Because that was 1985, and this is now. Entire supply chains, input costs, planning, etc. have been built around the assumption of the JPY trading in some sort of range.
Of course that will change over time, if it hasn't already. The Japanese government's messaging about this has been that they're not really worried about the currency weakening (after all they're massive net exporters! it should be a good thing), but rather the speed at which it's happening.
Many don't though, and even if they all did, you can't hedge forever. Hedges are also rolling, so as some hedges expire the companies need to set up new hedges, which are at a worse FX rate. So the hedges lessen the impact but they aren't perfect, otherwise they would not be called 'hedges'.
Use TextVerified, load up like $5 of credit and OAI verification is like $1.00. Then when your account is made, ensure 2FA/passkey is setup then you don't need to worry about the phone number.
As someone who's very well informed on that corner of financial markets.. you're absolutely right. 66bn might cause some minor moves in yields but it's far from a disaster.
US 10y bond auctions are often >40bn in size, with shorter maturities well over that. The seller of this debt (China) wouldn't want to smash the market because they'd only be shooting themselves in the foot.
Point being that it's an easily digestible amount of debt.
As someone who's very well informed on that corner of financial markets, you probably realize that China controls much more than $660 billion of US Treasury securities.
I'm sure you also realize that when a large holder sells a significant stake of any asset, traders anticipate they will sell more in the future.
Example 1: Berkshire Hathaway selling $47 million of BYD and the market price dropping 8% the next day, wiping out $10 billion of market value.
Example 2: Musk selling 0.6% of his stake in Tesla, and the market price dropping 15% the next day, wiping out $187 billion in market value.
Example 3: UK government announcing a planned sale of 0.3% of above-ground gold, and the global gold price plunging 10% before the first auction.
> As someone who's very well informed on that corner of financial markets, you probably realize that China controls much more than $660 billion of US Treasury securities.
How much do they control? Please cite your sources.
I can find some information about "shadow holdings" (exciting!) held in Luxembourg and Belgium [0] but I cannot imagine those treasuries would add up to a multiple of what's officially on the books and held by the Chinese government and Chinese companies. Interesting thought, though.
Maybe the tinfoil hat is also getting a little tight, but something like this is a giant repository of internal cybersec data being put into one place. The model will see what people are fixing and anyone peering in can make an educated guess on how long that vulnerability may continue existing because people don't update when they should - the alphabet boys wouldn't be able to keep their hand out of the cookie jar.
> By contrast, having zero mechanism for the rest of the parents to control this, as is the current case, does impose your "do whatever feels good" values on the rest of the world.
I use them. First of all, they're still absolute dogshit (but Apple promises good changes in next OS?). And the choice is to either allow social media in its current, extremely toxic form, or ban it entirely. There's no "Allow Instagram but only let them see the content their actual friends post." No "Allow TikTok but let me allow-list the influencers that show up in For You." The peer pressure on kids to be on those platforms is intense though, and many parents seem to be allowing it.
I think the theory behind the law is that experimenting on children to optimize (without any ceiling) for increasing watch hours, which 100% of the social media sites are doing at all times and have been for over a decade, is unethical and should be illegal.
If adults want to subject themselves to that, it's their business, but for children, we restrict all kinds of things from even being marketed towards children. Things (especially addictive ones) that are very obviously bad for humans, like cigarettes and liquor. Why? Because otherwise there's a huge incentive for the makers of those things to do so, because of how naïve kids are.
A wildcard here is how if at all to address careless, negligent parents of course. For the things so obviously harmful like drugs, it becomes criminal to give those to your kids. But perhaps social media falls into about the same category as R-rated movies, where we just say "it's bad parenting to take a 6-year-old to one, but not illegal." Another area where we have 'censored' things for children for decades - without any kind of scary police-state regime materializing and forcing biometrics and recordkeeping at the box office.
The difference is that those other things in the past didn't really place an undue burden on everybody else. Whether a child is allowed to watch an R rated movie or go to a pub has no effect on how I conduct myself, age-gating computers or the internet does affect how I use things.
> I think the theory behind the law is that experimenting on children to optimize (without any ceiling) for increasing watch hours, which 100% of the social media sites are doing at all times and have been for over a decade, is unethical and should be illegal.
I agree, and I think this is where the focus should be. It places no burden on any regular consumer to do anything and all the burden on the platform providers.
How exactly would this bill, as written, affect you? Would you indicate that you're a child when you set up your device? If not, you're arguing with a strawman version of the bill, I'm guessing one that imposes verification (which isn't in there, and which I oppose too). The slippery slope argument is nonsense. Windows XP asked me to type my full name to make a user account in 2001 and that didn't become a driver's license scan even 25 years later. Some things aren't conspiracies against you, and if we don't trust politicians not to pass the bad version of the law later, we should throw them out on their ear now.
If you're going to operate from that point of view there's really no point to further explaining how a bill like this would adversely affect people. One only needs to look as far as the 'temporary' measures in the patriot act to understand that slippery slope arguments are often not so silly. The Overton window moves with laws like this.
Is it any different to how it was previously? Before the age of AI, companies write all sorts of bullshit stuff into ToS or EULA which was neither enforceable or legal yet they routinely got away with it because Joe Schmoe had no ability to assess their arguments or fight back.
The only difference now is that the general population has gained access to low cost legal help and are able to push and argue (whether rightly or wrongly), previously it was the other way around.
> Is it any different to how it was previously? Before the age of AI, companies write all sorts of bullshit stuff into ToS or EULA which was neither enforceable or legal yet they routinely got away with it because Joe Schmoe had no ability to assess their arguments or fight back.
Well yes, because we don't do that. You might be shocked to hear we don't even have a ToS or EULA and the relevant legislation acts as that for our purposes.
I was just using that as an example with the private sector, but my opinion is equivalent to the public sector. Democratising access to legal knowledge / help / assistance is a good thing, regardless of the effect it has on public services.
Where you might see it as a deluge of AI slop - and I've got no doubt it is - I see the need for whatever part of the govt you're into improve their services.
If the public is annoyed by how your service is being provided and they feel the need to send through AI generated privacy demands, that suggests the department you're in isn't doing a good job relative to your customer's expectations. Something needs to change; maybe have a page that allows people to delete accounts or whatever private information they're ALLOWED to delete, maybe the public needs to feel more reassured that their data is safe, or maybe it's something else.
Whatever the reason, AI has placed pressure on you and your arm of government to meet the expectations of the public, pressure that didn't previously exist.
> Democratising access to legal knowledge / help / assistance is a good thing, regardless of the effect it has on public services.
When the 'democratised access' means they're quoting laws from other countries, sometimes multiple other countries mashed together I don't think anyone is getting value out of it.
We're not getting informed engagement from the public and the person making demands isn't getting any kind of valued legal assistance.
We have always, and continue to have, thoughtful engagement from the public in the form of questions about our operations. This new thing is not that. It's wild.
I take your point about there being an opportunity to be more proactively transparent or clear with people and I push for that a lot... but the sad fact is this new class of AI fuelled fervour really is just something else. It takes away our limited resources to do good work just to respond to it.
I hope so. I've got no issue with AI, but "influencers" are broadly a net negative on the world. Anything that reduces the amount of power/status/attention they get is a plus for me.
It tells me the way they measure 'livable' is wrong. Given the choice, most people would choose to be in any one of those over where ever they are now, and the cities on 'most livable' lists.
Those top 20 livable lists are always pretty narrowly defined though. They’ll mention some pricey cities in Switzerland for sure, and for forget the poor slouches that have to commute into Bern from Freiburg.
> They’ll mention some pricey cities in Switzerland
The thing is that these cities aren't pricy for swiss people, with a swiss pay-cheque (err, direct bank-to-bank money transmit). It's all a result of decades long higher inflation there, that now has this extreme price difference. And with prices did their wages increase ... but not yours, visiting Switzerland. At least the country is so small you can just drive through. You don't need to go into one of their supermarket and see that all the stuff is 2x as costly as north, east, west or south of it ...
But yeah, prices play probably a huge role in this "livability" index.
Zürich (Zurich) is at place 3, while Wien (Vienna) is at 2. And I guess this has something to do with the spectacular low flat rents in Wien. They have lots of non-profit cooperatives that own the houses and take rent so that they can refurbish the houses and build new ones (1/4 of all flats in Austria is build by such cooperatives). All over Austria, 16% of all flats/houses are owned by them. But I guess in Wien it's even higher.
There are comparison sites that say that in München (Munich) you pay in average 1249 € for rent, while in Wien it is 872 €. Okay, I select the most expensive german town, so maybe this is rigged. But even with capital vs. capital Wien is cheaper.
Those deals are only for locals though. If you move to Switzerland you need to pay. Actually, the same is true of any place with any kind of public housing or rent control, it’s a sticky advantage. Having been subjected to the Swiss rental market before, it is stressful for outsiders.
I wonder if the USA will go down the same route eventually.
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