Fractional reserve banking lends out deposits. This creates risk, but the net assets on the books remain the same (actually assets increase due to interest). With USDT, they may have bought something like commercial paper, which would be similar to fractional reserve banking, or they could have spent it on something irreversible (e.g. a dividend) and thus the net assets on the books is lower than the amount of USDT. It's unknown which situation applies to USDT.
It’s not quite that simple, no? If I deposit 1M in the bank, that bank can loan you 900k. You then buy a Bugatti from me for 900k, which I then put into the same bank. Then the bank loans you 810k to buy an NFT from me…
If the bank has 1M deposits, its net assets are 0. It has 1M is cash and has 1M in liabilities to depositors. If the bank loans out 900K, then it still has 0 net assets. It has 1M in liabilities to depositors, 100K in cash, and an "IOU" worth 900K (ignoring interest). Tether is different. When it mints and sells 1M USDT, it gets 1M is cash, but doesn't have any liability to Tether holders other than the honor system. It could easily pay a 500K dividend to its owners and no one would know.
What you describe is called the “money multiplier model” and yes, it’s not how the actual economy or actual banks work.
This document [1] from the Bank of England (UK’s central bank) is the best description I know of about how those ideas (“fractional reserve”, banks lending out deposits, “money multiplier” etc.) are wrong.
That’s not true. It’s not just that real-world banks don’t do that, they just plain aren’t allowed to “lend out deposits”.
I guess you could say “fractional reserve banks” do, because “fractional reserve” is a textbook model and not something that happens in the real world.
The problem is that deposits are a liability. Banks can only lever up assets to lend, so deposits are on the wrong side of the balance sheet to do that. What limits how much banks can lend is capital (and capital adequacy ratios), not deposits.
Banks create new deposits when they lend, as well as creating an equal amount of private debt. The loan is an asset of the bank, which creates a corresponding liability.
Customer deposits coming in as cash or transfers from other banks are useful as liquidity, but can never be lent.
> The problem is that deposits are a liability. Banks can only lever up assets to lend, so deposits are on the wrong side of the balance sheet to do that.
When someone makes a deposit in a bank it goes on both sides of the __balance__ sheet. On one side the "deposit" is a liability for the bank - who owes money to the depositor - but on the other side it increases the bank's "reserve" account.
Not mechanical, but chemical. At that level, brownian motion, molecular charges, and other forces we can't see at our scale are much more powerful than mechanical motion. All of the enzymes, ribozyes, etc. in your body rely on these forces as well as their own arrangement to produce chemical reactions which in turn drive their 'machinery'.
The original idea of nanobots argued that with enough effort mechanical machines could work at that level, even if it would be difficult. It'd allow for these machines to work outside of water and for them to be built out of materials like diamond. We're still not there yet, and may never be.
I understand why researchers use the term 'nanotechnology' to describe their work with molecular biology, but it gives entirely the wrong impression. Just look in this thread, where you have people asking 'what could possibly go wrong?' Pop culture makes people think nanotech = tiny robots = grey goo destroying the world.
>Just look in this thread, where you have people asking 'what could possibly go wrong?' Pop culture makes people think nanotech = tiny robots = grey goo destroying the world.
it would take a serious lack of imagination on my part to look at something like a custom protein and not think about the possible disastrous consequences that follow -- let alone something being described to me as a 'molecular robot', even without a lot of pop-culture influence.
> Just look in this thread, where you have people asking 'what could possibly go wrong?' Pop culture makes people think nanotech = tiny robots = grey goo destroying the world.
History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes… and so do peoples fears. Many times they are misinformed and misplaced, but usually right to be concerned in the first place.
My dumb take: what could go wrong? Interrupting normal proteins to become prions, that’s what.
A lot of these designer proteins being bad medications or good poisons is a valid concern. At least with that in mind we can better reason about the risks and rewards.
I suppose so, but biological. Like another commenter pointed out “nanocules” could be a more fitting name (I don’t know if it’s used to refer to anything else)
Can these clone passive RFID dongles? My building uses them and they charge $60 for a copy. Not needing to buy a copy from my building would almost cover the cost of this device.
You can clone most RFID keys at the key-copying kiosks inside supermarkets. I turned my most-used key into a sticker that I put inside my phone case for $10.
I got written up for cloning my work badge. Nothing in the policy. I protected it as if it were my real work badge. If your shit can be cloned by $10 worth of eBay bs, why is that my problem?
One way I could see this being cool is to drastically cut down the training time of some specific task. DeepMind's model can do a lot of things, but none particularly well. It would be nice if you could start with their model weights and update them to perform well on your specific task with your data. Ideally this process would be cheaper than starting the training from scratch. I also think this is how the human mind develops. There is some intrinsic knowledge that a human starts with, e.g. how to recognize a face and how to grasp, but then training happens over the course of one's life.
Does it really suck? His leave is getting paid and he's getting severance, which is essentially more paid leave. He can spend more time with his child. He might actually find it preferable. Having recently went on paternity leave myself, I would love to have more paid time with my child.
Quantum computers were theorized in 1980, and there still isn't even a basic prototype. 18 years later, the first 2-qubit quantum computer was built. There still isn't anything usable after 40 years.
This seems very different from the view that I learned about it from in the 90s because of Dan Simon's discussion of using a QC for factorization, and then by 2000 there were single qbit computers. Sure, it may have ben theorized in the 80s, but execution is key. This optical computer was demonstrated, and is well beyond the theoretical stage. Also, our ability to prototype circuits of any kind is ridiculously more powerful than 80s tech.
If it's economically viable, I'd bet we will see it in 15 years. There are libraries for quantum algorithms in multuple languages, and I remember trying to learn them in Haskell pre-2010, with the assumption that by the time I wrapped my head around it a decade or two later, there would be computers to run it on. I gave up on that, but from an investor perspective, a game changing improvement in classical compute tech is worth considering exposure to.
Are you seriously confident this optical compute model, if economical, is 30+ years away?
There basically is no evidence of a natural origin. No ancestors strains have been found and it's very likely the virus was spreading before the wet market. The evidence for a lab leak is circumstantial, however.
Uh, thanks for the link, but better if you'd just spell it out so it can be examined and responded to here. I'm not going to respond to a link.
> There basically is no evidence of a natural origin.
Except, I suppose, for the mountains of historical evidence that every virus ever had natural origins in people in close proximity to animals, exactly like the Wuhan Fish Market, where all of the first infections were found in proximity and not across the river near the Wuhan lab, and that in the last 80 years there have been a dozens and dozens of serious lab leaks of virulent and contagious agents that have never even led to an outbreak, let alone a global pandemic.
So circumstantial evidence just isn't going to cut any mustard here. There was talk of a smoking gun... I suppose it was just talk, because it appears the actual smoking gun is the Wuhan Fish Market.
> Uh, thanks for the link, but better if you'd just spell it out so it can be examined and responded to here. I'm not going to respond to a link.
If you don't want to spend even a basic amount of time to learn about a topic, then you're not worth debating with. Vanity Fair is a reputable source that spent a large amount of time researching the role of EcoHealth Alliance in the possible engineering of the virus at WIV. What possible discourse could we have if you only want to make hand-waving arguments rather than debate specific facts?
If you're not willing to make any arguments of your own supporting your position, but expect links to speak for you, then you are not debating and your position remains unsupported.
1) Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, was involved with viral research at the WIV. He received a grant from the NIH titled "Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence." The grant was for $3.7 million. $600,000 went to the WIV who was a key collaborator in the work. The grant was controversial and was suspended in July 2020.
2) At the beginning of the pandemic, Daszak organized a letter in the Lancet that sought to present the lab-leak hypothesis as a groundless and destructive conspiracy theory. Daszak was later dismissed from the Lancet's COVID-19 commission for refusing to share progress reports from his research grant.
3) Daszak's grant set off alarm bells in 2016 when he filed a progress report that stated that scientists planned to create an infectious clone of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus found in dromedaries that had emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012. The report also made clear that the NIH grant had already been used to construct two chimeric coronaviruses similar to the one that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002 and went on to cause at least 774 deaths worldwide.
4) Obama put a moratorium on gain-of-function research, but Daszak continued his work, stating that SARS-like chimeras from the completed experiment were exempt from the moratorium, because the strains used had not previously been known to infect humans. He also pointed to a 2015 research paper in which scientists had infected humanized mice with the same strains, and found that they were less lethal than the original SARS virus. This chimeric work took place at the WIV. Declassified intelligence stated that the Chinese military had also been working with civilian scientists at the WIV since 2017.
5) Needing funding, Daszak and his collaborators (EcoHealth Alliance and scientists at WIV) applied for a DARPA grant in 2017. In the leaked proposal, there was "a plan to examine SARS-like bat coronaviruses for furin cleavage sites and possibly insert new ones that would enable them to infect human cells." This is particularly notable because the COVID-19 virus has a unique furin cleavage site. The grant application proposed to collect bat samples from caves in Yunnan Province, transport them to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, extract and manipulate the viruses they contain, and use them to infect mice with humanized lungs. It would then map high-risk areas for bats harboring dangerous pathogens and treat test caves with substances to reduce the amount of virus they were shedding. The contract was “never awarded because of the horrific lack of common sense.” DARPA viewed the EcoHealth Alliance as a middle-man willing to travel to China, and nothing more.
6) As COVID-19 started spreading in 2019, to Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC at the time, it seemed not only possible but likely that the virus had originated in a lab. “I personally felt it wasn’t biologically plausible that [SARS CoV-2] went from bats to humans through an [intermediate] animal and became one of the most infectious viruses to humans,” he told Vanity Fair.
7) Early on in the pandemic, Fauci organized a small group of scientists to quell the lab-leak theory despite privately having similar concerns in emails obtained via FOIA requests. Dr. Robert Redford urged investigation of a possible lab leak days before Fauci's meeting occurred. Part of Fauci's group was scientist Kristian Andersen, who would later publish a preprint implicating the wet market as the sole origin of the virus.
8) Later, a scientist Jesse Bloom created a pre-print paper that investigated the disappearance of viral genetic sequences mentioned in early SARS-CoV-2 papers. The NIH had deleted these at the request of the WIV. Bloom invited Fauci and NIH director Francis Collins to discuss the paper. Collins invited outside biologist Kristian Andersen (mentioned above) to the meeting. Andersen was aggressive during the meeting and said it was the right of the WIV to deleted their samples. Andersen had access to the preprint server, and offered to entirely delete the paper or to revise it "in a way that would leave no record that this had been done." Fauci responded to this by saying: "Just for the record, I want to be clear that I never suggested you delete or revise the pre-print."
That's the general gist of the circumstantial evidence. The tl;dr is the U.S. (and likely the Chinese military) was funding gain-of-function research on this exact type of virus at the WIV. Those involved with the project have been the quickest to dismiss the possibility of a lab leak while simultaneously refusing to share their research. There also isn't enough evidence to conclude a natural origin as a similar virus has not been found in the wild. The furin cleavage site, in particular, is unique to COVID-19, and this was the specific target of gain-of-function research at WIV.
Well done. Thank you. Certain to be a best seller and too box office smash regardless of any relation to the actual cause of the pandemic. My cursory examination suggests this evidence is unfalsifiable, but I like it all the more.
