lavrov

What do you think happened in El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, Iran, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Honduras, etc

Didn’t read the entire post but I think the characterization of PCP’s is a bit off - some SNARK constructions and STARKs both use PCP’s - using a linear PCP vs a PCP doesn’t impact transparency or proof size, that’s more a function of the commitment scheme

It seems like a VRF might be a more natural choice than a commitment scheme for verifiable randomness, since it doesn't require any honesty assumption for participants, and Keybase already manages keys (though maybe it would be a problem if participants could change keys midway through the ceremony).

Not a pilot, and not trying to be an armchair pilot, but why would he have ascended all the way to 36000 feet? Isn't there a real risk of depressurization with hull damage?

You misread my comment - I'm saying that the argument is not that the fact that this other measure of unemployment is much higher than the standard measure shows that the economy is not healthy, but that the sudden divergence over the past decade hasn't been plausibly explained by anything except an increase in disaffected working-aged males.

>Of course it has. Being a stay-at-home-dad was unthinkable in 1950. Post-graduate education is increasingly common, as is mid-life career switching. I can think of many reasons why we shouldn't expect a 98% labor force participation rate from that demographic in this century.

All of the points that you raised should not show such a sudden effect in the past < 10 years.

I don't agree that using the OECD employment rate is bullshit. The argument is not that at a single point, the fact that this other measure of unemployment is much higher than the standard measure shows that the economy is not healthy, the argument is that the divergence between the OECD employment rate and the standard measure indicates that the economy is unwell. If you deny this, then you're forced to argue that somehow the number of "disabled, stay-at-home-parents, the leisure class, those enrolled in education, and anyone else who is not working but has no desire to do so" has increased within the same demographic (25-55 males, so generally post-school), while wages have remained flat.

Why not? Determining how we measure the health of our economy, and implicitly, what we want to optimize for, is a political process, not simply an objective, scientific one.

The point that he's making is not that individual observation should trump objective measures, but the epistemic claim that if what we perceive contradicts those measures, it's worth interrogating the validity of those measures.

I don't think that the particular example that you're giving is "fraught with peril". Note the lack of an upper bound on the labor force participation rate that you cite - 16+ includes people of retirement age, whereas the measure given in the article shows that the official unemployment rate for men 25-55 is just 1/3 of the "true" unemployment rate that includes disaffected workers. This is significant.

The emphasis on humor in Mozart and Beethoven is interesting, particularly since it seems almost absent in the later Sonatas. I remember hearing Martha Argerich note that it's present in early Beethoven, and then disappears in Chopin and Liszt, and then reappears a bit in Ravel, but truly with the Russians. I would be interested in whether Brendel distinguishes between the ironic humor (Mediant vs Dominant) and any other types.

Verifiable computation is an active and developed area of research in cryptography, and the validation method of having every node run every step of every computation is the most naive approach. There are plenty of ways to prove to you that I faithfully executed a computation that don't rely on your also having performed the computation.

I don't know how active the Maker userbase is, but Augur has 700 monthly active users.

It seems like it would be possible to manipulate the validator set for a particular shard - also, isn't part of the point of ethereum to be able to access information from other contracts? How do you guarantee that that contract is on the same shard?

Sure, I'm assuming that most of the transactions are trading/speculation, given that 60% of ETH is held on exchanges, and if the question is how we should value ETH, a measure that depends on the current market value of ETH seems flawed. Plus, the base transaction amount is denominated in ETH: .00042, and is fixed (though I think that the gas conversion changes?).

That position isn't supported by volatile transaction fee data - excepting spikes for spam or high traffic, the transaction fee denominated in dollars generally tracks the price of ETH. Probably because the overwhelming majority of ETH activity is speculative (60% of ETH held on exchanges), and traders view transaction fees as simply a percentage of gains/losses and are more amenable to paying higher fees.

Forks aren't as simple as you might think - who gets to determine what the "original chain" is in the event of a fork? Suppose that ETH forked and one version changed some consensus rules to increase the supply of currency, and Vitalik, the Ethereum Foundation, all of the miners/stakers, and users moved to that chain - wouldn't that be ETH? But it would violate the principle of fixed digital scarcity.

Confiscation of assets is obviously possible via forks as well, but the fact that someone can't take your money without your private key doesn't relate to scarcity.