Sounds great fun even for couples, where’s the repo!
3,628 karma · joined January 21, 2009
I’ve been similarly impressed by ChatGPT’s ability to both absorb and playback strategic advice on complex games based on a snapshot mid-game scenario (eg Twilight Struggle) and more impressively to strategise in completely novel games that it wouldn’t be able to lookup rules or advice for.
For example I described an invented hidden identity party game and ChatGPT without further guidance inferred the dynamics and proposed great starter strategies depending on whether you were the “hider” or the “catchers” including deceptive approaches to fit in, lure out other players, cast doubt, play it cool etc.
It’s been a little trickier as they’ve nerfed its abilities as public uptake has increased, but the glimpses of underlying inference and intelligence is astounding.
Surely this has to be inflationary on prices.
If I compare to the Australian market this would be massive, but I’m led to believe US housing is a lot more affordable, and imagine the loans that would be offered to moderate to lower income earners would also be lower, so it might be akin to first home buyer grants we’ve had for $20k ish.
I got myself mixed up and was misled by a Corporate Finance Institute quote (which incorrectly notes the loss is unlimited only to contradict itself):
For the seller of a put option, things are reversed. Their potential profit is limited to the premium received for writing the put. Their potential loss is unlimited – equal to the amount by which the market price is below the option strike price, times the number of options sold.
Likewise I didn't appreciate the possibility that lion may have primed me for a monarch, dilemma for angst etc.
The order of our 7 may have changed the score.
We seem to each have a Tool (Screwdriver/Easel), Political Construct (Autocracy/Monarch), Abstraction (Concept/Protocol/Paradigm), "Animal" (Ghoul/Lion), Emotion (Frenzy/Nostalgia/Angst), and Scientific Object (Molecule/Asteroid/Molecule).
I gather from research online it comes back to the practice of generally renting furnished apartments, a preference for wood building construction, a practice of having non-water-proofed wet areas, historical custom (perhaps coinciding with apartments being constructed post-war when these appliances were large and highly expensive?), and the chicken-and-egg problem of there not being a market for smaller appliances and therefore there not being great supply of smaller appliances.
Something like “produces the most highly valued outputs per hour of worked input” which should roughly correlate with wages with the assumption that if those inputs are easily interchanged then there will be more competition and the output value will fall. I’m sure there are good exceptions, but I’m not sure they’re material to the argument that taxation to some degree influences social mobility and participation.
Perhaps I’m also considering situations in which there is a close link between labour and output, and where those outputs are deemed necessary for society (eg doctors, tradespeople), even where perhaps there may not be high productivity multipliers in the same ways there are at somewhere like Netflix.
So in my mind I’m thinking what role is taxation playing to keep electricians, plumbers, doctors, and software developers working for as long as they can without retiring (ie maximising their consumer value without compromising their productive value).
I’m trying to put aside a value judgement about what I feel taxation policy _should_ be doing around this subject, but broadly I feel there’s a modern lens of alienation here in which control of means of production is perhaps less important than control of means of consumption.
For instance, how does taxation play a role in keeping the most productive people in society producing, motivated, and feeling like they’re getting fairly rewarded, without them say checking out for “less challenging” work or making enough to retire early?
I suspect at some level, consciously, intuitively, or perhaps just accidentally (and the US seems a bit exceptional here to e.g. Canada, UK, Australia, NZ) that housing policy is similarly supported by an idea that the productive middle class and upper working class are kept as active participants in society by some sort of debt-fuelled hedonic treadmill. From what I understand other sources of debt (student debt, new cars etc.) play a greater role in the US.
This is of course in addition to and balanced against all other monetary sinks / rents, e.g. utility bills, literal house rent, health costs etc.
And being a dynamic system, it’s hard to model outcomes, e.g. would cutting income taxes liberate workers to put a bit extra away and perhaps invest extra hours in overtime or a side gig, or would it just serve to give temporary wage pressure relief to companies who are already refusing to fairly pay workers while allowing easier wealth extraction by rent-seekers?
I find it a bit interesting we aren’t having more discussions about employment vs capital taxation, especially now that we’re seeing both escalating (rich getting richer) and broadening (a wider class of “rich” getting richer) inequality. I suspect historically there was little awareness/interest in your extremely wealthy growing their portfolios, but it becomes a bit more interesting when there’s eg a lottery around “the bank of Mum and Dad” or simply which specific year you were born (relative to eg the GFC) fuelling extremely different outcomes for people with otherwise similar backgrounds, capability, class, and contributions to society.
My first gig was at a small software retailer, straight out of high school and balancing study at uni. Picture a GameStop competitor but selling home/commercial software and licensing as well as games.
The owner’s approach was to employ a series of teenagers who saw this as an opportunity to get that elusive “foot in the door” first job experience despite being paid less than half minimum wage for the hours we were actually paid for (hard not to envy today’s junior Devs walking into jobs out of uni today, yet alone the eye watering salaries, but then again there’s something to be said with romanticised rear vision for working your way up the ladder during that golden age of the early modern web).
Two of us, while balancing sales and service to customers, and keeping the store running (receiving and unpacking stock, boxing up and posting customer orders, phone calls, stocktake, cleaning, directing the occasional casual staff), without any formal education, with tools that don’t match today (no especially useful libraries or tools, eg pre-jQuery, Ajax just catching on and feeling like magic, plain PHP, .NET 2.0 without an ORM etc.), built and maintained a website that in my view rivalled Amazon’s UX at the time (we developed some novel ways to group and present licensing and editions that surpassed Amazon in this space).
On top of this we developed and maintained a bespoke WinForms POS/inventory/accounting system that handled all sales and ordering etc., supporting tools to handle pricing/forecasting, automation scripts to keep customers updated etc., and a series of integrations with suppliers to pull near-live stock availability and pricing for perhaps 40k SKUs from around 80 suppliers (none of whom had APIs so we were screen scraping custom portals, parsing the odd PDF price list, or best case pulling CSV email attachments).
The net effect was with minimal operational effort we could effectively compete with far larger businesses and provide a better experience.
This included the ability, with near zero-touch, to surface a comprehensive catalogue of stock while maintaining minimal inventory, automatically take customer orders, place corresponding supplier orders based on the best price at that point in time (rationalising and aligning across price lists, with consideration of preferential contract terms or shipping timelines), publish near-live pricing and ETA changes, administer a customer loyalty program, and provide automatic updates to customers.
We just got stuff done because we didn’t know any better.
I know this is several scales lower in complexity than Amazon, eg fraud detection, volume of catalog and sales, reseller accounts etc. but again we were not 1000s of Stanford and MIT educated engineers.
Incidentally this has shaped my view of the undervalued power of having bespoke software supporting your core business operations, despite also driving home the risks and perils of reinventing the wheel.
Seems ripe for a sci fi concept: if the coherent conscious model of observers was able to shape the universe (rather than merely observe some “objective” truth about it), conceivably a society that believed in the daily intervention of gods could actually see that happen (not merely interpret it as such) in a way we might consider inconsistent with our understanding of physics. You just need faith as they say.
In retrospect, that concept has perhaps already been executed in Gaiman’s American Gods.
What do you think it means for the stability of nation states, either domestically or on an international scale, in such a world though?
It’s the increasing practicality of doing this (buy your breakfast in StarbucksCoin, your lunch in McCoin, and your groceries in WalCoin) that makes it more possible as a reality.
But how does a government have credibility and get taken seriously domestically if the currency they control is increasingly irrelevant day to day? How does the US continue to maintain leverage over energy costs? Etc.
Many of us in the haze of an enlightenment narrative in the 90s thought the web would empower through a decentralised model, and while it’s done that of course, it has also created powerful new sources of centralised power, monopolies, and walled gardens, that have challenged (and often won against) existing legal, societal, and political structures and norms.
It starts feeling a bit Neal Stephenson or Max Barry if you imagine a world in which monetary policy underpinning Western (and other) economies is further removed from existing political (especially democratic) levers.
Weber’s argument that states draw their legitimacy from a monopoly on the legitimate use of force is largely supported in Western economies by a monopoly on the legitimate exchange of value as well.
What does international trade, yet alone your annual tax return, look like in a world in which “govcoin” is just one (and a lower preferred one at that) of many currencies used day-to-day?
Is it really true, as the article states, that the field has largely dismissed the brain’s EM fields as irrelevant?
If so, this is the sort of thing that causes “armchair theorists” to feel frustrated when they offer seemingly obvious cross-domain insights for further exploration and are dismissed as naive.
On the other hand 30 seconds of browsing Google Scholar shows references to a conscious electromagnetic information theory dating back to at least 2001.