hundreddaysoff

Naive related question from a crypto n00b that a lazygoogle failed to answer:

I just plotted some Chia. I left my laptop open to do this. Usually I would just put the laptop in power save mode all night.

My understanding is that to actually make any Chia, I would need to wait ~1 year with my one 100GB plot with full-power mode enabled. Vs mostly with the case closed, as it is now, while I do other things.

And this doesn't even account for the rare elements etc needed to fabricate my hard disk.

So, general naive questions:

1. Vs Proof of Work, just how much better are Proof of Space/Proof of Stake/$HDOS_SUPER_AWESOME_PROOF in terms of energy consumption but also other standard measures of environmental impact?

2. How much worse, if at all, are they vs the null hypothesis of "modern" pre-crypto finance?

Has anyone run credible numbers on these things?

Not complaining, just giving y'all some interesting and updated information about my profession's economic situation and wondering why at least the patient end of the deal isn't getting any better. I'm pretty happy with my lot in life.

May be 97% by hourly pay but that implies I can work as many hours as I'd like. But I effectively already work all the hours I can work for various reasons, making my family 80--90th percentile.

Unfortunately, due to the physician oversupply and other forces I described, it's getting very hard to find random doctor jobs anywhere in the country. Just another interesting thing about medicine that is changing.

FWIW, garden-variety West Coast ER doc here. Right now, I'm an independent contractor who makes ~$200/h. In a few months when my small company gets acquired, I'll be a W-2 who for various reasons will make ~$160/h before CA taxes.

So, clearly not starving, and maybe even undeserving to be in the top 10--15% after working just ~24--36h/wk in night shifts. But won't make $$MILLIONS$$ and won't get as much as your average Googler with equivalent career experience to mine, I reckon. And also never made more than ~$50k in my life until my mid-30s.

Doctor pay is facing a whole lot of downward pressure from health insurers, private equity, and other FIRE people recently. Part of the C-suites' strategy has been to open self-funded residencies where they pay their residents much less than they would have to pay the equivalent lifelong salaried PA. This, then, creates an "oversupply" (from docs' perspective) of trained docs and forces pay down.

Personally I have no sentiment for the profession and do see how this could ultimately be good for patients. Unfortunately, in reality the FIRE people seem to just take all that cash for themselves and the patient is left paying the same amount or more than they did 20 years ago (via insurance or whatever you want to call it).

All markets stop eventually. There's no natural law saying they need to go up forever.

Maybe you think they should keep going up, for whatever reason, and you might be right. But that's different than the fact that they increased on average in the past.

This is an interesting theory. It also seems somewhat testable, because if true and Metz's superiors are not tone-deaf they we'd expect they will fire him, no?

I wonder if it was Metz who had the idea for the original more positive-angled story re SSC's COVID info.

I do agree with parent that this is an interesting political hypotheical though. There was so much media focus on Parler for a while and ultimately AWS was exonerated as the good guy in the mainstream narrative.

If Parler had self-hosted, would the potential wrath of the media just have turned to their upstream telco or whoever instead of AWS?

Just curious... in your experience, are most "Silicon Valley darlings" also more apolitical and pragmatic than this CEO's statement seemed to indicate he is? Or do they run the gamut?

Just curious as this was my overall sense when I lived in the Bay Area and it would be consistent with a lot of the corporate "censorship" of various diverse viewpoints that's going on now.

A second collective realization I'd like to see is that the SEC is still using the same faulty Value-at-Risk model they were using before the 2008 crash to estimate clearing funds. They should probably not use this model to do this any more.

See https://www.sec.gov/rules/sro/nscc-an/2018/34-82631.pdf and explanation at https://twitter.com/MKM_Abdul/status/1355310540235579395

Here's a great discussion of that:

https://johntreed.com/blogs/john-t-reed-s-hyperinflation-def...

Great info that stands independent of the author's politics and book-shilling.

How will these borrowed dollars be paid back short of real non-BS US economic expansion, which as I understand it is not presently occurring? If they are not actually paid back but just kicked down the road, are they still effectively borrowed, or are they effectively inflationary?

Not trying to troll, just trying to get a handle on the basics here.

One thing that could cause this loss of faith to occur is if the Chinese are successful with making their new E-currency a medium of exchange for Americans.

My understanding is that the modern monetary theorists have an argument as to why this hyperinflation won't happen in a country with monetary sovereignty. (All the famous historical examples of hyperinflation involve countries that do not control their own currency.)

Damned if I can find a good basic text explaining the MMT argument. Naked Capitalism makes some great allusions but seems like you need to already be on their team to understand their arguments.

Seems pretty important to understand this stuff as we are all modern monetary theorists now whether we like it or not.

This is one reason I changed careers from research to medicine. Now social interaction is built into my job, whether I want it or not, and I'm a much happier man for it. Sometimes all the grind does have a useful endpoint.

I'm an ER doc. A couple of points:

1. If we consult a specialist, that usually means we have no idea what's going on. Sometimes, we do it for "customer service" if a patient really wants the consult and doesn't seem to trust what we're telling them. If we know ahead of time that a specialist is going to say that they don't know the cause of the pain and there's nothing to be done, then in absence of customer service issues we usually don't consult the specialist. I'm sorry you feel you got a raw deal on that.

Why we focus on customer service issues is another interesting topic. It basically comes down to hospital admin, like most other bureaucrats, love customer feedback surveys (Press-Ganey being the most common) and doctors can get in trouble or even lose their jobs if their customer service scores drop low enough.

2. Unfortunately doctors are completely ignorant about the financial aspects of this. Likely the specialist didn't even know you would be charged $450 for his consult. I don't see any good solution to this problem, especially as we're taught in med school that the patient's health is the most important thing and financial aspects should be secondary. Not saying I agree or disagree with this, just that even if a doctor disagrees with this there's no way for them to change the facts.

Ha. The sad reality in our system is that if you choose science as a career, you publish or you perish. P-hacking allows you to publish. Most biologists know they need to publish or perish, but very few know what P-hacking is, although many of them do it implicitly.

Once you are aware of the problem, you have three choices that I could see: (1) roll the dice and legitimately win the lottery of objective truth discovery, (2) consciously be evil in order to feed your family, or (3) escape and go find another flawed system to feed yourself.

So I chose (3) and went to med school.

You're not wrong. But the point of the press release was not to convey understanding. It was likely a PR vehicle for the scientists and thus for the university. The ultimate goal is for all of them to make more money.

Paul Graham's essay "The Submarine" is quite instructive here.

My remembrance is that Campisi and others were thinking about them since at least the early 2000s.

It's irreversible because it's at a greater rate than DNA repair. At least, it is in mammalian non-germ cells.

Also, there isn't just one kind of DNA damage or DNA repair. Different kinds of damage have different orders of badness of effects and have different priors of happening by our cellular machinery.

emergency doctor