I'm no expert but my understanding is that unfortunately there is some correlation between transmissibility and severity of disease, because one of the ways it can become more transmissible is to reproduce in your cells faster so that you shed more virus particles. This also means it takes over quicker and your immune system has less time to respond before it does lots of damage.

Whether that outweighs the randomness you describe I don't know. Maybe nobody knows for this virus?

Well if the two events (improved transimissibility and improved lethality) are not independent as I assumed then it's certainly bad news.

I also heard the opposite thesis btw, higher transimissibility might sacrifice something in terms of lethality. Like you can't really add much as I'm not an expert.

The people have dramatically altered their behavior on a global scale (on average anyways) because of COVID’s lethality. There is absolutely selective pressure in that dimension.

If the lethality of Covid were to drop to seasonal flu levels there wouldn’t be anywhere near the amount of research into medical interventions nor would we feasibly maintain our current levels of public health interventions.

Don't really get your point.

> The people have dramatically altered their behavior on a global scale (on average anyways) because of COVID’s lethality. There is absolutely selective pressure in that dimension.

This reads to me: "Covid is certainly more lethal than the average flu, therefore is undoubtedly getting less lethal" (effect of selective pressure). It doesn't make much sense.

> there wouldn’t be anywhere near the amount of research into medical intervention

Right, how's that has to do with whether there's selective pressure or not?

It almost feels like you are attributing a different meaning to "selective pressure", but cannot understand which one.

You seem to misunderstand what selective pressure is.

Selective pressure is anything that disrupts replication. If people take measures to prevent spread of a disease that’s literally selective pressure. I don’t understand what is confusing about that concept.

I think you're too quick at making assumptions which are not correct unfortunately. Let's recap:

> there's no selective pressure for it to become less lethal.

> If people take measures to prevent spread of a disease that’s literally selective pressure.

How trying to slow down its spread can "force" it to become less lethal?

The only possible answer is that lower lethality gives it more time to spread around right?

It turns out Covid has a long incubation period, in fact plenty to use the host to infect other people.

Tl;dr: Given the length of the incubation period a less lethal virus would not gain much in terms of its ability to spread. That's the thesis I'm hearing.

> random mutation unlikely to improve

indeed, but subsequent success or failure does. Mutation and selection. Mutation prepares the pool to sieve the successful ones.

Yes my point is, when you do improve one (transimissibility) you probably did not improve the other one (or even got worse at it).

Well bitcoin does have an intrinsic monetary policy despite not having a monetary authority.

It is possible to engineer currencies to be inflationary/deflationary without an external authority.

It just cannot be a guarantee as there are many other factors to take into account.

Indeed, bitcoin has an intrinsic monetary policy, but such a policy doesn't and can't have an inflation target. This is why claims that bitcoin is inflationary or deflationary are nonsense.

> even Bitcoin experiences inflation as more of it is mined (as does gold).

Surprisingly they don't understand what inflation means despite having just quoted its definition a few paragraphs above.

Inflation doesn't mean that we "have more of something", it means we "need more of that something" to buy the same good over time.

Do we today need more bitcoins to buy a pizza compared to 2013?

Redefining words and ideas is common in 2021. I’m not surprised

> Nobody chooses to be a fool

Dogecoin is at least honest, so many other "jokes" including Bitcoin, contemporary art, some stocks etc...

If people want to play a game of musical chairs, I rather prefer this game to be called exactly what it is.

It surprises me to see so many warnings about Dogecoin and so few about Bitcoin for instance. People actually believe there's any relevant difference?

Contemporary art isn't a joke, it's a money laundering scheme.

It's a mainly tax deferral/evasion scheme, far less a laundering one.

And a Veblen good. Really if you want to avoid tax there are easier ways.

They don't understand they are playing musical chairs. They think they are investing.

The difference is Bitcoin is much more widely used for payments. It now has a second layer payment protocol, which makes transactions fast and cheap, while remaining permissionless. And yes, it is useful. I just recently contributed to an imprisoned political dissident in my country. If made through regular credit card channels, that contribution could land me in jail.

It can still end you up in jail once your regulating authorities catch up to the technology. It's a distributed ledger. This should translate to "queryable public datastore of your financial transactions" in your head.

Just look at how the U.S. IRS is starting to get a subpoena process off the ground with regards to identities of wallet holders from exchanges. Even though the glacier doesn't appear to move, I assure you, it most certainly does.

Never make the mistake of assuming just because something is new meaning it will always remain that way, and if your nation state is cracking down on political people non grata, they may have no compunction with figuring out who was behind those transactions with or without your help.

This is ironically why cash not in a bank vault is the king of anonymous, difficult to trace financial activity. No paper trail.

Note: Of course banks and regulators know that too, and capital markets will do anything to make sure the maximum number of people entrust their finances to an institution to a loanmaking institution. People don't realize that ease of transaction and traceability is in and of itself a populational control mechanism.

There are privacy-focused coins, like Monero, which are developing some pretty awesome tech

For what it's worth, I do feel the same way about bitcoin. I just feel like the argument is even more clear when discussing dogecoin. I also think that once you reach this conclusion on dogecoin it is easy to think "Well dogecoin is basically bitcoin, so..."

What is your opinion about Ethereum in this case?

I'd need to know more than I do about Ethereum in order to have a solid opinion. My current impression is that Ethereum tries to provide some value or innovation in the form of distributed computation, which is good, but also that there is no useful program being run on the distributed computation layer.

I haven't looked too much into it, so maybe I'm wrong about the useful program thing, but to my knowledge smart contracts are mainly used for creating digital tokens and things like that. Maybe Ethereum could be a useful way to conduct raffles, lotteries, or sports betting.

If you know more about Ethereum could you point out any useful applications that use it?

I think people should not think that much in terms of supply-demand for speculative phenomena. At least not in a macroeconomic sense.

The value of a coin is determined by the expectation of selling it in the future at a higher price, nothing else.

These expectations are affected by the supply level only via auction dynamics: lots of newly mined coins in a short timeframe tend to result in big sell orders and downward pressure on the price.

That's an effective but also very limited way to impact the price. For instance the increase in supply of a non-speculative asset reduces its marginal utility: the more oil available the less useful it becomes.

But there's no theoretical limit to the price of a coin and therefore no limit to the return one can expect!

As it's all about auction dynamics, a highly inflationary speculative asset with well-timed and strategic increase in supply could very well defy any macro supply-demand logic.

Well I wish he expanded a bit more on the “Just do X, that’s so much simpler” section.

He's on AWS, he could have gotten all those benefits with ElasticBeanstalk or ECS even. Plus no yaml files but actual IaaS (terraform etc.) and much better integrations with the other AWS services.

I'd personally still use EC2 for a blog, but if you're looking for convenience/battery-included type of thing...yes I'd argue you're better off just doing X instead.

Yeah... It's like software hipsterism, whatever is weird/hard is "cool," but the moment it become mainstream suddenly a new technology/language needs to made instead. 2 years from now everybody and their grandma will understand kubernetes or have a simple gui for it, and the hipsters will move on to something new and exclusive.

> When you can create money backed by nothing

Isn't that what money really is about?

Debt and money go together. When you take on debt your creditor can decide to sell his credit to somebody else, de facto using your promise to repay your debt as a currency.

Isn't your promise...just a promise? Yet you can buy stuff with it?

Fungible debt is a money substitute. The strictest definition of money would require that it has no counterparty.

> The central thesis of value investing is: if a company is going to close shop, the scrap value of that company will be higher than the market cap of that company. There's a lot more to it, but that's the gist of it.

There's enough "more to it", to make this statement incorrect.

You're describing Graham's style of value investing, Buffet's style is significantly different.

In fact the term "value investing" has now a very loose definition, since so many different styles are grouped under this term.

I'd say this is the most appropriate definition: "Investment is most intelligent when it is most businesslike" (straight from the Intelligent Investor).

In other terms, any type of investing that's not based on speculation is value investing.

I'd say he broke his own game of investing, rather than the game in general.

Given what he thinks he understand there's not enough opportunities to allocate this amount of capital.

I guess that's why he hired the two new managers. By the way they did come up with some of the best ideas in recent years like Apple and Snowflake.

> best ideas in recent years like Apple and Snowflake.

Are these really the best ideas. Bought apple only couple of years ago, snowflake was arguably the most hyped stock of all time. I don't see what the insight was here.

They are certainly very successful ideas in terms of outcomes. Apple went up more than 3X since he bought it in 2016.

A (big?) part of Databricks' success is the complicated mess that Spark is to run.