I have always seen Ivy League admission controversies as stemming from the fact that the number of "perfect" (as measured by objective criteria) candidates is so high versus available spots, that there are only two solutions:
* Select candidates randomly from a pool of perfect candidates.
* Select candidates based on additional, subjective criteria.
The first approach seems inherently fairer, but schools went with the second approach. It's hardly surprising that all sorts of biases creep in.
I once read that a candidate was rejected because, having an enormous amount of extracurricular activities in his CV, was deemed "too intense".
> I once read that a candidate was rejected because, having an enormous amount of extracurricular activities in his CV, was deemed "too intense".
While “too intense” is poor wording (and perhaps shorthand), I’m guessing that the activities had the following traits:
1. Limited to unspecified “participation”, the substance of which was not verified or confirmed in other parts of the application. Typically elite schools are looking for leadership roles as well as moving the needle in some way.
2. Looked like resume/application boosting since no one can reasonably participate in a quality manner in this many activities.
In certain communities, especially in the NE corridor, racking up mostly low-engagement ECs is a hobby.
In my opinion, regulators have a too-big-to-fail problem here. Tether is known to be used for artificially inflating the crypto market in collusion with certain exchanges. There is a lot of documentation on this, the following two articles are a good start:
If news suddenly come out about Tether being formally accused by the Department of Justice, the market may react in panic and things might get ugly. As an anecdote, I have a friend who told me she put a significant amount of her life savings into "etherium and carnado" (sic). There are millions of people like this who will get absolutely crushed.
I don't see a non-painful solution here. The regulators were too slow and have allowed a monster to be created.
What a depressing situation... having to protect a bunch of people on a get rich quick mission from themselves. Of course you can adapt that argument to people buying cheap food, clothes, housing, etc. A lot of people do these things because they are in situations where they have very real fears about their future safety and solvency, so it is not an argument against consumer protection by the state but an expression of frustration I guess.
Lukashenko will not go down without a fight, and Russia is very unwilling to see a color revolution again next to its borders. Putin dreams of annexing Belarus.
Couple this with the EU's overall weakness and fragmented interests (eg nordstream 2), and it's hard to imagine a good outcome.
A few sanctions will come out of this that will make EU officials look good and further place Belarus into Russian hands (namely, as you wrote, making Belarus airspace dependent on Russian airspace). Let's see what the real leader of the EU has to say.
If the EU can't stand for the people of Belarus, for the sake of freedom and human rights, then it will have once again failed.
It is not that clear that Russia all that happy about the incident. A girlfriend of Roman Protasevich, who is a Russian citizen, was also detained and that already caused PR issues for Kremlin.
Plus there is even comments from Russia’s Duma about how this can be damaging for Russia.
Protasevich was tracked in many countries before he entered this plane, tracked by someone doing that very professionally engaging a lot of resources. It is hard to imagine Belarus was doing this alone, without Russia support.
No one will stand for Belarus. Sanctions have the effect of running Belarus into Russian\Chinese debt pit even further.
Until the military sides with opposition (it won't) there will be no changes at all. Even if military gets involved, there will be russian "voluteers" (see Russian volunteers in Moldova 90, Balkans 92-01, Chechnya 93, Ukraine 14 ) that are there to help fight new "junta".
And then it will result in Ukraine II: electric boogaloo. Eastern Belarus is de-facto a part of Smolensk oblast' with some Russia funded murderers creating an "independent" republic. This was played out to death over the last 30 years.
And don't get me wrong. All while this will be happening, EU will be very concerned, that is for sure.
None of this will happen ofc, because all resistance will be suppressed with excessive force, at the very start. No trials, no judges.
There is a far more eco-friendly alternative to proof-of-work (PoW) called proof-of-stake (PoS).
I wonder if a serious discussion will finally begin on moving Bitcoin to PoS. This will certainly have a strong opposition and will likely lead to a fork, i.e. two cryptocurrencies will exist at the same time, call them BTC-PoW and BTC-PoS.
In any case these news are a leap forward in the crypto space. IMO, replacing PoW by PoS is a bit like replacing incandescent light bulbs with LEDs at home.
Proof of stake is the funniest scam that exists in the crypto space. Vitalik is a fucking genius scammer pulling off what he has with Ethereum. Premine the coin, leverage mining when hash rate is low to make more, then transition to a 'rich get richer' printing scheme when the preminers and miners ponzi'd up their asset as it costs more to acquire for newcomers. Just incredible.
It is interesting that people think proof of stake works. If there is no work, there is not time-lock in. It's just the whimsy of the majority at this time. Today's majority can re-write all of history if they feel like it. With proof of work, the past is locked in by the work done to validate it. Under proof of work, if there is just one honest node out there, it's provably correct and you can tell the others are lying. Under proof of stake, it's just the will of the majority.
Some people just can't see the economic absurdity of it. Imagine if the FED announced that future USD would be printed into the accounts of USD holders by balance size, but that you have to have a high initial balance to be eligible and that the poors need to assemble little pools of other poors to split a reward. That's proof of stake as proposed. It's that simple and that stupid.
Sounds kind of like how one can grow one's money by investing it in an index fund and sitting on it and how rich people can get richer with no income and a passive investing strategy.
How is it that PoW is better though? No single individual can mine profitably anyway. You also need to be part of a pool to get some share of the profits.
Right now the central bank wills money into existence and then gives it to other banks who already have lots of money. Change your lens and see the similar topologies.
Proof of stake still boils down to availability of resources. With proof of work, it was energy. With proof of stake, it's now energy and materials. If whatever crypto unit is based on proof of stake becomes sufficiently popular, it will eventually approach the incremental price of whatever object is used to build your "stake." Economic theory says that (assuming a competitive market) the selling price of the object should converge upon the incremental cost to produce the object.
> Economic theory says that (assuming a competitive market) the selling price of the object should converge upon the incremental cost to produce the object.
This does not need to apply always. Does money have the value equal to production cost?
Very few things apply always. Obviously money doesn't, but money is not your garden-variety competitive market like carrots or coal. The only legal suppliers of money are the nation-states that issue it. If you tried to print "money" yourself, it'd most likely be worthless because either nobody would use it (ok, maybe some cryptocurrencies excepted, but for reasons that have more to do with anonymity and a desire to stash illicit savings with a potentially lower probability of forfeiture than anything else), or you'd get in trouble for counterfeiting.
What you said is not true in case of PoW, and we know it experimentally already - mining costs follow the price of bitcoin, not the other way around. You can look at the charts yourself.
It makes no sense to try to mine a crypto token if the cost to produce one is greater than its value. Advances in mining technology or the increasing value of crypto can help keep it profitable, but there are diminishing returns to investment in technology, and (one would hope) the value of Bitcoin will eventually stabilize.
Vanishingly unlikely. PoS would effectively destroy bitcoin's immutability, which is a huge part of the value proposition. And more importantly, a huge part of it's core principles.
Coins like Ethereum that have already proven that immutability isn't a core principle (DAO fork) are fine moving to PoS.
Most coins don't need their own PoW though. It's likely that we'll end up with one PoW chain and everyone else can periodically checkpoint themselves into bitcoin's immutable blockchain.
Ethereum was running on PoW when that happened. If anything you've just made an argument against PoW and miner centralization, where they can just get together and roll back the chain. The same would be possible in Bitcoin and while it hasn't happened yet there, we've had instances of large mining pools trying to censor transactions. A PoS system with sufficient decentralization would actually be more resilient against both these threats than a PoW one where mining is done by ASICs, which means large mining centers as opposed to individuals running an Ethereum node from their homes.
This is a reasonable criticism. Let me try to counter.
PoW doesn't protect you from a large enough cabal of power (in Eth's case, developers and whale bag holders) controlling the direction of the chain, or censoring entities they don't like from continuing to contribute.
What it does do is ensure that this large cabal can't erase history that happened. The only reason Ethereum was able to fork was because it was still young, they moved very fast, and there was enough external incentive from all parties to ignore the lost mining costs. And even with all that, Ethereum Classic still exists with all the PoW post DAO hack preserved.
On the other hand, PoS has no cost associated with writing the blockchain as far back as you want. If a majority cabal of stakers agree to rewrite history, they just do it. They can rewrite the chain from the dawn of proof of stake with whatever changes they want and it looks equally valid as the "true chain". No energy intensive hashes needed.
With PoS, you have to compromise a large enough number of stakers to mutate the chain. Very little cost after that.
With PoW, you not only have to compromise the miners, but you need to force them to burn tons of real world energy to catch up to the current block to rewrite the chain. Insanely expensive and effectively impossible the farther back in time you go.
Fair point, you'd need more energy to do that in Bitcoin, although I want to stress that by no means could you simply roll back months of PoS Ethereum 2.0 history at the snap of a finger.
The DAO reset was very controversial and people still talk about it years later. Prominent Ethereum devs have repeatedly stated there would not be a second one. This isn't to say it couldn't happen, but it would be a big deal and even more contentious and would lead to even more fallout than the first time, should it ever happen again. So it's not like big Eth holders can just get together and roll back the state at will.
Granted, it's still a concern any way you look at it for certain applications where you want absolute certainty over long periods of time, for example for having an immutable archive of events for future generations. Wouldn't it be great if all that electricity were used to provide a truly reliable historical record for the first time in human history? Bitcoin could be used to preserve news articles, encyclopedias and other such data. For everything else PoS chains seem a lot more practical though. We have to see the pros and cons, for most applications it makes no sense to sacrifice all the advantages good PoS implications bring for absolute long-term immutability.
I do see a day when every database that promises immutability periodically checkpoints the root of a hash tree of every piece of data they have into the bitcoin blockchain.
Whether it's the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress, or your personal git repo, if there's some piece of data that you may want to be able to prove hasn't been altered, you check it into the blockchain.
Of course it doesn't prove truth, but it does ensure that the data hasn't been tampered with since it was published.
For example, some powerful entity might be incentivized to try to change the text of old news stories to better support their current agenda. If you can change our understanding of history, you can potentially manipulate the future. Records that include proof of immutability will go a long way to making this kind of power play orders of magnitude harder and more expensive.
> There’s another wrinkle: The Ethereum Foundation is on track to switch to a new consensus mechanism called “proof of stake”, and in that scenario, anyone who owns 14% of all ether will have tremendous control over the future blockchain.
This is nonsensical. PoS is a mechanism for assuring transactions can get added to the block chain securely. It has nothing to do with whether the controlling interests are centralized or not.
As you can see, buys make this worse, sells make it better. Robinhood could not execute buys, because it would increase the deposits they'd need, which they legally must obligate by. Sells, on the other hand, do not have this problem. They would not push the 95% boundary more to the right.
I have been trying to analyze this Robinhood story in an unbiased and objective way. My motivation is that I am interested in contemporary history and believe that what we witnessed in these past few days is a historical event.
I have a question to those here who are knowledgeable about finance and law (I am certainly not).
If my stock trading app stops allowing buying a stock, while still allowing selling a stock, even if this is done purely for technical reasons (see quote at beginning of this comment), am I incurring in market manipulation? To me the answer is evidently yes, but I would like to hear other opinions.
Indeed: Kadyrov (the current Marcher Lord) ought to know a thing or two, having been supported by both anti-Kremlin and pro-Kremlin regimes at varying times.
It's somewhat heart-warming to read the comments here about machine learning. I did my PhD in machine learning from 2007 to 2012, and the main reason I left research was because of the widespread fraud.
Most papers reported an improved performance over some other methods in very specific data sets, but source code was almost always not provided. Once, I dug so deeply into a very highly cited paper that I understood not only that the results were faked, but precisely the tricks that were used to fake them.
I believe scientific fraud arises primarily from two causes:
- Publish or perish. Everyone's desperate to publish. Some Principal Investigators have a new paper roughly every other week!
- Careerism. For some highly ambitious people, publishing papers comes before everything else, even if that means committing fraud. This happens even with highly successful researchers, who have the occasional brilliant, highly cited paper, but who also publish a lot of incremental, dubious work.
P.S. Mildly off-topic, but I love the Ethereum research community at https://ethresear.ch/ , precisely because it is so open and transparent! I wish an equivalent community existed for machine learning.
One thing I love about Ethereum is that it is self-funded, open, and basically separated from mainstream academia. They created their own money, convinced everyone that it had value, and then used it to self-fund their own fundamental research. It's an incredible alternative to academic research.
