Bonhomie3

I don’t understand Jacobson’s motivation in starting the scam when he was already making the equivalent of 200k today. Did he just do it to see if he could? And is that why he carried on for so long?

In 2000 Warren Buffet wrote an op-ed proposing a "diabolical" (by his own admission) proposal to limit the role of money in governance - and at the same time disprove conclusively that old canard that it doesn't influence politicians. He proposed launching a bill limiting soft money donations, and backing it up with a $1 billion donation.

Suppose some eccentric billionaire (not me, not me!) made the following offer: If the bill was defeated, this person -- the E.B. -- would donate $1 billion in an allowable manner (soft money makes all possible) to the political party that had delivered the most votes to getting it passed. Given this diabolical application of game theory, the bill would sail through Congress and thus cost our E.B. nothing (establishing him as not so eccentric after all).

What a $1 billion promise would buy here is a ''counter-revelation'' among legislators, who'd be induced by the offer to shift their position on campaign finance by 180 degrees so as to prevent the money from being delivered to the opposition party. When the roll call began, Republicans and Democrats alike would, in this scenario, suddenly find merit in a reform that they had previously classified as somewhere between repulsive and un-American.

Why does the taking a snapshot of neural activity “strain the bounds of physics”?