esja

Why does blockchain have a valid case for "tracking stocks"? We've been doing that for decades. Blockchain is a step backwards in many areas. So what positive benefits does it offer to compensate for its weaknesses?

From the Australian Financial Review two weeks ago:

"Unfortunately, ASX management and its board of directors have proven over the past seven years they do not have the technical skills to manage a large-scale technology project or the self-awareness to know that what they are doing is investing in a technology dead end."

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.afr.com%2Fchanticl...

The same happened in the dot com era. They don’t understand the layers beneath them that make their businesses temporarily viable. Well, maybe their CFOs understand, but the rest of them either don’t, or have to pretend that they don’t.

It is: Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.

"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headline...

It's also predicated on a never-ending flow of cheap debt being available to companies and their investors. When that stopped a few months ago a lot of these businesses died. It's just taken a little while for the bodies to float to the surface.

That annoyed me too. Still, it's to be expected. Companies with this sort of business model are dishonest at their core.

A regulated labor market exists. The regulations are there due to past problems. Like warning signs beside a crocodile-infested swimming hole.

"We'll lose on every sale but make it up on volume" takes me right back to the dot com era. It's amazing what central banks can achieve when they really put their minds to it.

We also use 100 million barrels of oil every day. Each barrel carries equivalent energy to ten years of human labour.

Let's forget for a moment about other energy sources, and also pretend we use all that oil just for energy. That would mean that every day, the 8 billion humans on Earth are using the same energy that it would take 365 billion humans to provide by hand.

They called it pretty well in 2005:

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2005/06/16/after-the-fall

The cycle will repeat again, eventually.

It's remarkable how Equity was just smuggled into "Diversity, Equity & Inclusion", without people realising that it doesn't mean the sort of equality that the majority supports.

I've had the same experience (over decades) and never understood it. SQL should not be difficult for any professional programmer, and it's extremely powerful.

Meanwhile in Switzerland, 4 year olds walk to Kindergarten and back home again, twice a day, on their own.

They meet friends along the way, play games, take detours, catch lizards, but also learn how to manage their time. It’s very good for them.

It depends on the bank. In some places VPs can manage a lot of people without being promoted to Director.

No, Directors are also corporate officers (and more senior than VPs).

Directors are also officers, just more senior than VPs.

The first step is to run the same test. The second step is to work out why the results are different (if they are), which might include teaching styles, focus issues, malnutrition, or many other things.

There have always been vast swathes of uninhabited land in Australia. 7.6 million square kilometres divided by a few hundred thousand indigenous people, even allowing for movement = a lot of empty space. And that's even truer today than it was in 1770.

Slightly off-topic but Tudum is a terrible name! Not hard to mispronounce as "Too Dumb". How could professional writers and editors miss this?

We do segregate many sports on other dimensions, e.g. by weight in boxing.

The problem with trying to do something like that across the sexes is that the performance gap between elite men and elite women (i.e. those at the top of their statistical distributions) is so large in so many sports (even when controlling for height or weight).

For example, a large number of amateur men who are well under 6 feet tall can dunk a basketball (and Spud Webb was 5 foot 7!), but it's remarkable to find even a professional female player of the same height who could do this. Similarly being tackled by an 85kg male rugby player is a whole other universe of pain compared to being tackled by an 85kg female. Anybody who knows sports can find similar examples. It’s not about testosterone or some other individual item - it’s the whole complex biological organism acting in concert. When you are working with so many dimensions and those are also interacting in real time, it is very hard to divide things into "fair" categories.

Because of these issues, women fought very hard for (and won) the right to have their own competitions, free of male competitors.

For more examples, see https://boysvswomen.com/#/. If Olympic events were mixed sex, most events would have no female competitors at all. Teenage boys routinely beat female world records.

My point is that you can’t reverse all the advantages of the years of previous testosterone (i.e. male puberty) just by cutting today‘s testosterone levels. You can make that person perform worse than other males, sure, but it’s not enough to reach a level playing field with females. There may be exceptions for specific sports - I’m talking about the general case, which is what we base policies on.

In general you also can’t give a female athlete sufficient testosterone to counteract the absence of male puberty and make them competitive with men. You can make them better than non-doping women, sure, but it’s not enough to reach the level of post puberty males, and the more you give the worse the impact on their health. The GDR already ran that experiment.

This should give a sense of the outcome: https://boysvswomen.com/#/

Yes, teenage boys (even 13 and 14 year olds) frequently beat female world records. In almost all athletic sports, a "combined" Olympics would have no female participants at all.

This is why women fought for sex segregation in the first place.

The advantages of male puberty and the Y chromosome extend far beyond testosterone.

It's also irrelevant how much testosterone a person produces today. You can reduce the testosterone levels of a Michael Phelps type to female levels (though it would ruin his health), yet he would retain insurmountable advantages over every woman who has ever been born on this planet.

I would suggest that declaring all views to be right and all views to be wrong is indistinguishable from your brain having fallen out. We can do better.

I think he feels like a prop for someone else's agenda. Imagine living a long life with congenital issues that seriously impacted your physical development, made you infertile etc., then suddenly loads of people are talking about your condition. But it's rarely in order to benefit you, and very often just a sort of debating tactic, to advance the goals of XY people who don't share your condition at all and whose goals you disagree with. I would also find that upsetting.

I can see your point here, but would argue that biology is the underlying reason that you don't have to think about it too much.

Think of it this way... in your lifetime of genuine interactions with people (e.g. conversations), how many XX people have you mistaken for XY people, and vice versa? For most people the answer is very close to zero, but why is that?

I would argue it's because billions of years of evolution (a biological process) have already helpfully trained us to detect even the tiniest differences between males and females. We have been a sexually dimorphic species for a very long time. And those differences (whether massive or tiny) are directed in large part by the chromosomes inside our trillions of somatic cells - skin, hair, bones, eyes, brain, etc. etc.

Also, for those rare cases you mention, the chromosomes often are a major deciding factor in how we do the classification, e.g. we might be confused about someone with a DSD because although they were "assigned female" since birth, they continue to show some male characteristics, due to the Y chromosome present in their organs, skeleton, etc. Surgeons can operate on genitals etc., but they can't alter all of the trillions of somatic cells in the body.z

Lia Thomas has XY chromosomes, always has, has benefited from their advantages, and continues to do so.

Everyone knows DSDs exist, but most of the time they are brought into this debate, they are merely a rhetorical device rather than any real attempt to address the specific situation. One of my close relatives has Klinefelter's, and I can assure you he finds this sort of thing extremely upsetting.

These sorts of comments are completely unnecessary, uncharitable, and against HN guidelines. This person is not hurting anybody (least of all you), and not doing anything that the rest of us wouldn't do in the same horrendous circumstances. He's also doing something to help lots of other people.

Absolutely. I think democratic governance and rule of law should be table stakes for participation in the "Western" economy and its international institutions. Countries that don't respect those values in their own societies won't respect them in international relations either.