Ray Dalio has a bit in his latest book Changing World Order where he points out what nations/empires in the past have done when faced with similar situations that the US now finds itself in. When debt is high, and country fundamentals are decreasing (like internal stability, and global share of economic output) countries can either buckle down and take the austerity measures required to increase output + decrease the debt… or they can print more money to pay off the debt which leads to inflation. They almost always choose to print money.
Get rdy for some events that haven’t happened in earnest for around 80 years.
Thank you for sharing a counterpoint. IMO this act of skepticism is the most important trait of the HN culture.
That being said, I read through the counterpoint article and found it pretty hollow. In fact it seems to strengthen my belief that Sapiens is a valuable book. I kept expecting the author to point out where Harari’s assertions were wrong, but each section more or less boiled down to Harari is either not funny or not clever. The author even contradicts his article’s own thesis partway through:
“Nonetheless, his version of human history involves moral judgments that suggest he is not so thoroughly reductionist, or as cynical about the human condition, as he appears to be at first glance.“
All software is an abstraction and that’s what makes it useful. It sounds like you have a particularly vindictive axe to grind against all the “pointless abstractions” people have poured hours of their time into so I’m sure I won’t convince you. But to other readers, it doesn’t have to be this painfully divisive.
It is an abstraction that can save any users from having to think about shell scripts. This is incredibly valuable. We should not waste human time on writing and thinking about shell scripts, there are much bigger problems to solve.
The article and numbers are right, it’s just not clearly worded.
I had this same question a couple years back when I read this stat, so I messaged the Cornell Lab Ornithology and one of their reps explained how these numbers make sense.
“We start with a population of breeding adult birds at the beginning of the year. They breed, and multiply, and then the population is "spent" throughout the year on deaths such as window strikes, pesticide poisoning, and cat kills. If the population could keep up with these deaths, we would see a net loss of zero. Unfortunately, instead, we are seeing less and less breeding adult birds at the beginning of each year.
So when we say "we've lost 2.9 Billion birds," what we really mean is, "We've seen a net loss of 2.9 billion breeding adult birds since the 1970's." Back in the 1970's, the breeding season started with about 13 billion adult birds. This year, we had about 10 billion. Throughout the year, they multiply to about 40 billion before they die back. Of that 40 billion, cats kill 2.5 billion.”
I find it hard to sympathize for the poor plight of the $200,000/month healthcare-less twitch streamer working 2 more hours a day than the average person. Was this article written entirely to provoke outrage or is there some oppression I’m missing?
This was an informative counter-argument to what I normally read about US healthcare, thanks for taking the time to share this info.
This site gives several survey findings related to medical bankruptcy. The data is complex and conflicting at times (like you would expect given something as complex as 300+ million people’s healthcare) but the number that the stats seem to fluctuate around is 1 million people. 1 million people declare bankruptcy a year due to medical-related costs. That’s 0.333% per year.
So there are a lot of people (1 million if you believe the data in that link) per year being affected by this.
It says in the abstract that this data is preliminary, and the size of the sample was 950 American adults. I don’t think we can take much away from this study, except that it deserves further investigation.
To any Fe developers reading this: please put a non-trivial code snippet of Fe, with code comments that highlight the improvements over Solidity, front and center on the README.
I am a longtime smart contract developer who has been burned by Solidity’s downsides so I am excited about new EVM languages. I’ve read the Fe README, the announcement blog post, and the Uniswap v2 examples, but still have no concrete set of improvements over Solidity that I can point to. Maybe it’s just because things are still early, but from 15 minutes looking at Fe it still seems like Solidity but this a Pythonic syntax. As a Solidity dev, I want to see concretely how Fe improves on my existing smart contract language.
Thank you for pushing the frontier on smart contract development! I feel we’re in the very beginning of smart contract development and languages like Fe can be the path towards preventing tons of these hacks we see every week.
This is very well done. I've been hobby researching learning tools for the past couple years and this looks like one of the best. @ai_ia have you seen Andy Matuschak's Orbit project?
Ray Dalio has a bit in his latest book Changing World Order where he points out what nations/empires in the past have done when faced with similar situations that the US now finds itself in. When debt is high, and country fundamentals are decreasing (like internal stability, and global share of economic output) countries can either buckle down and take the austerity measures required to increase output + decrease the debt… or they can print more money to pay off the debt which leads to inflation. They almost always choose to print money.
Get rdy for some events that haven’t happened in earnest for around 80 years.