{"id":19507,"date":"2018-06-13T12:25:31","date_gmt":"2018-06-13T16:25:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=19507"},"modified":"2018-06-13T12:25:31","modified_gmt":"2018-06-13T16:25:31","slug":"broody-hen-compared-to-gravid-human-in-the-office","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/13\/broody-hen-compared-to-gravid-human-in-the-office\/","title":{"rendered":"Broody hen compared to gravid human in the office"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Human Husbandry”<\/a> by Elaine Ou is fun:<\/p>\n

Domestication is a rather unnatural form of selection. As a population\u2019s per-capita GDP increases, average fertility decreases. This phenomenon has been termed the demographic-economic paradox, but it\u2019s really not paradoxical at all. Raising children carries a huge opportunity cost \u2013 remove this cost and the population has way more productive capacity. It\u2019s no coincidence that San Francisco, home of the most advanced civilization in the world, also has the lowest share of children out of any major city in the country.<\/p>\n

Just as a broody hen negatively impacts a farmer\u2019s productivity, a gravid human poses a significant inconvenience to her employer.<\/strong> That\u2019s why companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple pay for female employees to extract and freeze their eggs. It\u2019s great to see tech companies empowering women the same way that factory farms empower their battery hens!<\/p>\n

Marc Andreessen and his wife hired a surrogate to carry their biological child. While not scalable, it\u2019s always heartwarming to see billionaires take time out of their busy lives to reproduce like the rest of us mere mortals. Even if it does involve some outsourcing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She also writes about Bitcoin<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Paul Krugman doesn\u2019t know anything about anything, but I\u2019ll grant him this one: There\u2019s nothing to backstop a cryptocurrency\u2019s value! If people come to believe that Bitcoin is worthless, it\u2019s worthless. There\u2019s no tether to reality.<\/p>\n

One of the greatest tragedies of modern money is the decoupling between a store and display of wealth. Or, more accurately, the societal decoupling between wealth and status. For most of human history, the functions of display and storage were condensed. Even before people wore clothing, they wore piercings and tattoos. A full-body ink job isn\u2019t transferable, but it\u2019s a sort of proof of work.<\/p>\n

here\u2019s a better way to flaunt crypto wealth. …\u00a0Secure multi-party computations were first introduced in 1982 as a solution to the Millionaires\u2019 Problem: Multiple millionaires want to know their relative wealth standing, but no one wants to reveal their actual net worth.<\/p>\n

One solution is to distribute shares of a secret to each participant. Each person combines the secret with the value of their net worth, broadcasts the result, and a blinded function processes the values to arrive at the final rankings. This function evaluation forms the basis for a zero-knowledge proof.<\/p>\n

This can be done with any cryptocurrency. Instead of self-reporting a net worth, each participant signs a message to prove ownership of an account. The message is combined with a secret share, resulting in an output that indicates the user\u2019s balance relative to everyone else. Turn the output into crypto-bling by mapping it to a unique identicon. Bitcoin can now be used as a visual display of wealth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(This would work against “Secret bitcoin billionaires will renounce their U.S. citizenship before cashing in?<\/a>“)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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