Exactly that. The tech seems fine, but I live in a country with a government that has strong censorship laws, and I do not trust Apple to not bend to countries like China in extending this to political content.
It worked pretty well for Thailand, a country with 3k of land borders that people can and do walk across. Delta seems to have changed the calculus though
Do you have a source for “very likely”? I’m at “plausibly escaped from” so far and would be interested in evidence that changes that in either direction.
There has been some evidence of how the handlers of that laboratory's research went out of their way to shame anyone who'd suggest it emerged from there in the beginning, followed by mainstream articles noting that we simply can't rule this option out, and that the likeliest scenario is that some workers got accidentally infected and became patient 0
My "very likely", however, doesn't come from there. It's more of a statistical statement. What is the likelihood that a quickly mutating virus will appear next to a laboratory that specializes in quickly mutating viruses and not have originated from there? The world is big. The chances of that happening are very low. Therefore it's very likely that it comes from the lab
Maybe not "very likely", but Peter Ben Embarek, the head of the 13 member team at the WHO investigating the origin of COVID-19, recently said [1], "An employee of the lab gets infected while working in a bat cave collecting samples. Such a scenario, while being a lab leak, would also fit our first hypothesis of direct transmission of the virus from bat to human. This is a hypothesis that we consider to be likely."
Further, from the article, "But the WHO scientist pointed out that none of the types of bats suspected to have been the reservoir for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 lives in the wild in the Wuhan region.
"'The only people likely to have approached these types of bats are employees of the city laboratories,' he said."
The WHO is on China's payroll, so I would be very suspicious of conflict of interest.
Peter makes this assertion with zero evidence. They've already made up their mind, and are searching for evidence to prove their global international extortion.
Everything about covid-19 has no evidence behind it. Just like the common cold, any virus is impossible to cure (and therefore the symptoms can be alleviated through natural and allopathic methods), and that is a fact.
I had been very, very excited to start semaglutide, but about eight weeks ago I picked up a CBT-based eating book called The Beck Diet Solution and I’ve so far found it very very effective
Not to suggest anything about your personal experience, but note that in general pretty much anyone can follow pretty much any diet for two months and lose weight if they try. The seriously hard bit - and the way you know you've found the right diet for you - is if you can follow it for the third month (and then all the months thereafter). Two months is roughly the upper limit for the "any diet will work for anyone" effect.
Well said. My take from research: structures from a CBT-based approach are really helpful and should be more widespread - but for most people are not sufficient in staying at a healthier weight long-term.
Yep CBT (and third wave cognitive therapies in general) are very effective against emotion-based overeating (e.g. stress eating). Stress eating is widespread and addressing it is a core part of our coaching.
Important to say not everyone struggles with stress eating, which is why our coaching program goes much broader than that.
The metabolic medication aspect is also really helpful, which is why we combine the two for Fella.
Bitcoin gained 7% so far today from it's lowest to its highest. If I have a 5% margin on whatever I'm selling how could I ever feel good about trading for it, knowing that 7% was equally likely to be a drop and not wanting to treat it like an investment, where I have to wait for it to gain value again before I can sell?
The weird thing is that this is starting to happen to low-margin businesses that price their goods in dollars.
Restaurant prices around me have gone up anywhere from 25-100% in the last 6 months. I had the surreal experience of telling my wife, as she was phoning in a take-out order, "Ask them what their current prices are. I got different numbers from their Yelp page, the menu photos posted to Yelp, their webpage, and their DoorDash page, with the highest being twice the lowest." That's some developing-country shit right there - normally you think of needing to ask a business what their day-to-day prices are as something you do in Venezuela, not in the U.S.
I'm told this is because their food suppliers have jacked up prices 80-100%, so the restaurants that don't will soon go out of business. Memo hasn't filtered down to all restaurants, though, and some are more reticent to raise their prices than others for competitive or moral reasons.
Pacifica, CA. No, it's (mostly) real - we were confused between half & full orders, but prices are still up 50% between the Yelp menu and their official website menu, with the menu pictures on Yelp showing various prices in-between. Chicken & chips used to be $7.50, now it's $10.40 ($14.85 for a full portion).
This is fine as an anecdote, but it’s not what most US consumers are experiencing. In the last 12 months, food made at home has increased in price by 2.6%, and eating out has increased by 4.6%.
No real surprise here, considering that over 90% of existing USD money supply has been created since 2008.[1] Unless the real economy grew 90%, that monetary creation must necessarily push prices up, but due to information assymetries, price increases happen unevenly.
But until this year inflation didn't really increase over average[1], and we certainly can't blame this year all on the creation of new money, and it certainly didn't increase by 90%.
I'd be interested in where you think all that inflation is hiding. Because you're saying it has to be somewhere, right?
It all went to the Bay Area and other places where numerous tech workers congregate, along with NYC and other places where finance workers congregate. It's spilled out into the rest of America to the extent that these people move around.
Since 2008, home prices here have gone from about $1-1.2M for a modest home in Cupertino or Los Altos to about $3.5M for that same home. Restaurant meals have gone from about $9 for an entree to about $30. Daycare is now $2000/month for an average place, or $3500/month for a good one.
This is an example of a Cantillon effect [1]. Inflation doesn't affect prices uniformly. New money enters the economy at specific points (usually the financial industry), and then it pools in firms that have strong pricing power (currently the tech industry). People close to those areas experience sharp inflation while also seeing their wealth and living standards rise sharply relative to the broader economy. People not in those areas experience the money injection as an increase in inequality, not as inflation. The money doesn't circulate effectively between the "new" and "old" economy, because the "old" economy produces little that people in the "new" economy want to buy, and when they do, there are usually ample competitors to hold down prices.
The thing is that the pandemic and now the Biden administration's policies to build back from it have in some sense broken that dam that prevents money from circulating, and so we're beginning to see more broad-based inflation. Remote work let people on Bay Area salaries work anywhere, which means you might have multiple people with $500K+ compensation bidding up home prices and spending money at restaurants in what was previously a sleepy rural area. Direct stimulus payments inject money into ordinary people's bank accounts rather than into the financial industry, so inflation resulting from them is broad-based rather than concentrated in financial assets. Infrastructure spending will shift the Cantillon effects to areas like government contractors and raw materials like steel & concrete. And policies that are specifically designed to alleviate inequality will also result in inflation: the flip side of having lots of money is that everything you spend it on costs more.
there are plenty of stablecoins, and most NFTs are priced in ETH. It's also trivial to convert volatile tokens into stable tokens or fiat automatically. This is a non-issue, but is brought up by those who have not paid attention to the crypto market in the past 5 years.
You can reduce it to 0 by shorting Bitcoin futures contracts. You can make it even more volatile if you want. You can change the multiplier on base price change i.e. volatility to be any number between -300% and 300% of its base rate(the caps depend on margin requirement), with appropriate setup.
That's for Bitcoin, but you can do other cryptocurrencies indirectly.
And these are government-regulated contracts, marked-to-market daily.
If you have to do all this fancy footwork to make volatility not matter doesn't that prove that volatility does matter.
If you price asset X in crypto in the market and then buy options on USD to ensure that your sale price will be redeemable for a certain amount in USD in the future if it sells then aren't you really just pricing in USD? And then suffering a loss on your USD options if the asset doesn't end up selling?
No, it changes the argument to "Bitcoin is inconvenient and requires a lot of maintenance. I have to track margin, not lose my wallet, not get scammed, etc. and if I forget to roll my futures and it collapses I lose 80% of my money"
Which I would agree with, but the original "volatile instruments cannot be used for pricing" isn't true.
> doesn't that prove that volatility does matter.
It doesn't matter for making it "possible" or even "safe in principle". It does matter if you want it to be convenient.
> aren't you really just pricing in USD?
Sort of, but you can choose to price 90% of it in USD and 10% in Bitcoin. So arguments with a discrete "impossible" seem in conflict with this continuous ratio.
The point is: If there's a maximum volatility an agent is willing to accept, one can construct a financial setup that meets the constraint. So the volatility itself shouldn't be a reason against it.
It matters in terms of if you shift the argument from "volatile instruments cannot be used for pricing" to "volatile instruments have prohibitive costs that make using them for pricing very impractical" too, right?
Your example that you could price in bitcoin and then structure your sale offer in a way that 90% of the proceeds translate to a particular USD amount and the remainder are at risk to Bitcoin volatility is interesting to me because I think of it in terms of a Real Estate transaction. I offer my house at a price that translates to $100k USD in bitcoin and, for simplicity's sake let's say someone instantly purchases it. Now the deal is done but there is a time for all the paperwork, land title transfer, bitcoin is held in escrow, etc.. so the instant the deal is signed I buy some kind of option that ensures that the 90% of the bitcoin amount will be 90K USD when the transaction is consummated. That has a cost, right? And then if the deal falls through that cost and more is lost, right?
So those costs lower the value of my asset, so it is more than convenience is my conclusion. You agree with this, right?
I think you are right, and together with mining fees, dilution, negative attention from governments, block confirmation times, exchanges that aren't CME going bust, etc. mean it's generally not a very useful commodity.
However, one thing that should be mentioned is that Bitcoin is expected to increase in value. I don't mean that in a trader sense or that you should buy it; I mean Bitcoin futures are in contango(i.e. priced higher than the commodity) so you can lock in a risk-free profit by 1. Buying Bitcoin and 2. Selling a future. Specifically, the spot price is currently $47,150 while the September 2021 futures are $47,340 for a profit of $190 or about 4.8% annualized.
So currently, any financial institution would have a strong incentive to denominate any escrow accounts in Bitcoin for times of less than 4 months(there's not as much liquidity further out). I believe this is what's happening here: Regulators ask questions if banks buy the Bitcoin themselves, but if it's in escrow on behalf of your customers it's more acceptable.
Conversely, customers should prefer to pay in USD, because paying in Bitcoin is equivalent to either a short position(if they sell their Bitcoin and never buy any again) or an expected cost of 5% interest due to (directed) volatility.
So the original claim that it has "no impact at all" is probably too strong, but a 5% interest rate is not what people mean when they reference Bitcoin's wild price swings i.e. volatility: The capital appreciation/loss can be accounted for if you really want to.
Note: I'm not recommending this strategy, just attempting to calculate carrying costs in the context of a mortgage lender holding Bitcoin in escrow.
Fixed-income products are generally priced in yield, even though the actual agreements mention dollars. The futures for treasury bonds are literally denominated in yield points, but most (fixed-income) things it's more "people denominate in USD and think in yield".
That is, everyone trading bonds/certain commercial real estate/mortgages/preferred stocks/etc. converts them to a % return, with different yields falling in different risk categories. So you might get 3% on a relatively safe commercial bond, 10% lending to Turkistan, 4% on a property in the middle of a desirable city, 13% if it's filled with asbestos and shut down by the city.
It would be possible to price a mortgage in any continuous ratio between USD/Bitcoin, though I suspect the imputed interest rates for an already-low mortgage rate would make it undesirable. Someone would just have to punch current prices into a spreadsheet to see how it affects the yield.
I would expect Bitcoin specifically to have a high interest rate holding a long position(since Bitcoin people want high leverage), and the short position to have an implied positive yield. So banks should want to price in Bitcoin since they like leveraged low-risk low profit. But I haven't looked at a price chart for that assumption.
Perhaps, but OnlyFans will always be a porn site in consumer imaginations moving forward. Nobody’s going to put their wholesome knitting content on there moving forward
Can they possibly have such great IP that has any value over any 'I could clone that in a weekend' (i.e. longer than that, but still not long) jobs? Or other incumbents like Patreon?
They have a solid brand, it isn't what they want, but change that and what else is there?
I laughed reading the title, because it sounds just like 'TikTok bans dances', 'Instagram bans food and candid shots that aren't' to me. I don't use any of these sites, but that's the reputation they have/association I have for them; rebranding away from it when the core is so simple just seems nuts.
I really have no idea. I also don't know whether rebranding is the right choice.
But they have the code, the infrastructure, the marketing department, and all the revenue from their adult services days. So that seems like a pretty big head start over just a clone of their web UI.
