The Dollar Is Dead

Post by ethbr1 » Mon, Aug 04, 2025, 1:47 AM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #72

daft_pink wrote: post #14

I think that people and countries not wanting to purchase 30 year long term debt in a zero interest rate environment is perfectly natural. There is far more potential downside than upside and not evidence of demise. Reality is that there is little motivation to invest in long term debt under 3%, normal motivation to invest in debt between 5-10% and huge appetite for debt above 10%. Debt with a sub 2% interest rate ca…

I think the US is particularly crazy about it because ultra-low interest rates allowed the country to temporarily paper over the realities of the nationwide housing shortage and resulting housing prices, and now everybody's getting slapped in the face with more realistic mortgage terms again.

Post by ethbr1 » Mon, Aug 04, 2025, 2:32 AM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #166

toomuchtodo wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think an LLM is a thinking machine, I don’t know what to tell you. They are great at predicting tokens, but there is no evidence they are thinking in the human sense. They rely on patterns and probabilities, not understanding. Powerful search engines, certainly, but there is much work ahead to see how hard the limits being bumped up against are. https://direct.mit.edu/opmi/article/doi/10.1162/opmi_a_00160... h…

Without getting hung up on the definition of the word "think", the fact that anyone can feed an LLM a couple of bullet points and generate a pile of convincing sounding marketing copy, is worth something if you're to someone. We can disagree on exactly how much and to whom, but if you're not willing to see that as fact then there's no common ground to base a conversation on.

Post by daft_pink » Mon, Aug 04, 2025, 3:24 AM UTC

ethbr1 wrote: post #231

crooked-v wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the US is particularly crazy about it because ultra-low interest rates allowed the country to temporarily paper over the realities of the nationwide housing shortage and resulting housing prices, and now everybody's getting slapped in the face with more realistic mortgage terms again.

Eh. That was only true before the price hikes caused by those ultra low rates. If everyone has access to ultra low rates, housing supply prices rapidly increase to match demand, and you reach a new equilibrium (albeit with higher price:income multiples). So it’s not papering over anything — it just goosed housing prices higher.

Post by chasing0entropy » Mon, Aug 04, 2025, 3:26 AM UTC

declan_roberts wrote: post #48

The idea that a basket of foreign currencies or "BRIC+" will replace the dollar is absolutely not going to happen. If the dollar goes down it takes the entire world with it. Nobody is insulated from the risk of a dedollarization.

Post by chasing0entropy » Mon, Aug 04, 2025, 3:29 AM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #132

nostromo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having billions of low-skill "prime age workers" is not a good thing in the AI era. Africa's population surge is a liability as much as it is a benefit, especially considering they already have to import a large portion of their food supplies. Africa is 20% of world population but just 2% of world GDP... Maybe they will turn into China at some point, but I wouldn't bet on it yet.

AI era remains to be proven to not be bullshit. If it turns on to be something of value and not pets.com and webvan 2.0, prime age workers should be provided training and hiring pipelines for jobs AI cannot do: healthcare, construction, infrastructure, housing, agriculture scaling, etc. Knowledge/white collar jobs are most at risk with LLMs, not work building society up and operating it in the physical world.