> This reads as incredibly entitled. AMD owes him nothing, especially if he's opposed to the leadership's vision[1] and being belligerent about it.
A generation ago, everyone in sales and developer relations understood that "the customer is always right". Remember a sweaty dude on stage jumping about screaming "developers! developers! developers"? It was exhausting dealing with all the free software and hardware sent to developers, not to mention the endless free conferences for even the most backwater developer community. But that's an ethos for boomers, I guess.
On the one hand "incredibly entitled" and on the other you talk about AMD's leadership vision. Your long closing paragraph shows that entitlement of a developer has nothing to do with anything and isn't relevant in the conversation (I can show you guys at OEMs who are incredibly arrogant and entitled or outright a$$holes but so what?). It's just an opinion based on your personal bias.
In reality, AMD simply doesn't care about small AI startups or developers as you've noted. They don't care about me wanting to run all my AI locally so that I can manage my dairy farm with a modest fleet of robots. If they cared, and they sent him MI300s immediately (or sent them to the other 8 startups that asked for them), you wouldn't be chastising him about being "incredibly entitled".
It won't, not in any way that will make AMD approximately competitive with Nvidia.
AMD, unlike Nvidia, seems unable to prioritize developers. Here's a summary of last week's charlie-fox when the TinyGrad team attempted to get 2 MI300s for on-premises testing and was rebuffed by an AMD representative. https://x.com/dehypokriet/status/1879974587082912235
> Of course, people who have no moral principles about transfer payments (as long as they are transfer payments to themselves) support it.
Aren't all democratic elections about electing the person who will transfer wealth into the voters' hands? I think all voters have no qualms about transfer payments.
> Even if you total up all the money gained and lost on bitcoin, the total will be the same amount, whether expressed in dollars, euros, or rubles: Zero.
Not exactly, because the fiat denominator is inflated away by the printing of bank reserves , but the bitcoin supply is fixed and constant forever. That's what it means to hold an appreciating hard asset relative to fiat, in my opinion.
> the government just taking taxpayer money and giving it to owners of bitcoin.
Taxpayer money is a bit of a smokescreen in my opinion. The debt-to-gdp ratio is where the real story of government expenditure.
// Aren't all democratic elections about electing the person who will transfer wealth into the voters' hands? //
Interesting question. Consider, for example, Eisenhower's building the interstate highway system, which boosted the productivity of the entire nation.
Or the Apollo space program, which yielded back somewhere between 5 and 7 dollars for every dollar spent, by creating new technologies and whole new industries.
Contrast with the bitcoin reserve. Every dollar spent goes from the pockets of the taxpayers to the pockets of the bitcoin sellers, without doing anything to boost productivity, to create new technology, etc.
// That's what it means to hold an appreciating hard asset relative to fiat, in my opinion.
Well, bitcoin is not hard asset (it is created by consensus, and it has no intrinsic material form) nor is it intrinsically appreciating. It could be outlawed, have a flat tax imposed on it, or become obsoleted by, say, quantum computers.
But let's grant, for sake of argument, that in the long run, relative to puny fiat currencies like the dollar (which is merely backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S.) the price of bitcoin will generally keep increasing, due to inflation of the various fiat currencies. You may very well be able to sell your bitcoin for nominally higher prices, but in constant dollars, if you add up every bitcoin transaction from its inception to infinity, the total amount of dollars will still be zero.
// Taxpayer money is a bit of a smokescreen in my opinion.
However you want to phrase it, if we create a trillion-dollar bitcoin reserve, that trillion dollars has to come from somewhere. There's no such thing as a magic money-generating machine. End of the day, wealth comes from the productivity of laborers. If you spend money to increase their productivity, total wealth increases. If you just shuffle your money back and forth between gold and bitcoin, that does nothing to increase anybody's productivity.
// think all voters have no qualms about transfer payments //
Certainly, not enough voters have qualms about transfer payments. But morality is just for suckers, right?
chuckle that's true :) But it only happens when somebody borrows money, and somebody only borrows money if they think they can use that money to make even more money---i.e. improve their productivity.
E.g. somebody might borrow money to buy a McDonald's franchise. Now the nation can produce more burgers. It's really weird how banks do that, but it's not magic.
> But it only happens when somebody borrows money, and somebody only borrows money if they think they can use that money to make even more money---i.e. improve their productivity.
You might remember years ago during ZIRP when most of us on HN figured out this "infinite money glitch". Basically as long as you're willing to start a company, and know who to talk to, you could issue shares, borrow money, buy assets, use them as collateral to borrow more and basically have all the money you need for the rest of your life.
It was a severe red pill and rather cool. Money really is free. Productivity is a story one learns how to tell but is not really related to how loans are taken or given.
I think most people understand this about loans at some level, if credit card debt is any indicator.
Banks printing money means the burger is more expensive for everyone who uses the denomination that the bank printed money for surely?
It increases cost and consequently reduces the incentive to produce outputs? So less incentive to produce, but if produced the result is a more expensive burger would be my read on this.
Because it doesn't just increase the supply of money--it increases the supply of burgers as well :-)
Sure, the money is created out of thin air. But that money gets invested in things which actually increase productivity and increase the GDP. E.G. a factory borrows money to buy new machines, which makes their workers more productive.
If the increasing money supply does start to cause excess inflation, the Fed tamps it down by increasing the interest rates. From Volker to Covid, it did a remarkably good job of keeping the inflation under 2%. Plague and unfunded tax cuts have pushed that up closer to 3%, but it is dropping.
Are there any stats that burger availability increased?
My observation is that quality, affordability and availability of burgers have went down whilst price has increased since 2008, the date I became aware of th use of printing money.
I attribute this to the printed money being kept to a large degree by banks instead of going into the wider economy. Most of that money has led to increases in housing stock value/cost and subsequently unavoidable cost to most, than contributing to the wider economy.
I'm not in the US so maybe have a different experience from yourself, but printing money has largely just devalued money and decreased wages as opposed to ending up benefitting burger availability :-)
> Most of that money has led to increases in housing stock value/cost
You're of course correct in general about asset prices. The entire game over the past 2 decades or so of low interest rates has been: borrow money and acquire more assets because U.S. monetary and fiscal policy has mostly only cared about the U.S. stock market (despite what pronouncements about other priorities might be made, the effect was the same).
We all knew this and it was almost irresponsible to do anything other than keep acquiring assets. The government will inflate their prices for you so why fight the Fed?
One didn't even need to gamble by trading, just accumulate.
People buy gold because, over the long run, gold has traditionally had a stable value.
But that is just another way of saying that in the long run, gold does not appreciate or depreciate. "Stable" means "it doesn't change a lot". And an asset's value has to change in order for you to realize a gain on it.
But gold's value doesn't change that much, in the long term. Therefore, gold is not a way to make money. At best, gold is a way to preserve your money. This has been true for thousands of years, which is why we all have confidence that gold can preserve our wealth.
cf. with Bitcoin. We do not have thousands of years of experience with it. You can't make pretty jewelry out of bitcoin. Bitcoin is not an excellent conductor of electricity, like gold is.
Bitcoin has value by consensus gentium. It has less backing it than any fiat currency on earth. At any time, countries could ban its use. Advances in decryption will eventually render it unworkable.
It mystifies me how anybody who is afraid of fiat currency could be so comfortable with bitcoin.
> It has less backing it than any fiat currency on earth
Amusingly HN commentators have been saying exactly the same thing since the launch of Bitcoin and they've been wrong the whole time.[^0] It's crazy how people are unable to update their priors or recognize the dissonance between their mental model and reality. Oh well.
And those monetary properties are based on proof-of-work.
> At any time, countries could ban its use. Advances in decryption will eventually render it unworkable
You have no idea what you're talking about. I don't mean that as an insult. I mean it literally. These are not points a serious knowledgeable person attempts to make.
You can't "ban" mathematics or code. And being code, cryptographic protocols are continuously updated. In fact, we added new cryptographic primitives to Bitcoin just 2 years ago, which you would know if you were actually honestly knowledgeable about what you're talking about.
Handwaving about cryptographic advances only tells me that you don't actually study cryptography. Perhaps you read a luddite talking point somewhere and were gullible enough to believe it?
> It mystifies me how anybody who is afraid of fiat currency could be so comfortable with bitcoin.
And that information asymmetry is what creates a market: those who understand an asset better own it and profit from it while those who don't or can't hold a less valuable commodity. That's how wealth is transferred to more knowledgeable people from less knowledgeable people in every aspect of life.
Anyway, Satoshi wrote:
"
The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work.
The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.
Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve.
" [^1]
Bitcoin's supply can't be manipulated. It's permissionless, censorship resistant, a non-custodial bearer asset, independently auditable, decentralized, programmable. It's the best form of money ever invented. That's all.
> cf. with Bitcoin. We do not have thousands of years of experience with it. You can't make pretty jewelry out of bitcoin. Bitcoin is not an excellent conductor of electricity, like gold is.
Central Banks don't buy gold because of the awesome chains and bracelets they will make nor because they want to have a supply of good wiring.
Throwing around Latin phrases doesn't make your point more credible.
There is no such thing as intrinsic value; all value is subjective and relative, which I think you know.
// It is backed by only thing rfst backs any form of money: the credibility of it’s monetary properties //
Of course. That doesn't mean that all currencies are equally soundly backed, now, does it?
Bitcoin doesn’t even have any intrinsic properties. Its properties are also set by consensus genius.
// you can’t ban mathematics or code //
You can’t ban physical laws either, but somehow we manage to have speed limits. You can’t ban the laws of chemistry but somehow we manage to have laws banning drugs.
// . . . All value is subjective and relative . . . //
I'm sorry. I can't respectfully continue this conversation with you. It simply won't be productive for us because I don't believe you're a serious or intellectually honest person nor that you have the technical knowledge to discuss these things competently.
I'll just end up annoyed and my goal in 2025 is to be less annoyed and less annoying online.
I main ffs, the United States president owns Bitcoin (and just launched his own meme coin) and the largest asset manager in the world has well capitalized spot Bitcoin ETF but you're still regurgitating anti-bitcoin talking points from a decade ago about bans? Grow tf up!
Nonetheless, thanks for the conversation and for your time.
// I can't...continue...I don't believe you're a serious or intellectually honest person //
Exactly the right move. Don't waste any time with somebody who doesn't argue in good faith. Heck, these days, you have to worry about wasting time arguing with an LLM.
// Thanks for the conversation and for your time. //
You are welcome. here's a freebie: conversations on the internet never end in one person admitting they are wrong. Instead, as long as the two participants have rational reasons to disagree, they offer those rational reasons to each other. When one party runs out of such reasons, well...they insult the other guy and break off the conversation ;-)
> You seem to be assuming that the rapid progress in AI will suddenly stop.
> I think if you look at the history of compute, that is ridiculous. Making the models bigger or work more is making them smarter.
It's better to talk about actual numbers to characterise progress and measure scaling:
"
By scaling I usually mean the specific empirical curve from the 2020 OAI paper. To stay on this curve requires large increases in training data of equivalent quality to what was used to derive the scaling relationships.
"[^2]
"I predicted last summer: 70% chance we fall off the LLM scaling curve because of data limits, in the next step beyond GPT4.
[…]
I would say the most plausible reason is because in order to get, say, another 10x in training data, people have started to resort either to synthetic data, so training data that's actually made up by models, or to lower quality data."[^0]
“There were extraordinary returns over the last three or four years as the Scaling Laws were getting going,” Dr. Hassabis said. “But we are no longer getting the same progress.”[^1]
o1 proved that synthetic data and inference time is a new ramp. There will be more challenges and more innovations. There is a lot of room in hardware, software, model training and model architecture left.
> It's not realistic to make firm quantified predictions any more specific than what I have given.
Then do you actually know what you're talking about or are you handwaving? I'm not trying to be offensive but business plans can't be made based on a lack of predictions.
> We will likely see between 3 and 10000 times improvement in efficiency or IQ or speed of LLM reasoning in the next 5 years
That variance is too large to take you seriously, unfortunately. That's unfortunate because I was really hoping you had an actionable insight for this discussion. :(
If I, for instance, tell my wife I can improve our income by 3x or 1000x but I don't really know, there's no planning that can be done and I'll probably have to sleep on the couch until I figure out what the hell I'm doing.
> business plans can't be made based on a lack of predictions.
They can. It's called "taking a risk". Which is what startups are about, right?
It's hard to give a specific prediction here (I'm leaning towards 10x-1000x in the next 5 years), but there's also no good reason to believe progress will stop, because a) there's many low and mid-hanging fruits to pick, as outlined by GP, and b) because it never did so far, so why would it stop now specifically?
Why did we stop going to the moon and flying commercial supersonic?
Some things that are technologically possible are not economically viable. AI is a marvel but I'm not convinced it will actually plug into economic gains that justify the enormous investment in compute.
Spoken like a young man. I salute you. However, on your journey remember that risk of ruin is what you want to minimize relative to your estimated rewards. That is, not all risks can be afforded. I happen to have a limited budget, perhaps you don't and costs in terms of money and time don't matter for you.
Ruin can set you back years or decades or permanently and then you find yourself on a ycombinator thread hopelessly trying to find someone who can meaningfully quantity and forecast future medium term AI progress so that you can hire them to help your ongoing project. Alas all you get is the comments' section. :-)
> but there's also no good reason to believe progress will stop, because a) there's many low and mid-hanging fruits to pick, as outlined by GP, and b) because it never did so far, so why would it stop now specifically?
Specifically, due to lack of data. Please refer to the earlier comment[^0]: deep learning requires vast amounts of data. Current models have already been trained on the entire internet and corpus of published human knowledge. Models are now being trained on synthetic data and we're running out of that too. This data bottleneck has been widely reported and documented.
> If I, for instance, tell my wife I can improve our income by 3x or 1000x but I don't really know, there's no planning that can be done and I'll probably have to sleep on the couch until I figure out what the hell I'm doing.
For most people, even a mere 3x in the next 5 years is huge, it's 25% per year growth.
3x in 5 years is a reasonable low-ball for hardware improvements alone. Caveat: top-end silicon is now being treated as a strategic asset, so there may be wars over it, driving up prices and/or limiting progress, even on the 5-year horizon.
I'm unclear why your metaphor would have you sleeping on the sofa: If tonight you produce a business idea for which you can be 2σ-confident that it will give you an income 5 years from now in the range [3…1000]x, you can likely get a loan for a substantially bigger house tomorrow than you were able to get yesterday; in the UK that's a change slightly larger than going from the median average full-time salary to the standard member of parliament salary.
(The reason behind this, observed lowering of compute costs, has been used even decades ago to delay investment in compute until the compute was cheaper).
The arguments I've seen elsewhere for order-of-10,000x* cost improvements (which is a proxy for efficiency and speed if not IQ) is based on various different observations cost reductions** since ChatGPT came out — personally, I doubt that the high end of that would come to pass, my guess is those all represent low-hanging fruit that can't be picked twice, but even then I would still expect there to be some opportunity for further gains.
* The original statement had one more digit in it than yours, but this doesn't make much difference to the argument either way
> I realised all the magick stuff was a circus and the people peddling it charlatans and clowns.
Hear hear. Your comment reminded me of when Christopher Lee said, "Never get involved in the occult. You'll not only lose your mind, but you'll lose your soul." [^0]
> There is no technical moat, but that doesn't mean there isn't a moat.
Gruber writes:
"
My take on OpenAI is that both of the following are true:
OpenAI currently offers, by far, the best product experience of any AI chatbot assistant.
There is no technical moat in this field, and so OpenAI is the epicenter of an investment bubble.
"
It's amusing to me that he seems to think that OpenAI (or xAI or DeepSeek or DeepMind) is in the business of building "chatbots".
The prize is the ability to manufacture intelligence.
How much risk investors are willing to undertake for this prize is evident from their investments, after all, these investors all lived through prior business cycles and bubbles and have the institutional knowledge to know what they're getting into, financially.
How much would you invest for a given probability that the company you invest in will be able to manufacture intelligence at scale in 10 years?
> How much would you invest for a given probability that the company you invest in will be able to manufacture intelligence at scale in 10 years?
What's the expected return on investment for "intelligence"? This is extremely hard to quantify, and if you listen to the AI-doomer folks, potentially an extremely negative return.
> What's the expected return on investment for "intelligence"? This is extremely hard to quantify […] if you listen to the AI-doomer folks, potentially an extremely negative return.
Indeed. And that asymmetry is what makes a market: people who can more accurately quantify the value or risk of stuff are the ones who win.
If it were easy then we'd all invest in the nearest AI startup or short the entire market and 100x our net worth essentially overnight.
That logic applies for AI-cynics rather than AI-doomers — the latter are metaphorically the equivalent of warning about CO2-induced warming causing loss of ice caps and consequent sea level rises and loss of tens of trillions of dollars of real estate as costal cities are destroyed… in 1896*, when it was already possible to predict, but we were a long way from both the danger and the zeitgeist to care.
But only metaphorically the equivalent, as the maximum downside is much worse than that.
> That logic applies for AI-cynics rather than AI-doomers
Fwiw, I don't believe that there are any AI doomers. I've hung out in their forums for several years and watched all their lectures and debates and bookmarked all their arguments with strangers on X and read all their articles and …
They talk of bombing datacentres, and how their children are in extreme danger within a decade or how in 2 decades, the entire earth and everything on it will have been consumed for material or, best case, in 2000 years, the entire observable universe will have been consumed for energy.
The doomers have also been funded to the tune of half a billion dollars and counting.
If these Gen-X'ers and millennials really believed their kids right now were in extreme peril due to the stupidity of everyone else, they'd be using their massive warchest full of blank cheques to stockpile weapons and hire hitmen to de-map every significant person involved in building AI. After all, what would you do if you knew precisely who are in the groups of people coming to murder your child in a few years?
But the true doomer would have to be the ultimate nihilist, and he would simply take himself off the map because there's no point in living.
> or, best case, in 2000 years, the entire observable universe will have been consumed for energy
You're definitely mixing things up, and the set of things may include fiction. 2000 years doesn't get you out of the thick disk region of our own galaxy at the speed of light.
> The doomers have also been funded to the tune of half a billion dollars and counting.
> If these Gen-X'ers and millennials really believed their kids right now were in extreme peril due to the stupidity of everyone else, they'd be using their massive warchest full of blank cheques to stockpile weapons and hire hitmen to de-map every significant person involved in building AI. After all, what would you do if you knew precisely who are in the groups of people coming to murder your child in a few years?
The political capital to ban it worldwide and enforce the ban globally with airstrikes — what Yudkowsky talked about was "bombing" in the sense of a B2, not Ted Kaczynski — is incompatible with direct action of that kind.
And that's even if such direct action worked. They're familiar with the luddites breaking looms, and look how well that worked at stopping the industrialisation of that field. Or the communist revolutions, promising a great future, actually taking over a few governments, but it didn't actually deliver the promised utopia. Even more recently, I've not heard even one person suggest that the American healthcare system might actually change as a result of that CEO getting shot recently.
But also, you have a bad sense of scale to think that "half a billion dollars" would be enough for direct attacks. Police forces get to arrest people for relatively little because "you and whose army" has an obvious answer. The 9/11 attacks may have killed a lot of people on the cheap, but most were physically in the same location, not distributed between several in different countries: USA (obviously), Switzerland (including OpenAI, Google), UK (Google, Apple, I think Stability AI), Canada (Stability AI, from their jobs page), China (including Alibaba and at least 43 others), and who knows where all the remote workers are.
Doing what you hypothesise about would require a huge, global, conspiracy — not only exceeding what Al Qaida was capable of, but significantly in excess of what's available to either the Russian or Ukrainian governments in their current war.
Also:
> After all, what would you do if you knew precisely who are in the groups of people coming to murder your child in a few years?
You presume they know. They don't, and they can't, because some of the people who will soon begin working on AI have not yet even finished their degrees.
If you take Altman's timeline of "thousands of days", plural, then some will not yet have even gotten as far as deciding which degree to study.
I somehow accidentally made you think that I was trying to have a debate about doomers, but I wasn't which is why I prefixed it with "fwiw" (meaning for-what-it's-worth; I'm a random on the internet, so my words aren't worth anything, certainly not worth debating at length) Sorry if I misrepresented my position. To be clear, I have no intense intellectual or emotional investment in doomer ideas nor in criticism of doomer ideas.
Anyway,
> You're definitely mixing things up, and the set of things may include fiction. 2000 years doesn't get you out of the thick disk region of our own galaxy at the speed of light.
Here's what Arthur Breitman wrote[^0] so you can take it up with him, not me:
"
1) [Energy] on planet is more valuable because more immediately accessible.
2) Humans can build AI that can use energy off-planet so, by extension, we are potential consumers of those resources.
3) The total power of all the stars of the observable universe is about 2 × 10^49 W. We consume about 2 × 10^13 W (excluding all biomass solar consumption!). If consumption increases by just 4% a year, there's room for only about 2000 years of growth.
"
About funding:
>> The doomers have also been funded to the tune of half a billion dollars and counting.
> I've never heard such a claim. LessWrong.com has funding more like a few million
"
A young nonprofit [The Future of Life Institute] pushing for strict safety rules on artificial intelligence recently landed more than a half-billion dollars from a single cryptocurrency tycoon — a gift that starkly illuminates the rising financial power of AI-focused organizations.
"
> But only metaphorically the equivalent, as the maximum downside is much worse than that.
Maybe I'm a glass-half-full sort of guy, but everyone dying because we failed to reverse man-made climate change doesn't seem strictly better than everyone dying due to rogue AI
Everyone dying from a rogue AI would be stupid and embarrasing: we used resources that would've been better used fighting climate change, but ended up being killed by an hallucinating paperclip maximizer that came from said resources.
Stupid squared: We die because we gave the AI the order of reverting climate change xD.
Given the assumption that climate change would kill literally everyone, I would agree.
But also: I think it extremely unlikely for climate change to do that, even if extreme enough to lead to socioeconomic collapse and a maximal nuclear war.
Also also, I think there are plenty of "not literally everyone" risks from AI that will prevent us from getting to the "really literally everyone" scenarios.
So I kinda agree with you anyway — the doomers thinking I'm unreasonably optimistic, e/acc types think I'm unreasonably pessimistic.
Will it bring untold wealth to its masters, or will it slip its leash and seek its own agenda.
Once you have an AI that can actually write code, what will it be able to do with its own source? How much better would open AI be with a super intelligence looking for efficiencies and improvements?
What will the super intelligence (and or its masters) do to build that moat and secure its position?
> How much risk investors are willing to undertake for this prize is evident from their investments, after all, these investors all lived through prior business cycles and bubbles and have the institutional knowledge to know what they're getting into, financially.
There are not that many unicorns these days, so anyone missing out on last unicorn decades are now in immense FOMO and is willing to bet big. Besides, AGI is considered(own opinion) personal skynet(wet dream of all nations’ military) that will do your bidding. Hence everyone wants a piece of that Pie. Also when the bigCo(M$/Google/Meta) are willing to bet on it, makes the topic much more interesting and puts invisible seal of approval from technically savvy corps, as the previous scammy cryptocurrency gold rush was not participated by any bigCo(to best of my knowledge) but GenAI is full game with all.
Part of the risk is the possibility that a few key employees find a much more profitable business model and leave OpenAI, while the early investors are left holding the bag. This seems to be a recurring theme in the tech world.
> Part of the risk is the possibility that a few key employees find a much more profitable business model and leave OpenAI,
The fact that you can state this risk means that market participants already know this risk and account for it in their investment model. Usually employees are given stock options (or something similar to a vesting instrument) to align them with the company, that is, they lose[^1] significant wealth if they leave the company. In the case of OpenAI: "PPUs vest evenly over 4 years (25% per year). Unlike stock options, employees do not need to purchase PPUs […] PPUs also are restricted by a 2-year lock, meaning that if there’s a liquidation event, a new hire can’t sell their units within their first 2 years."[^0]
> Also, 'printing money' is a feature, not a bug: it allows for currency needs to be met so that economic activity/growth can occur.
We all know the Central Bank hymn book by now.
That said, printing money doesn't create economic activity nor economic growth nor wealth. I know central bankers and their inflationist acolytes want you to believe this and they have dazzling models to show this, and convincing buttoned-up tales to prove this, and I'm not trying to re-litigate an argument as old as Vienna.
Hopefully some subset of humans will remember how wealth is created. And incidentally, if you look in your library, you can find very different interpretations of the various booms and economic depressions of history.
Yes, but some folks don't seem to accept the evidence and the historical record of what didn't work, and why we moved towards the current system. Some folks still think that FDR (and Keynes) got things wrong.
> That said, printing money doesn't create economic activity nor economic growth nor wealth.
While liquidity is not (necessarily) sufficient for economic activity it is necessary, and a lack of liquidity certainly hinders it. This is evidenced not least from the Great Depression and that once a country abandoned the gold standard they started to recover:
Fixed supply monetary systems (like the gold standard) are a hindrance, and it's not like they do anything useful like create a stable monetary base either:
> but some folks don't seem to accept the evidence and the historical record of what didn't work, and why we moved towards the current system. Some folks still think that FDR (and Keynes) got things wrong.
They did get things wrong. But that's my opinion. And economics isn't a science but a confidence game, mostly.
They were wrong because the market is a coordination mechanism that works based on information. The most important information in the market is the price signal. The first important price is the price of money. Central planners mess with that price and thus distort the market. In fact, the era of money printing has created more economic instability than prior periods.
But why mess with the price signal? So that you can pick and choose winners and losers. If they couldn't do that it wouldn't be worth the effort to centrally manage and control all human economic activity.
But again, I'm not trying to re-litigate a boring debate. The Central Bankers won, monetary and fiscal control has been centralized in the hands of a few people. Gold has been confiscated and expropriated from civilian hands, the dollar is backed by nothing except guns and oil, and 90% of the world's trade and debt is dollarized.
Money printer go burrr and thanks to that printing all my assets over the past 20 years have become insanely valuable as denominated in dollars, which keep being printed.
> the historical record of what didn't work?
Work, for whom? By what measure? At what cost? And who paid the costs? You talk about the Great Depression but unless you're a time traveller you'll remember the GFC as well?
Ah. But this is all so boring and not worth debating because it's been debated for as long as humans have wanted central planning of economies and markets.
Thanks for all your referenced articles but I did not read your citations because I've read all this stuff before endlessly over many years, decades actually, because central bankers keep promoting their interpretation of history to justify their control of markets.
>> Some folks still think that FDR (and Keynes) got things wrong.
> They did get things wrong. But that's my opinion. And economics isn't a science but a confidence game, mostly.
I'm curious to know in what way you think FDR/Keynes got it wrong.
Hoover and others tried things in the (then) orthodox way in the early 1930s and things didn't recover. Further, as the Delong link shows, as soon as other countries followed the US' lead they too started to recover.
Then, when the US went back to then-orthodoxy in ~1936 under political pressure and moved towards (e.g.) a balanced budget, the economy started tanking right away. Further, the orthodoxy of (so-called) "sound money" and balanced budgets caused political turmoil in more than one country:
A whole bunch of folks had to relearn this not too long ago when there was a push for "expansionary austerity", which Keynesians said would be bad for economic growth/recovery post-GFC, and which did in fact turn out to be bad:
> But why mess with the price signal? So that you can pick and choose winners and losers.
Actually it's to regulate/moderate economic activity. Because it is not Friedman's money supply (quantity) that determines price stability (i.e., the rate of inflation), but rather its velocity. Even Milton Friedman admitted (Financial Times, 7 June 2003) that "The use of quantity of money as a target has not been a success. I'm not sure I would as of today push it as hard as I once did."
Even in the right-leaning Reagan/Thatcher 1980s central banks (e.g., Fed under Volker) gave up on money supply control and went to interest rates. This was formalized staring in the 1990s:
> […] and 90% of the world's trade and debt is dollarized.
And before that most of the world's trade was (British) 'poundicized', because the UK had the largest economy in the world. And before that…. It seems to be fairly common that world trade tends to be done in the currency of the country that does the largest portion of world's trade—and if two countries are close both of their currencies tend to be used:
> Work, for whom? By what measure? At what cost? And who paid the costs? You talk about the Great Depression but unless you're a time traveller you'll remember the GFC as well?
Yes, I remember the GFC.
I remember then-monetarists abandoning Friedman's (and Greenspan's) ideas and (re-)embracing those of Keynes. I remember rending of garments by right-leaning folks when QE was announced about the terrible things would happen:
> We believe the Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called “quantitative easing”) should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed’s objective of promoting employment.
I remember Keynesian saying it would be fine… and being right.
It was fortunate that Bernanke was the Fed chairman at the time, as his area of academic research was things like the Great Depression (of the 1930s) and how tight monetary policy (dictated by the gold standard) made things worse:
> I'm curious to know in what way you think FDR/Keynes got it wrong.
No, you shouldn't be. I'm just a random guy on the internet.
>> But why mess with the price signal? So that you can pick and choose winners and losers.
> Actually it's to regulate/moderate economic activity.
You see how you miss the point while restating my point? It's as though you're trolling me. We've literally said the same thing.
Ah well, I definitely can't read your long post, as well intentioned as it is because it's too long and I've already spent far too many years debating this stuff.
But thanks again. Maybe someone else will indulge you. I just happen to lack the energy and inclination.
It's simply a matter of first principles and values: If you believe in central planning and control of human activity, then you'll choose your adventure that way. If on the other hand, you don't want a cabal choosing winners and losers, and you truly believe in free markets, for money and everything else, then you'll choose a different path.
You and I can pontificate all day about our chosen interpretations of history, but to what end? You've already made up your mind. I used to believe what you do and buried interlocutors under endless citations extolling central banking.
What does debate with strangers accomplish? Nothing really.
> Bitcoins are the most useless "asset" that there has ever been. At least beanie babies had some entertainment value and tulips look pretty.
Hilariously, some people won't realize that your comment is almost entirely copy-pasta from a decade ago when Bitcoin cost less than $500. Thanks for the laughs though. Good memories.
Oh gosh. You're actually one of those people. Well, it's a pleasure to meet you!
And since you feel Bitcoin is useless (I'm leaving the door wide open for a retort filled with cognitive dissonance), please send me 21BTC for which I'll pay you $1000 immediately? My address is:
Is that still true in 2024? Now that fees are up, settlement time is longer, governments can trace coins, and KYC controls are popping up at exchanges?
> That the market can stay irrational longer than people can stay solvent is also true.
It's a myth that markets are irrational. It's a joke repeated amongst traders but fundamentally, we all know that markets simply aggregate all available information and reflect it in a price. A free market as a whole has rationality as its equilibrium: it's always telling you something true about the world.
To call the market irrational is a more humble claim than intended by those who quote it to aver that only they are rational, that is, it says: "I can't figure out what the market knows that I don't."
It means, "Those who couldn't hear the music assumed that those who were dancing were insane."
> As long as the Bitcoin price goes up, that is a viable business.
Okay, let's assume Bitcoin's price is going up forever, Laura. Right now, 16 years after Bitcoin was invented, that's a completely reasonable assumption.
> How much it is worth depends on how many customers they will find in the future. It does NOT depend on their NAV. The premium to NAV simply reflects the market's valuation of their future business potential.
Hold it! You're saying that the premium is saying that rational buyers are calculating that there'll be more customers for $MSTR or Microstrategy's convertible bonds in the future? So it's a ponzi? But is it a good ponzi or a bad ponzi?
That is: where is value being created to be returned to investors who are ultimately left holding the bag?
A generation ago, everyone in sales and developer relations understood that "the customer is always right". Remember a sweaty dude on stage jumping about screaming "developers! developers! developers"? It was exhausting dealing with all the free software and hardware sent to developers, not to mention the endless free conferences for even the most backwater developer community. But that's an ethos for boomers, I guess.
On the one hand "incredibly entitled" and on the other you talk about AMD's leadership vision. Your long closing paragraph shows that entitlement of a developer has nothing to do with anything and isn't relevant in the conversation (I can show you guys at OEMs who are incredibly arrogant and entitled or outright a$$holes but so what?). It's just an opinion based on your personal bias.
In reality, AMD simply doesn't care about small AI startups or developers as you've noted. They don't care about me wanting to run all my AI locally so that I can manage my dairy farm with a modest fleet of robots. If they cared, and they sent him MI300s immediately (or sent them to the other 8 startups that asked for them), you wouldn't be chastising him about being "incredibly entitled".