aazaa

It's baffling how anyone can simultaneously believe:

1. climate change is an existential threat to humanity

2. having one or more children is a good thing

If you believe one, you need to yield on the other. The article yields on (1) to support (2).

The thing is that (2) faces headwinds that have nothing to do with climate, namely economics. It's insanely expensive to have children. Not just the actual out-of-pocket, but also the opportunity costs, not to mention the emotional toll if the marriage becomes unstable.

Then there's the toll on children raised by people other than their parents due to the horrendous economics of both parents being at work.

So in this sense, the climate crisis as broadly defined, has a finite amount of room to run. Economics acts to cap births in developed economies. The rest of the world eventually catches up. Before you know it having a couple of kids has become a status symbol.

> I hesitate to speculate about Satoshi’s identity, given that the discourse has generally ranged from misguided to downright idiotic and unethical. But with Craig Wright fraudulently claiming credit and invoking a copyright claim to take down the Bitcoin whitepaper, it’s important we revisit the topic and recenter the discussion around the Cypherpunks who actually built Bitcoin.

If the author cared about the shenanigans of fraud Craig Wright, a better approach would be to deal with them directly. The only thing that's hard about that is that the false claims are so numerous.

Wright has conjured a tornado of bullshit. In the process, he has built a loyal following. This is the real story, because the Craig Wrights of the world are wising up to the power of the Internet. They're multiplying, spilling out of the woodwork, and overrunning the pantry. People have an insatiable hunger to be lied to with gusto, and the Internet gives them everything they need to satisfy that hunger. All it takes is an unethical person who understands this point and has no qualms about exploiting it. Past a point, the fact checkers just give up.

We've seen several examples now of this phenomenon. But the Internet-savvy Big Liar is on an exponential growth curve.

> More startups would succeed if they were bull-headed about keeping the customer and the problem the same but changing the solution. This is why passion matters. You are unlikely to pivot quickly through lots of different problems or customer types if you care deeply about the initial problem you set out to solve.

What would be some examples of companies that did and did not do this?

> But you'll still be able to do Bitcoin transactions without exchanges, even if they get banned.

Exactly. But a ban seems highly unlikely. Instead, exchanges are more likely to be regulated and subverted to the point of being useless. You're right, Bitcoin would continue on its merry way because exchanges are peripheral to using Bitcoin past a point.

If that transition never happens, Bitcoin will have failed.

> According to the epidemiologist, the Moderna vaccine has for the past two months been used almost exclusively here for stimulation vaccinations after the Janssen vaccine and after two-dose vaccinations for the elderly and immunocompromised. Very few individuals are said to have received the second dose of the basic vaccine that started with Moderna.

Assuming the translation is correct, this could be a problem in itself. I'm unaware of a single study on the safety or efficacy of mixing vaccine types like this.

> “If cryptocurrency exchanges want to be the banks of the future, we need to make sure people can have confidence in these systems,” she [Deputy Attorney General] said during an interview at the Aspen Cyber Summit.

You'll know Bitcoin has failed if cryptocurrency exchanges become the banks of the future. The entire idea behind Bitcoin is money without banks or the baggage they bring.

Ironically, the harder the US and other countries push exchanges - to tax, to fight the endless wars on drugs and terrorism - the more likely it is that users will implement the behaviors that will obviate the need for exchanges in the first place.

It comes from a book whose name I can't remember. Maybe "Don't make me think." It's about UI design.

"Banana" as in the fruit. Monkey as in, well, user. If you want a monkey to follow you, use a banana visible enough that the monkey can see it.

It's basically any giant, clearly visible button.

I find this kind of article that explains how to do something with vanilla Rust valuable because many articles will instead explain how to use a crate that offers similar functionality. This is the only way to know if a crate can actually pull its weight before you decide to adopt it.

What are "hunter-gatherer-style installs?"

> I’ve joined the Wasmer company at its early beginning, in March 2019. The company was 3 months old.

I had no idea that Wasmer, Inc. was a company. The home page, wasmer.io, says nothing about a company and reads like an open source project landing page.

Way at the bottom is a banana button to "Contact Sales" that's just an email address.

What's the product Wasmer is selling?

Clicking through to "about," I see nothing about products, just bios of the team members:

https://wasmer.io/about

> The CEO, Syrus Akbary, had evidently a lot of pressure on its shoulders.

I suspect that pressure had to do with not having a product for sale in the traditional sense. Maybe the company was viewed as a product, with another company as the customer. If so, it's clear how this could become a pressure cooker.

No product + investor money + team to support = pressure and bad work environment.

> “for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis”

The prize is about artificial catalysts. A catalyst is a substance that speeds up a reaction without being consumed. Another way to speed reactions up is to heat them, but that consumes energy and often leads to by-products that must be removed and disposed of.

The "asymmetric" part has to do with one kind of by-product. Some reactions produce 50% of a by-product that must be separated out and disposed of. This happens because some molecules have 3D structure that's different than its mirror image. Think of the way that certain objects like bottle caps and screws only turn one way to tighten. Molecules can have that property (including many drugs you may have taken), and if the handedness is wrong, in many applications, it's a by-product and/or poison. An asymmetric catalyst can make molecules of one handedness selectively, saving material, money, and energy.

The "organocatalysis" part has to do with what the catalyst is made of. Prior to the awardee's research, catalysts tended to contain metal atoms. A few Nobels have been awarded for catalytic processes that use metals.

So metals are great in principle, but in practice have issues. Some metals are linked to toxicity at trace levels. So when preparing drugs, you need to be very careful about purifying out the metal contaminants. Palladium is an example of a very versatile catalytic metal that causes problems during drug manufacture. Metals can also be quite expensive. Platinum and Rhodium are used in both chemical manufacture and in automobile catalytic converters. The price of Rhodium hit $25,000/oz recently. Not all metals are this expensive, but the cost and availability are often a problem.

The awarded work uses catalysts that don't contain metals. Instead, the catalysts contain the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and possibly some other non-metal atoms. In other words, these catalysts are made of the same kinds of atoms as life. (Enzymes catalyze biological reactions.) So now there's a link between biological catalysis and artificial catalysis that didn't exist before.

This work solved a number of practical problems, really went against dogma at the time, and opened up an important area of research that intersects with big questions like the origins of life.

The Platform page lists a selection of positions that I think would not be very controversial.

https://www.forwardparty.com/platform

Surprisingly, the issue that Yang is known for, UBI, is not on the list.

UBI is, however, present here:

https://www.forwardparty.com/whyforward

I wonder if that was accidental.

> And I don't think they had location/address

They most definitely did have addresses.

One of the problems with looking at the economy through the lens of inflation is defining "inflation" itself.

Consider the Wikipedia definition:

> In economics, inflation (or infrequently, price inflation) is a general rise in the price level of an economy over a period of time.

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

What is "the price level of an economy?" How do you measure it? What factors are included and excluded? Why? Who decides?

Do we include real estate? Financial assets like stocks and bonds? Or do we stick to things like milk and eggs. Housing? Is that an asset or a consumable?

And this happens before we can really talk about what causes inflation to increase or decrease. The problem with most of the discussions of inflation I've read and seen is that each side has its own, often implicit, definition of inflation.

From the conclusion:

> In the historical record, crises are like fires and the government interventions in those crises are firefighting. ...

There's a brilliant quote from James Grant to the effect that the US Federal Reserve acts as both firefighter and arsonist:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-08-27/fed-s-funct...

It's not clear that the paper even considers this perspective. Instead it seems to take the position that banking crises naturally evolve, rather than get spawned by policy missteps to correct the previous crisis.

Easy to say, but not to do: start writing every day.

There is a hack.

Choose a throwaway HN or Reddit account and commit to writing just one sentence about one article every day. Give yourself permission for the result to suck. All you need is one sentence, then you can be done with writing for the day.

But it must be every day, whether you feel like it or not.

What you'll find is that very often once sentence turns into two, and so on until you feel you're done.

You'll get immediate feedback. Keep this up on a particular topic, and you'll eventually start to figure out what clicks with a very specific audience.

At that point you can stop posting to HN or Reddit and start a blog if you feel like it. If you don't want public attention, use a private log where you store your articles.

After you've done this for a while, pick up a book or two on writing. You'll notice some habits you picked up that are helpful or harmful. Now you can work on them. The advice in the book won't be abstract because you'll immediately see yourself and know the behaviors to address for increase or decrease.

> The Prisoner's dilemma is the reason. There might be a way of doing complex multi-participant tasks that is better than what's being done currently, but the incentives for each participant are not aligned. Even when that lack of alignment produces a suboptimal outcome, each participant in the process lacks skin in the game. Each participant in the process creating the suboptimal outcome is not accountable for the consequence of their collective action.

The article goes on to describe solutions without actually explaining how the Prisoner's Dilemma operates in large companies.

This makes the article less valuable than it could be because it interferes with the reader developing a mental model of the problem.

For a take on this that does present a very clear (and possibly actionable) mental model, see "The Gervais Principle":

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

The idea is based on the axiom that "organizations don’t suffer pathologies; they are intrinsically pathological constructs."

> Stellantis has halted production at other plants, including in Europe and Canada, forecasting that it would make 1.4 million fewer vehicles this year due to the chip shortage.

For perspective:

> Combined sales of FCA and PSA totaled 6,206,000 units in 2020, down by 22% compared to 2019 figures. When the two companies announced their decision to merge, they became the world’s 4th largest automaker by sales volume. It was only outsold by Volkswagen Group, Toyota and Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance. With 7,907,000 vehicles sold in 2019, FCA-PSA (which was not called Stellantis by then), was bigger than GM and Hyundai-Kia. One year later, these two outperformed Stellantis.

https://fiatgroupworld.com/2021/02/14/stellantis-sold-6-2-mi...

If I'm reading this right, pre-pandemic sales were ~8 million. So a cut 1.4 million due to chip shortages represents an 18% drop. But compared to 2020, the drop is 23%.

That's disastrous hit for any company to withstand.

I'm curious how much of this is actually due to chip supply vs. how much could be due to other factors, but blamed on chip supply.

> It’s a lot of writing to do in any given week, but I don’t care. I want to write it all. I write all day to work, and then I think about writing all night to relax. In the late afternoon and evening, I am constantly, to paraphrase the great Walter Mosley, “percolating.”

I remember an author once saying there are two kinds of authors: those who like to write and those who like to have written. The interviewee was in the latter category.

Given that this article is about writing, here's a comment on the writing itself. It needs a rewrite. It's a good rough draft with maybe the kernel of a good idea, but in its current form is barely readable. It's stream of consciousness writing that doesn't fulfill the promise made in the title.

Or, maybe it does in fact fulfill that promise. If the goal is quantity of words - and 10,000 words a week in particular then never editing a rough draft is one strategy to get there. Just keep writing, never stopping to reconsider anything. Treat the screen you're typing on as an append-only log file. If so, well played!

There are readers who like to read and those who like to have read something. I went to this article with the intent of getting actionable advice to make writing easier. Half way through the article, this author hasn't even articulated a problem I can identify with.

Here's how to start the edit. Throw away half the words, then throw away the half that are left. Now start again.

Maybe the difference between writers who like to write and those who like to have written is that the latter take editing the mess they've created far more seriously than the former.

> The containership industry is a good illustration of the supply chain mess: as shown in the first chart, more than 70 containerships are stacked up outside Los Angeles/Long Beach ports waiting to unload. Idle containerships are back to just 3% of the total fleet, shipping costs are surging, manufacturing delivery times are extended and rail shipments are declining sharply from their summer peak, illustrating the far reaching impact of the delays.

I'm surprised that the article doesn't take up what happens when that logjam eventually clears.

At some point those ships will clear out of LA and there will be no more pile up. All the goods will have been distributed. Meanwhile, the world's container ship capacity will have increased by some large factor (30%, 50%) to address the shortage.

Fast forward 1-2 years and we have a world that's a mirror image of today's: surplus everything. Too much oil. Too much container ship capacity. Too many semiconductors. Too many employees.

It's not like COVID increased overall world demand relative to 2019. Rather, it created a log jam getting everything back to normal.

The current action in Washington DC around the budget sets the stage for rollback of the massive government transfers and deficit spending of the last 18 months. Eventually, those evictions will happen. Eventually.

Demand shocks can work both ways.

There would be an instant shortage of schools to train and credential the new drivers. Then there would be a backlog at DMVs to issue licenses. And on and on.

Kind of like we're seeing now.

> Low cost: Less than 1000 USD for the robot hardware.

I'm not sure where this figure comes from. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the Apple ][ cost ~ $6,000.

> Previously shown off to a few thousand rabid fans at the West Coast Computer Faire, the Apple II’s arrival means the masses can finally get their hands on the breakthrough machine. A base unit costs $1,298 — the equivalent of $5,810 in 2021 money.

https://www.cultofmac.com/484382/tiah-apple-ii-goes-on-sale/

Maybe all it takes is a good, but overpriced robot selling for around $6,000. The high cost of Apple's first computers was a major driver for a work-alike computer market that included Atari, Commodore, TI, Coleco, and Tandy.

If the Marketplace Disruption view of PC history is any guide, I suspect the first wildly successful robotic product will cause professionals to turn up their noses in disgust at the triviality of it all. They'll bemoan the lack of practical applications. They'll cluck at all of the things it can't do. Meanwhile, a small group of buyers will find the toy-like things irresistible. This product might have already been introduced.

Also, it's instructive to consider all of the things that were predicted for home computers vs. how things ended up turning out. Many of the concepts were sound (games, recipes), but few thought of the role a ubiquitous, worldwide, fast network infrastructure would play in creating entirely new classes of uses for small computers. And almost nobody predicted the astonishing rate of miniaturization/performance increases that would occur and which continues to this day.

> One strategy includes minting a $1 trillion coin, a move she [Pelosi] said Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York [Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee] has raised. Back in 2013, during another debt-ceiling fight, the Treasury and Federal Reserve said they wouldn’t pursue just such a plan as a way of avoiding the debt limit. And the White House earlier this month rejected the idea anew, saying there is only “one viable option” on the debt limit — increasing or suspending it.

I suspect this is mere posturing because it's not up to Congress to mint the $1 trillion coin. It's a decision only the Treasury Secretary can make.

> The concept of striking a trillion-dollar coin that would generate one trillion dollars in seigniorage, which would be off-budget, or numismatic profit, which would be on-budget, and be transferred to the Treasury, is based on the authority granted by Section 31 U.S.C. § 5112 of the United States Code for the Treasury Department to "mint and issue platinum bullion coins" in any denominations the Secretary of the Treasury may choose. Thus, if the Treasury were to mint one-trillion dollar coins, it could deposit such coins at the Federal Reserve's Treasury account instead of issuing new debt.[5][6][7][8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion-dollar_coin

AFAIK, Yellen has never made a statement on the trillion dollar coin.

However, the fact that this is playing out against a backdrop of unprecedented deficit spending, government transfers, and Fed interventions means that this time is different.

You are not paying attention.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/search?q=china+ban+bitcoin&...

> The hucksterish utopian rhetoric and blustering ambient scuzz of the broader cryptocurrency thing as it exists in this moment—the clammy slew of posturing experts, the open mendacity and barely concealed rube-running bad faith, the actual criminality and simple goonery that define its day-to-day—do the idea at the center of it no favors, but that is, more or less, the thing that always happens to any idea once people get ahold of it. Again, this is something that most people understand without really understanding how they understand it. At some point, when you are being lied to all the time and everywhere, you just know when it’s happening.

There are way too many words in that article, yet the author manages to say almost nothing that hasn't been said before. I suggest removing all adverbs and adjectives, then re-writing.

> A statement posted on the Central Bank’s website today says that “virtual currency does not have the same legal status as legal currency.”

China has "banned Bitcoin" dozens of times over the last decade. I mean, this is an ancient and well-known meme involving a certain South Park clip after all.

Maybe this time is for real, but all of these media announcements have one thing in common. They always conflate the concept of "legal tender" and "legality."

The number of authorities around the world who have warned citizens about Bitcoin using language like "no legal tender status" and "risky" and "no government guarantee" is legion. Easily thousands of times. Every time "journalists" with no business reporting on tech, law, or foreign governments interpret this as a "ban." 99% of the time, nothing happens and there is no ban.

So, maybe this time is different. Over the last year, an initiative toward greater centralized control seems to be underway in China's tech and finance sectors. Disappearing of wealthy founders. Restrictions on video game consumption. The three red lines. The ejection of the Chinese mining industry.

Then again, maybe not.

> CAF cases make the news when the victim doesn't get their money back in a timely fashion, for the same reason that fires and earthquakes do: because that's not the normal state of things.

Got a source for that?

> That system, by design, has conquered the boom/bust cycle, but western observers refuse to believe this because they are so throughly bought into the architecture of the western financial system and the many billions of words written on the topic of the operation of that system which is based on very different rules that they cannot imagine it could work any other way.

One thing all markets at their very peak have in common is the widespread belief that the business cycle has finally been conquered. Whether that's the "permanently high plateau" of the 1920s or the "new economy" of the late 1990s.

Remember "The Maestro?" Alan Greenspan was the guy who knew what was what and kept the economy humming.

How is he viewed now?

Same story, different actors. I doubt that any of these notions are true:

1. All of the information about Evergrande is out.

2. Half of the information that is out is accurate.

3. The CCP rescue actions will not re-inflate the bubble.

> Lyon arrived @RDUAirport & gave his bag to @TSA to be scanned. He says he absolutely knew TSA would see the cash, but said he also knew there is no law limiting the amount of cash one can fly with in the U.S.

Here's the real problem. Civil asset forfeiture is an extralegal action. It's outside the legal system, which is why it's nearly impossible to get your money back. It's why the legality of what Lyon was doing doesn't matter. It's not a system of law, but power. He who has the power makes the law on the spot.

That the US collectively has resigned itself to this level of clear overreach, utterly indefensible on any legal grounds, not to mention the bill of rights, says a lot about what 9/11 has done.

The terrorists won the battle the people of this country thought they were fighting.

> Strike works in all US states except New York and Hawaii, and the country of El Salvador.

That's odd, because Strike is the company on which El Salvador's Bitcoin experiment is based.

https://www.businessofbusiness.com/articles/what-is-strike-E...

Also, this article has a completely different take:

> A video was released on Thursday of Jack Mallers demonstrating the service with the firm’s integration of the Strike API. In the video Mallers sent Bitcoin from Chicago to El Salvador via Twitter.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/jack-dorsey-twitter-roll...

What am I missing?