lebuffon

That is what what we do now. Controlled inflation by central banks is really controlled reduction of the value of the currency. ~2% per year is the target. The USA gets a free pass at the moment because USD is "the" reserve currency. If/when that changes we might get a lesson in hyper-inflation. :(

That's why the wealthy don't hold much cash. (unless they see a crash coming)

One difference that I notice that no one has mentioned yet is that Americans like to "go ahead" and do something.

Example: "So now I'm gonna go ahead and put the cake in the oven"

This is just an observation but the Australian and some British pronunciations of "no" bear an interesting similarity to the sound of "nij" (no) in some Dutch dialects.

Perhaps the have a common source? Old Saxon?

Here is more background about the nature of the pivots at WU.

WU had already pivoted once in the 1970s to become a satellite communication company being one of the first companies to have five birds in orbit. (Westar series)

Sometime around 1980(?) things were so bad they went into chapter 11, bankruptcy protection. At a senior executive meeting the reports were all bad. A guy named Art Tarini spoke up and said "What about money transfer? Can't we do something with that?" The reply was something like "Art if you think you can help give it a try"

Art setup a call centre and had a small sales force to sign up agents in small stores in the north east side of the USA as money transfer locations and created paper forms to record the transaction details. All agent transactions were sent over the telephone.

They were scheduled to be in bankruptcy court at the end of the year, but the new money transfer business was making so much money they cancelled it.

Told to me by Art Tarini in 2001. (Paraphrased from memory)

Later on (1990?) a computer terminal was created with Turbo C, communicating over modems to a back office system. In 1989 when US law changed to allowed transfers to other countries somebody asked "I wonder if Mexicans in the USA would want to send money home?" A new platform was created to handle foreign exchange and the rest is history.

Telegraph service was shutdown in 2006. It was still doing ~$10M per year in revenue then. Money transfers were about $4B.

IMHO Forth has a longer learning curve than other languages and requires a significant mental model shift if you are use to conventional languages. It does not suit everyone. It seems more like learning a new human language with a large number of words.

Chuck Moore created Forth to improves his productivity versus conventional tools and there is some anecdotal evidence that it worked for him and those that worked with him, particularly where direct hardware control on new hardware could be interrogated and validated via the interpreter rather than an Edit/Assemble/Link/Test loop.

In many religious traditions it is in the practices that you experience the divine. In many religious traditions it is what you do, not what you believe that matters. These concepts are very foreign if you come from a reform era Christian tradition where Paul's ideas have precedence.

I put the wide range of religion understanding in my "God has a sense of humour" folder. (I infer from that, that we should too) :)

These attitudes come in cycles in the Roman church. There was a 50 year period of liberal thinking. The current has era has swung back to the conservative. When an organization has a 1600 year life span you can expect things like this. Just wait a while...

"Two nations separated by a common language"

                          Winston Churchill

Could we say that they are re-inventing the human mind architecture by enhancing "fluid intelligence" with "crystallized intelligence".

As humans age we apparently lose the former but compensate with the latter as best we can.

This seems to be a thing now. Overt rejection of the authority of laws. Makes me wonder how long a civilization can continue if that attitude is widespread.

Where does this obsession with the external come from. Russia has the largest national landmass yet still they look outwards despite the many improvements that they could make internally. It's bizarre to me.

If you want to use heat for storage liquid metal batteries might be better. (?)(Ambri) From what I understand they have ~80% round-trip efficiency, functionally unlimited lifespan and no moving parts required. Electrons in/Electrons out.

Interesting that Americans commonly say "The fourth of July". Is that a carry over from 1700's American parlance?

For happiness:

"Do more, want less"

            Dali Lama

It has merits for sure. It is higher level out of the box. Forth is low level by design for hardware level coding.

However as the paragraph states, both begin at a level X but both do not stay at that level in the hands of one who understands how to use them. When used as designed, one does not program in these languages. You program in the language you create to solve the problem at hand.

An example at the extreme end of this idea is CoSY (Armstrong), an APL-like language written in Forth. A small example is a useable OOP extension written in ten lines. (Paysan)

My un-spoken point was that two independent language writers (McCarthy & Moore) found that similar ideas, expressed in that paragraph, implemented in radically different ways, improved their coding productivity.

It begs the question is their a lesson here for programming? It could be that IRL these concepts just don't work well or that they only suite a small subset of real world problems or a small subset of human brains, but it makes me wonder...

I find it interesting that I can re-write this paragraph from the article and replace Lisp with Forth and it is still true.

"Forth takes a far different and far more pragmatic approach. The Forth designers do not assume what syntax, features or functions will be necessary in the future. The developers of Forth give you the full powers that they had to develop the language. You can develop macros for dynamically generating code. Without going into depth about how this mechanism works, a feat that was possible in Forth was the implementation of an object oriented programming system without having to change the compiler!"

It still seems to be a challenge to use programmable languages for day-to-day work despite how much fun they make programming for the programmer

I am referring to this feature:

4.4.4 Architectural features <snip> The NC4016 allows combining nonconflicting sequential operations into the same instruction. For example, a value can be fetched from memory and added to the top stack element using the sequence @ + in a Forth program. These operations can be combined into a single instruction on the NC4016.

Probably worth noting that many of these applications used the Harris RTX2010 CPU. This was based on Charles Moore's (inventor of Forth language) work on two-stack CPU design ie: CPUs based on the Forth VM architecture. These machines built by Harris were rad-hardened silicon on sapphire and so were deemed good for space applications.

The CPU could run 12 MIPS with a 10 MHZ clock while having no pipeline. Rather instructions were bit encoded in a single memory cell so some could be executed in parallel.

Single cycle sub-routine call with zero overhead for return from sub-routine. Two cycle interrupt. (if memory serves me well) Pretty cool.

Yes, especially in a disease with as much as 40% asymptomatic infections.

So if we correct by that 40% factor the USA goes to 1% death rate or roughly 10X influenza.

Mexico becomes 4.5%. Not insignificant.

This whole area might fall into the Sam Clemens quote: "There are lies, damned lies and statistics"

Since 30 to 40 percent of humans experience no illness with this thing the denominator can be quite different depending on what you use for it. Notwithstanding that...

John's Hopkins Website https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/bda759474...

USA

Total Cases Total Deaths

44,318,179 712,975 1.6%

This is with oxygen support and whatever treatments have been used.

In Mexico where health care seems harder to access

Total Cases Total Deaths

3,720,545 281,958 ~7.6%

So IF you get sick and you don't have modern medicine it's a serious disease.

IF you are one of the lucky 30..40% it's a piece of cake. Flip a coin.

So they are doing banking, lending deposits at interest, without any regulation or oversight.

I think we know from history how that story ends.

MPesa, Kenya

Yes but beyond transaction speed there is the fact that people need/want the money immediately in a form that they can spend.

These are not wealthy people. The remittance is for real goods. The last mile with money is "can I buy stuff now". Some African countries are moving fast in this area with mobile wallets but it has been slow generally. Maybe this decade...

Not true anymore. Moneygram and Ria Envia have been growing very fast to Latin America and there are numerous smaller firms stealing market share in the digital send space.

The actual take on remittances has been falling for 20 years.

Western Union struggles to maintain a "premium" price now due to competition.

The actual take on an average transaction from USA to El Salvador is way lower because El Salvador uses USD. So the only way to make money is on the Fee. (no foreign exchange revenue)

If you send $50, yes the take is high because there is a bottom to the price. But the average sender sends $200..$300 and cost, as a percentage, drops rapidly with the amount sent.

Many people thought bitcoin would destroy the remittance industry 10 years ago. It did not. People need money they can spend not bits in an exchange. Solve that last mile like Kenya did and maybe...

I don't think bitcoin can handle the transaction volume for the global remittance industry on the person to person scale for "money in minutes" service. It's a better fit for bulk transfers to pay the agents in foreign countries.

I can't prove this but I suspect this comparison is reflecting the relative price of goods and services which is a hyper-competitive market in the USA.

Other differences between the USA 20th percentile group and the Euro 50th percentile group is that one of them has healthcare and a longer lifespan.

Interesting. Looks like Forth. :-)

The difficulty I would think, is determining what is the real activity and what is just a side-effect.

For example old CRTs gave off RF signals that could be decoded to read the contents of the screen but the CRT display was not designed to be a radio transmitter.

"A real brain can and likely does have self stimulating loops"

This is what I understand causes epilepsy. At least when they are out of control.

So did Russell Peters (comedian)

"In the future there's gonna be a little brown in everybody"