shock-value

The idea that an automated shift scheduling system (even if efficacious) could replace middle managers entirely is not credible.

This is a poorly reasoned or at least a poorly articulated essay. AI to this point is built to optimize some objective function. What is that function with respect to middle management? Some sort of mathematical expression would be interesting but even a plain-English expression would certainly be helpful. And what exactly are the inputs and output? I guess the inputs could be a roster of employees along with some performance metrics, and output is a list of who is kept and who is fired (?). That’s the best I can come up with, but I still think it’s an absurd and impractical eventuality. The article doesn’t even make an attempt to explain.

This isn’t some sort of nitpick; AI to this point has not in any way encroached upon personnel management to my knowledge and a prediction in that direction ought to elucidate exactly how that could be expected to work. Managing workers involves empathy and understanding human emotions generally and I’ve seen no indication that AI has made advances into this space recently despite its rapid progress elsewhere.

I'm just arguing against this general idea that "increase in money supply doesn't cause price inflation". Which doesn't even really make sense because prices are measured in units of money. But the further implication, that Fed policy has no impact on prices, is just wrong to me and reflects some kind of misunderstanding.

> Reality is never all else equal.

Agreed, but that's not really relevant to the discussion.

> My point is strictly that people always claim that X is going to cause inflation and then just wait until inflation occurs to say "Aha, X does cause inflation" while doing 0 analysis to show that it was X as opposed to literally any other reason.

But we are talking about the money supply. Prices are measured in units of money. You are suggesting that there is not a reason to think that changes in the size of the money supply influence price inflation. That makes no sense. Unless that additional money is just being systematically hoarded which seems unlikely in the long run.

Put another way, a mismatch between the money supply and the demand for money (for use as a medium of exchange) is essentially what price inflation is, almost by definition. So whatever the underlying "cause" of inflation, it's also always fair to say that the money supply was or became too large to keep it in check.

The key phrase is of course "all else equal". A lot was going on in that decade that could (and is) argued to have been an opposing deflationary force. Worldwide demographics and productivity improvements, in particular. (On a separate note, much of that is or will be slowing/reversing in the coming years.)

To argue that an increase in money supply wouldn't lead to price inflation (again, all else equal) implies that the difference would just be hoarded indefinitely rather than used to buy anything, which seems unlikely just on the face of it.

Are you implying that it's impossible to draw such a conclusions from particular events such as those of 2020? Or that an increase in the size of money supply does not promote price inflation, all else equal?

Don't think there is much credible evidence or opinion regarding the latter.

Yeah it's one man trying to fight the Federal Reserve (and other central banks). We'll see how that works out for him.

Another more optimistic way of looking at it is the idea that as we transition into a higher interest rate environment, there will be short term pain as unprofitable businesses downsize / go under, their workers are let go, but they eventually make their way into healthy/sound companies that now have the scope to grow and contribute to real macroeconomic growth rather than just the nominal smoke and mirrors of the recent economy.

RTX provides hardware primitives from which one could build portions of a global illumination solution. Lumen is such a full-featured, turn-key solution which I believe can run in "software" (as in not using dedicated ray tracing hardware functions) or can take advantage of hardware raytracing, including RTX, for some portion of its calculations.

I'm not a lawyer. It appears that part of this heist involved hacked keys. That aspect would be straightforwardly illegal I would imagine.

You read it wrong then.

> affords me more time to relax, review what I have created, and enjoy it rather than drag myself to the next task

This is exactly what the author is promoting. A hypothetical so-called "worker bee" would indeed be moving on to the next task at the fastest possible clip.

They don't need to result in regime change nor policy change. If the sanctions lead to fewer munitions produced or soldiers fed, then they have a justified benefit, even if the overall arc of the conflict is otherwise the same.

You are wrong. While I agree that these broad-based sanctions result in collateral economic damage to everyday Russian citizens, they have an important role in starving the Russian state of the resources it needs to continue to wage conventional war in the medium to long term.

The sanctions regarding exports to Russia have to this point been relatively limited. The financial sanctions are what are doing the work right now.

Russia's principle problem is that its own currency is becoming worthless and external currencies are becoming inaccessible. This is a problem for the Russian state as well as individuals residing in it. If a ubiquitous and stable worldwide cryptocurrency were to exist, this would no longer be so much of a problem for Russia, to the detriment of all other sane countries.

If crypto were ubiquitous as a currency (assuming that's technically possible in terms of scale in a way that the current implementations seem not to be) sanctions in the first place would have been impossible. So depending on your viewpoint that's a major downside to the idea of a decentralized currency.

This is a reactive plan, not an aggressive plan as Putin's apparently is. It is not the same.

After the events of the last few days, it would seem you are quite mistaken if you think the west as a whole is interested in "developing a peaceful solution together" with Russia. We are first and foremost extricating our economy entirely from Russia at least in the short to medium term. I think you fail to grasp that this is now being seen as an idealogical conflict, not a conventional rivalry between fundamentally like-minded foes. At least as long as the current Russian regime is in power.

> Why are you concerned with long-term reduction of Russian war-faring capability? How is that relevant to this situation?

I’m concerned with all time scales in this situation. And I think steep economic sanctions can be relevant to all of them.

Whether you ascribe to it or not a lot of people (in the west, especially) have been jolted into now seeing this conflict through an ideological lens. That means long term strategic steps are being put into play. There is a lot more being considered now than just the short term, though I think most everyone also wants the immediate war to resolve with minimal loss of life — and I don’t see those twin goals as being in conflict at this point in time.

If Russia were to be forced into an isolationist command economy as you describe I would surmise that, much like the Soviet Union, its influence and relative threat to the rest of the world would deteriorate over time, maybe leading to a similar internal collapse. For your and the world's sake I don't want that outcome, but I'd nonetheless take it over its current status as a relatively more robust economy helmed by an aggressive and violent expansionist.

If sanctions negatively impact the Russian economy as a whole, resulting in a long-term reduction in its ability to wage conventional war, then that's a benefit regardless of whether regime change occurs.

For my personal perspective, I do have empathy for you (genuinely), but I still wholeheartedly support the forced deterioration of your economy if it either contributes to regime change or reduces your country's ability to wage conventional war (and I believe at least one of those outcomes is a plausible consequence).

It's the right thing to do if it contributes to either regime change, or to a deterioration of the nation's economy leading to a reduced ability to wage conventional war.

The threat that North Korea poses to the rest of the world has also been minimized partly as a result of its isolation (whether self-imposed or otherwise). To the extent that the Russian economy deteriorates through isolation, its reduced ability to wage conventional war is a benefit in and of itself.

You can have empathy while still taking the punitive steps that need to be taken on the country as a whole.

Totally agree. It's amazing how many in this thread don't understand this principle.

It would have been totally fair, especially in America, because we have a direct way to influence the selection of our leaders. It's obviously harder and more indirect in modern-day Russia, but the principle is the same.

Remember: this isn't regime change for the sake of regime change. The Russian government has shown itself to be a belligerent destructive authority that is a threat to the entire world (given the weapons it possesses).

We can argue about what constitutes a proper Ponzi scheme, but the idea that the promotion of crypto thus far has existed to allow early adopters to cash out at the apparent expense of later adopters, while bringing essentially no other utility to any of its backers or the public at large, is pretty obvious.

PayPal and your bank both transact in dollars. In the crypto space, presumably, you’d need to operate with different currencies at varying exchange rates. Or use some kind of “wrapped” currency at significant complexity and risk (see recent Ethereum-Solana bridge exploit and associated massive loss).

If you are into simulations (driving, flying) then I'd say get a headset ASAP. Also potentially if you see yourself getting into immersive rhythm/fitness games. Otherwise I think it's pretty reasonable to wait for more compelling content to be released (and reap the benefits of the better hardware that will be available at that time).

Strong agree. It baffles me that Meta/Facebook isn’t putting up more of that in the media section of the Quest software. Well, there are a lot of videos but most are 2D and/or very low resolution, and just not interesting content.

The best I’ve seen on there are the “Ecosphere” videos (best quality by watching through the actual app). It’s sort of otherworldly feeling like you are standing next to an actual elephant. Awesome use of the medium and totally convinced me of its viability.

Long-time developers of Postgres have spent a long time developing Postgres -- not necessarily running a deployment of it nor writing and running queries on growing datasets.

It's almost self-evident that this is the case, because if they had, they'd have implemented some more fine-grained way of overriding the query optimizer when it inevitably fails at times.