> If you own a house, you didn't have its cash value when you bought it;
> we solved the problem with ramshackle one-room buildings with dirt floors,
there is a fallacy here. People with access to debt bid up the price of an asset, like a house, against other peoples’ similar access to debt. Sans debt access, the solution was not necessarily a small ramshackle house. The fallacy is the belief that the same asset price - whether opulent or ramshackle house, wouldn’t adjust to the reduced level from the bidding environment. The differential cost of construction for a nicer house can be countenanced in the access-to-debt case, but that is second order.
Illustrative straw-man example: Suppose, once one had a parcel of land, that it was trivial to construct one’s ‘starter home’ the ramshackle house if you like. Get one’s family and friends to help build in exchange for future return favors. As one advances in life, rebuild to have something more opulent. The rub is in the parcel itself. Unlike the would-be house, it had no cost built-in, just whatever price the previous owner was willing to accept to release their parcel. That parcel’s (and those around it) price reflects the market’s access to debt, or lack of access to debt. In the market without access to debt, parcel pricing reflects which buyers have accrued more savings vs other buyers. In the market with access to debt, parcel pricing reflects who can access more debt (through the various means we know of today - down payment ability yes, which parallels the non-debt’s savings case, someone co-signing, long term expected future earning potential vs someone retired, the parcel itself put up as collateral, perhaps other non-immobile assets put up as collateral, like the family oxcart).
The point is that there isn’t necessarily a 1:1 coupling between market’s debt vs non-debt access and whether the construction is opulent vs ramshackle.
> People with access to debt bid up the price of an asset, like a house, against other peoples’ similar access to debt.
That might be true now, but it would not mean house prices would go down, it just means more people would rent.
Think about how these loans work right now... people with money they don't need right now loan that money to people who want a house but don't have the cash right now. The reason they loan that money is they want to earn a return, which they get in interest on the loan.
Let's say all consumer lending is banned, and you can't loan money to people to buy a house. Well, the people with that money still want a return, so they will invest it somewhere else. Where can they invest it?
Well, one option is they could buy houses and rent them out. Since they only have to compete with other people with money (since poorer people can't get a loan for their house), the price is going to be much lower than it is today, which means they can get a better return by buying the house and renting it out.
So now you are still in the same situation with house prices, but there is no way for you to get any part of that return.
Recommend wariness of technology history narratives, especially “just-so” retrocausal stories and, like this one demonstrates, “great man” narratives (like, but for this person, we would not have [invention mentioned in headline].
For example, the answer to ‘who invented the airplane’ takes different form depending primarily, in my experience, on the matchup between reporting outlet’s nationality and the nationality of the putative inventor(s). Qualifiers like ‘steady level flight’ follow from, and do not precede, the nationality matchup.
TFA’s missing info in between its PR pairing of the unknown biohub with the (much more well known) NIH and DoE is that biohub is a Zuckerberg initiative. So just imagine all your biological data paired inextricably tied on an opt-out-but-cant-really basis with your Facebook & Insta account.
It was called CZI Biohub, the Chan Zuckerberg Institure, up until about a year ago.
I don't have a Facebook page, I stopped using it after attending an ML meetup in 2012 and being creeped out by what Facebook was doing with photos, pre-AI.
But I use Biohub resources all the time in my research, and have zero, absolutely zero concern about anything developed at Biohub giving the creepy Meta stuff any extra creepiness. They aren't any more connected than the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute is connected to aviation industry.
I do have concerns about the size of investment, $2B to Biohub is abut much and a waste when it would be better to seed lots of independent labs in academia. This is double the cost of the Human Genome Project but with an undefined and therefore unachievable goal.
So there are lots of very valid critiques of this announcement, but I don't think privacy concerns are among them.
Yea I was thinking about this too. Then I thought about how this will be used elsewhere. Predictive models for mental health conditions, addictions, diseases, etc. strong data to try to exploit for marketing. Then eventually health and life insurance companies will be deregulated enough or be willing to pay the fines to squeeze some more capital that way. And of course one day if we are lucky enough eugenics efforts and specifically targeted bioweapons. Yay
His father is particularly intriguing with respect to wartime / postwar history, Good bet there’s probably more content there buried in the archives worth coming out.
Yes but draw an arbitrary line around any group. Call them HNdrathals if you want. Define them at one instaneous snapshot in time as 100% conserved gene corpus. Then watch generation after generation, as some of the HNers (against all odds) interbreed with the surrounding populace. After one hundred generations, should we expect many people to be more than 2% HNdrathal? Yet did the HNdrathals ‘die out’?
Careful, HNers are a population with a history of trauma associated with unclosed parentheses. By raising our cortisol levels you may be lowering our fertility rate by exposing us to them.
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