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I don't have an economics or finance background. But why could there not be a taxable event for the loan amount when it is made? Sure, maybe it gets taxed at a lower rate than even capital gains to continue incentivizing leveraged investments of this nature. Is there some economic argument for why lenders can realize the value of an asset when loaning out money against it but the tax man can't touch that asset until it's actually sold?

Having worked at non-profits, the distribution of wages can be unlike anything ever seen at for-profit corporations and has made me become quite cynical. At a couple of the organizations I was involved with, there was lots of unpaid volunteering, grossly under-market salaries, and unpaid overtime at the bottom of the hierarchy with anemic pay all the way up the pyramid until you reached the CEO position. The CEOs rarely did much of anything except help keep alive the notion that everyones sacrifice was worth it. In one instance, the CEO went on sabbatical for over a year, appointing a few senior management to share their leadership role and the whole operation actually seemed to function better while they were gone.

I don't have anything against a non-profit CEO paying themselves well if they also pay their employees well. Many do not, with some unspoken culture of employees needing to accept meager compensation so that resources can be directed toward the core mission whose objectives are fluid and progress often difficult to measure.

Does it say if the researchers knew his family members' names in advance? Wouldn't the "a ha!" moment be when the patient shares something that the researchers couldn't possibly find out on their own and that wouldn't be interpreted via his family's help? None of that appeared to happen here.

Having said that, I've just skimmed the Nature article. But what stands out is that they had 86 days of unsuccessful communication before they changed strategies and then all of a sudden started reporting success. I really hope this works but we should remain skeptical for the possibility of abuse here. Other commenters in this thread have reported that the researchers have committed misconduct in their brain research.

The only thing I fear more than being in the discussed patient's situation is being in their situation and having my thoughts incorrectly interpreted at best or outright manipulated at worst.

For macOS at least, the cause of this is the ECM driver that is used for the Realtek 8153. If you're lucky enough to find a device that has the Realtek 8156 chipset, which I believe the CalDigit TS4 uses, macOS will use the NCM driver and you'll be totally fine. ECM is a more primitive USB ethernet protocol and NCM is a more advanced one. The difference is similar to UASP vs BOT mode for USB external storage.

At least with respect to macOS, the Realtek 8153 chipsets in these docks suffer from having to use the built-in ECM driver. If you're on Apple Silicon, that's your only option. If you're on Intel, there are some flaky but more performant drivers from Realtek available. The ECM driver will cause high CPU load and for many users, will result in performance that's worse than wifi because of it. You'll also get audio dropouts and system hitches from the CPU loading.

If you can find an adapter that uses the Realtek 8156 chipset, which I believe the CalDigit TS4 uses, macOS will utilize the NCM driver and your performance will be rock solid.

ECM is a very primitive USB protocol for ethernet, whereas NCM is a more modern and performant one. NCM is to ECM as UASP is to BOT mode, if you're familiar with USB external drives.

The donor is anonymous but their characteristics are heavily marketed. In cases like this one, parents feel like they were intentionally misled: promised one thing and sold something else. I haven't had time to read the full article, but in many cases the decision about which sperm to use is made based on donor characteristics that are considered desirable: height, hair, skin colour, intelligence, lack of self-reported mental conditions, etc. The sperm they are provided tends to be from donors who don't measure up in these areas.

Furthermore, several stories resemble this one where a fertility doctor used his own sperm and that is considered particularly egregious. Not only for the reasons mentioned above, but because doing so is considered lying by omission. There are also notions of fairness with respect to fathering children: don't father too many and fulfill your responsibilities towards the ones you do. Biologically fathering dozens if not hundreds of children and having nothing to do with them afterward is considered unfair to the children, even if they happen to have a real father who raises them.

I know it sounds farfetched but hear me out. Stranger things have happened.

Bitcoin is a speculative asset like housing and used cars currently are in 2022. But the similarities end there. All the other speculative asset classes have been triggered precisely due to quantitative easing policies. Their current prices have been derived from this fiscal policy. As ridiculous as it sounds, bitcoin’s price is quite literally a bet against the future performance of these world currencies. As the speculative asset classes have their foundation in current fiscal policy, Bitcoin is a bet against their performance too.

Bitcoin has minimal carrying costs as an asset. The same can’t be true of other speculative assets like homes which have become financial instruments due to investors pouring their wealth into anything besides currencies in a desperate attempt to hold value over time. In many countries now, and increasingly so, the only way to profit off housing is through appreciation. Rent will not cover the carrying costs of the mortgages taken out against these homes. These assets have entered bubble territory, decoupling from any rational metric like average incomes.

Holding Bitcoin costs essentially nothing. Sure, there are idiots who invested through leverage. But there are many more who haven’t who can afford to hold on through all sorts of adversity. That makes it quite unlike these other speculative assets.

As a backing store for central banks, it holds value because it’s auditable. Bretton Woods fell apart in no small part due to countries becoming sceptical that other countries actually held the gold they said they did. The amount of Bitcoin each central bank holds would easily be auditable by others and that makes it valuable.

It only sounds foolish because we are used to thinking of measuring Bitcoin against the dollar. Rather, view the amount of Bitcoin each central bank would hold as an auditable hash of all its assets. Then view the digital currencies these central banks would issue as denominated in fractional units of this.

In the world where we value Bitcoin against USD, it sounds foolish because we don’t have enough Bitcoin to act as a foundation for all of it. But what if we have too much money in the world? Bitcoin’s fixed 21 million limit provides a means of truly measuring the rate at which currencies are inflated. Some inflation is of course desirable and Bitcoin could be an inherent regulator ensuring a healthy amount of inflation.

Note, this perspective equally pisses off Bitcoin skeptics and libertarian die hard hodlers. I have a very good chance of being wrong of course. But it’s not as farfetched as we’d initially suspect either. The biggest reason against this scenario isn’t the financial aspect, but the incredible shift in power that would result.

Current Bitcoin investors would find themselves suddenly incredibly wealthy and powerful. We don’t typically see shifts in power like this. But it happened to Saudi Arabia and other people who struck it suddenly rich (and powerful) with oil. So it isn’t unprecedented.

I'm somewhat using it as a stand-in, but I do have this gut feeling that bitcoin has a few characteristics that will make it the standard (more on this later).

I also think there will be digital dollars issued by central banks. In that respect, I don't see Bitcoin being used for day to day financial transactions. I see it being used as a backing value store for these digital dollars though.

I think economists and central banks throughout the world are reluctantly coming to grips with the effects of going off Bretton Woods:

- There is more influence over financial cycles so they can be smoothed over to help with the functioning of day to day life. This is desirable.

- The above influence has gone too far and has created an epic asset bubble and economic disparity that is even concerning to many of the world's most powerful and wealthy (i.e., it's creating an existential risk to them). Obviously this is undesirable and even worse, the central banks have no potential solutions to deal with this in their existing toolchain.

Why do I think bitcoin will win out? Somewhat for the same reasons I'm skeptical of that backdoor scenario. The major national governments have little trust amongst themselves, this trust is getting worse, and we're seeing an adversarial situation play out.

- China and some other economies outside the G7 want off of the USD as a reserve currency

- The G7 are reluctant to accept a world in which China exerts the financial influence they give up

All will realize something in the world's financial system has to change and for the sake of world peace a new arrangement is worth a shot. But none of these adversaries trust each other in such a way that a nationally derived crypto would be acceptable as the basis for a value backing store. Furthermore, existing assets will inherently be untrustworthy too because they're in a bubble. Nobody knows the true value of a house any more. Step in crypto...

- I don't think it will be Ethereum because as I said, reputation has been tarnished (there may be Russian influence). But it also tries to do too much and that may be undesirable for a value backing store.

- I think it will end up being Bitcoin simply because it's a lot more simple. It does less. And furthermore, nobody really knows who invented it so it is inherently not tied to any given nation. Or at least there's plausible deniability about it having been invented by a particular state.

- Other cryptos are distant runners up to these two main players so I don't see any other viable alternatives

Russia has a 10:1 advantage to the US in tactical nukes. They have all sorts of creative nuclear devices that can very much be used in theatre without triggering a MAD scenario. Why the big discrepancy? US weaponry is better. It's more precise. It's more effective. Head to head, Russia realized that they had no hope of competing against NATO. So they decided they won't. They'll just invest in and strategize around the use of tactical nukes which help them level the playing field without triggering a MAD scenario. It's all they've been investing in and cared about in the last 10-15 years if you've been paying close attention.

Putin isn't crazy enough to use strategic nuclear weapons. He's absolutely enough of a sociopath to use tactical nukes, particularly to avoid a potentially brutal urban assault on kyiv. I hope I'm wrong. But when you consider Belarus and Russia just completed nuclear drills in the past month and they're using a lot of conscripts in their first wave, it can't be ruled out.

Brands like Levis never weigh in on controversial issues until they've hit a certain inflection point of public discourse and it is clear where the majority of society will land on it. Then in hindsight, they will try to present themselves as pioneers of progressive ideals when they really only hopped onto the bandwagon when it was clear which bandwagon was going to win the race.

Today, some of these issues are being litigated faster than they were in the past. But don't be mistaken. Nike almost dropped Colin Kaepernick in the heat of the moment of his controversy. They only embraced him a few years later when it was safe to do so. I suspect Jennifer Sey drank her own koolaid in thinking that she'd be able to come out one way or the other on this still hotly contested issue.

Marketers choose their words carefully and more importantly than that, refrain from taking a stand until they know precisely how it can be dutifully exploited for their brand's needs. You might dislike this. But that's the game that's played in that industry. There's a reason that corporations, and the brands which encapsulate their identities, have been called psychopaths.

Agreed, but there's a higher baseline mental overhead due to increased complexity of Swift that Objective-C doesn't have, at least once you get past the weird square bracket syntax. This is mental overhead that distracts from the actual problem needing to be solved.

Swift isn't alone in this respect. I think TypeScript is another example of a language which started out claiming to offer a better experience than Javascript only to become very complex. I'm sure that this added complexity helps some programmers some of the time. But just like CISC was a dead end and all computer chips are essentially RISC-based today, I suspect the pendulum may have swung too far in terms of adding features to some of these developer-friendly languages.

But, it's a contrarian view for a reason. I'm just somebody who fell in love with the simplicity of Objective-C almost 20 years ago, before the iPhone was a thing. So I may be looking back at things with rose tinted glasses.

Apple's move to Swift and away from Objective-C won't be viewed as the no-brainer obvious decision with positive results 10 years from now, at least when both technical and business merits are considered. It will be compared in a similar light to Microsoft's big push to .NET in the early 2000s where they lost their way for more than a decade.

Apple's shift to Swift has caused a lot of software to be rewritten. It's not obvious that the reduction in software correctness bugs which Swift provides offsets the kind of bugs that are the result of rewriting software. Apple's software rewrites have introduced very little tangible benefit to the end customer while creating lots of software gremlins which are very annoying to them. Worse, focussing engineering resources on rewriting existing apps in Swift vs pushing the apps forward in terms of UX and features have allowed competition to catch up and surpass Apple in several areas that do matter to customers.

In hindsight, there will be a lingering question of if it would have been better for Apple to have continued to evolve Objective-C further in ways that could have provided similar technical benefits to Swift's introduction. At best the shift to Swift will have been seen as a necessary evil that exposed Apple's flanks. At worst, it will have been considered an unnecessary technical exercise that may have been started as a way to retain top technical talent, but even failed long-term in that respect.