blusterXY's comments

They would do the opposite of quantitative easing: jack up the Federal Funds rate and reverse open market operations to pull liquidity away from banks. Higher interest rates would encourage people not to dump USD, while also counterbalancing the cheap-money boom created by the influx of USD.

If the influx of USD was higher and faster than could be addressed, the economy would naturally get inflation that would force interest rates even higher up (since no banks will lend at a loss, so borrowing costs get pushed up first by the fed, and then by the need to cover for expected inflation). This would be a death blow to many indebted and highly-leveraged businesses that are dependent on low interest rates for operational purposes (including those in the financial sector) and so they would go out of business. The need for the financial system to write-off the debt held by these companies would also eliminate a certain amount of money in circulation. Eventually enough money has been destroyed/absorbed and the economy is back in equilibrium.

On a less than academic note: this is not a totally unlikely scenario since the flight-to-crypto is a de facto process of de-dollarization, with crypto assets essentially replacing fiat both as store of value as well as medium of exchange. Put another way, the increase in the value of cryptocurrencies is really just a loss in the purchasing power of everyone holding fiat, and since these additional assets are now competing to purchase the same pool of goods, what people think of as bubbles in assets like housing are really just reflective of inflation in the underlying supply of money-that-can-buy-things. And it will get worse when you can sell your house for crypto.

> Banks create money out of thin air.

The ability of banks to leverage deposits into fractional debt is restricted by the size of their deposit base and the need for fiat assets to earn competitive rates of return. This is not a "one way street".

Once people start shifting capital to crypto, banks will sell assets to cover withdrawals, and the cycle to which you refer starts to spin in reverse as the worsening terms-of-trade for fiat/crypto exchanges triggers a fall in the real value of assets in terms of fiat. In short, we are going to get more inflation as crypto spreads because there is less stuff being sold for fiat and more stuff being sold for crypto or held because people don't want to trade it for something likely to lose value.

At that point banks will have to raise interest rates to ensure they are not lending at a loss. Higher rates will weaken borrowing and push more borrowers into bankruptcy, at which point your expansionary cycle reverses until enough loans are written-off and the debt overhang is reduced and/or inflation eats up the implicit increase in the money supply relative to actual underlying GDP.

Look past the ICOs and drug sales -- you only notice these because they are salacious and thus reported on. What you aren't noticing are the people who are eliminating financial intermediaries in pretty much every industry that matters, from international shipping to remittances to supply-chain management.

Let me give you one example that might make you reconsider what is coming. In the future, you won't go to the bank to get a mortgage. One reason for this is because banks won't have the capital to lend you anymore because people won't deposit their money there: why accept a 0.5% interest rate on savings when you could be holding a mildly-deflationary token or staking a proof-of-stake security scheme? Or investing in solar power farms....

So what will people do when they want to buy a house? Instead of going to a bank, they will talk to the real estate company that showcases the property, and that company will take a 20% downpayment and then issue a token to collect funds for the rest. You will pay off your mortgage directly to the broker in cash or crypto (and all payments are recorded on the blockchain, along with the purchase contract -- a transparent template so you will know your rights in full) and the funds will be automatically transferred to token holders, who are splitting the savings with you: they get higher interest payments and you get a cheaper mortgage. Win-win. And if people need cash they can sell those tokens on any number of 24/7 decentralized peer-to-peer token exchanges, because who won't buy a token like that at a slightly discount?

The real estate agency will probably also be plugged into a decentralized AirBNB operation and have various other ways to monetize real estate. So if you ever fail to make a payment, they will take responsibility for monetizing the property such that token holders are paid-off in full. Systemic risk is thus split between the real estate company (that issues the tokens and guarantees the ROI) and the token purchasers (who take on the risk of the property company getting liquidated before they redeem the tokens in the event of a foreclosure -- not a big risk since their financials are mostly visible directly on the blockchain and your token is legally backed by the property in any case).

Where are the banks in this? Good question. We don't need them anymore. And this is just one small part of the financial system.

Scroll up, Stephen. These quotes are in the thread at the heart of this discussion, and they are pulled directly from the article.

I mean... I appreciate getting downvoted for reading the article and addressing it directly, but if there are indeed adequate residency spots then you are disagreeing with the article and would be better served to focus on what it gets wrong instead of attacking me for making rather rudimentary observations that follow from its core premise.

> In recent years, the number of medical residents has become so restricted that even the American Medical Association is pushing to have the number of slots increased.

This does not sound like a system where students can fulfill their residency requirements working at general care facilities with trained doctors who have years of experience.

> The major obstacle at this point is funding. It costs a teaching hospital roughly $150,000 a year for a residency slot.

So why exactly is there a slot shortage if people can literally fulfill their residency requirements pretty much anywhere? There are plenty of hospitals that could easily use the labor.

Now that we are discussing facts... please tell us how many doctors you have personally visited that have been required to perform neurosurgery on you? I can't think of a single incident where that has been necessary in my own experience, and yet every doctor I have seen has been required to have residency experience. Rather counterintuitively, most of the time that has seemed unnecessary, and the work was done by a low-paid nurse or technical staff with the doctor waltzing-in at the end to "sign-off" on the results in order to fulfill the requirements of the insurance companies and ensure the hourly-billing rate was well-above what it would have cost to pay a private clinic staffed by the same nurses to do the same work.

So please enlighten me instead of just slamming what seems a fairly obvious point without adding anything of actual substance to the discussion. Because from the perspective of an actual patient it seems rather silly that a nurse can't take a blood test, and a paediatrician-in-training can't study with a family doctor or another paediatrician in a private practice. And it seems absurd that extensive state funding is now accepted as necessary simply to certify someone to oversee tasks like prescribing antibiotics, or signing-off on STD tests, or allowing patients to get blood test results.

No-one is suggesting that neurosurgery should be done by people without specialized training (I would actually think that "residency" is a poor way of measuring competence in that field as well, fwiw). And by reducing the complaints to this rather silly level all you are really suggesting you have no practical answer to the question of why "residency" is a reasonable bottleneck blocking the certification of doctors and keeping the costs of general medical care far above what is actually needed to deliver the vast majority of it that doesn't involve cutting into people's brains.

EDIT: I love the downvotes people, but you would be better off answering the question since I have karma to burn and enough experience with the US medical system to know that "residency" hasn't been necessary for almost any of the medical care I have received.

Or allow people to do internships with normal, non-ER doctors.

Or provide alternate ways for people to demonstrate equivalent competence.

Or eliminate the residency requirement completely.

The original headline is written by someone with an axe to grind, because this change does not hurt Indian IT professionals at all. Restrictions on importing low-cost labor will raise wages for workers in India. The restrictions will also raise wages in the United States for obvious reasons as well.

The problem is that companies can spend their money on free speech without undergoing double-taxation. If the same money was allocated to an individual first it would be taxed.

It has had forks which have produced blocks which: (1) would not have been produced by any previous nodes in the network, and (2) forced the updated software to ignore the original majority chain. If you check the software, you'll see explicit checkpoints at which the client is told to ignore certain blocks (identified by their hash).

Breaking the ability of the network to follow a valid majority chain is breaking backward compatibility. It's disingenuous to claim otherwise simply because the forked version eventually ended up with the longest chain.

A tourist visa does not permit someone to work legally in China. And Chinese companies do not hire foreigners so the point is moot: there are more non-native Chinese people working in Silicon Valley than foreigners working in all of the Chinese tech companies in China.

Your examples prove the point. 3M is a manufacturing company that distributes face masks. Microsoft collects payments because diplomatic pressure from the US coerced China into paying for software licenses. And Yahoo stopped being active in any meaningful way more than a decade ago: their Chinese search engine even redirects to Singapore. All three companies are also effectively guaranteed to have more Chinese hires working overseas than foreign staff working in China.

Like it or not, the bias against China is easy to understand: China is racist and non-meritocratic in ways that Western economies are not. Tech workers face harsh wage competition (from Chinese workers) and commercial competition (from ventures with direct or indirect state backing) without any countervailing upside (the ability to compete in the Chinese market or play off Chinese against American employers).

How many Western tech companies do you know that are doing well in China? How many Americans do you know that are allowed to work legally in China?

What about the other way?

Someone knows their Big-Five! :D

> "Later, it turned out that fake Facebook accounts linked to the Russian government helped to spread stories about Twin Falls and even organized one of the rallies there."

You should take this with a truckload of salt. There is zero mention of who exactly has "linked" what accounts to Russia, yet there have been repeated discredited claims that have shown that "suspicious" accounts are nothing more than people critical of Hillary Clinton and US imperialism in Syria.

Yes, we will see what the situation is in terms of exchange liquidity. With that said, the reports were of exchanges investing customer-deposited RMB funds, not selling customer-deposited crypto for fiat and then investing that fiat for profit.

ironic

Three examples among many:

1. exchanges provide visibility into who is buying and selling crypto along with the ability to integrate crypto activities within real-name systems (i.e. whitelist wallets, etc.). This is the most efficient approach to market regulation as governments simply require exchanges to comply with policies and do not need to code the monitoring infrastructure themselves.

2. exchanges provide an infrastructure for supporting government initiatives -- the Chinese government is developing its own POW-based cryptocoin and has shown an interest in licensing ICOs and taxing transactions. And if China closes down all of the exchanges in the country it is a rather good question how it plans to accomplish either.

3. In the absence of a viable way to operate domestically, Chinese exchanges will simply move overseas (i.e. incorporate in HK), at which point they can continue to serve Chinese customers throughout the world without the need to bother with ANY Chinese policies (such as the elimination of zero-fee trades, KYC policies and data-sharing etc.).

What will happen in crypto is exactly the same thing that happened with video-sharing and group-sales: the government crackdown will be used to push uncooperative companies out of the market, and then licensing requirements will be used to tax those companies that remain while ensuring their compliance with the government fintech agenda. The current back-and-forth is part of an intra-government struggle for political primacy over cryptocurrency activities: the reason the big exchanges are silent is because they have their backers and are working to blunt the impact of these policies on their own businesses and the interests of those with whom they are affiliated. Smaller exchanges without this support are screwed and will close, but that is how China works -- it is not a market economy.

Dressing up a bad argument in the rhetoric of a derelict academic philosophy does not make it interesting or correct. Especially when all you are doing is describing a concept rather than telling us why it applies in this case.

Besides, if there is a fallacy in the OP's statement surely it is not the assertion that teachers don't prioritize money so much as the assertion that engineers do. At least among the software engineers I know (and I suspect the same holds for most people on HN), engineers are as multifaceted in their approach to work as anyone else. Most people would happily trade off non-trivial amounts of wealth for other social values such as work-life balance or work on projects that have personal meaning. The most unhappy workers anywhere are those who can only choose between jobs based on their salary.

"China is considering losing all control over domestic cryptocurrency activity"

tenure