Having worked at non-profits, the distribution of wages can be unlike anything ever seen at for-profit corporations and has made me become quite cynical. At a couple of the organizations I was involved with, there was lots of unpaid volunteering, grossly under-market salaries, and unpaid overtime at the bottom of the hierarchy with anemic pay all the way up the pyramid until you reached the CEO position. The CEOs rarely did much of anything except help keep alive the notion that everyones sacrifice was worth it. In one instance, the CEO went on sabbatical for over a year, appointing a few senior management to share their leadership role and the whole operation actually seemed to function better while they were gone.
I don't have anything against a non-profit CEO paying themselves well if they also pay their employees well. Many do not, with some unspoken culture of employees needing to accept meager compensation so that resources can be directed toward the core mission whose objectives are fluid and progress often difficult to measure.
You might be right. But I just want to add that this housing asset bubble is global in nature.
We here in Canada have been running the interest rate increase experiment ahead of the US. We've also had a much worse run up in housing prices. There are rundown shacks in Oshawa, Ontario selling for more than nice homes in Los Angeles. Where the hell is Oshawa? That's the whole point, it really doesn't matter but it's a former General Motors factory town about 1 hour east of Toronto.
Two months ago the real estate bulls were saying what you were saying now about supply. But the numbers are in for major areas like the greater Toronto area after a single 50 bps increase this past quarter like the one the Fed just dropped down south. Some suburbs of Toronto have already seen median prices drop 10-20% off their January/February 2022 peak prices [1].
The volume of home sales has plunged 41% in Toronto [2] as the market absorbed the 0.5% interest rate hike. And we haven't seen anything yet. A huge chunk of the buyers today have pre-approvals with interest rates from 75 bps ago. Around June 1 these buyers need to commit to a purchase to provide enough time for their lenders to close the deal at the old interest rates before those expire. The Bank of Canada is also expected to make a further 50 bps to 100 bps jump in rates in early June.
Anecdotally, there are already horror stories of over leveraged buyers -- perhaps amateur investors or a family that stretched themselves to the limit to buy -- only for their deal to fall through because the banks won't appraise the home at what they agreed to pay for it.
As a wannabe first time homebuyer myself, I've heard every argument you've said repeated ad nauseum up here in Canada the past half year by real estate bulls -- who I might add, have been totally right in their assessment of our crazy market which could only go up for perhaps the past 15 years -- only for the market sentiment to completely change overnight within a month or two of the 0.5% interest rate hike.
I think the biggest factor whether or not prices have room to fall is how built out an area is to its zoned capacity and how many jobs there are in the given metro area. Job growth incurs population growth with incurs development. Development will continue if there is sufficient population demand. In cities like LA, job growth has triggered huge surges in the population over the past century, and in turn this triggered development to the limits of zoned capacity. LA is 92% built out (1). In other words, all the low hanging fruit of how much can actually be built has been built already, and what's left in that 8% are probably the edge cases that for one reason or another have been picked last by developers for development because they are not going to very easily receive financing by lenders who are going to want to see penciled out and sound business plans before loaning money, not the crap in the remaining 8% of zoned capacity that is hardly going to generate a profit.
In order to stand a chance of working our way out of this, we need to make it easy to build in terms of what happens at city halls to make more supply increasing projects viable in the eyes of lenders. We need to increase the zoned capacity of our job centers so they can actually support the workers they employ versus force the lowest earning workers to far flung commutes or into living multiples per bedroom. It's like a law of physics. Make it possible for developers to build and supply will expand like a gas to fill available zoned capacity until demand incurred by labor are met, and prices should not appreciably rise if there is no need to enter bidding wars far above ask.
There's also strong differences in density - in the US it's often either single family homes or apartment high-rises; but if the City of Los Angeles had the 5-10 story wall-to-wall houses that Paris has it could see a population of 22 million, compared to the current 3.8.
Going for the metro area could be even larger.
One huge advantage places like Paris have is that they've been dense for so long that there is older housing available in dense areas; in the US any new density will be new construction, and therefore tend to aim at the luxury/higher-cost buyer.
There is a lot of this middle density already in places like the city of LA. This is a good map showing the true density of different parts of the city (1). The darkest blue are about as dense as the densest parts of paris (50k/sqmi). The model is already there in American cities, it just needs to be expanded to more neighborhoods especially near the job centers which are increasingly in these low density suburbs over transit connected urban cores. This also makes it more challenging to serve transit to more people when only a small portion of your workforce is traveling along any given corridor and in multiple directions). This is an older map not showing the more recent rail lines, but it shows how jobs are distributed across the county unevenly and how convoluted the commutes can grow to be in order to get to these different job centers across the county from the dense housing areas which don't always overlap the dense job centers (2).
This is part of the confusion people often have - what LA needs isn’t metro connections to the dense areas - it needs metro to light areas that can then be redeveloped into denser.
But the sprawling setup doesn’t help make it easy.
Does it say if the researchers knew his family members' names in advance? Wouldn't the "a ha!" moment be when the patient shares something that the researchers couldn't possibly find out on their own and that wouldn't be interpreted via his family's help? None of that appeared to happen here.
Having said that, I've just skimmed the Nature article. But what stands out is that they had 86 days of unsuccessful communication before they changed strategies and then all of a sudden started reporting success. I really hope this works but we should remain skeptical for the possibility of abuse here. Other commenters in this thread have reported that the researchers have committed misconduct in their brain research.
The only thing I fear more than being in the discussed patient's situation is being in their situation and having my thoughts incorrectly interpreted at best or outright manipulated at worst.
Perhaps hire the Randi foundation to design an experiment. This is not "psychic", but they have a lot of experience designing foolproof test for voluntary and involuntary fraud.
For example:
Make one person roll a dice and tell the number to the patient ensuring that nobody else can hear it. Kill the person that roll the dice to ensure the result is secret. Make another person read the BCI and write down the result. Repeat this 18 times and then look at the video and compare the dice and the BCI. It's a success if they guessed correctly at least 9 times. The expected number of correct answers is 3, and the probability to guess 9 randomly is only 0.1%.
If they do this only once, live streaming the experiment it is enough for me, but perhaps it's better to have a lower probability for a random guess. Also, I like that the "success" threshold is one half of the experiments. It's easy to explain, not too much in case it's not perfect, and less than a half is not impressive.
For macOS at least, the cause of this is the ECM driver that is used for the Realtek 8153. If you're lucky enough to find a device that has the Realtek 8156 chipset, which I believe the CalDigit TS4 uses, macOS will use the NCM driver and you'll be totally fine. ECM is a more primitive USB ethernet protocol and NCM is a more advanced one. The difference is similar to UASP vs BOT mode for USB external storage.
At least with respect to macOS, the Realtek 8153 chipsets in these docks suffer from having to use the built-in ECM driver. If you're on Apple Silicon, that's your only option. If you're on Intel, there are some flaky but more performant drivers from Realtek available. The ECM driver will cause high CPU load and for many users, will result in performance that's worse than wifi because of it. You'll also get audio dropouts and system hitches from the CPU loading.
If you can find an adapter that uses the Realtek 8156 chipset, which I believe the CalDigit TS4 uses, macOS will utilize the NCM driver and your performance will be rock solid.
ECM is a very primitive USB protocol for ethernet, whereas NCM is a more modern and performant one. NCM is to ECM as UASP is to BOT mode, if you're familiar with USB external drives.
The donor is anonymous but their characteristics are heavily marketed. In cases like this one, parents feel like they were intentionally misled: promised one thing and sold something else. I haven't had time to read the full article, but in many cases the decision about which sperm to use is made based on donor characteristics that are considered desirable: height, hair, skin colour, intelligence, lack of self-reported mental conditions, etc. The sperm they are provided tends to be from donors who don't measure up in these areas.
Furthermore, several stories resemble this one where a fertility doctor used his own sperm and that is considered particularly egregious. Not only for the reasons mentioned above, but because doing so is considered lying by omission. There are also notions of fairness with respect to fathering children: don't father too many and fulfill your responsibilities towards the ones you do. Biologically fathering dozens if not hundreds of children and having nothing to do with them afterward is considered unfair to the children, even if they happen to have a real father who raises them.
I used to think like this. But the older I get the more cynical I become. In massively corrupt environments, everybody needs to appear to be playing the game by the rules when it comes to primary objectives like the distribution of wealth and the financial operations surrounding it. Nobody trusts anyone else and everyone is an adversary of everyone else, even within the leadership ranks. I strongly suspect there would not be any widely known backdoor for oligarchs. A select few oligarchs might have the luck of being tasked with creating such a system, in which case they will build the backdoor for themselves.
Still... I think the speculative scenario is unlikely. I myself am speculating massively here. But what I think is far more likely to happen with respect to crypto is that an international agreement akin to the Bretton Woods System is negotiated that mandates central banks hold a store of value such as Bitcoin. This will provide some foundation of measure for all currencies to be valued against. But the current financial system layer on top will remain intact.
Note, I'm an early Bitcoin hodler and have remained strongly suspicious of Putin's interest in Ethereum with agreements between the foundation and VEB like this one (https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2017/08/31/misunderstanding...), its handling of the DAO event, and Eth2.0's coincidental timing (its delays too) with the Ukraine invasion.
My somewhat speculative paranoia follows, but I strongly suspect Ethereum will NOT play a part in this new system because of the above issues. I think Putin calculated that Ethereum might be a viable alternative to a widespread financial system replacement that could have provided a means of bypassing any sanctions, which is why he went ahead with the Ukraine invasion.
In the end, if this Bretton Woods 2.0 system comes into effect, bitcoin will have failed to become the libertarian financial tool many people hoped it would. But its utility as a store of value can't be ignored and so it will have been co-opted/integrated into the existing financial system. It'll be another example of techno-utopianism naiveté like the 90s style vision of the web.
Why do you assume Bitcoin will be the coin of choice rather than a “DigitalDollar” of their own creation? (Or are you just using it as a stand in for conversation?)
It seems silly to expect liquidity in bitcoin to support huge countries, and a bitcoin fork for each major side would be a mess
but there is a question of what neutral credibility a brand new world currency would have
I'm somewhat using it as a stand-in, but I do have this gut feeling that bitcoin has a few characteristics that will make it the standard (more on this later).
I also think there will be digital dollars issued by central banks. In that respect, I don't see Bitcoin being used for day to day financial transactions. I see it being used as a backing value store for these digital dollars though.
I think economists and central banks throughout the world are reluctantly coming to grips with the effects of going off Bretton Woods:
- There is more influence over financial cycles so they can be smoothed over to help with the functioning of day to day life. This is desirable.
- The above influence has gone too far and has created an epic asset bubble and economic disparity that is even concerning to many of the world's most powerful and wealthy (i.e., it's creating an existential risk to them). Obviously this is undesirable and even worse, the central banks have no potential solutions to deal with this in their existing toolchain.
Why do I think bitcoin will win out? Somewhat for the same reasons I'm skeptical of that backdoor scenario. The major national governments have little trust amongst themselves, this trust is getting worse, and we're seeing an adversarial situation play out.
- China and some other economies outside the G7 want off of the USD as a reserve currency
- The G7 are reluctant to accept a world in which China exerts the financial influence they give up
All will realize something in the world's financial system has to change and for the sake of world peace a new arrangement is worth a shot. But none of these adversaries trust each other in such a way that a nationally derived crypto would be acceptable as the basis for a value backing store. Furthermore, existing assets will inherently be untrustworthy too because they're in a bubble. Nobody knows the true value of a house any more. Step in crypto...
- I don't think it will be Ethereum because as I said, reputation has been tarnished (there may be Russian influence). But it also tries to do too much and that may be undesirable for a value backing store.
- I think it will end up being Bitcoin simply because it's a lot more simple. It does less. And furthermore, nobody really knows who invented it so it is inherently not tied to any given nation. Or at least there's plausible deniability about it having been invented by a particular state.
- Other cryptos are distant runners up to these two main players so I don't see any other viable alternatives
I know it sounds farfetched but hear me out. Stranger things have happened.
Bitcoin is a speculative asset like housing and used cars currently are in 2022. But the similarities end there. All the other speculative asset classes have been triggered precisely due to quantitative easing policies. Their current prices have been derived from this fiscal policy. As ridiculous as it sounds, bitcoin’s price is quite literally a bet against the future performance of these world currencies. As the speculative asset classes have their foundation in current fiscal policy, Bitcoin is a bet against their performance too.
Bitcoin has minimal carrying costs as an asset. The same can’t be true of other speculative assets like homes which have become financial instruments due to investors pouring their wealth into anything besides currencies in a desperate attempt to hold value over time. In many countries now, and increasingly so, the only way to profit off housing is through appreciation. Rent will not cover the carrying costs of the mortgages taken out against these homes. These assets have entered bubble territory, decoupling from any rational metric like average incomes.
Holding Bitcoin costs essentially nothing. Sure, there are idiots who invested through leverage. But there are many more who haven’t who can afford to hold on through all sorts of adversity. That makes it quite unlike these other speculative assets.
As a backing store for central banks, it holds value because it’s auditable. Bretton Woods fell apart in no small part due to countries becoming sceptical that other countries actually held the gold they said they did. The amount of Bitcoin each central bank holds would easily be auditable by others and that makes it valuable.
It only sounds foolish because we are used to thinking of measuring Bitcoin against the dollar. Rather, view the amount of Bitcoin each central bank would hold as an auditable hash of all its assets. Then view the digital currencies these central banks would issue as denominated in fractional units of this.
In the world where we value Bitcoin against USD, it sounds foolish because we don’t have enough Bitcoin to act as a foundation for all of it. But what if we have too much money in the world? Bitcoin’s fixed 21 million limit provides a means of truly measuring the rate at which currencies are inflated. Some inflation is of course desirable and Bitcoin could be an inherent regulator ensuring a healthy amount of inflation.
Note, this perspective equally pisses off Bitcoin skeptics and libertarian die hard hodlers. I have a very good chance of being wrong of course. But it’s not as farfetched as we’d initially suspect either. The biggest reason against this scenario isn’t the financial aspect, but the incredible shift in power that would result.
Current Bitcoin investors would find themselves suddenly incredibly wealthy and powerful. We don’t typically see shifts in power like this. But it happened to Saudi Arabia and other people who struck it suddenly rich (and powerful) with oil. So it isn’t unprecedented.
These are complexed nuanced ideas, and not really able to be confirmed objectively one way or another.. so for that reason I appreciate your detailed thoughts but I won't be replying in detail.
One thing I did want to reply to is the idea that house rents will not cover carrying costs of mortgages.
I think this is a telling point and focus on it because I think it's very telling regarding the mindset of crypto investors vs housing or traditional value investors.
The key difference is housing is a get rich SLOWLY system, not a get rich QUICKLY system. But crypto has been a flame for the moths of get rich quickly schemes. Previously this was the domain of ponzis, MLM schemes, various fake investments, tulips etc. While some people in Crypto may not all be of this ilk, the majority mindsets of it seem to be. I don't see many talking about HODLing for a lifetime, but only until they strike it rich somehow, generally with a minimum of work and minimum of value provided back to society in exchange for somehow getting rich, quickly.
With this in mind you say house rent does not cover holding costs such as mortgage payments (and repairs, government costs, management fees, insurances etc etc). That statement is only true when looking with a short term perspective. Which is the perspective of most people attracted to get rick quick schemes. However the statement on housing income vs costs is actually incorrect, is wrong, when looked at in with a long term mindset. This is because over time inflation increases rent while shrinking the mortgage which gets eventually paid down (in the average mode of housing investment outcomes). So when you see the fullness of time, housing investments can more than pay for their costs, while also providing capital gain. This is actually by design, it's structured, to share value between the investors for good management over the long term, and between society which gets the provision of housing provided, and managed, for the long term. This is an outcome of government policy, by design.
With that in mind, it may be that the fact that you've considered the short term perspective, may be an important insight into your thinking, may be an opportunity for you to expand the range of your thinking, should that provide you value in the fullness of your life! Anyway, just some thoughts to share!
Russia has a 10:1 advantage to the US in tactical nukes. They have all sorts of creative nuclear devices that can very much be used in theatre without triggering a MAD scenario. Why the big discrepancy? US weaponry is better. It's more precise. It's more effective. Head to head, Russia realized that they had no hope of competing against NATO. So they decided they won't. They'll just invest in and strategize around the use of tactical nukes which help them level the playing field without triggering a MAD scenario. It's all they've been investing in and cared about in the last 10-15 years if you've been paying close attention.
Putin isn't crazy enough to use strategic nuclear weapons. He's absolutely enough of a sociopath to use tactical nukes, particularly to avoid a potentially brutal urban assault on kyiv. I hope I'm wrong. But when you consider Belarus and Russia just completed nuclear drills in the past month and they're using a lot of conscripts in their first wave, it can't be ruled out.
Brands like Levis never weigh in on controversial issues until they've hit a certain inflection point of public discourse and it is clear where the majority of society will land on it. Then in hindsight, they will try to present themselves as pioneers of progressive ideals when they really only hopped onto the bandwagon when it was clear which bandwagon was going to win the race.
Today, some of these issues are being litigated faster than they were in the past. But don't be mistaken. Nike almost dropped Colin Kaepernick in the heat of the moment of his controversy. They only embraced him a few years later when it was safe to do so. I suspect Jennifer Sey drank her own koolaid in thinking that she'd be able to come out one way or the other on this still hotly contested issue.
Marketers choose their words carefully and more importantly than that, refrain from taking a stand until they know precisely how it can be dutifully exploited for their brand's needs. You might dislike this. But that's the game that's played in that industry. There's a reason that corporations, and the brands which encapsulate their identities, have been called psychopaths.
You might dislike this. But that's the game that's played in that industry
I’m confused. Why would I dislike that marketers are doing their jobs? Are they not supposed to choose their words and bandwagons carefully? Do you want your dentist pushing his controversial opinions onto you while treating your teeth? If you have a conflict of interests (professional vs personal) you resign. I don’t see a problem here.
It still surprises me how much we care about a company's opinion, as if it were some kind of entity capable of thinking for itself. It's perhaps a kind of parasocial relationship. People often feel connected to brands in a way that, of course, the brand does not think about them. I imagine that's why people get personally hurt if their favourite brands speak out on a topic that put's them at oods.
Apple's move to Swift and away from Objective-C won't be viewed as the no-brainer obvious decision with positive results 10 years from now, at least when both technical and business merits are considered. It will be compared in a similar light to Microsoft's big push to .NET in the early 2000s where they lost their way for more than a decade.
Apple's shift to Swift has caused a lot of software to be rewritten. It's not obvious that the reduction in software correctness bugs which Swift provides offsets the kind of bugs that are the result of rewriting software. Apple's software rewrites have introduced very little tangible benefit to the end customer while creating lots of software gremlins which are very annoying to them. Worse, focussing engineering resources on rewriting existing apps in Swift vs pushing the apps forward in terms of UX and features have allowed competition to catch up and surpass Apple in several areas that do matter to customers.
In hindsight, there will be a lingering question of if it would have been better for Apple to have continued to evolve Objective-C further in ways that could have provided similar technical benefits to Swift's introduction. At best the shift to Swift will have been seen as a necessary evil that exposed Apple's flanks. At worst, it will have been considered an unnecessary technical exercise that may have been started as a way to retain top technical talent, but even failed long-term in that respect.
Agreed, but there's a higher baseline mental overhead due to increased complexity of Swift that Objective-C doesn't have, at least once you get past the weird square bracket syntax. This is mental overhead that distracts from the actual problem needing to be solved.
Swift isn't alone in this respect. I think TypeScript is another example of a language which started out claiming to offer a better experience than Javascript only to become very complex. I'm sure that this added complexity helps some programmers some of the time. But just like CISC was a dead end and all computer chips are essentially RISC-based today, I suspect the pendulum may have swung too far in terms of adding features to some of these developer-friendly languages.
But, it's a contrarian view for a reason. I'm just somebody who fell in love with the simplicity of Objective-C almost 20 years ago, before the iPhone was a thing. So I may be looking back at things with rose tinted glasses.
I couldn’t quite get behind the initial assertion but I agree with this one, that Swift results in more complicated, clever code. Objective-C though had more convoluted, “unsafe” code (think swizzling and nil checks). I think in the end Swift requires less unit testing and is (usually) easier to read and make assumptions which increases velocity, doubly so if you can avoid being fancy (looking at you Generics).
Unfortunately, Swift is a completely different language with the completely different runtime. I wish they took the Java/Kotlin approach and used the same runtime.
However, it is far easier to read and learn than objective-c. All of our new software is written in Swift and we will never go back to objective-c.
I don't have anything against a non-profit CEO paying themselves well if they also pay their employees well. Many do not, with some unspoken culture of employees needing to accept meager compensation so that resources can be directed toward the core mission whose objectives are fluid and progress often difficult to measure.