In a centrally banked economy, retail and commercial banks create money when you take out loans. The government doesn't create money except during QE which only happened twice in the US, 2009-2014 and 2020-2021. That's why I was curious what you meant by "they." The Fed has been actively destroying money for the last 4 years.
The government creates money every time it spends more than it taxes. AFAIK, the US has been doing that nonstop since the turn of the century.
That new money is different from the new money the central bank creates to push interest rates down. That later one the US has been destroying. But both do many of the same things (but not all).
The amount of money banks create is determined by the appetite for credit which is determined by the interest rate. The fed has not been actively destroying money, they are at most slowing the rate of the increase of money.
They influence creation of money by adjusting the short-term interest rate which influences the demand for borrowing at commercial and retail banks. It's not that direct or straight-forward though, because they only have control over the short end of the yield curve not the long end. The long end of the yield curve has interest rates defined mostly by inflation expectations. If they dropped rates to 0% overnight it probably wouldn't move the 30Y yield all that much -- it might even raise it because of the expectation lower short-end yields would raise inflation.
The Fed doesn't have nearly as much control as folks think.
The Fed directly created money during QE and they are directly destroying it during QT. There's a net add, but that's mostly because the economy is growing, which creates new demand for money as expressed by demand for debt.
The money supply staying fixed or shrinking is a non-goal anyways. It's irrelevant. What matters is inflation as measured from the change in actual prices.
Deficit spending doesn't create new money. Deficit spending borrows existing money from the population and institutions in exchange for a promise of future government revenues. The Fed does not participate in treasury primary auctions and does not monetize the debt as a means of funding government operations.
If you printed new money to pay for the government, you wouldn't have a debt. That's double-counting. Not to mention the debt is twice as large as the entire money supply so what you're suggesting isn't even physically possible. It would be inflationary to simply print new money to finance spending, which is exactly why it's not done.
[edit] Also the debt limit is a stupid concept that's likely unconstitutional. Congress authorizes spending, meaningful debate over paying for it by adjusting the debt limit likely falls afoul of the 14th amendment's public debt clause. But yeah I mean the debt limit goes up because the government spends more money than it takes in, so it needs to borrow more each year.
"... resist the temptation to pour salt on [a bloodsucking leech], as folk wisdom recommends, because that could cause the leech to vomit into the wound, posing unnecessary health risks, suggest biologists behind a new exhibit on bloodsucking animals."
In my opinion, a virus in the environment is quasi-dead, but once it enters a cell and it hijacks its components, it becomes alive.
This does not differ that much from bacterial or fungal spores, or even from plant seeds, which can also be almost "dead", i.e. without detectable metabolism or internal changes, even over many thousands of years, until they reach a favorable environment that triggers their revival.
The difference between a virus and a bacterial spore is that the viral particle contains only a subset of the parts of a living organism, so it could never be brought back to life in an environment where nothing is already alive. However, once the virus takes control over many parts of a cell, which provide the functions that it is missing, like the machinery for protein synthesis, the ensemble formed by the parts brought by the viral particle and the parts formerly belonging to the invaded cell, can be considered as alive and distinct from what the invaded cell was previously.
In any case, the evolution of the viruses and the evolution of the cellular forms of life are entangled, with a lot of genetic material exchanged between them, so considering the viruses as non-living is definitely counter-productive, because neither the viruses nor the cellular forms of life can be understood separately.
The word you're looking for is cryptobiosis/anabiosis no need to invent a new one. Something thats later alive almost by definition is not dead. The entire living system has been alive since abiogenesis.
We have to agree on the basic definition of ultra-basic terms.
You just proposed a definition. Good. It's not complete, but necessary, conditionally.
Basically, we shouldn't use "alive" and "dead" as dualities. There's at least three states: "dead/inert/never gonna get there", "meets a definition of life (see next category) when supplemented by a host cell or something else complex and exterior", "can self-replicate and grow on its own, in a friendly environment with sufficient food/fuel/inputs available = life".
Maybe more. But let's stop pretending biology is dead versus alive, because viruses definitely ruin that.
That's a pretty cool framework for the alive or dead debate. I've always been firmly on the alive side but now I can do a better job of presenting the argument concretely instead of just ' nuh-uh '
> so it could never be brought back to life in an environment where nothing is already alive
I always thought of a virus as purely a "modifier", not having the characteristics of "life" independently. If this was a game, the virus might be a runestone or skin for your character.
Anything that doesn't need external "life" to come alive, I would consider as "life" in various states. Maybe it's in hibernation, or stasis, or dormant but the life is there. Maybe to keep the silly game analogy, this might be the extra character on your roster.
Yes but you are talking about the threshold of existence, and the cell is alive as soon as it starts existing. For a virus you also have the threshold of "application", when the viral code is applied to something alive. Before that the virus exists but is not alive itself. After the application it's modifying other life which maybe technically can be considered alive.
This is why I said "to come alive" instead of "to be created". The virus is something that just exists but only becomes alive when mixed with something that's already alive.
Most concepts in biology break down on the borderline cases, because the phenomena are so complicated with all the little variations, the concepts have an inherent fuzziness.
Instead of the concepts being like a box where something is definitely in the box or not in the box like in mathematics or maybe physics, the concepts are more like a clustering of characteristics in a high-dimensional space or landscape of variation, where things are classified according to their similarity to a central paradigm case. (This seems to be how our minds model at least some concepts as well, as evidenced by our being faster at categorising cases that are closer to some paradigm case)
One notorious example is the concepts of male and female: yes, there are borderland examples of individuals who can't be classified as either, but almost everyone clusters sufficiently closely to the distinct paradigmatic cases that the concept has an obvious utility.
But the same thing happens everywhere in biological classification: whether something is a mammal or not becomes fuzzy as we go back in evolutionary time, and whether something is alive or not is similar.
Sure, but considering how central and defining the concept of "life" is to biology (the study of life and living organisms) you'd think we wouldn't have a fuzzy definition for that specific concept. I can see why it's tricky, though.
Life is very useful as a term because it allows you to define a 'not living' term as well: dead. And it has meaning at the highest level. But if you start looking at things in a more detailed way even death doesn't arrive 'all at once' for multi cellular organisms, for instance a dead person's hair still grows to the point that corpses need to be shaved. And a virus may be dead by one persons view on what 'life' is all about but alive by someone else's definition. And depending on the context both of them may be right.
The definition is fuzzy because the concept is fuzzy! Even something that we in every day life see as settled such as a species is not always clear-cut. Cat or dog? That's usually easy. Member of a species yes or no? Not so easy, and in some cases subject to considerable debate and even then unresolved.
It is misconception that hair and nails continue to grow. What happens is the that kind and soft tissues dehydrate and shrink and the hairs and whiskers stick out more. Growth stops soon after oxygen and nutrients stop being delivered.
We really only have one example of life (or at least all our examples are interconnected), so I don't expect great definitions.
Just like geology doesn't have a great definition for their subject of study (the earth). They have a definition that works really well, but because they only have one example, the definition ain't stress tested.
Slightly less silly: it took the discovery of lots more bodies inside and outside the solar system (dwarf planets here, exoplanets elsewhere) for astronomers to really nail down the definition of planet.
I think that depends on your prior expectations about how biological concepts should be structured. I was trying to make the case that we should expect that they're fuzzy when we're dealing with very complex phenomena that exhibit a lot of variation. The fact that these kinds of phenomena happen to exhibit clustering is what makes (fuzzy) classification possible, but we also find that many phenomena or organisms are in borderland areas between clusters, so the classification doesn't work as well with them.
The problem is that it's really hard to come up with a definition that includes all of the things we agree are obviously life (e.g. mold), does not include fire, and does not just appeal to the particular structure that most or all life on earth seems to have (the cell).
The result is a landscape of fuzzy definitions mostly centered around that last one.
We only have a single tree-of-life (or possibly, several syncretic trees-of-life from a single planet) as an example. Makes it a little difficult to discern the true principles.
> the concepts are more like a clustering of characteristics [...]
> This seems to be how our minds model at least some concepts as well [...]
Since we have existed for 100's of thousands of years, and formal thinking only a couple hundred as a widespread practice, only habitually by a modern minority, and then for a tiny minority of daily concepts -- that is very nearly the only way we encode concepts.
In fact, we no doubt actually encode formal concepts using clustered characteristic thinking. We have just intentionally narrowed characteristics down to the point that the result is formal thinking.
Yeah, I think that's an interesting feature of linguistic thought: it builds on and exists within our deep evolutionary heritage of percetion and fuzzy classifications, but by the nature of words as being discrete items it also predisposes us to think naively that the phenomena referred to by words are also discretely organized into this box-like either/or structure, but the reality is more complex
Spoken words forced/helped us divide up completely fuzzy concepts into discretized hierarchies of less and less fuzzy concepts over time.
And then written symbols, enabled a trend of identifying more and more simple I.e “primitive” abstract concepts (culminating in true, false, 1, 2, 0, infinity, node, edge, …) that let us reformulate and better understand complex fuzzy concepts as compositions of primitive concepts.
> Most concepts in biology break down on the borderline cases
Most concepts break down on borderline cases, within and without biology. Those motivated will abuse this to argue that those concepts don't meaningfully exist at all.
Because in most cases the categories are invented by us, to make sense of the world. But the penomena themselves are often continuous. Or actually not just us but most life with some kind of sensory system - even paramecium differentiates between food and non-food.
Take our color perception as an obvious example: We clearly see different types of color, despite us being unsure at the thresholds in between, and the actual electromagnetic radiation of visible light being a continuous wavelength range.
That is just a fundamental limit of our reasoning. We mentally make models of the world to make sense of it. These models have to be of less complexity than reality, ergo they have to cluster perceptions, ergo we have to categorize.
Similarly, the standard definitions of intelligence break down when we look at borderline cases like simple algorithms, collective insect behavior, or AI systems.
Viruses particularly exemplify “intelligence” is better understood as a spectrum of information-processing and adaptive behaviors rather than a strict threshold.
The issue seems to me that neither concept is wrong, but that we humans keep trying to impose absolute definitions on phenomena that exist along continua, blurring into one another in ways that resist our neat little categorizations.
I would argue viruses exemplify some of the highest evolved intelligence in our world.
If you dropped me off in vacuo (eg in deep space), I wouldn't meet the definition of "alive" either. But the fact that my life require a specific environment doesn't phase us or challenge our definition of life at all.
Not only do I need certain physical conditions (temperature, pressure, molecular gas composition, etc), but I also need to eat, so actually me being "alive" is dependent on specific biological conditions too. My Minimum Viable Environment actually includes other organisms, yet this doesn't challenge the fact that I'm defined as alive.
Certain parasites can only live or reproduce within another organism. This is even more extreme, but it still doesn't challenge our definition of them as being "alive."
This new organism requires a specific "environment," and that "environment" happens to be inside another organism. So what? We're totally un-phased by this requirement when it occurs in other examples.
Perhaps it's better to think of this not as a spectrum between alive and non-living, but as a hierarchy of how constrained (vs unconstrained) is the "environment" required to support life processes.
Useful, but not exact. To go more general in biology. It's kind of like classical pre-cladistics taxonomy. It's helpful to have a definition of reptiles that excludes birds, sometimes, even if birds are evolutionarily reptiles, sometimes you might only want to talk about the cold-blooded species today.
This is just another way to say that the map is not the territory. Anything that tries to describe reality in simpler terms than actual reality is likely just going to end up being a leaky abstraction rather than a hard law. And nature is very fuzzy along the boundaries of whatever concepts you are going to come up with.
England & Wales (because policing is a devolved matter in the UK) have very robust crime recording rules. Consequently, the detection rates are low because you record and close crimes where there is literally no prospect of a conviction.
You compare this to, say, Japan, where an investigation only starts if it’s likely that the crime will be solved, and you have an explanation for why detections seem comparatively poor.
There is also the fact that, despite TVs assertion to the contrary, that solving crime is not easy and it is also true that being able to operate a fully encrypted communication system makes it harder as you rely on mistakes.
As we saw with Encro, criminal groups with Signal and modern iPhones can communicate with gay abandon if they maintain decent opsec.
> and it is also true that being able to operate a fully encrypted communication system makes it harder as you rely on mistakes.
Yes. You are describing actual police work; it is how things have always been.
Because this was true before robust encryption, we know encryption doesn't change the equation and can be safely omitted from your assertion.
> As we saw with Encro, criminal groups with Signal and modern iPhones can communicate with gay abandon if they maintain decent opsec.
Governments have never had realtime access to our communications. Humans' communications have been private for as long as there has been language. Privacy is good for us and is better than all other alternatives.
Robust encryption is how we maintain that natural, neutral, healthy default.
Otherwise, we're talking about gifting new, unprecedented surveillance powers to officials, politicians and their powerful allies.
Massive power. Over us. At which point we are less safe.
> Yes. You are describing actual police work; it is how things have always been.
No, it hasn’t. Criminals haven’t always had access to literally uncrackable encryption, both messaging and voice, in a manner that is impossible to attribute to an individual handset or terminal.
Regardless of whether you’re for or against it, you have to admit that this is a boon for criminals as much as it is for everyone else.
Encro failed because the Dutch got all up in their servers (and the owners, who I suspect are now dead as a result, pretended it hadn’t happened) - e2e encryption bypasses that vulnerability.
>> Yes. You are describing actual police work; it is how things have always been.
> No, it hasn’t. Criminals haven’t always had access to literally uncrackable encryption,
As a preamble, police already have a vast array of new avenues of surveilling citizens. They have this now and it gives them massively more access to our private data/comms, than ever before. There is little that LEO/Govs/Corps don't have access to already.
Police have never had at-will access to any personal data and communications they desired.
Until very recently: To find info they wanted, police performed police work and commonly found some degree of what they were looking for. But often it was nothing. Under this, society thrived.
What police have right now is massively more than that. In the few spaces where some content might be denied them, they still have the associated metadata which is valuable on it's own (often more so than the contents).
Historically, you and I have always had options and methods of keeping our personal info and our private comms out of the reach of police, govs and other powerful actors. It was good for us and promoted a healthy society.
We have lost most of that. However, using robust encryption we can keep a minuscule portion of our total comms and data out of their trivial reach. What little it is - it is still good for us.
Historical privacy was what we had. Under that condition, societies were healthy and thriving.
Persistent, pervasive surveillance is what we're moving (rapidly) toward. It promotes other types of societies.
>Police have never had at-will access to any personal data and communications they desired.
Wiretaps, postal interference.
None of it was routine, but the tactic for dealing with serious criminality was still there.
>Historically, you and I have always had options and methods of keeping our personal info and our private comms out of the reach of police, govs and other powerful actors. It was good for us and promoted a healthy society.
No you haven't. It is only until very recently that iPhones (less so android devices) have been basically uncrackable (notwithstanding NSA/GCHQ level tactics that aren't going to be used for criminal investigations) and, coupled with end to end encryption, you have a communications system for which their is no practical method of compromise.
It is very good for the citizen, but you cannot argue for it without also acknowledging that it is incredibly advantageous for the criminal. It is without precedent in human history.
I'm not saying that the police should be able to backdoor everything useful, because that's nonsense. What I'm pointing out is that once you realise that your suspects understand how to use signal and how to use a VPN and how to maintain some sort of operational discipline (and this isn't a high threshold), then your crimes become incredibly hard to solve even with a perfectly executed investigation and this is reflected in the clear-up rate.
>No you haven't. It is only until very recently that iPhones (less so android devices) have been basically uncrackable (notwithstanding NSA/GCHQ level tactics that aren't going to be used for criminal investigations) and, coupled with end to end encryption, you have a communications system for which their is no practical method of compromise.
As the comment above clearly and repeatedly mentions, this has been the default for most of history. Previous to the modern digital age of endless location and habit tracking, people could move around without being easily detected except through tremednous, dedicated effort, and communications was easy to secure in simple ways. You're describing a completely new phenomenon that's very dangerous in many ways which go far beyond mere crime prevention, and apparently lamenting countermeasures against it as if they were what's creating a "terrifying" new state of criminals being able to move and communicate without easily being tracked.
You're kidding right? Your phone was a stationary dumb object that only made and recieved calls if you were there to answer or use it. Your post was sent by paper and a million ways existed to avoid having it traced to your home or to you.
In no real way are these comparable to the deeply granular, deeply rooted 24/7 surveillance of movement, habits, contacts and nearly anything you like, that's today possible against any normally digitally connected person who doesn't take pretty extreme steps to avoid it (steps that by themselves make that person stand out as unusual enough to soon be flagged) I could go on and on with all the ways in which the tracking is pervasive and applied to most of the things we do today, and how none of that existed so autoamtically before the last 30-40 years or so.
Nobody with half a brain here is referring to some bucolic pastoral existence, simply to one in which the tools for tracking were just not like they are today, and if any government wanted to apply tracking of the kind that's pretty much turn-key constant now, it took unusual effort, staffing and specialized procedures.
You're either being deliberately obtuse or have no sense of perspective or idea of what you're saying
There has never, in the history of humanity, been a time where a criminal can communicate with other criminals with absolute immunity as they can today.
They don't have "absolute immunity" today either. They can make mistakes, or systems can be hacked as happened with the Encro Chat. And while the government may have used wiretaps in the past, they certainly weren't able to deploy that at the same scale surveillance is enacted today.
OK but given that only a tiny fraction of crime is solved, then why does the UK have huge prohibitions from carrying things to defend yourself, like even pepper spray?
You're the one whose being dishonest here, at least partly. From what I've read of self-defense laws in the UK, you can use "reasonable" force to defend yourself against attack (try measuring that precisely in the heat of a moment where you don't know your attacker's aims) but yes, you can actually be prosecuted for using force against someone trying to steal from you. Even something as shitty as a google search will show that your claim is demonstratable untrue.
How does insurance for stolen property work in Japan? Do the insurers not require evidence that the theft has been reported to the police, as they do here? Or do those reports not form part of the Japanese crime statistics, and if so, what would those look like if they did? Or is something else going on?
I simply don't believe this. Any one crime is hard to solve but the same criminals are doing most of the crime, so if policing were effective you'd still see closure rates.
>if they maintain decent opsec.
don't believe this either. no one has ever maintained decent opsec.
Nobody you've read about has ever maintained decent opsec. There's tons of people who started as petty criminals who made it to mid ranks, got old and got out before they got killed or got caught.
Because the only society with a high clearance rate for crime is a police state that is very good at finding someone to blame, but not necessary the guy who did it.
Perhaps not ironically, the careless distribution of incorrect information, combined with a dismissal of human endeavor, is such a perfect encapsulation of why so many people absolutely despise everything surrounding LLM hype.
That's true of any car, not just EVs. The word in certain circles is that people are only buying the Ferrari Purosangue in hopes of getting on the waiting list for their more desirable cers.
And the Taycan is a great car in its own right, just the price is stupid. The Audi E-Tron is the same car just packaged differently and can be had for sometimes half the price.
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