Pseudonymous substackers on life; Allison Shrager on financial virtue-signaling; Scott Sumner on the gas tax holiday; Glenn Reynolds on gas taxes and The Great Forgetting; Timothy Taylor on crypto
When I make a credit card transaction, it takes 5-30 to become 'pending' and sometimes several days to 'post'. Despite them taking a hefty fee out of the transaction for their troubles.
When there is a mistake and a merchant reverses a charge, that routinely takes 5-7 days. When I get paid by so-called direct deposit, it shows up as 'pending' with my bank for 3 days before becoming a 'real' completed deposit. Occasionally I have had payment instruments like gift cards with large balances get declined for no apparent reason, and without recourse. Yes, I get all the legal and historically contingent aspects that make this our weird reality. Still, despite being fully automated and digitized for a long time, the system does not exactly 'handle' those billions of transactions at the maximum speed and efficiency of electronic communications. I've done hundreds of crypto transactions without the benefit of the card duopoly, the bank oligopoly, or 'the system' monopoly and its spying eyes, and they were all verifiably and truly 'completed' much faster than what I've described above, and there was plenty of slack for scaling to match the purported speed and scale of the regular transaction system. More to the point, newer approaches are even faster, more efficient, more secure, while the system stagnates in perpetuity and, in my impression, seems to actually be getting worse in several respects.
I am biased (he is my son), but I know he is a lot smarter than I am and does understand the devil in the details in computer science and security areas.
He also covers the same subjects in his lectures at UC Berkeley, which are on Youtube.
From Bruce Schneier, computer security researcher/developer (would be a good choice for FIT tech team member): "On the Dangers of Cryptocurrencies and the Uselessness of Blockchain". Covers some similar ground that I believe you have covered before.
If gasoline demand is pretty inelastic and each company's supply at the going price is almost perfectly elastic, why would a reduction in the gasoline tax flow mainly to suppliers?
in 2008 were Democrats attacking Bush for causing high gas prices?
When I make a credit card transaction, it takes 5-30 to become 'pending' and sometimes several days to 'post'. Despite them taking a hefty fee out of the transaction for their troubles.
When there is a mistake and a merchant reverses a charge, that routinely takes 5-7 days. When I get paid by so-called direct deposit, it shows up as 'pending' with my bank for 3 days before becoming a 'real' completed deposit. Occasionally I have had payment instruments like gift cards with large balances get declined for no apparent reason, and without recourse. Yes, I get all the legal and historically contingent aspects that make this our weird reality. Still, despite being fully automated and digitized for a long time, the system does not exactly 'handle' those billions of transactions at the maximum speed and efficiency of electronic communications. I've done hundreds of crypto transactions without the benefit of the card duopoly, the bank oligopoly, or 'the system' monopoly and its spying eyes, and they were all verifiably and truly 'completed' much faster than what I've described above, and there was plenty of slack for scaling to match the purported speed and scale of the regular transaction system. More to the point, newer approaches are even faster, more efficient, more secure, while the system stagnates in perpetuity and, in my impression, seems to actually be getting worse in several respects.
Apropos of nothing, you might find this interesting—advice for academic refugees:
https://eigenrobot.substack.com/p/advice-for-academic-refugees
For a little bit (4 slides) of understanding about the crypto space and it failures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXDMzSZ409w
I am biased (he is my son), but I know he is a lot smarter than I am and does understand the devil in the details in computer science and security areas.
He also covers the same subjects in his lectures at UC Berkeley, which are on Youtube.
From Bruce Schneier, computer security researcher/developer (would be a good choice for FIT tech team member): "On the Dangers of Cryptocurrencies and the Uselessness of Blockchain". Covers some similar ground that I believe you have covered before.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/06/on-the-dangers-of-cryptocurrencies-and-the-uselessness-of-blockchain.html
If gasoline demand is pretty inelastic and each company's supply at the going price is almost perfectly elastic, why would a reduction in the gasoline tax flow mainly to suppliers?
in 2008 were Democrats attacking Bush for causing high gas prices?