jganetsk

The person to look to for explanations of why OCaml/SML and not Haskell is Bob Harper. For example, the module system vs ad hoc polymorphism: https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/modules-mat... He also has in-depth critiques of laziness-by-default but the one link I found is a 404.

I know the Effingo team at Google. It comes from Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/effingo#Latin

That's all included in the article, which admittedly is behind a paywall. He goes into great detail, including purchasing power parity, means vs medians, etc.

And the conclusion is the US generates more wealth for the middle class than Europe does.

As far as know the amount of poor people in the usa is also way higher than in Europe. If we take that into account i'd say that Europe is doing just fine.

Citation needed. No, Europe is not doing just fine. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/americans-are-generally-richer...

This is a great observation! Indeed, most languages have very few words for smells.

- https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/11/the-voca... - https://www.wired.com/2014/11/whats-up-with-that-smells-lang...

Noah Smith is no activist. He was a professor of finance and a journalist for the Associated Press, Bloomberg, and other reputable outlets. He now writes a very successful Substack.

This is a common misconception. Actually the primary fix is indeed to make affordable housing available. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-...

Stannous flouride stains my teeth and I avoid it like the plague.

One way to think about it: the world you are proposing is equivalent to one where the central bank fully monetizes all government debt. That possibility is a strict subset of the space of possible monetary policies we have today. The Fed could decide to do that, but it would have significant implications. It would push down interest rates substantially, which would (according to conventional thinking) potentially trigger inflation and incentivize various sectors of the economy to shift their portfolios towards riskier assets in an attempt to pursue greater returns. This could have a substantially destabilizing effect.

Another way of looking at the problem: generally, money is printed by banks, not by governments. The liabilities of the banking sector is precisely what we use as money. A bank is a "debt monetizer": it holds assets (often debt) on one side of the balance sheet, and balances that against money as a liability. https://nathantankus.substack.com/p/banks-as-debt-monetizers...

This property holds true for both central banks and private banks. They both print money that is balanced by assets on the other side of the balance sheet.

There are some benefits to this worldview:

- We have a unified model of banking that explains both central and private banks. "“Everyone can create money; the problem is to get it accepted“ -Hyman Minsky

- In a very real sense, all money is backed by something

If you just print money and use it outside of this framework, you essentially get cryptocurrency: https://www.crisesnotes.com/the-dangerous-brilliance-of-issu...

All signs pointing to a stock market recovery:

- Decreased consumer savings - Decreased foreign savings

Plugged into the profit equation: https://www.levyforecast.com/assets/Profits.pdf

US corporate profits should be shooting back up

There's a difference between economics and finance. It is possible to have real economic problems while having sound financial flows. That's what's happening now. Inflation is the consequence: there's more money chasing the same (or fewer) goods. That's not to say that a crash can't happen... because it did in 2020. It can happen again. But under these conditions, we can expect an aggressive recovery (like we just had).

yet we are in the middle of pandemic, millions get sick every day, inflation 30yr high, supply shortages

None of these things impact the aggregate profitability of the corporate sector. Please read "Where Profits Come From" [1]. The Kalecki-Levy profits equation says:

Profits before tax = + Investment – Nonbusiness saving + Dividends + Corporate profits taxes

Profits for the most part come from the "nonbusiness saving" term, which is the government budget deficit minus the trade deficit minus household savings. The numbers are looking very good. [2]

edit: i can't help but think there will be a counter reaction to the Fed printing dollars recklessly in 2020

and i'm even more scared Fed will go on a printing spree again to keep the current bubble from popping

It's fascinating to me that in times of outsize fiscal stimulus, people continue to blame monetary policy on all of our economic woes. If you think that monetary policy has a much larger impact than fiscal policy, you have it backwards. Monetary policy has far less impact than is commonly stated. The Fed does not really print money, it swaps one highly liquid US government asset for another. And the size of bank balance sheets do not change when this happens. And repeat after me: banks cannot and do not lend out reserves [3]

[1] https://www.levyforecast.com/assets/Profits.pdf

[2] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4475023-white-house-fed-inf...

[3] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/mrcb...

No. The persecution of religious minorities in Europe culminated in the Holocaust, which led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Don't blame the minorities who have suffered and continue to suffer.

There is something called fund flow: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fund-flow.asp

If a company issues $1000 of new stock, then that's an inflow of $1000 into the company. And if it buys back $1000 of stock, that's an outflow.

This kind of analysis is commonly applied to ETFs, for example, because ETFs will manage their outstanding shares by the issuance/redemption of creation units. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/creationunit.asp

You can certainly apply this analysis in aggregate, and you can also compute the net flow. I don't know if that's what the article posted here is doing.

Also, people talk about monetary policy as driving this, and that's wrong. Fiscal policy drives this (we've had a lot of new government debt issued in the last few years). Even though it's orthodox economics to attribute this to monetary policy, it's flat out wrong. Monetary policy does not impact net assets of the private sector. It's neutral in that regard. Fiscal policy definitely impacts net assets of the private sector. If you want to learn more, you can read "Where Do Profits Come From?" https://www.levyforecast.com/assets/Profits.pdf

I'm always surprised when people assume that inflation implies that wages will rise commensurately.

Pub/Sub Lite is a cheap managed cloud service on GCP: https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/lite/docs

With a Kafka compatibility shim: https://github.com/googleapis/java-pubsublite-kafka

Disclaimer: I work for GCP.

You can use Pub/Sub Lite: https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/lite/docs

With a Kafka compatibility shim: https://github.com/googleapis/java-pubsublite-kafka

Disclaimer: I work on GCP.

People should read Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber [1]. Then they would learn that debt 1) is viewed in very different ways in different cultures, places and times 2) is not always bad 3) should not always be paid off.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years

Increasing debt also means increasing savings. One person's date is another person's savings.

NYC lindy hopper here.

Does it also help that the code doesn't actually cast the raw pointer to references? It only uses the read and write methods.

Can you explain that more? Because the requirement I pasted about having unique aliases does come from the UnsafeCell documentation. My understanding is that &mut still needs to be a unique alias even when it comes from an UnsafeCell.

Ok you are right.

I don't know that synchronizing with acquire-release is enough to make LLVM happy in this case. Mutable references are tagged with the LLVM noalias attribute. Rust language folks are very adamant about how wrong it is to end up with multiple aliases tagged with noalias. This is playing with fire.

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I disagree.

- There is plenty of talk of block cipher modes. What do you mean "nobody talks about" them?

- Block cipher modes are critically important but a lot of them are fairly straightforward and standard.

- Understanding how to design a pseudorandom permutation is where most of the ingenuity of cryptography is.

- If you are doing cryptanalysis, you definitely want to know about SubBytes and ShiftRows, etc.

It assumes that at least 1 thread is running at all times. There are algorithms that can make progress this way.

I don't get it ; how could "locking a mutex" not be considered as an "operation that are designed to block" ?

That's not what is being claimed here. What is being said is that an algorithm that blocks a thread can still be considered lock-free. There's a difference between lock-freedom and wait-freedom.

Meritocracy is a concept that was invented to be critiqued. The word meritocracy was coined in 1958 by British sociologist Michael Young in his dystopian satire the Rise of Meritocracy. In his book, children are subjected to rigorous and highly accurate intelligence testing that selects their destiny among a set of highly unequal options. The fact that the ideal of meritocracy is widely lauded as an unqualified good is highly ironic given that Young's intention was to present us a stark warning. Prior to Young, people used the word "aristocracy" instead. Thomas Jefferson spoke of a natural aristocracy: "there is a natural Aristocracy among men; the grounds of which are Virtue and Talents".

There are a few great books written about this recently:

- The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? by Michael Sandel

- The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

Both of these books examine how 20th century American society replaced a leisure-oriented capital-driven aristocracy with an extremely hard-working well-educated labor-driven meritocracy. Numerous factors propelled this transition, including the deployment of SAT testing and increased competitiveness at elite universities. This may sound like a good thing until you come to understand that we've created a modern American caste system. Caste is highly heritable, and upward mobility is at an all time low. 2/3 of Americans have no college degree, and the prospects for employment for them and their children look bleaker each and every day.

Furthermore, it's easy to confuse merit with value. With the pandemic, we have seen that our society is highly dependent on a set of essential workers, many of whom are in the lower castes. For example, a garbage collector could have an utterly mediocre existence in every dimension, and yet provide more value to society than a well-paid high-frequency trader in finance. Another good book to read about the negative value produced by well-paid jobs is Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. The danger of the myth of meritocracy is that these lower-caste workers don't receive the appropriate level of esteem that they are due in our society. This leads to a politics of resentment.

Also other practical consequences of solar and wind: what about land usage? How much land do we need to power our huge appetite for energy? What impact does that have on the environment? Mining for rare Earth minerals? How do we recycle these systems at the end of life?

People keep talking about the cost of renewables, but in fact, money is the one renewable resource that we do have.

All of the above are majorly important questions. Maybe renewables aren't so renewable after all.

For the record, reserve requirements are not universal. Canada, for one, eliminate theirs in 1992:

Yes! This!

In fact, not only does the Canadian system have zero reserve requirements... it has near zero reserves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Value_Transfer_System

How it works is this:

- Banks send payments in real time. The system does not involve any transfer of assets, but it does require pledging collateral (often government debt). Asset transfers occur outside of the system. For example, if bank A sells a government debt instrument to bank B, then bank B sends a payment to bank A in the system, and then A transfers the instrument to B outside of this system.

- At the end of each day, settlement is done. Each private bank has a net balance at the end of the day. The net balances sum up to zero across the system, and post-settlement, each individual bank must have a net zero balance. In order to do so, they can either send/receive payments from/to another private bank for overnight loans. Or they can deal with the central bank, by having their reserve balance credited/debited, or by getting an overnight loan from the central bank at a rate determined by the central bank. With overnight loans, no assets are transferred... there's just a promise to pay back the next day via sending a payment.

A few notable things about reserves in the system:

- Use of reserves is totally optional. In practice, banks hold very little reserves.

- The quantity of reserves is entirely determined by demand from private banks.

- Reserves are never transferred from one private bank to another. They are only transferred between central bank and private bank.