neffy

Actually no, although I agree there is a certainly a lot of research, creating some horribly flawed mathematical models.

Essentially with respect to the banking system, economics has built on a false understanding of how it works (fundamentally the incorrect claim that banks lend out their depositors funds), and never gone back to fix that with a correct understanding. So we have the situation that the Bank of England published a memo reiterating how that deposit money is created through lending about 8 years ago now, but there are still papers being published with the incorrect understanding as a basis.

And now we have the Bank of England essentially proposing to "solve" that problem by introducing a digital form of asset cash. It will be very interesting to see what goes on the other side of the balance sheet for that.

This is a fairly major economic intervention if they go ahead with it. The big difference (in the report they refer to this as private vs public money), is that they are proposing to issue the equivalent of cash, i.e. Asset money, "public money", rather than the liability deposits, "private money" that are created by the commercial banks, when loans are created, and removed when they are repaid, or defaulted on. The vast majority of transactions today, use bank deposits, "private" money in this rather loaded nomenclature.

Because Economics has never really come to grips with how the banking system actually works, there has long been a movement there to replaced the current monetary system, with something that doesn't create and destroy money all the time. Amongst other things, I have seen economists advocate for this, because they believe it would mean that their mathematical models would work properly on the real economy.

It is hard to know what the actual economic impact would be, but it is to put it mildly, a little irresponsible to experiment with the production system like this.

And this is Google's core business. Nothing came along yet that replaced corporate use of microsoft office, and that is were they make most of their money.

ChatGPT itself is being trained on curated content, it is clearly not trained on unscreened internet sites - this is easy enough to establish if you ask it questions around hot topic issues in the conspiracy groups - it gets the correct mainstream answer.

I suspect we will see the rise of both groups of machines, curated A.I.s and A.I.s just trained on anything, which should be entertaining.

Get the feeling the software is being developed by people who never stray far from their desks?!

At some level it both is and it isn't. The problems behind scaling a distributed application are quite well understood at this point, the problem that hasn't been solved is that too many won't accept the answer in terms of development time and discipline. The mess that could be created with micro-services which simply recreated the mess within the monoliths, was both predictable and predicted.

At some level it's the Forth Bridge all over again. The Forth bridge was constructed within 10 years of the Tay Bridge disaster. It wasn't that civil engineers of that time didn't know how to build bridges that wouldn't fall down, they just hadn't learned to not go with the lowest bidder.

Hard to be sure, but I would suspect very probably, although perhaps not for that reason.

Long covid is real, and statistically significant. Heart and blood stream involvement issues with covid have also been apparent from the start. Put that together and any uptick in heart attacks, strokes, etc. might well be longer term consequences of Covid, and put that together with overloaded health systems, and not just in the UK.

It's not just a flu.

Did you include any compensation for the increase in water vapour due to the Ha'apai eruption?

There are far better ways to do this btw.

The other rather dangerous assumption is that arrogant Californians are the only ones who will try to do this.

The problem is Geoengineering is not a zero sum game - if India decided to try and engineer the next ice age for example, to get access to the shallower parts of the Indian Ocean.

Latency and logistics in my experience will always get you. On the similarly populated, but much closer to major landmasses than Vanuatu island I live on, we have had local outages from multiple failures close together. One transformer blows, and there is a replacement in stock for that. But if another one goes, then the new one has to be shipped from abroad, and that will take a few days even when emergency listed. Keeping replacement stock gets expensive as well, has to be checked, maintained, etc. It all adds up.

I have no idea why this got downloaded - but can only agree. Life in a major city at the forefront of technological change will rarely prepare someone for the realities of life outside that bubble. Numbers do have a quality of their own, and the combination of being behind the tech curve (which requires generational effort and education in itself to overcome) and not having a lot of people to do this with is a huge challenge for small countries and regions.

The cloud is just as vulnerable as everything else is:

https://www.amazon.com/Hack-Like-Ghost-Sparc-Flow-ebook/dp/B...

Go back 150 years, and what was tracked was actual production. Iron mined, boats produced etc.

GDP is a bad measure for all the reasons above, and because prices do not work the way GDP want's them too. As another poster alluded to, increase total production and cause prices to fall across the board, and the logic of the system is that GDP drops. The only reason we see GDP increasing is that there is an underlying increase in the measurement (money), and that feeds into the measurement data.

The problem though is that exceptional people are scattered all over the system, since 1) not everybody can get into Harvard (class size) and a significant percentage who do are selected from a small monied elite. The number of non-Harvard graduates is much, much larger.

So statistically it is actually far more likely that the Harvard person is relatively mediocre to a neutral sampling of the entire system.

It would be very interesting to have that studied... but my general impressions (as somebody who does read the publications) is that the answer is usually no.

Agreed... far worse in fact.

the issue in particular with the ice core melting is how much we can trust the peak readings for things like methane and co2.... what we consistently see in the cores is that these things increase steadily until they suddenly drop. If we are missing the top part of that information, it could be quite important.

It's usually the people - but don't rule out that sometimes the reason people are behaving strangely, let's say, is that there are financial, business, or somewhat corrupt pressures they are unwilling to talk about.

Which is probably also a clue to run away, terribly fast.

Yes, that's the joker in the pack. Did you see the papers about the evidence for the ice pack on Greenland having completely melted before? It left me wondering about how much we can trust the ice core readings from there.

It's accurate but not complete. The long term (600k year) climatic history of this planet is sobering, and if only climate change was just our fault. Believe me, there is nothing humanity has so far achieved that comes close to matching what nature does to this planet on a pretty regular schedule. We don't know nearly enough about this by the way, and we especially don't know enough about conditions about the end of the last inter-glacial. For the last 20 odd years we can't even discuss it rationally, because to bring up the non-anthromorphic aspects just gets some innocent scientist labelled a denier.

That volcano that went off in the pacific this January appears to have increased the amount of water vapour in the entire atmosphere by 10%. Sit back and contemplate that for a moment, because it is pretty awesome, and also the satellite pictures were quite something, and then take another look at what's happened in Pakistan and Italy. All our fault? We can wish.

There is so much more to this than shifting away from fossil fuels - that's the easy one, get rid of your car, and get a bicycle.

(Added) I have to feel the mindless downvoting on this and similar comments is just proving my point. Link for the volcano, impacts still being assessed...

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/03/1115378385/tonga-volcano-stra...

https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2022/egusphere-20...

If you take the truly non-performing folks, well sad to say you can probably get rid of most of them and improve performance.

Otherwise, get rid of any engineer and the minimum impact is 3-6 months code and culture familiarisation before they get up to speed with your particular application/code base/equipment. Can easily be more than a year - especially with some of the big systems.

So yes there is an impact on business performance, and a highly damaging one, far more often than is realised. Companies compete - and companies go under and get replaced, all the time.

I´ll put this here, since it may also help slightly tangentially with the above (and likewise thanks for the thread).

I worked in a large public library service as a teenager (before the internet), rotated around several libraries, and noticed there were several patterns to readers choices in all of the different libraries. Almost all readers would stick to one or possibly two genres, fiction or nonfiction (minority). For example westerns, detective stories, romances, etc., non-fiction, history (usually a fairly specific period, war, or service (naval combat for example)), pop-science, etc.

Most people took 3 or 4 books out for a month (allowed period) and brought them back at the end of that period.

And then each library would have 2 or 3 people at most who read voraciously across genres, fiction and non-fiction (although not the easy lit romance, western, etc. books), applied for extra borrowing privileges, and would bring all the books back typically within a week or two.

There are many, many books out there that are well worth reading, and there are probably even more that aren't, but I suspect you have to read some of the latter to be able to get to where you not only appreciate the former, but can tell the difference by the book blurb/and or contents of first couple of pages.

The UK does get the occasional tornado. Mostly in the midlands, and mostly places where they don't get noticed, but they do happen fairly frequently in fact.

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-33136737

Early pixel blob analysis (I don't know a better way to put this, check Figure 5 in the paper) from the James Webb:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.09428.pdf

Suggests that the universe may be older than the Big Bang theory predicts. There are a lot of qualifiers on both sides of this, so I would suggest sitting back with some popcorn and enjoying the spectacle of a lot of primate descended life forms earnestly debating something that in many cases they couldn't even be bothered to read up on.

Honestly, until we have actual Star Trek level medicine capabilities, I will take the NHS approach, loosely we want to cure you and never see you again, over the USA, again loosely, the patient is a source of income for all involved, so lets medicate and surgeon as much as possible, any day of the week.

The ultimate problem is that our current levels of medical knowledge simply aren't good enough, so the US approach often does more harm than good - and I would gently suggest that that shows up very clearly in US life expectancy figures.

Ferdinand Foch (French WW1 general) called the Versailles treaty a 20 year armistice in 1919. He thought the treaty was too lenient.

This is banking centric, but does have worked examples that may be useful.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.1583

Above and beyond other reasons, double entry book keeping has some very nice error detection properties (the original reason for its invention) that actually make it quite nice to use as a basis for this kind of software, as it provides a way to catch some bugs very quickly.

The problem with that argument, although I congratulate you for following the state line, is that it requires us to believe that the entire operation wasn't necessary to begin with. If there were no health consequences, then there weren't any reactor rods on the roof, there wasn't any radioactive fallout requiring removal and burial of top soil, no need to shoot all the animals, etc. etc.

It also requires us to believe that there was no widespread looting in the area, which is a claim that turns up in multiple sources, and is consistent with Russian behaviour in the current and past wars.

It requires us to believe that unlike pretty much every other event in Soviet history, Russia has told the complete honest truth about Chernobyl.

On which front, let me just ask - where are the memorials to the victims of Stalin's purges? There has been plenty of time to put a few up since the Soviet Union fell.

The gold standard didn't stop money creation.

The linkage in the banking system was to the price of gold, as fractional reserve lending slowly increased the amount of deposits in the system, the price of gold drifted up, and the amount of lending increased with it.

Then the entire system eventually broke apart (several times), because gold wasn't evenly distributed, and so the resulting rates of money creation drifted apart in different countries.

Yes, if you are living in the US, and could access fixed rate mortgages. Or indeed anywhere where a fixed rate mortgage for a reasonable 5+ year term is available.

Because the money supply is in some sense linked to house lending by the banks these days (not the entire source, but a lot of it), house prices will increase in tandem with the money supply, that is fairly guaranteed.

For the rest, look to the latter part of the 1970´s, which is what happens in the US, when following a long period of low inflation, inflation and higher interest rates kick in to create this situation. TLDR, it isn't pretty for the lenders (banks, savings and loan, pension funds) who get stuck with the low interest rate long term loans. But that's prequelling the next financial crisis, not the current one.

Money is no more imaginary than IP packets.

The reason the transfer problem is hard is that it is yet another instance of the Fischer consensus problem, that's all.