There is no right to not receive another's germs. If we take your argument to its logical conclusion, then the flu vaccine would be mandated. But it's not. So if you say that Covid is different, then what is your threshold or cut-off for when a medical procedure should be mandated?
There is no right to not receive another's germs. If we take your argument to its logical conclusion, then the flu vaccine would be mandated. But it's not. So if you say that Covid is different, then what is your threshold or cut-off for when a medical procedure should be mandated?
Why not? if the cost & benefit ratio is worth it, maybe we should. The same for any other diseases you can think of. If the answer is yes, then there are no reason for any of us to refuse unless we have good excuses.
The problem with "Don't Be Evil" is that it assumes everyone agrees on what the definition of "evil" is. But that is absolutely not the case. We live in a post-Christian/post-religious society where - aside from the basic human instinct of survival - no one agrees on First Principles. The dominant ideology in society now is Liberalism. And I don't mean American liberalism. I mean actual Liberalism - freedom of speech, expression, assembly, religion, etc. Because of this, there is a diversity of thought and moral relativism, so "evil" means different things to different people. A rural, socially conservative Christian's idea of "evil" will likely be very different than an urban, secular, and progressive definition of "evil." Without a dominant ideology guiding society using a set universal moral code, there will always be conflicts regarding First Principles, different sets of facts, etc.
I think a socially conservative Christian's definition of evil is almost the same as that of a secular progressive. Moral relativism is about using a small grey area as an example for how the massive overlap is wrong.
Sure, but there's a huge gap between "we all precisely agree on what 'evil' means and 'nobody has a clue what evil means'.
It's pretty unreasonable for somebody to say "I personally think this is evil so I can't be fired for refusing to do it, even though I'm the only one", but it's a lot more reasonable if most people would agree that it is in fact evil.
I could see a judgement for the former employees if Google were helping an authoritarian government identify and punish dissidents. Working with US customs? Probably not.
You make a good attempt at joking here, but ultimately fail. Your absurd position: "we live in a post-Crhistian/post-religious society" is just way way too far as an initial gambit. Maybe try toning it down at first? Or alternately going way further at the start. This just hits poe's law too hard.
I agree with your point but i'm not sure i agree that people disagree on first principles that much, and i think people mostly pay lip-service to liberalism more than practice and believe it.
Makes sense at face value. Generally speaking, religious minorities tend to perform better economically than the majority religious group(s) since they have to work harder to overcome institutional and historical hurdles placed in their way. So when they are persecuted, their economic productivity is reduced. Quite simply, they are either killed, flee, or are reduced to poverty. All of these affect economic performance. We see this today with the Christian minorities in the Middle East and Near East (Copts in Egypt, Syriacs in Syria, Assyrians in Iraq and Turkey, Armenians in Turkey, etc.).
> religious minorities tend to perform better economically than the majority religious group(s) since they have to work harder to overcome institutional and historical hurdles placed in their way
They dont? Religious minorities tend to worst then majority. They do sometimes get accused to be too rich by propaganda.
Jew in Europe nor in Germany specifically before WWII were not actually richer, statistically. They were on average lower middle class. Many of them were poor and refugees from eastern europe. Where individuals have been more successful, majority resented that and wanted to punish all Jews for it.
Yazidi are not richer then average in Iraque. Kurds are not richer then majority.
I think it's more important to find a good text book about the language you want to learn programming in, rather than a book about OOP. OOP is implemented differently by each language, and some popular languages these days completely avoid OOP.
I agree but I wouldn’t restrict the recommendation to just if you use python or ruby but if you want to use or understand any language in an OO fashion.
Lower taxes, great food, more open space, less expensive property, more freedom to do what you want as long as you don't hurt others. The only problem with Texas is that the economy is too dependent on fossil fuel. It's basically a mini petro state. They need to use that oil money to diversify into other industries. I'm not sure if they have been doing that or not, but I don't exactly have faith that the political class is thinking about long-term plans or goals. They only care about fundraising and the next election.
Pretty sure the Texas political class is thinking about their long-term plans to usher in a new era of Christofascism, starting with the bounty hunter abortion law.
Oh it started well before that specific law. This just made its way to the finish line. They have been trying things like this for a long time. Infamous bathroom bill comes to mind, plus voting rights issues, etc have long been a part of the Texas political agenda.
I did my undergrad in Economics but I want to transition to software engineering. But idk what stack to choose or what projects to work on. I also can't afford to leave my job to do a bootcamp either. So I'm stuck and it sucks.
I am still amazed by the shortsightedness of how these critical and strategic goods are off-shore. No wonder why the supply chains are fragile and not robust. It should be illegal for strategic goods and components such as chips and semiconductors to be produced offshore. Yes, it will raise prices in the short and medium-term, but it will make the domestic economy and manufacturing sector more robust, resilient to supply shocks, and antifragile.
We need a true industrial policy and state capitalist system similar to what Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have.
The blame for this is purely on the shoulders of business leaders coming out of MBA programs across the US.
It seems the only thing those places are teaching is how to join a company, strip it to the bone, hype up the short-term 5% growth, and get millions of dollars in raises.
Blaming individuals doesn’t help, it’s a coordination problem. If any one MBA refuses to outsource they’ll just be outcompetes by someone who does. This is the sort of problem that requires a government to solve
The blame is clearly on the shoulders of politicians and those who keep voting for them. Most of the political class are pushing globalization, and thus align tax incentives towards outsourcing. Imagine if the politicians in charge practiced what they preach and refused to buy or import goods that were produced by countries who don’t meet US labor law or emissions standards. The problem would practically solve itself.
>blame is clearly on the shoulders of politicians and those who keep voting for them
Or a system that depends on "voters" to know any of the nuances and details of manufacturing and supply chain importance, or actually vote with long term broad national interest in mind, instead of short term, out of narrow self-interest, and largely be ignorant of all manner of political, economic and other issues.
I don’t like those MBAs anymore than you but blaming this group is disingenuous and an oversimplification. Business schools train people to profit, and if that comes at the cost of secure supply chains and national security, who cares, it’s not their problem. Someone else mentioned that this is a coordination problem, and I think that’s more accurate. You need governments to help fund these capital intensive ventures and incentives like tax-breaks and the fear of supply chain destroying pandemics to urge them on.
And people wonder why China structures their political system to subordinate the interests of multinational corporations to the longer term interests of the nation, its people and economy as a whole.
Which is why ceding so much power to these entities, rather than vesting that in the state and the people, is a mistake. Of course capital free to come and go and flow wherever it wants will discard a nation and its people's interests to pursue global profit margins at every turn. Just letting that happen with no recourse and restriction is a silly way to run a country.
MBA programs do not produce "business leaders", except by accident. They produce business _administrators_, which is a different thing entirely, and often the opposite that of a leader. People often confuse management with leadership, and while a manager can be a leader, the two are rarely the same.
How does making something illegal counteract economic forces? Hint: Look at Soviet Bloc economics. They imported high tech goods even after spending loads of money on trying to build them internally.
I would agree that onshoring more of the supply chain makes a lot of sense, but I think it must be an economically viable solution. I don't know exactly how to do that, but things like having a guaranteed market (like we do for food) might be part of the solution.
No single country is capable of producing the newest chips end to end. Lithograph machines, raw materials, clean room builders, educated workforce, and the scale to do each of these economically are simply not available in one location.
By the time you could produce such a focus of the industry, it would already have moved on and require different inputs that are not in that country.
I think that's what the person you're replying to is saying. The government should subsidize domestic production because it's a prestige issue for the nation. Sort of like having an aircraft carrier group but in the form of economic power.
It's not that simple. The components of a chip go through something like 40-50 countries, and include tens of thousands of suppliers. Involved in this are some of the most sophisticated technologies known to man.
To centralize all of this in one country is most likely impossible. It's not even a matter of throwing money at it. $100 billion won't get you there.
> I am still amazed by the shortsightedness of how these critical and strategic goods are off-shore.
You're not half as amazed as Xi is.
> Yes, it will raise prices in the short and medium-term,
Right now we have cutting-edge fabs in Taiwan and Korea. If we were to follow your recommendation, we would also have them in PRC, USA, Japan, Germany, the UK, India, France, Italy, Canada, and Russia, at least. In fact, that's more or less how things used to be. The difficulty is that this would mean increasing world fab investment by a factor of 6, which would probably make them all unprofitable until chip prices also increased by a factor of 6. Permanently.
However, there is still one country that uses this policy: North Korea.
Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan don't have complete semiconductor supply chains either. All the companies in those countries are dependent on suppliers all over the region and the world.
> I am still amazed by the shortsightedness of how these critical and strategic goods are off-shore.
At what point do goods go from being non-critical/strategic to being critical/strategic? At what point did car companies have to worry about chips being "critical"? At what point did smartphones become "critical" to people's lives?
Things were not critical at all, and then when few people were looking, they moved across the spectrum to an area part that is considered critical by some measure.
semiconductors have been critical since the day they were invented, because computers were already critical at that time. the first major manufacturers of semiconductors were defense contractors.
Well, we would actually have to rein in the oligarchs and puncture the asset bubbles to do that, and I think we have 0 stomach for either.
Our public transit woes also demonstrate how little US politics cares about details, and how much they stomp all over the independence of a civil service that would.
This announcment by Samsung followed news that the onshoring semiconductor bill was moving through Congress (just saw it in the news today or yesterday). I doubt it's a coincidence,
So, I think, at least with regard to chips, your dream is coming true.
When you start thinking about politics/geopolitics from an "interest group" perspective, instead of a national perspective, you will understand all these. "Nation" is just a concept that we put up together as a "framework". It means a lot for common people like us because we simply have nothing else to rely one, but not much for different interest groups (I'm talking about banking, military, lobbyists, industrial conglomerate, those big shots).
You don't make semiconductors out of thin air. They're made out of inputs that we have to buy from other countries. The United States cannot possibly produce its own sufficient supply of rare earths and silicon for instance, they must be extracted where they occur naturally.
The US did produce its own sufficient supply of rare earths and silicon for decades, they occur everywhere, mainstream semiconductors don't contain any rare earths, and I suggest you at least skim a Wikipedia article on a relevant topic before writing your next HN comment.
The US imports massive amounts of silicon (from countries like Russia no less). We do not have our own supply.
And no, rare earths are not contained in semiconductors specifically, but I assumed the parent comment wants to onshore more production than solely semiconductors, and rare earths are needed for lots of essential electronics.
Yes, the US has its own supply of silicon. Toledo, Ohio, was
called the "glass center of the world" in the 01930s because of the combination of cheap energy (natural gas), low freight rates, and the high-quality silicon-dioxide sand mined at Silica, Ohio, twelve miles to the west (10.2307/141587). The US is the world's leading producer of silica, producing about 100 million tonnes per year and exporting 4 million (https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-sand-grave...), ten times the 0.4 million tonnes it imports. The world's highest purity silicon dioxide deposits are at the Spruce Pine mine in North Carolina, and these are commonly used to source silicon for semiconductors, because you don't have to spend as much money to purify it; also they are used for high-purity glassware for silicon processing (https://www.thequartzcorp.com/https://www.wired.com/story/book-excerpt-science-of-ultra-pu...https://archive.md/BMFtO).
More broadly, it's difficult to find a rock where silicon isn't a significant component. It is difficult for me to imagine the level of ignorance that could lead someone to claim that an entire country lacked silicon resources. It could be remedied by reading the first paragraph of the introduction to the English Wikipedia article about silicon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon).
It turns out to be true that rare earths are used for lots of essential electronics, though most components are devoid of them. Essential electronics are silicon semiconductors (silicon, aluminum, copper, boron, arsenic, phosphorus), metals for wires and traces (copper, tin, lead, silver, gold, zinc), FR4 (glass fiber and epoxy), optoelectronic semiconductors (indium, gallium, phosphorus, arsenic), high-speed semiconductors (indium, phosphorus, gallium, arsenic), inductor cores (steel, silicon, barium, manganese, nickel, zinc again, cobalt, strontium), quartz crystals, and capacitor dielectrics. Capacitor dielectrics include plastics, mica, electrolytic anodized coatings, tantalum or niobium pentoxide, and ceramics. Ceramics include the high-capacitance ferroelectrics (lead, zirconium, titanium, sometimes barium) and the high-stability NP0/C0G paraelectrics.
And this is where you finally got something right! It turns the NP0/C0G dielectrics do often contain rare earths: oxides of neodymium and samarium. There are non-rare-earth alternatives made from silica, manganese, titanium, barium, and zirconium (https://patents.google.com/patent/US5599757A/en) or titanium and magnesium (https://exxelia.com/uploads/PDF/ceramic-capacitor-non-magnet...), but the rare-earth compositions are widely adopted. Perhaps they have slightly higher permittivity (permitting smaller capacitors) or lower costs. I don't know.
Regardless, essential electronics can be made without rare earths with only minor compromises, and of course rare earths are everywhere; they could easily be mined in the US again.
They don't use silica sand to make semiconductors, they use quartzite. Which isn't available near near Toledo. There's plenty of other places in the US, but first you have to actually know the right mineral to look for.
You say, "They don't use silica sand to make semiconductors, they use quartzite." Even if this were true, quartzite is just silica sand that has been sintered together (naturally, underground). Moreover, Vince Beiser's Wired article (linked above) claims that in fact both high-purity silica sand and lump quartz (probably, as you say, quartzite) are used as sources of silicon.
My understanding is that the US definitely _could_ produce everything needed, it's just not financially viable or desirable to do so. With tax changes, automation and the rise in cost of labor in non-western countries, it might just become viable.
> We need a true industrial policy and state capitalist system similar to what Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have.
You forgot China. If you institute strong controls over industry in a country the size (and culture) of America, you won't get Japan, you'll get China, and the corresponding anti-features of their system (such as authoritarianism in general, and companies acting as agents of the state in particular).
Very few people want that, and certainly not me.
There are far better ways to build robust manufacturing systems than complete government control.
There are some uncomfortable questions raised here. Why is it desirable to build "robust manufacturing systems?" Why was it desirable to overengineer appliances to last decades in the 50s, other than "the designers felt it was the proper way to do it" and there was no market pressure to steer them otherwise. How many resources were wasted on such appliances over those decades?
If the supply chains have very little slack and products are designed with minimal material inputs, sure there may be some availability hiccup here and there, but how bad is that really and by what metric. At the same time many more people get to have access to modern goods due to lower costs and less unneeded material, less is wasted due to inventory stockpiling, and we are overall more efficient.
Observed macroeconomic properties are subject to historical path dependence and inextricable from a country's relative technological attainment. As an economic periphery of the Dutch Republic in the 17th century, Japan experienced problems similar to Argentina's. But now, as a "core" economy---no doubt through its special relationship to the US--Japan's role in the global economy is wholly different.
The quip above comes from Simons Kuznets and I wrote a book attempting to find an explanation:
Just tell japan we could send some politicians over there to fix their issue.
Argentina's issue isn't a case study though. On one of the last auctions to print bills there were no bids because they were asking for an insane delivery date. We literally cannot print them fast enough.
The quote originally is about Japan and Argentina being outliers in development trajectory, Japan extremely rapidly developing after WW2 to one of the world's richest countries vs Argentina's decline from being one of the world's richest countries after WW1. Argentina stands apart in having been initially on similar track as the "developed" rich countries and then significantly deteriorated.
Inflation can be psychological: the workers want to resist inflation, the unions block the factories, the factory leaders pressure the politicians, the central bank say now currency divided by 2, salaries expand, prices expand, everything expand, factories restart for another year.
Look at how Brazil introduced their last currency, they understood this and had the balls to fix it. They created a virtual currency based on a fixed usd rate, they pretended was just for reference and printed prices in it for salaries, products etc with a floating rate against the normal currency refreshed everyday. People start to wrap their brain around having the shit currency with exploding inflation AND everything priced in a stable, trusted reference point. Then, they rug pulled the old currency and said "now this virtual currency is the real one, here are the banknotes, good luck", and it held because people did not expect that one to inflate all the time.
It's simplified but do not imagine nobody understand Argentina's situation: the only ones not understanding are the people there, unwilling to bear the cost of stabilizing and instead forever running away demanding their salaries expand to "resist inflation" when it is the very inflation they try to fight.
Each time I hear a little guy in a country saying he expect his x% raise because of inflation (and not, say, results), I know it's a red flag. People should not try to all virtually raise their salary, or what do they expect will happen ? Their salary will change not at all, but the currency will magically be worth less: after all, they did nothing special to deserve more.
One's previous life experiences also flavour perceptions of inflation. The Odd Lots podcast had an interesting episode a little while ago:
> Inflation is running hot these days. But, even when the official measures were considerably cooler, there were many people who were skeptical and insisted that inflation was running hot and rampant. It turns out, nobody really experiences inflation similarly, and one's own consumption and behavioral patterns will have a big impact on their outlook. On this episode, we speak with Berkeley professor Ulrike Malmendier, whose work has shown how one's behavior (where you shop) and history (what conditions were like earlier in your life) can inform views and perceptions of inflation for years.
> How do individuals form expectations about future inflation? We propose that personal experiences play an important role. Individuals adapt their forecasts to new data but overweight inflation realized during their life-times. Young individuals update their expectations more strongly in the direction of recent surprises than older individuals since recent experiences make up a larger part of their lives so far. We find support for these pre- dictions using 57 years of microdata on inflation expectations from the Reuters/Michigan Survey of Consumers. Differences in life-time experiences strongly predict differences in subjective inflation expectations. […]
It's not just "the little guy" in Argentina - it's everyone and everything. Everyone always demands increases to their flow of money in Argentina. It's no surprise that they get inflation.
but that's the problem. there isn't enough food and housing to go around. you can't fix it with fake raises. you have to add competition back into the market at the corporate level. but investors don't like competition.
Argentina did the same thing with their local currency tied to the dollar, it initially lowered inflation and a flow of capital came into their country and bringing higher growth. But then the capital kept flowing in because it was felt that they would never or could never break the link with the dollar. So the foreign debt piled up, and went inevitably into assets like property. When the Mexican default happened in the 90's all the money flowed out, the currency peg was broken and after the short deflation, inflation took over again. And thats the way its been.
> Look at how Brazil introduced their last currency, they understood this and had the balls to fix
And now we're throwing it all down the crapper...
I'm not sure, I was fairly young, but I'm pretty sure that when the "virtual currency" URV (Unidade Real de Valor) was introduced, it was no secret it was a step towards a new currency (the Real). We've had a few changes in currency before, it was nothing new. The difference with Plano Real is that we finally gave up on short-term solutions and realized that any change would take many years of consistent economic policies. And it worked.
> Look at how Brazil introduced their last currency, they understood this and had the balls to fix it.
This was the topic of a recent HN posting, IIRC, but I can't remember the discussion article. In any event, for those watching at home a relevant Wikipedia link to begin your spelunking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidade_real_de_valor
Ha! I remembered commenting in that old thread (it was a good one) and was going to go digging too when I read your "but I can't remember", but you found it. :)
Wow! If only you hadn't beaten them to it, countless PhD economists around the world could've gained a Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for this. Now you will get it instead.
> _nobody_ in this country (And, very likely, in the whole world) can explain our inflation.
What? The explanation is simple, Argentina spends more money than what they make, and the only measures they do to "fix" the economy are raising taxes, getting foreign debt to pay common expenses and printing more money.
Nowadays, foreign debt interest is super high for Argentina, and it's on the brink of default (yet again), so the only thing the government is doing is printing money and raising taxes (yet again, for the nth time).
The reason why Argentina has inflation is just very inconvenient to central bankers. If the pool of money increases in size, prices go up, end of story. Central bankers like to think that they can use sophisticated measures to control the economy, but it looks like they can't beyond a few simple things. Print money and you raise prices, end of story.
Central banks can't print money nor can they influence the quantity of money in the economy. The best they can do is raise the interest rate which denies people the ability to borrow.
I think this is entirely dependent on the country in question because rules around central bank operations are very different in different parts of the world. Some can directly create money and some can even seize assets.
Note that if Central bank digital currencies are allowed then Central banks will most certainly be able to influence the currency in circulation with much more power than they currently do.
> In other words, governments with fiat currencies — including the United States — have the power to expand the quantity of those currencies. If they choose to do so, they risk inflating the prices of necessities like food, gas, and housing.
> In recent months, consumers have experienced higher price inflation than they have seen in decades. A major reason for the increases is that central bankers around the world — including those at the Federal Reserve — sought to compensate for Covid-19 lockdowns with dramatic monetary inflation. As a result, nearly $4 trillion in newly printed dollars, euros, and yen found their way from central banks into the coffers of global financial institutions.
This automatically assumes that the inflationary issues we are facing come from demand. However, it is very clearly a supply issue. Namely, the closure of plants and factories due to labor shortages, lockdowns, and geopolitical issues. When you reduce the supply of goods and services while demand is left the same, you get higher prices. Furthermore, OPEC isn't producing more, which increases oil prices and the prices of all other industries. The chip shortage, which is fundamentally a supply shortage, is also increasing the prices of all other goods and services that rely on chips.
This is not an issue of demand. It's similar to the 1970s: supply shocks that led to an increase in the price level.
Word on the street is fed "printing money" = "inflation like Venezuela." I've had these conversations dozens of times this year. I'm not extra smart, but somehow almost everybody misses your point about demand.
There is also the matter of where the money the fed "prints" ends up. Its not handing out singles, they're using other instruments like buying paper. I'm not educated enough to recount exactly what the mechanisms are.
If you allow me to contrive that essentially the fed is buying stock dips for example, the funds they are creating to do so doesn't end up as you mentioned buying loafs of bread and driving up demand, it ends up in the dragon's horde of large corporations and the beneficiaries of the windfall.
So the ultra-wealthy, corporations, large institutional funds (Stanford?) and/or corporate stakeholders see their paper balances of stocks increase, and along with the fabulous credit that having lots of assets brings you, they are free to leverage these assets to consolidate other assets such as real estate, stocks (and buybacks), maybe (but probably not given the yeilds) bonds and maybe a yacht or three.
Corporations, institutions, and ultra-wealthy wouldn't suddenly be able to afford to pay off their credit cards or buy extra calculators or yogurt, that is covered nicely in the first 100k/yr.
The rest is fiefdoms and trust funds for generational transmission. Probably lobbyists too.
Gotta add about 401k/retirement plans: That money is more or less a stipend for end-of-life, how much could that really balance the scale given the facts about the business cycle?
Yeah the states and local municipalities don't have the fed for handouts (whatever you mean by that exactly, I am assuming it is the unemployment benefits) State/local has to balance their budgets for the most part aside from federal redistribution to "poor" states with less tax revenue.
I think it's both a supply and demand issue. A much greater supply of dollars = more buying power, plus people working from home increased demand of certain items like lumber and computer chips. On top of shortages of everything for the reasons you describe.
That will get worked out, but here's why it looks to me inflation is here to stay:
1. Wages are going up in order to solve labor shortages. Higher wages = higher cost of goods = higher prices. And wages are sticky. Workers now getting paid $25/hr probably aren't going back to $15.
2. The just in time supply chain is being re-evaluated. We need resiliency, but it's less efficient and more expensive. Higher COGS.
3. The Fed seems likely to keep increasing the supply of dollars and don't want to raise interest rates much.
