Hey man, fellow Brit here. The American view on certain aspects of British life is insane. I've lived in not one but two places that have been called Muslim no-go zones in American media. My main memory of living near the east London mosque is an elderly Muslim trying to offer my his seat on the bus (I was on crutches) while two drunk gammons looked on gormlessly.
On the other hand, it is quite alarming that I can no longer say I support all non violent protests against the genocide in Palestine because that would include the group Palestine Action. It's amazing that supporting them openly is essentially equivalent to supporting Al Qaeda.
I think you've slightly straw manned the lamentation there. Not that I agree with the lamentation, but using your talent to make the rich richer (which is what quants do, they are paid a fixed amount to provide a larger value up the chain), as opposed to advancing human knowledge, is the reason for the lament, not some sort of respectability issue.
One way to make money is to create a great product that solves a problem people have and market it effectively. That's a sort of idealised situation, an aspiration, but it's what I would call socially valuable. Another way is to help people who are already rich move their money around so that they become richer, in return for a fraction of the increase in wealth. I personally have no problem with that, everybody has to make a living, but that is not socially valuable. It is debatable how socially valuable pure mathematics research is. But you take a fixed fee and all your best work is public domain.
Liquidity is extremely socially valuable from my perspective
I view the concept of "the market" as a construction project, that isn't finished. Not finished until every device around you can be traded instantly, with fractional shares even, with high liquidity and a capability for to the second price discovery, and there is a liquid options market on top of that.
The price of anything is not really resolved, its ability to be collateral and access a more liquid form of exchange at any time is not resolved.
Time is valuable, all of this reduces the time. There are still people waiting 90 days to access cash tied up in their home's equity, when another part of the market has split second collateralized lending. All of the market for anything should be that way.
The ability to exchange is valuable and wealthy people have liquidity issues. Poor people have liquidity issues. Everyone has a liquidity issue and doesn't know it.
Anything that slows things down slows down the whole construction project. A market with five 8 hour trading sessions a week with settlement the next day moves far slower than a market with three times as many trading sessions during the same time frame, where the trade is the settlement. The opportunities become endless for people aiming to accumulate more, the liquidity of traders to do actual business and negotiation and acquire goods and services and raise capital becomes vastly greater and far faster. Proving a new venture all the way to an exit becomes far faster, and results in the wealth distribution to the employees, vendors, and everyone else far faster and far greater.
That's what I see and look forward to. That has extremely high social value. Promoting liquidity and promoting velocity of transactions helps solve the actual reservations people have about the market at all. More paths for people on the poorer side of the bell curve to afford things.
As in: most popular modern board games combine both luck and skill. That would imply that like the parent, most people enjoy games that combine both rather than being purely skill xor luck based.
Seems dismissive at first, but I interviewed a chess team captain once and he told me they prepared for upcoming matches by learning new lines they wanted to play and studying the lines the opposing school was deemed likely to play.
Sometimes people will bring up the fact that Plato thought reading and writing were ruining real thought in response to things like this. Or "you won't walk around with a calculator in your pocket"
But there are two possibilities in cases like these. Either we will figure out how to leverage the newfangled thing to our advantage (like reading and writing) or we will figure out a way not to need it. How often do you really use the calculator on your phone to do arithmetic? Maybe it's just me but I almost never do. At least where I live, these days I can always split the bill by selecting my items on a screen (and frankly that happens pretty rarely). I know people who use LLMs for it!
AI is probably a bit of both. I think managers will one day realise that copy pasting screenshots isn't getting them far. Or if they don't, their managers will realise they're paying someone for nothing and fire them.
Well it only works when there is no information at all apart from the past frequency.
It's the solution to the tank problem. You know that the enemy number their tanks as they're produced. You capture a tank and know its number, N. What's the best guess about how many tanks the enemy has produced so far? As a pure mathematical model with no other details, the best guess is 2N. Of course in reality you have some ideas about how long it takes to make a tank, how many resources the enemy has etc.
Analogously you have information about the way trends develop.
Also they make it really difficult to mass delete stuff. I'm basically stuck paying for their storage because I don't really have the skills to self host (but I'm working on it!)
They make it impossible to delete stuff if you stop paying!
I was on Google Workspace for about 10 years. I moved off their service because the mandatory Gemini price hikes meant that it no longer represented value for money.
I get excessive storage utilisation warnings for some shared drives I used to have but because I no longer have a paid up license, I can’t manage shared drives anymore. So I can’t delete them.
Google’s “support” team in India told me all sorts of lies about how to resolve the issue, but they’ve finally settled on a position that I would need to reinstate my Workspace account, at my own expense in order to delete the data to stop the emails and save Google money.
They refuse to acknowledge the patent absurdity of this situation and escalate it to someone who can actually fix it.
> I get excessive storage utilisation warnings for some shared drives I used to have but because I no longer have a paid up license, I can’t manage shared drives anymore. So I can’t delete them.
I had the same problem, and when my account was suspended, it was practically impossible to resubscribe because no Workspace plan could accommodate the amount of storage I used.
I'd thankfully managed to transfer out most of my important data elsewhere, so I made my peace with the less important Linux ISOs getting deleted.
The I'm sorry (that someone died) is easy to explain as it's obviously connected to the word sorrow. The hardest is "sorry?" (I didn't understand or hear you)
It's easy to explain, but her language (Vietnamese) has no relation to English other than forced adoption of the Latin alphabet, so she wouldn't see that connection.
"Sorry" is most commonly translated as "xin lỗi" which literally means something like "request forgiveness". It's connected exclusively to the notion of fault, not sadness. The real issue is that sorry <-> xin lỗi is a ubiquitous but poor translation, because the meaning of xin lỗi is much more specific than sorry.
I speak Urdu (another South Asian language). If you asked someone the meaning of sorry in Urdu they would always say "ma'afi/ma'af karna" which is very strictly "asking forgiveness" although it "can" be used as "I didnt hear you / come again" literally nobody ever uses it that way
Someone once came over to tell me I was using a machine wrong and I thanked them, collected my things, and left. Haven't been back to a gym in two years! But to be honest I enjoy body weight exercises and cycling better anyway.
For a puzzle of this sort I would expect to be able to create multiple path segments and connect them later. I would be able to do this with paper and pencil. For instance on the first puzzle you can deduce the way 2 and 3 must be connected without knowing how to connect 1 and 2.
On the other hand, it is quite alarming that I can no longer say I support all non violent protests against the genocide in Palestine because that would include the group Palestine Action. It's amazing that supporting them openly is essentially equivalent to supporting Al Qaeda.
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