Volatility is a natural consequence of weather, blight, etc., etc.

To reduce volatility you would need to actually stabilize the supply of onions.

What futures do is allow traders to shift risk from the future to the present. By pricing that risk, it's possible for people who depend on onions to pay a little more now in exchange for a guarantee about the future.

It's not magically going to make onions less volatile (although high risk prices can spur investment which might) but it can reduce disruptions caused by volatility.

The classic example of this is futures on jet fuel which allow airlines to weather random wars in the middle east, OPEC shenanigans, etc. Ticket prices are higher this way, but the existential threat of being forced to cancel a bunch of flights is gone.

Oh you’re talking supply volatility, where most of us are talking price volatility.

As long as demand remains inelastic, the two are the same.

If there is a supply shortage prices will rise; no amount of futures trading can create resources out of thin air.

> It wouldn't bum me out so much but it clearly does nothing but hinder progress

I don't know if this is true. Lots of this stuff is inherently expensive - clinical trials, research into vast numbers of compounds, and then mass-producing the drug are all things that cannot be feasibly done without at least millions of dollars.

The US and China are the current world leaders in biotech, and it's because both of them have massive infrastructure to funnel billions of dollars into research.

Yeah, the IP law could be reformed (I am a big believer in reducing IP protections in general) but the truth is that SOME FORM of protection is necessary to convince people with money to fund this kind of research. The government is simply not capable of this level of spending for such uncertain rewards; it doesn't have the proper incentives to recognize and promote good research while defunding useless research.

I would hate to live in a world where questions of "legal or illegal" are "impossible to define."

A US citizen cannot be denied entry into the country for ANY reason. A valid US passport is prima facie evidence of citizenship so once you show it the worst that can happen is you getting arrested.

That's the theoretical worst that should happen. The theoretical worst that could happen is far worse than that.

I remember reading about narrow exceptions, but a quick search suggests I was mistaken.

Aircraft can already receive traffic and weather information over ADS-B. Larger or more modern aircraft even have onboard collision avoidance systems that supersede ATC when necessary and also carry weather radars themselves.

Additionally, there are human factors to consider. One commonly read-out piece of data is the local altimeter setting which ensures that all aircraft under the control of the same facility have a common reference - you generally don't set your altimeter to the area you're in, but rather to the setting of where you're going. Airplanes already automatically receive that data, but selecting the exact setting requires manual intervention for precisely this reason.

Add in the need to allow older airplanes to keep flying, the need to be robust to signal jamming, and the inherent safety issues with packing an airplane full of gas and hundreds of people, and it quickly becomes clear that full automation is inadvisable.

> Deflation is a good thing, it rewards delayed gratification.

"Delayed gratification" is also provided by investments producing returns. An economy with lots of investors will outperform one where people stuff their cash into their mattress, and deflation makes it very hard for potential investments to beat that strategy.

> For most of human history the money was stable.

[citation needed]

The Spanish empire was driven to collapse by hyperinflation. Even in the US, there were financial collapses in the 19th and 18th century. Bank runs have been a thing for as long as banks have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run

Your premise is based on faulty assumptions. The existence of credit itself is what causes monetary instability, and without credit the world would look very different.

> The existence of credit itself is what causes monetary instability, and without credit the world would look very different.

Indeed. Credit is money; ultimately anyone can expand the money supply with an IOU.

Money is destroyed when a loan is paid back. Private credit does not expand the monetary supply permanently. Only the state can increase the money supply.

Your understanding of monetary theory is somewhere between 110 and 5,000 years off. Furness had a pretty cogent explanation of a monetary system without central authority or functional currency about 100 years ago with the Yap. They even managed to have bouts of inflation without the concept of a bank or state.

You are neglecting interest paid. It doesn't matter who issues the credit - the Medici family or the US Federal Reserve.

credit does provide a kind of flexibility that is sometimes needed, though. However, predatory lending, and the endless stacking of recursive loans, and government money printers are a massive stability issue that we're running into globally, and have (as you say) run into multiple times, historically.

My thought on this would be a dynamicaly stable currency. estimate debt and transaction activity, and the more debt and more liquid activity there is, the more deflationary currency should be. the less debt there is, and the less of a percentage of the money is actually in-use, the more inflationary the currency should be. this, though, is fairly off-the-cuff.

Aviation fuel is taxed specially and is sometimes dyed to make it difficult to do this. Jet fuel itself is basically just diesel/kerosene, though, so if any is left over it can just be used for the next flight.

Not all Chinese models are open weight, especially now that they're actually getting close to the frontier.

Apps with maps use a specific and different Mercator projection which produces a nice quadtree for dynamically loading data. This is possible with other projections too, but reprojection and training users to expect a different looking map is expensive.

Almost nobody plots courses of constant bearing on a map. Almost nobody uses a map to measure area either.

99% of the use cases for maps these days are for local navigation where artifacts are minor. The differences in map projection are basically irrelevant to users in these cases.

Measuring area is a different use case to looking at the world map to get a sense of relative sizes - of continents, countries, regions, etc.

This in turns influences how you think about history, population density, travel times, etc.

But what if I'm looking at a world map to get a sense of where different cities fall on different latitude lines to gauge their climate?

His point is that "written and vegan agreements" is not the same thing as "has a contract" and that the legal niceties need to be respected or else it would be impossible to get anything done.

Asking "is it cool if I paint your wall?" more than three decades ago doesn't create a contract or protect the work.

I highly doubt that street artists made a legally binding agreement with the owners that protects the art for the simple reason that this would be a ridiculous encumbrance on the property that would be unacceptable to most sane people.