jotakami

6 ms·

1.
by jotakami 6y ago
The variety of social situations in typical schools is narrow and artificial. Once you leave school, never again in your adult life will you be forced to endure such a stifling environment. If a homeschooled child never leaves the house, th
2.
by jotakami 6y ago
The chronic stress of having to complete bullshit assignments on subjects I had no interest in does not justify it. If I could make one law by fiat, it would be illegal to tell a child “You have to learn to do things that you don’t want to
3.
by jotakami 6y ago
Couldn’t agree more. Parents who score high on conscientiousness and are able to set up that kind of home environment are going to have kids with many of the same traits (on average).
4.
by jotakami 6y ago
I don’t think anyone was denying that... What I read was a repudiation of the argument that on average poor children fare worse in school therefore a given child from a poor family will necessarily perform poorly. It is entirely possible
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by jotakami 6y ago
This reminds me of the final sentence from Tragedy and Hope, the 1000-page history of the first half of the 20th century by the late Carroll Quigley: “Some things we clearly do not yet know, including the most important of all, which is how
6.
by jotakami 6y ago
I believe the previous comment was implying that progress in school and personal development are not the same thing.
7.
by jotakami 6y ago
I’ve had a similar experience, although with one notable exception: within a week after I began microdosing a certain psychedelic, I spontaneously decided to quit caffeine cold turkey and had no qualms about it. Like some inner voice just s
8.
by jotakami 6y ago
Great idea, just have to wait for China to try it out
9.
by jotakami 6y ago
Because “centralized cryptocurrency” is an oxymoron
10.
by jotakami 6y ago
There’s already a “genius” solution: fiat currency which can be printed in infinite quantity for virtually zero cost. But, if you don’t like the downsides of fiat then you’re stuck with proof-of-work.
11.
by jotakami 6y ago
Useful proof of work is not the basis for a cryptocurrency, it is the basis for... useful work. The inventors apparently don’t understand the economic principles behind commodity money.
12.
by jotakami 6y ago
That’s why I say it’s mostly accounting—you have to convert reality into quantities before you can engineer it, and accounting is the set of rules for measuring and manipulating those quantities. The difficulty lies in the fact that unlike
13.
by jotakami 6y ago
I believe this sentiment is mostly a symptom of the extreme prevalence of charlatans who use economics as a marketing tool rather than a social science. Economics is really just accounting, statistics and psychology. But mostly accounting.
14.
by jotakami 6y ago
Where to begin? I’ve been reading about economics for about 15 years, and I have to say that this crisis has brought a level of clarity about certain economic truths that I never would have seen otherwise. First: accounting. I got an MBA fi
15.
by jotakami 6y ago
I like where you’re going with this but I’m not sure the analogy is quite right. If you’ve read Dawkins, the genome is composed of genes which are basically the quanta of self-replication. He goes on to coin the term “meme” to refer to the
16.
by jotakami 6y ago
If you’re curious you can find it yourself. Half a dozen comments on this thread have links you can check out. This is an anonymous comment thread, not a tribunal. Do your own homework and make up your own mind.
17.
by jotakami 6y ago
Also, just as our biological machinery is an engine of negentropy, carving out order from chaos, I think our brains continue that same work in the information theoretic sense of entropy. Humans are insatiably curious because we are alive, a
18.
by jotakami 6y ago
I’m currently working on a PhD in cryptography and I ran into this particular entry a few months ago while trying to wrap my head around entropy as an information theoretic concept. To be honest, it triggered a cascade of revelation that I
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by jotakami 6y ago
I had similar thought, which led me to believe that the closest thing to God is the irreducible quantum randomness in our molecules. In fact, I believe that life is not exclusively about order, but rather about harnessing randomness (entrop
20.
by jotakami 6y ago
It’s also “natural” to take your mare over to the prize stallion to get impregnated. Humans can control all the conditions around the “natural” process.
21.
by jotakami 6y ago
How many times do we need to repeat this... everyone assumes that “came from a lab” means “engineered bioweapon”. No! Also, people quickly forget that humans have been selectively evolving plants and animals for thousands of years without t
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by jotakami 6y ago
Yeah that’s what I’ve been trying to explain to all my reasonable friends who think that the moment I say “it came from a lab” that means this is a bioweapon that was intentionally released. No, actually, there is a chain of evidence that m
23.
by jotakami 6y ago
You are leaving out the single most important element of this whole mess: Eurodollars. There are banks outside of the US that take “real” US dollars and multiply them through fractional reserve lending but totally outside of the Federal Res
24.
by jotakami 6y ago
Ever heard of Eurodollars? That’s exactly what the original article is talking about. There are foreign banks that loan dollars—fractionally—outside of the US banking system. Dollars are needed to settle those debts, and they exist fully ou
25.
by jotakami 6y ago
I’m a resident of Gainesville and I was completely unaware of this. Now I know not to send anything sensitive to a local government email address...
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by jotakami 7y ago
I used to constantly read articles like this about how to get motivated to do all sorts of things I thought I needed to do. Then I was diagnosed with ADHD and found a suitable medication.
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by jotakami 7y ago
This is where the problem lies. Sure, liquid assets are as good as cash... until they aren’t. If everyone tries to convert assets to cash simultaneously, then cash gets scarce really quick and the difference between the two becomes clear. T
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by jotakami 7y ago
My retirement account is up 20% in two weeks from SPY puts and GLD calls
29.
by jotakami 7y ago
You’re not wrong, but government bonds actually have a somewhat different role in the modern financial system. Specifically, they are used as collateral in the interbank lending market, which means they have exchange value above and beyond
30.
by jotakami 7y ago
There’s a difference between capital and printed money. Capital is the result of forgone consumption, of producing more than is consumed. Much of what people call “capital” is really just inflated paper claims to assets. A share of stock is

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