I think it's also significant that the younger generation is coming up on Roblox and Minecraft. They see from the beginning that games with relatively primitive graphics can be fun.

I haven't been paying close attention, thus my first question: did they manage to factor an arbitrary number larger than 21?

No. Economy is movement of value, not of money. That's just speculation.

As little kids in a socialist country, we got fed the following tale:
Heating fuel in a mining town was very expensive. So the protagonist took a cart and a friend, went to the other side of a forest to buy wood cheaply, and with much effort, hauled it home. When asked why he won't haul another load and sell it at home, the guy answered: "I'm a worker not a speculant".
Abstracting from the nonsense of the price difference of wood being so high on two sides of a forest, the commies who produced this piece of propaganda inadvertently produced a nice example why trade is good despite not producing something by itself: the value it creates comes from moving goods to where they're appreciated (ie, needed).

Thus: economy is the movement of value (goods, services) between different owners who value those goods and services differently.
On the other hand, movement of money or similar tokens (eg. a wash trade) isn't valuable by itself.

If inflation is not a tax, then where does the value of newly printed or fractionally lent money come from? Money has no intrinsic value, it's a mere token -- if you add more tokens, the value of every existing token is suddenly lowered.

People not spending money is bad... how? This doesn't slow the economy any, nor does it freeze any value -- all it freezes is some _money_. Any money that's temporarily out of circulation increases the value of any actual assets that are in use.

As for borrowing costs, you got that reversed: if there's inflation, borrowing gives you an advantage by having the real cost decrease as time goes. With deflation, you need to actually pay to borrow.

Yet the world's average inflation goes around 5%, not 1%. Surely, they wouldn't be so incompetent if they meant it?

They don't claim that an inflation of 20% is good, indeed -- but only because with the economy hurting so much even financial institutions can't reliably make money. But, their claim is that any deflation, even of 1% or lower, is worse than a runaway inflation. And that's pure bullshit.

Well... and how, pray tell, the regular folk could make their voices heard? By now 2/3 of those polled who gave a yes/no answer want to Brejoin, yet your three largest parties all swear to keep out.

There's no need for a "backing", what matters is that it's impossible to "print money". Physical metal coins are only one way to do so, and not even the best (as they can be mined, and take up metals that could be put into useful work). Of course, current cryptocurriences are not that good, either -- waste of electricity, waste of disk space (Bitcoin currently needs 700GB to meaningfully participate), transaction costs, etc. Metal coins are merely the most traditional one.

Too bad, those in power (and money = power) have grown too attached to the ability to pull money out of thin air. Debasing of coins was popular for thousands of years, most countries defaulted in early 20th century (Germany 1914, UK 1925, US 1933) then successively removed remaining safety barriers (US went into freefall in 1971). And most of money from nothing is "produced" by banks rather than governments.

We are told that "inflation is good" by economists -- for me, it's nothing but a tax. Asking an economist whose very paycheck comes from inflationary measures is same as asking a christian Bible scholar whether the Bible is trustworthy.

Reflecting on that is instructive. Either:

• there is an easy way to verify that LLM output was real and verifiable and useful, and if we implement that, we eliminate the useless or incorrect outputs, making the LLMs way more useful,
• there is an easy way to verify that LLM output was real and verifiable and useful, but if we implement that, we show that all the answers are either incorrect or useless, and people lose confidence in the LLM, or
• there is no easy way to verify that the LLM output is real and verifiable and useful, and we're stuck having to verify the slop manually.

The fact that the verification processes haven't been implemented, means that either there is no way to verify the output, or the verification process would reduce confidence in the output rather than increasing it.

Now it's possible that there is *currently* no way to verify the output, but that we might come up with a good verification process in the future. Once we're in that future, we can then take the chance that we end up on the first possibility.

That you don't self-identify as a racist, doesn't mean that you're not one. You insist that members of a certain race should have benefits above others, for no reason relevant to the people concerned.

Science? Really? There's a lot of soft-brained, unscientific and technophilic pseudo-religion in the article.

Let's work with the argument's load-bearing phrase, "exploration is an intrinsic part of the human spirit."

There are so many things to criticise in that single statement of bias. Suffice it to say there's a good case to be made that "provincial domesticity and tribalism are prevalent inherited traits in humans", without emotional appeals to a "spirit" not in evidence.

DEI is advertised by its proponents as "anti-racism". And as such, it's to racism as antimatter is to matter: weighs the same, behaves the same, looks the same, has some colors flipped, acts violently when in contact with its counterpart -- but as long as all of the flipped "colors" remain flipped, indistinguishable from it.

So here's a math exercise: assuming a normal distribution (which is incredibly "infectious" as long as the scores have multiple different causes), generate a population of scores for group A and for group B, with group B having the average lower by X points. Now select the best candidates, using any of the following strategies:
* quotas: reserve A/(A+B) spots for group A, B/(A+B) spots for group B
* Affirmative Action: give every candidate from B X extra points, pick from the global population
* meritocracy: pick from the global population based only on the scores, completely blind to race/gender/zodiac sign/odd-or-even date of birth/etc
* penalty for the "inferior" group: subtract X points from every candidate from B, pick globally
* traditional racism: pick from only group A
Now compare the total score of candidates you picked for every strategy.

It doesn't matter if groups A vs B differ by race, gender, etc -- the mechanism is the same.

Or if it's even still readable. Intel when retrieving the 486 tape-in for the Edison project had to bake the tapes in an oven to remove moisture, and then had ONE CHANCE at imaging the tape as it crumbled to dust going through the reader.

I see that you've never been to that part of the world. Grab is ubiquitous in Indonesia, to the point that if you're on the street you can't go more than a minute without seeing their brand.

So just open 100 times as many? That'll bring you to the usual standard.

This is mainly due to inflation and to some extent a move to bigger luxury cars. Apples to apples it's not so bad.

The typical well-equipped Civic from the early '90s (EX or Si in the $11kâ"$12k range) would be around $26,000â"$28,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars today.

The 2025 Honda Civic starts around $24,250 for the LX trim, with better-equipped versions reaching $30,000 or more. Not only is this roughly the same price, but you're also getting a bigger and drastically safer car for the money today, even before considering the extra features standard on cars now.