Barrera

In a nutshell, for added stability back when it was thought that BART tracks would follow the lower deck of the Golden Gate Bridge:

> Michael Healy, a BART historian and the former BART Director of Public Affairs, believes the use of the broad gauge “goes back to when BART was planned to go across the lower deck of the Golden Gate Bridge,” he told BART recently.

> “High winds coming through the gate would have required more stability for the aluminum-shelled cars. Thus, the wide gauge, as I recall,” he said.

Why that particular gauge (five-feet-six-inches) and not the more widely-used standard ( four-feet-and-eight-and-a-half inches)?

> The pamphlet does not specify why only the wide gauge of five-feet-six inches was tested and not others. One possibility is that the broad gauge was among the more widely used gauges in other countries. Another theory is that complex calculations were required, thus limiting alternatives that could be practically evaluated at the time.

The article does not even mention long range attacks in which large portions of the block chain are rewritten.

This is made extremely hard in Bitcoin through proof-of-work. To rewrite history you must re-do all of the work, which means you burn enough real-world energy to work faster than the entire rest of the network (aka majority hash rate attack). It's allowed, but expensive.

In PoS, there was never any work, so you can just rewrite history.

Every time the subject of Ethereum's move to PoS comes up, it seems this issue is there. The solutions mutate into a head-spinning kaleidoscope of different guises, all rabbit holes in their own maddening way and suspicious on that basis alone.

That this lengthy piece doesn't even mention long range attacks speaks volumes.

> Validators fulfill various functions in blockchains, including the creation of transaction blocks and the updating of data oracles. Ronin uses a so-called “proof of authority” system for signing transactions, concentrating power in the hands of nine trusted actors.

This paragraph perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with the way promoters sell Ethereum. Smart contracts can do little of interest beyond straight monetary transactions without information about the outside world. That information comes from "oracles", or what the article calls "validators".

The security guarantees of this system are far, far weaker than the Ethereum consensus protocol, as the article demonstrates. And yet, the system is hyped to the n-th degree by sheisters who ignore this basic fact with ludicrous claims about security and stability.

Zooming out, basically Ethereum is hyped as a platform for "smart contracts." But the minute a smart contract does anything beyond basic money transfers, it needs an oracle. And with the oracle comes radically reduced security.

Eventually, this will be obvious. For now, shenanigans like this will continue.

> In theory, developing nations like El Salvador are ideal candidates for cryptocurrency adoption. More than half its citizens rely exclusively on cash, rather than credit or debit cards. Some 70 percent of households have no bank account and nearly 90 percent do not use mobile banking. A digital payment platform could be a way to make the economy more inclusive and accessible.

I have a really hard time understanding what lasting effect El Salvador hopes to accomplish.

> More than half its citizens rely exclusively on cash rather than credit or debit cards

That's not in itself a problem.

> Some 70 percent of households have no bank account

That's may be a problem, but is it something that Bitcoin itself can solve? For example, people who have no savings and survive hand-to-mouth really don't need a bank account. Maybe that's what the 70% statistic is telling us.

> and nearly 90 percent do not use mobile banking.

The experience of using bitcoin for most people is not unlike the experience of using a mobile banking app. What is it about Bitcoin in particular that makes it a better fit?

> A digital payment platform could be a way to make the economy more inclusive and accessible.

Possibly, but only if the reasons for lack of inclusivity and accessibility are understood, and Bitcoin is compatible with resolving them. If the reasons are social/political, Bitcoin is not going to help at all. Monetary policy is effectively set elsewhere, either Washington or the Internet through the Bitcoin protocol. Being the hardest form of money ever created, bitcoin is especially bad at funding public works projects like the kind El Salvador is going to need to elevate its standard of living.

Then there's the elephant in the room: money printing. El Salvador has no currency of its own. It uses the US dollar, and now Bitcoin. This means that the government has voluntarily foregone the ability to print the money to cover the debts incurred for domestic spending. Adding Bitcoin just doubles down on the status quo: no domestic currency and no possibility of money printing.

The article is vague about the identities of the elements. They tend to occur together, but some are way more valuable than others. Cerium, for example, is considered a "rare earth" but is not that rare at all:

> Cerium is the most abundant of all the lanthanides, making up 66 ppm of the Earth's crust; this value is just behind that of copper (68 ppm), and cerium is even more abundant than common metals such as lead (13 ppm) and tin (2.1 ppm). Thus, despite its position as one of the so-called rare-earth metals, cerium is actually not rare at all. ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerium

> A cryptocurrency lender backed by Peter Thiel and Coinbase Global Inc. suspended withdrawals, trading and deposits on its platform, citing volatile market conditions and financial difficulties facing key business partners.

> The platform, Vauld, said Monday that it froze the operations after users pulled almost $200 million over the last three weeks. A sharp decline in cryptocurrency prices that began with the collapse of two cryptocurrencies in May has spooked traders and caused knock-on effects in the digital asset world.

It's called "a bank run":

> A bank run or run on the bank occurs when many clients withdraw their money from a bank, because they believe the bank may cease to function in the near future. ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run

Except this bank has no FDIC insurance, no backstop, nothing.

Oddly enough, I think US tax policy may play a factor here in motivating people to ignore the repeated and loud warnings about how this was a really, really bad idea. When you're facing massive capital gains taxes, and have an inkling that those gains will turn to losses, the idea of lending out the asset, spending the cash without incurring tax, then getting the asset back starts to look attractive.

Of course, the real problem was that those warnings got ignored. I mean, who reads something like this without alarm bells going off all over the place?

> Our interest rates and trading fees are among the best in the industry. You can earn interest of up to 11.57% (APY) on your cryptocurrencies, and borrow tokens with our spread being as low as 1%. We don't charge deposit or withdrawal fees, or fix a cap on your daily withdrawals. You can check all our fees and rates here.

https://www.vauld.com/home

Those turtlenecks.

Anyway, the article mentions:

> He [chief product officer] said the company was "very well funded" with no liquidity problems. While he noted that its 2022 financial results were "below budget," he said that this had been caused by macroeconomic conditions, including a supply crisis and the Ukraine conflict. The executive urged employees to focus on product and tech infrastructure improvements in preparation for the "next bull run."

This is exactly the same line given by every single business. Even the White House does it. This is due to Ukraine, supply shock, and macroeconomic factors. As if this didn't matter. As if that meant that whatever is happening can be ignored. Don't worry, nothing to see here. It's just special, highly unusual circumstances.

Except it does matter. No matter how well you wear the turtleneck eventually reality matters. Mean-reversions from bubbles matter. They are inevitable and they are painful. It's never "contained," no matter how much leadership wants you to believe it. Gear up.

> Germany has recorded its first monthly trade deficit [€1bn] since 1991 [the year of reunification] amid soaring inflation and supply chain disruption weighing on the country’s industrial base.

Then from Wikipedia:

> In 2016, Germany recorded the highest trade surplus in the world, worth $310 billion. ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Germany

So it's not just the magnitude of the trade balance (negative) but the velocity (sharply downward) that should get attention.

The US has run persistent trade deficits (now ~ $50 billion) for years. This brought cheap goods but eviscerated the manufacturing base. You could call it a tradeoff. What the US has going for it though is: (a) the ability to print its own money; (b) the ability to print the world's reserve currency; and (c) the demographics to support a consumption-led economy.

Germany has none of these things going for it. The situation is not sustainable. The article implies that the change is not structural (increased competition from elsewhere, for example), but if it is things could get weird real fast.

> I’d like to learn whichever language will make me a “better” coder in the long term.

Since the goal is to learn rather than to get stuff done, I suspect Rust will give you far more bang for the buck.

If you're arrived at TypeScript voluntarily as an alternative to JS, Rust's type system will teach you a lot about types. You'll also be able to take advantage of a lot of what you already know.

Rust will teach you more than you thought there was to know about memory. Unless you've worked with a manual memory management language before, this will be a big eye-opener regardless of where you go with Rust in the future.

But I suspect you'll be most surprised by how approachable Rust is. It feels like a much higher-level language than its reputation might hint at. The single reason for Rust's difficult reputation is the "ownership model." If you own that and commit to figuring it out and practicing what you've learned, Rust will open up much more easily to you. That said, you can figure out a lot about Rust without ever using ownership.

Make sure that any unresolved issues between you and your partner have been resolved. Time to work on your marriage evaporates when you make that trip the the hospital. Actually, it starts fading some time before.

You didn't mention anything she's interested in currently.

Whatever it is follow it, no matter how frivolous or irrelevant to future success these may seem. Participate. Really jump into it in an unreasonable way.

Things your children get really interested in have a way of becoming interesting to an open-minded parent. Note that these interest can come and go at the drop of a hat. That's part of the fun!

> On June 28, the controversial author, clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto lost access to most of his Twitter account features because of a tweet he posted earlier in the week that used transgender actor Elliot Page’s former name and suggested he had his “breasts removed by a criminal physician.”

Then later:

> According to Twitter’s hateful conduct policy, users may not “promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”

It's quite a stretch to equate using someone's given name and alleging criminal activity with promoting "violence" or "directly attacking" or "threatening" someone. Twitter is being arbitrary, as is their right.

I'm wondering if the last sentence from the abstract is more of a holy grail than the conversion of methane to methanol:

> ... The confinement of mono-iron hydroxyl sites in a porous matrix demonstrates a strategy for C–H bond activation in CH4 to drive the direct photosynthesis of CH3OH.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-022-01279-1

Selective C-H bond activation (of which this paper is an example) is extremely difficult. It has been the focus of intense research for decades. Having a tunable catalysts system that performed this transformation would be a game-changer for the production of just of about every organic molecule. The authors just focused on methane as the hydrocarbon feedstock, so it's hard to know how general the process might be.

> Over the last two years I’ve been on over 120 dates with men I’ve met online - a few I met in person - in 3 different cities .

What was wrong with them? What common patterns (if any stand out)? If this were a StackOverflow question about reading a file from Node.js, it would be customary to at least enumerate the output you saw after the failed attempts.

But that's not here, which (a) is interesting and possibly important; and (b) makes it hard to say much constructive.

Is it possible that you want the family more than you want the husband? Or that you like the idea of a husband but not any specific husband you could marry?

> ... I was raised by a single mom and I really want to have kids with a man I love, not do it on my own.

Stay true to that and don't let your despair drive you to something you (and a future child) might regret. You have a perspective on this that only the child of a single parent can understand.

Kids raised by single parents have various ways to cope, and one of them is to become unusually independent. Maybe that has something to do with why there was no mention about what specifically was wrong with the men you dated unsuccessfully. Maybe you're, in fact, fine on your own. It's just that you want a child but being a single parent is a no-go.

So here's a hack. Write yourself a letter about all the dates you've been on and what's stopped you from moving forward with each man you've dated. Be extremely specific. Anything from excessive nose hair to anger issues would be fair game.

Then, categorize your dates. Group them according to biggest flaws. Maybe come up with some kind of classification system like "Selfish" or "Doesn't Want Kids."

After collecting the data and categorizing it, what stands out?

Edit: later on in the thread you note:

> I found about 1 in ten attractive and then they ghosted me after a few dates

Here are some ideas to follow up on that:

1. What was unattractive about them? If it was physical, for example, then an online approach is bound to lead to slim pickings and frustration. Be honest with yourself and if physical attraction is crucial, ask for a picture or stop meeting guys online. Whatever the case, 1/10 sounds kind of low.

2. Are you saying that the 1/10 you found attractive then proceeded to ghost you after a few dates? In other words, there has not been a single case in which you called things off after a man makes it past the first cut?

> It has already shrunk by two-thirds since the 1980s, from around 8,547 square kilometres to just 2,590, US Geological Survey data from last summer shows.

The article mentions Owens Lake in CA. Not nearly as well-known but much more substantial is the massive lake in southern CA that dried up completely and is now only vague memories, Tulare Lake.

> ... Tulare Lake was the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River and the second-largest freshwater lake entirely in the United States (as parts of the Great Lakes belong to Canada), based upon surface area. A remnant of Pleistocene-era Lake Corcoran, Tulare Lake dried up after its tributary rivers were diverted for agricultural irrigation and municipal water uses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulare_Lake

If you've driven Interstate 5 north of Tejon Pass/Grapevine, that valley you pass through is the site of the massive former lake.

Climate change isn't even needed, just an insatiable demand for land and water.

Quite a shock to see Niels Bohr staring at me from that page. He's a towering figure in atomic theory.

> We are in discussions with various parties regarding additional liquidity and the go-forward strategy for the company. While we don’t have anything else to share today, we are working diligently and hope to have more information to share soon.

Translation: we are insolvent. The action we have taken prevents a run that will wipe out our working capital. We have been running a fractional reserve all along.

This is getting tedious.

Also: Voyager's alleged debtor, 3AC, just filed for Chapter 15 Bankruptcy:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-01/crypto-he...

> “We know that teenagers are the most sleep-deprived age group, and the cause is our own public policy,” said Joy Wake, who helped lead the efforts of the “Start School Later” group in California.

I really doubt that. Sleep deprivation comes in large part from online behavior (source: personal anecdotes). Whether or not anyone wants to talk about that is another matter.

The new law is unlikely to change the sleep-deprived status of students. Parents taking responsibility can.

The story doesn't discuss what's causing this, but another story in Rolling Stone has a plausible lead:

> “They [company] were kind of implicating the customer in not cooking them correctly, but I definitely did because I cook a lot of vegetarian stuff,” says Aarts, who is a vegetarian and allergic to gluten. She says she sautéed the lentils until they started to crisp and even blacken a bit because she knows they need to be cooked thoroughly.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/daily-...

It turns out lentils contain lectins, a class of molecules with some alarming chemical characteristics:

> Lectins are carbohydrate binding (glyco)proteins which are ubiquitous in nature. In plants, they are distributed in various families and hence ingested daily in appreciable amounts by both humans and animals. One of the most nutritionally important features of plant lectins is their ability to survive digestion by the gastrointestinal tract of consumers. This allows the lectins to bind to membrane glycosyl groups of the cells lining the digestive tract. As a result of this interaction a series of harmful local and systemic reactions are triggered placing this class of molecules as antinutritive and/or toxic substances. Locally, they can affect the turnover and loss of gut epithelial cells, damage the luminal membranes of the epithelium, interfere with nutrient digestion and absorption, stimulate shifts in the bacterial flora and modulate the immune state of the digestive tract. Systemically, they can disrupt lipid, carbohydrate and protein metabolism, promote enlargement and/or atrophy of key internal organs and tissues and alter the hormonal and immunological status. At high intakes, lectins can seriously threaten the growth and health of consuming animals. They are also detrimental to numerous insect pests of crop plants although less is presently known about their insecticidal mechanisms of action. This current review surveys the recent knowledge on the antinutritional/toxic effects of plant lectins on higher animals and insects.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15302522/

It appears that lectins are degraded by heat, thus the importance of proper cooking.

> While some of what that means for California remains to be seen, parts of the process have already begun, including the steady decline of the Colorado River. Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir which is located along that river, is now only 150 feet from dipping below its lowest intake valve, officials announced this month.

How much time will it take for a 150-foot drop at current rates of loss? I haven't been able to find an estimate of the rate of loss in the last couple of years. I also imagine that the rate of drop could be non-linear.

There's way too much theory and not nearly enough experiment in this writeup.

I still don't know what happens if I put two glasses of water, one at room temperature and the other at 100 C, into a freezer and determine which one freezes first. If I don't see the hot water freezing first all (most?) of the time, there's nothing else to consider.

Maybe the controversy has to do with the lack of solid experimental data.

> But this time really is different. Driven by war and pandemic, a new macroeconomic paradigm is forming. High inflation is back after a 30-year absence, and with it, much tighter monetary policy. Interest rates are rising, and central banks around the world are burning money. The era of plentiful dollars is coming to an end. And that will mean persistently lower prices for cryptocurrencies.

This seems to be the gist of the author's case. What the piece fails to consider is the possibility that "much tighter monetary policy" is transitory. Really, the author goes on as if we're 800 basis points into the Fed hiking cycle when it's just barely lifted off. And QT, although it is supposed to have started, has done very, very little to turn the Fed's balance sheet around. Those MBS are still safely in the lockbox.

How exactly does this author think the Fed will react to another housing market crash? One that stretches out to an election year? One like 2008 that permeates the entire economy?

It's gonna be bazookas and "whatever it takes" as far as the eye can see. It won't matter what the CPI is reading.

> Substack, which takes a cut of its writers’ subscription fees, generated about $9 million in revenue last year, The New York Times reported. That means the funding discussions valued the company at a hefty premium relative to its financial results. Substack was said to be valued at $650 million last year after the company closed a $65 million funding round.

By any yardstick, a price/sales ratio of 72 is ludicrous. It's the kind of thing that can only happen within the safety of a financial bubble.

A lot of this can be simplified to three questions:

1. What problem is your company solving?

If you don't get an answer, beware. If the answer sounds vague, beware. If the answer makes no sense, beware. If the answer is multifaceted, beware. This suggests that the company will not even begin the process of becoming profitable.

2. Who has this problem?

You should get a clear picture of an actual person. If not, beware. If that person has no money, beware. If that person has no pull within an organization, beware. If that person is high maintenance or fickle, beware. This suggests that the company will never find the revenue they seek.

3. What's your solution?

If the solution doesn't actually address the problem, beware. If the solution is too expensive for the customer, beware. If the solution can't be differentiated from its competitors, beware. If the solution has no competitors, beware. If there are a dozen solutions, beware. This suggests that no matter how amazing the technology or technical team, the company will not be able to execute on its business plan.

Author blames the decline on Covid vaccine.

If this were the case, then comparable declines should be seen everywhere in the world wherever vaccines were widely deployed. The author offhandedly mentions Germany, without following this line of investigation further other than to provide a link to the author's previous article.

Interesting hypothesis, but a handful of countries is not nearly enough to draw conclusions at this point.

> Prominent crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital has defaulted on a loan worth more than $670 million. Digital asset brokerage Voyager Digital issued a notice on Monday morning, stating that the fund failed to repay a loan of $350 million in the U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin, USDC, and 15,250 bitcoin, worth about $323 million at today’s prices.

In other words, the $670 million that 3AC defaulted on was ~50:50 USDC and bitcoin.

Then later:

> Zhu [3AC founder] is known for his incredibly bullish view of bitcoin. He said last year the world’s largest cryptocurrency could be worth $2.5 million per coin. But in May this year, as the crypto market began its meltdown, Zhu said on Twitter that his “supercycle price thesis was regrettably wrong.”

This seems odd. How does a person convinced that bitcoin exchange is headed to $2.5 million take out a loan of 15K bitcoin if he actually thinks he'll be paying back it back at a higher exchange rate? Either the founder was bullish in principle but bearish in practice, or didn't have the first clue about what he was doing.

> ... it seems one by one the promises of crypto of the last several years are evaporating ...

Hardly. What's happening is that a financial institution is being regulated and pro-actively adopting steps to please regulators. And those regulators will never be satisfied.

As regulators squeeze harder and harder, it will drive Coinbase under. That is not the disaster that some might think. It's a necessary next step for Bitcoin to prove that it can actually deliver on the promise of censorship-resistant money.

At the very least what's happening with exchanges, regulation, and the over-eager suits at Coinbase demonstrates the need for censorship-resistance in the first place. None of the new steps add anything whatsoever to the experience of the user. It's all about other people exercising control over that user's money.

> How about if China decides to fill the power vacuum that the isolationist US leaves.

Zeihan argues that this is impossible on demographic grounds. The after-effects of the One Child Policy and the mass migration from farms to cities ensures a lack of soldiers, a greying population, and economic/military decline. Throw in Xi's unprecedented cult of personality that prevents anyone reporting bad news as the icing on the cake.

The US has nothing to fear from China, so Zeihan says.

The point Zeihan makes is that world trade as we know it a recent invention. It exists purely as a result of the US commitment to protect trade from piracy around the world. Prior to that, the system was one of isolated empires each protecting their own routes.

As the US is largely self-sufficient in energy and will likely start becoming self-sufficient in a great many things, it needs the rest of the world less and less.

Those shipping lines, which mainly benefit the rest of the world, start to look like an expensive relic with each passing year.

All it takes for an end of shipping is for the US to stop protecting shipping lines which mainly benefit foreign governments.

Haven't read the book, but for those who don't know who Zeihan is, his work follows two threads of post-WWII history:

1. Deglobalization; and

2. Depopulation

The article focuses mostly on deglobalization, but depopulation is in the horse pulling the cart.

Many are familiar with the deglobalization idea from the last US presidential administration. The current administration kept those tariffs, and abided by the previous commitment to exit Afghanistan. Zeihan argues that this trend toward increasing isolationism goes back decades.

What may seem less familiar is the demographic implosion the entire world is undergoing - a baby bust. The vast majority of major countries with the exception of the US and Mexico have passed a point of no return demographically. Their populations will shrink with mathematical certainty. As their populations ebb, so will their economic growth prospects and place on the world stage. The problem is especially pronounced in Asia and Europe, but can be found everywhere.

The reason for the bust: people moved to cities. On a farm, kids are free labor. In a city, kids are expensive conversational pieces.