I think it was a good call, yes. A deflationary collapse is incredibly damaging to the economy. The Great Depression was such a collapse, but there are others. The Panic of 1857, 1873, 1907... there's a long history of these.
The Fed avoided that. And they also avoided causing inflation. It was an amazing job of threading the needle. (One could argue that they caused a decade of stagnation, but in my view that was minor compared to the other options.)
I have really tried hard to figure out the counterfactual as being a good thing and it is just really hard to make the argument that we would have been better off with a deflationary collapse.
This is especially true from a global perspective. It would be a much more equal global economy but unimaginably poorer. The political consequences are unknowable but a deflationary collapse would not have had good political outcomes.
We largely shifted a nightmare into being a great time to be alive but take the good times completely for granted because we can't really know the nightmare we didn't see.
Thank you for the thoughts. Do you think if we had ripped the band-aid off then it would have been completely disastrous? I don't mind saying that this economy is frustrating, and it feels like we keep kicking the can down the road. I'm confident I'm not the only person that feels this way, and I'm quite open to being wrong here. My guts says there's just too much money sloshing around, and it gets vacuumed up, leaving the majority feeling like nothing changed.
I'm asking this in as non-confrontational way as possible, what am I missing?
I think you may be missing that $4 trillion evaporated in 2008, and the scale of the catastrophe that would have caused if the Fed did nothing. What the Fed did then was, essentially, restore the amount of money to what it was in 2007. They were trying to turn 2008 into as much of a "nothing changed" as they could, and they did it quite well.
I think the economy can adjust to any amount of money; it's the abrupt change in the amount that causes problems (because it causes an abrupt change in the value of money).
I think you may be missing that I'm not saying the same thing about the pandemic response. I think that too much money got poured in during the pandemic years, and that has caused inflation, and we've been seeing that inflation since. I wonder if you are taking how you feel about the last five or six years, and mapping that onto the last 18 years.
Now, from 2008 to 2020 was not all roses. Things were kind of stagnant. The rich were probably doing better than you were, because assets like stocks and land went up in value as interest rates went down, but your wages didn't go up. So, it was reasonable for you to feel "there's too much money sloshing around" in things like stocks during those years.
But I think it got worse after Covid. The government air-dropped too much money in, and there has definitely been too much money sloshing around since then.
In all of this, I'm not really saying that you're wrong in feeling that there's too much money sloshing around, or that the economy is frustrating.
> When I read something in a textbook I blindly believe it, depending on the broader context and the textbook in question. Is that a bad thing?
It is if what you read is factually incorrect, yes.
For example, I have read in a textbook that the tongue has very specific regions for taste. This is patently false.
> Keep in mind that research scientists need to keep abreast of far more developments than any human could possibly study in detail. Also that 50% of people are below average at their job.
So, we should probably just discount half of what we read from research scientists as "bad at their job" and not pay much attention to it? Which half? Why are you defending corruption?
The problem is that you can't just verify everything yourself. You likely have your own deadlines, and/or you want to do something more interesting than replicating statistical tests from a random paper.
>The problem is that you can't just verify everything yourself..
But one should be free to reject (in the sense that they should be free not to depend on it, or take decisions based on it) things that they did not themselves verify. But today if you do that, you become "anti-science"...and in-fact the people who wants others to "believe" science is anti-science..
Yes? What is exactly funny here? This is literally how the civilization works. I'm paid to do my work, and I pay others to do their work.
Do you grow your own food and sew your own clothes? Also, did you personally etch the microprocessor that runs your computer? The division of labor inherently means trusting others. So when I buy a bag of M4 screws, I'm not going to measure each screw with a micrometer, and I'm not taking X-ray spectra to verify their material composition.
The academic world also used to trust large publishers to take care to actually review papers. It appears that this trust is now misplaced. But I don't think it was somehow stupid.
> Eichhorn and her colleagues are pursuing a different possibility. In 1976, Steven Weinberg, a theorist who would eventually earn a Nobel Prize, pointed out that if you zoomed in far enough, you might reach a place where the rules of physics would stop changing. New realms would stop appearing; the intensities of the forces would stabilize; and gravity would turn out to make perfect sense after all.
One of the only ways I can imagine that would _somehow add even more complexity_ to the disaster that is ROS/ROS2, is to try and make rust a first-class citizen.
You're using ROS2, so you have a problem. You want to add rust to fix it? Now you have 47 problems.
I hear you, results is a gray area. However, with the companies we spoke to results looks like increased productivity for their developers.
It was a constant with all that they felt like 2 - 7 percent of their developers had made huge productivity gains but that the rest were not really seeing any, despite having access to the same tools.
The section you linked to says the decision was non-binding, and the next section includes multiple quotes disputing the idea that such a legal requirement exists.
Sorry, what do current LLM architectures have to do with this? It should be extremely clear to you that current LLM don't fit this definition. If they did, we wouldn't be having this conversation!!!!
Nobody is talking about current LLM. And, we don't know if gradient decent will be involved, since the systems don't exist yet. Maybe it all be some runtime gradient decent. If there's an optimization problem involved in any part of the process, and numbers are involved, there's a near guarantee it will include gradient decent.
Do you think replacing that 4T was a good call? I'm struggling to see how it was the right play.
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