doubleunplussed

Well, it seems half the people criticising MMT say it's a vacuous re-statement of how things already work, and the other half say it's wrong and discredited :p.

What does it actually advocate that has been discredited? I get the impression MMTers want to erase the distinction between central banks and the government, and basically run everything with fiscal policy, letting the government decide how big its deficits are instead of effectively the fed deciding. Is that right?

I mean, that would work in principle, right? It would just be a bad idea because the decision is best made by an independent entity rather than the government, which has short-term incentives that may lead it to make bad decisions about spending (usually: too much).

And maybe it would be a bad idea because interest rates are a more reliable lever for controlling the money supply than tax and expenditure rates? I mean, if that's the case, it's not super obvious.

And since these things haven't been tried, I don't suppose it's those things that have been discredited.

From what I see, people are saying MMT has been discredited because large government deficits have led to high inflation recently. But this seems off to me - MMT doesn't say infinite deficits are possible, they're saying the deficits are limited by inflation. Which is true and we're now seeing the consequences of exceeding that limit.

After QE4, seems to me inflation wasn't particularly high.

Well, let's have a scroll...

This one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33156617

No, the fed having negative equity doesn't stop them controlling the money supply. Unless like, they've literally sold all their assets and there's still too much money left in the system, but that's so far away from being a possibility that it's not worth considering. And even if it did happen, there would be options.

Here we've got fed negative equity apparently resulting in revolutions, wars, and famines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33156855

Here we've got "don't be fooled, they just want profit and power":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33156394

Here's a conspiratorially-toned objection to the whole concept of central banking, likening it to centrally-planned economies and implying it will be equally disastrous:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33160065

> Differently put, where exactly did you exit the conversation?

I'm still early on in my journey learning about economics (I'm a physicist turned software engineer), but after only learning a little bit it is pretty easy to spot the people who've learned almost nothing but confidently assert it's all a scam or whatever, and pretty much dismiss them.

But walking away from them doesn't mean entering an echo chamber. There are plenty of legitimate objections to how central banking is done. For example, whenever central banks monetise government debt, they buy it via private investors who therefore get to skim a bit off the top. It doesn't really feel fair for these middlemen to make bank off the central bank deciding to fund the government's deficits, an interaction that need not involve them. On the other hand, keeping the central bank and the government at arm's length from each other is an excellent idea. So how best to balance this?

It's starting to look like fiscal policy can be more powerful than monetary policy. How can we leverage this to stabilise the economy without handing the government too much power it might misuse?

Should the target inflation rate be higher? Should we target a different metric, like, nominal GDP? Should the target be symmetric? Should it be level targeting or rate targeting? Can interest rates be negative? Is the zero lower bound an actual problem, or is more QE a fine and sensible response and we're just a little too scared of it? Should the Fed pay interest on excess reserves? Is a corridor system better than a floor system for rate targeting? How can we best deal with moral hazard?

Even though I've got plenty yet to learn, it is extremely clear to me that some kind of control of the money supply is necessary, otherwise you get depressions. So I am not expecting to encounter much serious argument for getting rid of central banks entirely, unless someone invents a distributed way of achieving the same goal, or has a feasible plan for the government taking on the role instead of a central bank. If someone's got a serious argument, I'll hear it, but if it's from the "it's all a scam, we should never have left gold" crowd, I'm not expecting much. It's not a scam, it's a legitimate attempt to make a system that works, and it would be much worse if we were still on gold. Yet there seems to be something about the topic that draws otherwise smart people into dismissing the whole thing.

I would hope they set that rate to what they think is optimal for the economy, regardless of their solvency.

I only skimmed the article, but I don't see where it gives reasons why solvency matters, although it hints it might. I was under the impression it doesn't really matter if the fed is solvent, since I can't think of any concrete consequences.

This thread shows a phenomenon that I've noticed a lot of lately: that many smart people turn absolutely loopy when it comes to the topic of central banking. There's nothing quite like it, and I'm not sure how to explain it. The topic seems to make conspiracy theorists out of otherwise very reasonable people.

Good to see the highest voted comments are sane, but the sanity ratio is pretty low compared to other topics.

This but unironically. By the standards of the wild swings in CPI that we would have if denominated in any non-stablecoin cryptocurrency, the US's current inflation is brief and insignificant.

Good luck actually using a currency that does not have its quantity controlled by a central bank 'printing it out of thin air'. This is a feature, not a bug.

That's for different Python interpreters altogether, you still can't have multiple numpy packages in any one of them.

Arch actually supports multiple Pythons just fine, I currently have a bunch of 3.x Python interpreters I installed from the AUR. But installing other Python packages with these interpreters indeed needs to be done outside the system's package manager, e.g. with pip -U or a venv (usually a venv for me).

With regard to GPT3, it doesn't know what bits are. I'm guessing doesn't know what bytes are either, and that it operates on the level of some subset of unicode codepoints, with one input-layer and output-layer neuron for each. But I could be wrong, a quick google does not immediately confirm or refute.

vscode example notwithstanding, I do not encounter the 'conflicting packages' problem very often on Arch. In fact, I don't remember the last time I encountered it, other than when it's an explicit choice - like, Python can only have one version of a package installed for the system Python interpreter, so if you try to install both python-numpy and python-numpy-mkl-bin, well, you have to choose. That's how Python works, though you can of course make additional Python environments (venv/conda/whatever) with different packages.

I notice the vscode example involves the AUR, which is not the official repositories. I consider that a broken package, and it should be fixed. One of the packages should rename its main executable or whatever.

Chrome, for example, has various versions, but they ship binaries with different names, e.g. /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable.

The great thing about Arch is that there is one canonical user repository, the AUR. So the official repos should not have conflicts unless absolutely necessary, and the AUR should endeavour not to have conflicts, though it's more of a wild-west so they're somewhat more likely.

However, you generally don't have to think about how to not conflict with whatever random packages may be out there - you only need to consider the repos and the AUR. Anyone making their own packages that are not in the official repos or the AUR, and yet conflict with them, well, that's their problem.

Arch being super up to date and the existence of the AUR really does obviate the need for containerising apps to a large degree, at least from the perspective of ensuring dependencies are satisfied (there are still security reasons to want containerisation). I don't believe I have any containerised apps, and yet I'm running loads of modern common programs like zoom, chrome, discord, spotify, the list goes on.

A particle is less like a coin with only two sides, and more like a little arrow which could be pointing in any direction.

Quantum mechanics allows you to measure the projection of the arrow along any one axis, and you'll always get +1 or -1. If the two people with entangled particles measure along the same axis, they will always get opposite results. But they are also free to measure along different axes.

The statistics of what results the two experimenters get when they measure their particles arrows along random axes in repeated trials are not the same as what you would get if the arrows had a predetermined direction all along.

Google "Bell inequality" for details.

One cannot simply add more SSDs to one's laptop, regardless of price.

When I first got a phone without a headphone jack, I bought one such dongle. It didn't work. My two subsequent phones have had headphone jacks, so I'm not going to worry about this problem again for a while, but at the time at least it was certainly not as simple as buying a dongle and knowing it would work.

Those would not be travelling at extra-solar speeds.

I don't know how they do it but it seems easy in practice. You hash the concatenation of chunks of data submitted by participants. Adding more data to the hash can only make it more random, not less. As long as at least one participant wants the outcome to be random and therefore they submitted actual random bits, the result will be random no matter how unrandom all the other participants' data chunks were.

8.5% is the year-on-year figure. The month-on-month figure was 0.0%, so prices neither grew nor fell on average in July.

The reduction in spending is exactly what the fed wants in order to curtail inflation, it's a feature not a bug.

The question was

> How do you search for *non-unicode* characters in a pdf document

In the long run ACs are exactly 100% efficient at heating the environment. The extra heat is only temporarily displaced from the building being cooled, and will leak back in eventually.

Here's a list:

https://www.woodturner.org/Woodturner/Resources/Safety-Mater...

And they have a whole other post [1] about why science needs to actually check stuff like this, because reality is full of complexity that prevents us from drawing conclusions as rapidly as we'd like.

[1] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/01/11/reality-is-very-wei...

It's not assuming it, that's what they're testing for.

I always assumed it was his real name, but I suppose that was just an unexamined assumption.

Gwern Branwen is a prolific [1] netizen who is also completely anonymous. I don't know how people like him [2] do it. Surely the people who know him IRL are aware of what he's working on day-to-day and someone would be able to connect the dots. Unless he lives alone or his housemates are completely offline - and he doesn't talk to anyone IRL about what he does at home.

[1] Sometimes on Twitter or Hacker News I legitimately just scan my eyes around the screen expecting a comment from or link to Gwern to be already in my field of vision.

[2] I have seen since-scrubbed evidence Gwern is a "him" though he now seems to hide that too

> When the central bank lends money at positive interest rates, the interest profits or “seigniorage” are distributed to everyone like dividends (they would in the real world go to the government which would spend or distribute them). If seigniorage was not distributed, at the end of each loan, the money supply would shrink a little bit as the central bank would be gradually absorbing money from the economy as interest. Seigniorage serves to neutralize this.

Could you elaborate on this? Is this really what happens in the real world - interest on central bank loans going to the government? I was very much under the impression that this interest goes to the central bank (and is thus destroyed), and the fact that this would appear to contract the money supply seemed like it just increased the need for the central bank to increase the money supply in other ways. To be honest, I am still not clear on how the money supply is increased permanently by a central bank - all textbook examples of money supply changes appear to only do so temporarily.

Thank you so much! I've similarly been trying to wrap my head around monetary things recently, and as with learning anything in physics (my field), I believe you don't really understand a model unless you can code up a simulator.

It's been maddening not being able to find a comprehensive model of how all the bits fit together, and I have many times wondered if the lack of existence of a game like yours meant that no such model actually existed. Happy to be wrong!

And of course a game is a brilliant way to build intuition whether you know the equations of the underlying model or not.

I haven't played it yet but am greatly looking forward to it, really hoping to answer various gaps in my knowledge. Thanks again!

Sorry, you're absolutely correct. Brain fart. The equation I wrote actually is for an exponential, whoops.

It's the opposite [1]:

"taller soldiers are more likely to survive battle and that taller parents are more likely to have sons". This was based on his research of British Army records from the First World War, which showed that "surviving soldiers were on average more than one inch (3.33 cm) taller than fallen soldiers"

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Returning_soldier_effect

It's 5 foot 8.1 inches.

Well, English and most indian languages share a common ancestor, but indic languages have drifted just as far as any other from proto Indo-European that you can't really say one branch inherited anything from the other . Indic languages are our cousins, not our grandparents.

Periodic functions like sin(x) are the solutions to differential equations like dy/dx = -y that describe for example, oscillations of springs, to name but one of an extremely large number of dynamical systems that behave this way.