OK, suppose the whole world used a trustless digital cash. Now you cannot do monetary policy. Now booms are booms and busts are busts and we are back to the early 1900s. Great.
Actually what would likely happen is that people would be incentivized to opt-in a digital currency with a monetary policy knob, and this would again become the de facto currency that everyone uses.
The problem with 2008 was corruption not monetary policy.
No solution is perfect. Come up with a better one. More regulation, however, is not what we need. We need to decide what we want the financial sector to actually do, and that probably doesn't involve a bunch of children playing games.
"Monetary policy" in reality simply means printing more money than is ever destroyed. It's human nature and always will be.
This means bitcoin's average price will go up forever when priced in
fiat tokens. Or anything else for that matter - even gold's above-ground stock doubles every 35 years. How's that for an incentive?
The largest amounts of value will always settle in the best store of value for large amounts of value. Show me one with better fundamentals than bitcoin.
>>The largest amounts of value will always settle in the best store of value for large amounts of value. Show me one with better fundamentals than bitcoin.
See I truly respect President Boric from Chile, it’s one of the few progressive leaders from the region that has been outspoken about the Maduro regime and calling it what it is: a dictatorship. Unlike other leaders of the region who could be doing way more.
It’s pretty understandable for Mrs. Corina to take whatever support she gets internationally.
Providing her with this award while Trump's naval battle groups stand ready to attack Venezuela isnt helping arrest the collapse of the west's moral authority.
That’s like saying Volodymyr Zelenskyy supports Trump. Foreign politicians operate outside of U.S. domestic politics - they don’t get to choose other countries’ leaders. Their job is to use diplomacy to navigate international politics in whatever shape those politics happen to be in.
It's because he is the current president of the US and US support it's key for the liberation of Venezuela, she also supported Biden and Kamala Harris, have Kamala Harris won she would have "supported" her. And it's not like she supports Trump, she is not on favor of his policies but she knows his support it's necessary.
I'm Venezuelan and I don't see those acts as against my country, we hate our current government, at this point after 20 years of the same guys ruining our country we are desperate, and military intervention might be the only solution, because they hold all the power and weapons, and don't care that 80%+ of the population are against them. Although most of us hold the opinion that solving the problem by our own hands would be the best option, it seems like it might not be possible like what happened in 2014, and last year and many others. Military intervention might be the only option left that we have.
Yeah, I'm wondering if the Nobel Peace prize has anything to do with peace for people, or for her neoliberalism stance of protection of the free market that would usher peace for the business interests of oil companies [0].
I must confess I am no Venezuelan political expert, and it always gives me pause whether the economic siege that has been laid against Venezuela with the sanctions is about democracy, or about access to unrestricted markets (a la United Fruit Company — now Chiquita — and Standard Fruit Company — now Dole plc).
The problem in South America is that both versions are true. The outside exploitation pressures are extremely strong, so any vaguely socialist government succumbs to the temptation to squash the outside agitators .. and any local opposition who actually have a valid point or real anti-corruption objections. Running a moderate social democrat centrist country in that situation is not stable, instead you get pendulum swings from left to right and back again, with significant human cost along the way.
(exception maybe Costa Rica?)
To be clear, Venezuela is long past the "popular socialism" phase and decayed into the "strongman holding on" phase.
100%. The biggest economic problem plaguing Germany and most of the EU is that all the capital is in the hands of incompetent old farts, so called, "business leaders", and the economic class system is way more hierarchical and old fashioned than in the US and I dare say, even China. Supposed "market capitalism", means your economy is planned, by diaper wearing boomers whose thinking and worldview are stuck in the 20th century.
Sorry, but lol. Germany even makes you pay to be able to piss in a toilet. Even public libraries aren't free! And let's not mention the health care system, which literally has two tiers, one for the poor and one for the rich, with of course the poor-tier being barely functional, and still expensive as fuck. "Social market economy" my ass. Germany is a country led by incompetent extremely paternalistic leaders, the major part of which come from the capitalist class, the rest of which are their Akademiker servants. The only people getting any kind of social benefits are the retired boomers and if you were to do the accounting, even they got massively shafted by the capitalists, because those boomers would be 3x richer if their lifetime savings were properly invested.
Because they aren't public. They are provided by a company.
> And let's not mention the health care system, which literally has two tiers, one for the poor and one for the rich, with of course the poor-tier being barely functional, and still expensive as fuck
This is because of inefficiency, an aging demographic and regulation, not because of capitalism. The "system for the rich" was worse back in the day, and only became "better" for doctors because they adjusted their rates for covered services. In fact, because the "poor tier" insurance companies have not adjusted their rates according to inflation for a long time [1], services are of course getting worse. The average dentist earns 50% of what he earned 1970 adjusted for inflation. [2] This is called the "Punktwert", it hasn't changed since 1980 ([3]) and it is the single most important factor why services are getting worse and worse. No one is getting rich off of GKV members. Not doctors, and certainly not insurance companies.
> "Social market economy" my ass.
Sorry, no. This is the direct outcome of a social market economy, when the economic motor isn't doing so good, you still have to pay for permanent social gifts that were given to the largest voting class (old people). The government mandated insurance companies are close to being bankrupt because of this exact policy. In fact, they would already be bankrupt if we didn't have a social market economy [4], which pays billions of tax dollars to prop them up.
> The only people getting any kind of social benefits are the retired boomers and if you were to do the accounting, even they got massively shafted by the capitalists, because those boomers would be 3x richer if their lifetime savings were properly invested.
Well, boomers, pensioners and those close to retirement make up 60% of the voting base. They got what they voted for, good and bad, a social market economic model that bleeds the workers to pay for pensions. That matches the definition of a large welfare system exactly. They also voted pretty clearly against an investment backed pension scheme and have been voting like this for 4 decades now. As always, economic models have disadvantages, and we are finding out now that models close to socialism stop working when you run out of other people's money.
> Because they aren't public. They are provided by a company.
If you are talking actual libraries here: Hm? Public libraries are provided by the city - all I have ever seen in Germany. They usually cost a member pass, though I have seen completely free ones, but it's either a one-time payment or a yearly recurring fee. Small numbers though, can be as little as 5 Euro.
Public libraries provided by a company are an oxymoron, I doubt that exists in Germany.
> This is because of inefficiency, an aging demographic and regulation, not because of capitalism.
The Korean healthcare system has a much worse aging demographic as well tons of regulations, being nothing like e.g. the US.
Yet in terms of "system for the poor" the difference with Germany could hardly be bigger.
To blame it on those is straight up wrong, in that it's an oversimplification of a complex topic to such a degree that it no longer makes sense.
This goes for nearly all of the discussion in this thread, for what it's worth. On these topics sociocultural and historical factors that aren't simply represented by "regulations" or "current tax burden" or "demographics" have an enormous impact.
It's the classic STEM, and especially CS, mistake, so it's no wonder HN is full of it on any governance-related topic. And I say this as a CS guy myself. As a group, we are predisposed to the idea that a set of rules, regulations and statistics leads to a certain set of real-world outcomes. The reality could hardly be less true.
The communist parties have very low ratings and never make it into coalition governments so they are not a threat. The Greens also have fairly low ratings and despite the image, they tend to be elitist neoliberal types.
None of these people or parties are as bad or as dangerous as the AfD which is a party of grifters and fascists, full of unhinged people, who, even if you ignore all the hateful rhetoric, you couldn't trust to not destroy the country economically and politically.
I don't think so, I just think they expect that Nobel Prize level physics should feel less incremental, and everything that doesn't involve a revolution in physics (like supersymmetry) or at least an expected confirmation of an old revolution (like the Higgs boson or gravitational waves) feels incremental.
It would be pretty crazy to have enough big breakthroughs in physics to warrant a prize every year. I guess that’s how it was for a brief period in the early 1900s.
Thanks. Certainly lots of work seems to have gone into this, but if they had any good results they would be front and centre. Skimming the paper, I can only see model architectural details and some links they try to make to biology. That makes me doubt they actually got anything useful.
But generative models are always going to seem like they are doing ok. That's how they work. They are good at imitating and producing misleading demos.
Their representation is simpler, just a transformer. That means you can just plug in all the theory and tools that have been developed specifically for transformers, most importantly you can scale the model easier. But more than that, I think, it shows that there was no magic to AlphaFold. The details of the architecture and training method didn't matter much. All that was needed was training a big enough model on a large enough dataset. Indeed lots of people who have experimented with AlphaFold have found it to behave similiar to LLMs, i.e. it performs well on inputs close to the training dataset and but it doesn't generalize well at all.
Except their dataset is mostly the output of AlphaFold, which had to use the much smaller dataset of proteins analyzed by crystallography as input. This is really an exercise in model distillation - a worthy endeavor but it's not like they could have just taken their architecture and the dataset AlphaFold had and expect to get the same results. If that was the case, that's what they would have done because it would've been much more impressive.
> But more than that, I think, it shows that there was no magic to AlphaFold. The details of the architecture and training method didn't matter much. All that was needed was training a big enough model on a large enough dataset.
People often like to say that we just need one more algorithmic breakthrough or two for AGI. But in reality it's the dataset and the environment based learning. Almost any model would do if you collected the data. It's not in the model, it's outside where we need to work on.
I think the sentiment that simplicity is good, is a false conclusion. Simplicity is simply good scientific methodology.
Doing too many things at once makes methods hard to adopt and makes conclusions harder to draw. So we try to find simple methods that show measurable gain, so we can adapt it to future approaches.
Its a cycle between complexity and simplicity. When a new simple and scalable approach beats the previous state of art, that just means we discovered a new local maxima hill to climp up.
Actually what would likely happen is that people would be incentivized to opt-in a digital currency with a monetary policy knob, and this would again become the de facto currency that everyone uses.
The problem with 2008 was corruption not monetary policy.
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