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Comment Re: Nothing backs it (Score 2) 49

And also an inflationary currency is a very bad thing.

For one, it screws over debtholders (aka, most people), as the value of the debt owed grows instead of declining. If you work for a company making lumber, and a given board sells for $10 now, but 20 years from now sells for $5, and you sell the same number of boards per unit labour with the same relative margin, then all else being equal, your salary must be half in 20 years what it is today. But that mortgage that you took out today for $200k is still $200k (adjusted for interest and payment of principal). Which you have to pay on with a salary that is half what it is in dollars. That person is totally screwed.

Secondly, it discourages spending. The more you delay purchases, the more you'll be able to buy in the future. So everyone is encouraged to not spend. Which screws over your economy. It also screws over your tax base when taxation is based on taxing spending. Meaning you have to raise your spending-related taxes, which further discourages spending.

Third, it worsens wealth inequality. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you have no savings. If you're a billionaire, you have a lot of savings. The billionaires see their assets grow and grow, and it comes at the cost of the working class. Also, said billionaires are encouraged to keep their money as cash rather than investment, which further ruins your economy.

This is no way to run an economy.

Another thing you REALLY don't want in an economy is instability. Aka, Bitcoin's fundamental nature, because it has no fundamentals and no attempt at monetary policy. Economies are fundamentally unstable. If you do not regulate them, they swing wildly. The faster an economy moves - and economies keep moving faster as technology advances, it no longer takes half a year for goods to arrive on a sailing ship or weeks to communicate with the other side of your country - the more unstable it is. This is terrible for both individuals and businesses.

What you want in an economiy is:

* Stability
* Low and steady inflation - a couple percent, to encourage spending, slowly devalue debts, and encourage investment. Too much is bad. Too little is bad.

Comment Re:Nothing backs it (Score 1) 49

Yet, silver is valuable as both a monetary metal and industrial metal.

Unlike bitcoin. You summed it up nicely right there.

Right now, I want to buy tin-silver alloy, to use in casting. But the prices of both tin and silver are insanely expensive right now. So I'm not buying now. If the prices go down? I'll buy. If they go down a lot? I'll buy a lot, perhaps even to sell on my sales website. And this buying is to *use* it. Which takes it off the market. There are fundamentals behind silver.

There are no fundamentals behind bitcoin.

Comment Re:The search for the greater fool came to an end (Score 2, Insightful) 49

401ks have fundamentals behind them (comprised of companies that make products and services that people want to buy, generally as repeat-buys)

Governments have fundamentals (the ability to levy taxes, backed by the full force of the courts, the police, and ultimately, the military)

Bitcoin has no fundamentals. It's a collectible. Its value is based purely how much people want that collectible. The only reason, as was stated, that people were buying it was as a lottery ticket. But there is no reason to "own" it beyond that. It's not generating dividends or doing stock buybacks based on profits. It's just there for those who want to collect it. And its value depends on how much people want to collect it.

(Arguably its greatest power is that its holders stand to lose so much if regulation goes against them that they tend to be very politically active, with large donations to pro-crypto candidates)

Comment Re:Missing from the article (Score 1) 31

Eh... I think the "used for all kind of dangerous things" started with GPT-3. I used GPT-2 a good bit back in the day, and it couldn't pass as a person, let alone reason out as a cyberattack.

Since it wasn't instruction fine-tuned, you couldn't trust that GPT-2 would ever do what you wanted. The best you could do is "cute it" with leading text and hoping that it doesn't go off on a tangent. That said, you could kinda use it for things with decent reliability. For example, you could write a long paragraph, then write: "Or, to sum up everything above in one sentence" - and then (hopefully) get a one-sentence summary.

It could sort of try to write recipes ("Here is a recipe for [X]. INGREDIENTS:"), but far from usable (I remember that one contained vermiculite ;) ). You could write plays by starting out a play format, though the plotting was fairly incoherent. You could set it up to write a joke and it'd end up writing long anti-jokes where the punch-line never actually comes (in one, I set it up with "A nun, a priest, and a rabbi walk into a bar...", and it ended up with the bartender saying something antisemitic, everyone getting uncomfortable, and leaving, and priest turning to camera and talking about how antisemitism is bad). Etc.

It was this tantalizing glimpse of what was to come - not YET useful, but hinting at what could come if the models improved sufficiently. I don't think many people expected how quickly it would improve.

When GPT-3 came out (but not yet 3.5, aka ChatGPT), the writing quality was clearly dramatically improved. People were writing articles about GPT-3 using GPT-3, and only copyediting to piece the (small) chunks together. For me the big "Nothing Will Be The Same Again" moment was the "TheGentleMetre" scandal on Reddit, where it was discovered that someone had connected GPT-3 to their Reddit account... but it took like a month for them to get caught, and even then only because they were posting 24/7 at a regular pacing. And it was the fact that they weren't just writing arbitrary nonsense, but that there was logic to what they were writing. For example, one person asked something like "Would you rather have a psychopath or a Nazi as a roomate?" and it made a reasoned argument about how with a psychopath, there's something mentally broken with them, whereas with the Nazi, it's an ideology and there's still the possibility of changing that ideology. Back in that era, the notion that an AI model could do this was pretty staggering.

Comment Re:Blocks ..... (Score 1) 87

Reduction != None. Cities approve them because that even with any incentives offered they'll be raking in the cash, because the value of a datacentre is so high (even if you're in an area that only counts building + cooling + power interconnects + etc, but not the servers within, toward the property tax base)

You cannot simultaneously complain about consumer electricity prices and datacentres being bad neighbors due to having power plants on-site. Take your pick.

Datacentres buying power ALSO equals tax revenue, en masse, because electricity is taxed. And all of the jobs associated with providing that electricity.

A datacentre means a huge amount of income to the locality where it's at, plain and simple.

Comment Re:Queue the jealousy and entitlement (Score 1) 298

You are suggesting quite a few things, except you don't like to actually say directly what it is that you want to happen. Here is one thing you said: "Elon Musk should be a wealthy man, no doubt about it but a trillionaire or hell even a $100B is a failure of our economy, our culture, our society or our politics." - 100B is not Musk anymore, it's more than Musk, who I consider to be a con artist.

What you are implying to calling 100B owner a failure of economy and culture and society and politics is that it should be impossible for some reason for a person to accrue enough ownership of private resources to be at that level. It is your inadequacies that are showing here and it is your word play that we are debating. What you are suggesting is oppression and tyranny, nothing less, which is what is required for a person not to be able to accrue any amount of wealth regardless of how it is obtained.

How about this: "I mean, he does. He also still is one person with 24 hours a day, does he actually provide enough productivity to justify tens of millions every day?" - nobody has to justify anything, if they are able to accrue some wealth beyond your imagination does not make it wrong that a person should be able to do so.

To this I have already answered: "Explain this (i am fully anticipating Libertarian-Randian gobbledygook)" - obviously a large amount of accumulated wealth is represented by a business and this business clearly benefits the society much more than the individual who runs it, otherwise the company wouldn't be valuable enough for you to pay attention how wealthy the owner of this company becomes.

This: "Everything you said would equally apply if he was worth $1B as it does $1000B so what does he need the extra 999B? His lifestyle changes 0%. He can still own and run companies." - implies that a person shouldn't be able to have ownership in a company that is growing in value, Musk or anyone else. So if you build a company that becomes so valuable people invest into it enough that its market share, its profits are so large that the value exceeds 100B (on paper, doesn't matter). If you are the single largest owner of the stock in this company your shares go above and beyond 1B.

You are pretending that you are not suggesting confiscation (oppression by the voting majority) yet what else are you suggesting? Be clear, what are your demands and goals? I already see the reasons, jealousy and ideology with a strange belief that a person shouldn't be able to own something of serious value for some reason.

This: "And I would ask just the same what the unhealthy fixation on defending the massive wealth inequality?" - I am FOR wealth inequality, it's the only thing that actually motivates people to move forward with business ideas in the first place. If wealth equality was the goal, nobody would be ruining their lives trying to run a business.

This: " I'll guess if I ask for the alternative you'll point to "communism" and I will just say you are not a serious person with a serious position. Like I said, Randian nonsense." - you are the one bringing up communism and Randian ideas, whatever, you are fixated on the nomenclature.

This: "You say you want to "protect private property" as if what I am suggesting eliminates private property in any fashion." - of course you are. You are suggesting this exact thing, you wouldn't be happy until there wouldn't be "wealth inequality". This requires that people cannot own things cannot operate things as they see fit, cannot go beyond some artificial number that is stuck in your head. You think 1B is plenty and 100B is too much, whatever that is all about. In reality it's all garbage. A person who made a billion dollar company can use the money that he makes to start more companies and eventually go much further than 1B dollars and this bugs the shit out of you because you are on a mission.

Comment Re:Queue the jealousy and entitlement (Score 1) 298

what is unsatisfying to you? I am absolutely against majority oppressing a minority via government intervention, a minority in this case is people with more money than most The tyranny of majority leads to redistribution of resources. Communism is not even supposed to have a government. As someone born in the former USSR half a century ago I can point at that system and absolutely refuse it. I can also point at any oppressive system and refuse it. You are proposing an oppressive system, oppression by the force of government backed by the tyranny of majority. I am against it, it leads to destruction of freedoms, economic freedoms being the only ones that matter.

Comment Re:Like A Crypto Billionaire (Score 1) 298

Rich people don't liquidate assets when they want to buy something.

They get a loan against their assets. At extremely good rates. And no, they never pay them back. The strategy is called "buy, borrow, die".

First, you need to understand that if the stock price goes up more than their (low) interest rate, they're still making money.

Second, the whole thing is rolled up only when the ultra-rich person dies. The assets are revalued to their current market price at the time of death, wiping out decades of built-in capital gains tax liability. The estate can then sell a portion of the tax-free assets to pay off the outstanding loans.

tl;dr: They don't liquidate assets, if they did they'd have to pay taxes.

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