The Economist on how to preserve secrets in a quantum age: “The existing encryption standards that underpin just about every online exchange of information are a bit of gnarly mathematics designed to be well-nigh impossible for today’s computers to crack without just the right arithmetical key. But nist’s scientists have not been pondering today’s machines. They worry about a coming era of quantum computers…A more promising approach would be to identify new classes of mathematical problems that even quantum machines would struggle to crack. This was NIST’s task. In 2016 it launched a competition to find worthy algorithms for “post-quantum cryptography” (pqc), receiving 82 submissions from 25 countries. After three rounds of sifting and valiant searches for vulnerabilities by independent cryptographers, four winning techniques and four backup approaches have emerged.”
Emmanuel Roman of Pimco: : “Overconfidence is one of the great sins of mankind — and fund managers. It’s easy to build a narrative where you say I have seen this before…It’s very hard to escape [our biases] sometimes . . . and that’s why thinking through portfolio construction and risk and debating it with people of different backgrounds and age groups is very important . . . And not just people in your own mould.”
Richard Fulmer counters socialists’ claims about capitalism. Part 1 and Part 2. One of the claims of socialists is that capitalism creates inequality. The response: “Nature creates inequality. Different socioeconomic systems reward different natural inequalities – intelligence, physical health, strength, and beauty – by the incentives they create. Capitalism rewards the “bourgeois values” at which the left sneers: thrift, honesty, persistence, hard work, prudence, tolerance, and civility. Socialism rewards ruthlessness. Material inequality is the inescapable result of material progress. If a new product is created, it cannot possibly be instantly and simultaneously distributed to every person on earth. So, the first time someone invented something – the stone hammer, perhaps – inequality instantly appeared in the world. To demand complete material equality is to demand an end to material progress.”
