notahacker

15 時間前議論

Not gonna lie, I'd rather attack with 26 fighters that haven't survived lots of jump attempts than 8 who are much more confident in their motorbike stunt riding but presumably still aren't bulletproof.

But maybe they could ask Claude how to train themselves to resist bullets as well?

notahacker

一昨日議論

Founders decide they want to do other things with their lives all the time, and in the case of komoot reportedly exited at a €300m valuation for a company that had raised very little VC money, which is going to tempt most people no matter how much they hate popups...

notahacker

3 日前議論

Sure, but things like "OCR tool" or "agentic calendar assistant" or "agentic interface to CAD" don't feel like things I'd need pay 300k to build out custom infrastructure for, they feel like something lots of people/companies would rather pay an appropriate-sized subscription to a model optimized for that use case rather than burn ludicrous amounts on generalist models optimized for burning as many tokens as possible reasoning about how to update a calendar from first principles.

I mean, I also I think the "agentic calendar assistant" is more likely to come out of the Valley than Europe[1] and that the big AI startups will buy some of the niche AI startups gaining traction in strategic markets, but there are lots of niches that notionally benefit from transformer-based models

[1]probably a calendar assistant with a ludicrously inflated valuation based mostly on the assumption that Google/Meta/Anthropic will buy them to shut them down three years later...

notahacker

3 日前議論

To be honest, a novelty candidate couldn't possibly do less as a constituency MP than Farage and might plausibly turn up to Parliament more often. Would certainly liven up televised debates.

I don't think someone that runs for office is really that bothered that people who voted for other parties don't like them, particularly not people so unworldly they think a guy currently running away from an investigation involving him concealing Posh George (author of the semi-autobiographical How To Launder Money, whose mum once dated the King) paying for his social media manager and a Thai crypto billionaire and Tory donor paying him £5m as a 'personal gift' represents the voice of the ordinary person against the establishment.

notahacker

8 日前議論

Considering the design and certification is the expensive bit that needs thousands of sales to break even (want certification to be cheaper? Well I guess if you like more crashes) I'm not sure what some artificial separation of design and systems integration to create the illusion of a competitive market achieves, except perhaps worse safety as suddenly you've got a lot of companies selling the same licenced design manufactured by the same supply chain competing only on how many QC corners they can cut to reduce prices...

notahacker

8 日前議論

There aren't any common activities where visible corpses serve to remind you that around 1% of participants don't make it back

notahacker

9 日前議論

> I'm not the one arguing about definitions. You chose to take us down that path, adding a bunch of ad hominem while simultaneously misusing the terminology you were trying to be patronizing with. I 100% agree that it's completely inconsequential

Technically I suppose it is me that keeps insisting you can't just redefine terms to make them mean the opposite of what they mean because that would be convenient to your argument. I didn't realise you considered making up new definitions of words "completely inconsequential", but it explains a lot.

But one of the things about posting complete nonsense like "expected value [2] is a term you do not seem familiar with. It is a risk adjusted value of expected return on something" is that I'm going to patronise you for responding by posting incorrect definitions in a ill-advised attempt to patronise the person who knows what the words actually mean.

> I'm also trying to, within reason, respond to each thing you're stating

And yet your latest response to me continues to ignores all my points about risk, base interest rates, opportunity costs and the relative unprofitability of investing in productive ventures when average prices are falling and instead links to a trend line for Campbell's soup prices. I realise it's easier for you to triumphantly assert that inflation is correlated with the price of Campbell's soup to rise (well done, you managed to not get a basic economic relation the wrong way round for once!) than to learn why interest rates have an inverse relationship with money supply and why that might be relevant to the return on productive ventures, but it's a whole lot less relevant to anything I've said. Because, funnily enough, I never expected anything other than Campbell's soup increasing their prices in the last 50 years. Still, the proportion of budget spent on food, which matters a lot more, has gone down a lot since the gold standard era[1][2] and it's not like that's because Americans are getting skinnier!

> One major thing I'd emphasize here is that you're acting like the consequences of non-inflationary systems are speculative. The entire point of this discussion is we have a wealth of data to draw from, from both systems. With a non-inflationary system we have a system that was, more or less, stable over nearly 200 years through numerous catastrophic events. With the modern inflationary system we have something that already not only seems unsustainable, but is causing major societal issues after just 50 years of relative super-utopia. I say super-utopia because not only have we avoided anything on the scale of e.g. WW2, but it kicked off alongside the once-in-a-civilization super-economic boom of mass digitization that is now plateauing.

If we want to talk about stability verus "catastrophic events", the most notable periods of of sustained deflation (the thing you kicked off this exchange by praising) were called the Great Depression, Panic of 1893, Panic of 1873, the Panic of 1837 and the 1818-21 depression. So yeah, economists' alarm about deflationary spirals are not speculation but backed by a lot of data. If we're doing a natural experiment between deflation and steady 2% inflation even the names are a hint that the former state of affairs might be more problematic.

It's funny that you think there was a single monetary system over that 200 year period (again, you're disputing a universally agreed historical fact rather than making a defensible theoretical argument about causation here) and perhaps funnier still that you believe there were no societal issues over that period and that "mass digitization" has been more transformational than the Industrial Revolution was. Disruptions like the Civil War and WWII were dealt with by completely disregarding convertibility to gold and the growth of 1950-1970 was sustained by the US giving away quarter of the entire world's gold supply, a luxury it can no longer afford. The Bretton Woods trade arrangement that made everyone need dollars largely worked for the US; the attempt to link it to gold was what killed it. And it would have died much earlier if FDR hadn't already suspended the ability of anybody that wasn't a foreign central bank to demand gold in exchange for dollars...

> So on the data issue - the way you determine an inflection point on a noisy graph is just to look at the midpoints of the noise and graph them.

The way you determine an inflection point is to determine the breakpoint between upward and downward trends or concavity or convexity. Neither of the graphs of labour share of income you have linked to have that functional form, irrespective of what averaging method you use to remove the economic cycles.

I laughed mostly because it's actually really easy to find similar time series that do appear to have an inflection point some time around 1971, or at least between 1965 and 1990[3]. Here's one[4]. The trouble for you is that although it shows a fall in employee compensation as a proportion of GDI in the last 50 years, it also shows that it was lower still in the gold standard era's heyday back in 1929 (the 1920s were also the peak of post-industrial wealth concentration)... and that wage growth happened when the Fed inflated its way out of that mess...

It's almost like those billionaire funded think tanks promising that a return to the monetary economics of 1931 (but keeping the tax cuts of the 1980s and other policy and technology shifts you're furiously pretending didn't affect anything) would make ordinary people get paid a higher share of income aren't telling the truth.

[1]https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-fa...

[2]fun aside: there probably is an inflection point in this time series at 1932, the last full year in which people could redeem their USD for gold with food becoming relatively more affordable afterwards. Although you'd probably want to see the trend for the 1920s and earlier to be sure, and since I'm not as monomanically currency obsessed as you I would never make the mistake of arguing that decoupling from gold is the only reason why food is much more affordable to the average person today than it was at any point during the gold standard era...

[3]I mean, the silly website on that theme manages to find a graph to blame the end of Bretton Woods for divorce rates...

[4]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A4002E1A156NBEA

notahacker

9 日前議論

I mean, the "right price" for a 15 year old 787 (with a fresh new set of life limited parts and maintenance checks) is around a third of the cost of a new one and they're now starting to be parted out for their components (newer 787s have updated GEnx engines with better fuel economy, which is a big part of their higher value). And Boeing reckoned they needed to sell 1100 units to break even on the programme, which is a lot aircraft to sell if your design is only competitive with 15 year old aircraft airlines are trying to get rid of. People are already starting to breaking up old 787s for scrap because there are more buyers for spares than old 787s...

China may or may not be much more than a decade behind in their engine technology, but there's no commercial case for designing a new aircraft with engine variants so outdated they wipe >$100m off the sticker price of the aircraft....

notahacker

9 日前議論

Problem with antitrust hammers is that once you've chopped Boeing into bits you don't end up with a competitive market with lots of new aircraft designs, you end up with a global Airbus monopoly on aircraft over 150 seats and the few surviving bits of Boeing competing to sell into its supply chain...

Airframers really aren't that vertically integrated as companies go. But it turns out the business of designing, certifying and selling an aircraft (and managing complex multinational supply chains) is hard, and airlines don't want 6 competing types of narrowbody in their fleet, they want one type of narrowbody in their fleet with an abundance of type-rated pilots, multiple maintenance options and a robust aftermarket.

notahacker

9 日前議論

The problem with fully electric airliners is physics: to achieve useful range you either need batteries with energy density that seems unfeasible or some sort of power beaming infrastructure which has its own set of enormous challenges. So if Western turbofan manufacturers' moat lasts until electric aviation is ubiquitous, they can be very, very happy.

(Now sure, you can substitute electric aircraft with open rotor jet engines which require different institutional knowledge to modern high bypass turbofans, but they're still really sensitive to how the blades are manufactured)

notahacker

9 日前議論

They can order engines from RR or P&W

But those companies have no commercial interest in supporting a Chinese manufacturer that just wants the blades even without export controls, when they can make much higher margins selling whole engines that must be maintained using their parts (in practice variants of the engines destined for COMAC also omit some of the IP that finds its way onto Airbus and Boeing because you can help a customer too much...)

notahacker

10 日前議論

> In investing, you seem to be trying to derive variance from expected value, which is impossible. And risk is not the same thing as variance.

It's funny, because two posts ago you wrote the words "expected value is a term you do not seem familiar with. It is a risk adjusted value of expected return on something". So you're really only arguing against yourself here

But variance is, in fact a way for investors to assess risk (again, if you had an adult-level of understanding of the subject matter or even a modicum of self awareness you wouldn't keep contesting definitions for no reason). And since investors care about risk adjusted returns, they do not think an expected 0.1% nominal return on productive activity is attractive, least of all in a deflationary environment. (Sure, you can't directly derive variance from expected return, but you don't need to do that to rule out ludicrous scenarios like a sub 10 basis point risk premium on investing in productive activity whilst prices fall, which means you don't invest at 0.1%)

> It's entirely possible for an investment with a 0.1% EV to have a lower variance than one with a 15% EV.

Sure. It is however entirely impossible for a productive venture with a 0.1% EV to have an attractive risk adjusted return under deflation. Nobody with an adult level understanding of finance would make this argument, let alone still be trying to defend it by arguing against their own attempted gotcha multiple posts later. Because they understand basics like "deflation causes debt to be more expensive" (remember a week ago when you wrote that, apparently without understanding what it means), and 0.1% is not a high return on risky activity when debt is expensive. And also, they understand that the risk-adjusted return will be negative, particularly as risks to commercial activity increase under deflation caused by monetary policy intentionally starving the economy of capital).

> Because the point is that anything with a real expected return of "x" in an inflationary system has a real return of e.g. "x+5" (or whatever the exact delta happens to be) in a non-inflationary system

Again, this is just an assertion that only somebody with no understanding of basic stuff like how inflation/deflation affects sales prices and interest rates would make. It is very easy to argue that the price somebody has to pay a wealthier person to borrow money being x+5 rather than x is a bad thing, if you believe that it is better for economies to reward people that make stuff rather than people that have stuff.

The actual point was that it's harder to make a positive money return producing stuff to sell when next year's price is y-2 rather than y+2, and in those circumstances also easy to make a small real return doing nothing or a big real return lending to cover short term debts instead.

Again, I'm sorry you don't understand this, but it's really, really not possible to contest the fact that deflation does not incentivise investment if you understand supply and demand to high school level (never mind the actual nuances of interest rates and transmission mechanisms). I guess I can look forward to you eventually accepting that it doesn't whilst attempting to attribute your current position to me in five days time.

If only you could trade some of your unmatched reserves of persistence for a little actual knowledge... (you could, for example,read a book instead of doubling down on being wrong by Googling more economic terms to insinuate I'm missing whilst not even being able to define them without making mistakes)

> But the really interesting thing? Go open their graphs and look where the inflection point is. It's, again, the funny money

The really interesting thing is that you've actually managed to find an economic chart without an inflection point to make argument about inflection points, which is quite an achievement! The trend line over the period displayed appears to be a noisy concave function with the noise attributable to economic cycles.

Although if you put a gun to my head any asked me to point to what looks most like an inflection point in this graph without an actual inflection point, I'd probably point to the steepening of the downslope of the curve around the millennium which doesn't seem to have much to do with leaving the gold standard or inflation being high....

Watching you pretend to understand the subject matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WZLJpMOxS4

notahacker

11 日前議論

> I've also already said I fully agree that the data we're using isn't ideal in terms of inflation.

It's not a case of it being not ideal. It's the case of it being an example of literally the opposite phenomenon from the one you're arguing for. Arguing that the 1950s are a good example of how deflation helps people is like arguing that Barack Obama is a good example of how Republican candidates make good presidents.

> As for investment, expected value [2] is a term you do not seem familiar with. It is a risk adjusted value of expected return on something.

hahahahahahaha

Again, it's a basic definitional thing that EV isn't adjusted for the investor's risk tolerance (it's a probability weighted average, as your link and many better introductory economics and finance texts you should probably read will tell you.)

Not only am I familiar with what expected value actually means and its use as a synonym for risk-neutral return in investment parlance, I'm also apparently the only participant in the discussion aware that 0.1% expected return isn't likely to leave enough of a risk premium[1] and (ii) investors also have to consider opportunity cost, so even in a world filled with insane risk-neutral investors who'd in principle be comfortable betting their house on a fair coin flip, they still wouldn't touch an investment at a nominal 0.1% return in a gold standard world, because the opportunity cost would be giving up much higher returns on lending the money elsewhere. Because unlike you I know that market and base interest rates are a thing and why they're relevant to the argument. And also they're not the same thing as inflation and are in fact generally inversely related[2].

Once we've got past the basic definitional stuff and the "why doesn't this hypothetical gold standard economy where you're considering investing in a productive venture for a 0.1% return have anyone else that wants to borrow your money?", I could question what sort of venture would get a 0.1% nominal return when prices of stuff it might make are going down, and only get a 0.1% nominal return in an inflationary environment where the prices of stuff it might make are going up[3]. It's easier to make more than 0.1% making stuff to sell next year when prices of everything are going to be 2% higher, and harder when prices of everything are going to be 2% lower.

Again, if you don't have the basic grasp of the relevant terms you're quoting (some of them more high school than undergrad) never mind sufficient grasp to understand even an argument as simple as "risking money to earn 0.1% is not attractive when money is in short supply" have the decency to the possibility that you might not be in a position to know best about how the economy works. Also, if you don't like billionaire capital owners having too much money, maybe don't pin your hopes on the only policy prescription that hasn't trended towards the CATO institute, von Mises and Ayn Rand's[4] arguments in favour of letting billionaires keep more of their money since the 1950s...

[1]in any economy except, ironically, an economy with lots of money printing (seriously, go learn about QE. Hint: it's printing lots of money because printing lots of money is a way to get people interested in investing when interest rates are very low)

[2]and also why, and covering the relevant transmission mechanisms might take half a semester of undergrad macro, but even understanding that money isn't cheap to borrow when its in short supply would get you there.

[3]I mean, when I say wonder, I actually know that the most likely way of achieving that with actual goods and services is if it's an inferior good with negative income elasticity. I'm just not sure why anybody would want to base economic policy on incentivising the production of inferior goods with negative income elasticities, even if such a policy were feasible.

[4]weird how it's all these extremely rabidly pro-billionaire personalities and organizations and none of the pro-worker organizations that want the gold standard back, considering your conviction that it will be good for workers and bad for billionaires.

notahacker

12 日前議論

Well yeah, the relative velocity is what matters, but not everything is moving in perfectly circular concentric shells either. You've got many different inclinations and eccentricities (and drag profiles) within what's broadly construed as "LEO". The relative velocity of the Iridium 33 / Kosmos 2251 collision involving two satellites in LEO was over 11km/s.

notahacker

12 日前議論

Without wishing to defend Tim Cook at all, there is a difference between a corporation donating to an incumbent government that seems unusually receptive to bribes (including to be left alone) and an individual CEO being the main financial backer of a local fringe far right party he wants to make a national force, presumably because of his enthusiastic support for their policies which include the 'remigration' of citizens deemed excessively brown...

notahacker

12 日前議論

Nah, it's more akin to complaining about the number of bullets crossing your path. They don't occupy much space, but the fact they're moving at 17,500mpg means you want to ensure you avoid them, and ideally for there to be fewer of them fired at more predictable intervals.

notahacker

12 日前議論

Also, the number of countries with practical space launch capability is very small. US / China agreement isn't trivial, but if you can get them agreeing to ITU-administered slots, getting ESA, Japan, India, NZ etc is pretty straightforward (and Russia's capacity isn't huge even if they don't want to play ball)

notahacker

13 日前議論

Well yeah, that's where Zuck trying to stop his book being published makes it look a bit less like irrelevant self serving nonsense...

notahacker

14 日前議論

> So here are the apples to apples base data for the most recent branch of discussion:

These are explicitly not apples to apples comparisons because the 1951 percentage is extremely restrictive about the housing units considered (i.e. most apartments are excluded, as are farms) and there's no reason to believe the ownership percentages are equivalent. I could (equally unfairly) point out that the 9.5 million "free and clear" homes in your paper is less than a quarter of the total recorded nonfarm housing stock which is a lot less than the 34 million (39.4%) owned free and clear today.

What is clear though is that no interpretation of the available data is compatible with your original statement that "In 1951 56% of people owned their home, free and clear", or your assertion that something your source claimed had grown massively recently was a "local low". Defending those basic misunderstandings with clumsy misuse of statistics two posts later whilst telling me not to get too vested in arguments is... pretty funny.

Also, as I keep pointing out and you keep pretending isn't the case, the 1950s were a time where inflation rates averaged their current level (but with more volatility) not a time of deflation (and for that matter were also a time of the Fannie Mae mortgage backing you blame for everything, rather than the good old days when you had to save up 50% of the cost of your house as a deposit and pay it off within 10 years). So it is completely irrelevant to your argument for deflation.

You have not addressed any of the other points in my last two posts. I am sorry, but if genuinely don't understand why nobody would invest for a 0.1% return [under a gold standard] even when the post you are responding to explicitly mentions things like interest rates and risk and the relationship between credit prices and money supply, it is not worth my time trying to educate you on what those very basic concepts entail. Especially given that you have made it extremely clear you have no interest in understanding.

There is no point phrasing things like an adult to someone that flat-out refuses to acknowledge very basic adult concepts like interest rates and risk and supply and demand whilst resorting to babyish memes like "money printer go whirrr" and "funny money"

notahacker

14 日前議論

Whilst make outrageous claims to assert power is definitely a thing, I think the null hypothesis is less that they're playing 4D chess and more that people who constantly get away with stuff and constantly get told they're geniuses like spoiled children end up behaving like spoiled children. It's like for every "van Halen wants the brown M&Ms removed to audit the venue staff's attention to detail" anecdote there are 100 stars making extravagant demands who are just divas.

Zuck cheating at board games me of Elon buying a claim to being a great Path of Exile and Diablo player. Nobody believes he is, and nobody is loyalty tested into praising his ability at computer games, not even people who work at his companies. He gets mocked for it on his own website. The few people that would actually be impressed by a claim of being good at Path of Exile and Diablo know exactly how bad he is at it and find it pitiful; ironically it actually dents his reputation with a demographic disproportionately likely to be impressed by other things about him. Other people aren't inclined to think highly of him for playing those games in the first place, never mind paying others to boost his account. The reality is simply that when he's interested in a game he can't abide the idea of not being really good at it, and cheating and getting others to do stuff for you is the easiest way to appear really good at it. Especially when you're used to ignoring people calling you out...

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