apo

The Growth Ponzi scheme may be useful in thinking through housing issues:

https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme

Briefly, most cities are unsustainable in their current configurations due to an unaffordable maintenance cost structure. But they can fake it by adding people/businesses and thereby growing the tax base.

This scheme leads to a growth at any cost attitude resulting in market distortions. Throw in some help from a central bank hellbent on levitating the US stock market by shoveling money into the credit system, and you end up in a bad place.

Portland has decided to stop sprawl by investing in density-increasing infrastructure such as rail lines.

Ironically, the result has been to send property prices through the roof, leaving an overhang of unused land in its wake. Owners of these properties look around them to see high density developments everywhere. What's the value of their own land? It will of course be turned into and equally-high value development, so the price is set accordingly.

Nothing is left in the middle.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/10/23/portland-hous...

What's the solution? The author of Strong Towns puts it this way:

> What if along all these rail corridors and at all of these rail stops, instead of being able to build an eight-story condo unit, all a developer was allowed to build was the next increment of intensity? For most of that area, that would mean single family homes. In that case, what would happen to land prices? They would drop. They would crater, in fact. This would free up an incredible amount of land for cheap, affordable development while also taking a substantial amount of pressure off of the existing single-family neighborhoods.

> I'm not advocating for single family homes. I'm advocating for incremental development. Portland (and Austin and San Marcos and...) are trying to skip increments. They are trying to have a toned body without proper diet and exercise. ...

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/10/30/spiking-a-ris...

> Based on rule it should be 10k to make it interesting for the investors (buy and rent to make some profit). The only reason I didn’t sell it is the hope that prices will go up in x years, but right now I technically subsidizing people living there + waiting on possible rent increase in couple years.

Maybe the market is telling you that SF house prices are wildly overvalued. Maybe the best move is not to wait for ever higher prices, but sell now.

People seem to be programmed to buy high and sell low, making the old truism to do the opposite very difficult in practice. Your description isn't uncommon, but is very characteristic of the physiology of a top.

Along the same lines - Project Orion:

> Project Orion was a study of a spacecraft intended to be directly propelled by a series of explosions of atomic bombs behind the craft (nuclear pulse propulsion). Early versions of this vehicle were proposed to take off from the ground with significant associated nuclear fallout; later versions were presented for use only in space. Six non-nuclear tests were conducted using models.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...

> The office developed gradually over decades and centuries into one of administration of the royal finances, and under Henry VII, the Groom of the Stool became a powerful official involved in setting national fiscal policy, under the "chamber system".

and later:

> ... It is a matter of some debate as to whether the duties involved cleaning the king's anus, but the groom is known to have been responsible for supplying a bowl, water and towels and also for monitoring the king's diet and bowel movements[6] ...

Freud had some fascinating ideas on the connection between money and defecation:

> ... In reality, wherever archaic modes of thought have predominated or persist... money is brought into the most intimate relationship with dirt. We know that the gold which the devil gives his paramours turns into excrement after his departure ...

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/about-money/brown-gold

It appears the English monarchy were tapping into something primal by linking the office of royal defecation helper with finance.

> Over the past year, Malamud has — without asking publishers — teamed up with Indian researchers to build a gigantic store of text and images extracted from 73 million journal articles dating from 1847 up to the present day.

Maybe I missed it, but the article doesn't seem to explain exactly how Malamud's group compiled its database.

Throttling is a major problem with the naive approach of throwing wget on a publisher site. The publisher detects a bot on its network downloading everything in sight and either slows data transfer to a trickle or just shuts down access to it.

The publishers may not win on copyright, but they may try to make a case based on criminality if Malamud's team actively took steps to circumvent throttling and defeat the defenses of the hosting sites. Especially if the publisher knows what to look for in its logs.

Here are the steps to reproduce the attack from what I gather:

1. Find a vulnerable site. The author picked Revolut, a 3-year old, well-funded fintech startup. Others might be found at https://www.openbugbounty.org.

2. Inject the script. The author did so by tacking a URL parameter containing script content to a link he obtained from the Revolut site.

3. Preview the attack with Google's Web Rendering Service, which apparently uses the same version of Chrome used by Googlebot.

4. Submit the link to Googlebot for crawling.

5. View the cached page from the Google results page.

> I reported this to Google in November 2018, but after 5 months they had made no headway on the issue (citing internal communication difficulties), and therefore I’m publishing details such that site owners and companies can defend their own sites from this sort of attack. Google have now told me they do not have immediate plans to remedy this.

Translation: Google declares open season on this attack.

That flaw is also the root of the "Innovator's Dilemma." The idea is that "best" business practices and especially concern over lower margins and smaller markets, prevent companies from moving downmarket, leaving a gaping hole for an upstart to gain a foothold and eventually mount a fatal attack from the bottom.

> The Siwa Oasis (Arabic: واحة سيوة‎, Wāḥat Sīwah, IPA: [ˈwæːħet ˈsiːwæ]; Coptic: (ϯ)ϣⲉϣⲁⲙⲟⲩ (Di)Şeşamu; Berber languages: Isiwan, ⵉⵙⵉⵡⴰⵏ ) is an urban oasis in Egypt between the Qattara Depression and the Great Sand Sea in the Western Desert, nearly 50 km (30 mi) east of the Libyan border, and 560 km (348 mi) from Cairo.[1][2][3]

Oddly enough, there was a plan to flood the Qattara Depression with Mediterranean seawater to bring rain to the Sahara. It involved the use of hydrogen bombs:

> In the 1970s and early 1980s, several proposals to flood the area were made by Friedrich Bassler and the Joint Venture Qattara, a group of mainly German companies. They wanted to make use of peaceful nuclear explosions to construct a tunnel, drastically reducing construction costs compared to conventional methods. This project proposed to use 213 H-bombs, with yields of one to 1.5 megatons, detonated at depths of 100 to 500 metres (330 to 1,640 ft). That fitted within the Atoms for Peace program proposed by US President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953. The Egyptian government turned down the idea.[22]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression

Have you seen AssemblyScript, Poetry, Walt, and Speedy:

https://github.com/AssemblyScript/assemblyscript

https://github.com/FantasyInternet/poetry

https://github.com/ballercat/walt

https://github.com/MichaReiser/speedy.js

Unlike Rust, which has excellent support for wasm output but wasn't created with wasm in mind, the above languages appear to have been created specifically with wasm as the native compile target.

Also, there's an excellent curated list of languages that compile to wasm:

https://github.com/appcypher/awesome-wasm-langs

> In Europe, there are fears that the continent is following the path of Japan’s so-called lost decade, where policy makers struggled to revive anemic growth and inflation. ...

That decade was the 1990s, and Japan has never managed to stimulate significant consumer inflation since, despite massive deficit spending and outright publicly-announced purchases of stocks by the central bank.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan)

One question this article doesn't address is how long this funhouse hall of mirrors continues.

Judging by worldwide investment appetite for negative-yielding, long dated bonds, and the example from Japan and now Europe, the answer seems to be much longer than what might seem reasonable today.

The real crisis is that policymakers in Washington are hellbent on pursuing two diametrically opposite housing/real estate goals:

1. House prices will increase to generate appreciation (through 5:1 or more leverage) that households can tap into to finance consumption. Mortgage rates will be kept as low as possible through programs like QEX and abandonment of QT. Tax code will be kept in a state that allows at least the more extravagant spenders to claim a mortgage deduction on income taxes, stimulating home buying.

2. House prices will be kept low so that new families can afford to buy a house. Zoning, highway construction subsidies, and suburbanization tax giveaways will keep the dream of a standalone house alive as long as possible, unsustainable economics be damned.

It should be obvious, but house prices that routinely outstrip consumer inflation are incompatible with affordability.

The model Elsevier operates on is under attack from a number of sides. In addition to UC, there is Plan S:

> The plan requires scientists and researchers who benefit from state-funded research organisations and institutions to publish their work in open repositories or in journals that are available to all by 2021.[4] The "S" stands for "shock".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S

The plan is backed by a wide range of European groups.

Elsevier may have a right to license its content as it sees fit, but the market as turned against its business model. The company now must decide whether to go down fighting or acknowledge the inevitable.

An of course, there's the ever present Sci-Hub, which presents a comprehensive selection of research papers far better than Elsevier ever did - and at no cost to the reader.

Elsevier owns copyrighted material, which it licenses to individuals and institutions for a fee. The fee is negotiated on a case-by-case basis, which is no different than any other intellectual property such as movies, music, books, or software.

If a customer is unable or unwilling to pay the prevailing rate, then no access will be granted.

The argument that Elsevier uses unpaid academic labor and therefore should fall under some other system is a red herring. Authors signed over their copyright to Elsevier, and like any other copyright holder Elsevier can license its property toward any legal purpose that advances its business interests.

> Founder and operator of defunct bitcoin exchange Bitfunder gets 14 months jail time for lying to regulators about the loss of more than 6,000 bitcoins.

In the early days, it was common to see "bitcoin" used as a mass noun - without the plural. For example: "He lost 6,000 bitcoin." More recent usage seems to have switched to the countable noun version (e.g.: "He lost 6,000 bitcoins.").

I speculate that countable noun usage causes problems when users try to reason about how Bitcoin transactions work. Many think of Bitcoin as an account system, where a transaction debits from one account and credits to another account.

Not true.

A bitcoin transaction is much more like giving another user a specific mass of metal in the form of one or more ingots, each one measured to the nearest microgram. Only, this is done by melting/recasting enough metal on hand into one more more new ingots with some combination of masses exactly equal to the the asking price.

The merchant then can combine or split the ingots she receives in the same to make a purchase later. There is no concept of an "account," only splittable and combinable pieces of metal with masses measured to the nearest microgram.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_noun

> In English (and in many other languages), there is a tendency for nouns referring to liquids (water, juice), powders (sugar, sand), or substances (metal, wood) to be used in mass syntax, and for nouns referring to objects or people to be count nouns. ...

Worse still, the use of the countable noun "bitcoins" encourages two misconceptions:

- a full bitcoin must be transacted because the countable noun version conjures and integral entity

- 21 million bitcoin(s) is too few to work as a world currency (no division)

Another currency with confusion around mass/countable noun status is the euro:

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/13551/€10-ten-eu...

(long story short, both forms are used)

I would argue that the case for mass noun usage in Bitcoin is even stronger than for the euro, given the way it neatly maps as a real-world analogy to the underlying protocol.

The path to profitability seems to flow through lowering costs - especially depreciation:

> Bird’s largest cost per ride is depreciation, or the decline in value of its scooters. Depreciation, as calculated by the company, is a four-week trailing figure taking the total depreciation expense for that time and dividing it by the total number of rides, a person familiar with the matter said. Currently, that figure ranges from $0.94 to $1.17 per ride, or about a quarter of revenue for each ride, Bird says. ...

These numbers appear to apply to Bird Zero and Bird One, not the older scooters which presumably have even higher depreciations.

The article doesn't appear to break this down further, but it seems a big part of depreciation might be loss/theft/vandalism. That's unlikely to decline because better quality scooters are put into service. If anything, it seems the move to more robust (and expensive) platforms might make the scooters even more attractive to thieves.

For those who think this study says "all clear" for artificial sweeteners:

> Null results observed in this study regarding the association between artificially sweetened beverages and the risk of cancer does not support the hypothesis of an adverse effect of artificial sweeteners. However, caution is needed in interpreting this finding because statistical power might have been limited to investigate this association owing to the relatively low level of consumption in this population study (median=6.9 mL/d). Some experimental studies suggest a possible carcinogenic effect for some artificial sweeteners, but this point is debated.767778 In order to evaluate accurately these associations in humans, it will be necessary to distinguish the different types of artificial sweeteners (eg, aspartame, sucralose, acesulfam K), and also to take into account all dietary sources for these additives (eg, yogurts, candies) and not only artificially sweetened beverages.

It should be pointed out that the label "artificial sweetener" encompasses a wide variety of chemical entities, each of which can be expected to have its own risk profile.

For comparison:

> Median daily consumption of sugary drinks was greater in men than in women (90.3 mL v 74.6 mL, respectively; P<0.001, not tabulated).

And later (although the numbers seem to have been reversed):

> However, the median consumption of sugary drinks was lower in menopausal (88.2 mL/d) compared with premenopausal (43.2 mL/d) women.

So, the median volume of consumption was about 10:1 favoring sugar in this study.

> ... it’s simply impossible to compete making better goods and services if your competitor can lose money indefinitely.

This is yet another consequence of the Federal Reserve's forever bailout of the US stock market: a repeatable business model in which a company can operate at a loss indefinitely while it furiously tries to build an uncrossable moat around itself.

The easiest way to think more clearly is the one it seems is least tried: a good night's sleep. The second easiest: periodic disengagement from phones, computers, and people.

Stimulants such as the ones discussed in the article interfere with that.

Great idea as a way to benefit readers and the author of the post.

The first ~half of the book (prehistory) was much better than the second. Even then, I recall the author missing some rather significant points.

For example, the hypothesis that megafauna die-offs were related to the appearance of humans minimized one of the biggest, non-human contributors - the recession of glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age (Pleistocene). The accompanying environmental dislocation is enough on its own to explain the extinction, but you'll find almost nothing about it in the book.

It's almost certainly no coincidence that the early phases of what we think of as civilization begin to appear very soon after the end of the last ice age. Yet the author seems to blithely skip over that looming detail as well.

The question of where life originated will have no good answer until we figure out how to create life from basic components. We still don't know how to do that yet.

Yes, Urey and Miller showed that you could get simple organic molecules by passing an electric charge through gasses thought to be present around the early Earth.

But going from low molecular weight inputs to life is a vastly different problem. You could think of it as the most complicated bootstrapping problem in the universe.

Nobody has managed to do it in the lab, either. What can't be built from scratch can't be understood very well, and therein lies the problem.

If we had a stepwise procedure for building a self-replicating, self-feeding organism of any level of complexity from base components, we would know exactly what to look for.

Until then, the idea of sending a DNA amplifier to Mars isn't a bad fallback position.

> I come from an environment where, if you see a snake, you kill it. At GM, if you see a snake, the first thing you do is go hire a consultant on snakes. Then you get a committee on snakes, and then you discuss it for a couple of years. The most likely course of action is — nothing. You figure, the snake hasn't bitten anybody yet, so you just let it crawl around on the factory floor. We need to build an environment where the first guy who sees the snake kills it.

I can't help but read this quote in Ross Perot's voice. Hilarious and illuminating at the same time.

Quantitative easing is a powerful drug. During the 2008 crisis, most observers didn't even seriously consider the possibility that the Fed could buy long-term treasuries and mortgage securities. Those who did vastly underestimated the scale on which the Fed would eventually do so.

But QE is also highly addictive. The next downturn will most likely take place within the next 18 months. It's going to catch a lot of dumb money flat-footed, and that means big declines in the stock market - something that has now become simply not acceptable politically.

There's one more piece of candy in the jar though: negative interest rates.

Where the Fed decides to go with short term rates isn't really that important anymore. Far more important is how it begins to lay the groundwork for negative rates.

Because negative interest rates will transform the grossly distorted world economy into something completely unrecognizable.

> And I think he’s definitely brilliant enough to do the work.

It's part of the scam. Bamboozle the target with technobabble. Target lacks the skills to independently verify the claim or even recognize the vocabulary is just plain wrong.

The technical lack of understanding has been documented repeatedly and in depth. Still, people insist in heaping misplaced praise on this huckster's intellect.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/op-ed-how-many-wrongs-m...

Not only does Wright's temperament not match Satoshi's, but Satoshi actually knew what he was talking about.

The word "democracy" has apparently changed its meaning in the last few hundred years. A few sources (whose titles I can't recall) state that at the time of the founding of the US, "democracy" meant something more akin to "mob rule."

In other words, not something to embrace, but something to fear. Not a constitutionally-organized experiment in self-determination, but the French Revolution (something that many founders saw as a cautionary tale).

The deep mistrust in direct democracy is on full display in the Constitution itself. Only 1/3 of the Senate is ever up for election at one time. The framers were deeply worried about a "throw the bums out" revolt.

The Electoral College is another example. The framers didn't want a popularity contest that elected a lowbrow pandering to the the crowd's most base instincts. They wanted someone who could appeal to the elite members of the College and who shared their values.

Worth considering:

> In The Great Illusion, Angell's primary thesis was, in the words of historian James Joll, that "the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous."[3] For that reason, a general European war was very unlikely to start, and if it did, it would not last long.[4] He argued that war was economically and socially irrational[5] and that war between industrial countries was futile because conquest did not pay. J. D. B. Miller writes: "The 'Great Illusion' was that nations gained by armed confrontation, militarism, war, or conquest."[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion

> Contemporary mass surveillance relies upon annual presidential executive orders declaring a continued State of National Emergency, first signed by George W. Bush on September 14, 2001 and then continued on an annual basis by President Barack Obama,[3] and upon several subsequent national security Acts including the USA PATRIOT Act and FISA Amendment Act's PRISM surveillance program.

Mass surveillance is a bipartisan effort. Electing a Democrat to the White House is very unlikely to change this situation. The Obama administration went above and beyond any prior presidency in its aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers to these unconstitutional activities.

FWIW, the language in Fourth Amendment is pretty clear:

> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

What's happening now is the very antithesis of probably cause. And everyone is the target.

The worst part of all is that zero credible evidence has been presented that a single terrorist attack has been prevented by mass surveillance.

This reminds me of the most surprising scene in Mad Men.

The family has just driven the family car into a beautiful spot for a picnic. Wife remarks to husband how beautiful the spot is. Husband says "it's perfect."

Shortly after that they get ready to leave. The blanket is strewn with beer cans and other trash. With a flick of the wrist, husband ejects the trash into the surrounding landscape and wads up the blanket.

Trash problem solved, apparently.

> Radiotrophic fungi were discovered in 1991 growing inside and around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.[1]

The original study is open access and is worth reading. Here's an interesting little review:

> The literature already contains some indirect evidence for the notion that radiation can enhance the growth of melanized microorganisms. For example, the melanotic fungus C. cladosporioides manifests radiotropism by growing in the direction of radioactive particles and this organism has become widely distributed in the areas surrounding Chernobyl since the nuclear accident in 1986 [7]. Both in the laboratory and in the field several other species of melanized fungi grew towards soil particles contaminated with different radionuclides, gradually engulfing and destroying those particles [35], [36]. In addition, there are recent reports that certain life forms can utilize non-conventional forms of energy - microbes in geothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean can harvest thermal radiation as an energy source [37] while some microorganisms living in mines exploit energy from radiolysis of water [38]. On the basis of these precedents and the results of this study we cautiously suggest that the ability of melanin to capture electromagnetic radiation combined with its remarkable oxidation-reduction properties may confer upon melanotic organisms the ability to harness radiation for metabolic energy. The enhanced growth of melanotic fungi in conditions of radiation fluxes suggests the need for additional investigation to ascertain the mechanism for this effect.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1866175/

In particular the part about growing towards contaminated particles, "engulfing and destroying" them, seems like a finding with enormous practical potential.

This sounds lees like reverse engineering and more like decompiling.

> The grim paradox of this law of software is that you should probably be using the tool that you hate the most. You hate it because you know the most about it.

The presentation talks about "innovation" tokens. You only get so many to spend.

There are also pain tokens. And you must spend a threshold of them to understand the quoted statement. It's not fun, but you will be enlightened.