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11 sats \ 1 reply \ @freetx 2h \ on: Companies holding bitcoin reserves could face a sustainability crisis. Stacker_Stocks
I'm not at all saying "this time is different..." - and I have do have healthy skepticism of how far the virtuous cycle can go.
However, I feel like they are missing something.
- Bitcoin price drops
- MNAV falls
- Yet if debt-load is still sane, they can still issue bonds
- Money from bonds goes into buy more Bitcoin
- MNAV rises
Point being, Strategy has a 18% debt-load. That means price of BTC would need to fall by 75% before their debt-load got to 1:1.
From a pure finance perspective, a company have 50% debt load to assets is considered a healthy company, so they should be able to continue to issue bonds (ie. convertables)
This article is no doubt because someone told the author "have fun staying poor".
That evening, as he walked into his one bedroom apartment and reluctantly flipped through the pile of credit card bills and student loan statements, he thought ".....I'll show you..."
That aligns nicely with populism. It supports the idea that troubles in people's lives are caused by malign forces and that certain special individuals can take those enemies on and win.
Unlike Marxism?
From a wider lens. When is it that "trouble in peoples lives" are not because of "malign forces"? Its something like a tautology. (If your house is destroyed by a hurricane isn't that also a 'malign force')
Agree with almost all points, however I question this:
bitcoin-treasury hype-cycle most likely will prove to be virtue signalling noise without much long-standing cultural impact
Forget for a moment the fiat involvement. Don't you think its important that public companies are starting to hold bitcoin as a treasury asset? If that becomes the norm, how is that not culturally significant?
He wasn’t promoting nihilism, he was warning us about what happens after we lose belief in higher values. He saw that once “God (Ubermensch) is dead,” people wouldn’t become free, they’d panic, run toward comfort, and invent new idols (safety, ideology, herd-think).
Uhh...did you even read my post? We are literally saying the same thing.
Most people still don’t get the message. That’s why the book hits so hard.
Correct. The characters in Zarathustra missed the point, as did the real-world public who the only thing they know about Nietzsche is that "he was a nihilist".
I think restoration can probably go pretty far as long as there are no deep gouges.
I would offer: (a) let me try to get it professionally restored and if that doesn't work (b) I'll buy you a new wheel.
Personally, I think the offer to replace all 4 wheels is very generous but unnecessary. I think the "new shiny wheel" will wear quickly enough to match the general relative look of the others.
A few other options:
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Get new wheel + get other 3 restored so they match better.
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Buy a "excellent" condition used wheel, maybe it will match better with existing wheels.
The entire saga of "Thus Spoke Zarathustha" is almost too comically perverse to properly explain....its really one of those "are we in a simulation" situations.
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Nietzsche writes a book where the main character is trying to warn people about the effects of "God is dead".
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In the novel, the warnings are that they need to embrace this news and engage in true self-discovery, and self-reliance. Mankind needs to boldly go out build their own future. If they don't, they will fall into clinging to false idols out of fear.
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His major warning is that this "nihilism" will lead to increasingly fearful men who, because they've lost the promise of immortality, cling ever more desperately to "safety" and risk aversion. This desperate clamor towards safety-above-all will create a world that is unfit to live in.
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The people in the book completely miss the message and clamor towards safety and risk aversion upon learning that "god is dead"
Then comes the mind-fuck:
- In real life if you ask the random person about Nietzsche they will say: "He was a nihilist man....." that is they think he was advocating nihilism instead of warning about it.
The whole situation cracks me up.....the people both inside and outside novel missed the point....
How would AI be able to "take unilateral action"?
I think the idea that AI is going to start to self-replicate and improve itself -- although promoted by the AI industry -- is fanciful. There is no "intent" there is no "mind".
When you sit watching the LLM input cursor blinking, its not secretly thinking something. Its not "waiting" or "planning"....its effectively "turned off" at that moment.
Again this is why I call it autocorrect++ which is to try to undo some of the damage sister-raping worldcoin scammers AI execs have done to the publics mind. The AI industry promotes these ridiculous scare tactics in order to make their creation seem "so important that its dangerous". But the only danger is attributing intent where there is none.
LLMs by themselves have no intelligence. Human minds had to first generate the patterns that the LLMs are trained against.....as far as the LLM is concerned these patterns could be order of raindrops dripping off a roof.....there is no "thinking" or "pondering".
My point is those objectionable thought patterns already exist in the world which is why LLMs are able to match against them.
What's it gonna be?
Would just choose to die. To those of us who believe the soul/"consciousness spirit" is immortal death isn't that terrible of a prospect.
However I can understand why many materialist tech-bros are so panicked about wanting develop autocorrect++ so it offers them some feeble glimpse of immortality.
Well, yes autocorrect++ is going to pattern match on what training data says....
This entire article could be titled: We don't understand how LLMs work
As I've said ad-nausem, the real problem (as kinda highlighted here in this article) is people keep attributing "intent" and to autocorrect++ and there is none. Its just dumb pattern matching....
Its always funny to me when climate change zealots talk about "carbon capture". Its like....wouldn't it be wonderful if nature already sorted this out?!?
I've had Porsche's, BMW's, Cadillacs, etc.
The best decision I made is about 5 years ago getting a 10 year old Honda. They are cheap to operate and repair and in fact you can do lots of the routine repairs should you choose.
The traditional Catholic view was called "Supersession" - which was Gods covenant with man, which was renewed multiple times throughout history, reached its final form with the death/resurrection of Jesus.
This "New and Everlasting Covenant" established a "New Jerusalem" that came to encompass all of mankind. This view is supported not only directly in the Bible (ie. Jesus saying that he is establishing a new covenant that fulfills the old). But this view is also supported indirectly.
Each of the covenant renewals between God and Man expanded its reach: So from Abraham (a covenant between his family and God), to Moses (a covenant between an entire exiled people and God), to David (a kingdom and God), etc. etc. So it makes sense that the final covenant expanded to cover all mankind.
For whatever reason, a particular sect of Protestants (eg. John Darby) started this theory in 1800s called "Dispensationalism". This was a theory that held that Jews held a special "dispensation" from God that was above and beyond the New Covenant established by Christ.
Its a fairly convoluted (and biblically unsupported) idea that God still holds his covenants with Jews as valid and active and the future salvation relies on them.
This idea made its way into lots of US protestant churches (like Baptist which Ted Cruz is), and it explains the rather radically different views Catholics and some Protestants have on the subject.
Catholics think = Jews, you lost your inheritance to salvation because you rejected Gods covenant. The only path forward for you is to repent and accept.
Some Protestants think = Jews are critical to future survival of man because when Jesus returns it will be from modern State of Israel. They think that although Jews now reject Christ, somehow they will come to accept Christ once he returns to State of Israel.
Its pretty sad that so much of our modern turmoil is wrapped up in this theologically unsupported concept made-up by some random protestant minister.
Yeh, I think it was around 2010.
Over the course of a few months most of the mod team was replaced. It went from a place that was about 60/40 austrian to keynesian content to >95% keynesian.
Haven't been back there in many years, so not sure what the current slant is (betting it hasn't changed that much)
Agreed. As I said elsewhere. AI is sort of a 2nd Amendment issue.
That is the publics "private" AI will counter-balance the centralized AI from Gov / BigCorp.
Even though our individual AI agents may be 1000x less powerful than theirs, our numbers are greater. No different than how a group of Vietnamese peasants armed only with AK-47s and sandals can win a war against fighter jets, bombers, tanks, etc.
I don't think the risk of achieving AGI is that great - I'm think I agree with Roger Penrose's theorem, which is that consciousness is non-computeable.
There is however a real risk that dumb humans will start worshiping their simulacrum.
I'm reminded by the section of Isiah where he is making fun of dumb humans worshiping their blocks of wood...its actually a pretty funny section of the bible, real sarcastic tone.
He talks about how some guy walks outside and cuts down a tree, uses most of it to build a fire to eat his dinner...then looks at the remaining wood:
From the rest he makes a god, his idol; he bows down to it and worships. He prays to it and says, “Save me! You are my god!” They know nothing, they understand nothing; their eyes are plastered over so they cannot see, and their minds closed so they cannot understand. No one stops to think, no one has the knowledge or understanding to say, “Half of it I used for fuel; I even baked bread over its coals, I roasted meat and I ate. Shall I make a detestable thing from what is left? Shall I bow down to a block of wood?”