atweiden

To avoid ecological disaster, we need to slam on the brakes, not merely pump them.

Once the marginal productivity of physical capital is below the real interest rate people will abandon production even if there is a shortage of products and people are starving on the street.

Given the profit margin on farming is something like 10%, and assuming the average annual purchasing power appreciation of our hypothetical global currency of fixed supply equals the Fed’s inflation target of 2% plus 0.25% GDP growth, how do we arrive at people “starving on the street”?

If you want to discourage consumption you should introduce consumption taxes for natural resources, co2 and other forms of pollution

Surely the level of taxation necessary to curb industrial and retail usage of fossil fuels to the same extent of global deflationary economics would make the taxation measures politically infeasible. The tax policy would need to result in unthinkably high prices to create the drastic changes necessary. Deflation OTOH would lead to a decline in capital investment, employment, and spending without requiring any level of forcible compulsion.

A global currency of fixed supply would realistically deliver a sufficiently powerful financial incentive to galvanize widespread, voluntary adoption of ecologically sustainable consumer behaviour and business practices.

by maintaining full employment

Particularly with the rise of automation and AI, is maintaining full employment really an achievable goal? We desperately need a way for the majority of humans to subsist without working bullshit jobs [1].

hence the need to force ever greater quantities of money into the economy to keep it alive

We’re facing ecological collapse precisely because humanity has chased infinite growth.

[1] https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/

Hyperinflation of the old currency would erase all debt denominated in it as we shift to a global deflationary economic system.

Once in the deflationary environment, the cost of borrowing would be higher, and there would be less reason to work, consume and invest. Hence, there would be less incentive to take on debt.

Many things are preferable to having 0 savings and a planet on fire.

Another option is to pump the brakes.

“As the lockdown to stop the spread of coronavirus in India continues, pollution levels across much of the country have dropped sharply. Now some residents in northern India say they can see the snow-capped Himalayas 200 kilometres away for the first time in 30 years.” [1]

If we had a global deflationary economic system, the incentive to invest in capital and engage in consumerism would dissipate. People would work less, because there would be less reason to work. Without work, people would have less reason to travel. Pollution would drop accordingly.

Under a deflationary economic system, a touch over $480,000 in savings would yield an effective “UBI” of $1000/mo [2].

Once adopted by the entire world, a global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms could achieve this. Humans would voluntarily work less and pollute less.

[1] https://www.sbs.com.au/language/english/audio/himalayas-visi...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31759685

both Florida and California went through pretty stringent lockdowns

In Australia, police would patrol the streets to ensure people were staying within a 5 km radius of their residence, and to ensure they were only out for a reason deemed essential by the government.

This was accompanied by international, interstate and intrastate border closures, i.e. you couldn’t enter Australia, and couldn’t enter another state within Australia if already in Australia, nor could you in some cases even drive from one part of the state to another, without a special exemption.

I hesitate to ask what Florida did to enforce the lockdowns, because I’m fairly certain what passed for a “lockdown” outside of Asia-Pacific was a joke by comparison. I strongly doubt any of the above measures were done by any state in the US at any point in the pandemic.

Without a really deep dive I'm not certain the island-country numbers of Australia or Japan would be achievable in the US

If “being an island nation” was all it took to eradicate Covid, why was Hawaii unable to do so?

It’s clear border security was a rather important factor. And can you think of a more essential responsibility of government than securing the borders?

Gentle reminder that Australia is an “island country” the size of the continental US with several densely-populated major cities.

Here in the U.S., at least, what has widely been maligned as "COVID denialism" was actually a deeper and more nuanced conversation about whether sudden, sweeping changes to society would prevent more harm than they cause.

And now looking at outcomes across different states (e.g. Florida vs. California)--and considering ALL outcomes (public health, homelessness, unemployment, substance abuse, mental health, truancy, graduation rates, violent crime)--it's indeed unclear that draconian policies in the name of public health were a net positive.

Why are we drawing conclusions about the effectiveness of Covid safety protocols based on the failed half-measures taken by America? We have a plethora of working examples to study from the Asia-Pacific region: Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and China all eradicated Covid pre-Omicron.

But there seems to be little introspection from those who propose sweeping policy change about the need to consider second-order effects on those whose lives and livelihoods will be upturned.

Equally, there seems to be little introspection amongst American libertarians about the role their own society’s dysfunction might be playing in shaping their personal beliefs.

lizmat++

The innumerable dark-seeming corners of the language is part of what makes Raku so very, distinctly “Perl”. Little traits and single character sigils that change everything. I find the black magic of Perl моѕt all∪ring ∮.

The concept of "inflating debt away" is an assumption that wages match inflation while debt stays static

It also myopically focuses on household debt. But household debt is significantly lower than either corporate debt or government debt [1].

The biggest debtors benefit the most from inflation — quantitatively speaking, the debts of ordinary people aren’t very big.

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Financi...

The alternative is to have your boss decide for you when he wants to fire you

Just for fun, I thought I’d do the math on deflationary economics:

    #!/usr/bin/env raku
    use v6;

    multi sub deflate($n, $r, $y)
    {
        my $m = $n;
        loop (my $i = 0; $i < $y; $i++)
        {
            $m = deflate($m, $r);
        }
        $m;
    }

    multi sub deflate($n, $r)
    {
        $n * (1 + $r);
    }

    sub MAIN(:$rate = 0.0225, :$years = 10)
    {
        my $purchasing-power = 1;
        my $deflate = deflate($purchasing-power, $rate, $years);
        my $output = qq:to/EOF/.trim;
        After $years years of deflation at a rate of {$rate * 100}% per year,
        purchasing power is {$deflate * 100}% of what it was initially.
        EOF
        $output.say;
    }

Assuming an average inflation rate target of 2% per year (per the Fed) and an average GDP growth rate of 0.25% per year, your real purchasing power would grow by about 25% per decade.

Under this scenario, you could mimic a universal basic income of $1000 per month upon saving a total of $480,307.

Bonus: your monthly “UBI” could never be shut off by your government.

Have you used Raku before? The new and improved regex syntax [1] IMHO completely obsoletes legacy PCRE. Writing regexes in other languages feels like stepping into an ICE vehicle after driving a Tesla: so crufty and old and obvious legacy.

Raku’s built-in grammars make parsers trivial to write. I effortlessly created two [2] — one for reordering fstab entries, and the other for converting human-readable LUKS offsets into cryptsetup sectors — on a lazy afternoon. Grammars in Raku make this second nature.

Then you have Raku’s multi-dispatch. It is more capable than Erlang/Elixir pattern matching:

    # a list with at least one element, extracting the head and tail
    multi sub tail(*@list ($head, *@tail)) { @tail }
    multi sub tail(*@list) { @list }

    [3]
    ==> tail()
    ==> say(); # []

    [3, 4]
    ==> tail()
    ==> say(); # [4]

    # pattern matching with arbitrary guards
    multi sub user($name where { is-valid-user($_) }) { $name.say }
    multi sub user($name) { "invalid name: $name".say }

    sub is-valid-user($name)
    {
        # notice the additive character class in this regex: “letters plus digits”
        # fail the match if $name is root
        try with $name ~~ /(<+:Letter +digit>+)/ { $0 ne 'root' or fail }; $!.not
    }

    user('name'); # name
    user('1234'); # 1234
    user('root'); # invalid name: root

    class Coordinates
    {
        has $.latitude is required;
        has $.longitude is required;
    }

    class City
    {
        has Str:D $.name is required;
        has Str:D $.state is required;
        has Str:D $.country is required;
        has Coordinates:D $.coordinates is required;
    }

    my $latitude = -37.840935;
    my $longitude = 144.946457;
    my Coordinates $coordinates .= new(:$latitude, :$longitude);
    my Str:D $name = 'Melbourne';
    my Str:D $state = 'Victoria';
    my Str:D $country = 'Australia';
    my City $melbourne .= new(:$name, :$state, :$country, :$coordinates);

    my City:D $sydney = do {
        my Coordinates:D $coordinates = do {
            my $latitude = -33.86514;
            my $longitude = 151.209900;
            Coordinates.new(:$latitude, :$longitude);
        };
        my Str:D $name = 'Sydney';
        my Str:D $state = 'New South Wales';
        my Str:D $country = 'Australia';
        City.new(:$name, :$state, :$country, :$coordinates);
    };

    # deeply nested argument deconstruction
    multi sub melbourne-or-bust(
        City:D $city (
            Str:D :$name where 'Melbourne',
            Str:D :$state,
            Str:D :$country,
            :$coordinates (
                :$latitude,
                :$longitude
            )
        )
    )
    {
        my $gist = qq:to/EOF/.trim;
        Welcome to the city of $name. It’s located in $state, $country.

        GPS coordinates: $latitude, $longitude
        EOF
        $gist.say;
    }

    multi sub melbourne-or-bust(City:D $city)
    {
        'This isn’t Melbourne.'.say;
    }

    melbourne-or-bust($melbourne); # Welcome to the city of Melbourne ...
    melbourne-or-bust($sydney); # This isn’t Melbourne

Perl 6 took a long time to make, but how much did that matter? What was Perl going to do about Rails, Clojure, Go, Rust, JS/TS, and more? The world of programming languages used to be a lot smaller than it is today.

Perl 6 had a new different syntax.

Inline::Perl5 [3] allows running legacy Perl 5 code in Perl 6 codebases.

[1] https://docs.raku.org/language/5to6-nutshell#Regular_express...

[2] https://github.com/atweiden/voidvault

[3] https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5

I’m disappointed in the way this Perl 6 v Perl 7 debate is developing. Perl 6 modernizes Perl with e.g. concurrent and reactive programming, built-in grammars and a reimagined regex syntax superior to legacy PCRE, named function arguments, and gradual typing.

Perl 6 was designed to be the successor language to Perl 5.

The only technical grounds for Perl 6 being metaphorically sidelined was because Perl 6 lacked the startup and runtime performance characteristics of Perl 5 — fixable problems.

Proponents of Perl 5 often contend Perl could’ve escaped developer mindshare loss without Perl 6 in the picture. But to claim Python, Ruby on Rails, Clojure, Go, Rust and JS/TS never would’ve gained serious developer mindshare had _Perl 6_ not existed seems very myopic to me. All the brilliant new languages and web frameworks launching were bound to erode Perl’s early established dominance regardless.

Things would be different now if Perl 6 was at least as performant as Perl 5. Perhaps then it would’ve become popular years ago amongst Perl users to switch all greenfield Perl code to Perl 6. Then “Perl” would’ve become synonymous with modern language features.

Miners hold enormous political power in Bitcoin.

Users and developers are dependent on miners to create blocks. The negotiating power of miners is self-evident.

All blockchains require social coordination. How do you think Bitcoin operates?

That’s a great question, and one Jude C. Nelson — who has a PhD in distributed systems from Princeton — is better equipped to answer [1] than me (or you, probably):

“PoW requires less proactive trust and coordination between community members than PoS -- and thus is better able to recover from both liveness and safety failures -- precisely because it both (1) provides a computational method for ranking fork quality, and (2) allows anyone to participate in producing a fork at any time. If the canonical chain is 51%-attacked, and the attack eventually subsides, then the canonical chain can eventually be re-established in-band by honest miners simply continuing to work on the non-attacker chain. In PoS, block-producers have no such protocol -- such a protocol cannot exist because to the rest of the network, it looks like the honest nodes have been slashed for being dishonest. Any recovery procedure necessarily includes block-producers having to go around and convince people out-of-band that they were totally not dishonest, and were slashed due to a "hack" (and, since there's lots of money on the line, who knows if they're being honest about this?).”

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26810619

no one in this thread is promising utopia. i am merely pushing back against assertions of bitcoin being "most equitable".

Fairly launched proof of work systems are a great deal more equitable than PoS premined ICO coins. This is just a fact.

a publicly accessible ico is just as equitable as someone mining btc with their cpu on low difficulty.

No, absolutely not. Obviously someone has to get the ICO money. How on earth is that “just as equitable” as anyone in the world being able to use any old Windows computer to mine coins on demand. With proof of work, money isn’t being transferred from end users to developers, or their many Swiss foundations.

or can be coordinated by users in the network

Phone-a-friend consensus aka “weak subjectivity” doesn’t meaningfully differ from the administration of centralized Git repositories. If your blockchain requires human intervention to resolve disputes, as do all pure proof of stake implementations, you probably never needed a blockchain to begin with.

I’m only commenting from the perspective of investors concerned over debasement. 0.03% annual inflation reduces purchasing power by about 7% every 250 years.

A tail emissions rate of 0.03% or less annually seems acceptable.

    #!/usr/bin/env raku
    use v6;

    multi sub inflate($n, $r, $y)
    {
        my $m = $n;
        loop (my $i = 0; $i < $y; $i++)
        {
            $m = inflate($m, $r);
        }
        $m;
    }

    multi sub inflate($n, $r)
    {
        $n * (1 - $r);
    }

    sub MAIN(:$rate = 0.0003, :$years = 100)
    {
        my $purchasing-power = 1;
        my $inflate = inflate($purchasing-power, $rate, $years);
        my $output = qq:to/EOF/.trim;
        After $years years of inflation at a rate of {$rate * 100}% per year,
        purchasing power is {$inflate * 100}% of what it was initially.
        EOF
        $output.say;
    }

Expanding the supply on demand through on-chain governance in a way stakers can profit from, while sacrilege to “digital gold”, would be more palatable to me than rates of tail emission higher than 0.03% or so.

There isn’t an infinite amount of gold on earth, whereas there _is_ an infinite amount of any linearly emitted $COIN. Linear emissions models don’t resemble terrestrial gold mining.

Linear emissions are a security tax paid for by investors. Do investors enjoy paying this tax? Investors generally don’t “enjoy” being debased through inflation.

Ethereum got away with having no defined emissions policy early on, but they pulled it off during an era when information was low and ignorance was widespread. Many of their investors assumed Ethereum had a fixed supply just like Bitcoin did — and they had to scramble to rectify this years later.

“Governed emission” is achievable via systems of on-chain governance. Non-stakers get debased by tail emissions measures voted in by stakers. Stakers profit from the inflation measure or are hardly debased at worst.

While antithetical to gold, it achieves the stated goal of incentivizing ongoing chain security while also benefiting investors, particularly assuming staking yield is widely accessible to all in a decentralized manner.

Just to make sure I understand correctly, Eth2 stakers have no “voting” power, but are relied upon in a core capacity to ensure the continued functioning of the network?

Something about this explanation seems incomplete.

PoS is easier than PoW to defend against a 51% attack as the offending validator set can be targeted.

Who decides which validators are malicious?

how does the capital cost being mining hardware and electricity rather than a pos token make the system more equitable?

Every well known proof of stake system today was either premined, ICO’d, sold to investors in private rounds at “special” prices, or some combination of these.

Naturally, if you were autoyielding passive income by staking pos coins you had a cost basis of effectively zero in, either because you participated in an ICO, or worse, because you had the right connections, or exploited your privileged position as developer to hard code coin balances for yourself into your own ledger prior to launch, you’d _love_ proof of stake and trumpet its supposed equity and fairness in public.

In reality, the most privileged and exploitative of investors who have the lowest entry price get the highest rate of return on staking (effectively ∞ in the case of premine recipients).

To insinuate this situation is “equitable” is beyond ridiculous.

And that would constitute buying an equity. We’re not mining in your example, we’re buying shares in a mining company.

You’d have to be doing something seriously wrong in your staking endeavours to break even due to “staking costs” even over the course of 1000 years.

The primary cost of staking is the initial investment in the stake, handedly.

The initial investment in the stake dwarfs the cost of even the most sophisticated staking infrastructure.

Staking is similar to buying lottery tickets at the store, except you need never leave your home or pay any money for the tickets. It’s all about passive income generation.

Mining is a business, with real costs and logistics to fret about.

People should really stop doing the mental gymnastics to make push-button passive income generation seem extraordinarily challenging and, even more egregious, extremely equitable (“it’s _at least_ as fair as Bitcoin”).

Government money is a tool nations can use to further their own national interests.

While this isn’t without its downsides (though see Yanis Varoufakis on CBDCs [1]), the gains from it are socialized.

By contrast, an enormous percentage of bitcoin and all other major cryptocurrencies was mined (or worse, “premined”) in the first few years after launch. What nation of people benefits from this form of inequity? Cryptocurrency is entirely nationless.

[1] https://the-crypto-syllabus.com/yanis-varoufakis-on-techno-f...

Coming from a rural, conservative farm community in Australia — which seems quite culturally compatible with your own as you describe it — I beg to differ.

The case of Australia (and New Zealand) conclusively demonstrates it was in all ways feasible to eradicate at minimum the early Alpha strain of Covid with a relatively low-tech, low-effort approach:

Shut. TF. Borders.

Had America simply paid people to _stay home_, and closed its borders — all of them, international, interstate and even intra-state where necessary — they would’ve entirely halted the spread of Covid early on, sparing countless lives and curbing untold amounts of general insanity and hysteria.

IIRC the longest consecutive lockdown in Australia lasted just under four months. Said lockdown applied only to a single major international city of 5 million. Rural areas essentially got away from all forms of lockdown unscathed.

The majority of the people here are conservative

Strong borders and border security are traditionally conservative values, or so I hear.

For instance, you’d be wrong if you thought an 80 year old couple living off the land they’ve been farming for decades would be in support of opening the borders out of some sense of duty to the word “freedom”.

From the Australian rural conservative perspective, the only people who stood to gain more freedom in a situation where Covid had been eradicated thanks to closed borders were cosmopolitan travelers and urbanites.

Anyone can make anything which supposedly “works better as cash”.

How will they create confidence in the money, though?

In addition, please bear in mind aluminium and copper are more _generally useful_ than gold.

We cannot state, therefore, a money’s usefulness is more important than the hardness of the money: i.e. its scarcity and resistance to fundamental change.

This is likely why most competing currencies these days claim to be “decentralized”. It’s really just their way of claiming hardness without openly admitting to such.

As someone who prefers communicating strictly through text-based virtual media, I wholeheartedly support Mozilla’s message for a better web future. Mozilla’s message reminds us of the importance of keeping the web accessible for users with disabilities, and for people from all backgrounds. What few paltry successes I’ve had in life I owe almost entirely to the internet — internet freedom has had a profound impact on modern life and my life personally, and it deserves the utmost proliferation.

What I look forward to most in the future is discovering — through text-based communities like HN — high-fidelity, open source, native desktop applications, and running them on increasingly open and secure hardware platforms.

Less Javascript, less infinite scrolling, more text. More “native”.

Presumably life isn't a race at all, which makes you wonder why everyone is in such a rush to attend university when they are young

It’s the networking opportunities (i.e. “the college experience”) which suffer as the age gap grows between you and the other students. Since networking is the bulk of the value of university, your age during attendance is of disproportionate consequence. I’m speaking from personal experience here — going into a post-grad program, it was immediately obvious to me that the age gap would act as an all but uncrossable chasm. And I’ve seen this chasm in action in undergrad, where it was even more pronounced.

Simply put, university is a lot harder to justify when a significant age gap exists. To your point, maybe most people should wait a few years before attending university, but they don’t, and those who’d otherwise prefer to wait before starting university — which is doubtlessly a wise move for some — have to risk their college experience to do so.

Isn’t it time we abandon the search for dark matter?

https://www.cosmology.info/media/open-letter-on-cosmology.ht...

https://web.archive.org/web/20170624042109/http://www.nytime...