Don't get me wrong, it's kind of a weird planned community in the desert. I only know it because my coworker moved there and had a 1-2 hour commute into San Jose.
A rock seems unlikely to be conscious in any real way. Something as complex as a star, however...maybe all of the humans worshipping the sun throughout many thousands of years were onto something after all.
A rock the size of a human head (or, say, a container of seawater) has just as many electrons, protons, neutrons, photons, and other particles going about their business and doing their little dance, following the same equations of motion as our brains do. They're certainly doing it in different ways, but if you're just looking for complexity, there's no shortage of it. The rock might lack some macroscopic structural change over human timescales, but definitely not the seawater.
I think if you take the perspective that the human brain is conscious but not a brain-sized container of seawater, you need to then look carefully for distinctions between them. "Information processing" or "response to environment" is probably not good enough; the seawater is actually doing all of those, with a unique reaction to any possible input, so you'd have to be more specific.
Probably the only recourse you could look for to make the distinction is to say the brain embeds particular mathematical patterns that the seawater doesn't, such as a compact, stored representation of its environment (or its history of inputs), or a future-looking planning algorithm, or both. I personally take this view (I think of qualia, like "the appearance of a red apple", is just precisely what it feels like to read from the buffered [R,G,B] memory array in my head, filtered through image-recognition networks).
But then if you put your hopes on consciousness originating from those mathematical functions, you have to admit that any analogous expression of those functions in other systems would also be conscious, such as animals and robots.
And worse, once you start thinking about math and how flexible it is, how information is in the eye of the beholder and almost any system that follows certain rules can embed almost any mathematical computation, just like illegible scratches to me are information-rich writing to you, you might have to circle back and that there could be very analogous computations going on inside rocks and seawater. And that brings us back full-circle.
Is a star particularly complex, though? Is there much going on besides a lot of thermonuclear fusion? (Disclaimer: I don't know much about stars or astrophysics, so this question is coming from a place of ignorance.)
Would you say the same thing about gold? Genuinely curious, since obviously Bitcoin is frequently compared to gold as a store of value instead of a unit of exchange.
The most persuasive defense of Bitcoin as a store of value is that the world needs precisely one digital store of value, and game theory may dictate that it will end up being Bitcoin.
But yes, Bitcoin is obviously ridiculously volatile. I tell friends that there is money to be made, but you need to have a very strong stomach for it.
Would I say what? That it's a "speculative, high-volatility commodity with no use value traded in an unregulated market"? No. Gold has use value and is generally traded in regulated markets.
If something is volatile and great for speculation, it's a bad store of value. So I don't think Bitcoin qualifies as that either.
Everyone thinking this seems to have resulted in it happening a couple days early. It's not yet clear whether today or tomorrow is a good time to short BTC.
Is there speculation regarding what miners will do instead of mining Bitcoin? For example, mining another cryptocurrency instead of Bitcoin? This would seem to have implications for the mining power for these altcoins, and perhaps implications for their prices as a result. I haven't seen any discussion about this.
It balances itself out. a portion of the miners leave making it proportionally more profitable for the remaining miners, or they upgrade to more efficient hardware reducing their power costs to mine the same amount of bitcoin, or the price doubles, or a combination of all of the above.
during some periods of time the price falls and it takes longer for all of that to happen, with existing miners being slowly replaced by more well capitalized miners
Sure, but presumably the miners leaving will still want to do something profitable with their mining equipment. I'd expect to see the hashrate increase for other PoW coins. Unless there's some reason for that not to happen.
There is a market for coins with the same hashing algorithm, specifically to attract miners that can't do anything on the bitcoin blockchain.
They are all useless and don't have exchange rates to justify the electricity cost. You can launch a new one given the assumption that this is many miner's first halving.
The price to yield to electrical cost market is pretty efficient, rarely a long lasting advantage there.
> the pseudo-quantum stuff of adiabatically cooled circuits
Where is the innovation/research in this area happening? This is one of those topics that I find very interesting but any attempt to serious inquiry into it tends to result in ridicule from people I know with some expertise in physics and thermodynamics, as though it was just obviously nonsense.
Monthly vesting without a year one cliff is not really done, AFAIK. I also don't think that there is a lot of wiggle room for negotiated severance terms. But sign on bonuses and 200k base pay could certainly be on the table.
It was just acceptable before to have a 1 year cliff? Also it was done to placate Nooglers not getting a refresher for the first year (although that didn't make any sense and some Nooglers in 2017 got neither end of the stick).
Yep. That's what I had at Google. Was selling shares as soon as I acquired them (no issue with GOOG but I preferred more diversification). I recall there being some admin time needed (~2-3 months?) before I had access to said shares but as soon as I did all 2-3 months worth were "vested" and I started cashing out.
Looks like finally a comment thread where there are no pitch forks against G. Still waiting for someone to concoct a reason as to why this maybe bad for employees :D Also it's quarterly at FB.
Not really. RSU’s don’t have a “notional initial value” for public companies; if you get them, you pay tax on the number of RSU’s you got times the stock price at the time you get them. Your vesting schedule will just say, “X units of ABC on 5/1/20” with no dollar figure.
Brokerages will typically set things up so you can automatically sell enough shares to cover your tax liability as soon as they vest.
Typically you have to amend your cost basis on your tax return for this to actually work, for some stupid bureaucratic reason. Probably a conspiracy to make people who get equity compensation buy the more expensive version of TurboTax.
(Under US law,) You pay income tax on RSUs only when they are both vested and released. (These typically happen on the same day, but in the future, not on the grant date.)
At my employer they withhold taxes from the RSUs themselves as they vest (taxes are withheld at the bonus tax rate using integer multiplication, I believe).
E.g.: you'll get Math.floor(x * (1-bonus_tax_rate)) shares and will owe no income tax (unless your marginal tax rate is over the bonus tax rate). After that point, you'll only owe taxes on possible capital gains from price at the time of vest to the time you sell.
