For people who don’t know, John H. Conway’s doomsday algorithm allows you to compute the day of the week for any date by starting from a set of memorable dates (called “doomsdays”) and working from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_rule
So for example doomsday for this year is a Saturday, so I know the last day in February is a Saturday (this Saturday in fact) and also that Independence Day, Boxing Day and Halloween are also going to be on Saturday this year, because they are all Doomsdays (on non-leap years).
“Can’t complain” doesn’t make it legal. I had this argument a number of times with cryptobros at the time “if it’s on the chain it’s fair game” I heard quite often. Just, no. Just because some code allows you to get away with something doesn’t make it not illegal[1].
The thing is you or I don’t get to say what is or isn’t a market that is covered by market abuse laws. Regulators do, and while it’s true to say none of the relevant regulators had stepped up and conclusively shown these markets were under their jurisdiction, they had repeatedly said they were looking into them and given hints they felt they had jurisdiction. Heck, I was in a meeting with Kevin Warsh around 2014 or so[2] where he asked about bitcoin so it’s clear the fed was at least looking into crypto at that time long before they made public comment. ISTR talking to the cftc at the same time and they asked about it too.
So “unregulated” in this context doesn’t mean “not covered by regulation” it means “regulatory status extremely uncertain”. If you want to go in with a very aggressive strategy you’re taking some risk that regulators will post facto go after you because they do that a lot in conventional markets.
[1] Market abuse in this case, but it’s obviously the case in cybersecurity also.
[2] This isn’t some kind of weird boast btw, cbankers and regulators meet with people from industry all the time as part of their normal information-gathering process and he met with a group of us who were working with some bank on detecting things like market abuse. He had some sort of academic position at Stanford at the time iirc looking into various types of bank regulation, but he was still plugged into the fed governors because he had only just left that.
> Since the last several months, your US visa will be rejected if you do not submit public social media profiles.
I don’t think this is true. You can get a visa just fine if you don’t have social media profiles. Source: me. I don’t have facebook, insta, twitter etc and travel to the US just fine. When I filled in the form I left those empty.
What I think you can’t do is get a visa if you have social media profiles and choose not to disclose them or you post things or have friends/links on your social media that cbp considers elevates your risk etc.
Sure but if that’s the case there should be some tax on the mark to market difference. If not it’s just straight up tax fraud (which I suspect is often actually the case).
It’s sort of disappointing to me how on both sides it seems hard to have any sort of rational perspective. I find both the Citrini memo (and the subsequent market reaction) and Ed Zitron’s critique of it to be wildly off-base.
People often use that example, but Newton, for all he was unquestionably a giant of physics, was a bit of a weird dude and not 100% rationalist[1]. Additionally, just because he was a great physicist doesn't mean he knew anything at all about investment. You can be an expert in one field and pretty dumb in others. Linus Pauling (a giant in chemistry) had beliefs in terms of medicine that were basically pseudoscience.
> ...was a bit of a weird dude and not 100% rationalist...
That covers everyone. Especially and including the rationalists. Part of being highly intelligent is being a bit weird because the habits and beliefs of ordinary people are those you'd expect of people with ordinary intelligence.
Anyone involved in small-time investing should be considering that they aren't rational when setting their strategy. Larger investment houses do what they can but even then every so often will suffer from group-think episodes.
> Newton, for all he was unquestionably a giant of physics, was a bit of a weird dude and not 100% rationalist
The norms of "rational" science hadn't really been established yet. There wasn't really a clear line drawn between alchemy and what we would consider chemistry today.
That is what I used to think, but if you dig a little deeper I'm not sure it's quite that simple. If you read the link I posted, all that work on alchemy was not printed after his death because people examined it and deemed it "not fit to print". So it definitely seems that even at the time, there may not have been a clear line, but people felt that his alchemical writings were on the wrong side of whatever line might in future be drawn.
Newton was also definitely in favour of an empirical/axiomatic basis for science in general. If you read principia he proves almost everything[1] and of course he famously deformed his own eyeballs with wooden gadgets to do his experiments in optics.
[1] In fact pretty much the one thing he doesn't prove is the calculus, which Alex Kontorovich once said in a lecture on youtube that he has a pet theory that the reason that Newton never published the calculus was not the one everyone says about his rivalry with Hooke etc but that he wanted a rigorous proof first (which of course didn't come about until much later with Cauchy, Weierstrass, Dedekind etc for normal calculus and the 1960s for non-standard analysis to prove Newton's fluxions rigorously).
As I understand it, Master of the mint was more about knowing enough metallurgy to not be ripped off by people using weak alloys to smelt coins. It wasn’t like a modern central banker or anything like that.
Yes. You can get llms to generate just about anything you want in mathematica and in particular the gpt-4.4 -> 4.5 generation had a massive improvement in mathematica code correctness in particular so it really seemed to me at that stage they specifically worked on it.
Yes. My bet is they are going to try to say that a “balance of payments” problem is a “payments problem”, which maybe it is maybe it isn’t. It certainly sounds like it wasn’t what the framers of this particular law had in mind but there we are.
> they are going to try to say that a “balance of payments” problem is a “payments problem”
"The balance of payments consists of two primary components: the current account and the...financial account" [1]. The current account is the trade deficit or surplus in goods and services. The financial account (a/k/a the capital account) tracks movement of money.
If you have a free-floating currency, your balance of payments is always zero. This is the principle advantage of a free-floating currency: your exchange rate adjusts to finance trade deficits and invest surpluses [2]. America does not have a balance of payments problem because America doesn't fix the price of a dollar.
The best the U.S. could argue for § 122 jurisdiction is that a trade deficit constittues a fundamental international payments problem. That is, of course, nonsense from an economics perspective. But I don't know how these terms have been used in U.S. trade law. (My strongest argument against the author's argument woudld be that the Congress passing statute that "no longer applied by the time the Trade Act was introduced" merits deeper scrutiny of Congressional intent.)
So for example doomsday for this year is a Saturday, so I know the last day in February is a Saturday (this Saturday in fact) and also that Independence Day, Boxing Day and Halloween are also going to be on Saturday this year, because they are all Doomsdays (on non-leap years).
reply