sedev

The actual term is fine. Lack of an inline explanation is a blow-it move. Don't do that.

> You might look at the standard KYC questionnaire for a new retail account and think “Really? You ask questions which have obviously correct answers. You give people less than a tweet worth of space to answer them. How could this possibly catch any criminals not stupid enough to write Occupation: Drug Dealer?” […] this is not the only mechanism by which KYC questionnaires have a stochastic effect; they’re also useful in an entirely different part of the crime lifecycle. Many, many crimes involve lies, but most lies told are not crimes and most lies told are not recorded for forever. We did, however, make a special rule for lies told to banks: they’re potentially very serious crimes and they will be recorded with exacting precision, for years, by one of the institutions in society most capable of keeping accurate records and most findable by agents of the state.

> This means that if your crime touches money, and much crime is financially motivated, and you get beyond the threshold of crime which can be done purely offline and in cash, you will at some point attempt to interface with the banking system. And you will lie to the banks, because you need bank accounts, and you could not get accounts if you told the whole truth.

> The government wants you to do this. Their first choice would be you not committing crimes, but contingent on you choosing to break the law, they prefer you also lie to a bank. […]

> Particularly in white collar crime, establishing complicated chains of evidence about e.g. a corporate fraud, and mens rea of the responsible parties, is not straightforward. But then at some point in the caper comes a very simple question: “Were you completely honest with your bank?” And the answer will frequently be “Well, no, I necessarily had to lie in writing.”

> And congratulations, you have just eaten a wire charge fraud for every transaction you’ve ever done.

It's exactly this, in large part because Wikipedia happens to also be a large-scale exercise in direct democracy.

The thing you're not taking into account is that every article that exists takes up some amount of editor time, which is why it's good when more people participate in Wikipedia. You are correct that the server/bandwidth cost of almost all articles rounds off to zero. That leaves just the cost in "an actual human looked at this and okayed it," which has different scaling characteristics.

The downranking is particularly weird since HN's professed norms go extremely hard on something along the lines of "you should take atypical opinions seriously since they're more likely to contain new information than opinions that are conventional-wisdom-with-a-few-little-sprinkles-on-top." Sometimes the HN audience is very diligent about this norm. Reactions to Gruber's writing from the HN crown often show marked deficiencies in adherence to this norm. I'm not sure what, if anything, should be done about that by Gruber or HN's moderators, but I do believe that the problem is not located in Gruber's writing.

The black community in America has been presented with many such opportunities. How many of them were legitimate? Nobody has a really solid number, for hopefully obvious reasons, but whatever the real rate of legitimate opportunities that sound like the above is, it's low enough that 160-ish years of it have left the black community in America still suffering from widespread generational poverty. Particularly there is a pattern in economic-bubble periods where members of the black community buy in near the top (because the growth of a bubble is driven by existing capital flowing into it and the black community has less capital, while whatever activity is inflating the bubble seeks out large clumps of capital first, as any growing sector does), end up as bagholders (because they bought in near the top of a bubble), and suffer disproportionately (because they had less capital, and so a given absolute loss is a bigger percentage of their capital than for wealthier communities). There have also, of course, been periods of undisguised racial violence, which have always involved theft as one form the violence takes. All of this leaves the black community in America with noteworthy long-term scars around the topic of investment opportunities particularly marketed to them — and yet, what are they supposed to do, give up on pursuing the American Dream, especially when someone promises up and down that this is it, they can leave behind the sordid stuff, this truly is the pathway to affluence, safety, and respectability?

I have never been to Chicago and I know nothing about Bally's. All I know is that while history rarely outright repeats itself, it quite often rhymes.

Since you mentioned Q particularly, I remember the college course in which I learned about it was using Stevan Davies' New Testament Fundamentals, which my college-aged self was able to come to grips with pretty readily. For me that answers the question of "how do they prove that to anyone who's not a specialist" — they can publish a (relatively slim!) undergraduate textbook that incorporates the theory.

Do better.

Yes, I mean "you clearly did not think about this and your idea is very, very, very bad."

> The main question we tried to answer is whether a significant shift away from the US dollar as the dominant “hegemonic” currency is likely to occur in the foreseeable future, and in which direction the monetary system might develop. The key conclusion was that the fate of the US dollar as the currency hegemon depends on a number of factors, with the degree to which US policy makers would be able to maintain macroeconomic stability relative to other countries of supreme importance. Only if stability is maintained will the US dollar retain its position as the safe-haven currency of choice.

In heavily hedged terms, they conclude that the situation is currently stable and likely to remain so. My opinion is that there's good information in this document but the editing (mostly in the sense of structure and clarity) is quite poor, prone to using the very real complexity of the issues at hand as an excuse for weasel words, wishy-washiness, and desperation to please one's boss. In reading this document, I recommend that you keep in mind that the document is from late 2022 and Credit Suisse imploded in early 2023, so, as the document's authors might say, one suspects that it does not represent a level of intellectual rigor that one would prefer to see from a globally important bank.