simulate-me

If the bank has 1M deposits, its net assets are 0. It has 1M is cash and has 1M in liabilities to depositors. If the bank loans out 900K, then it still has 0 net assets. It has 1M in liabilities to depositors, 100K in cash, and an "IOU" worth 900K (ignoring interest). Tether is different. When it mints and sells 1M USDT, it gets 1M is cash, but doesn't have any liability to Tether holders other than the honor system. It could easily pay a 500K dividend to its owners and no one would know.

Fractional reserve banking lends out deposits. This creates risk, but the net assets on the books remain the same (actually assets increase due to interest). With USDT, they may have bought something like commercial paper, which would be similar to fractional reserve banking, or they could have spent it on something irreversible (e.g. a dividend) and thus the net assets on the books is lower than the amount of USDT. It's unknown which situation applies to USDT.

Ah yes, ultimatums always boost morale when the stock is down over 70%. Attrition is likely to be an issue.

To me, "nanocules" sound like small molecules, which is the opposite of a protein.

Aren't proteins basically tiny mechanical machinery?

It would be easy to falsify this evidence with a natural ancestor to Covid-19.

Can these clone passive RFID dongles? My building uses them and they charge $60 for a copy. Not needing to buy a copy from my building would almost cover the cost of this device.

The price may also decline just because borrowing is more expensive. The difference between 2 and 6 percent interest is huge.

One way I could see this being cool is to drastically cut down the training time of some specific task. DeepMind's model can do a lot of things, but none particularly well. It would be nice if you could start with their model weights and update them to perform well on your specific task with your data. Ideally this process would be cheaper than starting the training from scratch. I also think this is how the human mind develops. There is some intrinsic knowledge that a human starts with, e.g. how to recognize a face and how to grasp, but then training happens over the course of one's life.

Production has resumed: https://twitter.com/terra_money/status/1524812171179327488

Does it really suck? His leave is getting paid and he's getting severance, which is essentially more paid leave. He can spend more time with his child. He might actually find it preferable. Having recently went on paternity leave myself, I would love to have more paid time with my child.

Ok, here are the facts from the link:

1) Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, was involved with viral research at the WIV. He received a grant from the NIH titled "Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence." The grant was for $3.7 million. $600,000 went to the WIV who was a key collaborator in the work. The grant was controversial and was suspended in July 2020.

2) At the beginning of the pandemic, Daszak organized a letter in the Lancet that sought to present the lab-leak hypothesis as a groundless and destructive conspiracy theory. Daszak was later dismissed from the Lancet's COVID-19 commission for refusing to share progress reports from his research grant.

3) Daszak's grant set off alarm bells in 2016 when he filed a progress report that stated that scientists planned to create an infectious clone of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus found in dromedaries that had emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012. The report also made clear that the NIH grant had already been used to construct two chimeric coronaviruses similar to the one that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002 and went on to cause at least 774 deaths worldwide.

4) Obama put a moratorium on gain-of-function research, but Daszak continued his work, stating that SARS-like chimeras from the completed experiment were exempt from the moratorium, because the strains used had not previously been known to infect humans. He also pointed to a 2015 research paper in which scientists had infected humanized mice with the same strains, and found that they were less lethal than the original SARS virus. This chimeric work took place at the WIV. Declassified intelligence stated that the Chinese military had also been working with civilian scientists at the WIV since 2017.

5) Needing funding, Daszak and his collaborators (EcoHealth Alliance and scientists at WIV) applied for a DARPA grant in 2017. In the leaked proposal, there was "a plan to examine SARS-like bat coronaviruses for furin cleavage sites and possibly insert new ones that would enable them to infect human cells." This is particularly notable because the COVID-19 virus has a unique furin cleavage site. The grant application proposed to collect bat samples from caves in Yunnan Province, transport them to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, extract and manipulate the viruses they contain, and use them to infect mice with humanized lungs. It would then map high-risk areas for bats harboring dangerous pathogens and treat test caves with substances to reduce the amount of virus they were shedding. The contract was “never awarded because of the horrific lack of common sense.” DARPA viewed the EcoHealth Alliance as a middle-man willing to travel to China, and nothing more.

6) As COVID-19 started spreading in 2019, to Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC at the time, it seemed not only possible but likely that the virus had originated in a lab. “I personally felt it wasn’t biologically plausible that [SARS CoV-2] went from bats to humans through an [intermediate] animal and became one of the most infectious viruses to humans,” he told Vanity Fair.

7) Early on in the pandemic, Fauci organized a small group of scientists to quell the lab-leak theory despite privately having similar concerns in emails obtained via FOIA requests. Dr. Robert Redford urged investigation of a possible lab leak days before Fauci's meeting occurred. Part of Fauci's group was scientist Kristian Andersen, who would later publish a preprint implicating the wet market as the sole origin of the virus.

8) Later, a scientist Jesse Bloom created a pre-print paper that investigated the disappearance of viral genetic sequences mentioned in early SARS-CoV-2 papers. The NIH had deleted these at the request of the WIV. Bloom invited Fauci and NIH director Francis Collins to discuss the paper. Collins invited outside biologist Kristian Andersen (mentioned above) to the meeting. Andersen was aggressive during the meeting and said it was the right of the WIV to deleted their samples. Andersen had access to the preprint server, and offered to entirely delete the paper or to revise it "in a way that would leave no record that this had been done." Fauci responded to this by saying: "Just for the record, I want to be clear that I never suggested you delete or revise the pre-print."

That's the general gist of the circumstantial evidence. The tl;dr is the U.S. (and likely the Chinese military) was funding gain-of-function research on this exact type of virus at the WIV. Those involved with the project have been the quickest to dismiss the possibility of a lab leak while simultaneously refusing to share their research. There also isn't enough evidence to conclude a natural origin as a similar virus has not been found in the wild. The furin cleavage site, in particular, is unique to COVID-19, and this was the specific target of gain-of-function research at WIV.

Quantum computers were theorized in 1980, and there still isn't even a basic prototype. 18 years later, the first 2-qubit quantum computer was built. There still isn't anything usable after 40 years.

Uh, thanks for the link, but better if you'd just spell it out so it can be examined and responded to here. I'm not going to respond to a link.

If you don't want to spend even a basic amount of time to learn about a topic, then you're not worth debating with. Vanity Fair is a reputable source that spent a large amount of time researching the role of EcoHealth Alliance in the possible engineering of the virus at WIV. What possible discourse could we have if you only want to make hand-waving arguments rather than debate specific facts?

This article covers a lot of the circumstantial evidence supporting a lab leak: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-no...

There basically is no evidence of a natural origin. No ancestors strains have been found and it's very likely the virus was spreading before the wet market. The evidence for a lab leak is circumstantial, however.

What’s wrong with using a single canvas? It can be faster. Google Docs and Figma, for example, use canvas rendering

Maybe we're discussing different things. I was responding to the claim that higher taxes doesn't cause people to move. Just because high earners live in NYC doesn't mean that there weren't some high earners that left due to taxes.

It's easy to hate on SPACs. The duds brought to market were numerous. However, it was refreshing to see some new companies go public, which briefly reversed the trend of companies staying private for longer and longer. Rather than hate on SPACs, I would like to ask: has any company that went public via a SPAC been successful?

You can use arrays, but if you want to maintain the Elm-like model of before and after states, then you need to explicitly copy the array into the new state rather than rely on Go copying just the pointer.

Middle-sized companies usually pay dividends because that’s how the profit is moved from the business to the owners. Unlike many public companies that focus on stock growth as the main driver behind of providing shareholder value.

One thing that I like about this is the implementation of returning state from the Update function. My only experience with Elm-style architecture is with react / redux which involves meticulously copying pieces of the state object to return two distinct before / after states. Using a Go struct with copy semantics makes this extremely easy and more natural to write in an imperative fashion. One limitation of this is that the model structure can only contain value type (e.g. no pointers, arrays, or maps).

Sure NYC has certain desirable aspects. Seattle has a different set (e.g. way better nature). The point isn’t to compare the cities to find the absolute best. Rather, the question is whether or not the benefits of certain cities or worth the cost. For high earners, the cost of living in NYC is hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars per year. For some percentage of people that cost is simply not worth it and they move. To claim people don’t move because of taxes is to deny basic economics.

Assuming an algorithmic stable coin could work reliably, wouldn’t it be strictly better than a stable coin backed by fiat? Getting it to work seems like it would be a real innovation.

How many recessions happen when a bunch of people think a recession will happen tomorrow? The Fed is trying to reduce inflation. It seems like they’ve done a pretty good job of doing so just by signaling an aggressive rate increase schedule. Once inflation is lower, they can go back to pretending stocks and real estate aren’t real inflation and start juicing the markets again.

There is still 1.8T sitting in banks (based on reverse repo rate) with absolutely no purpose. It will be interesting to see what happens to this money.

What did they invest in?

Seattle and Austin are totally comparable, even preferable, to NYC and SF in many ways. So yes, all else equal, why not save an extra 10% of your income?

This is anecdotal, but I know multiple people who have moved to Washington and Texas from NY and CA specifically to save on taxes from large stock grants at tech companies. I don’t think this is a unique experience in the tech industry. At a large public company I worked for, an entire team ended up moving.

Who funds the more expensive tiers?

If you become an integral part of the logistics pipeline for the military, then yes. Even if the company seems relatively civilian, you can bet it will be forced to focus on the military in the event of a military operation.