Isn’t this thread about the pebble round 2 which is the closest from form factor to a garmin ? Moreover, GPS is lacking on any pebble anyhow which is also a major use case and again therefore, garmin’s and pebble’s can’t be compared, 2 different use cases for me.
Even the PT2 is significantly thinner than Garmins, roughly 2mm. That's about 15% thinner, which is a big deal in my book. Not as thin as AWs though, but not off by too much. Based on photos, it looks like the PR2 will be 2mm thinner than the PR2, which would make it thinner than AWs.
While we're on the topic, our school-issued Chromebooks allow unfettered access to YouTube. Yes, some of it is educational, but the kids can just click on the next video until they get what they want. Very convenient for you, Google Ads.
> They’ll nationalize and inflate away any institutional debt or wipe it out
This is just the reverse, actually, China isn’t afraid to go so far as to jail CEOs. There is no such thing as too big to fail in China, and all the Chinese domestic companies know it. The bailout playbook is a western thing.
China has been performing debt swaps with local governments to clean up their balance sheets [1], so used as an example. Agree with all of your comment. People make the mistake that China plays by artificial US capital market rules around profit and debt; they do not. They optimize for physical world success, not line go up.
Yes, exactly. Just as in the US, when an enterprise gets wiped out and recapitalized, all of the physical assets remain. In China’s case, they are the backstop of last resort, and will always recapitalize according to their nation state planning and target outcomes. They allow companies to operate the assets as long as the Chinese government is willing to allow it, but they remain assets of China.
> There actually literally is a free lunch. Debt owed to the government by itself isn’t real.
False.
It may not be the same as debt owed to other parties, but not paying it still has consequences for things like money supply.
Otherwise, why would the government not just lend endless amounts of money? Even the Chinese government knows they can't do that.
> It doesn’t matter how much you think China is in trouble financially, at the end of the day they still manufacture a third of everything in the world.
Their output doesn't really matter when it comes to their financial situation. You can produce a lot and still be in trouble. And it's not me that is calling out China's problems, China is talking about it as well.
I never said anything about lending infinite money, don’t straw man me.
The constraint is on real resources, which China has plenty of, regardless of how much debt they have.
The financial situation is an accounting detail. China could decide to write off all debt it owes to itself tomorrow, and literally nothing would change.
> I never said anything about lending infinite money, don’t straw man me.
You did say...
> There actually literally is a free lunch. Debt owed to the government by itself isn’t real
Which I think is reasonable to interpret as lending infinite money.
> The constraint is on real resources, which China has plenty of, regardless of how much debt they have.
I'm not even sure what you're saying here. Constraint on what? Money? Economic growth?
Assuming you mean money, it doesn't make much sense. Ok, China has lots of real resources. In order to pay down debt, they need to turn those resources into money. They can certainly create the supply, but they also need demand.
It's like Canada saying they have infinite resources in their timber. "We'll just cut down the wood and sell it". Well there isn't infinite demand for timber, so in fact, having a lot of resources doesn't mean you have endless money.
> China could decide to write off all debt it owes to itself tomorrow, and literally nothing would change
Absolutely not true. Look at the real estate developers. China is working hard to get them out from under the crushing debt they have. If, as you claim, they could "write off all debt, and literally nothing would change", why didn't they.
The answer is that China is mostly a market economy. Writing off debt has massive consequences bothing domestically and internationally.
This is the trade off China made when relying on the free market for growth. If they want to leverage the free market, then they are held to the free market's rules (which they are currently dealing with).
Can you imagine a world where a government could spend infinite money without any problems? If you can’t, then why would someone else think that? If you thought my understanding of macroeconomics was different from yours and you were genuinely curious, it would have been a good idea to start by asking questions. Or if you thought I was an idiot you could have just ignored me. But you chose to assume an obviously ridiculous premise to my comment and reply based on that. That’s the definition of a straw man argument.
If you still care to know, the constraint on government spending is real resources (and whether they can be usefully utilized of course).
I don’t know about the real estate situation in China, and I don’t know if it was financed by private debt or public debt, so I can’t comment on it.
That debt issued by a central bank to its government to productively utilize real resources is not inflationary and not really “owed” to anyone. It’s an accounting detail.
In response to you saying that there is no free lunch since debt is always owed to someone.
> That debt issued by a central bank to its government to productively utilize real resources is not inflationary and not really “owed” to anyone. It’s an accounting detail.
This sentence doesn't make sense. "Debt issued to it's government"?
I presume you mean government debt issued to the central bank, whereby the central bank prints new money as a part of the loan?
It absolutely can be inflationary (see US inflation during Covid) if the money eventually makes it into the economy (e.g. by paying workers).
And yes, debt is always owed to someone. Whether that someone is the central bank doesn't mean it's a free lunch - not paying back the loan has consequences to the economy.
From the outside, it appears that "upset the regime" includes "cheating your way into profits".
That said, it's very difficult to be sure if what I see from the outside is propaganda. Or rather, it is always propaganda even when it's true, and I can't tell how much of it is China's own self-promotion vs. other people giving negative propaganda.
I'm saying from the outside, it doesn't look like that. That's a much weaker statement, as should've been obvious from what I went on to say about propaganda.
Even with the sub-heading "It's legal, and that's the problem."*, and even though this kind of cheating is broader than this reply chain from "There is no such thing as too big to fail in China", this is absolutely within bounds for what I asked for :)
* and the not-proof-read AI generated image, that never helps…
There's ways to invest in stocks that are not cheating, for example.
Or, you know, they might have done what I myself am doing right now and be landlords. That's not cheating. Or at least, I don't think it is, I don't know what the Chinese government considers it to be, what with communism and all.
For this context: cheating is in the sense of "large bets where the cost of failure will be paid by the state and yet they get to keep the profits in the event of success": I think that if any of them have made such bets, those bets have paid off. I think that if any such bet had been made and failed, it would have been noticed by people outside China.
As I said:
From the outside, it appears that "upset the regime" includes "cheating your way into profits".
Key parts: "from the outside", and "appears".
In the event they make a bet and it fails and we spot it, that specific chain is what would make it cease to "appear" to be so "from the outside".
> I was always hunting for Pokémon with better abilities, better type coverage, analyzing synergy between moves… If you’ve ever played a mainline Pokémon game before, you must know how utterly unnecessary this is. Twenty years ago, I would have just powered through on Blastoise or Typhlosion alone.
I definitely beat the first Pokemon games with a level 100 Charizard. I even defeated gyms that were strong against fire types, often KO'ing Pokemon in one hit. The text would say "It's not very effective..." and then the opponent's health bar would drop to zero. So yeah, these games are easy enough that a 10yo can get by with twinking out a single pokemon. Makes the blog post even funnier
I appreciate the helpful reply, but I think this is precisely the kind of indirection I need to avoid. I'm a sucker for elegance. If left entirely to my own devices I'd probably design a language / write a transpiler of my own, and wind up with exceedingly elegant tooling for websites, and no websites. :)
This is why I don't use Typescript or frameworks in my own projects, I just constantly seek the cleanest abstraction and never get anything done. Using a deliberately messy solution is annoying but at least I accomplish stuff.
You see similar levels of hypocrisy leveled at the capacity for Chinese EVs to surveil consumers, but not at Tesla, when we know that Tesla employees had access to sex tapes of their customers in their cars. As long as it’s western capital or western police doing the surveillance, it must be permissible, right? /s
We should be clamping down on all surveillance, and this is not a problem that has a technological solution. Quite the reverse, actually.
It's rather difficult to do enough bad things to get a lengthy prison sentence these days. Usually requires a violent offense in the context of significant priors.
If you're interested in doing hard federal time, I would suggest you consider interstate trafficking of distribution quantities of drugs.
At the state level, by far the most common reason for long sentences are violent offenses. At the federal level it is more often trafficking at distribution scale.
There are always stories, but the majority are the above. If you have a state in mind we can look at the data together.
> It's rather difficult to do enough bad things to get a lengthy prison sentence these days.
...there are two million people in prison. Several million more in various stages of the carceral cycle who be be easily subbed in when more labor is required.
What you're saying isn't necessarily mutually exclusive to what gp said.
GPT-2 was the most impressive leap in terms of whatever LLMs pass off as cognitive abilities, but GPT 3.5 to 4 was actually the point at which it became a useful tool (I'm assuming to programmers in particular).
> Still when I ask Claude.AI to double-check the math on our power consumption, it thinks we have an incredibly leaky apartment. Like ridiculously off the charts.
Ah. That answers my question about how you ventilate the apartment for fresh air: it's thoroughly perforated.
