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34 sats \ 2 replies \ @0xIlmari 3 May \ on: Tariffs Did Not Make America Great and Won’t Make America Great Again econ
Excuse me, wtf? Wasn't the major intention of tariffs to bring back the industrial base back into the US? That will not happen overnight. How can anyone reasonably judge the effects already? This is insanely short-sighted thinking.
Throwing more hardware at this problem will only make the AIs faster and cheaper, not better.
The models are still dumb and don't show a shred of intelligence.
They still can't reliably count the"r"s in "strawberry".
You can't play chess and other games with them.
They continue to hallucinate every time time the task pertains to a hole in their knowledge. Totally incapable of saying "I don't know".
They are hopeless at creative story writing because they have the attention span of a goldfish and can produce discontinuities between adjacent paragraphs, despite massive context windows.
And don't even get me started at coding. They can barely comprehend what's going on in a single file in an actual project, much less a whole codebase. Again, despite growing context windows. They can't even do a proper code review and spot glaring errors.
The current model architecture has visibly plateaued. All progress is approaching an asymptote.
Intelligence is not as trivial as text completion. Anyone thinking otherwise is delusional, has been fooled (that's you, repeating NVidia's talking points) or outright lying (Sam Altman) to waste more investor money.
We need a completely new model architecture, then another decade of iterating on it, and then we can re-evaluate whether we're anywhere close to AGI.
That is, if AGI is even possible to achieve on digital computers.
Of course it should be legal.
What two consenting individuals do in private is none of your, my or the state's business. That includes any economic transactions they engage with.
Go after the traffickers, slavers, rapists. Leave people working to satisfy a demand out of it.
Cool, but the hash chips are still proprietary. Is any company or project doing anything about this? Or will we keep running circles around the elephant in the room?
If you can even talk about a "strategy" with terrorists, Hamas' is, ultimately, that Palestine is finally recognized as a sovereign state. That's a minimum. Killing all Jews would be a bonus.
The ceasefire seemed to at least be a step towards the first objective. But, as you can imagine, Trump's brilliant idea of displacing all Palestinians from Gaza and turning it into a "Mediterranean Resort" under American rule, does not seem conducive to these goals anymore.
They may be confused, and definitely crippled by Israel's operation in Gaza, but I wouldn't be surprised if they started cooking some more terrorists attacks or killing the remaining hostages.
The world is kinda going to shit.
Trump's either batshit insane or just culturally ignorant.
He sees this as a "Jews vs Arabs" conflict, like your average American redneck. He sees "Arabs" as a homogenous mass of people that you can freely displace and mix.
And yeah, he seems to not recognize the Gaza inhabitants' property rights (regardless of historical claims).
Can't wait to see what his "genius" idea for the Russo-Ukrainian war is.
[...] making it impossible for them to own a whole Bitcoin?
You need a whole house to live in.
You don't need a whole Bitcoin for anything.
(Maybe bragging rights.)
It's fine if Bitcoin goes to the moon if it demonetizes everything else because (a) things that you actually need will become more affordable and (b) whatever the next generations earn and save will appreciate (Boomers had to contend with money that loses value so they hoarded other things).
Bitcoin is the essence of property rights - money that you truly own yourself.
Communists are the enemies of private property. They want everything to be taken away and given to those in need. (In reality: given to those in power.)
Thus:
- Leftist politicians don't like Bitcoin because they can't steal it.
- Leftist voters don't like Bitcoin because politicians can't steal it and give them welfare for watching TV all day.
For a merchant who doesn't have any suppliers who accept Bitcoin, it's just an extra overhead without economic benefit: accounting, taxes, operational. He's better off buying Bitcoin on the side as savings.
So at this stage, you will only convince people who'd do it out of principle. Convince them with "Why Bitcoin?"
Once a merchant is introduced to a supplier who accepts Bitcoin, the landscape changes, but you still need to convince them to run a dual-currency operation, which is a big accounting headache.
However, at this point, the more "savvy" of them might realize the potential of hiding some of their cashflow from the government, which is a very enticing prospect. Convince them with "How Bitcoin?"
Also, I think Nostr supports paid relays, so I imagine pay-to-publish is entirely possible and we might need to transition to such relays when spam becomes a problem.
I don't think a "liveness" check is feasible in the long run. Projects that tried to invent a "Human ID" or "proof of humanity" all failed, demonstrating ways in which the system can be worked around or abused.
I don't think the real problem is that content is being created by bots. If you liked it, what difference does it make? The real issue is that it's too easy to take up your limited bandwidth with spam.
And what's the best way to combat spam? Introduce a cost. Proof of Work.
Pay to post should be the norm. It's the reason I ditched Reddit and only use SN. I wish posting and commenting here was more expensive.
E-mail should be extended in a way such that the recipient can request sats to receive the message (eCash is a great solution here with its bearer asset tokens). Other messaging platforms should have this option as well for PMs.
Phone calls? Operators should share the payment for a call with the recipient.
I leave more to your imagination.
Oh, okay. I read the first point as "It's our network, it's our rules. We merely allow/license you use it in a manner that seems fair. Most of the time." An extreme example of "you will own nothing" and the reason why we call fiat a "permissioned system".
And the second one really hinges on whether taxes are considered compulsory or not, I think.
If they are compulsory and the state can take what it thinks is "owed" without a legal process, by a single call to the bank, then yes, you don't own it. And it seems that this is the prevaling interpretation. And the linked story seems to confirm it.
If taxes were voluntary, or at least payable based on a contract, and enforcement required a trial to establish ownership, then that would be a different story.
Look at them yuuuuuge profits! Best profits! Only the greatest profits!
Why would you want to come back to those piddly sub-5% profits!?
On a more serious note, like I said elsewhere (#872224), if you want to start making a dent into the massive public debt (which is not going to magically go away), Treasury needs to start turning a profit. I don't think cutting out a massive source of revenue is conducive to that goal.
(1) the government creates money, so you can't own it;
I agree. Whenever you touch fiat money, you're playing by their rules. And the rules are rigged so absurdly in their favour, it's not even funny. I just hope they don't think ALL money fall under their "jurisdiction", like gold and Bitcoin, because that would be pure delusion.
(2) the government can tax your money, so you don't own it;
Non sequitur. I literally don't see how this conclusion is made. Taxes are voluntary anyway. Or at least should be. By paying taxes you enter a social contract because you believe some money should be pooled together to spend on the betterment of society, and hope to be able to benefit from that. Somewhere along the way this notion got lost, and governments started treating taxes as compulsory.
(3) the Constitution allows the government to spend money for the "general welfare."
Yes, it does. But how we get from that to abolishing property rights (literally communism) eludes me.
Isn't he saying that using fiat makes you the slave of government?
That's precisely what he's saying, and that's exactly how it is.
$36T of public debt. This number cannot just go away, you need to do something about it. And just about the only things that you can do are:
- Default on it.
- Pay it back.
- Devalue the unit to a point where it doesn't matter.
A formal default with cancellation is not going to happen.
To pay back debt you need to be profitable. This means austerity measures if you still raise funds through taxation. And austerity to pay down debt is doubly unpopular because it's not buying the people anything directly useful, like healthcare.
So you have to ask the question: Can you be more profitable with tariffs than with income tax? What do tariffs do? Dampen imports and stimulate domestic production. So it causes further income from tariffs to reduce but since we got rid of income tax, the Treasury is no longer benefiting from a boosted economy.
So I think not, my guess is the number don't add up and to actually burn down the debt you will need a period of both taxation and tariffs.
And then there's of course the way of inflation. Print enough money and $36T might actually go down in purchasing value, making it easier to pay down. I expect to see that in the mix as well.