I have no special knowledge about IBM Vs Apple historically, but: a quarter billion in CAPEX when you've earned a billion in revenue in a single year is extremely different to what we're seeing now. These companies are spending all of their free cash flow, then taking on debt, to the tune of percentage points of world GDP, and multiples of any revenue they've seen so far. That kind of oversupply is a sure fire way to kill any ROI.
Silver's forecasts do predictably change, more precisely in that they swing deterministically in favour of one candidate whenever the most recent poll to come in favours that candidate heavily.
Each time the probability drops below 40% (in your example) it is likely because the fair odds swung in the latest polls. To attempt to take advantage of this is to ignore the recent evidence (conditional upon that evidence being quite different to the current concensus).
It's not at all unreasonable to do so, but isn't arbitrage. What if all polls started being increasingly conclusive leading up to election? 40, 39, ..., 0. No surprises and no arbitrage.
Perhaps another way to express this critique of Silver's methodology is that it lends too much weight on recent outlier observations? Sure if you knew this you could profit off these swings, but making the arbitrage argument doesn't add much to the discussion to my mind.
Eh, I find that the current adaptive brightness works very poorly. Sometimes slight shifts in my sitting or holding angle will cause the screen to dim.
In the article they've trained the AI to predict what frames the game would provide given a certain input, but to demonstrate its effectiveness they show the original game given a certain input, side-by-side with the AI's prediction given the same input. I sure hope that wasn't part of the training set. Teaching an AI to recognise something it's already been taught and mirror it relatively closely isn't an achievement...
Equalities that involve units aren't straightforward. Not a physicist of any sort but don't all the 1's still fundamentally change the equality since they change the units? I would guess they therefore implicitly change the intuition behind these equations?
I would say it's the opposite. A unit conversion is not fundamental at all, but a matter of arbitrary convention. 0C and 32F are exactly the same temperature. Mass and energy are exactly the same property. c^2 is a constant, so E doesn't even vary as the square of anything - it's just a linear unit conversion. If you follow it further, you find c is only even in there because some other units are defined in terms of it. That is, the ME equivalence doesn't really have anything to do with the speed of information propagation per se - but our chosen unit conventions do.
It's because of people's fondness for legacy and backwards compatibility that we don't use natural units all the time, and still write "e=mc^2". I find this insane, personally, but that's just the way it goes.
I guess I should add that apparently this is still controversial? But in my mind, the only reason for this is that people find meaning in units. In this case, ME being the same property implies duration being exactly the same as length, which implies spacetime is a unified, regular 4D manifold. ME not being the same property implies time is special. I've been fully persuaded that duration is fundamentally exactly the same thing as length, so I've chosen my side, in case there's any serious controversy.
Definitely not. Everything couples to the stress-energy tensor, but not every type of particle has rest/invariant mass. No one really speaks in terms of relativistic mass anymore. (So a photon has energy but no rest mass.)
That's what makes natural units natural. Certain quantities (like mass and energy, or distance and time) are physically related such that the distinction is, in a sense, artificial. The conversion factors between the units used for these pairs of quantities are the fundamental physical constants that get set to unity in a natural system of units.
The distinction between distance and time is not artificial at all. It is encoded in the metric, at the most fundamental level. The existence of symmetries is not the same as equivalence.
Parent is not talking about the "distinction between distance and time" but about the multipliers that come into play into their equations (which are artificial and based on the base units selected).
The distinction between feet and seconds is just as real as the distinction between distance and time, and is much more real than the distinction between feet and meters. Look at the parent's literal words and pretend you did not already know what's going on.
I'm well aware of the practical value and conceptual clarity of natural units. They are just not being explained well in this thread. "What the teacher really meant was..." is not a good defense when the student doesn't understand.
> The distinction between feet and seconds is just as real as the distinction between distance and time
There is a "real" distinction between [light]seconds of distance and seconds of time, but it's a difference in what is being measured, not in how it is quantifiable. Measuring them with the same units doesn't imply that they are perfect substitutes, any more than one could arbitrarily replace an ounce of gold with the same weight of feathers; in practice, they are non-interchangeable enough that gold is even measured with a different type of "ounce". Likewise with spacetime: for most purposes human non-physicists think about, they are completely non-substitutable. So practically, it works well to use a "Troy" sort of system for one. But it's a purely human distinction.
> but it's a difference in what is being measured, not in how it is quantifiable. Measuring them with the same units doesn't imply that they are perfect substitutes
I agree! Please read my comments carefully. I am not arguing against the usefulness or deep conceptual importance of natural units! I am critiquing the terrible explanations being given in this thread.
> Likewise with spacetime: for most purposes human non-physicists think about, they are completely non-substitutable. So practically, it works well to use a "Troy" sort of system for one. But it's a purely human distinction.
No! Space and time are not interchangeable in any universal sense even if they are universally linked by a symmetry. A space-like interval and a time-like interval cannot be interchanged with each other by a Lorentz transformation. The distinction between space-like and time-like intervals is observer independent.
Would you agree that if there was a unit for 299,792,458 meters called 'q' then the "speed of light" could be expressed as 1 q/s? Then e = m*c^2 is e = m x 1 or e = m (but the units of q^2/s^2 are still there, just the arithmetic is simplified)
I am not arguing against natural units. I use them daily, and they are more than just practically useful. I am critiquing bad explanations for their interpretation and justification.
"are physically related such that, in a sense..." I didn't say they were equivalent, I said they were connected. You can't transform a time-like interval into a space-like one, but you can transform one time-like interval into another such that the separation on time increase and the separation in space decreases.
There's only so much clarity you can fit into a HN comment.
The interested parties on either side would have been better off buying pre-fork and selling the one they didn't want, rather than buying after the fork, even though the end result is the same. That is irrational.
If people trade based upon information asymmetry, then the fact that Bitcoin Cash actually had miners, didn't crash fatally, and was capable of sending transactions constitutes an enormous change in the information landscape.
Pre fork BTC price + risk premium ~ BTC post fork + BCH
Pretend like the fork actually taking place and working successfully as comparable to a company's earning reports. The second that news comes in, it prices itself in almost immediately.
Very true - neither the person who wants BTC (but has no opinions on BCH) nor the BCH buyer wants to take the risk that the other coin will drop before he/she can sell it. In other words the risk premium isn't zero.
However a rational (impartial?) actor should be willing to take that risk if the premium is big enough. That could mean buying pre-fork or selling pre-fork if there is an obvious opportunity. Which means in an efficient market the risk premium should be zero "on average". It's hard to reason about averages with one sample but that sample was distinctly not zero!
To me an asset that moves 15% in a day, and which no-one knows what it's truly worth, isn't great as a store of value.
I'm not going to speculate about where bitcoin will be trading when it becomes a stable, useful asset, but in order to justify a market cap anywhere near this high it will eventually need to generate actual utility for its users. Can someone explain where that will come from? Cheap currency conversion and easy money transfer?
Gold, art and wine all have a utility value that's way below their "store of value" value. Bitcoin is just a more convenient store with an equally insignificant utility value. Whether Bitcoin can persist while offering so little value I don't know, just saying these valuations are not unheard of in the asset world.
Just look at what people pay for mediocre Van Gogh paintings I wouldn't hang in my toilet..
It's hard to objectively value things. But bitcoin is a clear outlier because it's only value is that people think it's going to go up in value. It's more like beanie babies than a Van Gogh.
Wine price is generally determined by the genuine demand for the wine. Art less so, but still people actually want to hang the art somewhere. Some people speculate with art, but it's not a huge percentage of the value.
Gold is the closest, but it's still a mile apart. First, there is genuine demand for gold for decorative purposes. But there is a large demand for gold as a store of value.
There are two key difference between bitcoin and gold. Gold has a very long track history of reliable demand. All of history it has been valuable. It is seen as a safe bet. But the bigger difference is that gold isn't purchased on the expectations of massive growth. Gold isn't supposed to MOOOOOON. It's just supposed to be steady. Sometimes gold is over priced, but demand is steadish.
Bitcoin only has any value (beyond the negligible trading value) because a bunch of baghodlers think bitcoin will be work tens of thousands of dollars eventually. Why do they think that? Because it's gone up a lot in the past? There is no "there there." If people start to wonder if bitcoin will ever go up, it will crash.
Wine prices, gold price and art prices are all driven by genuine demand for them. Why would something have a price if there wasn't genuine demand for them?
What do you base the idea on that only some of the price of art is based on speculation?
I don't think Bitcoin is an outlier at all. And if you don't believe Bitcoin is an outlier, as many people are starting to do now, you can understand why its price is going up so fast.
Gold prices don't do anything because they're "supposed" to do anything. Gold moons whenever the market decides it wants gold to moon, just like Bitcoin, just like wine and just like art.
I'm so tired of people trying to validate and prop up cryptocurrency with horrible comments and logic. Hanging a mediocre Van Gogh above your toilet? Unbelievable.
"NVT Ratio (Network Value to Transactions Ratio) is similar to the PE Ratio used in equity markets."
The NVT is currently high, but not out of control like it was in 2014. This is the best dataset I've seen for working out if the network is actually being used in a way that matches the valuation, and I think will become invaluable when the CME Bitcoin Futures market opens.
It may be some time until $100M of daily churn doesn't result in a 15% price swing. The market capitalization of BTC would need to increase considerably to accommodate such a scenario.
And it looks like we are quickly approaching such a scenario.
The rich (and super-rich) have a lot of resources to move markets and BTC is currently especially susceptible to this.
Indeed. I guess volatility like this isn't a dealbreaker for other asset types so it shouldn't be here. Just seems odd that we call it a "currency" when these things happen routinely.
Perhaps the biggest derivatives house on the planet announcing that they are going address the specific concern makes it more useful? Because your exact rebuttal won't exist anymore.
That manifold is a torus - you can walk in circles by walking West-East or North-South, each of which repeats every 1 distance unit. If you walk along the diagonal you get a repeating path every 1.4 distance units. All "great circle" paths (straight lines on a manifold) on a sphere repeat every 1 unit of distance.
