fineline

OK I am not an economist, but here's my 2c (of my own currency...)

You're right, I phrased it incorrectly - the US could indeed default on its "debt" if it chose too - and maybe the current administration is more inclined to consider doing so - but it would be a choice - it never has to, if it chooses not to.

One thing the US can't and won't ever do is pay down all that debt. The associated contraction in the money supply would be economically devastating, and is basically inconceivable.

To quote the last line of your linked article "As far as the debt limit is concerned, the government really shouldn’t be run like a business." Sometimes this concept is bandied around, that a government is like a household or a business and needs to balance its budget. This is wrong, a government (of a country with sovereign currency and limited foreign-denominated debt) is a government, and should govern, adjusting the money supply to help balance the economy, letting off steam (by running a surplus, taxing more than it spends and taking money out of the economy) when the economy is running "hot" and opening the throttle (by running a deficit, spending more than it taxes and putting money into the economy) when the economy is running below capacity - excess unemployment and underemployment, productive capital laying idle etc. (The devil is of course in the detail, with different regions and sectors performing very differently, and lots of purely political distortions.)

Over time an economy that grows will naturally require more money to operate, so the default state of public finance should be deficit. It is somewhat inappropriate and unfortunate that we characterise this as "debt".

Warren Mosler mentions within this short book how he made a lot of money realising that Italian bonds could never default:

http://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/powerpoints/7DIF.pdf

Now they're on the Euro things may well be different. Never give away sovereignty over your currency.

If that "debt" is denominated in USD, the US cannot default.

Really what is national debt in a nation with soft (non-exchangeable for gold) sovereign currency and limited foreign-denominated debt other than an increase in the money supply - or a commitment to make such increase when bonds mature?

One more: I could try out/ use the app on platforms for which it is currently unavailable, such as my iPad Pro (with large screen and stylus) or Samsung Note 8 (smaller screen but also a great stylus).

Someone mentioned the lack of web API for stylus, which is a huge gap right now. I expect that gap will be filled sooner or later. Indeed with WebUSB it should be possible to implement drivers for the plug-in Wacom style devices for the web right now. Since getting these two great devices I haven't plugged in my Wacom once though.

The lack of a really good vector app for Android (like Autodesk Graphic for iOS) is what made me curious to check out these comments and see what Krita is about.

Yes the web has extra overheads, but it is the cross platform runtime with the broadest reach.

I don't know about Cobra, but I would say Nim has first class support for unit tests. If you check out the "Testable documentaion examples" section of the article, it shows they've even added support for testing sample code in inline function documentation. This is a really interesting approach. I don't use Nim myself (not a "systems" programmer - what a silly term that is, we all make "systems" but I guess that boat has sailed) but I'm interested in applying a similar approach in other languages.

I design and implement system architecture and user interfaces, manage people and projects, plan future areas of R&D, etc. and I still call myself (in conversation) a computer programmer. I find it helps distinguish me from all the talking heads in this industry who couldn't actually build an information system if their lives depended upon it.

I found this a strange decision in the Grid standard design. Surely most people* would think more in terms of "cells" that "cell-dividing-lines". Then again, compared to the design decisions in much of the rest of CSS including every other standard layout mechanism this is a fairly small gripe, overall CSS Grid is a big improvement. And when using the excellent "grid-template-areas" (compared to ASCII art elsewhere in this thread) you don't really specify start and end points anyway.

* By people, I mean designers (used to bootstrap-style grids), coders (used to arrays) and everyone else (used to spreadsheets).

I feel (i.e. just my own subjective experience) it's not only the formation of memory that benefits from mental "down time" but also the gradual solution of abstract problems, such as the ones we come across in building complicated information systems.

I'm not sure about this:

>> we should aim for “minimal interference” during these breaks – deliberately avoiding any activity that could tamper with the delicate task of memory formation. So no running errands, checking your emails, or surfing the web on your smartphone.

Whilst I agree that cluttering up the brain with other similar sorts of information (so stuff in emails or web) is counter-productive, I feel (again just my own experience) that undertaking a completely different sort of activity which exercises the brain in different ways (so for me things like a bike ride, chopping firewood, kicking a footy with the kids) can have great results. Getting back to the original task, I do often find progress has come out of "thin air".

Definitely - the easiest way to get something done is to have someone else to do it. Taming is a two-way process.

Historically? Round us, there are various predators (wild and feral) that would happily feed on a cat - hawks, owls, goannas, snakes, foxes, wild dogs. Mainly nocturnal, we keep our cats in at night (so they don't prey on native nocturnals themselves too). Plus our dogs roam the home yard, which helps keep predators at bay. We've had sheep killed though, and chickens, plus a rabbit that only has one ear left. People sometimes talk about a "natural death" as if it is some kind of peaceful alternative - but most deaths in nature involve being eaten alive by another animal.

Many people still enjoy horses without using them as primary transport. I reckon it will be the same with ICE cars - various people with the money and inclination will still enjoy classic cars even when their daily driver is electric.

Government checks can't bounce.

http://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/powerpoints/7DIF.pdf

Unless they give up sovereignty over their own currency of course. A mistake made by European countries - several of which have paid and are continuing to pay the price.

I absolutely agree that too much public debt is a bad thing, but not for the normally given reasons. It can lead to inflation, devaluation of the currency in relation to either goods or investment asset prices - indeed we see the latter at the moment in stock and property markets around the world, although that is driven by money creation through private lending. This is more worrying, as private checks can and do bounce, debts default, and we get another financial crisis.

Govt debt should be used for capital investment - roads, communications, health, education and security facilities - and if so used can be a true investment with an expectation of future returns. Debt that blows out on operational expenditure, transfer payments, public sector bureaucracy bloat, is not sustainable.

Maybe try different things. Some people "don't like exercise" because they don't enjoy the gym or running. But put them on a dancefloor / skateboard / ocean beach / roller-rink / climbing wall / mountain bike / zipline / parkour course / yoga studio .... etc, and it clicks. If your form of exercise requires "willpower" to do it, that's probably not a good indicator for long-term engagement. Personally, I hate gyms but I'd go surfing even if it made me fat.

I don't see too much problem with state controlling money creation - sovereign currency gives the latitude for deficit spending which provides opportunity to invest in future economic growth. (I have no idea why many "fiscal conservatives" have a problem with debt-fuelled capital investment by government whilst embracing it as normal and indeed good practice in the private sphere.)

But separation of finance _industry_ from state - the incredible amount of policy influence that the industry has, to its own benefit and the detriment of just about everyone else except the very rich, to the extent that many politics-industry players, on all sides, are basically representatives of banks - yes, that would be some kind of holy grail.

And execution. Knowing what you want doesn't guarantee you can deliver it.

Otherwise your point (and parents) is a good one - certainly a good indicator that you might really be onto something.

Thanks, sounds worth a closer look.

Hi Rich, I notice you mention Marko. That was my first thought when checking out Svelte today - Marko uses somewhat similar approach, and thus brings somewhat similar benefits. But Marko has couple of other advantages - beautiful "concise" syntax option, and easy debugging at dev time as the Lasso bundler turns JS modules into equivalent files in the browser, complete with same line numbering. (It only works with CommonJS modules, but that's what I prefer to use anyway as it allows unit testing in Node without transpilation.) What advantages would you say Svelte has that would make me consider using it over Marko? Thanks.

Despite being a progressive-leaning person I find the Guardian's recent political correctness and value-signalling to be grating, and have been looking for an alternative and less hyperbolic sources of news. It's like they abandoned their detachment, independence and integrity in a bid to become the mirror image of the Murdoch press. I guess there's a good market for that, a large and growing choir to preach to.

In Australia I get charged separate CC fees when booking flight tickets, concert tickets, many filling stations, some food / hospitality businesses, etc. Surprised that's not normal in the US.

How are you using du to find things that shouldn't be in node_modules? Wouldn't you need to build up a dependency tree, based on your app's package.json and recursing into every module's peer dependencies?

New Model Army, Vagabonds, around 1.15M hits:

https://open.spotify.com/track/41bdgBL7tjwQOl7RpwubKU

The "real" version, with a fantastic build-up violin intro that to my ear at least, makes this a truly great song. Not sure how many hits, but it doesn't make it into their "top 5", so presumably below 350k hits:

https://open.spotify.com/track/3WBwyZLd4hzMibFg6tVqh9

Just one datapoint perhaps - but a great sounding one :)

I wonder if in a few years people will be fondly writing articles like this about the 2013-16 Retina MacBook Pros. Mine is getting a bit long in the tooth, but what to replace it with?

Midlands of the UK, then various places around Europe, then Australia (since well before Facebook). I think we're probably seeing "the plural of anecdote is not data" in effect?

Thanks so much for that link. As a "progressive leaning" individual I have despaired at the descent of the Guardian, along with much of the formerly progressive media, into pure political-correctness-gone-mad, value-signalling nonsense, especially as I'm white, male and not getting any younger (apparently there are some demographics it's still just fine to build very negative stereotypes about...) It's good to counter that despair with the humour of collecting the maddest headlines together. Perhaps the Guardian really is just a clever, ironic, self-parodying send up thesedays?

Are you kidding? I'm an X'er and my parents are boomers, and I can assure you we all had an absolute ball before Facebook came along. "Not going out in the evenings to see friends, sitting watching TV, having narrow social lives" - seriously? Maybe in your family / community / culture, but not mine, and not many, many others too.

I'd even be tempted to speculate that those of us who aren't Facebook addicts are the ones who are able to socialise just fine without it, thank you very much, if it weren't for the fact that I know plenty of good-living, fun-loving Facebookers too.

Bingo. I do wonder why people insist on seeing house price inflation as being solely caused by rising value of houses - due to increasing demand, constrained supply ... kitchen renos? - without acknowledging the role of the falling value of money - increased supply via deregulated debt creation, artificially low interest rates and QE.

The capital gain on housing then becomes a self-reinforcing loop as capital seeks yield in a low interest rate environment, and investment flows towards these unproductive assets instead of creating productive capacity. Regular buy-to-inhabit buyers are dragged along in the cycle as long as they can obtain sufficient credit.

In a system like ours (the world's that is - I'm not American) where money is created when banks write loans, debt increases more quickly than the money supply (because debt has interest, money doesn't, and in a housing boom relatively little new real value is being created). So the debt can never all be repayed, and at some point there must be a financial crisis.

Unless this time is different?

Ahh the good old days. I can't hear SOAP without thinking this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhllo1xQer8

in particular 1:45 to 2:00.

Agreed, Typora has this nailed. Separate edit/preview panes seem clunky by comparison now.

Promises (representing the result of a single asynchronous operation) and Observables (representing an ongoing stream of emitted values) aren't really equivalent. I know you can create an Observable from a Promise, which will emit a single value when that promise is fulfilled and then be marked as completed or closed - but this is more for integration - such as being able to combine inputs from single-shot async calls into broader observable operations. If your Promises are discrete async calls, I'm curious why you would want to convert them?

>> Every release replaces more keywords with punctuation marks.

I can't think of any other examples. Closures get used heavily in JS and arrow functions do make their use quicker and more concise, as well as fixing `this`. Compared to other languages like Scala, OCaml, Elm and Haskell, with symbols for functional combination and pipelining, pattern matching, and whatever you call the thing where you can miss out parameters and use underscores in function bodies in Scala ... JS is relatively light on symbols.