Indeed! I understand that getting symbolic reasoning out of NN-like architectures is the new "body-mind" problem (J. Tenenbaum ?), but I mean we already have that with PGMs and Markov logic and all those things.
I really don't see why DNN change the game fundamentally. I mean graphical models, they really changed the way of thinking in the field. DNNs in contrast are really still fundamentally building on things built by Yann LeCunn and gang.
Another of alt.right's religious gospels is about BTC being the new 'gold'; about how BTC and XAU will rise as the world is set to plunge. I can't speak for the latter, but anyone with a two bit brain can see that BTC much like USD is negatively corelated with gold. It is currencies like CHF and JPY that ironically track XAU!
India: Maybe inside the alt.right's religious fever dream. BTCINR volumes are negligible; USDINR has barely moved. Demonetization remains quite popular, and supermarkets remain as full as before.
jimmywanger wrote a good comment, but I kinda wanted to expand on it.
In a certain way, it is illogical. There are drawbacks to adopting a foreign currency. You have to have enough trade with the other country to bring in the (in this case) dollars. You lose the ability to cover short-term debts by printing some money that you can take out of circulation a little latter (no harm, no foul). You also lose the ability for benefitting from seigniorage (by printing small amounts of money, you can prevent deflation as the economy expands and increase government purchasing power). By adopting the foreign currency, the foreign government keeps the seigniorage benefits.
But when your government is so corrupt that it can't be trusted to manage a stable currency, it can make a lot of sense. Right now, Venezuelans have no reasonable way to conduct commerce. Bolivars lose value so quickly that you never want to invest in enterprises or hold cash. If I have $100 on Jan 1, it's likely worth at least $95 in purchasing power on Dec 31. People expect inflation in Venezuela to be 1,600% next year meaning that $100 on Jan 1 would become $6.25 in purchasing power on Dec 31. People would rather hoard goods than cash - even goods that Americans would see as losing value quite quickly. Cars lose so much value when you drive them off the lot (the adage goes), but that's way better than the amount of value lost in Venezuelan currency over the course of a year. Currency should lose value slower than quickly depreciating goods.
When you don't have a stable currency, it's hard to operate economically. In many ways, if you have a good to sell, you don't really want to exchange it for cash until there's something else you want to buy. If there's a week delay between you selling what you own and then you buying the new thing you want, you've lost a lot.
By adopting a stable currency like the USD, it would allow them to have a functional economy where people could buy and sell goods and invest in things and make logical choices knowing that the currency has a stable value - rather than running around hoping not to be stuck with notes that are going down in value faster than any good.
When your country is so corrupt and incompetent that no one will trust your leaders for many decades to come, it then starts to make sense to adopt a foreign currency. The people then see that they can rely on the currency because the competent US government is in charge of it - and for all we might complain about the US government, it is competent by global and historical standards. It gives people a stable currency that the Venezuelan government can't offer them.
Venezuela wouldn't answer to the Fed or get to print notes. They'd just be exporting things like oil to the US, getting USD in return, and then using that USD locally as a stable currency.
Someone else mentioned Brazil. Brazil is one of the few places to really combat hyperinflation. The thing is that it's hard. You can't just say, "we're going to be good starting now. . .trust us". People don't trust you yet. It takes years for people to trust that you won't fuck up a currency after years of having the reputation of fucking up currencies. Let's say that Venezuela stops printing money today and acts like a good government. Hyperinflation continues because people don't truly know they have stopped printing money and don't believe the government when it says it has. So when the government needs to pay for goods and services, it suddenly faces very high prices without the printed money to pay for it. Most likely, the inflation will break the government's plan of not printing money since they would have to shut down the government due to lack of funds faster than people would trust that the government had stopped printing money.
Brazil overcame the issue by running two simultaneous currencies - one real paper currency that kept inflating and another non-paper currency called the "real" with stable prices. Stores had to denominate their goods in terms of the new "reals" and each day an exchange rate between the paper currency and the "reals" would be published. So, bread would always be, say, 5 reals, but on monday that might be 10 of the paper currency and on friday 11 of the paper currency. Eventually, people trusted that the "real" was stable, the government took the old paper currency out of circulation in exchange for new paper "reals" and people continued to trust it.
But it's hard to fight hyperinflation because when you can't measure and guarantee government actions, it's about trust. Trust is something hard to regain after decades of reasons not to trust.
I see - so basically, this is a way for reducing the existing state apparatus into a symbol, and become a sort of client state.
I'm assuming this means that Banks basically need to operate with 100% reserve ratio, which makes it really difficult to provide loans esp. when dealing with a commoditized external currency. Worse yet, unlike Gold, the foreign nation can issue currency at will (well, essentially), to actors in your state, and basically run it as they like. It's the perfect state of limbo.
Ecuador's case is interesting to say the least; the current US educated president, basically made the country's reserve bank answerable to the state, printed loads of money, had the currency replaced by USD, sold away the country's gold to Goldman Sachs, and granted Assange asylum. After the strange events surrounding last months event, it'd appear that Wikileaks itself is compromised.
> Worse yet, unlike Gold, the foreign nation can issue currency at will (well, essentially), to actors in your state, and basically run it as they like.
I'm having trouble parsing this statement. What do you mean actors in your state, and what do you mean run it as they like?
There are two sort of orders of magnitude of money that I can sort of make out what you're talking about.
One is bribe money, where you can give people money to do stuff that you want them to do. That's usually on the order of hundreds of thousands to millions, and it doesn't matter what currency that is. That should be a rounding error to sovereign government.
The second is trade war money. The sort of thing where you spend lots and lots of money trying to destabilize an industry or mess with a country's economic stability. That sort of intervention is measured in the billions to tens of billions, and that also doesn't matter what currency it's denominated in. If a foreign country decides to enter into a trade/commodities war with you, for instance dumping steel to ruin your domestic steel business, that also doesn't matter what currency they do it in.
> the current US educated president, basically made the country's reserve bank answerable to the state, printed loads of money, had the currency replaced by USD, sold away the country's gold to Goldman Sachs, and granted Assange asylum.
Dollarization happened in 2016. The gold exchange sucre last existed in 1932. Ecuador seemed to have given up wikileaks in 2016. And what does the fact that the current president is educated in the US have to do with anything?
You're conflating a bunch of events that happened over a long period of time and trying to draw a causal relationship out of them. Why?
> I'm assuming this means that Banks basically need to operate with 100% reserve ratio
No, not the case at all. You can do fractional reserve banking with a foreign currency as legal tender. Heck, you can even do it with gold as legal tender, which I always find ironic given how gold backing and the perceived evils of fractional reserve banking seem to go hand-in-hand, ideologically.
> Stores had to denominate their goods in terms of the new "reals" and each day an exchange rate between the paper currency and the "reals" would be published.
Actually, that was the URV, not the Real. One of the problems we had (and still have, though much reduced) is inertial inflation: a lot of things were adjusted by the inflation, and many of these were also components of the inflation index itself, leading to a positive feedback loop.
The trick was that, instead of being directly indexed to the inflation, prices and other things were fixed in URV, which itself was indexed to the inflation. This still kept the same indexing problem, but after a few months of this, the currency was converted to the Real, and the URV was fixed forever as exactly R$ 1. This removed a huge amount of indexation from the economy.
But that was only part of the solution. There were also reductions in government costs and tax increases, so the government wouldn't have to print money; increase in imports, so the demand for goods wouldn't become greater than their offer; increase in interest rates to cool down the economy; and interventions in the exchange rate (IIRC, not forcing a fixed exchange rate, but the government buying/selling dollars in the market to move the exchange rate). Without these, after the change from Cruzeiro Real to Real, the inflation would grow quickly again.
I think the above comment nails it: trust is important.
Countries have a lot of possibilities to play with their monetary policy. However, many of these possibilities carry a price in terms of losing trust in the international market. If you let down you investors, don't be surprised if the next round of investors is cautious. It's not a capitalist conspiracy; it's just how markets work.
Note BTW that Venezuela doesn't have to export oil to United States to get dollars. USD is the global currency of oil trade, and if you sell oil to anyone, you can get USD. The trade wouldn't have to be in U.S. currency either, as the country could sell in some other freely convertible currency and then change those to USDs if that's what they need.
USD is not without its trust problems, either. The U.S. federal reserve says that 1 out of 4000 notes or 0.01 % of value is counterfeit, but I expect that in world-wide USD circulation, the percentage is much higher.
> Adopting another country's seems completely illogical IMO; I mean, do banks in such countries answer to the Fed. Reserve ?
Do you know how this works? When you adopt another country's currency, that just means that their money is legal tender in your country. It raises confidence (if you've selected the right currency) that your country's officials in charge of the economy won't do silly things like print more money or devalue your currency.
It basically takes away a lot of potential economic tools you have to fix your economy in exchange for instant credibility in that most other foreign businesses will do business with you.
Many countries have used the U.S. dollar as currency, and there is not much of a problem - except that they don't have any control of monetary politics of course. Some also use the euro by agreement (e.g. Andorra and San Marino) and others without an agreement (Kosovo and Montenegro).
However, using the renminbi as currency would pose much more problems because it is not freely convertible.
> If anything, the roman alphabet is simpler than the syllable based Devanagari.
Actually, you're just arguing that the input methods for Latin are simpler (and I agree).
Devanagari is superior in almost every respect to Latin alphabet, from phonetics (in पाणिनी) to arrangement - it can be entered as easily with IMEs - the lack of which is an indication of the state of things.
To put this in perspective, if Indians were using logographic characters like China/Japan, the current input methods would be akin to old Chinese typewriters.
It's far more complicated that "need its own vernacular internet". The internet is an emergent thing, and what one sees are just the symptoms. This is also the reason India's literacy is so low (even compared to Africa/Middle East).
If India wasn't a linguistic apartheid regime, we'd already have seen a native ecosystem which is lacking quite badly. This needs fixing at the state and political levels, which I have exactly zero hope of ever happening. This despite having some nauseously xenophobic organizations like ShivSena (in Maharashtra), the DMKs (in TN), the KaRaVes (in KA). This is in addition to the "nationalistic" organizations like RSS and BJP at the central level.
These orgs are essentially vehicles which instrumentalize the widespread disaffection from the apartheid state, in order to put themselves in power (Advani's use of Ayodhya is a nice study). If you study their policies carefully however, you realize they plan to do precisely nothing that is the cause for the inequity.
This is not different from the independence movement, where a bunch of Brown folk wanted to run the colony.
Digital India, be in no doubt, is meant for the 200 million Brown sahibs, who do know English. The rest are peasants who have been at the losing side of the inflationary system today, and of the cruel taxation system of the British, kept at bay via endless subsidies (a dog hardly bites a master ?) and mutual bickering.
There is zero empathy from the former class, and these pretentious people are the source of endless pain for the red-pilled; it is very disappointing to live in communities where the kids start speaking English before anything native, and worse when the state hold such clones in such high regard.
May kek not have mercy on the clones (apologies for the 4ch lingo).
Technical:
I think Sailfish has better localization than Android. Keyboard is a disaster everywhere, since no one in India uses native language keyboard/input. They are very rare, if at all available, and next to no one knows they exist - it's in fact easier to find such resources in the US than within in India. Swarachakra is too crowded and very very information inefficient (unlike the 5-vowel Japanese system its based on), which leads me to believe even their creators don't use it actively.
The lack of feedback means that the ITRANS layout is very very bad, and unusable (xkeyboard moth-balled most layouts due to disuse).
Again, the roots of the problem lie with the education & state policies that are reinforced via state violence. China gets this right because India is a colony & it isn't.
(Downvote all you want clone people; सत्यमेवजयेत् !)
Agree completely. The Government of India, State Government of Tamil Nadu and Rajya Marathi Vikas Sanstha are actually institutional members of the Unicode consortium which makes decisions on behalf on India. Safe to say this has not gone well for Indians since the companies who are full members choose to ignore the basic encoding requirements for Indic languages. And oh, the membership fee to Unicode for full votes starts at $12,000 per year.
By the way, could you check out the Swalekh Android keyboard app and give me your honest feedback? Disclaimer: I work for Reverie and we made this keypad.
The "socialist" state runs a systematic unwritten discrimination regime where every thing from higher education to state services are restricted only to English speaking class; yet, it is the remainder that get the boot due to the inflationary forces of the currency. It is by every meaning of the word, an apartheid; this state mandated scheme of slavery is kept in check by various schemes of cultural propaganda and distractions by the Anglical state. Of course, without education, feudalism becomes only too normalized.
This system is widespread all over former colonies in Africa and Asia.
Great points you made. Agree with the fact that Swarachakra is too crowded and huge scope of improvement there.
Also agree that the root of problem lie with education and state policies. But even with the huge push that english gets in this country, the reality is more than billion people don't understand it. This might still become 500 million is a decade but still half the country is being denied of internet.
> This might still become 500 million is a decade but still half the country is being denied of internet.
Perhaps, but to paraphrase a comment in the attached thread, I'd be more worried about feeding the cow before milking it. I mean, for a linguistic population comparable to native English speaking population of the entire world, there exists not a single school teaching Engineering of Medicine in Hindi (not to speak of other far older languages) - these people barely have any money to subsist on on average (and arguably also why medicine and infrastructure suck).
Completely agree with you on this one. The situation is much more worse than what we living in a bubble imagine.
The video really touches your heart.
Reminds me of a couple of my friends in my college, and the struggle they went through - Shifting from one language to another.
Isn't it interesting then that all our intelligensia is engaged in the whole apochryphal "caste-system" narrative [1] [2], while essentially being the gate keepers of a state/violence sanctioned system of linguistic apartheid ?
Even Chomsky, when questioned about his accomplice Roy, seemed perfectly okay with the current state of things. My entire schooling/conditioning has been turned on its head - I can't recommend S N Balagangadhara & Dharampal's works enough.
Unless you would happen to qualify for public assistance, you'd be nearly starving and exposed to the elements. You simply can't meet basic needs on your own with that without outside support. There are a few exceptions for temporary circumstances (You might be able to farm and live in your paid-off house, for example, but without utilities - and you'd be out of luck when your first property tax bill arrives).
https://moxie.org/blog/gpg-and-me/