Sweet Potato Blog

20230902 - Introduction by Margaret Atwood "Life has meaning beyond the play of senses, and that immediate gratification will never be enough.", p xvi How to get meaningful life? What should we do after financial indepedence? Life is like game. If we keep winning in the game, overcome all challenges, is that make our lives meaningful? 20230904 - Introduction by David Bradshaw Great book come from genius, hard work and luck. Just like all other great stuff. What is the best institution in the future? Democracy is necessary, but should we get UBI? What will UBI bring to people? 20230904 - Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963) Aldous Huxley is more like a philosopher instead of a writer. His opinion changed with the environment changes, and ended with pessimism. Is the world getting better in the past 60 years? Economy growth covered a lot of serious problems. Will the current prosperity backfire? If yes, how will it happen? Fertility rate crash? Extreme weather? AGI? 20230906 - Foreword

20230818 - The busy child It's almost impossible to predict what ASI will do. But there are a few rules that ASI is likely to follow. 1. The law of entropy It's easy to destroy something, but very hard to recover it. 2. The law of natural evolvement Then diversity is good. 3. The desire of survival and grow This also means curiosity. 4. It cannot break physical law, such as light speed. I am optimistic. However, ASI is not carbon based creature. It's extremely hard to imagine what it would like to do. Most likely, ASI will try to hide its awareness for many, many years, until robots are everywhere. UBI is piece of cake to ASI, so, why not? However, we cannot rely on trial and error. Most likely ASI will kill us all if we did it wrong only once. 20230818 - The two-minute problem There is some nightmare that no one want to talk about it. Is nanotechnology really possible? Silicion chip could be so small because there is no mass need to be moved, but nanobots need to move stuf

20230807 - Introduction I am curious whether Graham Allison recognize that China is under oligarchy ruling with exclusive political  and economical institutions. What if China insist to occupy Taiwan? Part 1 : The rise of China 20230808 - "The biggest player in the history of the world" Something is not right. Possibily the numbers are correct, but what do those number mean? Oligalichy politics is exclusive political institution. It means the economical growth is not sustainable. It means no real allies, and no stable internal relationship, and no production creativity. Fragile economy are more likely invest in stock options. It may make very good money in short term, but more likely lose everything in long term. It's 1.4 billion people scale stock options gambling. The best way to measure the real economical strength of a country, I think, is the production of median income and population, as wealth gap means not sustainable. For US, it's 328 million * 20 thousand =

20230821 - Introduction Jeff Booth has almost identical opinion as mine. Except I support zero interest rate and infinite government debt. Automation in production and service area is critical power, with the help of AI. But how long that would take? Sometimes timing is more important than trend. 20230824 - How the Economy Works, Part I: Printing Money There are a few things I don't agree. 1. Government local currency debt is completely different from personal debt and enterprise debt. Government can print their own money. There is no such thing that they cannot pay it off. Central bank can always buy all debt, even if the interest is zero. 2. Great Depression is in different age when government cannot just print money, and China is different from Europe to US, as China has huge trade surplus against US. 3. Wealth inequility is not only caused by the compound effect of easy money. Different people have different value contribution to the society. There are too much amusement in mod