The crucial question, and we know the government's answer. But the thing is, it didn't have to be a choice between the two. The reason it has become a choice between the two is because of the government's initial lack of response.

Back in the early part of the year, China was in lockdown and the virus was spreading to other countries and wreaking havoc wherever it landed. In the UK, we even had Italy as an example right on our doorstep... and we did nothing.
The importance of being pro-active is drilled into us all the time. The government should have done so here. The best course of action would have been to bring in quarantining of all people entering the country. The result would have been a (comparatively) small economic hit, followed by no lockdown and business as normal. No crippled economy, no massive infection and death rate. In all these threads I keep talking about exponential growth. You don't control exponential growth by waiting until it is a problem; you need to act early so that it doesn't become a problem. This idiocy has been replicated around the globe, although the UK is certainly a particularly egregious example. Johnson should learn that doing nothing and hoping that a problem will go away is not a viable response to a global pandemic.

This xkcd strip from 09 March might deserve another airing:


https://xkcd.com/2278/

Yes, next year's cars will be very similar to this year's, before the total reset we will have in 2022. Ferrari have all but confirmed they have no chance until 2022:


It is also worth noting that Ferrari have now brought in world-leading designer Rory Byrne... crucially, he'll be working on the 2022 car rather than the current and '21 iterations.
https://thesportsrush.com/f1-news-rory-byrne-the-man-behind-all-of-michael-schumachers-title-winning-cars-at-benetton-and-ferrari/

Hopefully 2022 will mark the start of a new era where no single team is dominant, and we can see more exciting races with more drivers having a genuine chance of victory.

---



I'd imagine the Ferrari thing was kept secret because of Ferrari's power within the sport.
As for the Merc 'white smoke' being a rule breaker, I'm not convinced. Generally the teams that are stretching the rules are doing so in a desperate attempt to make up ground on the leader. The fact is Mercedes have been in a class of their own for years now; the pressure to bend the rules is all on the chasing pack.

Aston Villa's big summer spend looks to have been effective - they are in 12th, with 2 games in hand on the teams in the relegation zone... a big improvement on last season.
If they can just find a way to keep getting games postponed instead of playing them, they're all set for a mid-table position.
They may have played 0, but they've also lost 0 and don't have a negative goal difference...

 

XRP does have huge potential, and I expect that price rises, when they happen, will be sudden and dramatic as we've seen in the past with this coin. I had anticipated that once the US legal case had failed, then XRP price would increase substantially, but this hasn't really happened. It has been the case before with XRP that when there is good news around the coin, the price remains unmoved - very different to what we see with other coins.

I don't think you should view it as a potential income stream; the amount you'd earn is very small.
Have a look here though if it's not working for you. There's a video to walk you through setting up rewards: https://brave.com/brave-rewards/
Try here, too: https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360026361072-Brave-Ads-FAQ

From my personal experience, it seems to be a good browser, but I have everything enabled and I've never seen an ad.

It's been a weird Tour this year, with the Covid disruption and the uncertainty at the normally ultra-professional Ineos machine. I don't think we expected Bernal to crack in the way that he did. Of course if Thomas and Froome had been there and in top condition, the story could have been very different. I don't know if it was overconfidence based on years of domination, and Ineos just thought they could send any old team out and still destroy the opposition... but obviously that was not what happened this year. Perhaps Bernal wasn't able to cope with being the sole focus of the team, and this combined with the fact that their team was weaker than usual led to the failure. Either way, with Froome leaving this year feels like it's a bit of a reset for Ineos. Perhaps they could have won with a stronger team, perhaps not, but it does seem like the dominant force may be crumbling a bit.

I don't think the 'under $0.10' has any relevance here. The price of an individual coin is dependent on supply, the two work together - which is why we tend to use market cap to determine the overall quality of a coin.
A coin at $1 with a supply of 1 million is exactly the same as a coin at $0.01 with a supply of 100 million. Both have $100m market cap, both are equally likely to go x100. There is no difference. If you put $1 into both coins, they are equally likely to give you $100 return.

$10 sounds excessive. We did have $3 a few years back at the height of the 2017 / early 2018 frenzy... but the price fell back quickly. I do believe in the long-term potential of the coin, and they are one of the leaders in terms of integration with the real world. But I don't think this has anything to do with the launch of xRapid, which has been live for a couple of years now. I'm not sure about it being 'the next bitcoin' either, as the use case is entirely different. We do also (still) have the court cases with Ripple, which is probably depressing the price. Long term though, yes, if they can get through the legal stuff then the future looks promising. I just don't know about $10.

Looking specifically at price, I think that the effects of Covid 19 on bitcoin have been in general about what we might have anticipated - a sharp drop followed by a recovery. Regardless of its long-term use-case, bitcoin is currently seen by many holders not as a safe-haven, but as a highly speculative asset. This meant that when the virus started spreading out from China, and lockdowns started, and it became apparent that it would affect every nation... people started moving their money away from 'risky' assets such as bitcoin and into safer non-crypto alternatives. And indeed we did see a huge initial price drop of around 50%.

The thing that surprised me was how rapidly the recovery started, and how after only a few months bitcoin had surpassed its pre-Covid level. One reason that might have contributed to this is that governments started bailing out everyone in sight an attempt to shore up their ailing economies. The 'money printer brrr' response is of course reminiscent of the 2008 crisis, and the subsequent birth of crypto. The euphemism of Quantitative Easing, coupled with other government responses, really highlights some of the deficiencies of centralised fiat currencies, and has done so again. Perhaps this gave bitcoin price some extra upwards impetus. Secondly, pre-Covid bitcoin was on an upwards trajectory anyway, so the rapid recovery should be seen as a part of that. A third - and more prosaic - reason might be simply that when prices fall suddenly and substantially, there is a tendency for overshoot, which almost always triggers some form of swift rebound.

Personally I think that all three reasons have contributed, but I am hopeful that the first reason is the primary factor. The sooner people realise that fiat is unfair, the more quickly bitcoin will become integrated into mainstream society.

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A respiratory virus can have huge effects on an athlete. If he's had mild or no symptoms then certainly he's fit to play and will likely be at his best. But if he did have symptoms, then obviously this can have effects on the lungs, which can be a major issue for someone whose job is to run for 90 minutes. This is a deadly virus, and even super-healthy people can experience long-lasting symptoms.

It's certainly true that Belt and Road involves elements of colonialism, and is very different to the historic European approach of send in the soldiers and take the country by force. From a moral perspective, superficially at least, China can defend themselves against accusations by pointing to all the development and infrastructure they've paid for. The question of whether wresting control of a country and asset-stripping it through semi-legal means is any more legitimate than doing so by brute force is open to debate. Certainly though they are making themselves much more inextricable than the Europeans did. In the end, Western empires collapsed and the soldiers and administrators went home - the effects on the colonised nations were certainly strong, but in the end (in most cases) manageable - but it's difficult to see how for example the Chinese presence in Africa can ever be removed.

I think it's the wrong decision. Johnson has zero sense of moral responsibility and zero concern for the wellbeing of the population. He couldn't care less how many people die, so long as the economy keeps running smoothly. Indeed herd immunity was his initial strategy, and I suspect that the reason he eventually backtracked and implemented lockdown was that he realised that thousands of deaths might cost him some votes. Johnson appears to be a fool, and this coupled with his egotism makes him dangerous - the parallels with Trump are striking.

The main problem is the endemic short-termism in modern politics, and this is another reason why lockdowns are implemented too late. They wait until cases are really high, and then decide to act. That's not the way to respond to a problem that has exponential growth. It was a dereliction of duty back in March to not bring in early restrictions and quarantining of new entrants to the country. If he'd done that, we likely could have avoided full lockdown altogether. It was a dereliction of duty the first time. But to then repeat the same behaviour later in the year is not just inept, it borders on the criminal.


I might agree on the liberty point, but disagree profoundly on the other two. Exponential progression is not a difficult thing to understand, but Johnson has either failed to do so, or simply doesn't care. I would argue that the only sense he possesses is self-interest.

Gas prices increase when the network gets really busy. In a sense, high gas means ETH is doing well. It's certainly better than no-one using the network. The reason the network is busy is a DeFi frenzy - everyone wants in.

In theory, sure. In practice I think the numbers involved in reverse-engineering the decisions would be far too daunting for it to be practicable. ML is of course adaptive, so you'd have to go right back to the beginning and understand every input it's ever received, and all subsequent reasoning. Particularly if we think about neural nets as an application of ML.

Another good point, thanks.



And thanks to everyone who has contributed to this thread so far; it's appreciated. I do still believe that loss of accountability is a valid issue, but you have all made many good points, and have helped me reach a more nuanced perspective. Even where I've disagreed, you've still turned my black-and-white into shades of grey, and I can see now that the situation is perhaps not as bleak as I'd originally envisaged, and that - as with most things - there are positives as well as negatives.

Thanks for that. The lawyer bit is certainly a thought-provoking example.

I'd probably make a distinction between 'functional' tech, and the sort of machine-learning that involving classifying and categorising humans. It's this latter type where I'm more worried about a loss of accountability and the difficulty (or impossibility) or determining how it arrives at its decisions. SuchMoon's point about ML debuggers is a good one, but I'm not convinced that it doesn't just move the problem one step along.


Machine-learning is being used (and will increasingly be used) simply because it is cheaper and more efficient than having teams of humans doing the work. I think the question of whether it will be used to make decisions previously made by humans has effectively already been settled.
I am talking specifically about ML, rather than all forms of computer decision-making. ML is where the computer itself determines the methods by which it arrives at results. If ML decides that person A shouldn't be entitled to a credit card or a mortgage, person B shouldn't be considered for a job role, person C should be investigated by the police... then we only see these outputs, we have no way of unravelling how the machine reached these decisions, and so no way of determining whether the decisions were justified. That's what I meant by the death of accountability.

I feed your raw data into an ML black box. The computer decides to block your access to all gambling sites. Because this is ML, there is no human-devised algorithm that we can consult to determine why you were blocked. Perhaps the computer did it to protect you from losing money, perhaps it thought you were too good and wanted to protect the gambling sites from big losses, perhaps it thought you were cheating. We can't know why, can't get any justification for the decision.

I'll concede that there is certainly an element of this, but doctors do also provide vital and live-saving drugs. I think this outweighs the unnecessary sales, although I'd imagine it's difficult to acquire reliable data on this.

Age is cumulative cell division errors. It kind of is a disease in the sense that most early-onset diseases are removed from the gene-pool through natural selection (people succumb prior to reaching the age where they can create their own children), whereas late-onset diseases are not selected against. But I appreciate that 'age' by itself - without any of the health conditions that are more likely to occur in older age - is certainly not a thing that needs to be treated, and particularly not through unnecessary drugs.

By necessity it's a generalised approach, though. They are contacting you because you are in a high-risk category, not because you as an individual are at high-risk. They don't have the time or money (or indeed the competence) to target individuals. Better that they contact more people than they need to, rather than the opposite.


TBH I'd be surprised if they didn't harvest the phone numbers and abuse their position of trust. That's pretty much default behaviour for the government, and the friends to whom they grant lucrative contracts without even going through the motions of putting them out for tender.

It's subjective.

Personally I am in favour of reducing inequality, particularly inequality of opportunity. Rich people should be president rich based on their own merits rather than from being born into privilege. I would argue that Trump's approach benefits the already-wealthy at the expense of everyone else, and it also increases tensions between different elements of society (BLM as an example). Inequality - both having different levels of opportunity, and being treated differently, is a major source of the conflicts that exist within societies, and is also counter-productive to the long-term health of the economy, as it concentrates wealth in the pockets of the ultra-rich, rather than distributing it across ordinary people who put the money straight back into the economy instead of just hoarding it.

No, I'm not. It's perhaps a little disingenuous to suggest that anyone is talking about an alternative between government by a mainstream party and government by an extremist party. That's a false dichotomy. I appreciate however that I could have been clearer. I was saying that the tendency with a PR government - or any coalition - is that decisions are made by compromise, which of course will be the middle ground, whereas in FPTP government by a single party, there is nothing preventing a move towards a (somewhat) more extreme position. In the UK the Tories are a right-wing party who whilst in government have moved further to the right. But they're not extremists.

Apologies if I wasn't clear enough. However I will leave it there, as it's a thread about the US election.