Wealth can't be created out of thin air

Jamie Dimon isn't missing anything

The New York Times published a diatribe by a Jeremy Philips,

What Jamie Dimon Is Missing About Bitcoin.

The question mark is missing and the answer to the question is "Nothing". The CEO of JP Morgan Chase, the 9th largest company in the world by its capitalization, isn't missing anything.

Philips, an adjunct janitor at Columbia, is even questioning Dimon's simple thesis

You can’t have a business where people are going to invent a currency out of thin air.

Philips teaches us that gold, the Euro, and almost everything else has value that was created from nothing, so it's natural when the same happens in the Bitcoin case. Oh, really? Were these values created out of nothing?

Five good reasons why the governments will ban "independent" cryptocurrencies

Before I start to enumerate them, let me mention that the governments obviously can ban cryptocurrencies. This ability has nothing to do with some technical virtues of the crypto-technology. The governments can ban, look for, prosecute, and punish particular patterns of human behavior they declare illegal.



So just like it may be illegal to sell or even hold drugs, it may become illegal to sell or even hold cryptocurrencies. In principle, you may have cryptocurrencies in your living room – just like you may have hashish – but there may obviously exist laws that will send you to prison for XY years if a court gets some evidence that you're selling the cryptocurrencies, e.g. if you happen to sell them to a provocateur hired by the police. At that moment, almost all people will simply abandon cryptocurrencies – much like most people avoid hard drugs. They don't want to have anything to do with illegal things because they don't even want to take the risk of years in prison.

Cryptocurrencies are a classic example of a pyramid scheme in which the founders or early adopters make the largest and safest profit, the profit is diminishing, and the promotional search for new participants is what keeps it going. The ICOs, the offerings of the new "altcoins", are activities by which some people try to keep the positive exponential expansion rate of the bubble. The bubble may keep on expanding up to some point that we can't predict. It's equally plausible that the $5,000 price of the Bitcoin was a historical maximum and we won't see it again.

Now, let's look at the reasons why it may be a good idea, if not a vital decision, to ban the cryptocurrencies.

1. Protection of citizens against too risky trades

I started with that justification not because I consider it the most important one but because that's the justification that China has used to ban the cryptocurrency exchanges in the country. The documents say that these exchanges involve too huge an amount of risk, it's an extreme gambling, and the Chinese citizens need to be protected against it. They need to be protected for the same reasons why gambling is regulated by governments – not only Chinese governments. Some gambling addicts may lose their last money. They become a liability for their families or the whole society. They become screwed. And if there were too many victims like that, it could be a threat for the financial system or the fiscal balance of a whole country. The governments may very well take this attitude and the Chinese government has started with it.

Bavaria: third Afghani guy couldn't complete the act

FOCUS, Bavaria [CZ news] – On Friday night, a 16-year-old girl was trying to catch a train in the Upper Bavarian town of Höhenkirchen-Siegertsbrunn [Tallchurch-Winnerswell], ten miles South of Munich.

While she was walking, she was joined by three extremely friendly migrants from a nearby integration facility. A man of age 27 followed by a teenager of age 17 raped her on the street.



The third future German citizen of Afghani ancestry, who was 18 years old, couldn't get a hardon – his excuse was a passer-by. Police started a manhunt in order to reward the heroes. A helicopter was used and the three men were quickly found.

Nima et al.: making the amplitude minirevolution massive

Nima Arkani-Hamed (Princeton), Tzu-Chen Huang (Caltech), and Yu-tin Huang (Taiwan) released their new 79-page-long paper

Scattering Amplitudes For All Masses and Spins

a few days ago. They claim to do something that may be considered remarkable: to generalize the spinor-indices-based uprising in the scattering amplitude industry of the previous 15 years to the case of particles of any mass and spin, and to deduce some properties of all possible particle theories out of their new formalism.

Is it possible? Does it work? What can they learn?

First, they remain restricted to the case of on-shell, i.e. scattering amplitudes, not general off-shell, i.e. Green's functions. They have a cute self-motivating semi-heuristic argument why they don't lose any generality by this constraint: the actual off-shell amplitudes are being experimentally measured by the analysis of some on-shell scattering that involves the particles as well as some new very heavy particles, namely the detectors and other apparatuses.

Nice. I guess that the numbers showed on the apparatuses' displays must be considered as labeling different particle species, not just polarizations of spin. If your Geiger-Müller counter shows "5" at the beginning and measures something and shows "6" at the end, it was a scattering in which the "Geiger-Müller-counter-type-5 particle species" collided with some small particles, got annihilated, and produced a similar big "*-6 counter" particle. Cute. ;-)

Mr Juncker, Czechia won't leave the EU because of cocoa in chocolate

North Korea's Kim III has promised to place his country's military on par with the U.S. Good luck with that, comrade. Meanwhile, a similarly ambitious leader, Jean-Claude Juncker, the general secretary of the commissars of the European Soviet, gave his "State of the Union address", probably in order to claim that this unelected drunk clown is on par with the U.S. president.

He also mentioned my country, Czechia, once in his speech. It was about the double "standards" of food products in the post-communist and old EU member states. Slovaks and Hungarians should have the same high meat content in some products while the Czechs should have as much cocoa in the chocolate as others.

I have always disagreed with the hysteria exactly because this hysteria contradicts the national idiosyncrasies, the rules of the free market, and it's an ideal "cause" for clowns such as Juncker to become more important. To violently unify and centralize Europe, it's exactly what similar politicians want to do and what they want to be paid for. So I totally expected that Juncker would become a warrior-in-chief against the "double standards in the quality of food".

There exists a small percentage of packages whose content is different e.g. in Czechia and Austria. I believe that it's not about an unambiguously lower quality in the post-communist world. In particular, I do believe that we Czechs actually prefer meat-like products that contain a higher fraction of fat and meat that isn't just the ordinary protein-based muscle, perhaps including some grounded skin, organs, if not parts of bones. It tastes more yummy. Our nation may be genetically predisposed to eat such food because our ancestors, maids and stableboys working for a German farmer (if I simplify things), have gotten used to such food. We may also prefer weaker spices, more milk-like and less bitter taste of chocolate, and many other things. At any rate, if products obey health standards and they are sold well, no one should be allowed to prevent the food companies and their consumers from the mutually agreed purchases.

Can decoding of Hawking radiation be easy?

Last month, I discussed a fresh paper by Kyriakos Papadodimas about the creation of objects inside a black hole using operators that exist outside, if I put it in catchy words.



Since that time, I was returning to my old tempting ideas that the black hole complementarity – the dependence relating the black hole interior and the black hole exterior – could be much simpler than we thought, given by some formula, and that this formula could be rationally justifiable or provable by a rock-solid, physically understandable, nearly rigorous argument.

McAfee's irrational pro-Bitcoin arguments

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, said that the Bitcoin was a fraud. JP Morgan would fire any employee who trades the Bitcoin for his being stupid. Dimon was also asked about some alternative great economy that will run on the Bitcoin and avoid taxes and other aspects of the government supervision and he said that it obviously won't happen. The Bitcoin is used as a mechanism for tax evasion and other crimes and when the lost taxes get too high, the governments will simply ban the Bitcoin.

Some cultists say that the Bitcoin cannot be banned because people make the payments in their living rooms, just with their computer, and the exchanges are in principle unnecessary. This claim is exactly equivalent to saying that hashish cannot be banned as a currency. Hashish is banned as a currency. You can use sell it and buy it – use it for payments – and quite often, no one will see you. But if someone sees you, e.g. if your other party turns out to be a policeman or agent-provocateur, you are in trouble! It may be exactly the same with the cryptocurrencies and indeed, if those would expand the black economy, the status of the Bitcoin and hashish will have to be put on equal footing (as El-Erian of Pimco said, the governments won't allow the mass adoption that is already priced-in in the Bitcoin's price).

I agree with every single word by Dimon, he is an adult in the room. Well, I added some words and I am confident that Dimon would agree with those, too.

John McAfee, the antivirus legend has promised to cut his dick if the Bitcoin doesn't cost $500,000 in a few years is afraid of his little friend. So he tried to contradict Mr Dimon.

Decentralized blockchain and subjectivity of the wave function

A quantum-cryptocurrency analogy

Unlike some other people, I am not a real member of the cryptocurrency cult.

I think that the economics orthodoxy as imagined by the founders as well as champions of the Bitcoin is deeply flawed. Also, I don't find the key "virtue" of the cryptocurrencies – decentralization of the list of transactions – terribly important or practical. By the way, JP Morgan boss Dimon said that the Bitcoin was a fraud (something that most of the financiers may agree with) and the currency instantly lost almost 10% of the value. Not too resilient! BTW I have written exactly the same thing as his 1-minute monologue. When the tax losses etc. become significant, the Bitcoin will simply be banned, will drop to near zero, and this "economy" will be over.

On the other hand, I think that the switch from classical physics to quantum mechanics was the most important event in science of the last 100 years. And I generally dislike vague analogies. For these reasons, you would think that I just can't possibly sell the following analogy. But the analogy looks so self-evident and catchy to me that I simply have to dedicate a blog post to it.

Merkel: we must accept an infinite number of invaders

Apple: off-topic: to watch the Apple event showing iPhone 8 and iPhone X (a $1,000 beast that looks like this) etc. since 1 pm Boston time, open this page in Microsoft Edge on Windows, or in an Apple browser

Gourmets may be convinced that e.g. Konrad Adenauer or Helmut Kohl were great leaders but the most famous German leader in the last 100 years was unquestionably Adolf Hitler. And because insanity seems to be what counts and what makes the tenure of the German leaders long-lived, Angela Merkel is quickly becoming the number two.



We thought that we have already heard everything but last night, Czech readers were generally stunned after we were told about some exchanges of opinions during the otherwise super-boring German campaign. The Christian Social Union CSU, a semi-autonomous subsidiary of Merkel's CDU that only operates in Bavaria, the "Texas" of Germany, has proposed 200,000 immigrants as the upper limit of approved asylum seekers per year, in order to establish some pressures that will make sure that the year 2015 – when 1.2 million immigrants invaded Germany – wouldn't be repeated. CSU are therefore somewhat "softcore welcomers" who realize the sheer magnitude or at least the very existence of the problem that Germany has created.

The current and presumptive future chancellor, Angela Merkel, answered a question from the audience in Lübeck about the proposed upper limit on the number of immigrants.

Why vanishing commutators imply there's no action at a distance

I believe that an extremely similar blog post has been written in the past but I can't find it or what I can find isn't quite the same so that's why I decided to write this one again.

Lots of people say that there must be non-local influences or some action at a distance in the real world, and this claim is implied by Bell's inequalities or something like that. This statement is completely wrong. Since the 1905 special theory of relativity, we have known that the non-local or superluminal influences would be equivalent – by the Lorentz transformation – to the influencing changing one's past, and those are logically inconsistent.

So why don't entanglement experiments imply any action at a distance?

In quantum mechanics, events are predicted probabilistically. Unless all the probabilities are calculated to be 100% or 0%, and they're usually in the middle, we can't say that the outcome will be something or something else with certainty. We can only say that the outcome will be something with some probability; and something else with some other probability.

In this setup, the action at a distance obviously means that the willful action at one place which we will call Alaska (A) will modify the probabilities of some properties of outcomes of measurements at another place which we will call Boston (B). OK, let's imagine we have an entangled pair of particles or other physical objects that were created as entangled somewhere in Texas, to make it general, but the subsystems have propagated to Alaska and Boston, respectively.

I chose Alaska and Boston for them to be on the left and on the right. Alabama's position didn't look convenient enough.

Klaus: alarmists have won the climate debate

Czech ex-president Václav Klaus was visiting Nuremberg, Bavaria, where (an uncle of mine lived from 1980 and where) Klaus supported the Alternative for Germany (AfD) before the parliamentary election where they're expected to get 9-10 percent.



The city hall wanted to ban the event because of the presence of an AfD boss who had previously said that Germany should get rid of a PC politician. Klaus' support for AfD was criticized by the boss of the Sudeten German Patriotic Organization Mr Bernd Posselt, affectionately known as "a Hitler who returned from a fattening station" (a nickname invented by the current Czech president Zeman). Posselt said that Klaus and AfD hate the EU and it's bad.

As you can read on German Google News, Klaus responded, on the contrary, Sir. AfD – representing a fraction of Germans who have been silenced – and he are doing what they're doing because of their love towards Europe, its traditions, and its future.

German nuclear bomb on TV

Norwegian "Heavy Water War" on Heisenberg et al.

Last night, I accidentally caught the first episode of the Heavy Water War on TV, a (mostly) Norwegian 6-episode series from early 2015 about the Norwegian heavy water sabotage during the Second World War.

The program was produced in Norwegian-Danish-British coproduction, the budget was $10 million or so, and it was shot in Norway and Czechia. See a 6-minute trailer.

My understanding is that the program was mainly created to promote this courageous picture of the Norwegian folks during the war. Such "Old Norwegian Legends" are particularly needed probably because the Norwegians have become the ultimate symbols of collaborationists with the Nazis, and the word "a quisling" – named after the Norwegian war-time leader Vidkun Quisling – became a synonym with a traitor who maximally cooperates with a Nazi or similar force.

OK, in this program, we can watch a different Norway, a nation of brave chemists – such as Leif Tronstad, a Norwegian career chemist, heavy water worker, and warrior on the British side – who were saving the world from the German nuclear Armageddon.

Theories can't secure patents, copyrights, and monopolies

Mikael and many others sometimes say things like

...a physical system evolves in some way, then a measurement occurs and a sharp classical value comes out of it.

---

Therefore, quantum mechanics relies on classical physics and it's unsatisfactory, not a self-sufficient or standalone theory.

Similarly, assorted critics of string theory often say

...quantum mechanics made predictions for the LHC collisions and other low-energy processes. It follows that string theory already predicts nothing about the LHC.

The basic logic is the same in both cases. The logic is that an older theory – either classical physics or quantum field theory – has achieved something or defined some concepts. It follows that this Miss Older Theory walked to a patent office and asked the patent officer to register the patent. In this way, the older theory acquired a patent, copyright, or monopoly over the ideas, concepts, achievements, or rules and no other theory has the right to do the things in the same way, at least not without worshiping Miss Older Theory and without permanently acknowledging its own inferiority.

If you want to have a sharp result of a measurement anywhere, dear quantum mechanics, you can't have it. Classical physics has already secured a monopoly. Do something else, dear quantum mechanics. For example, you can clean the toilets. Similarly, dear string theory, quantum field theory has already predicted the low-energy LHC phenomena. So you obviously can't do it again. Do something else, dear string theory.

Czech calendar forecasts: Irma's big day is Sunday

TRF folks are praying and motling for Tony and Charles Wilson in Florida

Cuba is just experiencing Irma as a Category 5 hurricane, winds over 170 kilometers per hour are common. Tourists who came there for the Sun weren't given what was promised.

Everyone who is close enough to Florida should watch the nice animations at Ventusky.com and Earth.Nullschool.Net and maybe the National Hurricane Center.



But look at this. It's the Czech calendar for September 2017. Just to be sure, the weeks start on Mondays and end on Sundays. The words written under each day are first names. The people with that name have their name day on that day – which is almost as good for them as the birthday. They get gifts.