This is an amazing example of why our courts are perhaps the last pocket of sanity and honesty in our federal government.

The political leadership of the Pentagon doesn’t care that they aren’t in the best position to do that.

They don’t want the vendor _to be able to_ restrict what they want to do.

Your frustration is absolutely well placed in the sense that there’s no transparency or recourse once the defense department gets their way.

“Rule of thumb” is a heuristic, which is necessarily inaccurate.

My only EV was a 1Gen Nissan Leaf, which is a perfect example of the EV that violates your assumptions.

I don’t think the first gen leaf is what parent had in mind when referring to “modern EVs”…

Which is why I commented — because there was a blind spot to their point.

I interpret “modern EV” as an EV in the 2010+ era (as opposed to the original EVs from the 1880s-1910s, which were not modern) which were made for streets / commuting (as opposed to golf carts / theme park cars, which have been around for many decades). And I don’t think I’m alone when using this framing.

1. A lot has changed in 15 years.

2. Old leaf batteries are popular with the modding community. I have friends who who’ve done ICE to EV car conversions using old leaf batteries that still work fine.

EV Tax rebates ended.

EPA standards for fuel mileage goals in the future were scrapped.

Current fuel mileage standards are no longer enforced.

The Trump Feds sued to stop California’s fuel mileage standards goals.

Tariffs on EV / battery imported products.

The administration paused the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program and cancelled over $7.5 billion in funding for green energy projects, including grants meant to convert manufacturing plants to EV production.

And Musk participation in the fraud that was DOGE sure did push EV buyers away from Musk / Tesla.

This assumes that everyone is currently sufficiently informed enough to make the same expert observations about methodology affecting bias. This is flatly untrue for the vast majority of the population.

And nobody has enough time or desire (or likely money to subscribe to the journals) to read the details of the papers and grok the nuances. Humans think in simple narratives for a reason.

We shouldn’t have blind faith in science, but we also shouldn’t have to go back to first principles and do our own version of every experiment. The repeatability crisis is a thing and we know about it. P value hacking is a thing we know about.

The problem described in the article is that we shouldn’t believe headlines or short summaries created by writers who aren’t incentivized to add the nuance. And nobody should believe a headline anyway - in addition to necessarily being lossy, for any for profit organization they are likely written by someone other than the writer and probably A/B tested for clicks.

You haven't even mentioned how LLMs can absolutely mimic any opinion anywhere at any time!

The trust in Science is about the system the produces it; not a single paper or whatever, but that's being erradicated because of the needle in haystack problem.

So even if you think going to original sources makes you safe, think again.

Yellow journalism existed generations before you and I. The institution was always sullied by the worst and has always contained some of the most dogged pestering fact finders.

It’s not even clear that journalists of the 1960s-1980s were as impartial or brutally honest as we remember. That is most likely a halo effect from having a few highly trusted very visible personalities (eg. Walter Cronkite), but even they were slow to realize (by a decade) how much of a morass the Vietnam War was.

It was always about independence, not impartiality. Instead of having a big boss on the top issuing correct opinions, reputable news outlets gave their reporters a lot of freedom in their work. Each reporter had their own biases, and the variation within each outlet was usually greater than the variation between outlets.

This ignores a huge blind spot that humans have: confirmation bias.

There is no accurate heuristic which is a good short.

For profit organizations are legally required to maximize shareholder value. Many of them will abuse the spirit of the law in order to squeeze profits where others won’t.

The FBI is violating the spirit and original intent of the 4A by creating an entire industry out of the “3rd party doctrine” bypass to the 4A. That doctrine was whole cloth created by SCOTUS and Congress has been too happy to avoid credit or blame for it to not enshrine it in statute.

> Functionally shorting a stock is not much different than a Polymarket prediction.

But can you short a stock if you are a director at that company?

The problem people have with betting markets isn’t that you can bet on an event. It’s that the event’s outcome might be shaped by the same people (or friends of the people) who actually shape the event.

This is why there are so many articles speculating who bets on Trump winning the election, or which company buys Time Warner or when Venezuela is attacked or when Iran is attacked. Maybe the winner is just a super forecaster in their own house or maybe they are a cabinet secretary walking into the Situation Room.

Sports betting was illegal until the last decade and the sports leagues in the USA had extremely stiff penalties for violating these rules. I’m still not sure what changed (other than money buying the crumbling of regulation).

> But can you short a stock if you are a director at that company?

You can, if you cover your tracks well enough. Or donate to a President willing to keep the SEC off your back.

I get that people in power can place bets on their own actions. But again, they can just do that in the stock market. A lawmaker might know a law is going to pass and trade on that insider knowledge. Or maybe the vice president owns shares in Haliburton and then helps encourage invading Iraq... what's old is new again, I guess.

In many companies this is not allowed.