Bitcoin will never "win". as currency, it is worse than useless, not being backed by a central bank and being deflationary by nature. And don't give me any crap about deflation being good... And the OP is right, it basically is a Ponzi scheme.
You could imagine a crypto currency where certificates would be emitted by a central bank holding a master key against which they would be verified. It would be designed in such a way that any number of certificates could be printed. You could even have negative interest rates that way.
It would be anonymous, work like some electronic version of cash, and make sense economically.
You are wrong, for two reasons:
- You assume there is such thing as a total money amount. There isn't; rather there are measures of the amount of money flowing in the system.
- You further assume all money is available to buy all assets. This is not true. Although any dollar can be exchanged for any other dollar, it remains the case that depending on the distribution of money, not all goods and services produced can be bought. Capital reserves of banks don't count, for example.
If there is no credit and houses are worth a fixed 1000 dollars, and the median American has 900 available at any time, not all houses can be bought, and the amounts of dollars is worth all goods produced minus houses divided by the available money. Now, if you print money and give Americans each 100 dollars, suddenly, you have simultaneously increased the value of money and the number of dollars!
Even as an AC, I will not give references, sorry. But I will say this: people do not verify their model/claims against the right control, which is random() with an appropriate probability distribution.
In general, some people consciously or unconsciously in competitive fields try to have as little controls as they can get away with. And infuriatingly, the reviewers don't want to see that either, depending on the authors. My advice: big papers from small groups are way more trustworthy than big papers from big groups... And if it comes from Boston, it is oversold (any field).
in matlab, you cannot do (some-complicated-expression)(i,j), whereas in octave this is valid. To me, this syntax is orthogonal, because there is such thing as the (...,...) operator, which applies on anything which returns a matrix. Matlab thinks some things are matrices, and some not, even is they are. Thus some things which should be the same are treated differently as a function of context.
"Objects" without tolerable syntax is not object -- or rather it is completely pointless. Otherwise you might as well claim GTK has objects (warning, troll inside)...
As for plotting, if you are into baroque languages, I find R to be far better.
Amusingly, I have a mathematician friend who came up with an algorithm to solve numerically chemical problems. The things you describe are more the product of being a skilled technician than a scientist... As for the total synthesis of strychnine, I would think that doing that ab nihilo would require enormous amounts of maths. Or lots of trial and error.
People who do not understand maths fail to realise that mathematicians can frequently learn the essential bits of their specialty very fast, because they are trained to think in the abstract. See for example the stories of Feynman amongst biologists. Also, in many fields, people still learn heaps of useless facts with very little attention to overarching theories which allow one to quickly figure out said facts...
Let's put it this way, the most common adjective used to described MDs from my biologist friends -- some of whom work in Boston -- is "useless".
They are overpaid, underqualified, have an exaggerated sense of their own importance and most importantly, are really bad at science, seeing everything from the point of view of clinical outcomes. Which are truly not important when trying to understand biology. Even in a hospital: once you understand your topic, there will be applications. Looking for applications in a topic you do not understand is just delaying them being found.
don't get me started on MDs, they should never be allowed near a lab until they get a real university degree in a hard science. Which they should get _after_ their MD.
MD is a trade, like Carpenter or Mason or Lawyer. A hard one, which requires all sorts of qualities. But it does not qualify you to do science. Not remotely.
it's a shitty language. Still, in my opinion, much better that than nothing.
Why is is shitty, you ask? No objects, the syntax is not orthogonal (octave is a clone but seems to have done indices right, at least). Horrible, inconsistent libraries. Incredibly inefficient -- People going from naïve matlab to naïve c++ can get x1000 speed-ups.
And so on.
And yet, not coding at all is infinitely worse, so I don't give a hard time to my colleagues who at least try:)
Bullshit. Any scientist needs to understand basic maths, notably statistics. Not advanced calculus or complex algebra. But statistics and understanding what a model is is paramount. If you cannot recognised the patterns produced by common types of random processes, you may well start to believe you have found something.
This would be funny if it were not true... Beware the biologists who tells you they found a number N of categories of each suspiciously smaller than the previous one by the same ratio. And never checked for fear that their result might not be publishable after all.
As in : "This a ground-breaking, paradigm shifting result: these identical individuals are not: some are short-lived, some long-lived, and we found an intermediate category, too" -- "oh, so your mortality curve follows an exponential law".
I know of certain articles in highly recognised journals which passed the review process, pushed by the editors who liked the message so much.
I also know that their data was largely noise, because the main authors clearly are math illiterate. Of course not everyone needs to be a mathematician, but every scientist should know the basics of statistics and be able to recognise a binomial or Poisson process after a cursory glance at the data.
Likewise not everyone should be some über-coder, but every scientist should be able to write small programmes in MATLAB, R, numpy, or whatever is appropriate for their field. These are basic qualifications which prevent you from churning out bullshit.
The current state of the world, Eurozone, vs England vs US is pretty good empirical evidence that
- tight monetary policy + austerity = disaster
- loose monetary policy + austerity = bad
- loose monetary policy + no austerity = sluggish recovery
Also, if you think that goods and services did not get produced and consumed because some number has the wrong sign is a global accounting identity (which completely ignores dynamic effects), you need to rethink what is real and what is the number in the spreadsheet.
At the end of the day we want people to produce as much as is possible, and have the largest number of people benefiting from that production. Money is just a shared illusion which helps doing that. But it is not real. If it turns out we miscounted and there is no more money, we only need to collectively agree that there is more.
Now if there is no more of some finite resource, we have a problem.
No, this is the key point: the value of money is not some fixed amount divided by the number of dollars in existence.
It is the total number of goods and services divided by said amount of dollars. Thus you may have cases where adding dollars to the economy increases the value of the dollars, because that caused the production of more goods and services.
This is normally not the case, but can easily happen in a depression.
Large amounts of gold sit idly in Fort Knox. Clearly, these bars are already buried:) Burying gold is a dumb activity in any case, but the point is that in the case of a depressed economy, you don't get the ill-effects you would: the depression is caused by people not having work and thus not being able to afford stuff. Until they are able to afford things, the depression goes on and they stay unemployed, because no-one wants to hire people when no-one buys stuff.
Thus the need for external intervention. And thus also the remote importance in the quality of said intervention.
This does not mean you shouldn't try to be as productive/clever/efficient as possible. It just matters less than doing something vs not doing anything.
I am in fact rather smart. An I will make the argument that is is not possible in general to delineate what is a luxury and what is not.
No, I'll just let you come up with an example, any example, of something which is purely a waste of money. Which can never, in any way be construed as an investment.
There is one argument about stimulus and the surprisingly small importance of your choice of investments -- as opposed to the speed at which money gets spent -- which I find convincing. It goes like this: if I were to find gold, or oil, I could immediately start digging, found a mining company and generate profits. Now oil is useful, but gold, not so much, people like to think it is worth something.
But in the mine example, it doesn't matter. You get something of value out of the ground, and that's the point of it. Now is someone was to bury gold -- useless activity if there ever was one -- and another group was to dig it up, we all agree as per the first part of the argument that the diggers are creating value. And the burriers are not actually destroying value: the gold does not serve any purpose except that people like to pile it up.
Now if they were otherwise gainfully employed, you could make the argument that this is a horrible mis-allocation of resources. But this is a depressed economy: they were unemployed!
Thus stimulus needs to be abysmally bad to produce negative effects in depressed economies.
No, amusingly enough, QE does keep yields low, but not because the Fed buys the bonds, but rather because as the Fed demonstrates its willingness to buy any amount of bonds, these are deemed safe stores of value and thus people invest in them.
Also, you will note that after a trebling of the money supply, there has been no significant change in inflation. So much for catastrophic currency collapse. How's your gold doing these days?
This is not the way governments work. They can of course print the extra money: after all the money spent does correspond to goods consumed in the economy, thus it may even be that there will be no inflationary consequences. But the more reasonable answer is simply that governments are forever. They have forever to pay back. They have an infinite amount of time to wait for the economy to get better, and in fact, by spending, they can even make that happen sooner:)
But in general, they just roll over debt. Forever. And because in the long run the economy always grows, they will always make it.
Germany has undergone many years of internal devaluation, partly because of the costs induced by the integration of East Germany, partly because of pure masochism. Life in many parts of Germany is harsher, and the standards of living lower than in Northern Italy, for example. No parts of Europe is truly a hell hole -- this is not the US. It is also the case that the current imbalances in Europe are due in part to this largely pointless German deflationary strategy.
If you look at a GDP/capita map of Europe, which looks at regions instead of countries, you will see that there is indeed a core and a periphery. The core comprises southern Germany, Western Austria, Switzerland and Northern Italy. The periphery comprises Eastern Austria, Northern and Eastern Germany and Southern Italy. The separation in fates during this crisis comes from 1) unfortunate and fortunate lumping of regions with blocks which could or could not transfer funds when needed 2) Those countries forced into austerity contracted badly.
Oh, I think it is a very good system which should be emulated. But it is a bit disingenuous to directly compare the rates from countries which have this option for kids, and those who don't.
Crises which happened in a world without central banks are profoundly different than those after. In that what was ignorance and foolishness is now malign or incompetence.
If you read the re-analysis of RR, with the correct data, you see that there is nearly no correlation between debt level and growth. And indeed, crises happen randomly, and so do the rise and fall in debt level. sometimes they meet, but it turns out that most of the time it's just bad luck.
Should you pile on any amount of debt? probably not. But you also should not worry much about it.
You know that Germany has relatively low unemployment compared to the rest of Europe because many youth learn trades instead of being jobless? Same for Austria and Switzerland.
Austerity affects everyone. It kill opportunities, it stifles social mobility, it removes funds from research and long term investments. There are no good aspects to austerity, except that at the top you fall less than those at the bottom so you are comparatively better off. But to rejoice in that makes you a horrible person.
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Bitcoin will never "win". as currency, it is worse than useless, not being backed by a central bank and being deflationary by nature. And don't give me any crap about deflation being good... And the OP is right, it basically is a Ponzi scheme.
You could imagine a crypto currency where certificates would be emitted by a central bank holding a master key against which they would be verified. It would be designed in such a way that any number of certificates could be printed. You could even have negative interest rates that way.
It would be anonymous, work like some electronic version of cash, and make sense economically.
You are wrong, for two reasons:
- You assume there is such thing as a total money amount. There isn't; rather there are measures of the amount of money flowing in the system.
- You further assume all money is available to buy all assets. This is not true. Although any dollar can be exchanged for any other dollar, it remains the case that depending on the distribution of money, not all goods and services produced can be bought. Capital reserves of banks don't count, for example.
If there is no credit and houses are worth a fixed 1000 dollars, and the median American has 900 available at any time, not all houses can be bought, and the amounts of dollars is worth all goods produced minus houses divided by the available money. Now, if you print money and give Americans each 100 dollars, suddenly, you have simultaneously increased the value of money and the number of dollars!
This is how stimulus works...
Even as an AC, I will not give references, sorry. But I will say this: people do not verify their model/claims against the right control, which is random() with an appropriate probability distribution.
In general, some people consciously or unconsciously in competitive fields try to have as little controls as they can get away with. And infuriatingly, the reviewers don't want to see that either, depending on the authors. My advice: big papers from small groups are way more trustworthy than big papers from big groups... And if it comes from Boston, it is oversold (any field).
in matlab, you cannot do (some-complicated-expression)(i,j), whereas in octave this is valid. To me, this syntax is orthogonal, because there is such thing as the (...,...) operator, which applies on anything which returns a matrix. Matlab thinks some things are matrices, and some not, even is they are. Thus some things which should be the same are treated differently as a function of context.
"Objects" without tolerable syntax is not object -- or rather it is completely pointless. Otherwise you might as well claim GTK has objects (warning, troll inside)...
As for plotting, if you are into baroque languages, I find R to be far better.
Amusingly, I have a mathematician friend who came up with an algorithm to solve numerically chemical problems. The things you describe are more the product of being a skilled technician than a scientist... As for the total synthesis of strychnine, I would think that doing that ab nihilo would require enormous amounts of maths. Or lots of trial and error.
People who do not understand maths fail to realise that mathematicians can frequently learn the essential bits of their specialty very fast, because they are trained to think in the abstract. See for example the stories of Feynman amongst biologists. Also, in many fields, people still learn heaps of useless facts with very little attention to overarching theories which allow one to quickly figure out said facts...
Let's put it this way, the most common adjective used to described MDs from my biologist friends -- some of whom work in Boston -- is "useless".
They are overpaid, underqualified, have an exaggerated sense of their own importance and most importantly, are really bad at science, seeing everything from the point of view of clinical outcomes. Which are truly not important when trying to understand biology. Even in a hospital: once you understand your topic, there will be applications. Looking for applications in a topic you do not understand is just delaying them being found.
don't get me started on MDs, they should never be allowed near a lab until they get a real university degree in a hard science. Which they should get _after_ their MD.
MD is a trade, like Carpenter or Mason or Lawyer. A hard one, which requires all sorts of qualities. But it does not qualify you to do science. Not remotely.
it's a shitty language. Still, in my opinion, much better that than nothing.
Why is is shitty, you ask? No objects, the syntax is not orthogonal (octave is a clone but seems to have done indices right, at least). Horrible, inconsistent libraries. Incredibly inefficient -- People going from naïve matlab to naïve c++ can get x1000 speed-ups.
And so on.
And yet, not coding at all is infinitely worse, so I don't give a hard time to my colleagues who at least try :)
Bullshit. Any scientist needs to understand basic maths, notably statistics. Not advanced calculus or complex algebra. But statistics and understanding what a model is is paramount. If you cannot recognised the patterns produced by common types of random processes, you may well start to believe you have found something.
And in fact just measured experimental noise.
This would be funny if it were not true... Beware the biologists who tells you they found a number N of categories of each suspiciously smaller than the previous one by the same ratio. And never checked for fear that their result might not be publishable after all.
As in : "This a ground-breaking, paradigm shifting result: these identical individuals are not: some are short-lived, some long-lived, and we found an intermediate category, too" -- "oh, so your mortality curve follows an exponential law".
Better MATLAB than wishful thinking... I'm not a fan personally, but I would rather people used that than nothing at all.
I know of certain articles in highly recognised journals which passed the review process, pushed by the editors who liked the message so much.
I also know that their data was largely noise, because the main authors clearly are math illiterate. Of course not everyone needs to be a mathematician, but every scientist should know the basics of statistics and be able to recognise a binomial or Poisson process after a cursory glance at the data.
Likewise not everyone should be some über-coder, but every scientist should be able to write small programmes in MATLAB, R, numpy, or whatever is appropriate for their field. These are basic qualifications which prevent you from churning out bullshit.
The current state of the world, Eurozone, vs England vs US is pretty good empirical evidence that
- tight monetary policy + austerity = disaster
- loose monetary policy + austerity = bad
- loose monetary policy + no austerity = sluggish recovery
Also, if you think that goods and services did not get produced and consumed because some number has the wrong sign is a global accounting identity (which completely ignores dynamic effects), you need to rethink what is real and what is the number in the spreadsheet.
At the end of the day we want people to produce as much as is possible, and have the largest number of people benefiting from that production. Money is just a shared illusion which helps doing that. But it is not real. If it turns out we miscounted and there is no more money, we only need to collectively agree that there is more.
Now if there is no more of some finite resource, we have a problem.
No, this is the key point: the value of money is not some fixed amount divided by the number of dollars in existence.
It is the total number of goods and services divided by said amount of dollars. Thus you may have cases where adding dollars to the economy increases the value of the dollars, because that caused the production of more goods and services.
This is normally not the case, but can easily happen in a depression.
Large amounts of gold sit idly in Fort Knox. Clearly, these bars are already buried :) Burying gold is a dumb activity in any case, but the point is that in the case of a depressed economy, you don't get the ill-effects you would: the depression is caused by people not having work and thus not being able to afford stuff. Until they are able to afford things, the depression goes on and they stay unemployed, because no-one wants to hire people when no-one buys stuff.
Thus the need for external intervention. And thus also the remote importance in the quality of said intervention.
This does not mean you shouldn't try to be as productive/clever/efficient as possible. It just matters less than doing something vs not doing anything.
I am in fact rather smart. An I will make the argument that is is not possible in general to delineate what is a luxury and what is not.
No, I'll just let you come up with an example, any example, of something which is purely a waste of money. Which can never, in any way be construed as an investment.
There is one argument about stimulus and the surprisingly small importance of your choice of investments -- as opposed to the speed at which money gets spent -- which I find convincing. It goes like this: if I were to find gold, or oil, I could immediately start digging, found a mining company and generate profits. Now oil is useful, but gold, not so much, people like to think it is worth something.
But in the mine example, it doesn't matter. You get something of value out of the ground, and that's the point of it. Now is someone was to bury gold -- useless activity if there ever was one -- and another group was to dig it up, we all agree as per the first part of the argument that the diggers are creating value. And the burriers are not actually destroying value: the gold does not serve any purpose except that people like to pile it up.
Now if they were otherwise gainfully employed, you could make the argument that this is a horrible mis-allocation of resources. But this is a depressed economy: they were unemployed!
Thus stimulus needs to be abysmally bad to produce negative effects in depressed economies.
No, amusingly enough, QE does keep yields low, but not because the Fed buys the bonds, but rather because as the Fed demonstrates its willingness to buy any amount of bonds, these are deemed safe stores of value and thus people invest in them.
Also, you will note that after a trebling of the money supply, there has been no significant change in inflation. So much for catastrophic currency collapse. How's your gold doing these days?
This is not the way governments work. They can of course print the extra money: after all the money spent does correspond to goods consumed in the economy, thus it may even be that there will be no inflationary consequences. But the more reasonable answer is simply that governments are forever. They have forever to pay back. They have an infinite amount of time to wait for the economy to get better, and in fact, by spending, they can even make that happen sooner :)
But in general, they just roll over debt. Forever. And because in the long run the economy always grows, they will always make it.
Germany has undergone many years of internal devaluation, partly because of the costs induced by the integration of East Germany, partly because of pure masochism. Life in many parts of Germany is harsher, and the standards of living lower than in Northern Italy, for example. No parts of Europe is truly a hell hole -- this is not the US. It is also the case that the current imbalances in Europe are due in part to this largely pointless German deflationary strategy.
If you look at a GDP/capita map of Europe, which looks at regions instead of countries, you will see that there is indeed a core and a periphery. The core comprises southern Germany, Western Austria, Switzerland and Northern Italy. The periphery comprises Eastern Austria, Northern and Eastern Germany and Southern Italy. The separation in fates during this crisis comes from 1) unfortunate and fortunate lumping of regions with blocks which could or could not transfer funds when needed 2) Those countries forced into austerity contracted badly.
Oh, I think it is a very good system which should be emulated. But it is a bit disingenuous to directly compare the rates from countries which have this option for kids, and those who don't.
I have yet to meet a libertarian that was not a greedy asshole (the pretend ones) or lived in a parallel universe (the true believers).
Crises which happened in a world without central banks are profoundly different than those after. In that what was ignorance and foolishness is now malign or incompetence.
If you read the re-analysis of RR, with the correct data, you see that there is nearly no correlation between debt level and growth. And indeed, crises happen randomly, and so do the rise and fall in debt level. sometimes they meet, but it turns out that most of the time it's just bad luck.
Should you pile on any amount of debt? probably not. But you also should not worry much about it.
You know that Germany has relatively low unemployment compared to the rest of Europe because many youth learn trades instead of being jobless? Same for Austria and Switzerland.
Austerity affects everyone. It kill opportunities, it stifles social mobility, it removes funds from research and long term investments. There are no good aspects to austerity, except that at the top you fall less than those at the bottom so you are comparatively better off. But to rejoice in that makes you a horrible person.