As far as I understand the federal reserve is not technically part of the government but a private institution. It has shareholders not unlike a public company and those shareholders are the big banks like JPM. I'm not sure if those are the same as the so called primary dealers or if there is just an overlap. You are correct that the actual printing of physical cash is done by the government on behalf of the fed, I think by the treasury.
> It's established by Federal law; its Chairman is appointed by the President.
It's amusing that you think that the Fed is an instrument of the government, but other conspiracy theorists think it is an instrument of private banks:
> Griffin then turns his attention to the secret meeting that took place on Jekyll Island in 1910. He reveals how a small group of powerful bankers, including representatives from J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, and other influential figures, devised a plan to create a central banking system that would serve their own interests. They realized that they needed to present the Federal Reserve as a government entity to gain public support, despite the fact that it was, in essence, a private institution.
The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 is not a "conspiracy theory", it's a fact. The events leading up to it are not a matter of serious dispute as far as I know. Of course the government and the Fed will give you a very different interpretation of those events, but their interpretation doesn't stand up to actual scrutiny.
> it is an instrument of private banks
It is both; it is part of the government (for the reasons I have already given), and it transfers wealth to private banks and financial institutions from everyone else by printing money. The private banks were tired of the government coming to them for a bailout every time there was a financial panic (the Panic of 1907 being the most recent one at the time), so they convinced Congress that creating a central bank would stop the panics. (It didn't, of course, but they convinced Congress that it would.) With the Federal Reserve in place, banks and financial institutions, as I've said, got wealth transferred to them whenever the Fed printed money, and also the burden of recovery from financial panics was transferred from the banks to the taxpayers (a recent example of course being the bailouts of 2008).
Disturbing others with smells is already against the law. There have been cases of renters getting kicked out for bothering nighbors with tobacco smoke. Some amount of smell is just part of life. I also have so smell disgusting (to me) food sometimes.
There are also restrictions where you can and can't smoke, like schools, playgrounds or sports fields.
Consumption of all drugs is legal in Germany. The problem is buying/selling/production, as well as simple possession. I think this is the case in most countries.
> This tiny detail makes the difference why employer-mandated drug tests are not a thing in Germany like it is in the US.
It doesn't explain the difference, no, since the same is true about the US. In most states, consumption of most drugs is not a crime - possession, production, distribution, sale, and trafficking are the actual crimes prosecuted.
Nearly any amount of intoxication is vaguely illegal under disorderly conduct. It’s a catch all they can apply whenever. Fighting it and winning still costs time and money.
So sure, the act of consuming might be legal, but having consumed isn’t.
As I understand it, the issue is only about showing up to work with any level of drugs in your system, even if there aren't any actual signs of you being intoxicated.
> Nearly any amount of intoxication is vaguely illegal under disorderly conduct. It’s a catch all they can apply whenever. Fighting it and winning still costs time and money.
This is a weak argument. Almost nobody is getting prosecuted for "disorderly conduct" when under the influence of marijuana as a proxy for marijuana consumption. And even if they were, the connection between that and employer drug tests is extremely tenuous.
Unless you drive a car or own a gun in the US, then if you do get a bad drug test result you can easily get charged with a crime. It is not likely to get drug tested in relation to having a gun, but anywhere pushing DUI enforcement is going to be drug testing significant samples of random people and charging people who may have smoked long ago and had all side effects completely subsided but still charged with a DUI offense. You can get active THC in a blood sample up to 3 days after smoking despite the effects lasting hours at best and levels not increasing or decreasing linearly with consumption. And of course metabolites for cannabis can go back up to an entire month.
> Unless you drive a car or own a gun in the US, then if you do get a bad drug test result you can easily get charged with a crime.
The likelihood of getting charged with a drug-related crime for testing positive for drugs on an employer-mandated drug test, which is the context being discussed, is absolutely minuscule.
You may get fired, but your employer isn't going to refer you to local prosecution, and the prosecution wouldn't take it if they did.
AFAIK this is allowed during the approval process for very specific roles, but not just randomly in day-to-day work after admission.
And for good reason. That would be an entirely unproportional encroachment on privacy and personal rights, irrespective of whether the test turns out positive or negative.
I never heard of anyone around me required to do a drug test for work. May be different for people carrying guns, like police and hunters, but that's because of gun license requirements.
A drug test may be legal, or suggested, when there is reasonable suspicion someone was high during work hours. Maybe air traffic controllers and similar professions need to be evidently clean. Otherwise I don't think drug tests are legal in Germany. Even asking about consumption is illegal in most cases.
> Maybe air traffic controllers and similar professions need to be evidently clean.
kinda obscure example. i expect most operators of heavy machinery, human transportation devices and some security professions to require some verification of abstinence. i was tested once in order to get the required permit to drive a van with elderly and disabled ppl for the red cross.
> This tiny detail makes the difference why employer-mandated drug tests are not a thing in Germany like it is in the US.
Not really. The business of employer-mandated drug testing in the EU is generally tricky, and employees enjoy wide ranging protections. Most countries only allow drug testing where there is a certain aspect of risk, and in most of those case, only a physician can perform the test, and cannot share findings, only declare the subject as fit for duties or not.
In Germany, specifically, a pre-employment test but a physician is allowed, and when employed only rarely and for very specific circumstances.
You're probably right that it's the case in most countries, but an interesting counterexample is Sweden, where testing positive on a drug test is a criminal offence. Police can arrest you for appearing to be under the influence of drugs, and if they find any traces in a urine test, they'll fine you for it.
I hope that legalization in Germany will lead to more sane laws in Sweden, but honestly, I'm not holding my breath for it
I saw a man get hassled by Swedish police on a train just after crossing the Øresund Bridge. "The dog is very interested in your bag", they said. The man admitted that maybe he had smoked marijuana in Copenhagen and they left him alone.
I'm sure selective enforcement is at play, but at least in my experience they didn't care.
Prosecution in Sweden for an act committed in another country is generally only possible if it is punishable in both jurisdictions. Internationally it's a relatively common rule in criminal law. Courts have smacked the cops and prosecutors over this so they don't waste time on such cases anymore.
That is not the norm. You won't get charged for smoking in Copenhagen, but it will put you in a high risk category for smuggling so their typical response here is to search you. They were probably under a high workload and had to prioritize heavily.
I have been searched twice crossing Øresundsbroen into Sweden, and both times I was the only one in the carriage to be searched. I have never seen them search anyone else.
They will always be under time pressure as the train needs to depart promptly.
(This is Swedish customs, nothing to do with identity checks. I don't use cannabis or socialise with people that do.)
Is there any jurisdiction where selective enforcement is not how drug laws are enforced? I'm guessing maybe somewhere like Japan, but I'm sure the vast majority of states do not enforce drug laws very consistently.
Even more wild is Singapore's law that it is illegal for citizens and permanent residents to consume illegal substances, even if that consumption occurred in another country where it is legal.[1]
So you have Singaporeans testing positive for cannabis upon arrival at the airport after a trip to Thailand, who are not in possession of cannabis, have not consumed it in Singapore (or another country where it is illegal) and they are charged with a crime.
Sweden is (in)famous in Europe for taking probably the continent's hardest line on drugs. Cannabis is in the same category as heroin and treated accordingly, there's no tolerance for medical use etc.
It should be noted that a lot of things are still illegal and are being worked on. Two examples:
You are not allowed to share cannabis.
The amount of THC in your blood that would make it illegal to drive is 1 ng/mL blood serum. This is essentially nothing and can, anecdotally, be triggered by losing weight after consuming.
I've had the opportunity to see one of the infamous German drug tests in practice (wasn't driving). The result is that if you used any canabis 4 days earlier it will show up on the pee test. It was waved off as no issue, but four young Dutch people in car got their attention a bit too much apparently. If they thought we were the type they were looking for they had cause to do whatever. We were not the ones they were after though as we were not going to the nearby festival and were just driving by.
No, it makes sense with the philosophy of german law. It's not illegal to harm yourself. It is not illegal to flee from the police or from prison. But of course there are various crimes surrounding the allowed behaviour.
They often cut rates when a recession is in sight, and raise them when they think the market will handle it. I don't think cutting rates directly causes recessions. Interest rates are still too low but they are about to be cut to save the banks which invested in low interest bonds, presumably.
What it shows is that the Fed starts cutting rates shortly before or shortly after a recession begins, exactly as you would expect. In some cases they started raising again too early and had to backtrack.
Even ignoring all sources of irreproducibility, there does not exist a bijection between source and binary artifact irrespective of tool chain. Two different toolchains could compile the same source to different binaries or different sources to the same binary. And you absolutely shouldn't be ignoring sources of irreproducibility in this context, since they'll cause even the same toolchain to keep producing different binaries given the same source.
Exactly, but neither the source nor the binary is what's truly important here. The real question is: can the LLM generate the functionally valid source equivalent of the binary at hand? If I disassemble Microsoft Paint, can I get code that will result in a mostly functional version of Microsoft Paint, or will I just get 515 compile errors instead?
This is what I thought the question was really about.
I assume that an llm will simply see patterns that look similar to other patterns and make assosciations and assume ewuivalences on that level, meanwhile real code is full of things where the programmer, especially assembly programmers, modify something by a single instruction or offset value etc to get a very specific and functionally important result.
Often the result is code that not only isn't obvious, it's nominaly flatly wrong, violating standards, specs, intended function, datasheet docs, etc. If all you knew were the rules written in the docs, the code is broken and invalid.
Is the llm really going to see or understand the intent of that?
They find matching patterns in other existing stuff, and to the user who can not see the infinite body of that other stuff the llm pulled from, it looks like the llm understood the intent of a question, but I say it just found the prior work of some human who understood a similar intent somewhere else.
Maybe an llm or some other flavor of ai can operate some other way like actually playing out the binary like executing in a debugger and map out the results not just look at the code as fuzzy matching patterns. Can that take the place of understanding the intents the way a human would reading the decompiled assembly?
Guess we'll be finding out sooner of later since of course it will all be tried.
