to be illegal because if someone sells short without killing anyone then that's fine, and if they do assassinate someone then you don't need to be able to charge them with short selling because you can charge them with murder.

Notice also that the murder (or tampering with sensors etc.) is the thing you don't want happening in your jurisdiction, so that's the thing you have to prohibit anyway, because even if you ban short selling or prediction markets in your jurisdiction, having them in any other jurisdiction in the world would allow anyone to just place their bet there and you're right back to needing to deter that by punishing the murder rather than the bet.

> A few years years ago, there was no conceivable profit motive for interfering with weather sensors on public property. Now there is one.

Can this really be said with a straight face?

Suppose you're an oil company, or a trader with a large position, and "hottest year on record ten years in a row" is bad PR that will make bills you don't like more likely to get passed. Or for that matter a company selling carbon capture stuff who wants to make sure it goes the other way. How about tobacco companies?

This has been a huge problem for as long as public data has been used to make decisions affecting profits.

> Your argument is that people had no existing profit motive to use dirty tricks to influence scientific results/data?

No, that's way too broad. I don't believe that, and I didn't write that.

Oil companies indeed had enormous incentives to obscure and confuse the scientific record of climate change. But hiring thousands of Taskrabbits to go around the world blowing hot and/or cold air on weather sensors would not have helped them: some of them would have been caught, and it would've been exposed as a hamfisted and shambolic scandal.

Oil companies had to do larger-scale, longer-term stuff like funding think tanks, lobbying politicians, and writing op-eds.

Now, because of prediction markets, the "attack surface" for interfering with scientific data collection is much larger and more fine-grained. The incentives for big oil companies probably haven't changed much… but now any random amoral idiot or degenerate gambler has an incentive to go find unguarded weather stations or water quality monitors, etc, and mess with them.

> some of them would have been caught, and it would've been exposed as a hamfisted and shambolic scandal.

Isn't that the same thing that happened here? It's a news story because they got caught. There is apparently already a law against this sort of tampering and it makes sense to have that law.

> Now, because of prediction markets, the "attack surface" for interfering with scientific data collection is much larger and more fine-grained.

Oil and tobacco companies are the canonical examples because they're huge and contemptible, but the incentives scale all the way down. A small industrial plant is only allowed to use river water for cooling as long as the temperature isn't too high, they now have the incentive to cause the reading to be lower. The local school doesn't have A/C and therefore cancels class whenever the outside temperature is above some threshold, what happens when the kids figure out that the temperature sensor they use is in a public place?

You can make messing with the sensor illegal to apply a disincentive to counter the incentive but that doesn't mean the incentive wasn't always there to begin with.

It's now that poorer, less powerful, were caught. I'm sure it's been caught before, but buried.

Is that supposed to be better or worse? If it gets buried you don't even know that the data has been manipulated when using it for other purposes.

Also, the oil and tobacco companies have certainly been caught manipulating scientific results on multiple occasions.

I think it's a good thing that more people are aware that it is a possibility. It was a possibility before, but people would just say "we don't have evidence this has ever occurred"

It's probably a combination of high density storage nodes getting I/O bound and SSDs having finite write endurance. Anything that improves the first problem costs them money to improve it and then makes the second problem worse, and the second one costs them money again, so why would they want to make the default something that costs then more twice if most people don't need it?

Instead they make the default "meager IOPS" and then charge more to the people who need more.

I'm not sure about this but I remember that a lot of servers at my old company stuck with hard disks as late as 2018 - exactly for the same reason - HDDs for all their faults dont have write endurance issues. This was quite surprising to me back then.

How often is the storage in cloud providers even local vs how often are laptops doing anything other than raw access to a single local disk with a basic FS?

I remember my worked laptop's IOPS beating a single VM on the first SSD based SAN I deployed as well. Of course, the SAN scaled well beyond it with 1,000 VMs.

The problem with the US system is that it doesn't know what it's trying to be.

If you did a socialist system then everything is "free" but possibly slow and expensive on the back end when the government isn't efficient.

If you did a libertarian system then everything is cheap but it's caveat emptor because nobody is stopping you from buying morphine for $10 from Amazon.

The US system isn't either one. It pretends to be a market sometimes but then has a bunch of rules to thwart competition. Doctors are required by law to do residency but the government limits the number of residency slots in response to lobbying from the AMA so there aren't enough doctors. "Certificate of need" laws explicitly prohibit new competitors for various services. Insurance is tied to employment to make it hard for individuals to shop around. Laws encourage, require or have the government provide "prescription drug coverage" to make patients price insensitive so drug companies can charge a huge premium for patenting a minor improvement or simple combination of existing drugs and have the patient will something which is marginally if at all better even if it's dramatically more expensive because they don't see the cost when the insurance/government is required to pay for it.

It's a big pile of corruption, because all that money is going to places. But then if you try to fix it, half the population insists on doing the first one and the other half is only willing to do the second one, and the industry capitalizes on this to prevent either one.

Maybe instead we should do both rather than neither. Have the government provide a threshold level of services, like emergency rooms and free clinics and anything more than that the local government wants to fund, and then have a minimally regulated private system that anyone can use if the government system doesn't satisfy them.

I think you're trying to apply ideology where it doesn't belong. Nobody on earth would advocate for such extensive spending to facilitate agreement on financing. It's extremely, extremely inefficient. (But it does produce jobs, which makes politicians super horny.)

The market also won't assist us, as we can't exactly compete future treatment costs against unknown illnesses.

Merely providing emergency rooms and "free clinics" will ensure that people only use these services.

A public option eliminating profit margin seems to at least be sane, and ideally would starve private funding from existence. Any remaining options would highlight deficiencies in the existing system.

A schumpeterian system, if you must slap an ideology on it.

> Merely providing emergency rooms and "free clinics" will ensure that people only use these services.

Emergency rooms operate by triage. If you're having a heart attack, you're going in right now. If your shoulder has been bothering you for six months, you might have to come back multiple days in a row and spend the whole day waiting before there is a slow enough day that you can be seen. There is then an obvious incentive to go pay a private physician to be seen immediately instead. Free clinics are similar: There are no appointments, it's first come first served, and then most people prefer to pay $100 to schedule an appointment rather than wasting an entire day waiting in a queue, but you still have that option for people with no money.

Emergency rooms are also a natural monopoly because in an actual emergency the primary consideration is which one is closest, which doesn't make for a competitive market. So it makes sense to have the government do that. Whereas non-emergency care (which is the large majority of medical expenses) would allow people to compare prices or make cost trade offs against distance or convenience etc., if we would actually expose people to pricing. For example by requiring price transparency and then having insurance pay the second-lowest price for that service within 100 miles of your location, but then letting you choose where you actually want to go and make up any difference yourself, or choose the lowest cost option instead of the second lowest and then put the difference in your HSA.

> A public option eliminating profit margin seems to at least be sane, and ideally would starve private funding from existence.

It's not clear how a government option that doesn't have taxpayer subsidies would do this any better than a private non-profit. There are many existing non-profit healthcare providers and they don't have meaningfully lower costs than for-profit ones.

The general problem is that "non-profits" and government-operated services still have money flowing through them and "profit" can be extracted in all manner of ways other than paying dividends to shareholders. The officers can just pay themselves high salaries, or whoever is in charge of the budget can take bribes/kickbacks to shovel money in the direction of the contractors or unions paying them off.

Meanwhile the nature of "profit" in a competitive market is largely misunderstood because of accounting differences. If a non-profit wants to buy an MRI machine, they have to take out a loan, and then pay back the loan with interest which they account for as an expense. A for-profit company might get the money to buy it by selling shares to investors, and then paying dividends to the shareholders instead of paying interest on a loan, which goes on the books as "profit" instead of interest expense. But you couldn't just replace them with a non-profit and then lower prices by the amount of "profit" they were making because then they also wouldn't have had private investment and you're back to needing the loan and paying the same money as interest to the bank.

The thing that requires providers to be efficient is competition, because then the ones wasting money or taking bribes have to cover the amount wasted/embezzled by charging more to customers and then the customers don't choose them because they have higher prices. But that's the thing the existing regulatory system goes out of its way to thwart.