You have $100k income, and $800k debt, on which you have to pay ~$40,000 interest every year. That takes up a good chunk of your income. But if the debt doubled, at the same interest rate, you could really be in trouble.
Not if your income was partly “getting loans from the bank” and now the bank won’t lend you money anymore, which is more in line with what the debt means for the us.
It's definitely worth practicing willpower because I can't always avoid temptation. Constant practice with the smaller things helps with the bigger things, like any practice or habit.
AND, avoiding temptation is hugely useful for me. With the right firefox extensions for example I've rid myself of most of the really enticing internet time sinks. I never have sweets or sugar or processed food in the house.
It doesn't have to be one or the other. I'd say for me avoiding temptation is the low hanging fruit that is obviously worth doing, and then practicing the choices I want to make is the real work. But avoiding temptation gives me more spaciousness of mind to practice my choices.
Easy - a greater portion of the world's resources can go toward the luxury market for the wealthy. This is already the trend.
It's dark but certainly not impossible to have a smaller and smaller group doing all the spending and keep spending the same, and to keep stability by force using technology.
Luxury products can only exist at the margin of a broader economy. You can have luxury sports cars only if you have a market and an entire supply chain for millions of non-luxury cars.
I believe myopia is primarily caused by less use of the eyes to focus on a variety of distances and scenes. We mostly are indoors looking at books and now screens -> myopia goes way up. I also believe it can be reversed by using the eyes differently and this happened for me.
I had myopia from when I was a teenager. I didn't realize it till I was 21 and tried glasses and could suddenly see what I didn't know was possible to see. I then wore glasses from 21 to 27. Quit wearing glasses at 27 and left the office and computer to be mostly full time in the woods. Two years later my myopia had mostly reversed and I could see crisp detail at long distances without glasses for the first time. Six years now since I noticed the reversal and I still can see clearly at long distances. I love it.
Eye Spherical Cylindrical Axis Prism Base
O.D. (Right) Pl -1.00 075 1.5 OUT
O.S. (Left) -1.00 -0.50 076 1.5 OUT
Mildly nearsighted in left eye, with astigmatism in both eyes.
I am not sure to what extent it was a reversal of myopia or reversal of astigmatism. It must have been one or both as far as I can understand. Neither are considered to be at all reversible "officially" but I've seen other people claim that their myopia has reversed naturally.
What I do know for sure is that I can see crispness at long distance in both eyes that I could not before. I imagine I was mildly nearsighted in my right eye as well and that the eye test was not granular enough and rounded down to it being considered perfect. My right eye is still a little better than the left. But even with both eyes open things are crisp now.
I don't have health insurance that covers eyes now so I haven't bothered to get another test. Someday I will.
I don't get the importance of the distinction really. Don't LLMs and Large non-language Models fundamentally work kind of similarly underneath? And use similar kinds of hardware?
you are correct the token representation gets abstracted away very quickly and is then identical for textual or image models. It's the so-called latent space and people who focus on next token prediction completely missed the point that all the interesting thinking takes place in abstract world model space.
> you are correct the token representation gets abstracted away very quickly and is then identical for textual or image models.
This is mostly incorrect, unless you mean "they both become tensor / vector representations (embeddings)". But these vector representations are not comparable.
E.g. if you have a VLM with a frozen dual-backbone architecture (say, a vision transformer encoder trained on images, and an LLM encoder backbone pre-trained in the usual LLM way), then even if, for example, you design this architecture so the embedding vectors produced by each encoder have the same shape, to be combined via another component, e.g. some unified transformer, it will not be the case that e.g. the cosine similarity between an image embedding and a text embedding is a meaningful quantity (it will just be random nonsense). The representations from each backbone are not identical, and the semantic structure of each space is almost certainly very different.
For one, there could be some financial incentives mixed in in that health insurance companies would want their people to be healthier so they don't pay out as much, but it's not that simple for them either - the health industry as a whole profits more if there is more treatment ergo more health problems. If health care was cheap or less needed the insurers themselves would make less.
More importantly, there can be other than financial incentives mixed in for doctors and public health organizations to encourage health. Doctors for example take an oath and I think often genuinely want their people to be healthy. Public health organizations may be more murky but there's definitely a financial and otherwise incentive for the government itself minus those corrupted by the health industry, to want people to have less health problems.
The problem is entirely about patients refusing to do what they know is good for them if it takes any self-discipline, so doctors resort to medication.
It seems as if some researchers think that reducing this single metric without considering any other factors is inherently always a good thing and is very important.
I assume that's simply a calculation they do of how much their revenue will change if they adjust the prices up or down. Until it makes financial sense to lower prices, they can wait on trying to capture the market. I would guess they're working on making the cars and equipment cheaper before massively scaling up.
> if big ag subsidies were phased out, small local farms would have a better chance of being viable.
Maybe. The subsidies that we always hear about is a portion of insurance premiums paid by the government. Presumably if the government pulled out of the subsidy, the risk/reward of insurance would tilt towards not having it. Many farmers already forego having insurance even with the reduced price.
Which would mean nothing until something bad happens. But when something does happen, that means some big farms could collapse. But it would also mean small farms are just as likely to collapse right beside.
I expect you are ultimately right: That once the collapses occur, it would be hard to rebuild a large farm before it ends up collapsing once more, leaving farms unable to ever grow beyond being small again. But is that what you imagine for small farms?
Of course, that's all theoretical. In the real world, the government wouldn't let the food supply fall apart like that. If farms didn't have insurance, it would simply come in and bail them out when destructive events occur. It is a lot simpler, and no doubt cheaper (the subsidy is offered on the condition of being willing to give production data back in return), to implement a solution ahead of time rather than panicking later.
I'm for subsidizing agriculture that improves long term soil quality and abundance. i.e. kind of the opposite of what most big ag row crops do now.
It's tricky to implement any subsidy in a way that's not exploited by big companies. But a place to start would be not subsidizing synthetic fertilizer and pesticides or anything that degrades soil long term, to encourage farms of every scale to focus on natural long term soil improvement.
> i.e. kind of the opposite of what most big ag row crops do now.
From what I'm seeing out there, the big row croppers are largely leading the pack in bringing sustainable improvement to soil quality. It has become abundantly clear that, even if you aren't concerned about the soil, that these modern practices are actually leading to higher yields, improved efficiency, and ultimately greater profitability. — It is small farms that are often struggling to adapt, lacking sufficient capital and/or cashflow needed to transition away from their old tools and methods.
A better analogy would be this:
You have $100k income, and $800k debt, on which you have to pay ~$40,000 interest every year. That takes up a good chunk of your income. But if the debt doubled, at the same interest rate, you could really be in trouble.
reply