Donor-advised funds (DAFs) are institutions with which an individual can open an account, contribute financial assets, and invest tax-free before disbursing to an eligible nonprofit. In the United States, DAF accounts are not subject to disbursement...

The Busy Beavers are Turing machines that run for the maximum amount of time before halting, given their size. For this question, the function BB(n) will be taken as the maximum shifts function (often denoted S(n)) for a two-symbol, n-state Turing...

On September 27, 2023, the House Financial Services Committee, chaired by Patrick McHenry, conducted an oversight hearing of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), featuring testimony from SEC Chairman Gary Gensler. McHenry and the Committee...

In the wake of the March 2024 theater attack in Russia, the FBI is concerned about a similar attack happening in the US (The Hill). For the purposes of this question, "terrorism" is as defined by federal law in 18 U.S.C. § 2331(5), though actual...

Despite our best efforts, Earth is still the only known planet in the universe to harbor any kind of life. Though plenty of our attention in this hunt has been focused on studying potentially habitable exoplanets, this question is concerned with the...

Bloomberg recently projected that "California [is] Poised to Overtake Germany as World’s No. 4 Economy" based on total GDP. However, looking at GDP per capita, California is currently the 6th highest state in the US.

When comparing GDP per capita...

Decisions about how much to prioritize nuclear risk reduction and how best to reduce nuclear risk should be guided in part by our best guesses about:

• how many deaths would occur given a large-scale nuclear exchange

• what proportion of those...

The United States military has long relied on aircraft carriers to project power and support its operations around the world. Due to their strategic value, these carriers are some of the most well-defended military targets in the world. The last time...

A key issue in developing quantum computers is the implementation of quantum error correction. If physical noise corrupts one or more qubits, error correction codes make it possible to detect and correct those errors, so long as the amount of...

A world with radically smarter-than-human intelligence would probably be very different than the one we live in today. Bostrom (2003) speculated on the likely outcome following the creation of artificial superintelligence,

It is hard to think of...

Elon Musk is the founder and/or CEO of several companies, including electric vehicle company Tesla, space exploration and nascent Internet provider company SpaceX, tunneling company The Boring Company, and brain interface company Neuralink. He is...

The refugee admissions cap was set to a historic low of 15,000 for fiscal year 2021 by the Trump administration, following a steadily declining admissions cap after Trump took office. The Biden administration raised the cap for FY 2021 to 62,500 but...

As of April 2023, the largest model currently known is GPT-4 and while information about the compute needed to train the model is not public, GPT-4 is estimated by Epoch to have been trained with 2.1E+25 FLOPs.

The largest Chinese-made model is...

US President John F. Kennedy's assassination on November 22nd, 1963 has long been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories. The majority of Americans believe in one or more of these conspiracies, however nothing has yet been definitively proven....

A PHEIC (Public Health Emergency of International Concern) is defined by <a href="https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/annex-2-of-the-international-health-regulations-%282005%29" target="_blank">WHO</a> as "an extraordinary event which is...

Consciousness is a concept hard to define. Wikipedia states that consciousness at its simplest is "awareness or sentience of internal or external existence". And that despite centuries of analyses, definitions, explanations and debates by...

This market will resolve to “Yes” if Nimrata Nikki Haley wins the 2024 nomination of the Republican Party for U.S. president. Otherwise, this market will resolve to “No”.

The resolution source for this market will be a consensus of official GOP...

Somaliland is an unrecognised state, which presents itself as the successor state to British Somaliland and the short-lived State of Somaliland which followed. In 1991, Somaliland broke away from Somalia after a decade-long rebellion against Siad...

Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States, has been involved in an array of legal battles post his presidency. Currently facing three indictments with the prospect of a fourth, his legal circumstances have sparked curiosity about the...