simula67

Why some arguments for 'Gold money standard wouldn't work' do not make a lot of sense

1. 'Co-operation under anarchy is impossible to achieve'

The whole point of money is to get people with different motives to co-operate. It is a technology that allows people to produce, store and exchange value. This system does not require perfect coordination, it only has to be good enough and humans have built good enough systems of coordination based on gold many times over the course of history. Is there any good reason to think humans have lost this ability?

2. 'The specie-flow numbers are not perfect'

Neither are most financial models including discounted cash flow, interest rate models etc. They do bake in many assumptions and conditionals but that does not mean it cannot be used to build a system.

However, there is a point to be made about the fact that gold is not that useful in the modern world because of the invention of new alloys like stainless steel, improved metalworking technologies etc. Also, economic activity would be correlated with gold extraction if we move into a gold standard.

However, we already have economic activity correlated to commodity extraction when it comes to oil. Oil (and other forms of cheap energy) consumption are a direct predictor of the economic output of a nation and so far there are no substitutes for oil.

Technically speaking the world might be better served by an oil standard. Ideally, there could be a central bank that exchanges (standardized) oil for paper currency. The system could be kept honest as new currency is only issued when people supply oil to the reserves and currency is destroyed when it is redeemed from the reserves. This would mean that currency circulation and economic activity is proportional to oil extraction which is already roughly how modern economies work.

However, this will never happen since western countries have deadly militaries and they are not going to let middle east economies set their own agenda on the global stage.

Long term however, if we can get hydrogen as currency that might be best. I am not a chemist, but it might be possible to develop good electrolysis technology to store energy by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. Then burn hydrogen to generate power and release harmless water vapor. We could have a decentralized monetary system that could potentially benefit everyone.

> Most people accept this, but tell them if you increase the number of dollars but leave cheeseburger production the same, you'll need more dollars to get the same amount of cheeseburgers as you did previously, and they insist this isn't true.

The "leave cheeseburger production the same" is doing much of the heavy lifting here. There are many studies that show that prices tend to be sticky[1]. However, when prices do go up, more production does come online to capture those higher prices[2]. However, this can fail to materialize due to a number of reasons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_rigidity

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_oil_glut#Causes

Why Americans refer to petrol as gas, even though it is liquid, is still a mystery to me.

HN hug of death? Mirror: https://archive.is/Vz4M5

> Even worse are image results.

> The problem is that search engine results – especially on mobile – are not how you find that any longer.

I think the biggest story of the web in the last decade is the slow but steady decline of Google.

Google has fallen victim to spam. Goodhart's Law wins in the end. Almost every site on Google's front page is there because people have spent a lot of time and money optimizing it for search engine ranking. But just because a page is good at gaming Google's algorithm does not mean it is the most useful anymore. Google put up a good fight, but it seems like they have finally lost.

It also seems like the company has lost it's way. I was recently using Yandex mobile browser to browse some Russian sites and it can translate text inside images and now even voice inside videos. Chrome on the other hand often fails to detect other languages and therefore does not translate even text. It feels like even 15 years ago (when I was becoming a Google fanboy, I have since grown out of it) I would have expected Google to get there before some obscure Russian company. I get it, Russian web is smaller than English web and therefore it is probably more useful for Yandex, but Google's revenues are many times that of Yandex, they should ideally be getting there by now.

Following projects seem promising:

* OpenCompute[1]: A Facebook lead initiative to build and design open source hardware, mainly for data centers but also for enterprise.

* RISC-V[2]: An open source ISA and alternative to x86 and ARM.

* Cloud Native Computing Project[3]: An industry collaboration for building cloud infrastructure.

* Teleoperations[4]: Remotely operating machines where humans take over in situations where AI is not sure of the correct action to take. For example, before humans get self-driving vehicles, we may get vehicles that are operated remotely. The vehicle will have cameras that stream the data to operators who could be sitting at an office who in turn send control signals wirelessly to the vehicles. This model could also be applied to drones, humanoid robots etc. More jobs could be sent to low wage economies and workers there could perform work that previously required physical presence in high wage economies.

[1] https://www.opencompute.org/

[2] https://riscv.org/

[3] https://www.cncf.io/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleoperation

This is why the study of ancient languages used in religious texts are important. Many churches still conduct some activities in dead languages. For example, the Roman Catholic Church still publishes texts in Latin and trains people in Latin. Other churches study Koine Greek even today. Scholars of theology sometimes study Biblical Hebrew and even Aramaic. The good scholars often use their grasp of history, politics, philosophy etc. while performing their exegesis.

What is your answer to the Thiel Question?

So it's Bluestacks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueStacks) for GNU/Linux?

I think they are most likely to move to Ireland or the Carribean and not Swaziland

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_erosion_and_profit_shif...

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprechaun_economics

3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement

> Learning about historical events where there are multiple inevitably biased narratives

Not just historical events. For example, Vladimir Putin's Russian page looks very different from the English page. If I suspect bias, one quick check I always do is to read the page from another language using Google Translate. Does not always work, but sometimes you get more information.

Is Chuck Feeney Jewish?

There is something missing from this argument: How is Bitcoin a store of value?

Not trying to armchair quarterback here, just speculating for entertainment

> Around this time, Mozilla started paying serious attention to Chrome. Chrome had started with very different design guidelines than Firefox:

> * at the time, Chrome didn’t care about eating too much memory or system resources;

> * Chrome used many processes, which gave this browser heightened security and responsiveness by design;

> * Chrome had started without an add-on API, which meant that Chrome developers could get away with refactoring anything they wanted, without this development tax; as Chrome introduced their extension mechanism, they did it with a proper API, which could usually be maintained regardless of changes to the back-end;

Was it possible to do this inside Mozilla? Release a new browser with different branding that does not have these handicaps. Then, let the marketplace decide which browser to pick. If it won out, announce publicly that ongoing investment would be on the new browser.

I wonder what the authors thoughts are on the Moscow Metro. Schematic map: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Moscow_m...

Seems like a bunch of concentric circles with lines going away from the center.

I have never been to Moscow, but it seems like an interesting success story of planning infrastructure projects properly.

I meant in a hands-off manner.

How do you make sure you don't get hacked using Wordpress?

I hosted my own blog for a short while and got hacked, so I moved back to Wordpress.com.

It is not possible to have a decentralized meeting place. Meeting places are supposed to be centralized, that is their point.

Many people say that they should consider Mastodon like email, but even then, there must be a forum where people need to meet in order to find like minded people and collect their email addresses. The moment such a forum develops, powerful people whose power is threatened by the meeting of such people will attack and destroy these meeting places. This will stop dissidents from getting their message out.

It was just a happy accident that town squares (where people were forced to come in order to buy and sell things) were owned by the government. Therefore a restriction on the government to stop it from restricting people to voice new ideas would mean that people would be exposed to new ideas. In this way, people were "forced" to consider new ideas or starve (If you did not go into the marketplace - which hosted the town square, you may starve as you could not get tomatoes or whatever. But if you did go, you will have to hear new ideas).

Today the town squares are Twitter, Facebook etc which are privately owned. If you cannot be on Twitter, Facebook etc you are screaming into the void. No one will hear your ideas. This will make the world less dynamic and less responsive to changing situations.

We are screwed.

Non-clickbait title: Google might prefer divesting $22B AdSense business to avoid antitrust litigation.

Magnetic Levitation can exceed this speed limit. From the FTA:

> a Japanese maglev had set a speed record at 581 km/h. The French managers considered it pointless as well as prudent to force the experiment to exceed that speed, as they could have entered a kind of “international race” that they did not have much chance of winning. Time would prove them right: in 2015, another L0 series maglev reached 603 km/h on the Yamanashi test line.

Chinese maglev seems to run at 431 km/h and brings in losses of more than 1 billion RMBs[1]. So these trains may not be economical.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_maglev_train

For Python, there is a code walkthrough by Philip Guo : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzV58Zm8FuBL6OAv1Yu6A...

I am from India and I despise the actions of these people.

You could also use https://ngrok.com/

They used WebKit for rendering and that cut down some of IE's 10+ year lead.

Also, I think they had a fairly good test infrastructure from the beginning ( I think they tested new versions of Chrome against Google's index of top million websites ). Good test infrastructure can give you compounded returns as the project goes on.

Delve also does not seem to be able to evaluate code fragments. This is something I miss from Java and Python.

I think the purpose of democracy should primarily be to avoid civil conflict and only secondarily be to represent the median voter. First past the post voting ensures a two-party system which means that people will make compromises while voting and not outsource that responsibility to politicians. The latter might cause voters to not own the consequences of trading favors (which is necessary for coalition building) and potentially lead to civil conflict.

This was India's moment to shine. But as usual, it looks like this opportunity will also be squandered.

Salaries may not improve in Europe even if Visa restrictions are tightened, companies may set up offices in countries where wages are lower. I think the reason that western countries encourage high skill immigration is because it creates additional jobs to service the new workers: every new software engineer will need restaurants, cars, etc. These jobs can go to locals. Also, the taxes paid will go to the western governments to improve services for westerners.

No, it is not manifest. Investors should ideally not invest in companies that are not "Going Concerns"[1][2]. If the company fails, all investors (including employees who invest with their time and energy) should bear the losses. The increased risk is what usually justifies the outsized returns.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_concern

[2] https://ssfllp.com/going-concern-rules-company/

Why?