...which swaps the font for monospace (less legible for body text in my experience, my eyes start just glazing over) and swaps the images and diagrams for ascii art (or in some cases omits them entirely).
There’s a comfortable middle-ground to be had between the two options.
> Society should be aiming to provide the entire hierarchy of needs for everyone.
I don’t know. Society should provide the framework within which people can achieve their needs (and wants), but not the needs and wants themselves directly.
Otherwise you put an artificial cap on human growth and inefficient allocation of resources.
> Stock price going up is not the success criterion for a business. Making money is.
Microsoft’s net income is up roughly 5.4x from ~$22B in 2014 to $119B today. Profit margin also expanded, from ~25% net margins in 2014 to over 36% today.
RISC good. CISC bad. But CISC tribe sneaky — hide RISC inside. Look CISC outside, think RISC inside. Trick work long time.
Then ARM come. ARM very RISC. ARM go in phone. ARM go in tablet. ARM go everywhere. Apple make ARM chip, beat x86 with big club. Many impressed.
Now ARM take server too. x86 tribe scared.
RISC-V new baby RISC. Free for all. Many tribe use. Watch this one.
RISC win brain fight. x86 survive by lying. ARM win world.
None of these thinkers predicted industrialization as a systemic economic transformation such as rising wages, urbanization, demographic shifts, the factory system.
They all saw the machines but not the world those machines would create. That leap seems to have been unpredictable from within an agrarian mental framework.
through out history many people recognised the idea of disruptive technology and ideas
as a threat, just as they do today, and that is why change periods are called "revolutions".
And then as now, the "thinkers" ha!, are predicting that they can hold back the tide by evermore brutal mindless violence on a population that can see the hand in front of there face, the genie is useing the lamp to roast up a few status "crows" for lunch.
yum yum.
For some reason we’ve put intelligence on a pedestal, but intelligence is a commodity. There are intelligent people all around me. Surrounded by people more intelligent than I am.
Intelligence is a functional thing, but humanity is a much bigger concept.
Life experience, determination, character, compassion, generosity, wisdom, etc. These are super human powers, not intelligence.
> Gold has always been stable, because it is physically limited.
Incorrect. Physical scarcity matters, but it’s not the main driver. Gold’s price is far more sensitive to interest rates, dollar strength, sentiment and fear, speculative flows.
The stability it’s historically shown was mostly the result of fixed monetary systems, and those are long gone.
its because you are measuring stable Gold in volatile fiat which is being printed every day depending on the factors you mentioned (interest rates, expectations of future growth, sentiment etc).
because you are getting paycheck in fiat, you are psychologically programmed to think of fiat as something stable, and Gold as volatile.
> its because you are measuring stable Gold in volatile fiat
You're defining gold to be stable, and fiat to be volatile. Well, fiat is volatile, but that doesn't make gold stable.
Gold (measured in dollars) nearly doubled over the last year. Does that mean that the dollar is worth only half what it was a year ago? No, it doesn't. (There's been some inflation, but not nearly 100%.)
Gold is down 10% since January 28th. Does that mean that the dollar is worth 10% more than it was on January 28th? No, it doesn't.
You're wrong; the prices of precious metals have never been stable, which is why bimetallic systems have always had a lot of problems papering over the notionally fixed exchange rate between coins of different metals.
That said, I agree that e.g. gold under a regime where most things for sale are priced in gold is more stable than gold as a novelty investment under a fiat currency regime.
When things are priced in gold, most of the demand for gold comes from the fact that it's useful as currency. All of the phenomena we have now still exist, and they disturb the price, but they're small effects compared to the demand for currency.
In the fiat regime, that source of demand is gone. All of the same random effects still push the price of gold around, but because the price is so much lower (due to much lower demand), the price swings are wilder.
I find this to be quite an interesting perspective change!
If I may try for a metaphor, then it's like our default perspective from the Earth is that we are the center of the universe, the other planets, Sun, and stars move around us, and we are stationary.
But, to zoom out, you can take a more objective view that everything is moving independently (ie, volatile). The baseline stability is a subjective perspective.
The only "stability" gold has is an emergent property of an interconnected system of hairless apes somehow making each other believe they need it. Same with fiat, bitcoin, or whatever we come up with tomorrow. None of these things have any real utility outside of an expectation that the peer ape also finds them valuable.
>Incorrect. Physical scarcity matters, but it’s not the main driver. Gold’s price is far more sensitive to interest rates, dollar strength, sentiment and fear, speculative flows.
Those are only relevant on a shorter timescale; on a long timescale gold's held its value extremely well. The price of a loaf of bread in gold now is still similar to what it was in the Roman Empire 2000 years ago.
That comparison actually sounds horrible for gold... By all accounts we should be extremely more efficient in manufacturing loafs of bread. So a same amount of gold should buy lot more bread now than 2000 years ago.
So if you really think about it. If you held gold for 2000 years. You would only reach same standard of living as 2000 years ago...
All value is subjective and thus at the whims of wild animal spirits.
Gold seems stable largely because the price must rise to make mining significantly more of it economically viable. Yet, were it truly stable, prices measured in terms of gold should have seen price deflation from the Roman era to now. That this is not the case proves that gold has zero intrinsic value. It may have some inherent utility, but that is not the same thing. As people want more gold for use as a conductor, or in alloys for dental prostheses, or for adornment the price will go up. Speculative demand can make the price go up. Demand for trade without USD can make the price go up.
Gold and USD prices are independent of one another. That they can be used to measure one another is also a human invention and an accident of history.
For certain periods of time, not losing to inflation is a major win. The more people think that we're headed into such a period, the more they reach for gold.
The real price of gold has been deflated by paper gold/futures trading, which has the effect of multiplying the perceived amount of gold in circulation without a necessary counterpart in physical gold. Financial institutions can within limits manipulate the price of gold so that it remains lower than it should be if the physical material had to be delivered.
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