But what are the chances of the housing demand evaporating?
In most cities where the housing bubble exists, it exists for a reason.
The city is growing because all jobs are relocating to cities and universities located within these cities have growing student populations.
The demand is considered very stable so the risk of that happening is quite low.
And before anyone says it, I don't think we are going to experience a remote work revolution any time soon.
It’s not that demand evaporates, it’s that if you can afford $2500 a month mortgage, and interest rates at 2%, the value of house you can afford is much higher than at 4%. The limit on house prices is capped at what a family can pay per month combined with mortgage rate. So if rates go up, and you own a 800k house that is now 600k in resale because people can’t get approved for 800k mortgage now. So you are stuck and can’t move unless you can afford the loss.
My understanding of US mortgages is they tend to be a fixed interest for the entire life of the loan -- i.e. with a 25 year mortgage at 2% paying $2k a month, if interest rates went upto 10% in 2030, you'd carry on paying $2k/month.
In the UK the longest fixed rates I've seen are 10 years
Right but how much loan you can get in the US is tied to how much monthly payment you can afford. If interest rates are 2% the total price of the house can go up with the same monthly payment. At 4% you can’t afford as much house. Housing prices generally fall when rates rise. Once you are locked into a loan, you pay the same amount. But if you need to sell and you only put 5% down on an 800k house, and now the house can only sell for 650k, you would have to make up the difference on the note.
But you won't be kicked out of the house because the monthly repayment increased by an extra $1k a month.
I was in negative equity in the UK for nearly a decade after buying in September 2007 and seeing value collapse 40% pretty much the day after exchanging contracts (Northern Rock bank run). A new built flat was always going to deprecate a little, but when the flat directly below us told a year later for 60% the price we paid it wasn't fun.
Solution when I did need to move was to rent out the flat (which covered the interest payments and maintenence) and rent somewhere else until 2016, when the price had recovered enough to sell it for the price I bought it at.
The reason the school employed a bunch of bleeding heart liberals is so the future politicians and thought leaders amongst those kids can later pretend they had a progressive upbringing.
I would not be surprised if the school hires professional photographers and takes kids on school excursions to protests to take photo shoots. In the future all politicians will have photos of them at the Friday climate school strike and the BLM protests.
The whole situation is analogous to the chivalry code of conducts that knights had.
And btw the teachers are in on the whole thing. They aren't stupid either. They know what role they are playing in this game.
It depends on the culture. I also live in western Europe and in my community even the literally illiterate shepherds that I grew up amongst, have their money in stocks and bonds or intermediary funds.
I understand your reasoning with regards to inflation. But what makes you so sure Bitcoin will keep going up?
Yes it has gone up over the last 10 years. But 10 years is a relatively short time, and moreover this was a period during which all assets went up. I don't think one can really extrapolate from that alone that Bitcoin will just keep going up forever.
And how do you explain away the various risks? Governments could theoretically hurt the price if they decided to pass more regulation that made interacting with an exchange harder. Or if they tried to close the exchanges altogether. And we are talking here about worldwide governments. I am not very worried the US would do something like that since they have mostly shown support towards cryptotech. But China or Russia or India or the EU might. And the other big worry is the lack of transparency. The exchanges are hardly as trustworthy as the NASDAQ or the NYSE. One cannot tell what sort of plays they are making to manipulate the price.
And then there's the risk of speculation itself. The price is not determined by anything more fundamental than user sentiment. There is no constant stable demand or anything.
User sentiment can be manipulated (by government regulations for example) or a big scare might happen organically. There is also the risk from competing cryptoassets. And risks from infighting between Bitcoin developers and miners as is happening right now with Ethereum.
Now of course all investments have risks so this alone is not a reason to not put money in Bitcoin. But I just have not yet seen a rigorous examination of all the risks.
if hypothetically one could ban cars from cities and only allow such low powered transport, it would be quite an efficient safe and clean form of transport
I don't know, I'm not sure they are really solving something. Local residents can probably rely on public transports/walking/cycling to move within the city. People from outside probably need a car to reach the city itself, but if you can't use those low powered cars on high speed roads then there's no point in having one. Better a "full" car that gets you to a public transports node on the edge of the city and then you switch.
The fact that nobody can simply say, "here is what Bitcoin does, this is why the energy consumption is justified" is a strong indictment against the supposed value that Bitcoin brings.
But, there is no legal mechanism that measures the utility of commercial activities, and which dictates that energy should be consumed only by enterprises that have a certain utility. This is unprecedented territory.
There's a bigger world outside the island of U.S. There are more political regimes, tax regimes, banking restrictions and all sorts of uncertainty that needs sound and cheaply stored/secured/transferrable money that would protect a person and their family/community against all these issues.
Just the recent multi-trillion debt expansion is a pointer to that. You can't and you won't store your savings in USD-denominated cash. Your options are either getting in debt and tying yourself to a certain credit institution/jurisdiction, or getting some freedom by exiting into Bitcoin.
That's exactly my point. Bitcoin is useless in the US because we have a relatively stable, universally useful currency. You seem to think the stimulus will cause dramatic inflation, but I doubt it.
For people who want to use USD as a replacement for their unreliable local currency, Bitcoin may be one of the easier ways to hold and trade it.
> The fact that nobody can simply say, "here is what Bitcoin does, this is why the energy consumption is justified" is a strong indictment against the supposed value that Bitcoin brings.
I argue the opposite in a separate comment. The fact that Bitcoin has retained and increased its market value, despite having being inflationary this entire time, demonstrates the value that it brings. I can't tell you where that value is, but if it weren't there, the market would collapse. And it hasn't.
Perhaps 10 years isn't enough for a speculation bubble to burst. But then, at what point would we say that there isn't a bubble? 50 years? 100 years? One might ask the same question about gold since we left the gold standard. Is indefinitely sustainable speculation a bubble at all? Or is that what we call a commodity?
Bitcoin still doesn’t provide any significant value
outside of black market purchases, though.
The increase in value is due to an increase in hype and a lot of people hoping to get rich quick - not due to increased practical adoption.
Governments aren’t going to let it replace currencies they can control - and to be honest, I’m not sure we’d want it to - somebody’s always in control, and I’d argue it’s better to at least know who they are (see any HN comments on “flat” organizations). It’s just a bunch of wasted energy to arbitrarily move money from one set of traders to another.
> It’s just a bunch of wasted energy to arbitrarily move money from one set of traders to another.
If it's wasted energy, then it's wasted money. But traders don't have unlimited funds. They are somehow generating at least as much wealth as the value of the electricity that is being used.
Depends on what you mean by self driving cars.
To me it is not even clear that driving assist tech will ever be advanced enough for cars to drive themselves reliably.*
But that aside.
Human in control + driving assists is already safer than fully manual driving.
The question is whether the opposite is even safer. It is obvious to me that
self driving with the human as backup is a joke. Humans cannot react fast enough in real emergencies.
So if you want the car to mostly drive itself, it has to actually always drive itself.
And to me it is not clear whether this is really going to be safer than the human+driving_assist scenario.
*Of course I am talking about tech based on the current DL approaches. If we had AGI, then the question does not even need to be asked.
So now the developing world will start using their energy to mine BTC instead of manufacturing goods for us to consume.
Will this ultimately cause inflation then? Because demand for goods will not be met?
This crypto experiment keeps yielding more interesting results.
"This crypto experiment keeps yielding more interesting results."
I completely agree. I don't pay attention to a lot (or any) online economic circles, but I'm astounded at the pushback of high profile economists (Krugman, et al) against the shear novelty of the moment for their discipline.
Regardless of whether or not someone "believes" in bitcoin, the reality of the times is that cryptocurrencies are creating fantastically interesting economic experiemnts right under our noses. This seems like it would be the dream come true for an economist from an observational/curiosity perspective
These “experiments” have real life consequences on ”subjects” who never agreed to be part of it.
We should maybe create a crypto-country where crypto-currencies fanatics are free to experiment all of this on themselves instead of all of us… (it’s a joke, please don’t create a crypto country!)
There was no grand conspiracy and no master architects of chaos. It was simply a meme that got out of hand.
It started out as a sentiment, a set of ideas that I would call liberal chauvinism. Then anti-immigration got on board. Then the Tories tried to win the anti-immigration folk back, but instead got swallowed by the BREXIT movement, along with a big chunk of Labour.
Is scientific computing getting some revival with the advent of quantum computers?
From what I could see the niche is relatively small and not well paid, with most jobs somehow tied to the public sector.
Not sure how Julia factors into all of this. I don't think the programming language makes that big of a difference, ultimately.
Very interesting field at the intersection of all my skills, but I'm hesitant to get into it.
Scientific computing has always been around, but as you allude, a bit in the background. It used to be matlab/mathematica on your desktop or a supercomputer that very few could get access to and program. With cloud computing, GPUs, ability to get terabytes of RAM on a single compute node, and all the exciting developments in CPUs despite skirting the edge of Moore's Law - a lot of opportunities are showing up.
You can now simulate science in ways like never before. Today, the median scientist can easily rent a cluster of hundreds of nodes for a few hundred dollars an hour. It is increasingly the case that you can actually simulate entire products in silico before you do anything in the lab. SciML is a large part of that story because we are able to use ML to approximate science and speed it up even more.
I like to think about it as follows - 10x faster CPUs, 100x from GPUs when possible, 100x from ML when possible, 100x through easier access to parallel computing on cloud. So your best case speedup compared to a decade ago is easily 10^7x. Because of this huge space for improvement, we can easily find 1000x improvements in so many cases.
And this is what we as software engineers can do to change the world - by simulating science, building new batteries, designing new drugs, solving power infrastructure, getting climate right and its impact on our cities, food production, and so on and so forth.
Bret Victor captures this really well in his essay: http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ and at Julia Computing, we are doing a lot of what it outlines, and really grateful that ARPA-e and DARPA are funding all this hard science and improvements to Julia and its ecosystem.
> I don't think the programming language makes that big of a difference, ultimately
I mean, it should be clear Julia is a much higher-performance method of crunching data than Python, which is unquestionably the king of the data science pile, and therefore it factors into performance & cost.
You can also look at it in terms of man hours with respect to how much time it takes to implement and how much time it takes for others to read it. Coming from a computational physics background, one of the main reasons I love programming in Julia is because it allows me to write code with syntax very close to the underlying mathematics.
Scientific computing is not done in python. It is usually Fortran on C/C++ or Matlab (which I think uses Fortran libraries behind the scenes).
Python is only used for the data manipulation part but not for the core simulation.
There is hundreds of millions of dollars funding available at the DOE for quantum computing research, but that is spread over all aspects of quantum computing, so
it’s not really enough to make significant headway anytime soon. Maybe at the $5-10B mark we could see rapid progress and start to think about scientific computing in a production context
Scientific computing is chugging along about the same as it always has, quantum computers aren't really that relevant yet.
> I don't think the programming language makes that big of a difference, ultimately.
I can see how you might think this, but it's really ahistorical.
Scientific computing has always been a niche because of the range of skills needed. To have any real success at it as a team you needed to be a good enough at numerical analysis to understand the implementation, a good enough programmers to write something like production code (e.g. not your typical lab code) and good enough at the science to do the right project.
In the old days you were basically looking for one person who could do all of this, and in Fortran 77. You can carve off the last requirement if you only work on tools for other people, but that still leaves you with two domains.
Fortran 77 basically limited the scope of project that was reasonable. Things like matlab essentially started as wrappers on good libraries (in F77) so that people could get some work done without spending all their time fighting that complexity. This had a massive impact on productivity globally.
Introduction of things like c++ allowed more complex programs to be built for good or ill (also lead to improvements in fortran) but a lot of the same problems remain in terms of managing the complexity.
Later people added enough numerical libraries to python to get real work done, and that started to eclipse matlab at least in some specific domains (mainly because it's free and open).
Neither matlab or python are particularly good languages for scientific programming, but they are accessible - a gazillion grad students shoot themselves in the foot less in python than they would in fortran or c++, and iterate much faster.
In some ways systems like this have impact because they have reduced the necessary skill level across domains. There is always going to be room at the margins for a polymath but a lot of people who aren't can get things done much more easily now than a few decades ago. Now you may argue that nobody "does" scientific programming in python but it's a bit of a semantic flip, the core algorithms are all in c or something but depending on domain you may mostly be using python wrappers to access them.
Julia is an attempt (not the first one) to define a language that is both approachable and interactive (important) but also well designed for numerics etc. It's a very interesting project for that reason.
I've obviously skipped a lot of important stuff, but the impact of languages and particularly their accessibility has been really significant, especially when we get past scientific programming for it's own sake, and into real applications.
I'm a math grad student studying numerics and scientific computing actually.
But I do not see a future in it as it does not seem to pay well and the relevant jobs are scarce. So it seems risky to get into it as a career when I can pivot to a more profitable SWE role or do something with ML.
You could certainly choose a few paths that are likely to pay higher salary that most of the scientific computing jobs you'd likely get. On the other hand, the pay for some of those scientific computing jobs is reasonable, and often the work is more interesting for someone with your background. It's worth bearing in mind that unless you are extremely unusual, you'll need a few years training in industry as well before you are really running on all cylinders.
You'll really have to think about your priorities, but it sounds like you have a bit of time to do that.
Probably the worst case is "support programmer for a research lab", some people do well there if they love the lab and the work but it tends to combine poor pay with extremely limited options for professional growth.
1) If you are a US-born citizen and qualify for a security clearance, jobs aren't as scarce as you think.
2) You are right the pay is worse in the public / government side. I will say - you might not believe me now, but it really is true that once you make enough money to pay all your bills, suddenly more money is less motivating than the ability to work on interesting problems.
What I just said above supposes that most lab work is interesting, which is not not the case, but I still think it's better than the average SWE's workload at your average tech company, just based on my personal experience having done both at different times in my career.
The demand is considered very stable so the risk of that happening is quite low.
And before anyone says it, I don't think we are going to experience a remote work revolution any time soon.