9,167 karma · joined August 24, 2019
I can't help but think that this massive shortage is setting up and equal an opposite reaction 2-3 years down the road: a glut as all this new capacity comes online. Especially given that because companies are now scrambling for chips, they're likely to over-order to ensure future supply.
A better question: how did the (arguably at this point) most powerful country on earth fail to understand even the most basic principles of life in Afghanistan and why any counterinsurgency effort, no matter how well-funded and armed, must ultimately end where it has? And even worse, why did this country not learn exactly the same lesson 50 years ago?
That's a recipe for a high priest class.
Still, the hoards eat it up. It's a testament to the power of complex, flawed ideas, marketed to the hilt, and the promise of riches if you stick with the leadership.
It's really a recipe for a technology religion.
> ... Occasionally the screen went black when an employee at MTV inserted a tape into a VCR.[20] MTV's lower third graphics near the beginnings and ends of videos eventually used the recognizable Kabel typeface for about 25 years; but they varied on MTV's first day, speaking in a different typeface, and including details such as the song's year and record label.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV#Official_launch
None of that mattered though:
> MTV's effect was immediate. Within two months, record stores where MTV was available were selling music local radio stations were not playing, such as Men at Work, Bow Wow Wow and the Human League.[27] MTV also sparked the Second British Invasion, featuring existing videos by UK acts who had used the format for several years (for example, on BBC's Top of the Pops).
This is what a lot of people don't get about market bottoms. Nobody cares. It's not like they hate an asset class. They just could not care less.
This is one of the reasons that buying market bottoms is so hard. There's no story. You tell somebody what you did, and they just look at you with a blank stare.
Then you get to wait while ... nothing at all happens. Good news that should turn prices around - nobody cares. Or worse, a surprise snap lower that makes you question your "value" stance.
During the transition period from bear to bull, nobody believes it's real. The bears from the previous cycle who called the top and made the right choice to sell will not believe the bull is real and so will stay on the sidelines. As the market rises, everyone - even the bulls - will expect the inevitable return to baseline. Rinse and repeat. Maybe for years. Not many people will continue to hold on during that period.
Near market tops, of course, it's exactly the opposite. You will be congratulated from here to Timbuktu and back for your "wise" investment when buying into a market shooting higher. You'll look like a star. Somebody who knows what they're doing. There will be lots of talk about new paradigms and how this time it really is different, and why.
You should be selling, but your own brain and the brains of the people around you will make you buy, buy, buy instead.
It's so predictable as to be laughable, except for the pain and chaos that happens when an especially monstrous bull goes to the slaughterhouse.
This is a great way to lead into the article. The author pulls off something that turns out to be extremely hard to get right: Interweave humor and slightly off-topic material into a technical post. Most of the time it falls flat, but not here. Looking forward to reading further.
That's surprising. I would have suspected that more than 75% pay for their travel on a credit card. They decide to travel first, then pay for whatever piles up later. Or maybe they just let the balance accrue.
How did you conduct a "statistically significant survey" on this for the US? Maybe there's a startup idea there.
This is a global phenomenon. Real 30-year yields are steeply negative in the US as well, with nominal yield at 1.85% and year-over-year CPI above 5%.
But it helps to zoom out. This is part of a multi-decade trend in ever lower 30-year yields stretching back to the Regan administration.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS30
I challenge anyone to find a channel that long and that persistent (except for possibly the CPI). Keep following and you make the prediction of nominal 30-year yields touching zero within 3 years.
Somebody is on the wrong side of this trade in a big way.
Those who say the inflationary spike is temporary and will mean revert are buying bonds with wild abandon because once you break zero, you can always go deeper negative. And as yields fall, bond prices rise.
Those who say we're on the road to permanent inflation and possibly more are looking for inflation hedges. The odd thing about this is that gold, the traditional inflation hedge has gone nowhere fast.
It's also possible that both sides are wrong and what will actually happen will be unlike anything that has come before in terms of the ferocity and diversity of forces at work and ultimate pain/suffering.
For right now, both extreme sides can point to data supporting their outlook. But for how long?
> A wiper is a class of malware whose intention is to wipe the hard drive of the computer it infects.
What makes you think it hasn't already?
This article kind of leaves the significance of what's happening as an exercise for the reader.
The Fed is in the fight of its life to hold back negative short term interest rates. That 0.05% in the RRP is the only thing standing in the way. Yes, this is ironic (and alarming) because QE was supposed to drive down long rates and thereby entice borrowers to borrow. However, the massive drawdown of the TGA (the Treasury's account with the Fed) has left the banks starved for good collateral yielding anything. Money market funds are obligated by law to buy short-erm US Treasuries. Throw in various government transfers clogging up the banking system, and all of this puts huge pressure on short-term notes.
QE is only inflationary if banks lend against the collateral they receive as a result of QE. So far, that hasn't been happening much. So the potential here is a deflationary shock that few are expecting, with negative rates across the yield curve leading the way.
I knew it. What is it with these EVcompanies and their pre-announcements? Why do that? Why not just start talking about the damned thing when, you know, it's actually ready to test drive and buy? Is every car maker that desperate for attention?
Oh, that's right. Because these vehicles aren't necessities. They're fashion accessories. I totally forget this isn't about transportation. It's about buying the thing that makes you look good.
This raises a point that article doesn't address: what is "money"?
If Johnson trades those cigarettes he makes from tossed butts for food, is he using money? Cigarettes have been used as currency in some special situations like war time.
Likewise, if Johnson accepts a product created through the use of money, isn't he in fact using money, if only indirectly?
Then there's the big question that never gets asked or answered: what happens if every single person on earth lived like Johnson? Money is fundamentally a way to fulfill future needs and wants. Abandoning money is really abandoning a path to build a future deliberately.
Storing grain, smoking meat, or building a shelter serve exactly the same purpose as money in this context. They are ways to make the future more predictable. They also have the interesting property that they can be traded for other ways to make the future more predictable. And that leads to the main problem that Johnson seems to be trying to solve: how to stop focusing on optimizing one's future through the accumulation of things that can make the future more certain.
What does a world of people who have abandoned the idea of making a future for themselves actually look like?
The meaning of "grayness" would appear to have something to do with the fuzzy line between life and non-life.
There is a footnote to the article "The Seven Pillars of Life":
https://www.pps.net/cms/lib/OR01913224/Centricity/Domain/333...
But it doesn't mention grayness at all.
This gets cleared up a little a few paragraphs in:
> The ability to clearly distinguish between abiotic and biotic systems is considered by many a prerequisite for effective astrobiology studies. However, since no natural demarcation truly exists, there is a profound difficulty in advancing the field if we rely on a strict dichotomy. ...
It's not good that this introductory post doesn't start right off with a problem to be solved. Instead it presents the credentials of the current leader.
If I had to pick out the problem, it would be this sentence, contained in the fourth paragraph:
> Currently just 10 countries manufacture 70% of the world’s goods.
In the fifth paragraph, we get a more clear phrasing of the problem:
> The surprisingly manual and bespoke process of teaching robots how to do things, which hasn’t changed much over the last few decades, is currently a cap on their potential to help more businesses.
Ok, so this is going to be a company that solves the problem of poor usability of industrial robots through machine learning. The larger goal is to put manufacturing capacity closer to consumers for better sustainability.
> Adoption in the United States was hampered due to a lack of a single Teletext standard and consumer resistance to the high initial price of Teletext decoders. Throughout the period of analog broadcasting, Teletext or other similar technologies in the US were practically non-existent, with the only technologies resembling such existing in the country being closed captioning, TV Guide On Screen, and Extended Data Services (XDS).
https://juliahub.com/lp/pricing
I see Free, Pay as You Go, and Contact Sales.
Clicking the middle option, I see that I must be logged in to view anything.
What you want to do with this information is up to you, but it doesn't look good from the customer side. And from the perspective of someone trying to figure out if Julia Computing has a future as a money-making enterprise, it looks iffy at best.
What products/services does Julia Computing sell to justify that Series A? The article doesn't mention anything.
Although the company website lists some "products," there are no price tags or subscription plans attached to anything.
And even if there are revenue-generating products/services on the horizon, how will the company protect itself from smaller, more nimble competitors that don't have a platform obligation to fulfill?
How is this not another Docker? Don't get me wrong, both Julia and Docker are amazing, but have we entered the phase of the VC-funded deliberate non-profit?
Ditto the GFC. I remember being in the audience of Startup School circa 2008 and some editor from a business magazine gave a talk about how he didn't give a hoot about "Subprime." What he really cared about was productivity declines.
When you get a real bubble going, so many have attached everything to it that they just can't bring themselves to actually look at it objectively. People can actually say "new economy" or "new paradigm" or "the old rules don't apply" with a straight face.
By that metric, "the everything bubble" we currently have is nowhere close to popping. The bears are everywhere. When the last prominent bear goes into hibernation, the inevitable won't be far.
I think this phenomenon deserves more attention.
That's because you're not offering enough money. Raise it by 20%, 50%, 200%. Keep raising it until you get qualified applicants.
You will eventually find a price that attracts the people your business needs. And if that price is too high to turn a profit and there's no other way, shut down.
Article after article with business owners acting like they're entitled to pay workers sub-market and/or sub-living wages.
Time to wake up and face the fact that large sectors of the service economy are no longer viable due to decades of misreported inflation, trickle-down economics, and disastrous, unchecked monetary policy blunders.
The thread doesn't prove any of the claims in the first tweet:
1. Inherently right-wing, hypercapitalistic. What's the source? Whitepaper? Source code?
2. Built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents. Again, what's the source for this claim of what motivated Satoshi? Look through the the Bitcoin Talk forum. You'll find nothing of the sort.
3. Tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight and artificially enforced scarcity. He's just described blue chip stocks.
Paying attention to notable people is all well and good. But they, like everyone else, have the same standards for evidence as the rest of us.
That "right-wing" label probably relates to this:
> Cryptocurrency is like taking the worst parts of today's capitalist system (eg. corruption, fraud, inequality) and using software to technically limit the use of interventions (eg. audits, regulation, taxation) which serve as protections or safety nets for the average person.
What the author fails to consider is the rate at which the world's governments are seizing ever more power for themselves. The lack of regulation (or regulatability) in Bitcoin is viewed by many (clearly none that the author has interacted with) as a technological safety valve against a state in the process of iterating with gusto on Acton's maxim.
That safety valve will appeal to some, but others not so much. It is unfair to smear all users with the same brush.
People who want Merkle trees and a trusted institution don't understand either.
I haven't read the book, but I suspect this refers to the deafening "Blockchain not Bitcoin" hype from 2015-2018.
It turns out that Bitcoin solves a very specific problem in a manner that looks general. It's taken several years for that idea to play out, but it appears to be on a well-deserved decline.
It's possible to see Bitcoin as the answer to a range of problems without seeing it as the solution to every problem.
A simple example is solubility. Molecules with amines generally are soluble in acid. Molecules with carboxylic acid groups are usually soluble in base. Molecules with flexible hydrocarbon chains tend to be soluble in oils. Molecules with lots of polar groups tend to be soluble in water. Large, rigid molecules are rarely soluble in anything.
Trained chemists can do this sort of thing with specialized properties (such as metabolic stability, brain penetrating ability, and oral bioavailability) as well, although success depends on specifics.
There's a lot going on here.
Hate on billionaires, that makes sense. Envy is a terrible thing. "Unearned" fortunes and all of that.
But the bigger problem is a gross misinterpretation of history and the human condition. Do people take big leaps into the unknown out of desire for understanding? Some primal thirst for knowledge? Some do. Most don't.
If you really want to create a stampede into the unknown, the thing to do is plant rumors of fortunes to be made. Even better, broadcast reports about ordinary Joe's striking it rich. Nothing in the world is more motivating than the realization that your neighbor has become rich.
Unfortunately, the author isn't alone in misreading history and human motivation, but I'll bet they get the envy part.