domain:forecasting.substack.com
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
5m ago
I guess the play would be to release an actual AI generated version of the same picture, so that everything is confused as to what they're looking at and what was the original.
since the mantra of most owners is to buy and hold.
That's not necessarily it. I used to know a guy that donated 1000 BTC to a minor-mid influencer, back when the price was in single digits. It later came out that the recipient lost his wallet key, without selling a single coin.
Either way, I don't breally silly the problem. The pathologization of savings always struck me as economist cope.
pbmonster
18m ago
The clothes themselves seem to be pretty standard ones, similar to what I see in every store, not some junk or second hand ones, so they must cost something? How these costs are covered? How are they ensured against loss or theft?
The answer to all of that is that those clothes cost almost nothing when you directly import them from China/Bangladesh/Vietnam. Single dollars, often cents, per item. It's all mass produced plastic garbage.
Go onto shein.com and sort cloths by "price, ascending". Bulk is even cheaper than that.
pbmonster
24m ago
The clothes are sourced from others in the community, maybe a couple of whom acquire big volume discount merchandise from discount store closings, perhaps wholesale outlets etc, then sell them on.
And frequently, it's just the same plastic garbage Shein/Wish/AliExpress is selling, imported in bulk.
On vacation, my wife tried getting a cheap beach dress from those stands, the only criteria being "cotton or linen" and "kinda fits". The entire operation was abandoned because the first 5 people we tried didn't have a single piece of clothing not made of plastics.
pbmonster
34m ago
That's also probably the ideal vessel for a sail system. Transporting bulky rocket parts below deck makes mounting the sails/masts straight forward, the low density cargo doesn't require a large displacement hull, and the ship probably doesn't need to run on a tight schedule. Container ships would have much more trouble finding room for the sails, and with more draft comes more hydrodynamic resistance, and so a requirement for much larger sails.
But maybe bulk carriers could get foils mounted cheaply and quickly. Even 0.1% fuel savings are a big deal in the industry.
Now I'm wondering what happened to all those startups that tried lashing a robotic kite to cargo ships...
quiet_NaN
58m ago
Directionally, I am okay with that, provided that the long term consequences for the CEO are real, which seems doubtful. On the other hand, having a fat bank account allows for a much nicer prison term ('work' release etc), and having a nice life despite a criminal record.
As another example, suppose someone kills a kid in a DUI crash. If it is their own kid, then it seems very likely that the killing will haunt them for the rest of their days. If it is some unrelated kid, it will not affect the median person as much. So I am fine with giving the filicide a shorter prison sentence.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
1hr ago
Just finished The Reverse of the Medal.
Jack Aubrey displays his characteristic gullibility on land and walks right into a trap laid for him by his father's political enemies. Practically the entire book is set in England which makes for a nice change of scenery after having most of the last three books set in the Mediterranean, South Atlantic and the Pacific seas. Really interesting novel that plays more like a spy thriller than a naval adventure, and I can see how its in some people's top 5 for this series.
After a bunch of ????? happens that I don't want to spoil (but includes someone accurately insulting Maturin as a cuck), our heroes end up on The Surprise bearing a letter of marque and sailing as privateers. I'm looking forward to Letter of Marque, because while there's plenty of ink spilled about pirates, there's very little about pirates that are endorsed by their legitimate government.
Haven't been commenting since most of this has been simple evolutionary-biology stuff I'm already intimately familiar with, but you stated last post that part 3 would ruffle some feathers - in contrast, I see the conclusion this part comes to as transparently and obviously true. This would have been clear to people in some way or other until the Enlightenment idea of tabula rasa irreparably fucked everyone's view of human behaviour (though there was prior precedent in earlier concepts of mind-body dualism as well as the Christian concept of everyone being equal in the eyes of God). Perhaps this is more clear to me than it is to most other people, since I strongly suspect that many personality traits of mine lie somewhere around two or three sigma from the mean. I have always found the way most people form their moral and factual beliefs, as well as how they experience the world, to diverge significantly from mine. That applies to members of my family as well in spite of the shared genetics (albeit marginally less so). I always feel like I'm speaking to lizard people when interacting with others, and have always been an individual without a clear tribe or any place in which I "belong".
But I digress. All of that's besides the point - what gets me to write this is that the topic of this post dovetails a little bit with something I've been looking into. Just recently, I've been looking at my family history and can't help but notice that some of my personality traits are exactly what you would expect given the history of where I come from. I can't prove my hypothesis is true, but the suspicion is unshakeable.
I'm about three-quarters Hokkien and one-quarter Cantonese, and while I haven't been able to trace the hometowns of all of my great-grandparents I know at least one of them grew up in the historic Chinese port city of Quanzhou. It was an important port city for four hundred years spanning the Song-Yuan dynasty, and many people there were traders - in fact, the name for "satin" comes from the Arabic name for the city. Given its importance, Quanzhou saw traders from all over the world and played host to many religions - it was a place where Buddhists, Confucians, Taoist, Muslims, Christians, Hindus and even Manichaeans would have congregated (even now, descendants of Islamic traders live in the city, and hidden Manichaeans still practice their religion in the mountains of Fujian province). A gigantic proportion of overseas Hokkien trace their history back to Quanzhou, and it is likely their ancestors would have been involved in a whole lot of trading and seafaring along the Maritime Silk Road. Unlike the more famous overland Silk Road, where merchants would specialise in a specific area and goods would only travel the length of the road after changing hands many times, traders on the Maritime Silk Road travelled long distances and could even travel the entire length of the route. This harsh lifestyle probably placed selection pressures on those who engaged in it, and adaptations would have trickled into the gene pool in response. (Cantonese were also, unsurprisingly, big traders and merchants.)
Five months ago - before I even started looking at any of this - I had written a post about my inexplicable need to wander, and in that post I even mention the romanticism and pull of the Maritime Silk Road. That's quite the trippy coincidence. When I was six or seven I had claimed ownership of many of the travel books my parents owned, and placed Post-Its in these books to mark destinations for future reference. I have always had a low need for human interaction and connection, an unusually high openness to experience, and find myself with a deep longing for exploration and novelty which exceeds that of most other people I know. I often find myself looking out the window of my apartment building once the sun has gone down, and feel like walking into the night. Some part of me has always wanted to be a nomad, and the idea of being tied down to one place doing the same thing for the rest of my life - even something I like - actually sometimes induces low-level panic. It feels uninspired and uninspiring. It feels domesticated. I recently watched a video where an old hippie recounts his time travelling through Southeast Asia on the Banana Pancake trail, and couldn't help but feel nostalgic and wistful at the same time while watching it. I can't help but wonder if this was because some significant portion of my ancestors were traders at some point.
I've seen this urge in other male members of my family too, who seem to have this compulsion to travel and wander and see new things. I don't know if this is real or if it's just me inappropriately pattern-matching, but it's fucking weird and disconcerting to look back into your history and come across a glaringly obvious selection pressure that might have produced your specific pattern of behaviour.
Corvos
1hr ago
Those 2 million aren’t in circulation per se, though, since the mantra of most owners is to buy and hold. In many ways it’s a demonstration of the issues with non-fiat, non-inflationary money.
benmmurphy
2hr ago
so the presumably if we follow this logic a CEO of a company would get a shorter custodial sentence than an unemployed person because the extra consequences will be much larger for the CEO. if you have special circumstances that will make punishments extra costly then you should make extra effort to not break the law.
5434a
2hr ago
From what I remember seeing the members were basically normal in terms of looks, just wildly over-invested in the idea/ideal of One True Love romanticism and the childish wish that the way to get what you want is to really really really want it. You don't have to be fat and ugly to to be dissatisfied with being judged solely for your looks.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
3hr ago
I think the far right will come to power in Germany, Austria or both.
Don't get my hopes up, and don't you dare be wrong about it.
Also, even if - the far right is known to bungle it.
odd_primes
4hr ago
The litrpg space and progression fantasy genre is weird, it feels like the audience is vaguely right-leaning (lots of male video game nerds) but there are author cliques that purity test each other. And in order to succeed on Royalroad or Amazon, it really helps to get bootstrapped by other authors. For example the progression fantasy subreddit has a year-round pride flag, and it's run by a clique of authors who chase off anyone outside their political window of acceptability.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4hr ago
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4hr ago
Ireland and the vast majority of the British empire, including Western countries like Canada, Australia...
CanofWorms
4hr ago
I finished *The Poisonwood Bible and while I thought the first 2/3's and the lead up to
I'm on to To Kill a Mockingbird. I haven't read this book since I was probably 14 and want to revisit it. I'm surprised at how much of the story I don't remember.
Out of curiosity have you read To The Stars? It explores a kind of similar idea.
Mild spoilers (worldbuilding elements): ||Eventually they interact with an alien society structured around the idea that individuals have a prefspec (preference specification) that they can modify at will which determines their compulsions and interests. An individual can decide to modify their own prefspec to better match their desired goals. For example someone planning to be a parent could self-adjust to enjoy the nurturing and caring components more than they otherwise would.
This also allows for prefspec negotiation, where individuals or groups can negotiate mutual modifications to each others' prefspecs to reach compromises between what would have been mutually incompatible values. Factions end up trading prefspec modifications between each other, sometimes for material compensation or sometimes for prefspec modifications in other areas.||
It's a pretty neat exploration of the concept, but it does start pretty deep into the story.
JarJarJedi
5hr ago
It's an interesting question whether Coinbase is already qualifying as "too big to fail". I'd say probably not yet, but could become before this decade is over. Of course, massive regulatory interventions would accompany that.
Having asked my wife to please move out, I now wait for our daughter to wake up. All I want to do at present is make sure the little one has a nice day.
These are very long minutes. Hence, pointless posting.
In other news, I had my first BJJ session a few days ago, which was fun, but on the drive home I noticed a broken rib, which isn't. Still worth it, but man I hate being flimsy.
JarJarJedi
5hr ago
My theory of crypto value is that most of the coin gets stolen every few years.
If by "the coin" you mean bitcoin, it's not true. Currently, about 20 mln bitcoin is outstanding. Known bitcoin thefts, as far as can see, over all history, amount to under 1.5 million, and significant part of it has been recovered. Of course, some thefts may not be discovered until the funds are moved - if somebody knows your keys, you wont know it until they move the coins. But then it doesn't make any difference on the pricing. As I see from reports, e.g. https://river.com/learn/who-owns-the-most-bitcoin/ most bitcoin is owned by individuals, and the largest custodian of bitcoin is Coinbase, which holds around 10% of the supply. Which puts it in roughly the same position as Chase bank (the largest US bank) has in dollar economy.
If you talk about shitcoins, anything is possible, it's a wild chaos and pretty much any wild claim could be true for some subsets of them.
There‘s only like 6 bitcoin left in circulation, that‘s why they are getting bid so strongly.
That's hilariously far from truth, Coinbase alone has over 2 millions, and since it holds the keys for every single one of those, it can trivially recover coins that are known to be stolen. And if they are not known to be stolen, again, there's no difference in economic effects - if the original owner did not intend to move them and also the thief doesn't move them, there's zero effect. One can only wonder - why would anybody bother to steal anything in order to never ever use it?
Tree
6hr ago
My theory of crypto value is that most of the coin gets stolen every few years. The thieves, fearing being connected to the crime through the ledger, never dare to touch their ill-gotten gains. One day, as we all must, they die, rich in spirit, and their cursed coins follow them into the grave.
Destroying money is strongly deflationary. There‘s only like 6 bitcoin left in circulation, that‘s why they are getting bid so strongly.
DOGE didn't ultimately succeed in shrinking the government, but it eliminated the security of government employment.
More options
Context Copy link