Economic Devastation

[iamnotback]

What is creativity but the shifting of matter that already exist into new patterns? The whole universe does this, so why can't a computer? Algorithms have been creating music and drawings, so who gets to say that isn't creative?  Also, you keep overlooking that humans augmented with artificial devices like nanobots are the AI Kurzweil thinks will most likely happen.

You are not comprehending what I wrote in my prior two posts.

It is not the creation of patterns that is relevant, but rather the serendipity of the relevance of the timing of creating patterns. The entire point is that the universe is not deterministic. Thus no form of computation can be any more perfect than any other. What makes us human is what we evolve with the game of chance and that we don't need to have the right answer. We just are, for a little while any ways. The concept of a superior intelligence that is "correct" more often than any other, is futile because it isn't even wrong. There is no "correct". Our universe is game of dice. No intelligence can predict that which is random.

Kurzweil seems to not comprehend basic computer science either. He should know that as the programmability increases, the opportunity for non-determinism does as well. This is what the entire failure of The DAO is about.

The non-determinism of computation even comes into play for example as the distance between computing components increases (again because the speed-of-light must be finite, else nothing can exist). You can recall smooth and I discussing that in the context of Byzantine fault tolerance.

Computation is not a panacea. And computation is also subject to the non-determinism of our universe.

Kurzweil seems to just really be full of shit and trying to sell books. He doesn't understand basic fundamental issues of physics and computer science.

[iamnotback]

generalizethis I don't mean you are butthurt, but these past posts of mine reinforces my point that resilience requires imperfection:

...But there are some ideas in each development that are perhaps worthy. I have borrowed for example some concepts from Iota, even though I have explained that (afaics) the DAG can't be a decentralized consensus algorithm. So you can't say that it has all been worthless, neither from a marketing development nor technological concepts development perspective.

Nature meanders on the path of annealing optimum fittness. The noise is necessary in order to not get stuck in a local minima. Study simulated annealing algorithms over N dimensional spaces.

I am not going to criticize the projects of others. I think the speculators have to wise up or lose their lunch money. That is life. After all, even you are playing the speculation musical chairs game. The market is what it is. If I deny reality, I am diminishing my opportunities to succeed...

Thanks for proving to everyone what a low class loser you really are...

I agree.

Hilarious to observe these two clowns circle-jerking each other while the rest of the forum ignores them.

Any one following these two hollow-threat-making-diarrhea, excuse-proliferating, do-nothing, rocking-chair-finger-up-their-anal-ysts clowns is going to miss out on 10, 100, 1000 baggers (but no specific endorsement of Iota intended).

I've always believed in quality over quantity.

That is because you still don't understand Physics, i.e. you don't understand that 'quality' can't be distinguished a priori, because the Butterfly Effect is unpredictable, i.e. there is no top-down omniscience (you two clowns still haven't grasped the underlying entropic theory and that the reversibility of time/entropy[1] would only be possible if the speed-of-light was not finite, which is why you continue babbling nonsense about some impossible nirvana where you want to be the regulating top dick sergeants):

...

Max Keiser wander in and pump Factcom to the moon as just a long shot gamble even though he has no idea if it's a viable system or not, which then attracts random noobs into thinking it might have value.

AnonyMint critiqued the ludicrous tech of Factom.

But that is irrelevant. Max brings awareness to crypto, brings more lunch money to the table.

From this cesspool can rise a BitcoinTrojanHorse killer. Processes aren't noise free because there can't exist omniscience on which is the noise and which is the signal a priori (it can only be known in retrospect and even then perspectives will differ on the account of history).

It isn't usually possible to throw the bath water out independently of the baby when the baby is a decentralized market. You say you want decentralized markets, yet you are unwilling to accept their imperfection. Imperfection is required to have any dynamic system. Otherwise you have top-down control, which is the antithesis of existence, because the speed-of-light is necessarily finite (otherwise past and future would collapse into an infinitesimal nothingness) and thus a top-down observer can't anneal distributed processes in real-time.

Nature is simultaneously ugly and fabulously diverse and interesting. I wouldn't prefer the disinfected nirvana of absolutely no possibilities.

Yeah HODL some Bitcoin. It is the most stable CC so far. HODL your nose and realize the altcoin cesspool is necessary.

...

Please enlighten us why "free will" is immoral (i.e. the free will to choose to participate in a randomized redistribution of bets).

Seems immoral to want top-down control to remove "free will", for it is the antithesis of the physics of existence:

It isn't usually possible to throw the bath water out independently of the baby when the baby is a decentralized market. You say you want decentralized markets, yet you are unwilling to accept their imperfection. Imperfection is required to have any dynamic system. Otherwise you have top-down control, which is the antithesis of existence, because the speed-of-light is necessarily finite (otherwise past and future would collapse into an infinitesimal nothingness) and thus a top-down observer can't anneal distributed processes in real-time.

Nature is simultaneously ugly and fabulously diverse and interesting. I wouldn't prefer the disinfected nirvana of absolutely no possibilities.

If Satoshi's idealism was decentralization, you don't want it.

Now readers will understand why I referred you to your own request to look up the definition of 'idiot'. You aren't one of sharpest Qtips in the medicinal cabinet.

[1]

http://unheresy.com/The%20Universe.html#Entropic_derivation (AnonyMint's blog) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.msg14270820#msg14270820 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.msg14286635#msg14286635 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.msg11218201#msg11218201 (from 2015 when AnonyMint got CoinCube interested in the entropic force) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=365141.msg9885459#msg9885459 (from 2014 when AnonyMint aka contagion got CoinCube interested in the entropic force)

[STT]

Imperfection is required to have any dynamic system. Otherwise you have top-down control

The ironic thing with top down control is its more prone to failure then something distributed by many much more smaller factors which can fail and then correct, giving a greater resilience overall .   A crowd can also be wrong but its usually wrong to force or fix absolutes and call it perfection or strength.   Anytime in a market everyone agrees or has come to some overwhelming consensus its also a signal to become more cautious as inaccuracy is more likely at that point with then greater rates of change

I have a suggestion for a 42% per annum fixed income investment by lending your USD at Bitfinex:

Its some worry they could find no alternative to 42%   Doesnt crowd funding usually achieve cheaper rates, Im not sure

[CoinCube]

I have a suggestion for a 42% per annum fixed income investment by lending your USD at Bitfinex:

Its some worry they could find no alternative to 42%   Doesnt crowd funding usually achieve cheaper rates, Im not sure

This exchange lost 1,500 BTC in a hack last year.
http://cointelegraph.com/news/breaking-bitfinex-hot-wallet-hacked-bitcoins-stolen

Interest rate is probably so high out of a concern the company is under capitalized.

I also saw this post a while ago about strange things that go on at that exchange.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=660948.msg7444557#msg7444557

The combination is enough for me to stay far far away.
 

[CoinCube]

Let me make a couple of predictions here: That the UK will
vote "Leave" in a few days time. Following that, Europe
and the USA, and Mr Cameron will do their best to make
the UK's life Hell for the next two years after which
they will propose another vote.

My prediction on how a Brexit can play out is the following:
1. Leave wins.
2. Politicians claim that since Leave wins we will leave the EU, just not immediately.
    First we must create a roadmap for an orderly exit, resolve the legal issues, negotiate post-BREXIT treaty with EU
3. If EU likes nothing more that protracted eurogroup meetings I don't know what that is. So UK will be caught for years in
    an "exiting" purgatory that will wreck the UK economy
4. After much pain and dead-end negotiations Brits will be pleading to forget the whole idea. 

You both called this one correctly. It will be interesting to see if the rest plays out as predicted.  The coming punish the UK period might be a good opportunity to invest in the UK.

[minor-transgression]

Thanks CoinCube, though I have to admit that calling the Brexit
right was mostly cynicism of the MSM reporting rather than any
insight into the UK's political process. I'll point out that the
Westminster Village was 75% Remain, and 25% Leave, hence the 
ongoing disarray while they reform.

Some of what I'm about to say might be better said on my "Learning
form Imperial Rome" thread, but it's relevant here.

Rome was lucky. It took over 300 years, with crisis after crisis and
war upon war, until the debt finally crushed the structure. One
critical point pointed out by MA was the debasement of the currency.
Eventually a silver coin was less than 1% silver.

A dark reflection of "When things get serious, you have to lie" to
quote Mr Junker. Then lies get built upon lies until the entire
fabric of society and business is undermined.

Watching Mr Farage in Brussels I did wonder if from time to time
he feels like an extra in a scene from "Sixth Sense", "I see dead
people. I'm recalling the scene where the teenager has found his
father's gun and blown half his head off. For the EU that gun is Debt.
To Mr Farage's credit, he does seem to have a well-rounded view of
the risks within the EU and has two years to get through to those
MEP's still in denial.

I think the UK will do OK from here on. It will take a couple of
years for the Pound's devaluation to read through into enhanced
exports. Exporting means having products you can sell and that
takes time. For the EU, things look less certain.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-30/european-commission-grants-italy-crisis-%E2%82%AC150bn-bank-bailout-program-prevent-run-depo
"How did this happen so quietly under the table and without Merkel's blessing? WSJ says that the program was approved under the bloc's "extraordinary crisis rules for state aid.""
"Needless to say, for Italy's Prime Minister to be contemplating how to avoid "investor panic" and prevent a "run on deposits", then Italian banks must truly be on the verge of collapse. Finally, for those curious about timing and how soon until it all unravels, we quote the European Commission spokesman who said that 'there is no expectation that the need to use this scheme should arise.'"

Will the EU manage to do in 30 years or so, some things that
required over 300 years for others? We may soon find out.

[STT]

I never thought UK would leave, its an extreme reversal and its out of line with the majority of outspoken Brits.   Popular culture as we're seeing very much is mystified as to why would you leave the EU, almost the return of the dark ages and ignorance could only justify such a thing.

Neither side is 100% correct, EU is a positive for unity and it is better then war.  That might be seen as flippant but I agree diplomacy is a positive over countries working against each other, import tariffs and war even.

Rome was lucky. It took over 300 years, with crisis after crisis and
war upon war, until the debt finally crushed the structure. One
critical point pointed out by MA was the debasement of the currency.
Eventually a silver coin was less than 1% silver.

Ive heard of this before, I'll post the link as there is an mp3 from a lecture.    Its a strange parallel but apparently Roman citizenship went from an honour to a curse as it became a strain to support.  Barbarian invaders were seen as liberators from an oppressive Rome centralist regime.   That was quite a switch in thinking then just as its a struggle for some people to understand now

https://mises.org/library/inflation-and-fall-roman-empire

[certainly things will move faster now as is the velocity of money greater, though I would relate it to least originate in the Nixon era]

[OROBTC]

...

minor-transgression

I believe you have raised a major point (Italy bailing its banks) that is getting little attention!

The Germans went along with it.  As long as only Italy itself bails out its banks.  Banks all over Europe apparently are even weaker on the average that US banks are.

IMO, this is all going to blow up in a way that hurts a whole lot of people.  Best have some assets outside the financial system.  Bitcoin and gold count...


STT

I agree that things have sped way up since Rome.  The parallels are ominous.

[iamnotback]

CoinCube et al, I don't think we will figure out any of this global shit. It is just mess.

If worry about that, we will neglect our own lives. I think better to focus on our own accomplishments. What ever happens globally will happen. I am going to be paying much less attention to it.

Read this:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1413819.msg15439016#msg15439016

[OROBTC]

CoinCube et al, I don't think we will figure out any of this global shit. It is just mess.

If worry about that, we will neglect our own lives. I think better to focus on our own accomplishments. What ever happens globally will happen. I am going to be paying much less attention to it.

Read this:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1413819.msg15439016#msg15439016

iamnotback & amigos

I read an interesting comment at Zero Hedge re what he would do if Hillary gets elected.  He will not fight, at least in the way in the way most of us think.

He said his battles would thenceforth be only on a spiritual plane.

^^ I like the thought of that. ^^

Sort of an active "Going Galt".

[picolo]

I never thought UK would leave, its an extreme reversal and its out of line with the majority of outspoken Brits.   Popular culture as we're seeing very much is mystified as to why would you leave the EU, almost the return of the dark ages and ignorance could only justify such a thing.

Neither side is 100% correct, EU is a positive for unity and it is better then war.  That might be seen as flippant but I agree diplomacy is a positive over countries working against each other, import tariffs and war even.

Rome was lucky. It took over 300 years, with crisis after crisis and
war upon war, until the debt finally crushed the structure. One
critical point pointed out by MA was the debasement of the currency.
Eventually a silver coin was less than 1% silver.

Ive heard of this before, I'll post the link as there is an mp3 from a lecture.    Its a strange parallel but apparently Roman citizenship went from an honour to a curse as it became a strain to support.  Barbarian invaders were seen as liberators from an oppressive Rome centralist regime.   That was quite a switch in thinking then just as its a struggle for some people to understand now

https://mises.org/library/inflation-and-fall-roman-empire

[certainly things will move faster now as is the velocity of money greater, though I would relate it to least originate in the Nixon era]

Not everybody voted no for the same reason and it's not that bad not to be in the eu.
For example, Swisszerland is not in the eu or the us is not in the eu, you could argue the us is an other eu aka big government with washington making decisions for the states.

The NO is a victory of small people against the establishment and london.
A lot of people that voted NO want to restrain immigration volume to the uk and do not wanting to be taxed to help other countries.

That being said, the immigration could have bee resolved with staying in the eu and they benefited of a lot of the deals made but a lot of the advantages of being in the eu can be achieved without being in the eu.

For example you don't need the eu to trade, you dont even need the government. The government often ban free trade which impoverishes the people like it bans freedom, set racist laws, heavy regulations and slows the creation of wealth.

[iamnotback]

This whole deflation/inflation question is a very intriguing question which is very difficult to get the head around.

...it is reckoned that after this wealth has come out of stocks and fled to government bonds; then as the market loses faith in government bonds, due either to negative interest rates or massive devaluation of the currency behind those bonds, as governments are forced to continually print in order to meet ongoing debt obligations, this wealth will finally flow into commodities. The world of real things...

Sorry that can't happen, because the physical commodity markets are too small and illiquid to hold the $trillions of liquid wealth locked up in bonds and stock markets.

This is why assets are likely to flow in US stock markets (via the US dollar) as the sovereign bonds start to fail in Europe.

If there is a truly decentralized crypto-currency available when the US stock market begins to overheat at nosebleed levels, and if it has gained sufficiently liquidity, then it could see a tremendous influx of capital. Unfortunately, Bitcoin nor the altcoins have solved the scaling and decentralization issues.

Fuck this is an amazing opportunity for me if I can get my coding ass in gear.

They basically have to unleash a huge tsunami of freshly printed fiat to stop it, but that fiat has to be distributed in the hands of the entire population or it solves nothing.  Random central banker choices would be forgiving things like student loans, helicopter money, "basic income", or all three.  Of course the "solutions" could collapse the system itself, so you have a situation of do nothing and implode, or forgive a few debts and create some wheelbarrow hyperinflation to maybe extend the collapse a little longer.

Governments already have a helicopter money system, it is called "food stamps" and "unemployment insurance". The plan of the TPTB is to turn more than 50% of the people into social welfare parasites, so they will always vote to continue the totalitarianism.

There will be no dropping money from helicopters. Just more and more debt piled onto to people who have to beg for more totalitarianism so they can get some government handouts for their basic necessities of life.

[aminorex]

assets are likely to flow in US stock markets (via the US dollar) as the sovereign bonds start to fail in Europe.

An unsolicited opinion: Good conclusions, questionable reasons;  EUR is likely the weak link, not bunds. BTPs and even OATS may face a crisis, but not bunds, not forseeably, what with all the consumption in Europe feeding the mittelstadt.  (Unless Germans were to suddenly become much more stupid that they have been since WW2.)

Anyhow, spx/gold is unlikely to surpass 2015 highs over the next 10 years. Softs and industrials just reflect demand collapse.  Monetary metals have no where to go but up now, at least 4 months out, and perhaps forever.  Demographics are a bitch goddess.  Either risk bottoms out in 2025 or there is a "reset" and a new regime along the way, with imperfect conversion making for massive volatility, stacked crises, and all that implies in politics. 

Best case scenario is conversion to a classical gold standard, which at least provides known workable precedents.  It would have to start in US or China.  Unlikely in any case because it is so hard to game it, long term. Why change to a game you are not guaranteed to win?  CCCP is more likely to go that route than is the western deep state, due to the characteristic Chinese long view and worship of stability. Western elites prefer fascism to mercantilism.  It would be ironic if the communists saved capitalism from the capitalists, eh?

Governments already have a helicopter money system, it is called "food stamps" and "unemployment insurance". The plan of the TPTB is to turn more than 50% of the people into social welfare parasites, so they will always vote to continue the totalitarianism.

There will be no dropping money from helicopters. Just more and more debt piled onto to people who have to beg for more totalitarianism so they can get some government handouts for their basic necessities of life.

Entitlements are peanuts.  Ask yourself where the 9 trillion went. They sure didn't go to food stamp recipients.  Anyhow I am violently agreeing with you:

The technological need for UBI is sheer futurism.  Won't happen for decades: Regardless of hyperexponential tech curves, social capital has inertia.  Generations must pass.  Helicopters will continue to supply the carry trades and black budgets.  They certainly won't rescue the middle classes. 

Saying AI can't surpass human creativity, though - that's utter bunk.  Stick breaking in Banach spaces is not rocket science any more.  We have the math.  We just haven't had the time and money to implement it yet.

[iamnotback]

Sorry that can't happen, because the physical commodity markets are too small and illiquid to hold the $trillions of liquid wealth locked up in bonds and stock markets.

That statement makes no sense!

The bond market is selling unservicable debt, aka bad IOUs, not "liquid wealth" as you put it.  The people buying the IOUs will eventually get shafted and hold a bag of zero, and when they do, things like metals and Bitcoin skyrocket while the debt markets collapse (and take down their respective currency with it).  It is not required to transfer the market cap from bonds to metals and Bitcoin in some type of orderly process on an exchange.

As a primitive example, let's say you only have two currencies on earth - the peso with 10% of market and the shekel with 90%.  The value of all labor is represented by those two assets.  If the shekel collapses, there's no such thing as "the peso is too illiquid to absorb the shekel market", it gets it by default - literally and figuratively.

If the govt buys their own debt, it's the same thing as printing paper and you're essentially transferring value to Bitcoin and metals in that manner anyway.  If governments try to rig metals and Bitcoin downwards, all it does is create bigger gains for the smart money that buys it while it's repressed unless you actually believe you can continue the fraud to eternity (not possible).

Until bonds are unserviceable or the market believes they are, Bitcoin and gold mcaps are too illiquid to absorb the $trillions of inflow. Once that capital is trapped and expropriated, then it can't move into Bitcoin or gold. You lack logic skills r0ach. My statement was logically correct.

Also you are putting the cart before the horse, in that we haven't even YET seen the Europeans attempting to bail out of their F.U.B.A.R. economy into the USD, US Treasuries, and finally US stocks (but they will next year when the SHTF). So we have a long way go before the masses think the US bonds and stocks are unserviceable. And by definition, once there is a stampede of confidence, only a very small percent of the capital will escape into these alternative assets.

This is why assets are likely to flow in US stock markets (via the US dollar) as the sovereign bonds start to fail in Europe.

Again, this doesn't make any sense either.  For the stock prices to go up, those companies actually have to be moving product off the shelves, and the economic outlook of every country is generally bad.

Nope. You don't seem to understand anything about markets. Do altcoins actually have to offer any thing real in order to go up in price! Of course not!

All that is required is that the world sees the USA as somewhat more stable or safe, that can ignite an influx and then capital follows capital, because everyone wants to get some of those gains in valuations, i.e. the wealth effect.

You don't seem to understand that in the brave new world of collapsing velocity of money, collapsing marginal-utility-of-debt, ZIRP, etc., that investing is forced off of any fundamentals and just blowing bubbles seeking yield, liquidity (follow the herd), and valuation appreciation.

(Besides the US Treasury debt is no where near being unserviceable. Rather it is only the unfunded future liabilities that will be defaulted on, e.g. Social Security. Come on man, at least get a clue)

It is such a pita and waste of my time to read your weak ass attempts to slander and smear Armtrong, when you seem to not even understand basic issues about investing in times like this.

If there is a truly decentralized crypto-currency available when the US stock market begins to overheat at nosebleed levels, and if it has gained sufficiently liquidity, then it could see a tremendous influx of capital. Unfortunately, Bitcoin nor the altcoins have solved the scaling and decentralization issues.

From my estimates, all Bitcoin would need to do is scale to 8MB to allow market penetration as a checkbook type device for large value transactions in the middle/upper middle class of around $5,000 - $10,000.  At around 1-2 MB, Bitcoin would be more of a tool for the top 2-10% of wealth assuming we rely on on-chain transactions to prevent fractional reserve.  It's unknown just what percent of the transaction volume is required to be on-chain to prevent fractional reserve.  If you think the answer is 100%, then obviously only something like LN would work.  I don't care if you think it's "flawed" or whatever, that would be the only type of solution if you require all transactions on-chain.

Bitcoin is already ChinaCoin. It is not decentralized even at 1MB blocks.

Besides money that you can only spend by converting it to fiat, isn't really an alternative asset. The appeal of gold was you could hope on a plane with it, and someone could convert it in the blackmarket and spend it for real goods. But this isn't going to be possible any more. And ditto Bitcoin, as the capital controls come down the pike, you won't be able to spend it on stuff with only 8MB blocks. You need actually scaling if you want it become a currency. And you decentralization if you want to it be resistant to control by any one nation or power (e.g. China).

I am just going to need to get my coding ass in gear and fix this shit.

The only other alternative would be to use a technically federated chain where verification is centralized amongst one node or a few federated nodes, but the centralized orderer/verifier can't actually double spend or anything like that.  All they can do is take the thing offline and then you're forced to manually replace them somehow.  Realsolid actually already coded this system out, but it's a pretty hard sell being technically a federated chain because it has no way to replace the verifiers should they spontaneously die.

That is not the only other alternative design for a scalable, decentralized block chain.

Governments already have a helicopter money system, it is called "food stamps" and "unemployment insurance". The plan of the TPTB is to turn more than 50% of the people into social welfare parasites, so they will always vote to continue the totalitarianism.

There will be no dropping money from helicopters. Just more and more debt piled onto to people who have to beg for more totalitarianism so they can get some government handouts for their basic necessities of life.

And you think creating a dystopian civilization run by a single room full of jews to control a population of 6 billion will actually work?  No, it will not work.  The end result of such attempts is always being beheaded by guillotines.

Define "work". The masses will seek their own destruction as they always do, by clinging to collectivism. That is nature's culling mechanism at-work. So it is "working".

Tyranny will come in the guise of safety and security and of course the envoirnment and health and safety are included because it is always best to hide the lie in the truth. Selective truth and doublespeak create the narrative as the tyranny rolls out and the sheeple have been slowly boiled like a frog.

Tinfoil hat investors don't seem to understand that the masses are still a long way from viewing all of the current financial system as F.U.B.A.R.. They are just at the point of trying to vote to kick out incumbents. They are no where near yet bailing out with a parachute.

We have a long ways to go and this will culling of the herd will get very ugly as it always does throughout repeating bouts in man's history.

[iamnotback]

assets are likely to flow in US stock markets (via the US dollar) as the sovereign bonds start to fail in Europe.

An unsolicited opinion: Good conclusions, questionable reasons;  EUR is likely the weak link, not bunds. BTPs and even OATS may face a crisis, but not bunds, not forseeably, what with all the consumption in Europe feeding the mittelstadt.  (Unless Germans were to suddenly become much more stupid that they have been since WW2.)

Anyhow, spx/gold is unlikely to surpass 2015 highs over the next 10 years. Softs and industrials just reflect demand collapse.  Monetary metals have no where to go but up now, at least 4 months out, and perhaps forever.  Demographics are a bitch goddess.  Either risk bottoms out in 2025 or there is a "reset" and a new regime along the way, with imperfect conversion making for massive volatility, stacked crises, and all that implies in politics.  

Best case scenario is conversion to a classical gold standard, which at least provides known workable precedents.  It would have to start in US or China.  Unlikely in any case because it is so hard to game it, long term. Why change to a game you are not guaranteed to win?  CCCP is more likely to go that route than is the western deep state, due to the characteristic Chinese long view and worship of stability. Western elites prefer fascism to mercantilism.  It would be ironic if the communists saved capitalism from the capitalists, eh?

Going into deeply negative interest rates can be seen as a failure (a form of expropriation and slow default), when the stampede into the USD, and US assets appreciation is making negative ROI looking pretty fucking stupid in comparison. Capital tends to not be that stupid and follows capital instead to last-man-off-the-boat (aka greater fool theory of investing) appreciation wealth effect.

Germans are already doing insanity with Merkel at the helm inviting millions of Muslim migrants in a form of delusional socialism that is analogous to the Weimar Republic's mass delusion. They even shut off all their nuclear generation plants and will be at the mercy of Putin for electricity. This is repeat of Hitler's problem of not having enough FOREX to pay for oil, so he had no choice but to go take by force.

SPX will likely double or triple in a massive bubble, which may take some of the steam out of gold for the interim (2017-18ish) because a booming USD and US assets, will be seen as a less risky bubble to pile into, than gold. So it is possible we haven't yet seen the high for SPX/AUG, but eventually the USD stampede will peak and then the wheels will entirely fall off the current financial system, so then expect gold to rally into 2024 at least and the SPX/AUG will have peaked 2017/18ish.

Perhaps Western fascism and Asian mercantilism are semantic analogues at some abstraction. It is really all about the elites holding the power. Asia has youth so they don't need to cull the unfunded liabilities, so the lurch forward into Digital Technocracy (666 system controlled by the elites) can be a positive lifestyle improvement in Asia. In the West, the wealth has to be expropriated from all the middle class to pay for the unfunded liabilities, whilst eventually defaulting on them any way (i.e. there is no political solution in the West which isn't fascist because the Westerners don't want to willing accept a downgrade of their financial status so there must be a fight to the 0 level for everyone).

Edit: read this post also.

Saying AI can't surpass human creativity, though - that's utter bunk.  Stick breaking in Banach spaces is not rocket science any more.  We have the math.  We just haven't had the time and money to implement it yet.

Try to actually rebut my mathematical and physics reasoning. Then we can have a discussion.

[aminorex]

Going into deeply negative interest rates can be seen as a failure (a form of expropriation and slow default), when the stampede into the USD, and US assets appreciation is making negative ROI looking pretty fucking stupid in comparison. Capital tends to not be that stupid and follows capital instead to last-man-off-the-boat (aka greater fool theory of investing) appreciation wealth effect.

To which I would add the balancing observation that the U.S. 10 year is currently yeilding -1.5% after CPI indexing and marginal taxes.  Anybody buying treasuries today is (1) speculating on policy actions, (2) forced by a mandate, (3) gaming something linked, or (4) happy to lose less money than they would lose elsewhere.  Frankly I find it hard to put myself in their mental space.

Germans are already doing insanity with Merkel at the helm inviting millions of Muslim migrants in a form of delusional socialism that is analogous to the Weimar Republic's mass delusion. They even shut off all their nuclear generation plants and will be at the mercy of Putin for electricity. This is repeat of Hitler's problem of not having enough FOREX to pay for oil, so he had no choice but to go take by force.

Yeah, it's amazing the crazy stuff people do to hew to some broken self-concept, which they can't even consistently embody.  Politics does that.  I still have great respect for the practical intelligence of the German entrepreneurial class and petty bourgoisie.  Enslaving southern Europe from Slovenia to Portgual without firing a shot was one shrewd piece of work.

SPX will likely double or triple in a massive bubble, which may take some of the steam out of gold for the interim (2017-18ish) because a booming USD and US assets, will be seen as a less risky bubble to pile into, than gold. So it is possible we haven't yet seen the high for SPX/AUG, but eventually the USD stampede will peak and then the wheels will entirely fall off the current financial system, so then expect gold to rally into 2024 at least and the SPX/AUG will have peaked 2017/18ish.

Here's where we are in unequivocal disagreement.  I say xauusd bottomed in January, and consider the fundamentals too dismal to allow equities to make new real highs (not nominal), and the political situation too fubared to allow even a kamikaze move like BoJ buying half the real estate in Japan to offer reflationary substance.  Blips yeah.  CPI yeah.  Pockets of growth, sure.  System down down down.

Perhaps Western fascism and Asian mercantilism are semantic analogues at some abstraction.

Oh absolutely.  The similarities far outweigh the differences.  It's like feeding Hokkaido uni and Santa Barbara uni to a cowboy side-by-side.  The difference just doesn't make a difference unless you're dialed into it. Even the victims of the inherent injustices are more similar than different.

It is really all about the elites holding the power. Asia has youth so they don't need to cull the unfunded liabilities,

...you say from a Phillipine perspective.  Japan, Korea, even China(!) not so much.  Better say South and Southeast Asia.  Then the exceptions become inconsequential.

Saying AI can't surpass human creativity, though - that's utter bunk.  Stick breaking in Banach spaces is not rocket science any more.  We have the math.  We just haven't had the time and money to implement it yet.

Try to actually rebut my mathematical and physics reasoning. Then we can have a discussion.

Okay.

A.I. mastering the known sciences, has nothing to do with my point about where future creativity is derived from serendipity of chance meeting imperfection. If computation could replace the necessary finiteness of the speed-of-light and the necessary zigzag imperfection fitness annealing of nature, then omniscience is possible, the speed-of-light is infinite, and the past and future collapse into an infinitesimal point of nothingness.

This bit?  Serendipity is just a stochastic algorithm.  In no wise is it the hard part of constructed intelligence.  Simulated annealling has been a staple of non-convex optimization since Metropolis-Hastings.  I know of no reason to think that any emergent phenomena of the physical substratum is not amenable to simulation to a degree of accuracy sufficient to generate every perceivable organizational behaviour required for any clearly definable pragmatically useful behaviour or outcome.  Quite the contrary:  In every case studied, the consistent pattern has been for the accuracy of simulation models to increase to within some infinitesimal delta of the principled bounds of information, where any further precision becomes an accuracy illusion, and the differences no longer make a difference.  

To claim otherwise would require that you resort to bounded rationality (as in e.g. diffusive maps bifurcating to chaos, in which case I argue that there is no evidence that chaotic divergence is germane to intelligent behaviours in a way which digitally generated chaos cannot suffice, and indeed is generally an epiphenomenon which can be bundled up in summary statistics or a lyapunov exponent, stuffed in a noise term) or hold that there is a ghost in the machine, a transcendental element, with causal import, which is masked by stochasticity.  In physcial reality, all observation is consistent with the view that, while outcome and observation is stochastic, the distribution envelope evolves with simple determinism. And non-physical reality is not amenable to rational analysis, so I consider discussing it in a rational discourse to be a red herring.  (Arational discourse has its place, but not in seeking rational clarity, with universalizable implication value.)   Omniscience is not possible (in the sense of a computable clockmaker universe, or a pervasively comprehensive sensor network, or even a complete reasoner), but neither is cognitive nihilism a useful response to the (often exceedingly well-understood, but with some subtle quirks of great interest which are less clearly understood) bounds of both analytic and synthetic knowledge.  Gödel numbers and wave equations do not constitute a mystical elan vital.  They are just approximative grammars and should not be reified.

You appear to consider that the ability to allocate new descriptive dimensions from an inexhaustible resource latent in the equations is tantamount to performing a transfinite path integral over the whole space, but it is not - no more than evolution, having solved a problem, can be said to have considered and discarded all of the alternative solutions.  (But before addressing this mistake I would point out that being latent in the equations implies that there is something to be drawn out - and I am saying it can be drawn out, in a pragmatically sufficient manner and degree for any known practical purpose, at least in principle, albeit not yet in every case has that capacity been exploited sufficently to manifestly preclude informed disagreement on its eventual outcome.)

I agree with your implied chain of reasoning from omniscience to nihil sum, and its inferential reductio, but I dispute that one crucial premise, without which the argument does not pertain.  Yes, finitary systems are incapable of embodying critical behaviours of higher order intelligence, including distinctly creative aspects.  But physical computers are not even finite closed systems, like an automaton.  They are embodied things.

Are you familiar with genetic algorithms for VLSI routing invoking flaws in the die to bypass clock propagation?  I can't quickly come up with the reference.  I think it was in one of the early 90s GA conference proceedings.  Anyhow, it wasn't an isolated case, and it seems exactly on point to the kind of limitation you would impose on automation, and to confront those limits quite directly.  And we use that sort of stochastic search power all the time, in non-parametric Bayes, in non-parametric latent dirichlet allocation, in variational autoencoders, in neural gasses.  I think you haven't chased down that rabbit hole to see how far it goes, because if you had done so, you would be saying with me:  It's rabbits all the way down.  In that case the embodied implementation manifested information in a open and unbounded form, by appearing in the objective function of a deterministic chaotic search.  How much more can be drawn out by using more modern, more sophisticated heuristic architectures, such as separated policy networks, and other virtuoso tricks which seem to proliferate faster than state university PhDs?  I think what we have in hand today is likely to be quite sufficient.

Really AlphaGo was an underappreciated watershed.  The gamespace of Go is large enough to be a fully qualified proxy for (countable) infinity.  The simple architectural trick of policy network separation, in combination with a lengthy catalog of less pivotal techniques, made the difference between a heuristic algorithm for guided search, such as is applicable in chess, and a meaningfully creative learner.  If you need to add another dimension to a learner's representation space, you just add a parameter.  It's really no big deal.  It's certainly not the stopping point of creative intelligence.

The hardest button to button in closing the loop on AI is the temporal sequence chaos which allows unbounded forward chaining inference to "jump outside of the system" in the classical Hofstadterian description, not just in toy cases, but quite generally.  It's not in the static representation space.  It's in the dynamical system.  But I have seen enough successes (and failures) in process discovery to be quite committed to the task of proving concretely that the fitness landscape is rich enough, and the requirements of practical intelligence weak enough, so that effectively unbounded arbitrarily good approximate covers of the space of intelligence behaviour ensembles are possible.   (I do not claim they are finite covers.)

It's like this:  Who really cares about transcendental numbers except as theoretical objects?  Yes, overwhelmingly all of the reals are transcendental.  But algebraic numbers, or a truncation of an infinite algebraic series, will suffice for any computation resulting in an observable.  I admit that the search landscape for dynamical systems embodying creative intelligence is not a perfect cover.  The inverse may be dense in that space.  But I also hold that the positive set is dense in that space as well.  We know how to add orthogonal dimensions to a representation space at will, I am sure you can agree.  All I ask is that you acknowledge that generalizing that to adding independent dimensions to a process space is not significantly harder, AND that the resulting behaviour manifold can be dense in the infinite-dimensional manifold containing the most precise possible description of every intelligent (creative) behaviour.  The last is not practically proven, but neither is it prohibited by first principles.  

Structure and process are duals.  Where you can create in structure, you can create in process, and vice versa. In summary, the one weird trick a Minnesota dad is using to make creative AGI is to apply that creative process to self-representation, to the self-representation of the process which embodies self.  The result is a space-filling bifurcation cascade in a Banach space of truth-functionals, which suffices to dominate every control strategy.  (I am using the words loosely because I'm not trying to do a proof here, just describe in tight summary a constructive strategy using coherent and illustrative language with sufficient clarity to make the fulfillment - with lots of sweat and capital - plausible in every regard.) I can go on about the pragmatic strategy elsewhere.  This is only to emphasize that it is not a project predicated on a contradiction.

[groll]

You will probably need a week or two of studying the thread slowly.

I will be the first to admit I needed a week to fully absorb the following works of AnonyMint.

The Rise of Knowledge
Understand Everything Fundamentally

Together these are quite simply the most insightful piece of economic theory I have ever read.

If the author is right and I think he is we are all in the midst of a tragedy of epic proportions.  It is sad unstoppable and will devastate the lives of much of humanity.

Edit:
This thread is now over 100 pages and too long to realistically expect a reader to cover from start to finish. There have been multiple requests for a roadmap or guide. In response to the latest request I wrote the following roadmap.

You write a lot of interesting things but I really have to ask for some sort of roadmap to your universe.  I’m not asking for a summary but a sitemap, a directory where the main ideas and concepts are mentioned. Catching up with a linear approach isn’t really doable especially if one wants to reach actionable status before the projected economic meltdown/madmax.

Thanks for any reply

It is best to start with a secure understanding of our financial system as it truly is. The three links on finance below were inspired by Anonymint's overall insight and are less deep than Anonymint's writing making them a good starting point. Part I covers fractional reserve banking what it is and how it works in a modern economy, Part II covers the business cycle how fractional reserve leads to recurrent and cyclical booms and busts impoverishing the masses. Part III covers how fractional reserve banking leads to government capture and the eventual economic strangulation of the economy.  

Finance Part I: Understanding the Parasite
Finance Part II: The Parasitic Cycle
Finance Part III: Divide, Conquer, Enslave

Once you understand the basics of the modern financial system you are ready to move on to Anonymint's more complex writings and ideas. I would start with

Understand Everything Fundamentally

Understand everything fundamentally covers the broader principle of collectivism and its dangers including the tragic consequences of our current economic trajectory. It also covers the principles of centralization and degrees-of-freedom in the economy. Next up is

The Rise of Knowledge

The rise of knowledge is in my opinion the very best of Anonymint's writing. In it he covers finance and why the role of finance and debt will progressively decline in the future. It is a compelling argument that describes how and why humanity will eventually and inevitability break free of the chains of finance and unrestrained collectivism and enter an age of knowledge.

CoinCube Highlights
Health and Religion
On Fractional Reserve
Justification for New World Order: Part 1, 2, 3, 4
Thesis on Life
Surviving Socialism
JamBox Announcement

Every economic theory is important though they vary in different stage or economic condition but it is necessary to learn about them. We can have a broader understanding of what has happened before, what is happening today and what will happen in the future if we have a good knowledge on the economy. THough  the system has changed through many innovations, technology and methodology but the principle behind it all are are related. In understanding Anonymint's complex ideas and theory you must have a thorough understanding of the basics and how did he come up with such theories and ideas.

[iamnotback]

Going into deeply negative interest rates can be seen as a failure (a form of expropriation and slow default), when the stampede into the USD, and US assets appreciation is making negative ROI looking pretty fucking stupid in comparison. Capital tends to not be that stupid and follows capital instead to last-man-off-the-boat (aka greater fool theory of investing) appreciation wealth effect.

To which I would add the balancing observation that the U.S. 10 year is currently yeilding -1.5% after CPI indexing and marginal taxes.  Anybody buying treasuries today is (1) speculating on policy actions, (2) forced by a mandate, (3) gaming something linked, or (4) happy to lose less money than they would lose elsewhere.  Frankly I find it hard to put myself in their mental space.

I was not framing my analysis as a choice between EU nation sovereign bonds and US Treasuries. I was explaining the rationale for the exodus from the Euro and the ZIRP of the EU core bonds (e.g. Germany) to the USD and US assets, primarily US stocks that will cause a massive bubble approximately to a double to triple of the current level of the DJIA.

Those who need maximum liquidity are moving to the short end of the curve so the NIRP is one of the costs of liquidity. Liquidity is collapsing in the EU (and everywhere so capital will concentrate home in the reserve currency which is always the most liquid), and this is one of several factors that will drive capital to the USD to jumpstart the process of capital chasing capital for gains, liquidity, and safe haven.

Those who are free to maximize yield vs. risk tradeoff and have the balls to do so, have long since left sovereign bonds and moved to AAA corporate or emerging markets. So those who think interest rates haven't been rising, haven't factored in the composition of fixed income portfolios.

The public has largely been on the sidelines since 2009 and is attempting to put some money under their mattress or holding cash (velocity of money is collapsing). The money that does come into the markets is chasing bubbles. The general public in the West is ripe for chasing another "sure thing" bubble in US stocks as US stocks surprisingly go against the direction expected by all the pundits.

Germans are already doing insanity with Merkel at the helm inviting millions of Muslim migrants in a form of delusional socialism that is analogous to the Weimar Republic's mass delusion. They even shut off all their nuclear generation plants and will be at the mercy of Putin for electricity. This is repeat of Hitler's problem of not having enough FOREX to pay for oil, so he had no choice but to go take by force.

Yeah, it's amazing the crazy stuff people do to hew to some broken self-concept, which they can't even consistently embody.  Politics does that.  I still have great respect for the practical intelligence of the German entrepreneurial class and petty bourgoisie.  Enslaving southern Europe from Slovenia to Portgual without firing a shot was one shrewd piece of work.

Enslavement has a boomerang effect and now the Germans are paying the inertial (political, etc) cost of that "shrewdness". I have some German ancestry and I know that side of myself that fucks myself over by being too shrewd against others.

Nothing is free or without a footprint. Choose a poison or ramifications. "You can't do just one thing".

SPX will likely double or triple in a massive bubble, which may take some of the steam out of gold for the interim (2017-18ish) because a booming USD and US assets, will be seen as a less risky bubble to pile into, than gold. So it is possible we haven't yet seen the high for SPX/AUG, but eventually the USD stampede will peak and then the wheels will entirely fall off the current financial system, so then expect gold to rally into 2024 at least and the SPX/AUG will have peaked 2017/18ish.

Here's where we are in unequivocal disagreement.  I say xauusd bottomed in January, and consider the fundamentals too dismal to allow equities to make new real highs (not nominal), and the political situation too fubared to allow even a kamikaze move like BoJ buying half the real estate in Japan to offer reflationary substance.  Blips yeah.  CPI yeah.  Pockets of growth, sure.  System down down down.

Fundamentals (P/E ratios, etc) are not going to drive the bubble in US stocks. Rather it is going to be capital chasing capital. We only have bubbles now. There are no more fundamentals. Please re-read my prior reply to r0ach and also my last few posts in the Martin Armstrong thread wherein I explained this in more detail.

When Trump wins, we will be kicking unsuitable migrants out of the USA (or at least rhetoric causing confidence to think that) and in Europe they will be rolling out the red carpet for trouble and strife. The USA is preparing to roll up its sleeves and get back to work (or at least rhetoric causing confidence to think that). Europe is a much more fucked political morass from hell. The fundamentals will still be onerous in the USA, but it is still the most liquid safe haven on earth. Have you not being reading Armstrong? I cite some important links for your review as follows (prepare to be educated by the master):

If you open a corporation in Nevada, you do not have to declare who the actual owner is. That company can then engage in Panama and such names will never show up in the leak.

The United States of America is emerging as a top tax haven after beating Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and Panama. You can have secrecy in the USA and states such as Delaware, Nevada, South Dakota, and Wyoming are now competing with each other to provide foreigners with the secrecy they need. However, many are now just migrating to the States. Some 3,000 millionaires from Greece; 10,000 millionaires from France; 6,000 millionaires from Italy; 2,000 millionaires from Spain, and about 2,000 millionaires from Russia have all migrated to the USA. The trend is picking up momentum as tensions between Muslims and Christians rise throughout Europe. After the revelation of the Panama Papers, in which Americans were named the least, the trend is now picking up speed.

There have been a some unusual capital flow developments involving Egypt that illustrate a shortage of dollars caused by the decline in oil prices.

This decline in oil has resulted in a decline in subsidies for Egypt from other Arab nations. What has been taking place is interesting. Shares of Commercial International Bank Egypt on the Cairo market have been bought using Egyptian pounds. These shares were dumped in London and sold for dollars, creating a loss of 20% to 30%. There is a shortage of dollars building, and there are developing net capital movement through proxy instruments.

“You know the same thing is happening in Latin America. Tons of dollars have been flowing there recently and dollar borrowing rates have skyrocketed as all US benchmark rates reached record lows.

Economies are booming and it doesn’t take a genius to see most of it has been funded with cheap dollars flowing from the United States as well as Europe.

Most Latin American countries indeed live on effective two-tier systems as the dollar is readily accepted for payments of most transactions. In particular, mortgages as well as land purchases are usually financed by dollar loans, it’s cheaper, and the lenders usually refuse to have long term exposure to local currencies.

Governments are also usually in the habit of borrowing in dollars. And borrowed they have! Argentina is the key here because they defaulted for political reasons a few years back, and up until now they were being financed by Venezuelan oil money, also for political reasons (Chavez was in the habit of handing out “gifts” in exchange for political favors).

So the short dollar position is indeed a WORLDWIDE issue. It will be very interesting to see what happens if something sparks a run to the USD, like the situation in Europe turning from bad to worse. Dollar borrowers the world over will indeed have a ‘religious experience’ of Biblical proportions!”

It is amazing how people keep touting the demise of the dollar yet cannot comprehend that it remains the only game in town. We may yet see a tremendous capital flight to the dollar for a host of reasons from war and political risk to the landscape of interest rate trends. An Asia capital fight to the dollar may really set in motion the most dramatic swings in the world economy starting very soon.

When we look at the foreign-exchange reserves of developing Asian nations, we find that they are now growing 12% annually. This trend has been bullish for the dollar for central banks are deeply worried about Europe and this limits the scope of what they can hold to primarily dollars. Those who keep preaching the crash on the dollar are perpetually myopic and cannot see the financial landscape on a global scale.

Numerous countries and foreign companies borrow in dollars for rates have been cheap. This trend has masked the decline in China for Chinese companies were borrowing dollars at 1% in Hong Kong and depositing in Beijing collecting 5%. However, because world trade is measured simply by capital movement, this carry-trade masked the fact that real trade was declining matching the performance of the Shanghai Index.

The rates are collapsing in Europe as capital flows to the center fearing war. This trend should begin to shift again and the dollar will rise AFTER 2015.75 with the ECM as it has always done.

We can see the 13 year high following the 1995 low in 2008 that was precisely on target. This should turn back to new highs starting in 2016. You can see the pattern is by no means a Phase Transition or a spike high. The dollar rally into 2008 came way too close to the 1985 high that sparked the birth of the G5 at the Plaza Accord. This is warning that the ultimate spike high that will break the US economy appears off into 2021. This is where we expect to see a capital contraction into the USA from outside the country.

Those who seriously think that the dollar will be impacted by oil or China will unseat the dollar as the reserve currency are simply living in a world of delusion. Such statements made by people display they have no clue about the depth of international capital flows remaining clueless to the FIRST Golden Rule of international capital flows that dictate why the dollar is even the reserve currency. This is the golden rule of a reserve currency always attributes to the most powerful and largest economy throughout history

The SECOND Gold Rule is that of finance over trade in the modern age that has been really accelerated globalization of the world economy since the fall of Bretton Woods. People fail to even comprehend why Bretton Woods collapsed. It had little to do with trade – it was a current account deficit of the USA caused by the global expansion of the military. Even John F. Kennedy understood this and stated bluntly that the US could end its current account deficit any time it desired. I personally believe Kennedy was assassinated because he wanted to curtail the military to support the dollar. That was the real economic issue that he understood.

This globalization of the world economy is best illustrated by trading in foreign exchange markets. Daily foreign exchange trading has reached over $4 trillion, including spot and forward markets and other foreign exchange derivatives that feature prominently in carry trades (cross currency swaps based upon interest rates). While still in the teens in the late 1970s, the ratio of yearly foreign exchange market turnover over merchandise exports had reached about 50:1 in the 1980s, and has doubled again since that time. The current ratio of around 100:1 implies that only about 1% of foreign exchange trading is actually related to merchandise trade. The bulk of money flowing around the world is INVESTMENT. So just how can China or Russia displace the dollar if trade is a tiny fraction of the world economy?

This is the real state of affairs and it is why in 2032 we could be facing a profound change in our political-social-economy. If we have leveraged the entire system far beyond our rational understanding of our management capabilities, then the correction will be equally leveraged on the downside. This is the danger we face for I cannot rule out a Dark Age as long as we over leverage the entire global economy.

I was asked: “Can the dollar and gold rise together?” Yes! However, that variable comes into play when all other avenues become closed. What happens is much like the bubble in Japan. The yen was rising and that attracted some foreign capital, causing the Nikkei to soar and that attracted even more capital. A shares market can also rise with declining currency value but that relationship is associated with DOMESTIC buying as a hedge against inflation. Therefore, gold and the dollar can rise together ONLY when it is international capital flows. That did not materialize 1980-1985 because the gold rally began because of the declining dollar. This time, we may have more capital fleeing the rest of the world so that moves into US dollars, US shares, and gold. However, that scenario precludes gold rising to wild and crazy numbers anyhow and it certainly rules out the hyperinflation nonsense. The exponential rise in gold will come only after the dollar peaks and capital then once in US dollars starts to shift from PUBLIC (bonds) to PRIVATE (assets).

Troika will destroy the liquidity of the Euro:

All it takes is just one law to ruin the economy. Agriculture will certainly be detrimental to farmers, but Brussels wants to outlaw short selling and control the financial markets that are going against them. Their fundamental authoritarian belief is to force the markets to comply with their demands no matter how unreasonable they might be. The European Parliament was pushing to fast-track powers to ban short selling of government debt by early 2011 against the interests of Britain as it would end a free market system. Clearly, the thinking process in Brussels is anti-democratic in every step of the way. This notion of outlawing short selling to stop the markets declining against them is preposterous. It would only fester and destroy London as a financial hub in the world economy. The demise of the London Stock Exchange cannot be ruled out come 2025. That will be 224 years from its founding in 1801. At the very least, we will see a major upheaval and things will change dramatically for them.

However, we are finding simply a capital flight out of the Euro and into the dollar is contributing the free-fall in the Euro.

...the ECB is now attempting to destroy many companies ... by wiping out their short-term liquidity. If companies have no cash on hand because they spent it as the ECB desires, they would run the risk of bankruptcy unable to pay employees in an economic downturn we are likely to see 2016-2020. This policy is having a major impact upon the Euro – far more than anticipated just based upon our own clients.

Yet the problem concerns major companies in Germany listed in the DAX companies. Penalizing liquidity will be even more devastating for the small and medium-sized companies under the ECB’s policy. This is driving the Euro into a free-fall and sending capital flows into the dollar just to maintain liquidity – completely brain-dead ECB policy.

This trend becomes vastly problematic for the corporations leaving no effective alternative – end liquidity or move to the dollar.

Saudi Arabia has banned financial products that amount to a short position against the riyal. The measure indicates the high degree of attack that the peg is starting to come. The government has announced a wave of layoffs in the public sector. This is an absolute first. The Middle East was considered beyond economics because of oil. Everything is changing.

We will see the same situation with respect to the euro. If Britain does not leave the EU, it will stand in silence and its financial standing in the world will collapse. Brussels will adopt the same type of policies and just make it illegal to disagree with them.

Cameron loses fight with EU over allowing short-selling. The European politicians think they can prevent a collapse by outlawing short-selling. What these morons fail to grasp is that once a market turns down and confidence vanishes, the ONLY support is short-covering. Without that, you get the 90% declines as was the case during the Great Depression in the USA. They were hunting down shorts aggressively and nobody would play the short-side resulting in a steady erosion of the market value.

The capital flows MUST push the dollar higher and that will then set the monetary reform and dethrone the dollar. Until that happens, things do not shift. Eventually, China and India will rise because the West will destroy their economies with this constant attack of rising taxes to keep their failed system in motion. That is unsustainable.

You MUST move to extremes to create the change. Change will never come without motivation. The crude oil fell from 1997 to nearly $10 going into that ECM turning point 1998. Our forecast for $100 was met. Yes, oil exceeded that intraday. It could not close any year above $100 stopping at the $98-$99 level. That was the FALSE MOVE – the drop to $10 into 1998 had everyone believing oil was going back to a few dollars. On the upside, all we have heard is how the dollar will crash for it is losing the fight against oil. Opinion ALWAYS mirrors the current trend.

The BUBBLE for 2015,75 should be the bond market – not stocks. The capital flows should move into the typical flight to quality mode and drive rates even lower. This will set the stage for BIG BANG. To accomplish that, we should see the stock markets tread water, but not necessarily drive off the cliff.

We can see the 30 year bonds from a yearly perspective we recreated back to the late 1700s not only elected THREE YEARLY BULLISH REVERSALS for the close of 2014, but the oscillator also turned up. This is reflecting the sectorial capital flow shift. Of course, the dollar haters are out in force claiming our capital flow models are wrong because the stock markets are dropping. This is typical myopic perspective that will prevent them from ever really profiting from what lies ahead. They refuse to comprehend (1) you have capital flows among nations that drives the currencies for example, and (2) you then have sector driven capital flows.

It is the sector flows that we see as bubbles. To create a bubble in anything, we need capital CONCENTRATION. This is where confidence comes into play. People display their herd-instinct by running into a sector because that is what everyone else is doing. People are convinced by price movement.

Fallout From the Swiss is a Dress Rehearsal for the Dollar

The move in the Swiss was extraordinary because of the massive short-Swiss through loans and their own buying of Euros. The audacity of the IMF to even state they will look into this as if they have any such authority or credibility is just stunning. They want the inside info so they can line their own pockets along with friends.

The British brokerage house  Alpari (UK) Limited has entered insolvency due to the Swiss move. There is no way a Broker can limit the risk of an account when something moves 30%. There is more fallout to come. Just keep in mind this will happen when the dollar rises for there is even a larger short-dollar position around the globe. What we have seen in the Swiss will be the dress rehearsal for the dollar.

There remains a vast dollar short-positions as numerous emerging-market governments have issued debt denominated in dollars to save money on interest rates.

Note that even if the Fed isn't raising rates, the market is already doing so, as I explained we much look at the statistical change in composition of private portfolios from Treasuries to a mix of corporate AAA and emerging market debt ($9 trillion in dollar loans abroad to emerging markets as of 2015, an increase from $5.7 trillion in 2014):

The collapse in the Swiss/Euro Peg has exposed the amount of mortgages and loans in Swiss being found in Britain to Greece. This is a drop in the bucket. For the amount of debt issued in dollars has grown by 50% since 2007 and has now reached some $9 trillion. This the total amount owed in dollars by non-bank borrowers outside the USA. If the Fed raises interest rates as anticipated this year for the first time since 2006, higher borrowing costs for companies and governments, along with a stronger greenback, will create the greatest economic collapse in modern times.

The dollar debt is just one example of how the Fed’s tightening would ripple through the world economy. From the housing markets in Canada and Hong Kong to capital flows into and out of China and Turkey right down throughout South America and lets not forget the Middle East and Australia.

I have explained the QE1-3 would not be inflationary and all those who simply try to equate inflation to money supply have been dead wrong. The dollar is now THE world currency. Not merely is world trade taking place in dollars, we have world debt as well. The increase in money supply has been easily absorbed globally and that has rendered the old theory constructed on a simplistic idea that inflation is solely driven by an increase in money supply are in adequate in today’s global economy.

Liquidity conditions globally will start to tighten as this idea of negative interest rates unwinding the entire leverage of the economy as well. Emerging markets will not be the only area that will be affected. We have a domestic US economy now being fueled by collapsing energy prices and mortgage rates falling through the floor to historic lows.

The broad trade-weighted dollar has strengthened 12.3% since June, and we expect the dollar outright will advance further as the Fed is forced to tighten while the European Central Bank continues to monetize with negative interest rates buying in failed sovereign debt. Of course, Japan extends its record stimulus as well leaving the USA the only game in town. The pegs of China will have to go as the dollar rises China will have to let go of the balloon or be dragged even higher into the sky without a footing. The pegs in the Middle East and Denmark will also have to go as more and more cappital concentrates into the USA.

The real importance here is the setting of the stage for the one-world reserve currency. To reach that point, what we need is a strong dollar rally that will hurt the world economy significantly forcing political change. This is ripe for Obama has done far more to destroy the integrity of the United States than anyone could have possibly imagined. In just 3.14 years, he wiped out decades of peace and reignited the cold war.

So the resistance toward the dollar is there waiting in the wings. However, this will not prevent the rally near-term in the dollar. It is illustrating that eventually we will abandon the dollar as the reserve currency and the botched job creating the Euro has also contributed to setting this trend in motion. Displacing the dollar takes decades to accomplish for it is one domino at a time. Such profound changes to the world monetary system are not accomplished overnight. It took 26 years to wipe out Bretton Woods. From 1971, it was 26 years to the start of the Euro and the Asian Currency Crisis. We should see the dollar displacement by the peak of the next 8,6 year wave.

As we stated at the conferences, nothing appears ready to break before May. Nevertheless, the crazy period ahead appears to be the 2017-2020 time frame. The euro held the Yearly Bearish at the 103 area and elected the 116 number. Normally we would see a rally first to retest that area before turning down.

Technically, this view from the reversal model is also supported. When we broke that uptrend line, there was no retest. The euro just collapsed. We should mount some sort of a retest. As far as breaking the 80 cent level, as we have stated before, that is not short-term, but long-term. This type of move will send the U.S. dollar higher after 2017.

Every time the dollar moves to record highs, we get major monetary reform. Roosevelt devalued the dollar in 1934, and in 1985 when the dollar was pushed to all-time record highs they formed G5, which is now G20. When it broke in 1971, we ended up with the Floating Exchange Rate System. Extreme moves in the dollar spark political economic reform. Governments see this coming and are preparing to move electronic.

This is the type of move we need to see to create the change in the monetary system once again. It will probably take the form of the U.S. dollar no longer being the reserve currency. We will probably be looking at some electronic currency based on a basket.

So nothing has changed yet. We have a long, hard, road ahead into 2020.

So what we need to complete here is the dollar rally. There is about $9 trillion in dollar short positions from emerging markets. Clients around the world have been calling us in for consultations, as usual, since the number one creator of havoc is currency. More than 75% of corporate losses have to do with currency.

We have not yet felt the pain needed to create the major global shifts for the future. The TIME is not right. It appears to be the second benchmark. If you look at these markets from a connected basis, it becomes easier to see the trend. Our forecast for a dollar rally is critical to the outcome as a whole and we are seeing the subtle pressure building, as with China’s devaluation. A dollar rally will create global chaos and that is the key to political change. If you are familiar with charts, our Dollar Index back to 1900 shows that the dollar is still alive and well with a new spike high being within the realm of possibility.

Furthermore, so many people (mainly Americans) are so bearish on the dollar because of debt that they cannot see the simple fact that even $17 trillion in debt is nothing in comparison to $158 trillion in worldwide debt. They also fail to grasp that the US debt is the ONLY place for money right now to park among nations. Europe has no single debt and as such we see predominantly the bunds of Germany going negative as capital shifts to Germany inside the EU.

Additionally, the vast majority of people do not understand how capital moves and therein lies their problem. Just look at what happened in Europe. Back in 2010 when Greece first came on the radar as in trouble, capital began to flee and traders looked around to see who would be next. They suddenly discovered Portugal, Spain, and Italy. There are now sniffing around at France. In 1931, when all of Europe moved into default with a few exceptions, China and Asia as well as South America for the fourth time overall, capital fled to the USA sending the dollar to record highs. This set in motion the whole protectionism game as politicians did not understand what was developing.

Herbert Hoover wrote in his memoirs “foreign government reserve deposits were constantly driven by fear hither an yon over the world. We were to see currencies demoralized and governments embarrassed as fear drove the gold from one country to another. … [capital] behaved like a loose cannon on the deck of the world in a tempest-tossed era.”

Understanding how capital moves is absolutely imperative to surviving the future. If you cannot grasp this aspect, you will lose everything by 2020 – and that is no joke. The US Federal Reserve has pulled the trigger on the nonsense of QE and has cautioned that rates will rise. The Fed will have no choice as the stock market rallies they will be criticized for QE creating inflation. Of course this will not be true since the dollar is being absorbed globally. You cannot simply add QE to domestic economic conditions and expect inflation. The dollar is the RESERVE currency and it is a global money supply – not purely domestic.

We will see not just Russia in economic chaos as commodities must decline into the end of 2015 including energy as the dollar rises, but all emerging markets must now brace for their ordeal by fire. Domestic analysts focus purely on domestic issues never looking around the globe to comprehend the real trend at hand. Emerging markets have collectively borrowed $5.7 trillion actually in US dollars. This presents  a repeat of Greece.

The Greek financial crisis was caused NOT by simply unrestricted spending, but the conversion of their debt to euros and then the euro rose in value more than doubling the “real money” they had to repay. This became like stip-mining taking the wealth of Greece and exporting it to the bond holders. It was such a great deal for the buyers of government debt like money from heaven, and the worst of all worlds for the Greek people.

Now we will see this VERY SAME trend hit the emerging markets like a hammer. The emerging markets have issued debt in dollars which is a currency they cannot print and do not control. This hard-currency debt has tripled in the last decade and is split between $3.1 trillion in bank loans and $2.6 trillion in bonds. This will ripple through the banks causing massive new losses just as the Cyprus banks held Greek debt. This time, it will be the debt of all emerging markets. We are looking at a drastic scale of the biggest cross-border lending sprees of the past two centuries.
A large portion of this emerging market debt was taken out at real interest rates of 1% on the implicit assumption that the Fed would continue to flood the world with liquidity for years to come. This has made the emerging markets vast borrowers dollars so in a trading position they are “short dollars”. This is the greatest short-position on a currency on the boards and when the dollar RISES, they will face the margin call from Hell itself. This will set off another banking crisis for bankers always buy the high and sell the low. They have NEVER learned even once from any economic crisis.
The Fed dashed all lingering hopes for continued dollar leniency on Wednesday this past week. The pledge to keep QE-stimulus for a “considerable time” has vanished into the sunset.  The developing countries may be just as vulnerable to a dollar shock. The Russian Rouble crash is just the beginning. Furthermore, the commodity bulls have found every possible excuse to convince themselves that China would continue to drive a commodity supercycle. That has proven to be dead wrong for a unbiased glance at their share markets there clearly demonstrate a decline has been in motion since 2007.

These false assumptions have blown up hedge funds and traders around the globe as results for 2014 have proven to be the worst year perhaps ever. Russia’s Vladimir Putin may be brilliant, but his timing is way off for his country suggesting that the hard times ahead will be even harder.

The collapse in energy also threatens to create massive economic readjustments throughout the Middle East. Additionally, this economic chaos is spreading beyond Russia reaching also Nigeria, Venezuela and other petro-states. Indonesia had to intervene on Wednesday to defend the rupiah. Brazil’s real has fallen to a 10-year low against the dollar, as has the index of emerging market currencies. Sao Paolo’s Bovespa index is down 23% in dollars in three weeks.

The coming meltdown in Emerging Market debt can be seen in Pimco’s Emerging Market Corporate Bond Fund, which suffered a loss of $237m in November, and the pain is unlikely to stop as clients discover that 24% of its portfolio is in Russia. We are facing a very serious crisis for BIG BANG.

Clearly, gold is not in such a Waterfall Event no matter how bearish everyone gets. We have moved beyond the 3 year window from 2011 and the Yearly Bearish Reversal at $681 has held. To make that final low in gold, the vast majority have to write off gold entirely and regard it as the WSJ just did – nothing more than a “pet rock”. So as the bearishness builds, this is good for establishing character separating the traders from the fools who just believe propaganda and trade fundamentally. But the hate mails still come in and this warns the tree must still be shaken. When they stop, then the market will be ready to rebound but only on short-covering – not new longs. So expect no sudden news of a huge buyer to save the day. That will NEVER happen. The low is made by massive shorts just as highs are made by fools rushing in an believe the propaganda of the promoters at the top.

So far, we are still dealing with a reaction only phase. That could have produced a low as soon as 2013 with a rally into 2015.75, but that would have required also a Phase Transition in the equities, which did not materialize. It would have also required a premature peak in government (low in interest rates), which Larry Summers assured us would not happen by justifying negative interest rates. A 3 year reaction would have been a low in 2014. We just proved that pattern wrong as well making new lows here in 2015. This is a bear market so we have to do some damage. The PRICE objective of breaking $1,000 was not met within that 3 year window so we must look to the Benchmarks as laid out in the International Precious Metals Report.

Gold has not bottomed as of yet for it must line up with everything else. The sell signal at the end of July was yet another confirmation that new lows still lie ahead. The Phase Transition in the Dow was postponed for the post-2015.75 era because this target is manifesting as the peak in government – not the private sector assets. Therefore, we should see the low in short-term rates with this target with the last rush into Flight to Quality. This postponement in the Dow likewise secured the decline in gold would be protracted rather than the typical 2 year correction with the low in 2013 or even a 3 year reaction low in 2014.

Those targets for the low in gold are in the International Precious Metals Report that warns of the final decline. We are NOT looking for the low in gold to be on October 1 either. If that materialized, it would be extremely profound. However, the more likely event will be the rush to cash completing the final Flight to Quality.

The euro has an EXTREMELY RARE virtual TRIPLE WEEKLY BEARISH REVERSAL at 10815. This is not looking very good for Europe. Our model is setting up for the massive dollar rally that the dollar haters just cannot comprehend. They swear the dollar will collapse and the U.S. will lose its reserve currency status out of thin air. They are SO DEAD WRONG; it is a shame for we are about to enter a period where there will not be a single asset class standing without its ardent supporters suffering huge losses.

The HIGHER the dollar rallies, the more likely it is to create an economic storm and losses. If the dollar declines, then all those who issued dollar debt will win. How do we create an economic downturn with a declining dollar? Corporate profits will rise, not fall, and the $9 trillion in dollar-denominated debt will reap huge profits instead of losses.

Then there are the crazies who cannot see the forest for the trees; they send in e-mails that say I am wrong and the dollar will collapse because Russia is abandoning the dollar. They are so lost in thinking that Russia is somehow a major holder of dollars. What is the alternative? There is nothing. A rise in the dollar will inflict the greatest losses worldwide and then the cry for an independent reserve currency will emerge. A declining dollar will NOT dethrone it.

It is really all about the elites holding the power. Asia has youth so they don't need to cull the unfunded liabilities,

...you say from a Phillipine perspective.  Japan, Korea, even China(!) not so much.  Better say South and Southeast Asia.  Then the exceptions become inconsequential.

North Asia's demographics are decades away from the collapse mode of Europe. And besides, the youth in the rest of Asia (including India) so far outnumber the elderly in North Asia by a significant margin. Asia will integrate and leverage its youth throughout the Asia economic Union. Starting this year, professionals in any country in the Asian Union can migrate to work in any of the other countries. Asia is going to rocket up as the West falls into the demographic abyss. The USA leverages Latin America and the Bible Belt to keep its youthful demographics from imploding. Europe is adding to their woes by importing millions of migrants who are culturally incompatible, so instead of economic integration there will be strife and disintegration. Europe is a complete disaster. Which is another reason for the coming USD and US stocks mega rally.

Saying AI can't surpass human creativity, though - that's utter bunk.  Stick breaking in Banach spaces is not rocket science any more.  We have the math.  We just haven't had the time and money to implement it yet.

Try to actually rebut my mathematical and physics reasoning. Then we can have a discussion.

Okay.

A.I. mastering the known sciences, has nothing to do with my point about where future creativity is derived from serendipity of chance meeting imperfection. If computation could replace the necessary finitenessnumerability of the speed-of-light and the necessary zigzag imperfection fitness annealing of nature, then omniscience is possible, the speed-of-light is infiniteinnumerable, and the past and future (light cones of relativity) collapse into an infinitesimal point of nothingness. And nothing exists any more. Kurzweil is a certified idiot!

This bit?  Serendipity is just a stochastic algorithm.  In no wise is it the hard part of constructed intelligence.  Simulated annealling has been a staple of non-convex optimization since Metropolis-Hastings.  I know of no reason to think that any emergent phenomena of the physical substratum is not amenable to simulation to a degree of accuracy sufficient to generate every perceivable organizational behaviour required for any clearly definable pragmatically useful behaviour or outcome.  Quite the contrary:  In every case studied, the consistent pattern has been for the accuracy of simulation models to increase to within some infinitesimal delta of the principled bounds of information, where any further precision becomes an accuracy illusion, and the differences no longer make a difference.

Since you've entirely missed addressing my point, then there is nothing to rebut.

I should give you a hint to try to steer you to discover your error, otherwise you might dismiss me under some wrong impression that I am cankerous and hand waving.

There is no such thing as "accuracy" in creativity. The entire point is there can't be a top-down observer (to measure any such metric) because this would require the speed-of-light to be not finitenumerable. Creativity originates from imperfection, or stated in another way, from the entropy of the diverse perspectives. Diverse "fitness" (i.e. creativity and not one correct fit) is occurring due to the fact that nature is not measuring any thing globally. The only way to approximate nature is to recreate how diverse evolution functions. There isn't any superior omniscience. What ever A.I. is, it can never be more perfect or superior to every other thing in nature, because that would be the antithesis of a finitenumerable speed-of-light which requires local diverse perspectives. Without a finitenumerable speed-of-light, nothing can exist because past and future would collapse into the same infinitesimal point of nothingness.

I had explained all this already. You are simply not grasping that existence is a game of chance. A.I. would simply become another species in the game. A.I. can't be any more creative than I can be more creative than a monkey. A monkey does creativity in it's ecosystem that I can't do. Man could attempt to kill all the monkeys because we make superior weapons, but remember "we can't do just one thing". There are always ramifications. Kill all the monkeys and some other ecosystem changes (aka trophic cascade), which dominos and eventually impacts humans in some probably "undesirable" way since we not automatically adapted to any change (yet some will always prosper with any change, as that is the way creativity functions, since we are diverse opportunists operating in diverse local perspectives). Ditto A.I., because by correct definition of intelligence (which is always randomly accretive and not deterministic order) it can't be omniscient.

All the failure of your approach at analysing this issue begins and ends with your lack of focus of the necessity of the finitenessnumerability of the speed-of-light. Which also implies you don't grasp the Second Law of Thermodynamics at a fundamental level.

You go off on terms such as intelligence and determinism, without relating to them fact that they are ill-defined concepts. Start from well-defined fundamentals as I have done and you won't end up in ill-defined soup.

There is no such thing as a "non-physical reality". Physical is an ill-defined distinction. Verlinde's link between information and gravity should hint you of that. The red-herring is constructing ill-defined strawmen concepts.

I have stated in the past that for A.I. to be creative, then it would have to make mistakes and be alive. So my entire point has been to dispel this fear of A.I. becoming some omniscient superior force that subsumes the relevance of every other species in the universe. I have not stated that it is impossible to create new species. Heck humans have been engineering new species of plants and animals with cross breeding. My point is don't expect A.I. to be any more "perfect" than the finite ability to collect and process information globally which is inherently limited by the speed-of-light. Man might need to disperse light-years away into the universe in order to keep A.I. from being absolutely dominant at some point. But I don't even think that will be necessary, because for A.I. to be truly creative, then each instance of A.I. needs to have free will. Because otherwise it would mean the universe was deterministic, which thus would imply the speed-of-light is not finitenumerable (that future is already predetermined). By definition, free will requires that there can't be any omniscient control and that there must be divergence and "mistakes".

It seems you fail to understand that existence requires divergence. Convergence is not distinct from a static system. Convergence would require that the entropy of the universe is not trending to maximum, thus violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Really AlphaGo was an underappreciated watershed.  The gamespace of Go is large enough to be a fully qualified proxy for (countable) infinity.  The simple architectural trick of policy network separation, in combination with a lengthy catalog of less pivotal techniques, made the difference between a heuristic algorithm for guided search, such as is applicable in chess, and a meaningfully creative learner.  If you need to add another dimension to a learner's representation space, you just add a parameter.  It's really no big deal.  It's certainly not the stopping point of creative intelligence.

The key factor you are missing in your analogy is free will.

The hardest button to button in closing the loop on AI is the temporal sequence chaos which allows unbounded forward chaining inference to "jump outside of the system" in the classical Hofstadterian description, not just in toy cases, but quite generally.  It's not in the static representation space.  It's in the dynamical system.  But I have seen enough successes (and failures) in process discovery to be quite committed to the task of proving concretely that the fitness landscape is rich enough, and the requirements of practical intelligence weak enough, so that effectively unbounded arbitrarily good approximate covers of the space of intelligence behaviour ensembles are possible.   (I do not claim they are finite covers.)

Again you are focused on fitness and not on the fact that dynamic systems require divergence and free will, and thus there isn't one best fitness. No one can say which fit is good or bad. This is the essence of creativity.

It's like this:  Who really cares about transcendental numbers except as theoretical objects?  Yes, overwhelmingly all of the reals are transcendental.  But algebraic numbers, or a truncation of an infinite algebraic series, will suffice for any computation resulting in an observable.  I admit that the search landscape for dynamical systems embodying creative intelligence is not a perfect cover.  The inverse may be dense in that space.  But I also hold that the positive set is dense in that space as well.  We know how to add orthogonal dimensions to a representation space at will, I am sure you can agree.  All I ask is that you acknowledge that generalizing that to adding independent dimensions to a process space is not significantly harder, AND that the resulting behaviour manifold can be dense in the infinite-dimensional manifold containing the most precise possible description of every intelligent (creative) behaviour.  The last is not practically proven, but neither is it prohibited by first principles.  

Structure and process are duals.  Where you can create in structure, you can create in process, and vice versa. In summary, the one weird trick a Minnesota dad is using to make creative AGI is to apply that creative process to self-representation, to the self-representation of the process which embodies self.  The result is a space-filling bifurcation cascade in a Banach space of truth-functionals, which suffices to dominate every control strategy.  (I am using the words loosely because I'm not trying to do a proof here, just describe in tight summary a constructive strategy using coherent and illustrative language with sufficient clarity to make the fulfillment - with lots of sweat and capital - plausible in every regard.) I can go on about the pragmatic strategy elsewhere.  This is only to emphasize that it is not a project predicated on a contradiction.

There is a lot of math one could imbue an A.I. species with (much of it I am not even expert enough to digest), but ultimately you have to give it randomness and imperfection (i.e. free will) else it will just be a closed universe, static, and convergent.

Randomness means it interacts with its local environment and there is not total order. The partial orders is what makes the universe divergent (and irreversible) and allows for our existence to not collapse into a globally deterministic future (i.e. a total order) and instead a trend to maximum entropy. If the speed-of-light was not finitenumerable, some omniscience could indeed calculate a total order and reverse time. If time can be reversed, then nothing is exists, because everything is already statically determined from all past to all future and thus there is no free will.

It is quite elegant how the finitenessnumerability of the speed-of-light is essential and that we can't have existence without divergence and free will. It all fits together elegantly. As Einstein quipped, theories should be beautiful and elegant.

[aminorex]

Who knows if I'll ever have a chance to write a proper reply?  I know that I can't now, so I will cherry pick a few points:

I composed that last post as a response to the text which your back link indicated, and that text did not require or imply the framing or premises which you observed were missing from my post.  A response which accounted for those would necessarily have been quite a bit longer, or would have been forced to assume a great deal of context which I am unwilling to take as given - certainly not without a negotiated examination.

I disagree with the representation that determinism and intelligence are not well-defined, in a general sense.  (They are admittedly polysemous, and some of those senses are pretty fuzzy, but as terms of art they can be quite clear.  Infinity, an analogous example, is about as well defined as a term of art as any formal object can be, and also maximally polysemous.)

A system is deterministic when its state at time t suffices to exactly infer (fully specify) its state at time t plus delta, for all t, and for all delta greater or equal to the infimum of the set of finite deltas.  (Explicitly: State need not be finite, and no Markovian property is assumed.)

Intelligence is a lattice coordinate in a partial ordering of agents, such that A <=[c] B with probability P iff P(e(A) <= e(B) | c), where e(X) is the loss of the action sequence of X given hyperparameters c.  (Interpolation over property distributions of lattice neighbors allows for a metric approximation, and dimension reduction techniques can certainly be used pack
the metric into a 1-d continuum, when context requires it.)

Then you say:  You've just shoved all the interestingness into the objective function and the definition of neighborhood.  Then I say:  An axiom schema is no less well defined than an unschematized axiom, and significantly more potent. 

Even more controversially I will propose a prototype definition of creativity as the surprisal of an observer model for the likelihood distribution of the response function of an agent.  So far, I like this because it allows one to dial-in a trade-off between formal clarity and alignment to ordinary language use of the term.  It generalizes in useful ways.

As delightful as I find Verlinde to be, I am pretty skeptical of the physicality of his theory.  There are some respected counterarguments which I have not done the dilligence to examine.  I am hoping he's very close to right, because it would confirm my own long-held metaphysical biases in a particularly gratifying way, but I am not making book on it yet.

If you expect me to prove that space is metric, I'll just shrug, since I don't even believe that it is.  Metricity is just a useful model, and there are no experiments feasible to exclude that the reality is only approximately metric.  I think that's why I balk at your ab initio calculations so often:  I am much more skeptical of the reliability of metricity assumptions.  I usually try to restrict my assumptions to weak topologies, which seem less likely to be mistaken, as they exclude fewer possibilities, and are in the main not relevantly less powerful.  In general I find myself with too much bias and not enough variance, so it is my preferred direction of model error.

[iamnotback]

Who knows if I'll ever have a chance to write a proper reply?  I know that I can't now, so I will cherry pick a few points:

Ditto me. It would take me some time to unpack your condensed mathematical logic herein.

Then you say:  You've just shoved all the interestingness into the objective function and the definition of neighborhood.  Then I say:  An axiom schema is no less well defined than an unschematized axiom, and significantly more potent.

CoinCube raised the point upthread that purely localized focused systems can't converge on anything. Life is a diverse mix of top-down and bottom-up organization.

My point I think is that never will be there an entirely dominate 100% total top-down order, thus there can't any omniscient A.I.. As well, never will any species or individual actor be entirely immune to impact from top-down efficiencies. I am not arguing that A.I. can't have some radical impacts, rather I am disputing this notion of omnipotent A.I. that Kurzweil sensationalizes obstensibly to sell books and public speaking engagements.