At least he ended another war on his birthday. People will be lining up to give him peace prizes.

Has an agreement actually been reached? Both sides agree on the terms?

How much was given away to get it?

How will Trump and his stooges spin it?

How long will it last?

I hope you'll forgive me for being skeptical, give what has happened up 'til now.

I have 40 kWh of batteries in my home, for backup and time-shifting, and I participate in a grid-stabilization program with my power company. The grid never draws significant energy from my batteries -- grid stabilization doesn't need a lot of energy, just a brief spike of power to keep things stable while the operator makes other adjustments. Historically this has been unnecessary because generation was from big spinning turbines and their inertia was enough to smooth out spikes and dips in demand. But renewable-heavy grids don't have the tons of spinning steel, so batteries increasingly fill the gaps.

What do I actually see when the power company draws from my batteries? I see an otherwise-unexplained spike of 5-10 kW flowing from my batteries and into the grid, for a period of 2-5 minutes. 10 kW for 5 minutes is ~0.8 kWh, which is 2% of my house battery storage. I see a draw that large maybe once per week; usually it's much less. Bottom line: the impact on my storage is insignificant, and my house batteries are smaller than what most EVs have (my EV has a 100 kWh battery pack).

What do I get for allowing the power company to do that? For the first year of participation, I got a check for $2000. For subsequent years I'll get bill credits of up to $50/month, applied to energy charges only. I'm not sure how much that will translate to, since my net energy purchase is usually zero (thanks to solar panels). It's a great deal for the first year. Beyond that... we'll see.

Yes, you're the second person to point out the typo, which would have been edited within seconds of me clicking "submit" if we had an edit button.

My last 99 investments were flops ... so this one has *got* the be the big one.

I thought we were talking about aliens.

Not aliens with lumps of rubber glued to their heads.

What is your point?

It's nonsensical to talk of the British Isles (or Islands as you incorrectly write) "being part again", because the British Isles aren't one country and part of them is still in the EU.

I fail to see it.

I'd expect nothing less from you.

True, except that gold's actual usage price -- for industry and jewelry -- hasn't been its trading price for a very long time. As long as people have viewed it as a store of wealth its price has been inflated by that perception.

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.

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.

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)

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.

I mean, it is a pretty impressive model. And not just from the benchmarks. Relentlessly proactive and resourceful. It's a shame it's cut off.

There is no reason bitcoin can't slide back to being worth a dollar a coin. There no guarantee of value behind it. You can argue about whether fiat money is any better once the US went off the gold standard, but there is still a bit of irreplaceable value there; "the full faith and credit" means you can use it to transact business with the government, both by contracting to do public works for which the government pays you, and paying taxes and fees which are used to perform government functions and give you tokens such as licenses which show that you've contributed your share. Money's very liquidity for these purposes is a source of value, even if you can't redeem your picture of a President for precious metal. By contrast, Bitcoin literally isn't worth anything unless you can find someone (for some reason the phrase "bigger fool" comes to mind) to trade you something for it that does have value.