The idea with Rust is that you get safety...not that you get safety at the cost of performance. The language forces you into paying a performance cost for using patterns when it is relatively easy for a human to reason about safety (imo).
You can use `unsafe` but you naturally ask yourself why I am using Rust (not rational, but true). You can use lifetimes but, personally, every time I have tried to use them I haven't been able to indicate to the compiler that my code is actually safe.
In particular, the protections for double-free and free before use are extremely limiting, and it is possible to reason about these particular bugs in other ways (i.e. defer in Go and Zig) in a way that doesn't force you to change the way you code.
Rust is good in many ways but the specific problem mentioned at the top of this chain is a big issue. Just saying: don't use this type of data structure unless you pay performance cost isn't an actual solution to the problem. The problem with Rust is that it tries to force safety but doesn't have good ways for devs to tell the compiler code is safe...that is a fundamental weakness.
I use Rust quite a bit, it isn't a terrible language and is worth learning but these are big issues. I would have reservations using the language in my own company, rather than someone else's, and if I need to manage memory then I would look elsewhere atm. Due to the size of the community, it is very hard not to use Rust too (for example, Zig is great...but no-one uses it).
The idea with rust is that you _can_ have safety with no performance cost if you need it, but depending on what you're building, of course, that may imply extra work.
The pragmatism of Rust means that you can use reference counting if it suits your use case.
Unsafe also doesn't mean throwing out the Rustiness of Rust, but others have written more extensively about that and I have no personal experience with it.
> The problem with Rust is that it tries to force safety but doesn't have good ways for devs to tell the compiler code is safe...that is a fundamental weakness.
My understanding is that this is the purpose of unsafe, but again, I can't argue against these points from a standpoint of experience, having stuck pretty strictly to safe Rust.
Definitely agree that there are issues with the language, no argument there! So do the maintainers!
> if I need to manage memory then I would look elsewhere atm
Haha I have the exact opposite feeling! I wouldn't try to manage memory any other way, and I'm guessing it's because memory management is more intuitive and well understood by you than by me. I'm lazy and very much like having the compiler do the bulk of the thinking for me. I'm also happy that Rust allows for folks like me to pay a little performance cost and do things a little bit easier while maintaining correctness. For the turbo-coders out there that want the speed and the correctness, Rust has the capability, but depending on your use case (like linked lists) it can definitely be more difficult to express correctness to the compiler.
Agree, that is the purpose of unsafe but there is a degree of irrationality there, which I am guilty of, about using unsafe in Rust. I also worry about unsafe leaking if I am using raw pointer on a struct...but stdlib uses a lot of unsafe code, so I should be too.
I think the issue that people have is that they come into Rust with the expectation that these problems are actually solved. As I said, it would be nice if lifetimes weren't so impossible to use.
The compiler isn't doing the thinking if you have to change your code so the compiler is happy. The problem with Rust is too much thinking: you try something, compiler complains, what is the issue here, can i try this, still complain, what about this, etc. There are specific categories of bugs that Rust is trying to fix that don't require the changes that Rust requires in order to ensure correctness...if you use reference counter, you can have more bugs.
I have worked in places where this would work...all terrible places that usually had someone with a "maverick" view of how organizations worked derived from reading Warhammer books or something.
It is an insight into human irrationality to see a country where hundreds of millions have been lifted out of crushing absolute poverty, that has built one of the world's best infrastructure from nothing...in the 70s, China was poorer than every country in Africa bar one.
...the problem is that some people are concerned only with how things are done, this is feudal government, this is pre-industrial economic growth, who does things, how they do it, make sure nothing new is every tried because that is dangerous and might lead to the elite losing control. China (and much of East Asia) succeeded because they are concerned only with outcomes, and this is all that people care about anyway. Unfortunately, the West is now controlled by people who see change as dangerous, and nothing is more dangerous than a country leapfrogging them in development because it proves that their leadership is bankrupt and incompetent.
Are you willing to submit to my one party state and be ok with being disappeared if you have an unpopular opinion or being enslaved if you are the wrong minority?
That isn't the powerful criticism that a lot of people think it is. You can keep saying this until you're blue in the face. It doesn't stop China's growth in power and scale. It doesn't impact their citizens at all. It's cheerleading with hot air and ignores the real work that the West needs to put in to effectively compete or counter.
In fact, we should be worried about what the success of such a large non-democratic institution means to developing nations seeking their own model. Or what it means to those in power back at home. Your manner of argument doesn't successfully address the incredible success China has achieved, and if anything, it risks calling the basis of your argument -- the importance of democratic institutions -- into question.
The things the West can do to compete are to work harder on education, become an attractive destination for immigration, foster productive innovation, and focus on key industries and supply chains. Right now the US in particular is doing the opposite, and it's damaging America's standing and ability to compete with China. It comes at a time where it's critical to perform.
By all means, China should be the north star incentive to work harder. During the Cold War we used the threat of the Soviets being better than us to do some of the best engineering and science we've ever done. If our response to China is to call them names and hope that their growth stalls, then I think I can predict a very different and very mediocre outcome for the West in the coming century.
This is our opportunity to rise to the occasion again and be better than we were. Let's not be arrogant and dismissive. Let's not fumble.
Look I get it’s a little early to really draw that line in the US, but we were in a hell of a lot better position to have this argument a couple months ago.
If I told you that a government would exist in Africa that would eliminate poverty across most of the continent in three decades, would you think it strange if people thought this was a terrible thing?
I don’t think anyone who understands geopolitics can agree with this take.
China has been able to (for a time) sustain this kind of rapid industrialization because of globalization, a model of hyper-inflation and by taking advantage of wage inequality (i.e. paying their workers less) in order to dump goods into other countries’ markets. Take away globalization and China starves in the dark, because the part of their population that is largest, most productive and knows how to even feed itself (China is a heavy net importer of food, especially pork) is also very old. And when those people are too old to work, China is going to rely on the rest of the world to sustain its (rapidly declining) population.
There are a lot of other Asian countries in a similar situation, but China is unique in how bleak the future could be for hundreds of millions of people.
A year ago I would have said “who knows when the scale will tip?” With what’s going on lately it seems that it may have already happened. Whether you agree with the economic policy of this administration or not, the ramifications are astounding. The US is positioned to come out of this the best, at the expense of the rest of the world. This is why China is all of a sudden calling the US bullies. They would never admit weakness, but they are suddenly feeling the heat. If the US took it a step further and decided to stop securing the seas in that part of the world, all hell would break loose.
For instance, do you think Japan and China would just “play nice” with no incentive to? I’m not so sure, and China has no access to the ocean without going through Japan.
This argument is Peter Zeihan's thesis too, and I'm not sure it'll be what actually comes to pass.
China still has an enormous population, and if they convert their society from production to domestic consumption and ride the value-add wave, they'll follow the American growth equation. And with more people to bolster that economy, to boot. You can already see this in their dominance of electronics, drones, EVs, and green tech. They're doing advanced, bleeding edge work in all of the industries that matter.
BYD, DJI, Eufy/Anker (vs iRobot), Lenovo, Alibaba, ... China is a formidable powerhouse in advanced products and value-add. These companies absolutely rival the best of what America and the West have to offer. And if your argument is one of demographics, these companies are staffed with young educated workers from a huge and healthy pipeline of STEM grads.
I think of all the predictions about the future of China - from the incredibly bearish ones like Zeihan's "death of China", to the bullish ones that declare this the "Chinese century" - I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
I don't see how China doesn't become a larger version of Japan or Germany or the US. Despite some demographic and economic headwinds, they've got an incredible head start.
If America aims to compete and remain in the top, it needs to stop doing things that look like Brexit that lead to degrowth and isolation. China isn't magically going to get weaker and provide free opportunity to the United States. On the contrary, it's fantastic peer-level competition that the US should use as motivation to work harder.
China is an incredible growth and innovation story, and a bar that all countries should hold themselves to. It's no time to slouch. Competition fosters the best innovation anyway.
Hyperinflation? They have been exporting deflation. Wage inequality? It is a productivity inequality, relative to the US. The idea that everyone should just be paid the same wage is quite an odd inference when you start the comment with explaining how everyone else just doesn't understand the things you do.
China moved away from the export-led model of growth about ten years ago (the largest exporter of deflation today is Germany and has been for a number of years).
China does have too many people...there is nothing they can do about that and that will limit their living standards for a long time.
China's future is only bleak if you are unaware of their history. They were poorer than every country in Africa bar one a few decades ago, what they have done is still regarded as impossible even after they did it. It is like winning the lottery and then grousing because there is someone else richer than you (which, btw, most people probably would do).
China does not trade with the US intensively anymore. The US doesn't really make anything that anyone needs, and is a big export market but not at the margin anymore...total exports to the US are 3% of GDP. Their economy has been rebalancing for decades (again, proof that their leaders are just smarter...Trump is flailing around in the darkness with tariffs rather than actually being able to design good policy, China started this ten years ago and almost done already, it would make more sense to target the EU).
China has a long coastline, their primary products mainly come through the Malacca strait...again, it is hard to take someone seriously who starts talking about their expertise in geopolitics but doesn't know which trade routes China actually uses.
This is nonsense, ~zero rich people in third world send their kids to study in Shanghai instead of Boston or immigrate to Beijing instead of NYC to park their capital.
In fact it’s the rich Chinese who continue to move to Vancouver and London and Irvine to escape China and have a better future.
The old-guard rich people don't, that much is true. But the middle classes sure as hell are.
There's the fact that Chinese companies are basically hoovering up all the talent. In Latin America, Huawei alone eats up entire graduating classes of engineers. Pretty much every 'industry' event in any sector is nearly 100% Chinese. University staff are increasingly forming themselves via Chinese companies, and are thus transmitting that to their students. Chinese scholarships are popping up like mushrooms. Again, Huawei alone has provided more of them in the past year than the US Embassy has done in the past three decades.
People still dream about going to the US, sure. But MAGA is doing their damned best to whittle that lead away.
that is provably false. there are many african students in china. and they all must have some amount of wealth from home to afford that, at least compared to the local average which is a lot lower than in the west.
I know many people in third world countries who fear China. I did when living in one (and continue to do so as a citizen of one with still close connections to it).
China is a success for whom? Exploited factory workers, Tibetans and Uyghurs?
For the hundreds of millions of people who have incomes more than $1 per day now. Simple.
China produced one of the greatest economic miracles ever seen in an age when every economic authority said that miracles were impossible. This is still the legacy today where people argue, even after China has thrown up cities housing 20m people in two decades, that isn't real...because it fundamentally overturns basic aspects of the pre-China account of economic growth (which was itself largely based on lies to create support for politicians).
Never forget that economic growth is dangerous to vested interests.
This is like saying what makes cerebal palsy so dangerous. Why is trying to find out causes so dangerous? The dangers of empiricism in the 21st century.
In the UK, there are regions where 50% of children born in the early 2000s have special needs, and more children than adults are claiming disability benefits. It is going to have a very big impact on the labour market when 20-30% of these cohorts cannot work and, therefore, need to obtain income support from everyone else.
> It is going to have a very big impact on the labour market when 20-30% of these cohorts cannot work
"Cannot work" has more to do (imo) with the American Welfare Cliff where if you accept disability, you're forced to not have a job because if you make even a small piddling of money (it's something like $600/mo), you lose all your disability.
It's very disgusting, imo, and rejecting people's admission of a very real struggle they have because admission "does more harm than good" is, itself, harmful.
The real gap is "the economy" vs "living standards". For example, quality adjustments for inflation stats are so bad as to make comparison over long periods meaningless (a few years ago, the ONS had to retract decades of inflation data due to poor quality adjustments...and this was for components where quality adjustments are quantifiable).
One of the reasons why is because you can clearly see that life today in most rich economies has plummeted in quality. Technology has spilled over from the US but if you take away those gains, there is very little underlying improvement. Skills are collapsing, governments/companies struggle to provide basic services, disability is skyrocketing, it is a complete mess (and this is often linked to "the economy", look at Canada, look at the UK, set on paths of permanent decline for short-term political gain).
This. My boss had the nerve to tell me inflation is not a valid reason for a discussion of raises all the while company ( and its upper management ) had a rather good year and did not hesitate to reward themselves accordingly. Surely, previous year's bonuses would have sufficed. Honestly, it is a public company. Do they think we don't read quarterly results that they themselves publish?
I am effectively being paid less and the expectation is that I somehow work more. In fact, and this is genuinely the part that gets me more than anything else, when I mentioned it to my extended family during a social function, the response was: "can't you work on a train?".
I don't get it man. Is it some sort of weird generational gap? What gives?
This probably exists or maybe it's impossible to measure. But is there a widely adopted quality of life index? Or "fulfillment index"?
Like if someone is commuting an hour working full time in a LCOL area and can't afford a house, that would be scored lower than if someone is working remotely for a huge salary from a various resorts around the world, which would be a higher score.
You don't need an index. Are the people in your country happy or not? Are they having children? Are they participating in civic society? Crime? Signs of social unrest?
There is an issue with people being systemically negative but it is very obvious which countries are thriving at a high-level from aggregate behaviour.
The problem is that some societies (unsurprisingly the ones that have a problem in this area) do not want confront this. So you have countries where the economy is collapsing, it is obvious to everyone...and they are getting economic policies from corporate lobbyists...to fix "the economy". I think this is getting at the spirit of the OP's point, most people who talk about "the economy" just have a very short-term, very self-interested take.
No, it isn't. An index is a quantifiable measure. I said the behaviour of people in the aggregate, not measuring the behaviour of people in the aggregate.
How do you measure civic participation? Why would you even try? It is genuinely baffling to me that people view quantification as an end in itself when any understanding of human behaviour tells you that a huge proportion of the population just shut their brain off when a number appears (that is the point made in the original post, we have this problem with "the economy" that leads to people making such bad policy choices because of this mindset).
Quantification is not an end in itself.
I can think of many ways to measure civic participation and reasons I might want to, especially if I think it is healthy for society and wanted to encourage more of it.
As I said, this is the issue. "The economy" is a direct consequence of people thinking that everything can be quantified. It is so shallow until you realise that this thinking is pervasive in government, and explains why "line goes up" whilst everything valuable is collapsing is so prevalent. In other words, to explain why basic societal functions are collapsing whilst you have people saying things have never been so good requires an extremely reductive mode of thought.
It isn't. Some of their data has been suspect for a very long time, unfortunately (and ironically) there is also a partisan reason why the Economist doesn't mention the series that is most suspect: population estimates. These numbers are known bad for over two decades now...they have done nothing.
The US has had a far more serious approach to economic statistics, the ONS is a complete joke. It has never been easier or cheaper to collect stats but the ONS, for some series, is using collection methods that haven't changed since WW2. This is typical of government in the UK, completely isolated from the rest of society.
1. These summaries were terrible.
2. The economics of these summaries was to get into Google News, spam newsfeeds, and use this to drive traffic to your paid product. This business model stopped working when Google News stopped accepting new sources for their Finance feed...because it was full of spam (I worked for a company that tried to start in this area with human writers, didn't work because they couldn't get onto Google).
Simply Wall St was one company that made tens of millions doing this, there were many others...but none were doing anything that is related to what OP is doing.
Every time someone will tell you something can't be done...this very clearly can work, it is not easy but ad revenue for financial services is still completely ludicrous and most services doing this are complete garbage (the news articles above the OP is producing are far from it, I worked in equity research, this is better than most journalism in the space...which is now non-existent...and probably at the level of a junior analyst).
The business model of VCs works, in part, because you can offload your radioactive equity to shmucks buying equities.
The sales pitch with passive investing is that it is an anti-decision...there are no anti-decisions. The only way to produce a savings system that works is to recognise that people are shmucks, people who index funds are also shmucks, and that you need a professional to manage those funds cost-effectively.
Almost no individual investor should ever be making a decision about VC investing (why do you think so many VC firms have listed publicly now? You have to fish where the fish are). But this is the job of plan sponsors, there is no why reason why DB funds should be doing all this stuff (and it going pretty well...people think they are smart investing in passive funds, they aren't aware that DB funds are doing segregated account deals with active managers for LOWER fees than passive funds, most passive funds are high-fee in institutional terms) but no-one else can do it? Makes no sense (as long as individual investors are not making these decisions).
Passive equity investments have close to the worst risk/reward, largely because they are so accessible so effectively support the creation of vast amounts of worthless equity (the return on the average US stock is 0% and has been for many decades). Also, most equity indexes are nonsense, in most of the world the state is heavily involved in which companies list so they are and have always been historically and culturally contingent.
The reason why this is happening is because some institutions have been extremely successful doing this. I assume you are familiar with the ones like Ontario Teacher's (because they seem to own everything) or endowments but has also been true for Superannuation funds in Australia. In the latter case, they have (I believe) the highest levels of average wealth (higher than the US) but incomes that are lower, largely because of Super funds.
Speaking generally, one of the biggest drivers of wealth inequality is that the rich have access to financial products that go up in a straight line, and other people do not...despite "other people" in aggregate holding most of the wealth. Germany is one of the most famous examples of this, GDP per capita is very close to the top ten, median net financial wealth equal to Greece. Saving options are non-existent so everyone is funneled into deposits, and the banks take that money and give it at -2% to a billionaire (whose family got suspiciously and suddenly very wealthy in the 30s). China is effectively the same model but Germany is a bit more notorious...because people continue for vote it.
The alternative is Singapore, everyone knows this model cannot work with US politics (to keep it brief). So what is happening is the obvious thing to do.
Same thing is happening in the UK under a left-wing government btw. The US is already somewhat ahead of the curve in that their exists a deep pool of people who have decades of experience running funds for savers and institutions this way (again, people in the US miss this context...the UK is doing a similar thing, the issue is that there is almost no-one with this experience). It is right to say plan sponsors should do this, the statements by Biden and Trump quoted are both correct (and not contradictory). As the article points out, DB plans have used these for decades shrug
However, there is also stuff here that is also known bad: it sounds like they want to incorporate this into funds that offer daily liquidity...how did CEFs work for PE funds pre-08? Not good (the solace with this kind of thing is that PE funds lose out just as much doing this, it is a bad idea that has failed every time but they just can't resist).
The paper you have linked is a survey (economic historians are like other people and believe things that do not have clear evidence too, as someone who studied economic history I can give you a long list of subjects on which opinions without evidence are common...this is one of the most notorious), it does not say that it contributed half (there is no way to know this either, it is an anti-factual statement, there is research that says it contributed to the drop in imports...but this is against the backdrop of a massive drop that was probably at least 5-10x as large caused by banking), the quantum is extremely important here because you can say something is probably negative but also probably irrelevant (true in this case, the reason why this statement is said is because tariffs are negative ceterius paribus, so it is easy to say that they were negative but this ignores all other context...the irrationality about tariffs is exposed by almost all of the growth miracles in economic history occurring in countries with extremely high tariffs), and (finally) there is massive amounts of evidence that 99% of the cause was banking.
On the latter, this is knowable because you can point to failures of specific banks that coincided with the Depression getting worse in areas where those banks traded (in particular, the failure of Caldwell). This is a very different kind of evidence to the one for tariffs, in economic history terms the latter is shrug maybe (this kind of thing is not apparent to people who don't know how the sausage is made). This is why you have papers (like Eichengreen) that revolve around asking why SH is such an obsession for economists (usually not actual economic historians). Compare this to the number of papers on banking history of the period, on the failures of massive banks like Caldwell...there are very few on this because banking history is extremely unpopular and boring amongst economists because you can't use mathematical models that show how clever you are, macro is very popular but completely useless (again, most people don't know how the sausage is made).
There is no evidence that it contributed significantly. This is like your house being on fire, and saying that your house collapsed because you left the kitchen door open (and, again, to repeat: there is no evidence that tariffs are bad either...because almost every country that has experienced huge growth had tariffs in the past, there is a lot of evidence that tariffs/trade barriers are bad for economically uncompetitive countries i.e. the EU today, South America in the 50/60s, and Britain 20-70s but those two things are not separable, tariffs have a context).
Other comments are also mostly wrong. Issue wasn't unregulated banks in the GD either, most banks that failed were regulated. There is an argument for saying that state regulators were worse, that there was massive regulatory fragmentation (in the 20s, banks were regulated in a completely different way to today) but I am not clear why people would assume regulation automatically leads to less crises. Savings and Loans were also heavily regulated...still blew up. The issue is that heavy regulation usually causes massive concentration in the banking sectors (Canada and Australia are two examples) and this generally leads to a much lower frequency of banking crises but significantly greater severity. The assumption that regulators can just magically find this optimum is not logical (and is based on the theory that people who work at banks do not have an incentive to stop failures, this aspect was sold heavily after 2008 to support significantly more regulation...but it isn't accurate, for example Lehman's senior management lost 95% of their net worth, and ignores that regulators were overseeing the institutions that failed before too).
Your whole argument is based on "it's causal because we saw a peak just after a bank collapse", as if a fire started bt a spark couldn't have fuel and generate other sparks in a positive feedback loop. The rest is basically "there is evidence that" without nothing to back it up.
See Rustici (2005),Irwin (1998), Bond (1993) and Crucini (1996)
I'm not as engaged in this topic as you are, likely because I'm not as ideologically fixated on it. But the idea that the Tariff Act had a significant negative impact is well analyzed (e.g above), hence the consensus.
Imports fell 40% and it is a small part of that fall. And, as the paper explains, the actual economic impact was quite limited in the context of the Great Depression and the financial system shutting down completely.
The reason why I am engaged is because I have a postgrad in economic history. Within economic history, SH is generally understood as something where the evidence is often misunderstood by journalists (for the reasons I have explained), and this filters down (the Irwin paper is somewhat notorious for this because Irwin is a trade economist who is often very careful, because trade economics is often non-conclusive, and you hear the conclusion from people who have never read or actually understood the paper...you may not have noticed but I alluded to this paper in my original argument, it is that well-known that people will misunderstand it).
The issue is that people who haven't studied GD in depth do not understand any part of the context. They just do a quick Google search and then act as if this is the same thing as prolonged study.
The idea with Rust is that you get safety...not that you get safety at the cost of performance. The language forces you into paying a performance cost for using patterns when it is relatively easy for a human to reason about safety (imo).
You can use `unsafe` but you naturally ask yourself why I am using Rust (not rational, but true). You can use lifetimes but, personally, every time I have tried to use them I haven't been able to indicate to the compiler that my code is actually safe.
In particular, the protections for double-free and free before use are extremely limiting, and it is possible to reason about these particular bugs in other ways (i.e. defer in Go and Zig) in a way that doesn't force you to change the way you code.
Rust is good in many ways but the specific problem mentioned at the top of this chain is a big issue. Just saying: don't use this type of data structure unless you pay performance cost isn't an actual solution to the problem. The problem with Rust is that it tries to force safety but doesn't have good ways for devs to tell the compiler code is safe...that is a fundamental weakness.
I use Rust quite a bit, it isn't a terrible language and is worth learning but these are big issues. I would have reservations using the language in my own company, rather than someone else's, and if I need to manage memory then I would look elsewhere atm. Due to the size of the community, it is very hard not to use Rust too (for example, Zig is great...but no-one uses it).