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now do purchasing power of the dollar

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R


> now do purchasing power of the dollar

… if the dollar is literally stuffed in a mattress or buried in jars in your backyard. Which is not the point of a currency.

Having it drop in value—at a modest, predictable rate—is arguably a good thing:

> No currency should be able to buy the same basket of goods over very long timespans through hoarding. If you want to retain the purchasing power of your money, it should participate in society via investment.

* https://twitter.com/dollarsanddata/status/159265180975079833...


The linked graph includes inflation.


It was relatively stable if you could go back to the century before that graph starts, when there was no federal reserve.


Now do frequency of recessions, depressions, and panics.


You mean like the great depression which happened not long after formation, which some prominent economists have argued was exacerbated by the fed?

Things did stabilize quite a bit after we bombed the rest of the industrial world into oblivion, though, creating a period of prosperity roughly equal in expansion to the period from the end of the civil war to before the creation of the fed.


To be fair, while what you say is no doubt true, the Federal Reserve didn't gain the tools that it would now use correct for that until the mid-1930s and in some ways not until the 1950s — when the Great Depression was already well on its way to being over/was ancient history. It was something quite different leading up to/during the beginnings of the Great Depression.


> You mean like the great depression which happened not long after formation, which some prominent economists have argued was exacerbated by the fed?

The tight monetary policy of the Fed (dictated by the rules of then-orthodox gold standard) made the Great Depression worse:

* https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/financial-markets-an...

And it was only after leaving the gold standard that countries started to recover:

> In the end, recovery from the Great Depression does not begin until countries give up on the combination of the Bagehot Rule and of commitment to sound gold-standard finance. Those countries that have central banks willing to print up enough money so that people are willing to spend it--it is when you adopt such policies that your economy begins to recover. If you don’t, you become France, which sticks to the gold standard all the way up to 1937, and never gets a recovery. When World War II begins, Nazi Germany’s production--equal to France's in 1933--had doubled between 1933 and 1939. French production had fallen by 15%.

* https://delong.typepad.com/delong_long_form/2013/10/the-grea...

It was the 'sound money' orthodoxy that everyone adhered to that made things bad, and not the Fed specifically. It's not like things were any more stable pre-Fed:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1896

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1907

And the "Great Depression" used to refer to something else pre-1930s:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression

It should also be noted that how the Fed (or any central bank) was run one hundred years ago, and how it/they are run now, are two different things. We've learned a lot (sometimes through painful experience(s)) about how to run economy(s).


I totally agree with the sentiments in the video that the current state of agent architectures feels not there yet and we need an interoperable composable standard.


In my own experiments I have had major failures where much of the text is fabricated by the LLM to the point where I just find it hard to trust even with great prompt engineering. What I have been very impressed with is it’s ability to take medium quality ocr from acrobat with poor formatting, lots of errors and punctuation problems and render 100% accurate and properly formatted output by simply asking it to correct the ocr output. This approach using traditional cheap ocr for grounding might be a really robust and cheap option.


My brain must be warped by using LLMs because I could not help but think that it would be an amazing prompt, complete with multiple examples of each principal. Perhaps good prompting is good writing?


I thought the same.

(I did something similar in drawing. So it's a not uncommon path)

Get your art sharp. Digest that into a science. Digest the science into automation.

(And yes, one could argue that the result is a crystalline turd.)


Logical yet, how overvalued did Tesla get?


As the old saying goes, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid. So shorting a clearly overvalued stock can be a dangerous move.


Oops. We posted that at the same time.

Short Nvidia only if you hedge with some call options. Or other financial instrument that mitigates your losses.


In a world where seed and A stage AI startups are getting $100mm rounds and half that money's going to NVIDIA ... eh it's probably not too overvalued. I think there's more oomph left in the bubble.


When the valuation is something like "it looks like it's assuming they'll continue to sell $X billion a year" it can be reasonablish.

When the valuation requires "they will continue to grow sales X% a year" is when it quickly becomes impossible, and for a much smaller X than you might realize.


Even if you do think AI is a bubble, Nvidia's capacity is completely booked for a few years or so if I'm not mistaken. And that's with huge margins.


the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.


To the contrary does it not imply any well organized group should have an easier time of accomplishing their aims while the rest are mired in the chaos?


> To the contrary does it not imply any well organized group should have an easier time of accomplishing their aims while the rest are mired in the chaos?

This take makes sense to me. It's not the org as a whole that is accomplishing secret aims, but a sub-org within a chaotic org, or spread across multiple chaotic orgs, that is able to do so since no one is paying close attention to anything.


The claim is that there are literally no observable organizations running without chaos, so are we to believe the only one to achieve it is nefarious instead of just regular profiteering?

I like the meta conspiracy theory that the only organizations running without chaos are covert ones though.


It’s more that within that chaos there are short bursts of organization that can pull off narrow conspiracies.

There are also natural long term aligned players who conspire in ways that they can use their energy for their benefit. “Market makers”

There are also random alignments that appear to be conspiracies ex post facto.


You think the waste is high in tech saving a few mill here and there with db settings an ec2 optimizations? Imagine all the low sophistication marketing managers and CDOs, CMOS literally with 10 to 100+ million budgets much of which is completely wasted. Ten years in this space I have 2nd hand knowledge of specific cases that make your face melt.


This popped up in the new feed yesterday and seems significant in the ANN space https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38054537



This looks to be a big deal for vector database hosting costs. The pattern of moving away from hot ram towards algorithms that efficiently leverage ssd storage is a winner every time.


A thought, write a very constrained sane rendering/layout engine as a compile target for an llm to convert html/css to rather than support all css or any of it for that matter. Could there be some kind of llvm for html/css?


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