Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | Xen9's commentslogin

This is actually known as the Drowning Child problem, and its most important implication is that any billionaire is "extremely evil."

The parent comment would still be correct though, and billionaires are just filling a power vacuum, nothing wrong about that. I genuinely believe U.S. is also just filling the power vacuum & mostly has done nothing wrong, similar to other superpowers. There's nothing inherently wrong about letting the child drown unless you are the child & can protest about your own drowning, and there's nothing wrong with filling the power vacuum, because the universe has determined that someone ought to do it sooner or later. And we cannot do anything about this.

I define problem/issue/similar words in the following way: a thing that, if deemed existent by me, is also my own fault & realistically fixable by my self.


You are talking about peter singers drowning problem, which is a pretty separate set of concerns.

I was highlighting systemic disincentives that punish potential help.

For example, About 15 years ago restaurants stopped feeding the hungry and poor because they could be sued, and locking up their dumpsters due to liability.


If oil is cheap energy, and you cut down oil revenue, how do you prevent Russia from turning oil into cryptocurrency?


Turning oil into cryptocurrency requires electrical power plants and related infrastructure. Russia has very limited industrial capacity to build this stuff anymore. They're still heavily dependent on pre-1991 industrial infrastructure. I think most people don't realize how weak Russia really is.


You're right. How can any state with nuke-backed right to issue ultimatums slowly get weakened like that? If Russia states limits, and convinces U.S. that they will launch if the limits are crossed, and these limits are within the threat budget of Russia, can they not make U.S. agree to things (and vice versa)?


The distinction between government and crypto currencies is wrong one to make.

I fail to see how gold-pegged, gasselized (demurraged at constant rate until they vanish down to UBI limit, except from government/CB wallets, with other assets also demurraged when sold/bought via cap gains style taxes), constant supply cryptocurrency would not be in fact better than the dollar and the euro and the yen, and it would be both inflation & deflation resistant.


> gold-pegged

Between Sep 2012 and Jul 2013 gold went from $1780 to $1210 (-32%).

Between Feb 2024 and today gold went from $2040 to $2950 (+45%).

That's a crazy amount of volatility you would never want as a currency. Can you imagine signing multi-year contracts denominated in that? Even monthly contracts! It would be madness.


Did it ever fluctuate like that when it was pegged?


How could it, it was pegged? That’s begging the question.

But you can see that inflation (and worse deflation) had volatility when the us was on the gold standard: https://www.investopedia.com/inflation-rate-by-year-7253832

If you dig into the 1800s the volatility was even worse.


It's a bidirectional relationship. The value of gold actually remained stable when the U.S. dollar was pegged to it. I view that as evidence for pegging stabilizing the value of the commodity it is pegged to. However is an simplification, because share of the dollar relative to other currencies policies has changed. I also only believe the system I depicted would work, if the exports of the commodity were restricted so that no one or only the central bank could sell it abroad.


Saying something is “pegged” is saying that the price is fixed. There doesn’t exist any volatility between pegged instruments because that’s what a peg means.

So you have to compare them to other things, which is what inflation (or deflation) measures. And gold pegged usd has volatility to other items in the economy greater than modern fiat usd.


Then I certainly feel confused & may be wrong.

---

Edit:

You're near-certainly right that pegging in dollars would means some rate, let's for simplicity presume a constant ratio, between dollars and what it's begged to.

I think crux is what happens if we model two different currencies, one of which is begged, and the price of te commodity in each.

If after the conversion rate you can get cheap gold, that keeps golds value low and pegged currency's value high, I would guess.

Again I think restricting impots in the commodity is necessary to maintain supply.


You fail to see the actual price fluctuations that have occurred?

This isn’t some hypothetical situation we have plenty of real world data to work from.


> I fail to see how gold-pegged, gasselized […] constant supply cryptocurrency would not be in fact better than the dollar and the euro and the yen, and it would be both inflation & deflation resistant.

If you don't see it then then you may wish to read more economic history, as the history of gold-pegged currencies shows that they caused anything but stability:

* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch...

* https://archive.is/http://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-go...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression#Causes_of_the_...

And it was only after leaving the gold standard that countries started to recover from the Great Depression:

> In the end, recovery from the Great Depression does not begin until countries give up on the combination of the Bagehot Rule and of commitment to sound gold-standard finance. Those countries that have central banks willing to print up enough money so that people are willing to spend it--it is when you adopt such policies that your economy begins to recover. If you don’t, you become France, which sticks to the gold standard all the way up to 1937, and never gets a recovery. When World War II begins, Nazi Germany’s production--equal to France's in 1933--had doubled between 1933 and 1939. French production had fallen by 15%.

* https://delong.typepad.com/delong_long_form/2013/10/the-grea...


If you can always move to smaller denominations, deflation would not be an issue:

If the price of an apple at t_0 is $2 and (using arbitrary symbol for the other currency) §2, and at t_1 $20=§2, then at t_1 citiziens in the nation using § as currency would pay §0.2 for an apple, et cetera.

The other currency would have to use scientific notation, for cash.

(if deflation wasn't the the cause of that crisis, this is not an answer).


The issue with deflation is that it discourages investment and so prevents growth in productivity. It's not about denominations.


"gasselized"? We're not seeing "gassel" come up in any search related to demurrage. What word are you referring to?


*(Silvio) gesselized

I apologize for the typo.

I don't know the best rule to use for the process, since there seems to be many potential combinations of rules for it, but the idea of forced-gesselization is that if you buy a house with the bad money from foreign gray markets dealer, when you try to sell the house, you are taxed as if house and the bad money you bought it (this type of situation would be gray area, as such requiring intervention and appraisal of actual value by government body, which is not to be desired; but such practice also would not have to be commonplace) with had been in the demurraged currency, e.g. for the duration of the ownership.

Normally we can think of sales value to mean value - tax, where tax = g(ownership_duration), where g is gesselization function, which would preferably remain same over time but doesn't have to be linear or simply value or function of time as long as it is simply enough high schooler can solve for it without a computer.


What psychedelic/mind-altering/weird coaching prompts do you use?

I have separate system prompts for taboo-teaching, excessive-pedanticism, excessive-toxicity, excessive-praise, et cetera.

My general rules is anything & everything humans would never ever do, but that would somehow allow me to explore altered states of consciousness, ways of thinking, my mind, the world, better. Something to make me smarter from the experience of the chat.


Malgorhitms are. We could, if we didn't confuse use it with LoTR entities, have belgorhitms, which would not only be recommended by Kahneman & Tversky, but also recommend by intelligence analysts, the historical opposites of corporate analysts, minions Belegron.

Algorhitms, "changing how one thinks" is real, and ultimately good. The social changes, when they start expecting you to Anki your work contract (which would, if the Anki was monitored, be highly legally effective against you); or requiring you know Kellyed Bayesian decision theory because that's a prequsite for getting reasonably priced insurance, or simply, surviving, that is unknown. I give 37.7% confidence Elon Musk was gaming in 2025 U.S. politics using construct akin to a Bayesian decision tree.

It would be great if one didn't have to change how one thinks, whether they delve into CLRS or TikTok.


My grandparent used consider global bubbles as the norm, likely because his own parents never told him that local, company-limited bubble are actually the norm. Fortunately my own parents are more agreeable with how I manage my finances, and my whole family – including the 380-minutes old grand-grandparents – is still alive & well. We still see each other, despite the occasional confusion my use of the English plurals causes us (not to mention everyone's own ups & downs, and the weird reproductive mechanisms of our larger genus within the world).


Now that you mentioned, "as highly conscious and self aware person", I observe the wave like up and down breathing effective, which I did not pay attention to while on the site, as a cost-effect. The interesting part is I am not always sure if I am actually waving from breathing, of if this is the illusion, and it was for half minute certainly both. This is the type of thing one remembers a decade afterwards.

I don't know if this is AI, it looks like it, but could well not be.

I believe this isn't "just fun" but having told the AI to not to make it work for meme effect on HN. Obviously AI could fix easily, including but not limited to the music itself.


I don't live in Germany but hate internet banking and de-letterization and other "digitalization" because it's first step in erosion of rights. The second step is forbidding the offline version.


The problem is no proper theory of backups exists: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41173227


Unfortunately, I also have to agree with that fact.


It would be great use of my money, were I a billionaire, to build a vacuum-insulated sodaduct & cervisiaduct as a ring going around Europe perhaps with a monorail on the bottom (for convenient repairs) & photovoltaic cells on top to power it the monotail. Technically you can have two monorails for one track, one above and one below, so the upper monorail could be used for something else as well. The ice & carbon dioxide would be delivered separately to keep the the drinks fresh, and there would be few be a different pipe for drinks from different German & French & Spanish districts inside the cervisiaduct.


Fourier-pilled


Markov chains of fools



Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: