> Four hours of knowledge work a day is actually a lot. The average corporate worker probably does far less. Meetings, small talk, answering emails, etc. feel like work, but most of the time it isn’t. Four hours of focused knowledge work can produce exponential more value that four hours of meetings.
No idea if I should be rolling on the floor laughing or extremely saddened reading that. I might advice taking a reality check before spurring this kind of non sense in public if you want to avoid sounding both entitled and utterly disconnected.
The complaint - which I definetely share by the way - is that for all the critical acclaim it got, Emily Wilson's translation strays so far from the actual text, it is not really a translation anymore and is actually closer to being a new text inspired by the Odyssey. That's fine if that's what you are looking for but it doesn't make for a great translation.
The πολύτροπος thing is a complete red herring by the way. Her translation is questionnable but remains within the bound of what I would expect from a modern translator. I am more annoyed by everything she drops in the rest of the poem. Remarkably and annoyingly, the coverage when her translation was released spend far more time dwelling on her gender than on her actual work.
I don't like the way you handwaved my criticism. Complete red herring? I brought up only the first line because it's the most famous part of the poem and it sets the tone for the rest of the book, which – as you pointed out – is more of an adaptation. It might be acceptable for some people, fact remains that the new sentence hardly resembles the original meaning. If meaning can't be our benchmark, then how do we determine the quality of a translation?
I am not hand waving it. This line was commented ad nauseam when the book was released and is the one people who have no idea of neither what in the Greek text nor what’s in the translation like to discuss. As it’s far from being the most questionable part of the translation, I don’t see the point of centring discussion on it, especially when you consider it’s not an awful translation of the original. It’s not very close but you can find far worse later.
There's a lot of circumstantial evidence, and circumstantial evidence is sometimes sufficient to convict people for murder. Circumstantial evidence is certainly enough to suspect murder, if not convict somebody of it. To be pedantic, "proof" is for mathematicians, the rest of us mere mortals have to content ourselves with evidence.
Evidence and proof are the same word in my own native language.
> There's a lot of circumstantial evidence
Hardly. You could arbor doubts for the people who ate at her place but for her husband there is absolutely nothing. I am not proud of HN falling at the level of the tabloid press through not really surprised.
In English we often use the same word 'evidence' when speaking of weak circumstantial evidence and conclusive direct and damning evidence (e.g. "proof"). I think it must be similar in whatever your native language is, because some way to express this nuance is vital to the pursuit of justice. What you essentially said above is that nobody should be accused of murder on the internet if there isn't conclusive evidence. But if I'm seen covered in blood walking away from a murder scene hours before the murder is reported, why shouldn't people on the internet speculate that I'm the murderer? All they have against me is circumstantial evidence, not conclusive evidence e.g. proof, but it's certainly reasonable for people to say they think I did it. Maybe they're wrong, but their suspicions are still reasonable even if they happen to be wrong.
Somebody dying or being grievously injured after a meal you prepared is circumstantial evidence. Yourself being unharmed is further circumstantial evidence, as is your children being unharmed. Your spouse suffering from some manner of GI-related injury and then his parents being poisoned to death in a separate incident, both after eating meals prepared by you, is circumstantial evidence. This is a lot of circumstantial evidence.
In this case the circumstantial evidence isn't proof of anything. It's probably not enough to convict, I think there is reasonable doubt (mushrooms can be misidentified, the kids may have refused to eat the mushrooms because 'mushrooms are icky', the husband might have been injured by something else, etc) But it's certainly enough circumstantial evidence for casual observers to reasonably suspect murder, and for authorities to start an investigation.
At this point, the EU has the worst of both a free market based economy and a planned one. Profits goes to corporate owners when they exist and losses are taken up by the general public through subsidies. It's very comfy for our corporate overlords and the old generation who could afford to become shareholders in these companies when public policies actually helped them but it's a raw deal for the rest of us. Sadly, old people are the one who still vote and put our governments in place so I don't expect things to ever get better. I guess it's doomed to happen when the median age of your country hits 45.
Unsurprisingly, highly regulated sectors like banking where entering is extremely hard display cartel like behaviors. There is no incentive coming from the competition so why would anyone lower the net interest margin. In this context, I think a windfall tax somehow makes sense. Then again, I'm pretty sure it's going to be misused by the government. I would much rather see regulation forcing banks to raise interest rate on deposits but well at least this goes somewhat in the right direction.
I trust governments more than banks and the people who run banks. More regulation is welcome, and occasionally, one off policy hacks are needed vs slowly tightening the regulatory regime (which gives banks time to adapt and avoid or evade; not good!). Move fast and regulate systemic systems.
I am not sure myself. The past two decades have shown that banking is a sector which needs to be tightly regulated and bankers can never be trusted to not do utterly stupid things if there is even the slighest hint of profits. Honestly, I would be fine with the banking sector being nationalised at this point at least for the retail part. We are already bailing out banks when they fail so let's be coherent.
It's entirely technologically possible for central banks to take over retail banking at this point and Brazil has demonstrated nicely that taking over payment processing would be a net improvement for everyone. Honestly, I don't understand why we haven't done it already but I suppose entranched interests are partly to blame.
If you think about running your own bank, guess what, the entire business model is inherently fragile. The payment services banks offer do not pay for themselves. People expect bank accounts with zero fees. This means that the payment infrastructure has to be cross subsidized from something unrelated to the payment infrastructure and that in turn means that the availability of the payment infrastructure is dependent on the actual cash cow of the bank.
Lending to borrowers and diverting interest means your payment infrastructure is now tied to the creditworthiness of debtors. Even worse, what if the margins are so thin the bank does investment banking instead? Now your payment infrastructure is tied to the erratic stock market!
The obvious solution is to stop the cross subsidy and start demanding that people pay for payment services separately. This doesn't guarantee proper and competent management. It merely makes it possible in the first place. Of course the problem is that various consumer protection agencies lobby for legislation that appears on its face to protect consumers but only by making the entire system less stable.
I think the more coherent thing to do would be to treat banks like other industries and not bail them out. Customers would then place their money in safer banks, discouraging banks from engaging in risky behaviour.
Sure, I'm convinced that no one is going to riot when they get their their lifetime savings casually wiped out. I bet on them fully understanding that they just made a terrible decision when they chose the wrong bank, it's entirely their fault and that it is what's best for the economy as a whole.
I have to wonder how competitive these banks are. Without being able to invest in anything other than government bonds, they lose out on a lot of money that bigger banks get.
The fractional reserve system and its associated fiat currencies will always drive "banking" as a service in the same direction: loans that become increasingly predatory.
The root problem isn't the banks, per se, rather the problem is the underlying system that modern banks are incentivized by.
Remove usury (loans at a profit) and base the national currency on something (anything is better than nothing, but the Socialists in Germany used production, and before the 1970s the US used gold) and I think you'd see that banks as a business would radically change.
They wouldn't because you literally changed nothing. The USD is on a failed gold standard. We are still living the aftermath of a failed gold standard. Also, in theory a gold standard does absolutely nothing. All the theoretical benefits you think that come from a gold standard can be implemented today. The only difference is that a gold standard collapses when you go out of its modus operandi.
The obvious problem is the concept that money from this period should be valid in any future period with no decay or costs associated with holding the money. This leads to a compression of the economy along the time dimension. It manipulates time preferences because money can be transported into the future at no cost which artificially subsidises low time preferences. The market no longer properly integrates the time preferences of all participants and this then leads to people who met their needs to assert their low time preference over people with unmet needs who by mere necessity, and not because of psychological or personal failure as many claim, have a higher time preference. A recession can be viewed as shifting production into the future even as people have unmet needs in the present.
The only known solution is to get rid of cash or to introduce some sort of time bound money like demurrage currencies. A demurrage currency cannot be carried into the future at no cost. This binds the currency to a specific time period which in turn means that people with excess money can no longer impose their patience onto people who are impatient by circumstance.
The gold standard was removed in the 1970s. There has been no value behind the dollar since then. During the same time, the US Gov't actually seized citizen's gold.
> The obvious problem is the concept that money from this period should be valid in any future period with no decay or costs associated with holding the money.
This statement is confusing to me. Are you saying that there is not time-cost to the holder of cash if that cash is backed by gold? That is, if I have 100USD (gold backed) there is no downside to holding that cash as opposed to spending it?
> The only known solution is to get rid of cash or to introduce some sort of time bound money like demurrage currencies.
You may like the idea of CBDCs, then. With a centrally controlled digital currency it would be possible to put expiration dates on cash in order to force people to spend their money. Hyper-inflation has the same affect, though. If you look at the Argentine economy and how people spend money with 40-200% inflation year-over-year, you'll see that no one holds onto their cash. They all spend their cash in a very short period of time. People convert the currency that cannot store value into things that can; things like goods, US dollars, crypto currencies, etc.
> Fractional reserve banking is the idea that banks take their reserves and lend them into some fraction based on the quantity of reserves they hold. This idea has been largely debunked since the financial crisis. In reality, banks do not lend their reserves, except to one another inside of the reserve system (which is a closed system, ie, reserves don’t even leave the system). They don’t even lend based on the quantity of reserves they hold.
That is fairly shortsighted. Regulation also prevents customers from being defrauded. Beyond that, antitrust action is regulation but it increases competition.
>Unsurprisingly, highly regulated sectors like banking where entering is extremely hard display cartel like behaviors. There is no incentive coming from the competition so why would anyone lower the net interest margin. In this context, I think a windfall tax somehow makes sense. Then
I'm not sure what the banking market is like in Italy, but in the US it's trivially easy to find banks that pay close to or above fed daily funds rates[1]. Sure, your average main st or wall st bank might still be paying 0.1% interest, but there isn't exactly lack of competition either.
I will bet on the usual confounding variables when it comes to lifestyle study. Highly likely that eating late at night means coming home late, probably due to working late which probably means a more stressful life. Sadly they are controlling for a chokingly low amount of variables so we will never know.
There is little point of doing a study based on BMI when what you want is body fat. BMI is imperfect. It’s fine when you want to give people a quick metric for them to assess their fitness by themselves. People who are extremely fit with a high BMI already know they are extremely fit after all. It’s not fine when you want to analyse the effect of different life styles.
R&D is a significant part of what you have to amortise. I'm guessing they are going to pay the machinery significantly less than if it was brand new. Part of it might even be relocated from another fab. Yields should also be better. That leaves the building but I'm guessing the German state must be generous here and that should help offset that.
Good luck when the war starts and you can’t build weapons anymore because your source of strategic ressources are not under your direct control.
There are good reasons modern economists are so critical of Ricardo. You need to take what he wrote with a major grain of sand. The actual situation is a lot more nuanced.
No idea if I should be rolling on the floor laughing or extremely saddened reading that. I might advice taking a reality check before spurring this kind of non sense in public if you want to avoid sounding both entitled and utterly disconnected.