Ray Dalio has a bit in his latest book Changing World Order where he points out what nations/empires in the past have done when faced with similar situations that the US now finds itself in. When debt is high, and country fundamentals are decreasing (like internal stability, and global share of economic output) countries can either buckle down and take the austerity measures required to increase output + decrease the debt… or they can print more money to pay off the debt which leads to inflation. They almost always choose to print money.
Get rdy for some events that haven’t happened in earnest for around 80 years.
It's also worth pointing out that austerity would probably fail miserably given the specifics of our situation. The time for Austerity was maybe circa 2004 or 2011 when debt to gdp was half of what it is now. We are WAY past that point.
We are massively overleveraged, both externally and internally. If we just tighten our belt, we are going to cause a massive debt default deleveraging. Austerity works when a single sector is slightly over leveraged and just needs to shift numbers around for a year or two to make the math work. That's not even close where we are at. Every single sector of the US economy is massively overleveraged. There is no playing with the math. We either grow the pie (roughly, GDP) or the system needs to get massively overhauled. There is no "beautiful deleveraging" in Ray Dalio terms.
Through that lens, the choice is either inflate or massive systemic failure. It's not hard to see which direction we are heading if you do buy that premise.
Dalio has gathered quite a lot of data - but he fails to discuss one difference between those past empires and USA. In the past money was based on gold and debasing the currency was quite easy to spot. With pure fiat money there is no such clear measure to tell that it is inflated.
I’m still reading that book, but he describes pure fiat as response to that kind of dynamic (people noticing the value of the debt being reduced relative to hard money and it being harder to sell). I believe he cited a couple other examples of pure fiat/lack of gold or hard asset convertibility, but don’t remember what they are. This wikipedia article mentions some examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money
> With pure fiat money there is no such clear measure to tell that it is inflated.
Especially if you read HN, where many people believe and will try to explain why currency debasement is a completely outdated idea, generally not applicable in our modern financial system.
I’ve been in a company heading for the layoff more than once. The final sign that it’s coming is a strange ossification of goals and thinking around ideas that more or less amount to “focus on every other data point other than the ones we’re failing at”.
For the debtor or the creditor? For the creditor the right level is 0 or short. Maybe if you are close to retirement and you strongly value stability over growth it has a role. There is some nuance here for large complicated portfolios but for most people the answer is don't be holding treasuries, don't be a creditor.
For the debtor the answer may be, as much as possible. If I can get at 3% loan with 7% interest that is the deal of the century. I'm getting a negative real risk premium on a return yielding asset.
Right now treasuries are reward free risk. A mortgage is low risk high reward.
Thank you for sharing a counterpoint. IMO this act of skepticism is the most important trait of the HN culture.
That being said, I read through the counterpoint article and found it pretty hollow. In fact it seems to strengthen my belief that Sapiens is a valuable book. I kept expecting the author to point out where Harari’s assertions were wrong, but each section more or less boiled down to Harari is either not funny or not clever. The author even contradicts his article’s own thesis partway through:
“Nonetheless, his version of human history involves moral judgments that suggest he is not so thoroughly reductionist, or as cynical about the human condition, as he appears to be at first glance.“
It is an abstraction that can save any users from having to think about shell scripts. This is incredibly valuable. We should not waste human time on writing and thinking about shell scripts, there are much bigger problems to solve.
Are you serious? Writing a shell script or thinking about ways of tweaking stuff is not valuable but wasting time reinventing wheel is? You're the perfect example why there is a complete lack of creativity. Everyone is about making pointless abstractions no actual substance.
All software is an abstraction and that’s what makes it useful. It sounds like you have a particularly vindictive axe to grind against all the “pointless abstractions” people have poured hours of their time into so I’m sure I won’t convince you. But to other readers, it doesn’t have to be this painfully divisive.
The article and numbers are right, it’s just not clearly worded.
I had this same question a couple years back when I read this stat, so I messaged the Cornell Lab Ornithology and one of their reps explained how these numbers make sense.
“We start with a population of breeding adult birds at the beginning of the year. They breed, and multiply, and then the population is "spent" throughout the year on deaths such as window strikes, pesticide poisoning, and cat kills. If the population could keep up with these deaths, we would see a net loss of zero. Unfortunately, instead, we are seeing less and less breeding adult birds at the beginning of each year.
So when we say "we've lost 2.9 Billion birds," what we really mean is, "We've seen a net loss of 2.9 billion breeding adult birds since the 1970's." Back in the 1970's, the breeding season started with about 13 billion adult birds. This year, we had about 10 billion. Throughout the year, they multiply to about 40 billion before they die back. Of that 40 billion, cats kill 2.5 billion.”
I find it hard to sympathize for the poor plight of the $200,000/month healthcare-less twitch streamer working 2 more hours a day than the average person. Was this article written entirely to provoke outrage or is there some oppression I’m missing?
This was an informative counter-argument to what I normally read about US healthcare, thanks for taking the time to share this info.
This site gives several survey findings related to medical bankruptcy. The data is complex and conflicting at times (like you would expect given something as complex as 300+ million people’s healthcare) but the number that the stats seem to fluctuate around is 1 million people. 1 million people declare bankruptcy a year due to medical-related costs. That’s 0.333% per year.
So there are a lot of people (1 million if you believe the data in that link) per year being affected by this.
It says in the abstract that this data is preliminary, and the size of the sample was 950 American adults. I don’t think we can take much away from this study, except that it deserves further investigation.
To any Fe developers reading this: please put a non-trivial code snippet of Fe, with code comments that highlight the improvements over Solidity, front and center on the README.
I am a longtime smart contract developer who has been burned by Solidity’s downsides so I am excited about new EVM languages. I’ve read the Fe README, the announcement blog post, and the Uniswap v2 examples, but still have no concrete set of improvements over Solidity that I can point to. Maybe it’s just because things are still early, but from 15 minutes looking at Fe it still seems like Solidity but this a Pythonic syntax. As a Solidity dev, I want to see concretely how Fe improves on my existing smart contract language.
Thank you for pushing the frontier on smart contract development! I feel we’re in the very beginning of smart contract development and languages like Fe can be the path towards preventing tons of these hacks we see every week.
Fe founder here. I'm not currently actively working on the project and haven't been for a while. That being said, a useful bit of context is that Fe was also originally conceived as a response to Vyper. In fact, it used to be called "Rust-Vyper." Vyper was just like what you say; a python-looking smart contact language that didn't work much different from Solidity. However, it actually explicitly removed certain features in the name of security. I felt like some of what was removed was actually pretty useful and their removal might have actually decreased security (imports, multiple contracts per file, and so on). So some of what I felt Fe should do was just add those things back in.
Vyper also had other issues such as (IMHO) its choice of implementation language which led to a lot of internal tech debt. Also, at the time I was working on Vyper, it actually used Python's standard parser library and so we often had to shoehorn language features into the Python syntax. Vyper may have corrected those things since then but I don't know. In any case, I eventually just decided to start over in my spare time using Rust as an implementation language.
There was other work planned for Fe such as providing a "strict" compiler mode that would facilitate formal verification of contracts written in Fe (that was basically a goal of Vyper). Also, we planned to provide a thorough specification and semantics for the language also for that purpose. I believe a lot of those plans are still in place but the current team should probably comment.
As you say, I think part of the issue is that things are still very early. The core devs are always figuring out useful things to add along the way that end up differentiating the language from its competitors. I'd say more but I'm on my phone :).
Seconding this. It’s a broader problem I find on open source repos where they bury or leave out the info a first time visitor wants: what does this thing do? Why is that better? What does it look like in practice?
This is very well done. I've been hobby researching learning tools for the past couple years and this looks like one of the best. @ai_ia have you seen Andy Matuschak's Orbit project?
Yes. Check out this article that is half an essay on quantum computing and half a call to action for using spaced repetition (the main idea behind supermemo) as a new medium for learning.
I would disagree :)
I think the main idea of SuperMemo (now) is actually incremental reading: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading
though it is nowhere near as popular as spaced repetition. I think we'll see more alternate implementations of IR pop up over the next few years.
Ray Dalio has a bit in his latest book Changing World Order where he points out what nations/empires in the past have done when faced with similar situations that the US now finds itself in. When debt is high, and country fundamentals are decreasing (like internal stability, and global share of economic output) countries can either buckle down and take the austerity measures required to increase output + decrease the debt… or they can print more money to pay off the debt which leads to inflation. They almost always choose to print money.
Get rdy for some events that haven’t happened in earnest for around 80 years.