9oliYQjP's comments

I don't have an economics or finance background. But why could there not be a taxable event for the loan amount when it is made? Sure, maybe it gets taxed at a lower rate than even capital gains to continue incentivizing leveraged investments of this nature. Is there some economic argument for why lenders can realize the value of an asset when loaning out money against it but the tax man can't touch that asset until it's actually sold?

Having worked at non-profits, the distribution of wages can be unlike anything ever seen at for-profit corporations and has made me become quite cynical. At a couple of the organizations I was involved with, there was lots of unpaid volunteering, grossly under-market salaries, and unpaid overtime at the bottom of the hierarchy with anemic pay all the way up the pyramid until you reached the CEO position. The CEOs rarely did much of anything except help keep alive the notion that everyones sacrifice was worth it. In one instance, the CEO went on sabbatical for over a year, appointing a few senior management to share their leadership role and the whole operation actually seemed to function better while they were gone.

I don't have anything against a non-profit CEO paying themselves well if they also pay their employees well. Many do not, with some unspoken culture of employees needing to accept meager compensation so that resources can be directed toward the core mission whose objectives are fluid and progress often difficult to measure.

You might be right. But I just want to add that this housing asset bubble is global in nature.

We here in Canada have been running the interest rate increase experiment ahead of the US. We've also had a much worse run up in housing prices. There are rundown shacks in Oshawa, Ontario selling for more than nice homes in Los Angeles. Where the hell is Oshawa? That's the whole point, it really doesn't matter but it's a former General Motors factory town about 1 hour east of Toronto.

Two months ago the real estate bulls were saying what you were saying now about supply. But the numbers are in for major areas like the greater Toronto area after a single 50 bps increase this past quarter like the one the Fed just dropped down south. Some suburbs of Toronto have already seen median prices drop 10-20% off their January/February 2022 peak prices [1].

The volume of home sales has plunged 41% in Toronto [2] as the market absorbed the 0.5% interest rate hike. And we haven't seen anything yet. A huge chunk of the buyers today have pre-approvals with interest rates from 75 bps ago. Around June 1 these buyers need to commit to a purchase to provide enough time for their lenders to close the deal at the old interest rates before those expire. The Bank of Canada is also expected to make a further 50 bps to 100 bps jump in rates in early June.

Anecdotally, there are already horror stories of over leveraged buyers -- perhaps amateur investors or a family that stretched themselves to the limit to buy -- only for their deal to fall through because the banks won't appraise the home at what they agreed to pay for it.

As a wannabe first time homebuyer myself, I've heard every argument you've said repeated ad nauseum up here in Canada the past half year by real estate bulls -- who I might add, have been totally right in their assessment of our crazy market which could only go up for perhaps the past 15 years -- only for the market sentiment to completely change overnight within a month or two of the 0.5% interest rate hike.

[1]: https://preview.redd.it/w61ns3b7jgx81.jpg?width=1024&auto=we...

[2]: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/toronto-home-sales-plunge-41-in-...

Does it say if the researchers knew his family members' names in advance? Wouldn't the "a ha!" moment be when the patient shares something that the researchers couldn't possibly find out on their own and that wouldn't be interpreted via his family's help? None of that appeared to happen here.

Having said that, I've just skimmed the Nature article. But what stands out is that they had 86 days of unsuccessful communication before they changed strategies and then all of a sudden started reporting success. I really hope this works but we should remain skeptical for the possibility of abuse here. Other commenters in this thread have reported that the researchers have committed misconduct in their brain research.

The only thing I fear more than being in the discussed patient's situation is being in their situation and having my thoughts incorrectly interpreted at best or outright manipulated at worst.

For macOS at least, the cause of this is the ECM driver that is used for the Realtek 8153. If you're lucky enough to find a device that has the Realtek 8156 chipset, which I believe the CalDigit TS4 uses, macOS will use the NCM driver and you'll be totally fine. ECM is a more primitive USB ethernet protocol and NCM is a more advanced one. The difference is similar to UASP vs BOT mode for USB external storage.

At least with respect to macOS, the Realtek 8153 chipsets in these docks suffer from having to use the built-in ECM driver. If you're on Apple Silicon, that's your only option. If you're on Intel, there are some flaky but more performant drivers from Realtek available. The ECM driver will cause high CPU load and for many users, will result in performance that's worse than wifi because of it. You'll also get audio dropouts and system hitches from the CPU loading.

If you can find an adapter that uses the Realtek 8156 chipset, which I believe the CalDigit TS4 uses, macOS will utilize the NCM driver and your performance will be rock solid.

ECM is a very primitive USB protocol for ethernet, whereas NCM is a more modern and performant one. NCM is to ECM as UASP is to BOT mode, if you're familiar with USB external drives.

The donor is anonymous but their characteristics are heavily marketed. In cases like this one, parents feel like they were intentionally misled: promised one thing and sold something else. I haven't had time to read the full article, but in many cases the decision about which sperm to use is made based on donor characteristics that are considered desirable: height, hair, skin colour, intelligence, lack of self-reported mental conditions, etc. The sperm they are provided tends to be from donors who don't measure up in these areas.

Furthermore, several stories resemble this one where a fertility doctor used his own sperm and that is considered particularly egregious. Not only for the reasons mentioned above, but because doing so is considered lying by omission. There are also notions of fairness with respect to fathering children: don't father too many and fulfill your responsibilities towards the ones you do. Biologically fathering dozens if not hundreds of children and having nothing to do with them afterward is considered unfair to the children, even if they happen to have a real father who raises them.

I know it sounds farfetched but hear me out. Stranger things have happened.

Bitcoin is a speculative asset like housing and used cars currently are in 2022. But the similarities end there. All the other speculative asset classes have been triggered precisely due to quantitative easing policies. Their current prices have been derived from this fiscal policy. As ridiculous as it sounds, bitcoin’s price is quite literally a bet against the future performance of these world currencies. As the speculative asset classes have their foundation in current fiscal policy, Bitcoin is a bet against their performance too.

Bitcoin has minimal carrying costs as an asset. The same can’t be true of other speculative assets like homes which have become financial instruments due to investors pouring their wealth into anything besides currencies in a desperate attempt to hold value over time. In many countries now, and increasingly so, the only way to profit off housing is through appreciation. Rent will not cover the carrying costs of the mortgages taken out against these homes. These assets have entered bubble territory, decoupling from any rational metric like average incomes.

Holding Bitcoin costs essentially nothing. Sure, there are idiots who invested through leverage. But there are many more who haven’t who can afford to hold on through all sorts of adversity. That makes it quite unlike these other speculative assets.

As a backing store for central banks, it holds value because it’s auditable. Bretton Woods fell apart in no small part due to countries becoming sceptical that other countries actually held the gold they said they did. The amount of Bitcoin each central bank holds would easily be auditable by others and that makes it valuable.

It only sounds foolish because we are used to thinking of measuring Bitcoin against the dollar. Rather, view the amount of Bitcoin each central bank would hold as an auditable hash of all its assets. Then view the digital currencies these central banks would issue as denominated in fractional units of this.

In the world where we value Bitcoin against USD, it sounds foolish because we don’t have enough Bitcoin to act as a foundation for all of it. But what if we have too much money in the world? Bitcoin’s fixed 21 million limit provides a means of truly measuring the rate at which currencies are inflated. Some inflation is of course desirable and Bitcoin could be an inherent regulator ensuring a healthy amount of inflation.

Note, this perspective equally pisses off Bitcoin skeptics and libertarian die hard hodlers. I have a very good chance of being wrong of course. But it’s not as farfetched as we’d initially suspect either. The biggest reason against this scenario isn’t the financial aspect, but the incredible shift in power that would result.

Current Bitcoin investors would find themselves suddenly incredibly wealthy and powerful. We don’t typically see shifts in power like this. But it happened to Saudi Arabia and other people who struck it suddenly rich (and powerful) with oil. So it isn’t unprecedented.

I'm somewhat using it as a stand-in, but I do have this gut feeling that bitcoin has a few characteristics that will make it the standard (more on this later).

I also think there will be digital dollars issued by central banks. In that respect, I don't see Bitcoin being used for day to day financial transactions. I see it being used as a backing value store for these digital dollars though.

I think economists and central banks throughout the world are reluctantly coming to grips with the effects of going off Bretton Woods:

- There is more influence over financial cycles so they can be smoothed over to help with the functioning of day to day life. This is desirable.

- The above influence has gone too far and has created an epic asset bubble and economic disparity that is even concerning to many of the world's most powerful and wealthy (i.e., it's creating an existential risk to them). Obviously this is undesirable and even worse, the central banks have no potential solutions to deal with this in their existing toolchain.

Why do I think bitcoin will win out? Somewhat for the same reasons I'm skeptical of that backdoor scenario. The major national governments have little trust amongst themselves, this trust is getting worse, and we're seeing an adversarial situation play out.

- China and some other economies outside the G7 want off of the USD as a reserve currency

- The G7 are reluctant to accept a world in which China exerts the financial influence they give up

All will realize something in the world's financial system has to change and for the sake of world peace a new arrangement is worth a shot. But none of these adversaries trust each other in such a way that a nationally derived crypto would be acceptable as the basis for a value backing store. Furthermore, existing assets will inherently be untrustworthy too because they're in a bubble. Nobody knows the true value of a house any more. Step in crypto...

- I don't think it will be Ethereum because as I said, reputation has been tarnished (there may be Russian influence). But it also tries to do too much and that may be undesirable for a value backing store.

- I think it will end up being Bitcoin simply because it's a lot more simple. It does less. And furthermore, nobody really knows who invented it so it is inherently not tied to any given nation. Or at least there's plausible deniability about it having been invented by a particular state.

- Other cryptos are distant runners up to these two main players so I don't see any other viable alternatives

I used to think like this. But the older I get the more cynical I become. In massively corrupt environments, everybody needs to appear to be playing the game by the rules when it comes to primary objectives like the distribution of wealth and the financial operations surrounding it. Nobody trusts anyone else and everyone is an adversary of everyone else, even within the leadership ranks. I strongly suspect there would not be any widely known backdoor for oligarchs. A select few oligarchs might have the luck of being tasked with creating such a system, in which case they will build the backdoor for themselves.

Still... I think the speculative scenario is unlikely. I myself am speculating massively here. But what I think is far more likely to happen with respect to crypto is that an international agreement akin to the Bretton Woods System is negotiated that mandates central banks hold a store of value such as Bitcoin. This will provide some foundation of measure for all currencies to be valued against. But the current financial system layer on top will remain intact.

Note, I'm an early Bitcoin hodler and have remained strongly suspicious of Putin's interest in Ethereum with agreements between the foundation and VEB like this one (https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2017/08/31/misunderstanding...), its handling of the DAO event, and Eth2.0's coincidental timing (its delays too) with the Ukraine invasion.

My somewhat speculative paranoia follows, but I strongly suspect Ethereum will NOT play a part in this new system because of the above issues. I think Putin calculated that Ethereum might be a viable alternative to a widespread financial system replacement that could have provided a means of bypassing any sanctions, which is why he went ahead with the Ukraine invasion.

In the end, if this Bretton Woods 2.0 system comes into effect, bitcoin will have failed to become the libertarian financial tool many people hoped it would. But its utility as a store of value can't be ignored and so it will have been co-opted/integrated into the existing financial system. It'll be another example of techno-utopianism naiveté like the 90s style vision of the web.

Russia has a 10:1 advantage to the US in tactical nukes. They have all sorts of creative nuclear devices that can very much be used in theatre without triggering a MAD scenario. Why the big discrepancy? US weaponry is better. It's more precise. It's more effective. Head to head, Russia realized that they had no hope of competing against NATO. So they decided they won't. They'll just invest in and strategize around the use of tactical nukes which help them level the playing field without triggering a MAD scenario. It's all they've been investing in and cared about in the last 10-15 years if you've been paying close attention.

Putin isn't crazy enough to use strategic nuclear weapons. He's absolutely enough of a sociopath to use tactical nukes, particularly to avoid a potentially brutal urban assault on kyiv. I hope I'm wrong. But when you consider Belarus and Russia just completed nuclear drills in the past month and they're using a lot of conscripts in their first wave, it can't be ruled out.

Brands like Levis never weigh in on controversial issues until they've hit a certain inflection point of public discourse and it is clear where the majority of society will land on it. Then in hindsight, they will try to present themselves as pioneers of progressive ideals when they really only hopped onto the bandwagon when it was clear which bandwagon was going to win the race.

Today, some of these issues are being litigated faster than they were in the past. But don't be mistaken. Nike almost dropped Colin Kaepernick in the heat of the moment of his controversy. They only embraced him a few years later when it was safe to do so. I suspect Jennifer Sey drank her own koolaid in thinking that she'd be able to come out one way or the other on this still hotly contested issue.

Marketers choose their words carefully and more importantly than that, refrain from taking a stand until they know precisely how it can be dutifully exploited for their brand's needs. You might dislike this. But that's the game that's played in that industry. There's a reason that corporations, and the brands which encapsulate their identities, have been called psychopaths.

Agreed, but there's a higher baseline mental overhead due to increased complexity of Swift that Objective-C doesn't have, at least once you get past the weird square bracket syntax. This is mental overhead that distracts from the actual problem needing to be solved.

Swift isn't alone in this respect. I think TypeScript is another example of a language which started out claiming to offer a better experience than Javascript only to become very complex. I'm sure that this added complexity helps some programmers some of the time. But just like CISC was a dead end and all computer chips are essentially RISC-based today, I suspect the pendulum may have swung too far in terms of adding features to some of these developer-friendly languages.

But, it's a contrarian view for a reason. I'm just somebody who fell in love with the simplicity of Objective-C almost 20 years ago, before the iPhone was a thing. So I may be looking back at things with rose tinted glasses.

Apple's move to Swift and away from Objective-C won't be viewed as the no-brainer obvious decision with positive results 10 years from now, at least when both technical and business merits are considered. It will be compared in a similar light to Microsoft's big push to .NET in the early 2000s where they lost their way for more than a decade.

Apple's shift to Swift has caused a lot of software to be rewritten. It's not obvious that the reduction in software correctness bugs which Swift provides offsets the kind of bugs that are the result of rewriting software. Apple's software rewrites have introduced very little tangible benefit to the end customer while creating lots of software gremlins which are very annoying to them. Worse, focussing engineering resources on rewriting existing apps in Swift vs pushing the apps forward in terms of UX and features have allowed competition to catch up and surpass Apple in several areas that do matter to customers.

In hindsight, there will be a lingering question of if it would have been better for Apple to have continued to evolve Objective-C further in ways that could have provided similar technical benefits to Swift's introduction. At best the shift to Swift will have been seen as a necessary evil that exposed Apple's flanks. At worst, it will have been considered an unnecessary technical exercise that may have been started as a way to retain top technical talent, but even failed long-term in that respect.

The FLQ kidnapped a British cabinet minister then murdered a Quebec politician responsible for immigration. There's a lot more to the October Crisis and the invocation of the War Measures Act than you are alluding to. I hope that you simply haven't been informed about the full picture here.

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/october-cr...

The article makes no mention of the warming predating the industrial revolution. Rather, the quote below indicates a marked change in temperature at the beginning of the 20th century.

When we looked at the whole 800-year timescale, our temperature and salinity records look pretty constant,” said co-lead author Dr Tesi Tommaso from the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council in Bologna. “But all of a sudden at the start of the 20th century, you get this marked change in temperature and salinity – it really sticks out.

The Chinese and Russians just completed joint military exercises for the first time on Chinese mainland soil. It’s a ratcheting up of their version of NATO - the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

My pet theory is Russia is playing both sides of this. The SCO has been around for 20 some odd years. But recently China and Russia have been fucking with each other and it primarily involves inviting India and Pakistan to join the pact. Anyhow, I imagine Putin is arming and possibly coordinating funding to the Taliban. Once in power the Taliban will become China’s problem in the region and may very well have some excursions past their border with China. So Putin will be able to swoop in to assist with additional military might. It may even become a showcase for the SCO as a NATO-like coalition.

It’ll achieve two objectives: showing that China now is a regional military influence in a former US sphere of influence, and that Russia is still itself a military power that can throw its weight around. And just like the US in Afghanistan and the Soviets before it, this will become China’s problem to deal with long term.

I'm from Canada and we were taught something similar as early as grade school. But that was back in the 1990s and I'm not sure if it's currently part of the curriculum or if this was taught across the country as education curriculum is mostly a provincial responsibility.

It was explained to us in simple terms that everyone's experience with the world is unique. As such, there is no such thing as unbiased sources and we should always consume news critically. They were simpler times. The most political it got was when my teacher brought in the 3 main newspapers in our area and candidly shared with the class how they were stereotyped in their political editorial leanings. For Americans, think of it like sharing this statement: "Fox News leans toward Republican policies. The New York Times leans toward Democrat policies. USA Today is somewhere in between."

There wasn't any discussion of whether these newspapers were accurate or inaccurate. Fact checks weren't rattled off to us about each source. Rather, the teacher kindly explained to us that it was impossible to be unbiased and we did exercises to critically interpret news sources and see how the same topic might be covered by multiple sources.

I'm going on a bit of an aside for the historical context in which I had these lessons for the next two paragraphs, so feel free to skip to the final paragraph.

In some ways while they were simpler times informationally, Canada was going through wilder times politically back then. There's an argument to be made that Canada as a country was more divided in the early 1990s than the US is today. Québec separation was a very real possibility during this time and actively being sought within our political system. This wasn't just the online pissing contests that some Americans have talking about California or Texas separating from the union. Separatist parties were elected both at Québec's provincial level and as the official opposition party in Canada [EDIT: for Americans unfamiliar with this concept, our Prime Minister and the ruling party had to spend the majority of their daily routine responding to attacks from separatists in the House of Commons and every day the news would have this front-and-centre].

For those too young to remember, the political turmoil culminated in a referendum in the province of Québec -- 50.58% to stay in Canada and 49.42% to become an independent country. The Canadian military had to strategically fly its CF-18s out of their Québec base to American ones in case the referendum passed lest they fall into a foreign nation's hands. Our Prime Minister was busy actively seeking the support of President Bill Clinton and shoring up our gold supplies while the would-be leader of an independent Québec had an official visit to France complete with red carpet and television crews to discuss what their relationship would be once Québec separated.

What's my point? I suppose just to give Americans who still believe in the core concept of the country, a bit of hope. As divided as things are today, they can quickly change. Furthermore, I believe that it is possible to teach these things so they have real merit and aren't just tools of the current political ruling party even in uncertain and highly divided times.

The Canada Revenue Agency is very clear about how they are interpret tax law here. If it’s a gift from a non-employer then it’s most certainly not taxable. There is no gift tax. However, Vitalik has generated a capital gains event by the act of donating a capital property. Canada doesn’t distinguish between short term or long term capital gains. 50% of the fair market value would be taxable at whatever his marginal tax rate is. But if he has donated to a qualifying charity, he may not have to report any of this capital gain.

In short, he probably owes no tax from this act.

I was piling on but could have done a better job with the opening statement to articulate this, yes. I’ll take every opportunity to point out the Nobel prize issue because I think it has created real harm. The equity of the real Nobel prizes is being exploited to gloss over alarming gaps in the field. These gaps have led to real harm and yet they’re jokingly dismissed.

Some of the smartest people in the field are actively trying to obscure its limitations. The author of this article is more modest but even still it’s a PR rebuttal and a bullshit fear tactic: a “You know what? Things are really bad but what would be worse is if you didn’t listen to us”.