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>If one accepts that the talent gene is randomly sprinkled around the planet, it seems obvious that the region where the majority of humans exist should be the epicenter of dynamism. It was true in the pre-industrialized world, with China, along with India, being the giants. ... . As Asia adopts best practices in modern ideas, institutions, and technologies, the historical norm should be reinstated in the global order.

Are these statements a hypothesis or a scientifically accepted truth?

a) that the talent has a gene

b) that the epicenter of dynamism is where the people with the talent gene are

c) that the gene is randomly sparked and is equally distributed

d) that the epicenter of dynamism is the same as the epicenter of economic prosperity (or am I assuming what is meant by dynamism)


I also agree with your sentiment. Excel is coding for people who are not programmers.

But I think the author conflates 1) engineering practices

2) Programming

3) Expressing domain knowledge using tables, charts and numbers

Most excel users do 3) They are certainly not programmers, and the do not follow engineering practices we associated with programming: modularity, hiearchical or functional re-usability, testability, etc

Excel creators do not reproduce bug reports, do not measure their success by the number of bugs they fixed, they do not do SDLC...

These are not particularly fault of excel. But as soon as there is a recognition that 'oh that excel workbook needs to be managed by programmers' -- then after a few month programmers realize that Excel and VBA macros are subpar programming environment, and will just argue that the way that the author does -- that it does not make sense to maintain a complex, business critical code within Excel.

So they will re-write it in Python or something else.

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I think Ex cell's success in the business world is precisely because it allows non-programmers to bypass the whole SDLC and express their domain knowledge in a computational system.

As programmers, we want to replace Excel with something that

a) allows business users to do what they want to do, without SDLC

b) when their work reaches a certain level of complexity, we want the tool to allow us to gradually transition the work the domain users have done into an engineered piece of software with minimal effort, free of cost, easy to debug.

I do not think such as system exists yet, but that would be a killer app


original poster here.

I read this site as a 'permabear' for financial news. A contrarian. Meaning that they help to filter out what's bushtit in a bullish sentiment. But I would not use them to guide me for what to invest into -- as according to them, anything but gold or silver, is a 'so so'.

I think they apply this 'permabear' lens onto the main-stream anything, especially mainstream advisory.

So that's the context.

With regards to the specific article, I would say it fits my 'Confirmation bias'. That is through my career I had not seen an effective link between the quality of academic credentials and ability to predict future.

An economics PhD or CS PhD (or masters) did not particularly make a person being able to analyze current conditions to predict future outcomes any more than a lay man with a lesser university degree.

Just thinking outload here the, diminishing reliance of a average layman on credentialed expertise, seems to be real.

This indicates a combination of 'experts' being intentionally used to promote some money making or policy making idea. Resulting in these experts being viewed as false prophets or health advisors, or military/foreign policy advisors. Essentially resulting in general public loosing trust in 'expert opinions'. That's what the article is reflecting, providing some current examples.

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Not mentioned in the article, in the field of computer programming, this may indicate that an advanced degree in computer science may not result in significantly differentiating 'practical' expertise in typical programming jobs with AI or without AI help. This is my particular experience too.

One could only project that view into many fields where evaluating critical impact of a particular decision or a prediction is not practically possible. So subsequent grading of an 'expert opinion' becomes an exercise in one side arguing for an 'F' and other side for a 'B+'


I'm wondering if you would acquiesce to surgery by somebody with vibe and no degree. Or want to take heart drugs designed by an acolyte of RFK jnr, rather than somebody a current pharma would hire. Overwhelmingly these structural roles demand formalisms acquired through tertiary study.

If you just mean fintech and politics... I guess it's arguable common sense is more valuable but again, the $b hedgefunds pay for quants who did advanced maths and stats and can prove their assertions. We're not talking vibe. Functional programmers in Haskell get jobs in banks.


Wait, but is any of what he says true? Inflation is up, and it seem to early to tell most of the macroeconomic stuff.

He makes this very shallow argument that the degrees class was al binary pro free trade, but that’s not true, there’s a wide swath of perspectives, and most I’ve read said that the US has been shafted on trade but a straategic set of tariffs and not random fluctuations and false start would be the solution.

Can you name one person doing finance in the Trump Administration that doesn’t have an advanced degree? Trump has a degree in Economics for cry in out loud! Stephen Miller went to Duke, Scott Bessent went to Yale.


A thing about strategies, if it is good (even for a particular set of circumstances), if it is leveraged by other traders, it become less impactful

if my strategy is good, could you confirm that it will not be copied by anybody? (not that I have something that I think is good!)


Yes. Your data is your own and would not be accessed/viewed/used or copied by other traders. It's entirely optional if you want to share your strategy, and you don't have to include the code.

Your point is valid. If enough people leverage a strategy the edge will diminish. As it is, it would be difficult to find any real edge using price/volume alone that would scale to a meaningful size.


Not sure that the arguments are reasonable.

This 3rd-level-derivative blaming Microsoft for innocent causalities in the war against terrorism... may work for some people, but certainly would not work for many OSS developers.

Using this 3rd-level-derivative logic that the author is using, could one assume that the author of this post supports the murderer, Elias Rodriguez?


I would like to have a substitative discussion of how to validate the claims that DOGE is not saving as much as they claim.

Should I trust the Intercept's article [1] that New York times is referring to?

I guess a larger point is that NY Times wants to their readers to focus on particular instances where Doge, they believe, they miscalculated their impact on waste.

But, in my mind, does not change the overall intend of Doge's remit, the short term and long term benefits of improving organization efficiencies, reducing corruption, and reducing federal budget.

50 years from now, the next generation will be looking at these times, and these efforts -- as a rare example of positive, transformational polices, a bloodless revolution of the common sense defeating the monster of corruption, selective persecutions, identity politics and senseless wars.

[1]https://archive.is/MCUX8


> This is all very basic, can someone explain what I'm missing here? Why people are pushing for this thing that doesn't make sense whatsoever?

So do the analysis from another point of view.

https://x.com/zerohedge/status/1854144250562429081

Assume (say your null hypothesis) that 2020 had fraud by creating ballots that voted for Biden just in enough in several GA, AZ, PA, MI counties.

Now, say in 2024 -- that fraud did not work (could not be done). How would it look at the number of voters who voted in 2024?

Is that plausible that it would like 'fewer people' voted in total, and also giving less votes to Harris?

If it is plausible, then that's the core of their argument, in my understanding.


No, it is not a single thing that drove US citizen to give Trump unprecedented mandate to fix the country.

It is:

1. the selective outrage judicial system that corrupted the trust in the process , the judges and the prosecutors. Not only towards Trump, but towards his close allies and supporters

2. It it the Covid response that forced people to get vaccinated to get a job (talk about bodily autonomy)

3. It is complete disregards for immigration law, importing into US workforce, families and criminals illegally. Causing hardship to US citizens

4. It is the visible immoral US stance on using Ukrainian lives in an unwinnable territorial war, so that US could 'weaken' Russia, while also enriching the military-industrial complex

5. Yes, it is the economy (inflation, lack of stable income, where people have to work multiple jobs to pay rent and to buy food).

6. It is a complete disregard for a family unit, parental accountability and control for mental health of young kinds. Adoption of transgender surgeries for the kids, having public schools push racial self-hate, demoralizing kids identities.

7. It is support for on campus violence against american Jews.

8. It is remarkable encouragement for transgender to compete, and even violently attack (or hurt in competition) females.

9. It emboldening the South American gangs in crossing borders, child trafficking, extortion.

10. it is distrust in 2020 election process, and the judicial refusal to actually review the cases brought in front of them.

Different 'categories' of voters were deeply disturbed by different points in the above. But the collectively -- it is clear that the problem why Dems lost is exactly in their anti-constitutional, immoral policies and constant lies by the propaganda machine and their 'experts' (that Trump is guilty of something, Russian interference, mRNA is safe ... etc)

Trump received a mandate not just to address one of the above points, but to address all of them and forever through strengthening the word of the Constitution via detective, preventative and corrective controls.


I am sure there are multiple views on this. Some I had read: " Federal law prohibits paying people to vote, rewarding them to cast a vote, or even for registering to vote — however, compensating people for signing petitions or convincing others to sign them is not illegal "

https://nypost.com/2024/10/20/us-news/elon-musks-1-million-p...


I keep thinking that these kinds of sites, e.g readthedocs.org should be LLMized. It is certainly easier and more efficient to browse through them via an LLM prompt, rather than the old search box.


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