codekansas

Noah Smith had a good blog post about how the world order is likely to shift if Bitcoin reaches $500,000 USD. It would mean that many (most?) of the world's wealthiest people will have made their money from Bitcoin, which selects for a different type of person from the typical tech entrepreneur. It might breed a certain resurgence of libertarianism in mainstream politics, simply because of the money involved, and there could be financial support for ideas like these from idealists with disposable income

Good, as it should be. The idea that you should get priority to live somewhere just because you were born there runs totally counter to America's founding principles. Building more housing to house more people and create more opportunity is the only morally conscionable way forward

An interesting aspect of China's green energy activities is the historic role that coal has played in the revolutionary imagery of the communist party. The coal lobby in the US is powerful, but not in nearly the same way

Like which jobs? Amazon, McDonalds, Walmart all are non-union. Major union professions are nurses, teachers, plumbers, steel workers, automotive workers, none of which are exactly low paid

I think a prerequisite for union to be successful is that it's members have leverage by withholding their collective labor, otherwise how to they negotiate?

It's questionable whether or not America's healthcare system would be considered "globally competitive" though. We do have top-tier medical research but there's a lot of waste too

Woah, didn't know that, neat

By competitive I mean that America does a better job at that thing than other countries, e.g. the examples I listed

Is there am American industry that is heavily unionized that is globally competitive? Education, policing, auto manufacturing, and steel come to mind for me as both heavily unionized and significantly poorer quality in America relative to comparable peers. Maybe the entertainment industry though? I'm genuinely curious

Looks like they mixed up correlation and causation

Kinda hard to colonize another planet with just one sex

I don't know about quizzing each other, but when my youngest sibling, an unemployed community college dropout, got super involved in the Portland antiracist scene, to the point that they stopped talking to our family (because we represent white oppression, basically what the author described) it has been really rough to see our love for them weaponized to push this particular cult. Having a family member join a cult doesn't make day-to-day problems (they don't even speak to us anymore), but that doesn't mean it's not a major social trend

It was the parent comment's language. I was more taking issue with the "cork board" metaphor

Presumably in this scenario the employee was one of a small group of people that was responsible for maintaining the cork board, and used it for their political beliefs

I think the point is that software automation tools (automatic testing, nice IDEs) generally don't lead to companies hiring fewer devs, it leads to companies being able to do more with the same number of devs and consequently hiring more. Same thing in construction or any globally competitive industry

I would guess this speaks more to political mismanagement than an intentional goal. No politician is going to get elected on a platform of higher rents and lower wages. Increased rents, at least, are usually caused more by good intentions gone bad than by intentional malice

Per what measure? Are you counting the United States and Western Europe as the #1 economy collectively?

I suspect there's a growing market for summer camps and other forms of tech hiatuses. I would gladly subscribe to a service that forced me not to use social media or whatever, since I don't think my own brain can be trusted with that

The latest edition of the Economist had an article about the recent coup in Mali, and about the (rather obvious) need for institution-building rather than pure military interventions by European powers: https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2020/08/19/...

Mostly unrelatedly, whenever I see these types of forts I am reminded of the forts that workers build in Civ 5, which are equally useless

There's a cool related video of Greg Mankiw [0]. He talked about two "redistribution" schemes:

1. $1000 per month to those with zero income, phased out at 20c / dollar extra income, financed by 20% tax on all income above $60k 2. Transfer of $1000 per month to everyone, financed by 20% flat tax on income

Apparently a group of Harvard students he asked were strongly in favor of the former, without realizing that the two plans are equivalent. It's all about framing.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cL8kM0fXQc

I think one common criticism of wealth taxes is that assessing these asset values can be gamed. When I'm donating my yacht to charity it's worth way more than when the government is assessing it for taxes

But there's other stupid crap you can waste money on that doesn't count as assets. Spaceship rides, political donations... Maybe you can sell your yacht to some yacht company and lease it back from them?

Definitely. There's a conversation to be had about which billionaires do we want. Most Americans have a favorable opinion of Bill Gates [0], but not Jeff Bezos [1]. And there's good arguments for having large-scale philanthropic efforts be semi-privatized.

A "punitive tax on interest income" is popular with the left because it is, on paper, very progressive and avoids taxing the poor. But in truth, I don't think people actually want fewer billionaires, they just don't want aristocratic billionaires.

It also doesn't help that it's so unclear what the money would be spent on.

[0] https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/explore/public_figu... [1] https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/explore/public_figu...

Bloomberg did a writeup of this a few weeks ago: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-01/did-china...

I think this can be viewed as a marketing and UX problem, sort of. It reminds me of the Wii Amiibo - people actually paid money to train their AI bots because of how Nintendo designed them. Not sure how many people, but a reasonable enough segment of the market that Nintendo thought it a worthwhile investment anyway

I've been re-reading Infinite Jest recently and it is amazing how prescient David Foster Wallace seems. The deep philosophical question - does American individualism mean anything in a world where the average person cannot be expected to delay gratification?

Personally I felt the appeal of TikTok is that the design is ML-centric - clean buttons, very clear signal, not a bunch of mixed feedback signals like in other apps. Everyone on board seems to understand the importance of the underlying ranking algorithm

ByteDance and iFlytek have stood out to me. I saw iFlytek's universal translator at the airport one time and it was really impressive. There's also a number of examples in Kai-Fu Lee's book "AI Superpowers" - I guess that's the book that put this thought in my head in the first place

Speaking entirely anecdotally, I suspect having a bunch of people working on an ML algorithm actually does more harm than good. It's more important that everyone in the product stack is on the same page about the point.

The Facebook Newsfeed UI, for example, has to balance so many different signals. Compare that with TikTok's UI, which is very efficient at collecting a clear reinforcement signal and only has to deal with one homogenous kind of data. It's like the entire TikTok team, not just the data scientists, focused in on doing ML really well.

I'm really impressed and kind of scared whenever I use TikTok. It really does feel like a whole different level of ML-powered addictiveness, designed from the ground up rather than having the ML part added on.

Some really good points. Does anyone have a good explanation for why Chinese startups seem to have mastered build AI-centric apps while American startups (and large companies) lag behind?

Edit: Want to rephrase this to avoid promoting nationalism. Why has ByteDance been so successful? TikTok / Douyin and Toutiao are both really big hits, Facebook hasn't had a comparable ground-up hit despite having top-notch ML engineers.

This seems pretty similar to the Longformer, and the performance is not that much better. Is the only difference the random attention?

If the lender can garnish future wages, I think the incentives are still pointing in the right direction. The only way the lender loses money is by lending too much to someone who will never be able to pay it back - which is what you want, presumably.