jkhdigital

Not a lot of evidence that economic incentives change birthrates, unless they are completely over the top like Hungary’s lifetime income tax exemption for women who become mothers before 30. But that’s only been in effect for a few years so the verdict is still out.

This is a question that statistics can answer. I don’t have the data myself but I’ve seen one analysis that pins most of the drop in birthrates to childlessness rather than fewer children per mother. That is, among women who become mothers, the average number of children is relatively stable over time. But the proportion of women who never have a child is rising rapidly.

I’ll add that the drop in birthrates is not something that has persisted for generations—as recently as 1950 Japan had a fertility rate over 3.

I realized that I needed to know way more about HTTP than I wanted to when trying to write a bunch of API wrappers for crypto exchanges. There’s just… a lot of failure modes and the application needs to respond differently to each. Some failures just need a quick retry while others must be pushed all the way back to a client to decide what to do.

Came here to say this as well! Tesla was my library of choice for setting up dozens of crypto exchange API wrappers while minimizing the repeated boilerplate for each.

Hadn’t heard that list of “symptoms” before but… I guess that means I am in a midlife crisis at 39.

Right as I clicked the link, I thought to myself “I bet it’s smartphones.”

Standardized testing is the benchmark for efficient signaling. Of course, it is in a college’s financial interest to insist that their “branded” signal is much more valuable, since a test doesn’t care how you studied for it.

A personal anecdote on this point: I enlisted in the US Navy after failing out of UIUC because I preferred to smoke weed and play video games instead of going to class. While on active duty I resumed my studies with online classes at military-friendly Strayer University, which accepted CLEP exams as credit for many lower level courses. I ended up taking like 8 different exams to take care of all my general requirements like sociology and Western civilization, each of which cost $0 thanks to military reimbursement.

Some good points here, although frankly academic rigor has fallen even further out of favor in the five years since Caplan’s article so that would probably strengthen his case.

Painting higher education with such a broad brush is guaranteed to create an intractable debate. There are students for whom college is a necessary and beneficial step towards a successful career, and students for whom college becomes an albatross of debt with little tangible benefit. Identifying the conditions which give rise to the worst-case outcomes seems like a more worthwhile course of inquiry.

OKX used to be quite sketchy but managed to hang around long enough to bring the grown-ups in. I was arbitraging across like 8 exchanges back in 2018 and OKEx definitely gave me the most pause. But, they had minimal verification requirements and leveraged spot trading which opened up a lot of creative trades so I couldn’t resist.

Amen. This is why I use my turn signal when changing lanes every. single. time. Over 20 years and counting without an accident.

It would be a better article without the anti-capitalist ranting. Capitalism won, because it is the only economic system compatible with individual rights. We can disagree about the level of taxation, redistribution, regulation, etc. but we’re not getting rid of free markets and private property rights. I wish we had a more precise set of terminology here. Maybe corporatism is a good description of what the author is opposed to?

The entire DDG1000 program was a boondoggle. An active-duty friend of mine who is well-connected in naval strategy circles keeps repeating that the Navy won’t pull its head out of its ass until a few large hulls end up at the bottom of the South China Sea.

Well this was a fun little trip down memory lane for a former US Navy calibration technician :-)

There is no rigorous, objective methodology to account for externalities. It’s a bit like the ideal thermodynamic “closed system” which cannot actually be realized—it is simply not possible to draw a clean line between the various costs of economic activity and assign them to responsible parties because the economic activity itself is embedded in a cyclical environment.

My point is that we should not delude ourselves into thinking that we can arrive at “rational” decisions about resource use by reducing everything to accounting.

Politics and economics are virtually inseparable. There’s a reason the field of economics used to be called “political economy”.

Externalities are the activists’ favorite technical-sounding economic concept because they introduce a fudge factor into every single economic process that can be abused to support almost any conclusion.

The article essentially claims that nearly all major industries would be unprofitable is forced to pay their externalities. Great! Let’s shut it all down, let everyone gradually die off and then we’ll finally reach the sustainable utopia these people seek.

I think Nassim Taleb does a good job of identifying the core issue, which is “skin in the game”. A key problem with regulation is that it diffuses responsibility, in the sense that an engineer adhering to some regulatory scheme is partially absolved of personal responsibility for the outcome as long as they check the regulatory boxes. This point is raised by Brunel as well.

In other words, the harm of regulation is not that it trades progress for safety, but that it stifles both. See also Frederic Bastiat, The Seen and the Unseen.

The modern counterargument might be that engineered systems have become so dense and complex, and in some cases capable of catastrophic consequences for failure, that we simply can’t afford to let practitioners figure it out on their own.

Or performing gain-of-function research on pathogens.

Engineers, at least at that point in history, paid the consequences of their failures. It’s not about competence, it’s about “skin in the game”. For further reading, Nassim Taleb wrote a whole book on this idea.

> These agents don't eat because they need to, they eat because literary tradition suggests they ought to.

Exactly, you're always going to get weird deviations from authentic human behavior if you don't also simulate the human body and everything that comes with it. I'd argue that "qualia" fall into this bucket as well.

We don’t have a lot of good history on this, but there’s basically only one instance of such a deep and lasting depression and it occurred after central banking was established, not before.

We shouldn’t conflate money with payment systems. Like 90% of my daily expenses are through a credit card. The unit of account for these transactions is my local currency (happens to be JPY) but yen is not being exchanged. What happens is that I give an IOU to the bank and the bank gives an IOU to the merchant. These IOUs are settled on a recurring basis, at which point actual money might be involved.

In the strict sense only physical banknotes, coins, and reserves at the Fed are money. Everything else involves a counterparty and some level of trusted intermediation. If there is ever a significant amount of economic activity that is priced and settled in Bitcoin, we can be sure that most of it will be through trusted intermediaries just like every other currency.

I’d say this is the high school textbook version of the story. Money is simply the “best” medium of exchange in a given context. Stable value and fungibility (“unit of account”) are attributes that make something better at this role, because it becomes suitable for a wider range of transactions across time and scale. Ludwig von Mises has a lot more to say about this.

No, this isn’t a mark-to-market loss, as the article clearly states—these are operating losses, literally more cash flowing out than flowing in. This is because the Fed is trying to raise short-term interest rates, and to do this effectively it has to be willing to pay out its own interest target. These interest payments now exceed the interest it receives on its portfolio of government bonds and mortgage-backed securities. If this goes on for long enough then the Fed’s equity will become negative.

The headline is a simple statement of fact. And I think the article does a reasonably good job of stating facts without too much speculation about the potential consequences. I think most educated adults would agree that the facts being reported here are indeed newsworthy, especially considering all the other things that manage to make the editorial cut.

There's plenty of garbage on that site but their "how-the-sausage-is-made" reporting on the financial system is second to none. I recall reading ZH articles about this back in March 2021 when the SLR relaxation ended and that analysis is still spot-on two years later.

The article mentions the real core of the issue, but doesn’t make it clear that it is in fact the core: SLR (a banking regulation). SLR effectively requires banks to raise capital along with deposits. So if you flood the banking system with cash through fiscal policy, they can’t just accept all those deposits and leave them parked in their Fed reserve account. If they could, then the Fed wouldn’t need reverse repo—it could just pay interest on reserves to set a floor on interbank lending rates.

The article explains it pretty well, but it’s hard to understand which are the important bits without having done a lot of background research.

The main idea is that bank regulation and fiscal/monetary policy are often at odds with one another. The article mentions the SLR, which is supposed to reduce systemic risk by enforcing minimum capital requirements. Importantly, deposits are part of the denominator—they are liabilities of the bank. So flooding the banking system with cash (e.g. pandemic relief) will force banks to raise capital to maintain compliance with SLR.

The Fed could see this coming and relaxed the SLR requirements at first, but this temporary measure expired in March 2021 and within a matter of months the Fed’s reverse repo had swelled to nearly $2T. Reverse repo can be complicated to explain but basically it is the Fed’s version of an overnight money market fund—we take your cash and give you highly liquid securities and then buy them back at a slight premium tomorrow, so you earn a return for the risk of holding those securities overnight.

To reiterate, the only reason this facility exists is because banking regulations punish banks for holding excess deposits. If that was not the case, then the Fed could just pay interest directly on reserves to set a floor on interbank lending rates.

“The scheme was a seemingly innocuous change to the financial system’s plumbing that may, just under a decade later, be having a profoundly destabilising impact on banks.”

Innocuous only to the fools at the Fed, I suppose. Outlets like ZeroHedge have been watching this for years, carefully documenting the transformation of the RRP facility from an “emergency” stabilization measure into a deposit roach motel.

Preach! Need more comments like this—about the cool new shit that will happen in the real world thanks to technological advancement. A very Musk-ian point of view.

Real talk though, we need another frontier to give (now globalized) human society something to look forward to. Colonization of space is pretty much the only place to go, and fortunately it doesn’t carry the moral baggage of displacing other life forms (at least as far as we know).