What you are missing is fairly straightforward. Inflating away debt is a form of default. People don't want to lend you money when that is how you plan to pay it back -- same outcome as a default. I guess you could do it once but only if you plan to not borrow again.
This is completely incorrect. Even if you believe the premise, you cannot expect others to lend money to you when you obviously refuse to pay back previous creditors and then the premise becomes incorrect because the debt will not be a safe bet.
Though it would never come to it, the U.S. will always be able to pay back creditors because it could, in theory, simply take whatever was needed to settle. Uncomfortable to reconcile but ultimately true at present.
What is with this pervasive assumption that the US owing other countries in USD somehow implies that the US might somehow end up wedged trying to pay back debts denominated in USD? These are not household finances - the US is monetarily sovereign. The US can always pay any USD-denominated debt by conjuring new money, meaning politics is the only thing that can actually cause a default.
Your top level comment is basically a huge red herring. The dynamic is not one of the US starting a war to take others' lootable assets to pay off debt denominated in USD. Rather, benefiting from US military hegemony in the future is what other countries are buying into when they choose to store their wealth in USD. They accept the demurrage from holding continually-inflating USD as the cost of moving bulk wealth forward in time, and our spending much of the proceeds of that arrangement on maintaining our global hard and soft power made perfect sense.
Trump's policies have directly made the US an unreliable ally, and therefore made USD less attractive. Monetary inflation has always been acceptable (there isn't a better game in town). But after our allies have trusted buying shares in our economic empire, leaving them high and dry or overtly extorting them for even more is breaking the arrangement.
All of these points about "cutting spending" and "making other countries pay their share" are essentially quack narratives covering for actions aimed at directly undermining the United States and the Dollar. It's even more blatant when you see things like spending is not actually being cut. Presumably if he (they?) succeed at the goal, the plan is to blame the results on purported inevitability when the reality will be that they blew it up.
Devil's Advocate on that: if you pursue something out of envy, it's very unlikely you're going to enjoy it nearly as much as anticipated, after acquisition.
There's a difference between pursuing what you want independent of particular concern for what others have, and pursuing something because someone else has it. The end result upon acquisition is entirely different. It's similar to fame or prestige in that sense, which are given to you by other people's often fleeting opinions, and are frequently torturous accordingly to the extent one cares about such.
As far as I can tell (I ran out of patience about halfway through), this is less a review of Capital than it is an attempt to brand Piketty part of a particular ideological lineage. It seems like for every sentence quoted from the book there's a couple of paragraphs name-dropping Marx, Aristotle, Malthus et. al..
Also:
> One begins to suspect that the typical leftist—most of the graver worries have come from there abouts, naturally, though not so very naturally considering the great payoff of “capitalism” for the working class—starts with a root conviction that capitalism is seriously defective. The conviction is acquired at age 16 years when the proto-leftist discovers poverty but has no intellectual tools to understand its source.
When can we hope to see some form that will allow the public to play against this even if it is pay to play for each game or a weaker PC version? I hope the system does not end up being put away like Deep Blue was.
Also, what kind of hardware results in this level of play and how is hardware correlated with strength here?
I'd love to put it on a public go server and will try to convince people :)
However, this will have to wait until after the match in March, that's our number 1 priority at the moment.
There are graphs in the paper showing how it scales with more hardware.
Deep Blue was only innovative in that it was specialized hardware for this type of search. The algorithms it used were well-established, and as there was no way to play it as a piece of hardware without great expense, there wasn't really a reason to keep it around.
Chess engines you can run today, for free, on your own laptop, are far and away better than Deep Blue (and any human), and I believe still don't reach Deep Blue's raw speed.
I'm curious: is there a Chess league for software? And if yes, how far are they already better (in ELOs) than humans if run on commodity server hardware?
I can't find the claimed ELO for Jonny (current champ) but Junior (previous champ) is listed at 3200+, Magnus' top rating, the highest ELO rating ever, is 2882 for reference
There is a lot of politics in chess programming but the bottom line is that Komodo is currently the strongest program followed by Stockfish (which is distributed under GPL).
This is not correct. In the professional ranks 1p is often no weaker than 9p because often the young players start out at 1p and are very strong because selection pressure is much greater. The 9p rank in Japan also came partly out of just playing a lot for a lot of years so that accomplishment was not as great as it seems. In any case, active professional players for the most part are not dramatically stronger than one another. The range for the most part is about 2 stones, maybe 3.
Even though Fan Hui is not an active professional in the traditional sense this is an absolutely huge accomplishment and leap in playing ability by computers. BTW, Michael Redmond is not particularly strong by professional standards.
(Edit: The correlation between strength and rank now as noted below is due to promotions more often coming from acheivements: If you win at X you get promoted to 7p immediately, if you win at Y you get promoted to 9p. You cannot win a big tournament and keep your low rank. Here is an example of someone who went from 3p to 9p in one match: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_Tingyu. But professionals cannot give each other 6 stone handicaps when one is 9p and the other is 3p)
This is not quite correct either. 1p is of course generally much stronger than an arbitrary amateur dan (even some (many? most?) 9d amateurs) and you can advance up the pro ranks quickly by winning certain games, but you can see the histograms yourself that while there's a clump of 9ps everywhere but China there's still a distribution. http://senseis.xmp.net/?ProfessionalRankHistograms Another problem is you don't lose your 9p rank once you earn it. It would be nice if there was an international Elo system tracking all the 9ps of various countries to rank them properly... Maybe someone's tried to calculate rankings independently? Still, I think it's pretty uncontroversial that someone who's been a lower-rank pro for longer than a few years is going to be significantly weaker than their higher-rank peers.
There are two major attempts at international ratings today. Dr. Bae Taeil does ratings for Korea, and Remi Coulom produces ratings independently, based on the database at go4go.net (http://goratings.org is the site).
Taeil's method seems unusual, though it may well be justified . I think he's using a relatively complete database of games, but I don't know for sure. Coulom has a very well regarded mathematical model, but we know that there are some gaps in the database, which a) may skew international comparisons, and b) may result in inaccurate ratings for players with few games in the database (but those players are usually not top players in the world).
See my comment below: there are very few 1p players near the top, unsurprisingly.
I feel like this is mostly misleading. Look at a list of top players (goratings.org). The top fifty is mostly players 5p and up. There are a few 3p or 4p Chinese players running around, and apparently even 1 1p (Li Qincheng) but by and large, there is a relation.
Yes. He's a case where you'd make exactly the right assumption if just told his rank.
Though I should warn: as a low level pro who moved to Europe, this database has very little data on him. His European results indicate that he's stronger than Pavol Lisy, Alexander Dinerstein, and Mateusz Surma, who all rate higher than him here.
