Entirely possible, but defaults tend to be higher when debt is in a currency that cannot be debased, for somewhat obvious reasons.
2,063 karma · joined June 28, 2016
Countries can and do issue public debt in other currencies. If we all used gold or bitcoin, there’s no reason to think public debt would be lower. But the obligation to pay it back would, in a sense, be harder to dodge.
It’s worth noting, as an aside, that the trend line on cost of servicing public debt in the US has been downward (though I would expect this to change): https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/us-debt-has-increa....
For many (though certainly not all) of the investors victimized by Holmes, I'm not terribly sympathetic. As implied by "qualified investor", if you write such a big check, it's sort of up to you to do the homework.
I do have some sympathy for people who got Theranos tests and were mislead about their efficacy, but on the charges of defrauding patients Holmes was found not guilty! (Similarly, I have some sympathy for employees who went to work at Theranos and ended up bullied and threatened by the company, as with Tyler Schultz, but they aren't represented by any of the criminal charges!)
Maybe the takeaway is that criminals (and humans) aren't entirely rational, and 65 years is just a great "headline" for deterrence. But framing this as about deterring rational criminals strikes me as then putting a high burden of proof on the argument for 65 vs 10.
This is also true if you look at average prices vs average income (though that’s a really crude metric): https://www.worlddata.info/cost-of-living.php.
Houses are larger, on average, in the US, but I’m not sure that’s a meaningful comparison; houses tend to be larger in New Jersey than in New York City, but I’d rather live in NYC. ;)
It is true that net income after taxes and transfers is higher in the US (https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/income/), but it’s important to look at it after taxes and (market value of) public services (“transfers”), not merely after-tax; in many EU countries taxes include the cost of health care, whereas in the US healthcare is largely employer-provided and costs ~2x and is half as good (measured by outcomes).
All that is to say it’s complicated. The US is by most measures richer than EU countries, and prices are generally commensurately higher.
But I do think it’s strange to conclude from this that the EU is seeing “the death of the middle class”; the metric I most associate with that is income or wealth inequality—a shrinking middle relative to the rich and poor—and by common metrics like GINI or top percentile share of wealth (or by percentage of the population living in poverty: https://www.statista.com/statistics/233910/poverty-rates-in-...), the US tends to do substantially worse than the EU states.
That value judgment may look a lot like an ad hominem, but it’s perfectly rational—for example, in this case, the question is, should I take the time to seriously engage with a book written by a man who claims vaccines cause autism, led a group that opposed flouridation of drinking water, claimed that 5G “damages DNA” and is being installed to facilitate “mass surveillance”, and, oh, by the way, is a master falconer? (Nothing wrong with that, but I find it hilarious.)
Obviously the answer is no. There are a lot of interesting, well-founded books on science that I want to read, and I just don’t have time to read a book by a master falconer, let alone engage meaningfully with it online. Maybe the earth is flat, and I’m just living with my head in the sand. Oh well?
While it seems highly likely that at least some “minimally conscious” patients do, in fact, have much greater interior consciousness than we might have thought, I also think that these stories tend to underemphasize the potentially fragmentary nature of consciousness.
A patient who is able to respond to commands to “visualize playing tennis” may be fully and completely conscious, with only a motor defect—or they might be much less conscious than that, but nonetheless able to process spoken commands and trigger relevant neural activity in response. From the few cases I’ve read, it seems like the bandwidth (so to speak) of the “imagine this if yes, that if no” method of communicating via fMRI is far too limited to draw conclusions about exactly what the interior experience of the patient is.
Not to say this research isn’t interesting. It’s fascinating. But I do sometimes think it makes the same sort of mistakes Benjamin Libet famously did, in making assumptions about the indivisibility of consciousness.
Yet broken down more narrowly, the same paper suggests 0.01% for 25 year olds, which would seem to still strongly support vaccinations for university students.
As I've noted elsewhere, the comparison is, of course, more complicated: policymakers should also consider the effect of vaccinations on community spread, since other age strata are substantially more vulnerable, as well as the non-mortality cost of infection (as economists like to frame it, in QALYs, or in terms of lost working days).
But even excluding all of that, your implication that vaccination makes one less safe is just not born out by the data you linked to.
As an aside, and to your parent comment: I do think it makes a lot more sense for these booster vaccines to be distributed to people in countries who have not had access to the initial vaccination. But, taken out of context, your comments seem to suggest that vaccination is a net negative to the health of young adults, which is not at all supported by the data shown.
Friend, you don't know what I don't understand. :)
Maybe in the future try something like, "In case you aren't aware..." or "You may already know this, but..."
> It overstates actual risk by at least a factor of 10.
As it happens, the CFR from covid is still more than 10x the excess myocarditis risk from the vaccines, so...I don't know. I guess I don't understand something.
> I implied no such thing.
Perhaps not, but then I don't understand how, on its own, this paper is relevant to the decision in question. It's like observing that the risk of a plane crash is higher if you fly on an airplane, so you're going to take a car.
First, in the US, seasonal flu vaccines are used by >50% of the population (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/fluvaxview/coverage-2021estimates.ht...). Yes, they're not mandatory, but many employers heavily encourage it.
Second, chickenpox is compulsory for public schooling in a majority of states, and has a CFR of about 1/100k (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/varicella.html#:~....), which is, if I am reading https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.7384... correctly, significantly lower than the covid CFR for the same age strata.
Obviously it also makes sense to consider things like safety of the vaccine, risk to vulnerable populations, etc. But just on its face, it's not obvious that the covid vaccines are in any way contrary to prior precedent, at least not to me.
You're the second person here to cite this study and imply that the risk from covid is lower for young men than the risk of the vaccine. But that's...not what the study says.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.7384... suggests the case fatality rate for Covid in 20-39-year-olds is 0.62%. In comparison, the excess risk of myocarditis following a vaccination, per the Nature paper, was 15 per million, or 0.0015%.
The status quo (which differs by country!) for compulsory or somewhat-compulsory vaccination provides a great benchmark for what's seemingly "reasonable."
I think that benchmark--and your analysis seems to show similarly--suggests most developed countries are sorta fine with compulsory vaccines for diseases like Covid. But looking at things through this lens helps contextualize and normalize the current policies--people who are concerned about Covid vaccines might feel a lot better when the vaccine is put into perspective.
But yes, it matches my intuition--brute forcing human-strength keys is surprisingly cheap. (And I don't know if they're taking into account the discount if you have custom ASICs for this, defend against which is the argument made for scrypt instead.)
Well, or in the human-chosen passphrase. There are plenty of systems that can brute force an 8-character alphanumeric password run through PBKDF2 for 100,000 rounds.
Per https://support.1password.com/pbkdf2/, that costs...about $60k.
So keeping the ciphertext safe is in fact a very reasonable precaution, especially if you have a fairly short input passphrase or are not using a ton of rounds of key stretching.
- Eng are still writing the postmortem
- Marketing want to put out a statement
- Eng know or suspect a bug exists that can trigger spurious notifications, but don't have sufficient logs to be able to reconstruct if that bug was in fact in play in production
- Legal advises not to say anything definitive that they can't stand behind later
I don't see any of that as particularly damning or malicious. "We aren't yet sure, but have a suspicion and are still investigating" can come out like the LastPass blog post when run through the PR filter.
Black Panther...was a good movie? And people liked it? I'm a little confused about your "in the media" comment--wouldn't the box office receipts represent, you know, what the market actually liked?
I'm not sure what any of this has to do with revisiting _actual_ history, which (as https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/06/27/medieval-africa-... points point) had been often significantly misrepresented.
There's a painting of the Congolese ambassador to the Dutch Republic in the Danish National Gallery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Don_Miguel_de_Cast...). The history of this painting reflects the significant political power held by West African kingdoms--I for one (having had a standard American historical education) was struck by how little I knew about the complex cultural and political institutions in sub-Saharan Africa before and during the early slave trade.
In a way, it's not surprising; as David Graeber wrote in "Debt", it was culturally convenient for Europeans--who at the time in many ways appeared quite culturally backwards!--to misrepresent the power and cultural dynamics and justify their own barbarism. In that light, while we certainly should hold research everywhere to the same evidentiary standards, we shouldn't be surprised to learn about more sophisticated cultural histories in Zimbabwe as well, or other places skipped over by the standard history.
(Another odd aspect of my American education: I was given the distinct impression that civilization went from Greece to Rome to Enlightenment Europe to America. Strange how nobody questioned who preserved the thinking of all those Greek philosophers after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.)
But just because you don't know something--just because the history you were taught must be revised--doesn't make it revisionist history.
I mean, technically this is true, but it's also true if you have the ciphertext of the stored-password database, which is sort of LastPass's entire job. ;)
The only thing that might make it harder to brute force the master password with the latter than with a hashed password database is if the key derivation algorithm differs.
But I think your blanket statement is sort of misleading. In principle, if you trust someone with your encrypted password storage database, you should trust them with a hash of your master password; both serve as brute forcing oracles.
The whole point of the protocol (as described in the Apple whitepaper) is to allow clients to attest to perceptual hash matches without the server having access to the plaintext.
So, the irony of all of this is that the Apple design is effectively more private than the status quo, but everyone freaks out about it.
Whether this is good or bad is a topic for fair debate, I think, but it continues to astound me both how little people are aware of this and that, in comparison, Apple's relatively privacy-preserving approach generated so much flak.
Apple clearly documented that this was only for iCloud uploaded photos, and indeed the technical description makes clear that this is only designed to work with uploaded photos: https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni....