Yep

Yep, everything got easier once we realized that bribery is speech.

That's v1. v2 Robo-Minders have a credit card swipe built in where you can purchase indulgences on the spot for more criming.

I read it for a book club I was in at the time, and I *immediately* had to go back and reread it and mark it up. It is so incredibly made, a true work of genius--just in terms of how it is written and constructed. Obviously there are the other, ahem, issues with it, but it's a marvel of craft.

"I have altered the terms of the deal."

Looks small, but feeds dozens.

Pocket Full of Kleptonite

Tons of examples for me, but here's the first that springs to mind: One Hundred Years of Solitude.

It didn't change me directly, but it totally changed how I felt about myself and my life, in a way I very much needed at the time.

Noah Smith on Paris: It was all right but the bread was too crunchy.

At Rice, we always referred to that airport as "Intergalactic."

Yep, that's right. He's still hoping to get Musk back in the D corner someday.

But there are others, like the example above, that never really "settle down" around the point of interest. And then there are others that are continuous but when it comes to the derivative, there are two (in univariate functions) conflicting answers--like f(x) = |x| at zero.

There are plenty of functions with little holes in them that aren't continuous, don't have a derivative, but the discontinuity is kind of removable--you can say "okay, it doesn't really have a derivative, but if it did it would definitely be this." f(x) = x^2 / x at zero being a simple example.

Sure, everywhere in real analysis there are these interesting cases. In your example the limit at zero doesn't even exist on the function, never mind its derivative.

Wiener process paths are fun because they're everywhere continuous but nowhere differentiable.

Maybe I'm just being naive, but I think a lot of people can understand the weighing of outcomes in a difficult situation like this: Trading a certainty of imminent harm for the possibility of an eventual benefit is something you can only really do if that possibility seems realistic.

I do wish elected D leaders were just more straightforward and honest in their communication on these matters. Voters are in large part quite smart and realistic; they may not be listening, which is always a problem, but condensing down to glib sound bites and talking points does NOT fix that.

Easy enough to locate the story at a point in time before he died. Might be nice for whomever takes up the franchise to get something of a clean start anyway. And it would be funny to have an explicit guarantee from the beginning that Bond literally cannot die. Could have lots of fun with that.

Now that's a lunch I can get behind. Any baguette to go with that?