The comments here demonstrate a lot of AI Effect, to the point that most of it is clearly wishful thinking plus lack of experience with current-generation LLMs.

This whole debate is a little weird to me, because unassisted suicide is very easy, and cheap. Out of an abundance of caution I'll refrain from describing common cheap, painless, easy methods, but the information is very easy to obtain online. So it seems to me that the issue really only arises if the patient is already severely debilitated by their illness, such that they lack either physical capacity to carry it out. Those situations occur, of course, but they're far less common that the scope of the debate would seem to imply.

Thus, I think the first step any regulation should apply is to ask the question "Is the patient physically capable of unassisted suicide"? If the answer is yes, then no one may assist, except to provide information. This alone should filter out nearly all of the "greedy relatives" cases. If there's a case of an individual who says they want to die, and is physically capable of doing it but just can't bring themselves to... IMO that's a case of someone who hasn't really decided they want to.

Happy to: It has NO VALUE.

The problem here is that your definition of "value" is invalid. Your claim is equivalent to saying that shares of Apple stock have value because we have built systems to ensure that ownership of them is unique and non-duplicable, and that the supply is finite. But that is not what makes shares of Apple stock valuable. What makes them valuable is that they represent partial ownership of a company that produces and sells hundreds of millions of useful devices every year, among other things, and generates hundreds of billions in profits.

Shares of stock, dollars and bitcoins are all non-duplicable, finite-quantity tokens, but the shares of stock and dollars are tokens that represent something in the real world, while bitcoins represent nothing beyond proof that some electricity and some hardware was diverted to create them and transact them, rather than put to a productive purpose.

Yes, it's true that the guarantees of the non-duplicability and finite quantity are stronger for the coins than the others, which could theoretically make bookkeeping easier and reduce the need for auditing of transactions, but it turns out that the cryptoasset guarantees are hugely more expensive than the old way of bookkeeping and auditing, and the non-reversibility of crypto transactions is a fatal flaw for serious real-world use (though it's a boon for scams). If cryptoassets were easier and cheaper to exchange than traditional methods, and if there were a good way to address the reversibility gap, it would make sense for countries and companies to switch to using crypto-tokens rather than audited database entries. Maybe someday someone will invent a crypto-token design that achieves that, and then we'll trade shares of Apple stock by exchanging tokens on a blockchain (or similar). But even if we do that, it will still be the case that it's the ownership of a productive enterprise that provides value, not the token, no matter how elegant the cryptography.

Note that I'm not saying this because I don't understand the cryptography behind cryptoassets. I'm a mathematician and a professional cryptographic security engineer; this stuff is literally my day job, and has been for most of my 35-year career. I deeply understand the (actually quite simple, though cleverly assembled) cryptography and precisely what it does and doesn't do. It strongly ensures that there is a limited supply and that coins cannot be double-spent, and it does this in a decentralized way. That's it. The limited supply and non-duplicability are properties required of any asset, but aren't what give an asset value.

Most people fundamentally don't believe in markets. Look at how they react when prices rise due to a supply bottleneck or similar. They shout "Greed, we're being gouged!", even when there's plenty of competition to keep prices down and rising prices is actually the optimal solution to suppress demand in the short term and encourage increases in supply in the long term. Conservatives are worse than liberals these days, since conservatism/liberalism has evolved to be divided in large part by education level, and market mechanics are really non-obvious and counterintuitive unless you've had at least some level of formal (even if auto-didactic) education in basic economics.

I think markets are, to a first approximation, the ideal solution for every problem that involves optimization of large-group human behavior. Only when markets clearly don't or can't work should you even start to think about non-market alternatives, such as direct regulation, or even subsidies.

But shockingly few people agree. Carbon pricing immediately makes them want to know who's getting the money and why they should get it, even though that question is irrelevant to the primary goal.

I have great confidence in market-based solutions to rapidly move us toward optimal solutions to the climate problem. I have near-zero confidence that it's what we'll do. Heavy-handed, imprecise and mildly counter-productive regulation is the strategy we'll take, if anything.

More like 80% for me. I use Rust.

(In Rust, an expression without a semi-colon at the end of a block -- including at the end of a function -- is the return value for that block. This is used heavily in idiomatic Rust, which means there are lots of lines that do not end with semi-colons. The more you use short, single-purpose functions and the more you program in a functional style, the fewer semi-colons you use.)

I'm also a fan of market solutions. Most people aren't, though, and they're especially challenging with an international problem, so I don't think carbon taxes or warming fees is how we'll do it.

I think you present a false dichotomy. Several of the proposed geoengineering schemes are relatively inexpensive, though of course a lot of investment will be needed to demonstrate their practicality and effectiveness. I expect that geoengineering will be much cheaper than getting to net zero.

However, that doesn't mean we don't also need to get to net zero, because the geoengineering proposals only address warming, not the other effects of high atmospheric CO2. Ocean acidification and whatever is downstream of that is probably the biggest one, but there are others.

Geoengineering should be viewed as a short-term mitigation strategy, not a long-term solution. I think we'll need that mitigation, though. Assuming AI doesn't kill us all and render the whole question moot :-).

Yeah, I figured that. My point was just that "fixed" is just an accurate description of my income/budget (and probably yours) as it is of hers. I knew what you meant, I was just pointing out that the terminology we use doesn't make sense.

The price of a cryptocurrency reflects those things. It's value is zero. Period. There is nothing behind it.

No, fiat currencies are backed by debt, meaning that real people and companies have made enforceable legal commitments to do real work to generate the value backing the dollars or whatever. Without getting into the details, every time a dollar is created, that creation is balanced by the creation of a dollar of debt, the commitment of some productive entity to produce value to repay that debt (and thereby destroy that dollar). As a common example, when you borrow money to buy a house, the bank doesn't lend you money [*] that other people deposited, it creates that money out of thin air at the same instant you sign an enforceable contract to repay it, meaning you commit to do some sort of value-producing work to generate the value of those dollars.

Derivatives represent specific legal contracts to perform some action, e.g. buy a fixed amount of stock from the derivative seller on or by a specific date for a specific price, and those contracts get their value from the underlying security. That underlying security can also be some sort of contractual obligation rather than a hard asset, but if you keep digging down the layers you always get to something real. It's always possible, of course, that the layers of repackaging make the actual value hard enough to see that its price becomes divorced from that value (and stock pricing also gets divorced from underlying value to various degrees), but at bottom there must be something of actual substance. Further, if markets were perfectly efficient, it would not be possible for the price to move away from the value.

None of this is true with cryptoassets. Their true value is zero (arguably, negative, since proof of work is a pure sink that generates no utility), so any price above zero represents market inefficiency/insanity.

[*] It used to be that the bank created most of the money under the fractional reserve system, but for quite a while now most of the developed world has abandoned the reserve lending requirements, enabling banks to effectively create all of the money they lend. This might seem like a crazy system, but it's actually pure genius because it allows the money supply to expand and contract with the economy, which along with Keynsian fiscal policy massively reduces the boom and bust cycles we regularly experienced before we switched from metallic to fiat currency.

Aside: That phrase "fixed budget" and its twin "fixed income" always strike me as curious. I mean, short of changing jobs, most of us have a fixed income and therefore a fixed budget... and changing jobs isn't necessarily an option.

I guess maybe it's just a euphemism for "small income" or "small budget".

That would be very risky. It's more likely the court would order the administration to enforce it immediately. The administration would appeal that up to SCOTUS, but SCOTUS has already made its opinion very clear and would almost certainly uphold the order. At most they might slow walk it. Trump might simply refuse to obey the court order, but that's a very big step with a lot of risk for him, and while he might well take that step in some context he cares enough about, this isn't it. Not without a really big payoff, anyway.

No, the status quo is the best outcome for ByteDance. AFAICT, no one other than ByteDance and Congress has standing to sue over enforcement, and Congress isn't going to, so if ByteDance doesn't the courts can't intervene. ByteDance can just keep slipping cash to Trump and he can just keep extending. That's a win for ByteDance and a win for Trump. If you believe TikTok's influence over young Americans and the data it can collect is a national security risk, then it's a loss for the American people, but no one cares about that. Even if you don't believe that, it's a loss for Congress, whose authority is being flouted -- but the current Congress seems fine with that in a hundred other situations, so why not this one? ByteDance has no motive to rock this boat.

Very well put.

Crypto bros think what they'll get from regulation is respect and trust, and they're right. But that respect and trust will arise from transparency, and that transparency will also show that the emperor has no clothes. Proper regulation of cryptocurrencies will spell the eventual end of cryptocurrencies, at least as they exist today. It'll take a while, but it will happen.

Perhaps along the way someone will come up with a cryptocurrency design that actually works as a currency, providing convenient, fast, low-cost transactions that somehow manage to be cheaper than moving numbers in an audited bank database. But unless that happens, real scrutiny and regulation of cryptocurrencies will just end them.

With very critical difference that the stuff sold by the Wall St. bros is repackaged ownership of real stuff. Real enterprises that make real products for real people, real commodities that people need, real debts that people have made legal commitments to repay, etc. The Wall Street bros.' stuff has actual value behind it, even if that value is obscured through many layers of packaging.

What the crypto bros have to sell is nothing. Nothing at all. The early promise of cryptocurrencies was that they would make transactions more flexible and cheaper, but cryptocurrency transaction fees are sky high and transactions are super slow. Then came the idea of tying them to smart contracts, but that idea is foolish for reasons that I'm happy to explain if anyone wants to know.

This is completely, totally wrong.

When you buy a share of stock, you're buying part of a real enterprise that produces and sells some sort of good or service, and has some sort of real-world assets (offices, factories, equipment, etc.), structured and managed to (hopefully) generate real profits by delivering real value to real people who want to buy it.

Cryptocurrencies are nothing at all like that. With them, you're buying some bits that have value only because people think they have value.

Some people might think that "has value only because people think it has value" is also a description of fiat currency, but that's just as wrong as equating stocks with cryptocurrencies, though that's a more complicated topic for another post.

Transaction fees, paid by the merchant.

Of course, like any cost of doing business for the merchant, the cost is passed onto the customer. In the case of credit card transaction fees and the rewards they fund, what happens is that people who don't use cards with expensive transaction fees subsidize the rewards for those who do. In most cases that means poor people and people who manage money poorly actually pay for the perks of rich people and people who manage money well.

Personally, I shamelessly maximize the benefit I get from rewards cards. I never pay any credit card interest because I pay my bills every month, so I happily free-ride on the people who use cash and debit cards, who fund the very nice perks I get. The system is what it is, so I exploit it. But I think it actually sucks and would support legislation that eliminates rewards cards or -- even better -- allows merchants to explicitly pass along the card transaction fees, called out as a line item on the receipt. Merchants should also estimate a cost-of-cash fee and add that to cash transactions (accepting cash is not free for merchants; it's actually rather expensive).

I think explicitly charging consumers for the cost of the transaction is the best option. It would enable markets to push transaction costs down, benefiting consumers and merchants alike. Banks wouldn't like it because they love taking a cut of every purchase. My guess is that we would still end up primarily using credit and debit cards because bank-based purely electronic payment will be the cheapest, but the transaction fees would drop dramatically and rewards cards would obviously disappear.