riskneutral

There are a few abstract, mathematical proofs that a theoretical quantum computer could be faster at certain specific specialized tasks (such as prime number factoring, which has important implications for cryptography). No one has actually really built such a quantum computer yet, it remains a theoretical idea. The theory of quantum physics itself is also incomplete. So our knowledge of the universe and the possibilities it contains is very limited. Someone who says "never" is operating from a mindset where they equate the whole of reality with their current, limited knowledge of the universe. I don't think it's far fetched to imagine that our understanding of quantum physics might one day lead to new breakthroughs in general computation. Given that silicon processors are already near the quantum limits, there would be a huge incentive to find a new breakthrough. That said, this is in the realm of pure science fiction and not something that people are actually working on today or something we are likely to see in our lifetimes.

I think if you want to make good money, then your realistic options are finance, crypto or AI.

I would pick AI, because it's a growth industry with on-going innovation. You would also be able to work in many different kinds of applications. It seems like it would be fulfilling work.

You didn't mention why you're uncomfortable with trading. Finance used to be a great choice, but it's not a growth industry now, innovation stopped after the Financial Crisis in 2008, and the industry has been saturated with PhDs for over a decade. Meaning math PhDs not in demand very much anymore in finance and most of the work is not very interesting anyway.

Personally, I wouldn't pick crypto ("blockchain") as a lifetime career.

Note that any of these career would require significant effort and learning on your part. You didn't mention what your PhD in mathematics is in. You would be competing with PhDs who have done their thesis in something highly relevant to AI or finance and/or have done a great deal of research on the topic before applying for jobs in their target field.

If you don't care about how much money you'll make, and enjoyed your PhD work, then I suppose postdoc would make sense. If you don't care about money and didn't like the academic environment, then you could go into teaching relatively easily with your qualifications. Perhaps teaching / lecturing at a private school or college, if not a university. I would suggest that you do care about money though, because it is an important factor in determining your quality of life.

Well, with a human coming up with a PDE model (i.e. a system of equations) based on their intuition about what the causes of a given phenomenon are, they would be limited by their intuition/imagination about which variables are significant for the model. For all practical purposes, the variables that a modeler imagines to be significant are a subset of all the possible observable variables. A machine learning approach would learn the significant variable directly from the data, and is therefore not limited to imagination. There's an example of this mentioned in the article, in the context of ocean models:

“The algorithm picked up on additional terms,” Zanna said, producing a “beautiful” equation that “really represents some of the key properties of ocean currents, which are stretching, shearing and [rotating].”

> It’s all good to write down approximate solutions to some hard n body problem or non linear pde, just don’t look too far ahead in time, or update your model with fresh data if you need to.

It sounds like this symbolic regression approach can potentially find correct PDE solutions directly from data:

"In February, they fed their system 30 years’ worth of real positions of the solar system’s planets and moons in the sky. The algorithm skipped Kepler’s laws altogether, directly inferring Newton’s law of gravitation and the masses of the planets and moons to boot."

Note that Newton’s law of gravitation can also be derived from a differential equation. Also note that simply knowing the exact solution to the PDE does not mean that the PDE model itself is an exact representation of reality. For example, we know from Einstein's laws that Newton's laws are not correct at astronomical scales. In the symbolic regression approach, the solution would be limited by the number of different observable variables available to train the model on.

Many PDEs in real world problems also do not have any known exact symbolic solution, so approximate symbolic formulas are used routinely anyway but are just painstakingly discovered and derived by humans with "deeper understanding" (actually, just hoards of PhD students and their advisors throwing everything they can think of at the problem until one of them lands on a unusable formula).

It takes a long time for societies to evolve and it is a gradual process. Implementing this in new cars now would mean a couple decades or more before it's ubiquitous. As the father of a young boy, I would be willing to make the sacrifice to know that by the time he's old enough to make stupid mistakes these protections would be in place on the road.

Allowing almost anyone to operate a multi-ton, extremely powerful machine at high speeds, that can kill people in a instant, and is indeed a leading of cause of death, is not a natural human right. The public road is already a highly regulated environment, as it should be. Traffic laws are not "running" anyone's life, that's just a reactionary sound bite. Future generations (if our civilization survives long enough) will look back at this era of automobile deaths and horrific accidents caused by human error as barbaric. In the long term, all cars will be autonomous and humans will not be allowed to drive themselves on public roads. Speed limiters, and other automated safety measures, are a logical step towards that future. The increased safety, in the long term, will allow legal speed limits to be safely increased.

Don't get me wrong, I don't live in the EU, and I do speed on the highway, but I'm not proud of it and I'm terrified of other drivers who speed (sometimes recklessly). As a start, a "generous" mandatory speed limiter (such as 50km/h OVER the legal speed limit) makes a great deal of sense. Someone doing 100km/h in a 50km/h zone, where children could be playing, is a heinous crime.

You have a well-defined test, {SUM(—-(A1:A1999<A2:2000)}, but it is unreadable and does not reference a well-defined unit of logic that is being tested.

The unreadability of the test and the lack of a referenceable unit of logic are directly related. What kind of variable name is A1:A1999? What on earth is the significance of row 1999? I don't even need to elaborate on the inadvisability of the hardcoded "1999." What is column A? A programmer would be ashamed to use a variable named "A" even for a temporary or scientific variable. Is it something so unimportant that it does even bother being named? And yet it could refer to a column concerning millions, billions or even trillions of dollars and critical decisions real world decisions being made on the basis of this comically unreadable code.

I am not being critical of your suggestion, I am being critical of Excel itself.

> As in you own the dollar longer thus it has more value?

No. As in, having $10 million cash in hand today has more value than having a guarantee that you will be paid $10 million 10 years from now. Think about it, would you rather have $10 million now, or in 10 years? Which is more valuable to you?

Having a finite maturity date is generally preferable over a perpetuity ("forever"). I explained above that the value of a perpetuity declines rapidly when interest rates rise (and interest rates will be rising in the near future). For example, the government of Austria recently issued a 100 year bond, which then fell nearly 50% in value as interest rates increased. A perpetuity is even worse than a 100 year bond.

With a finite maturity, you invest (let's say) $2 million, earn your yield for 5 years (let's say LIBOR + 7%) and then you get your $2 million back and you can decide then how to best re-invest your money at that time given the situation. There is a reinvestment risk here, where after 5 years you might not be able to find similarly attractive investments but unless you an insurance company or a pension fund trying to meet very specific long-term obligations you don't really need to worry about super long-term reinvestment risk. On the flip side, if you get your money back after 5 years you might be able to find an even better investment, and that kind of optionality is very valuable.

New loans have moved to SOFR as of Jan 1, 2022. There are still a lot of LIBOR linked loans outstanding. It will take some time for references to LIBOR to disappear from the market.

You need a broker and a couple million dollars to invest for them to take you seriously. The bonds typically sell in minimum $100,000 pieces.

Because the BB bonds are currently yielding LIBOR + 7%. A royalty stream is similar to a bond in the sense that you pay a price today to own an asset that will pay an uncertain stream of future cashflows over time.

Securitizing the Listerine royalty would require setting up a Special Purpose Vehicle (basically a legal entity whose sole purpose is to own the Listerine royalty rights). It would require bank accounts to be setup to process the royalty payment. It would be considered security and as such would need to registered and regulated by the SEC in order to be sold. All this would cost a several hundred thousand dollars in legal, administrative and banker fees. This would only make sense if several hundred million dollars worth of Listerine royalties were being securitized, and if there are investors who are willing to buy the hundreds of millions of dollars of resulting securities.

None of those securitization processes could be made more efficient, secure or cost effective with an NFT or any other blockchain technology. Introducing cryptocurrency into the securitization process would only be for the purposes of a marketing stunt that would make the process more costly, complex and risky.

You say you would love to buy 1/100th of an asset that has a list price of $2 million, so presumably you would be willing to invest $20,000. Well, I have news for you, multi-hundred million dollar securitizations are not done because someone says they would love to "interact" with a "smart contract" and have $20k to invest, they are done because multiple investors have promise to buy tens of millions of dollars of those securities. And those investors are interested in earning dollars, not "interacting" with "smart contracts" for fun and games.

So no, NFTs are not ideal for this kind of asset.

This is not a great investment.

You can earn LIBOR + 7% on a BB rated CLO (Collateralized Loan Obligation) bond. Since you earning a floating rate (LIBOR) plus 7%, you would be far better protected against interest rate increases. The Listerine royalty is a perpetuity, which means that its value declines very rapidly when interest rates increase.

The value of the Listerine royalty has some natural immunity to inflation because the price of Listerine would increase with inflation, but it is difficult for manufacturers to pass on costs when it comes to retail consumer products like Listerine. The CLO bond is floating rate, so it is also protected somewhat against inflation.

You would need to dig into all the details of the Listerine mouthwash business before investing, and those granular details are unlikely to be available from the owner (Johnson & Johnson). The CLO bond will be backed by underwritten loans to 100+ large, private American companies across all different industries, so the commercial risk is far lower due to the diversification benefit of a CLO. The CLO structure itself also ensures that chances of the CLO BB bond defaulting are very low. The default risk can be reduced further by investing in multiple CLOs. You could also diversify beyond CLOs through other kinds of floating rate securities that have a similar LIBOR + 7% yield, for example Mortgage Backed Securities. With $1.5 million, you could construct a very nice structured credit securities portfolio for any target yield and risk level that you're looking for.

By the looks of this auction, the Listerine royalty is not easy at all to buy or sell. A BB rated CLO bond would be more liquid than this, and if you can afford to invest $1.5 million in a mouthwash royalty then you can also get an investment broker who can help you buy and sell structured credit bonds and perhaps even lend you money to increase your leverage if you want to.

The Listerine royalty belongs in a huge investment portfolio, such as a pension plan or hedge fund, where they have so much capital that needs to be deployed that they are forced to invest in highly obscure things like mouthwash royalties.

Whenever I see something sexist like this, I like to imagine what kind of public outrage there would be if the gender roles were simply switched.

For example, these "researchers" could have easily made a different "discovery": "Biggest Karens Often Middle-Aged Women"

Corruption is the natural state of human affairs. Anyone who has spent enough time in a developing country knows this. I recently read that, in pre-war Ukraine, the majority of Ukrainians obtained a driver's license by bribing an official. If you tried to get a driver's license legitimately, you would spend a whole week going through a maze of bureaucracy that was designed to encourage you to give up and bribe someone. I point this out because street level corruption is not commonly heard about in European countries. People who live in developing countries run up against street level corruption on a routine basis. So it is obvious to people in those countries that there is corruption at much higher levels, if not the highest levels.

The developed Western countries have been very successful in stamping out street level corruption (most Americans are not used to bribing a cop if they get pulled over, for example), but they have turned a blind eye to corruption at higher levels. The general population in these countries are left with an impression that corruption either doesn't exist in their country, or that it is quite rare and limited. A cursory review of the state of international banks' performance in "enforcing" anti-money laundering laws, or the recent bribery record of Western insurance, energy, mining, and civil engineering companies should give pause to any thoughtful observer. Indeed, the rich, Western world's form of corruption seems far more insidious and far reaching than the stories of street level corruption in places like Afghanistan or Ukraine.

I am deeply interested in this problem space. If someone else reading this is as equally interested and would like to collaborate, let me know!

> Basically it comes down to whether we are purely material beings or whether there are non-material aspects to our mind.

The current state of physics suggests that we really have no idea what the "material" universe really is, at any scale. There may well be aspects of physical reality that we have yet to even conceive of. Given that when we cannot even say what a lump of rock is truly made of, or what even the dark void of space is made of, it should be obvious that we cannot be certain at all about what consciousness is made of.

"Sister city" "Brother city" "Sibling city" "Twin city"

For some strange reason, no one ever says "brother city." The term "sister city" is very common. "Twin city" is also conventionally used. I do think it's a bit strange to say "sister city" but not "brother city," and it forces me to think about gender in a context where I do not want to think about gender. So I like the term "twin city" better. "Sibling repo" preferred to "sister repo" for the same reason (if I was reading this Github documentation, having to think about a repo as female gendered would be a highly distracting diversion while I'm trying to concentrate on source code).

I wonder how they solved the problem with the NATO MIGs having completely different systems than the Ukrainian air force? They must have either magically retrofitted the MIGs back with old Soviet tech, or they're transferring more than just jets to Ukraine.

Surely some surface-to-surface missiles or long range artillery could reach the Russian column and break through the air defenses? It seems to me like both sides are holding back from unleashing the full fury of their power, for good reason.

I don't think nuclear winter is the biggest risk from a "small nuclear war." I'm not an expert at all, but my understanding is that the nuclear winter narrative was outdated and overhyped (especially when thinking about a detonation of two or three warheads, rather than hundreds or thousands).

> The 750 principle is basically leading a 500+ engineer org

So not that different from senior management pay grades in other industries.

> Where in the world is $150k entry level?

Finance, Management Consulting, Law, Medicine.

Chinese government flexing it cyber warfare capabilities while former U.S. Secretary of State is visiting the island. Just a preview for Taiwan and Eastern Europe.

Only 500MM per day. Very affordable for a couple of weeks. After 6 months, though, that's a $90 billion accumulated bill. That's not including escalation of costs as everything gets more difficult. Unlike the United States with its US dollar, Russia does not own the reserve currency of the world, so it cannot really afford to wage war at this level of intensity for the next 10 to 20 years that it would need to, in order to hope to achieve its extreme political and military objectives. It's a clearly idiotic an egregiously costly strategic error.

It is the whole of Europe: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/16/business/eu-gas-russia/ind...

So woke. You must be a joy at parties.

> of the various government agencies, only the military had access to the heavy vehicle movers that were needed

I am 100% certain there are people who can easily pick whatever kind of ignition lock cylinders are used in these trucks. It would be far more efficient to "car jack" these trucks, drive them to an impound lot, and auction them off the next day, than trying to tow them with "military tow trucks" (whatever those are).

> why does everyone NEED to learn how to code

They teach calculus and SQL to undergraduate business students in universities. I'm not sure what the confusion is, programming is a useful skill in many diverse fields.

The "imminent" event actually took place 1.2 billion years ago, which is how many light years away the the galaxy in question is (SDSSJ1430+2303).