I did competitive programming. I believe you need to push yourself to your limits to understand what your limits are and why you may have some. It helps with self-understanding. One can then figure out how to go further, faster.
On a side node, it was in competitive coding that I first ran into students using Ritalin for performance enhancement. Until then I had never run into it before.
No, they're saying their personal USDT trading strategy involves a cessation of activity if Tether breaks the $1 peg, as it probably indicates trouble requiring human intervention.
Not forcing per se - the arbitrage incentivizes market makers to keep the value roughly in the expected range. This happens in any asset class but the mechanic is quite straightforward in this case.
There is a catch, but you won't find out what it was until they loose all of the money they are holding. There is probably a 50/50% chance this is just a Ponzi, and if it isn't it is some complicated strategy which can not handle black or even grey swan events, and there is a 5% chance there is a bug in their code that allows for all the funds to be stolen.
Could they be selling it at a discount, like $1.00 - X discount per Tether and allowing these other firms to benefit in order to get the flow? Bulk discounts to their friends?
I think back to how we have responded to this pandemic. We were in denial until the pandemic was spreading unchecked wildly through the population, and even a good chunk of the population is still in denial after 100,000s of dead.
We are a hopeless species when it comes to organizing effective collective action ahead of known disaster. We seem to only respond collectively once disaster has struck, and even then it takes time.
I read a book in 1997 that was about this. Can not remember the name or author of it for the life of me. It was about climate change and the risk that North Atlantic currents would shift causing a state change that would be hard to reverse. 24 years later we think it is getting closer, but we still do not act swiftly.
That's because there is no "we". The most popular way to deal with coordinating important collective efforts is to give up all power to a small elite group and hope their members are magically not self-interested. The effect is predictable and manifested with the Covid pandemic: elites were informed in time, prepared their own affairs adequately [1], and let the rest fend for themselves.
Figure out some actual governance and coordination schemes and "we" may have a chance at beating the Prisoner's Dilemma.
You forgot a step - the elites will ban any community attempts to self-organise and solve their own problems. Note that in the COVID pandemic it is typically illegal (at least in the West) for non-government actors to decide what controls and remedies are appropriate.
I seem to recall someone, possibly the US CDC, banning alternative COVID tests to their faulty one in the early days of the pandemic.
If someone attempts set up emergency mask production they'd probably get hit by anti-gouging laws, because that isn't cheap.
And the vaccines are presumably only available because the governments relented, fast-tracked them and provided special guarantees to help people get over the testing hurdle. Normally it takes 4-8 years to get a vaccine to market. We've got evidence here that those years are more red tape than requirement, it suggests up to 75% of the regulatory process is destructive theatre.
Clinical testing is affected by diminishing returns. Anything is a lot safer after a month of testing, but the usual safety standards demands a little more safety, and improving on “100 times less likely to kill you than the disease” thing often takes years.
This will not be our last pandemic. The lessons we leaned, and the lessons we should have learned, will come back a lot.
I wonder how the elite will approach climate change when it really starts to bite? If I wanted to survive a dystopia I'd be making friends with the common people and using my considerable personal resources to help address their concerns and earn their loyalty, not elevating myself stratospherically above them then trying to hide when shit hits the fan.
They actual elites have enough money to live comfortably for hundreds of years. They don’t have to care about climate change, maybe they even see it as welcome since it will kill billions of people if nothing is done. That’s how detached they are from the rest of us.
Don't give up hope. We licked CFCs and leaded gasoline. There are probably plenty of other times in history when we mobilized to solve a problem at scale. These are discouraging times for sure. But ultimately there's just no point in being hopeless.
I see this as a very US centric view. I remember ecological issues were huge in Germany as early as the 80s.
The pandemic has been well managed by a number of countries across the globe.
Especially about global warming, it is not a specie problem. It is possible to fix, and some countries / groups of people are better than others at it.
Exactly. Those same people that are in denial right up to the point where they're being shifted onto ventilators then change their tune to "wishing they took the vaccine" will be the same denying climate change right up to the point they burn to death from wildfires consuming their homes.
At some point last year I realized we just aren't going to deal with climate change. Human society isn't capable of the scale of changes required. My children are going to inherit a world quite unlike the one I was born in.
The question is, why don't the elites want urgent action on climate change? Presumably the answer is that they're still making too much money under the status quo, or have not yet aligned themselves to exploit the transition to sustainable energy and transport.
I bailed out half way, but despite the disclaimer, that post does sound like climate change denial.
"Dealing with it would be just as bad as not dealing with it" appears to be the core of your claim, and I don't think thats backed up by anything I'm aware of. It is a fairly common trope of people who would be widely described as climate change deniers though.
Even more so, dealing with it say 20 years ago would have been even more straightforward.
We couldnt do it because we couldbt co-ordinate, like the prisoners dilemma, not because the two outcomes were equally bad but by working towards out own best outcome we've headed towards the worst overall outcome.
I read your blog post. I agree with most of it. But...
> resource-depleted hellhole within a century or two
I wish I could be as optimistic as you are. We're seeing extreme, unpredictable weather _right now_. This could lead to reduced food production a few years from now.
Wealth sure managed to make it easier to reduce your risk of getting covid, as well as substantially reducing the quality-of-life sacrifice from lockdowns.
Look at how many wealthy people somehow managed to achieve entry/residency/citizenship to countries where Covid was well-contained.
The wealthier you were during the quarantine, the more likely you were to be able to access services that were denied to others. Gym is closed? No problem, I have a home gym anyway. Many elite athletes brought their trainers, cooks and physical therapists into their households (IIRC Russell Wilson said he had a staff of ~11 in his family's bubble, meaning he was paying those people to isolate with his family instead of being with theirs.
At a lower level of wealth, access to WFH-able jobs, more living space (including being able to avoid living with multi-generational and potentially vulnerable family members), delivery everything, tech and tutoring for your kids' educations, and private transportation options certainly made it easier to mitigate the lifestyle sacrifices of avoiding contagion.
They want to exempt miners who are making Bitcoin from paying taxes on it? Why? They are making revenue from this activity. Of course they should pay taxes on that revenue.
Did you read the article? This is just about exempting non-exchanges from “broker” status i.e. keeping track of users’ personal information, transaction history, and data. The representatives said they agree people not paying taxes on crypto is a problem, but classifying them as brokers is not the solution.
Why isn’t it part of the solution? It seems like keeping track of who buys mining equipment (at least at large scale) would be a pretty important component in making sure that they pay taxes? Just like it’s important that brokerages report your stock transactions to the IRS.
If you are under broker requirements, and you wish to mine a new block, you must have, for every transaction you include in the block, the legal name of the person whose transaction it is, their address, and whether they are a politically compromised individual (ex, a general or politician of a nation that is not the US).
For every transaction you're going to include in the block.
This information is reasonable to expect from brokerages and exchanges, but not from miners, who are merely transaction processors.
Payment facilitators and processor would normally fall under some sort of KYC regime, I think (let's say when onboarding a merchant). Arguably, there isn't really a one-to-one correspondence with a miner, but to completely exempt miners here is an interesting twist.
It's whether bitcoin miners need to KYC the other boxes they communicate with. It'd be like requiring bittorrent clients to have a copy of drivers license on file for every other node they make connections to.
The proposal does not exempt anybody from paying taxes; it exempts people and organizations who are not actually brokers from reporting on their customers' activity.
On a side node, it was in competitive coding that I first ran into students using Ritalin for performance enhancement. Until then I had never run into it before.