I feel bad for the users that were left holding the bag. I put a good amount of money in the YC backed StableGains (Terra) just to watch it evaporate overnight. The investors and founders should feel deeply ashamed for selling these platforms as legitimate savings accounts. The fact that these platforms were backed and promoted by well know VCs/incubators, such as Y Combinator, is utterly appalling.
Ashamed? You can be pretty sure that the founders and early investors knew exactly what would happen in the (likely) event that it would crash and burn, and they safely extracted their salaries, bonuses, etc. at the peak.
And they are very unlikely to feel even the slightest remorse, because the people who pushed these too-good-to-be-true schemes are sociopaths, if not psychopaths.
You're right. Y Combinator doesn't deserve a shred of the respect they garner. I don't know why I thought I could trust one of their portfolio companies. I assumed they did due diligence and had customers/users in mind when selecting companies to invest in.
they are bred and selected by game rules a.k.a. "rational" actors.. look at Martin Shkreli, still listed as "American Executive" and right back in the pharm trading..
The Federal Reserve, which is almost completely independent from the federal government, is the biggest player in regards to controlling inflation. In reality, POTUS doesn't have effective levers for controlling general inflation. However, I agree that their messaging has been absolutely horrible. They could at least create the appearance of doing something about it instead of just dismissing it as the Putin price hike.
> The Federal Reserve, which is almost completely independent from the federal government, is the biggest player in regards to controlling inflation.
The Federal Reserve Board of Governors, an executive agency of the federal government that is “independent” within government in the same sense as, say, the FCC, and not at all independent from the government, is actually the relevant actor in inflation-control policy.
Aside from appointing governors, what power does the president have over the federal reserve board? The president can direct/order the FCC to pursue a course of action, but as far as I'm aware, the president doesn't have executive authority over the fed's monetary policy.
FYI: Johnson & Johnson patented the S(+) enantiomer of ketamine and sells it as a nasal spray called Spavato. It's been FDA approved for depression since 2019. Although Spravato costs more on paper than regular ketamine, it's often less expensive for patients since it is covered by insurance (regular ketamine treatments are considered an off-label use and are usually not covered).
It's pretty awful though for a lot of people. Researchers outside of the US have published studies showing that s-ketamine has higher risk of dependency in animal experiments and lower long term efficacy for depression, like on par with placebo. If I'm remembering right there are a number of reasons for this and one of them is that r-ketamine seems to simulate neuroplasticity better, something related to BDNF in certain parts of of hippocampus I think?
While it probably works for some people, it's likely dangerous for many others.
Kenji Hashimoto and others have published numerous papers about this. It's not exactly under-researched. The incentives in the US are horribly misaligned.
Quite honestly it's upsetting that spravato even exists and there ought to be a huge class action lawsuit about this.
Yea, I agree. I wish there was some kind of organization that would seek FDA approval for racemic ketamine treatment of depression. It's cheap, and widely available. Unfortunately, without the incentive for a patentable product, it's unlikely to ever happen.
The title is somewhat misleading. A groundstop is far less dramatic than "grounding" all flights (including ones already en-route). Grounding all flights would be akin to what the FAA ordered during the 9/11 attacks.
I think it's worth pointing out that, like all autism spectrum disorders, there are varying levels of severity for aspergers syndrome. It's entirely possible for a highly functional adult to have a minor form of aspergers and never be formally diagnosed or treated.
I'm an iOS developer that has no idea what CouchDB is other than another database system. I'm a little confused as to what CouchDB Mobile is. Is it at another database engine I can use to locally persist my data on the device (like an improved SQLite), or is it some kinda of API system that can be used to communicate directly with a CouchDB hosted on a server without the need for a REST API to be created to manage the interaction?
Apache CouchDB is an open-source database that stores JSON and runs in resource constrained environments. It's killer feature is that the data it holds can be shared across multiple users and devices in near realtime. Did I mention that CouchDB is also a web server?
Mobile Couchbase is a package of Apache CouchDB designed for iOS. It is pre-Beta right now, but we are taking the wraps off the source because we've had an application that uses it approved by Apple for sale in the App Store. We are soliciting open source contributions and feedback from users.
Okay, I checked out your site and you guys have me at "CouchDB provides a RESTful JSON API than can be accessed from any environment that allows HTTP requests."
To put it mildly, this sounds fucking awesome. I have no idea why I haven't checked this out sooner.
Its another database engine that you can use to locally persist data, the main upside is that the data you locally persist can be synced online with CouchDB's replication.
Discovery doesn't use fossil fules. The main engines are powered by oxygen and hydrogen and the solid rocket boosters are made up of ammonium perchlorate, aluminum and iron oxide.
Hydrogen is a storage medium. Fossil fuels are used as the energy source to make the rocket propellant.
I can also guarantee you that fossil fuels were used in the production and distribution of the rocket boosters and that the airplane the video was taken from wouldn't be flying if it didn't have any jet fuel in it's tank.
Humans are smart creatures, but we shouldn't kid ourselves into thinking we would be where we are at now if it weren't for a cheap, albeit limited, supply of highly concentrated energy.
True, with the difference being humans (and our predecessors) had to wait hundreds of thousands of years for the fossil fuels to form under the immense pressure (and additional energy input) of the earth.
And you believe that the value of this observation is what, exactly?
That we are wasting energy which has been stored and untapped for hundreds of thousands of years? Do we really expect that our ancestors will be better able to exploit this value than we are... without our given expliotation? Will this be true forever? Should we just let that stored energy remain forever?
Ceteris parabis, we will extract exactly as much value from our ancestors as makes sense. And our ancestors will do exactly the same. I do not begrudge them that any mire than I begrudge us this current state of affairs.
Unfortunately the graph doesn't take the geopolitics of the situation into account. American oil reserves are long past their peak (about 40 years ago) and we are largely dependent on foreign oil. If demand begins to outstrip supply, what's stopping the Saudis from keeping their oil to themselves? Or better yet, what's stopping them from selling it to China for a much higher price than what American oil companies can bid.
Oil is fungible. As long as the product is sold into the market, it doesn't matter who is purchasing/selling it. So, if Canada were to switch it's contracts to China, then the people who were previously selling to China, would then sell to the US.
The only possible concern would be an embargo, in which countries _refused_ to sell to the US at any price. That would be problematic - but it isn't related to Peak Oil and could occur at any time (and, in fact, has in the past) - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis
No. It's always fungible. Crude oil is crude oil is crude oil.
Now, problems could still arise where many countries refuse to sell to us or where China just buys a bunch of oil and starts a huge strategic petroleum reserve that's mainly meant to give us more of a shortage (but that would get expensive quickly, even for China.). But that has nothing to do with whether oil is fungible.
Fungibility means that it makes no difference if Saudi Arabia decides they won't sell to us and instead sells the 100B barrels/day that they would have sold to us (made up number) to China, and because of that, China buys 100B fewer barrels/day from Canada, who sells that 100B to us instead.
You don't understand. America, for example, needs a minimum amount of oil per day to function.
If oil becomes very scarce, very quickly, then most countries will see it as a strategic resource. They may sell, to be sure, but not at a volume or a price that will ensure a level of functional viability.
This may not happen, of course, but America isn't stupid: it has spent hundreds of billions ensuring that Iraqi oil will be that source when others fail.
Do you see? It's not just a simple matter of being fungible, because all suppliers are also consumers, and the resource has the potential to be strategic, in which case trumps market forces. If suddenly water became scarce, I may not sell to you at any price because I want to ensure that I have enough for me and my family. It doesn't matter that water is the same everywhere -- if everyone feels that way, you're not going to get some at a price or volume of any certainty. Period.
And suddenly, there was oil panic. Because while oil is fungible, that's an attribute of market dynamics. You have 18 suppliers? Great. Oil is fungible. If one won't sell there are 17 more. But what happens if all 18 won't sell?
Without oil, some countries, like America and its military, can't function. That makes it also strategic.
According your logic, the 1973 crisis wouldn't have happened. Yet it did. And it could again. Oil is fungible until it's strategic. End of sentence.
they don't work when we try them on other countries.
Embargoes really only work when we help those that are embargoing us by setting price controls.
We did that in the 70s and it worked like a charm. Normally, the price we would pay would just go up and third countries would sell us the commodity or cartel members would cheat themselves.
The 70s embargoes wouldn't have worked if the US government hadn't shot itself in the foot. We even had shortages of natural gas and ALL of it was coming from the US!
The market works. The law of supply and demand functions, unless the government decides to break it.
How I'm using the term strategic here is to indicate that certain resources, those that are most critical to be able to function, such as water and oil, will not always respond to market forces.
So the flatness of suppliers, that it is fungible, is rendered irrelavent once it becomes critical, because that is an aspect of the market to which it no longer strictly applies.
Your last point is what makes a market. If the oil is worth more to the Chinese than it is to American oil companies, the Saudis ought to sell it to them; whether you're Saudi, Chinese or American, capitalism works the same.
That's a very interesting article from the heart of the American foreign policy establishment. Back in 2002-03 during the runup to the Iraq war, I had long conversations with an office mate trying to figure out what was really going on (the asinine fiction of WMDs being obvious propaganda, ineptly executed at that). One theory that we came up with was that the US were doing it to gain leverage over the Saudis. It's interesting to see that articulated so plainly in the pages of Foreign Policy magazine:
the emergence of Baghdad as a rival to Riyadh
Couldn't have put it better myself!
(I'm not saying that's why, of course. I don't know why. But "it has nothing to do with oil" always struck me as a tad naive, and by "a tad" I mean "maximally".)
