I've grown pretty skeptical of most counterfactual thinking, because it seems to be largely based on a sort of primary cause fallacy. That is, since it's basically impossible to properly construct very complex counterfactuals, in which events proceed according to a realistically convoluted web of indecipherable causality, we instead do it in a naive ceteris paribus sorta thing, in which we change one variable but leave everything else equal, and assume that's good enough.

To get to the point, consider this question:

Your best friend is taking a nap on the floor of your living room. Suddenly, you are faced with a bizarre existential problem: This friend is going to die unless you kick them (as hard as you can) in the rib cage. If you don't kick them while they slumber, they will never wake up. However, you can never explain this to your friend; if you later inform them that you did this to save their life, they will also die from that. So you have to kick a sleeping friend in the ribs, and you can't tell them why.

Since you cannot tell your friend the truth, what excuse will you fabricate to explain this (seemingly inexplicable) attack?

This question requires such a bizarre alteration to reality---in order to construct this scenario, we'd have to imagine an ailment that'll kill someone unless they're kicked in the ribs, and if they are kicked, will kill them if they're informed why---that I honestly can't make heads or tails of it. But if a more rigorous situation were constructed, for example involving blackmail, then it becomes conceivable to avoid the question by outmaneuvering the blackmailer.

Similarly, there's:

Someone builds and optical portal that allows you to see a vision of your own life in the future (it's essentially a crystal ball that shows a randomly selected image of what your life will be like in twenty years). You can only see into this portal for thirty seconds. When you finally peer into the crystal, you see yourself in a living room, two decades older than you are today. You are watching a Canadian football game, and you are extremely happy. You are wearing a CFL jersey. Your chair is surrounded by books and magazines that promote the Canadian Football League, and there are CFL pennants covering your walls. You are alone in the room, but you are gleefully muttering about historical moments in Canadian football history. It becomes clear that---for some unknown reason---you have become obsessed with Canadian football. And this future is static and absolute; no matter what you do, this future will happen. The optical portal is never wrong. This destiny cannot be changed.

The next day, you are flipping through television channels and randomly come across a pre-season CFL game between the Toronto Argonauts and the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Knowing your inevitable future, do you now watch it?

Now we're left wondering about temporal mechanics, or what knowing the future actually means. I'm an incompatiablist (i.e., I believe in mesoscale determinism and deny free will), but this question still leaves me wondering about the mechanism for destiny and the apparently paradoxical situation it would present. Does the universe conspire to ensure that destiny is maintained, or are we somehow completely wrong about causality? Again, this prevents me from making headway in understanding the question.

But these aren't interesting thoughts. Pursuing actual insight requires, at the most basic level, at least two things: epistemology and methodology. These questions lack both, so I award them no points, and may God have mercy on their souls.

Well, more in the sense that she knows all the tricks, and everyone uses her.

So I suppose that means Java is a sex-ed video actress, and Python is a high-priced escort.

Well, that certainly makes The Pretender seem a lot more plausible.

perhaps make them a bit darker and less one dimensional.

Give it some substance, some grit.

I think "darker and grittier" is usually the opposite of substance, or rather, I think there's a tendency for writers and the like to think that darker and grittier means more substantial.

But dark and gritty is an aesthetic, and nothing more.

Like Dragon Age, the series that thinks blood and sex make a story mature, or, for that matter, the Nolan Batman movies, which sidestep the question of how to make a convincing villain by instead telling us that some men want to watch the world burn.

No, I think in practice adding darkness to Star Wars, a franchise that's already truly awful, would just turn it into the middle schooler that takes up smoking cigarettes to appear cultured.

Scientific visualization.

Context, man! The post is about real-time raytracing, not professional 3D design.

More than anything, this is probably key:

Contrary to some popular beliefs, most of the rendering work is not done to be “realistic”, but to be artistic or stylish.

...But maybe raytracing will eventually have its day.

Taxes explain why people want a certain kind of money---that is, why in the US we carry dollars, and in the UK people carry pounds, and so forth. I'm less familiar with monetarism (i.e., Friedman), but I think the big difference between monetarism and MMT is that the former operates on the idea that money is a store of value, while the latter says that money is a unit of account and transaction medium.

To clarify this a bit, by a store of value, I mean that monetarists take money to represent, say, an amount of labor. It's a very "bars of gold sitting in a vault" way of thinking about money, and it very much leads to the conclusion that price stability (low inflation) is the ultimate good in a monetary system. However, it also leads to the belief that money becomes "diluted" by issuing more of it---that is, it's based on the likely false belief that issuing more money causes existing money to become worth less.

MMT instead pulls from a tradition called "functional finance," which holds that the "right amount" of money is the amount that would be required to purchase all the goods that could be produced in an accounting period, given a frequency with which that money is expected to be spent. This gets away from the belief that money is a store of value, to a more functional view, that money is a thing that exists to facilitate transactions, and that there is both such a thing as too little and too much of it. That is, having too little money to buy all things that could be made instead means that the deficit---the things that can't be bought---instead just won't be made.

Regarding kids trading cheetos, I'd reiterate my argument from another post: taxes are a constraint on what forms of money can be used. If such a constraint isn't in place, for example, when considering black markets, or when considering elementary school children, then it stands to reason that people will tend to agree on what's most convenient to use. Taxes serve to limit the options available---using anything but the sovereign currency for transactions that are taxed (directly or indirectly) usually carries too high a cost, but when considering a simpler economy that contains no taxes, then anything could fill that void.

At the core, money serves as a unit of account (that is, it's a way of expressing relative values of goods) and a medium of transaction, so the question isn't necessarily "why would we use money?" so much as "why would we use this particular brand of money?" Though the question of why we would use money at all is interesting, and as minimum_wage said, I've heard that Graeber's book Debt: The First 5000 Years is an excellent treatment of that topic. Suffice it to say, the parables of the goldsmith and of Robinson Crusoe are almost certainly false, and (from an anthropological perspective) the origin of money is almost certainly rooted in the origin of the state.

World of Warcraft fits perfectly with the taxes-drive-money view, in that there are still plenty of taxes that are denominated in gold: chiefly (at the high end), equipment repairs, though at the low end one could also consider taxi costs, mounts, certain vendor items, and auction overheads. If there were no demand for gold in WoW, then it's conceivable that auction houses wouldn't be used, and instead player-driven barter systems would emerge (as they did in Everquest and Diablo 2).

Indeed, Diablo 2 poses a telling example. I never played the game online, but I was told that gold was so plentiful and so useless that the unit of account in player trading was some (otherwise worthless?) legendary item, and the only thing anyone ever did with gold was the little gambling minigame.

I've never played Team Fortress 2 so I don't know anything about any hat market, though certainly it's been shown that players can be heavily driven by vanity, because what else is there to do in online games? For example, I bought a few motorcycles during The Wrath of the Lich King, which is sadly an accomplishment that's been diminished by gold inflation. Player vanity is largely independent of this argument, though.

I don't know very much about bitcoin, but I'd wager that either it's a fad, or if there really is narcotics trading in bitcoins, then of course the answer is similar to the US dollar black market in Zimbabwe: it's a convenient currency, but somewhat spurious to real national monetary systems. That is, for a black market, it really does make sense to suggest that the most convenient currency wins (after all, black markets aren't taxed); in normal markets, there's a lot of resistance to choosing a currency by convenience, since for example the euro is still limping along.

Yes, I suspect that is possible, but then my theory of asset prices is that people have a bias toward the status quo, and the perception of change ("new information") makes people think prices should change, so they proceed to change prices. So there is a question about how much policy rate changes are just due to this sort of circular reasoning ("something should be happening, so let's do something!") versus actual changes to the availability of credit.

That being said, the real skepticism here is whether monetary policy can be used to stop an asset bubble once it's started.

MMT is Modern Monetary Theory, and bgritzut hit the nail on the head: of all the posts I've made about economics, this is the most that's just a plain recitation of MMT.

Well, mortgage bubbles in particular tend to be accompanied by mortgage fraud.

One of the biggest factors in the global financial crisis was so-called accounting control fraud: executive compensation was (is) based on quarterly revenue, and executives could fraudulently increase quarterly income by issuing a ton of loans with negative expected returns. The bank might go under in five years, but why does the executive care? Then, on the flip side, brokers are paid on commission, so they have strong incentives to make sure that mortgages make it. I point this out to say that neither morals nor "rational self-interest" represented serious constraints on the growth of lending, because the problem with the argument from self-interest is that it's usually considered with respect to the wrong person's interests.

Anyway, during the later days of the real estate bubble of the '00s, the focus for particularly bad lending shifted to loans in which banks did not actually verify the applicants' stated income. (This is normally reserved for people who the bank has good reason to believe are actually good for it.)

So I suppose the point is, in principle this could represent a higher constraint, but in practice, "where there's a will, there's a way."

Monetary policy is (allegedly) controlling the size of the money supply as a matter of macroeconomic policy enforcement, but I can see how "..." is a solid refutation of the problems for that viewpoint posed by endogenous theories of money. It turns out, just because something is accepted wisdom, that doesn't make it true.

Regarding your link, I'm immediately turned off by anyone who would use the phrase "the grand illusion called money." Money has value for a very good and very tangible reason. Though the fact that it has a testimonial from Ron Paul just makes it sound like even more of a joke.

In spite of my other posts, I'm pretty skeptical of the importance of monetary policy. For starters, it seems like a misnomer, since there's no particularly good reason to believe that the money multiplier is reliable. That is, it seems like monetary policy is based on an exogenous theory of money, while in reality it seems more likely that lending is driven by demand at a particular interest rate -- and while the Fed can set the interest rate, it can't set demand, and in that sense the causality of the money multiplier may very well go the other direction.

But even if money is exogenous and monetary policy works, it's presumably even less relevant to asset bubbles, because the interest rate of a loan only matters if you plan on holding it. If the plan is to buy a house and flip it, thus extinguishing the loan quickly, then the rate of the loan doesn't matter.

If there's any way in which Greenspan (or the Fed generally) was important, it was that it's supposed to be a regulator for the banking system, and it totally dropped the ball.

Libertarians are fringe.... Yeah, great, you've realized that Rand's followers are silly. Trumpeting it to everyone like you've had an epiphany quite possibly makes you even sillier.

I think "libertarian" is a large umbrella. Remember that Paul Ryan (who at least identifies as an objectivist) is the chairman of the House Budget Committee and was a major party vice presidential candidate last year. Of course, they lost, but the margin was way closer than it should've been if this ideology is at the fringe.

More pressingly, though, neoliberal dogma has reduced much of the economic discourse to "private sector good, public sector bad." That is, it's still very commonly believed that governments negatively distort markets (and that this is inherently and always bad), that public deficits (fiscally) crowd out private investment, and I'm sure there are still people who believe that public deficits are self-defeating because consumers will save the extra money to pay imagined increased future taxes.

So anyway, it may seem blindingly obvious (and a bit silly) to beat up on libertarianism, but by all accounts, people do in fact believe their bullshit. Maybe not under that particular banner, and maybe not in all ways, but neoliberalism is still the benchmark.

Regarding that specific issue, I think the fear is that if they let their employees wear dosimeters, then people would think, "Man, if the agents have to wear dosimeters, then there's probably a serious risk of dangerous levels of radiation." So that puts us at "the simplest way not to have problems is to never know if you have problems," i.e., disable the check engine light in your car and nothing's ever wrong with it.

Like probably everyone else here, everything I know about Mars comes from the Kim Stanley Robinson books. So let's just hope we live to see John Boone's party in the caldera.