I wonder how that train it? The network is built into the silicon so I don't see how training could occur after its creation... But maybe they build a simulated network and train it then construct a faithful hardware representation
Have efforts been made to produce a cryptocurrency that is compatible with monetary policy? Such that supply can increase or decrease either on command or naturally?
The “naturally” part is interesting...we manipulate money supply partly to hit target inflation rate. Would there be a way to use the ongoing transactions on a blockchain itself to calculate an inflation metric, and then naturally increase or decrease the money supply to keep it around 2-3% or whatever?
That's exactly what I've been thinking. Of course the inflation target would be arbitrary, but once agreed upon and baked into the blockchain logic it could maintain itself based on some parameter or set of parameters
Would be easy to implement, but hard to manage (what if govt loses privkey for printing money?) and build trust (what if next congress decides to stop this currency).
#1 could be solved by having a scheduled key rollover system, anchored robustly by the central bank (eg public display of key fingerprint at headquarters).
#2 doesn't sound any different from other fiat currencies or bonds issued by nation states. It's in the issuer's ecnoomic self-interest to preserve their credibility.
I'd rather not be fighting my fellow humans because they've been claimed by a different empire - either violently through the funding of outright war or nonviolently through economic wage slavery. Governments are unable to resist the siren song of the inflationary treadmill, as the alternative is to fall behind the others. Uniformly diminishing their ability to conscript (militarily or economically) is one actual step towards world peace.
(disclaimer: I'm not personally bullish on bitcoin itself)
> Inflation can be properly managed by responsible central banks. It's not really a problem.
But it isn't, so it is.
> "wage slavery"
Wage slavery is perpetuated by debasing the unit in which you are paid. That's inflation. I don't want to eliminate governments. I want governments to stick to the role of governing, not punishing people because they want to save to better themselves.
Mortgage payment over 20 years 2x. House prices vary inversely with interest rates. When you go to get a loan the bank figures out how much cash flow you've got and assumes some percentage will go to paying the loan back. They start from that monthly payment and figure out how much you can borrow at the current interest rate (this is where lower interest rates mean borrow more money for the same monthly payment) then you run off to but a house and everyone (seller, agent, appraiser, everyone) has an incentive to get you to spend as much as you possibly can. So ultimately you're 30 years of payments will be based on your income. How much of that money goes to the bank vs the seller depends on interest rates. Low rates mean higher prices and more money to the seller. High rates mean lower prices and more money to the lender.
This all stems from people living paycheck to paycheck too, so the affordability of things has nothing to do with price and everything to do with size of payments.
Furthermore that attitude makes me physically sick. You are a debt slave providing the fruits of your labor to the banking industry, all priced at the maximum value that can be extracted for the longest period. All because inflation punishes savers.
The problem is that you cannot save everything the same way you can save money or gold.
Food you consume has to be produced. We can't just produce a lot of food in one year and then store the excess for 100 years until you finally want to consume it. The food is gone. Your deflationary currency is worthless if you can't buy anything with it.
I stand by my statement. Payments have not gone up nearly as much as housing prices and it's due to the lower interest rates - which have mostly fallen over the last 40 years. The attitude makes me sick too. I never said it's MY attitude, just how the world works for enough people to drive the trend. I live more responsibly.
Yes to one, no to two. Monetary inflation allows governments to tax you by stealth. They then manipulate the inflation statistics (hedonic regression anyone?) to make it seem that inflation is lower than it is, so that your purchasing power is debased faster than the statistics. That's why house prices have exploded for 40 years, and just about anything you buy costs more by some orders of magnitude than what it should given CPI.
Bitcoin is the reckoning for that system. The government will be forced to accept that people will not hold their token except to pay taxes. When it is not possible to know the worth of someone, which is already painfully obvious for the very wealthy, the only taxable system will be on the use of goods and services in their respective governanace area.
> Monetary inflation allows governments to tax you by stealth.
It's even worth since rich people can easily exempt from it by allocating their wealth into inflation-proof assets while working class have to take a full exposure of it.
moreover monetary inflation absolutely kills poor people and enables rich people to do things like leveraged investments, and drives the middle class into investing in corporations to stay afloat for retirement (essentially a subsidy for the wealthy).
I think bitcoin will finally separate the good debt from the bad debt. It is my personal belief ( as in i don't know of any formal theory ) that debt should only be incurred for the use of building a productive asset. In a deflationary currency, this encourages businesses to ensure that productivity increases will have greater returns than savings. Instead, our financial system has encouraged the acquisition of debt for fixed assets. The only thing this has done is bid up the price of those fixed debts with debt, and handed over the money for supporting that system to banks and their owners. In order to stimulate growth in such a system, the only way that you can function is to tax savings. That's what inflation is. What it forces people to do is to invest in increasingly risky assets, because of the loss of their purchasing power. Hence bubble after bubble after bubble. Crisis after crisis after crisis.
Bitcoin will eventually stabilize to an ever appreciating value asset. But what it will allow you to do is save for a house. If you have a business proposal that encourages people to pay you for a good or service, people will invest their savings in it and take on that risk. Banks will instead move back to providing capital to businesses, using savings from people that are willing to invest. Businesses will again focus on productivity increases, because that's how you get access to capital.
I also don't think it is going to be resisted quite as much as people think it will be. People still need to pay their taxes, and that is not going to stop. The main thing it is going to do is prick the bubble of consumer debt, and remove the banking middle-men from that space. That alone is a multi-trillion dollar industry, let alone the annuities that banks own and graft from, from those assets. Removing these people (i.e. banking debt suppliers) from positions of power, by strangling their access to capital, is a justification for bitcoin in its own right. Imagine a world in which banks didn't control governments.
That's the way it is supposed to work i think. It is pure genius.
Your argument fails even with traditional currencies.
It's legal to own Euros in US (or the other way around), even if the US government can't control the Euro money supply, or people exchanging USD for Euros (yes, they have some levers, but it's not control)
Well the author starts out by saying 15% of Economics Professors are women. Then says
"Across all the years, only 18% of the authors are female. This disparity between male and female authors alone exemplifies the gender gap."
Which is in line with the previous acknowledgment, so there is no additional conspiracy at play, just a result of the gender composition of the field.
But then the statistic about collaboration.
Men tend to collaborate with other men, just as women tend to collaborate with other women. The natural tendency for people to collaborate with people like themselves is universal.
So don't blame male economists for collaborating with other males slightly more than with females. It's a natural human tendency to do so. Women are more likely to collaborate with other women.
I worked in the administration of a flagship state university. Instead of spending millions of dollars on salaries for bogus administrative positions like 'Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives', put that money towards grad student salaries and bringing down general tuition.
These are just words that don't mean anything without a concrete implementation plan. Owning a piece of America... What is America? Is it US based companies? Is it physical property and capital? These things are already owned by people. Everything worth being owned is already owned by someone or some corporate structure. Who is going to rearrange and adjust all these existing ownership structures to introduce joint ownership by the American people? Why would we expect existing stakeholders to want anything to do with such a plan?
Just like milk, there is probably a sub population of people whose body chemistry is not compatible with caffeine or coffee. You may fall into that category.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and state a theory I've been considering for a while that could explain these coffee health benefit results...
The liquids I and everyone else consumes can be placed in two classes: pure water and everything else.
When I'm not drinking pure water, my drink of choice is usually coffee, of which I drink about 3 cups a day.
Now let's think of the alternative non water drinks out there... Many of them are sodas which have obscenely high sugar levels, just like most drinks that aren't pure water.
Someone who doesn't drink coffee may have more of these sugar containing drinks when they're not drinking pure water, inundating their bodies with harmful amounts of sugar.
So the benefits we see from high levels of coffee consumption come not from the coffee itself but from a substitution effect of replacing unhealthy sugary drinks with coffee.
A good test for this would be to see if tea drinkers also experience health benefits similar to those seen in the study. If not then that may indicate that my theory is wrong.
Here's another theory. Coffee makes you move more. Moving is healthy. Think of how coffee gets people off their desks to get it and also because of the caffeine and the need to urinate after. Its unlike other drinks as people don't carry it in bottles, it requires more movement. Maybe the sedentary lifestyle is what's killing people.
Probably right. I drink 2-3 espresso shots a day, one at home in the morning and one after lunch when I have to walk 10 minutes to get. Some people don't even bother to leave their desk or complain it's long walk.
I think you're correct. I'm also actually astonished how many people drink sugared/flavoured drinks (including "juice" and "milk") as a substitute for water and never question what effect this might be having on them. I would encourage everyone to stop drinking anything except water for 6 months just to see what happens.
I usually drink just tap water, and what I've noticed is that over time I will get sick and feel really dehydrated. I then buy myself a 1.5 liter mineral water from the store and feel much better. I wonder if the "tap water" that we drink is actually the "natural state of water", or if people aren't used to consuming water with a higher mineral content in nature.
Tap water doesn't necessarily have any more or less mineral content than bottled mineral water. The variation between mineral water brands and the variation between tap water sources (mostly: well water vs surface) is much larger than any difference between bottled and tap.
If you live in an area with hard tap water you're essentially drinking "mineral water" out of the tap.
It depends where you live I think. Your tap water, if it's good, should normally contain a lot of minerals already. If you're drinking some kind of reverse-osmosis filtered water, then what you're saying makes total sense.
I lived in Cambodia for a while, where tap-water is a no go for drinking, and even though we avoided buying plastic bottles (plastic is a huge problem particularly in S.E. Asia) and instead stuck to larger tanks of filtered water, we had to make a point of always having some bottled mineral water in the mix. It was quickly noticeable when you hadn't had enough (extremely tired, drowsy, etc.)
If you want to get hydrated, you should drink water with approximately the same concentration of minerals as your body, especially if you lose a lot of water by sweating or sickness. Osmosis in your cells happens along the concentration gradient. Drinking water with too little concentration can cause them to swell, drinking water with too much can make them shrivel. Neither is good in the extreme.
Very interesting. I've felt this as well. Even bottled flat water, doesn't seem to hydrate me as well as a carbonated mineral water (e.g. Perrier or Pellegrino). I wonder if this is placebo or if there is some other meaningful effect happening.
But for people in general, just because they drink coffee doesn't mean they cannot also drink beverages with high sugar content or am I not getting your thought right?
The assumptions I'm making are that most people drink water and non water, and the non water they drink is not going to be more than 3 to 4 drinks (cups/bottles) per day, and that people drinking coffee are already filling their quota of non water drinks by drinking coffee so they don't drink sugary drinks.
The assumption is still that most people drink water during the day in addition to the coffee, and I'd think that is actually not the case. My experience is water is just an occasional drink during the day, not a primary drink.
Most people who add sugar to their coffee use a couple of teaspoons, so probably less than 15 g of sugar. Now in e.g. a Coca Cola, there's 10.6 g of sugar in each 100ml. You'll probably drink at least 300-600ml of coke.
> A good test for this would be to see if tea drinkers also experience health benefits similar to those seen in the study. If not then that may indicate that my theory is wrong.
Counter theory: Higher coffee consumption might actually increase the craving for some sugary treat like donuts and banana bread, the classic companions to coffee.
"Dando's previous research had already found that when you chemically block people's ability to taste sweet flavors, it makes them crave more sugar and seek out higher-calorie treats. Based on his collective research, we now know that drinking a caffeinated cup of coffee, which has the same blocking effect, makes people want cookies or cake more than they otherwise would."
Caffeine seems to blocks the adenosine receptors, which makes us feel less sleepy, but these same receptors also play a part in helping us taste sweet flavors. While doing this, it pushes us to find more sweet, sugary tastes. This might be a part of why when drinking coffee especially, which is also pungent and bitter in taste, opposed to sweet, might drive us toward these sugary treats.
Also I feel coffee depletes our energy levels very fast, making us feel more tired when the effect comes down, making hte body want to replenish those energies quickly, and high in sugar ingredients do that fast, with a price though.
It's interesting why tea and mate for example don't have this effect so clearly, maybe it has to do with the bitternes of coffee and the way it is roasted, not sure.
Yeah really no need to study this. There's "anecdotal" and then there's "this happens to 80% of people and we have cute euphemisms for when you excuse yourself" and that to me is as good as the most rigorous of studies. Now uhh, excuse me, back in a sec.
What? I drink rather a lot of coffee and have never had that effect. I've never heard it from anyone else either. Is there any non-anecdotal evidence for this?
Nope, just normal coffee. Sometimes made in a cafetiere, sometimes from the (rather good) machine at work, but I mostly make Greek or Turkish style these days. It's never given me a dose of the shits however its made though!
I'm not exactly sure what the point of the article is or what the author is trying to say. It's pretty much an abbreviated biography bookended by some attempts at philosophizing. It is interesting to hear how much easier the author found his British curriculum than his Chinese. I was also amused by how he mocked his Stanford MBA curriculum, and how the career office people were dismissive of his passion to make money.
Smart hard working people succeed much more often than they don't. Born into difficult circumstances, their probability of 'success' (accumulating prestige and wealth) is much higher than for others.
Of course sometimes circumstances are too oppressive to overcome, and sometimes the stupid and lazy are elevated in spite of themselves... But these are exceptions.
"Smart hard working people succeed much more often than they don't."
A smart hard working person today might be a hard working computer scientist.
Their skills would be absolutely worthless even a few centuries ago. Their skills would be absolutely worthless even today depending on where they are born and to the parents they are born.
I'm not convinced "smart and hard working" are not post hoc descriptors themselves.
Plus, that sentiment is only true with a narrow set of upper middle class, white collar assumptions. What about hard working retail workers or factory workers? Or look how vast the race and gender disparities are...
maybe they don't want to be anything other than factory workers. That doesn't mean that they are fundamentally less valuable and less worthy of being paid their fair share.
To be born with the genetics to be smart and hardworking is out of our control. So smart and hardworking can be considered circumstances we are born into as well.
I mostly agree with this sentiment (though I grant that there may be other, more nuanced views with which I might also agree) and find its implication a little startling: that one's life is really "One's Life: The Movie".
