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Galanwe

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πFS 1 month ago

It's recursive as well, you now need to store how many levels of indirection of indices you had to resolve, which will in turn take 20TB to store, unless you store that in pi as well, which in turn...

Like that, a few companies are specialized in sucking public funds and delivering nothing.

Not just public, private funds as well. Typical EU, I call that helicopter regulating: you see a problem, throw a regulation at it, then close you eyes.

GDPR pop-ups are the most obvious example, but there are so many more.

For instance, now apparently companies can opt to send payslips digitally instead of physically (paper). Of course, some smart ass nitpicked that employees could loose or change their mail address, so the company is now forced to store digitally delivered payslips in some kind of European-hosted vault for 10 years. And since no sane company want to be liable for that, we now have a wonderful ecosystem of trash "payslip digital vaults" startups, which companies use to proxy-send employee payslips.

So in essence, my company is now sending my payslips (with name, address, contact details, compensation breakdown, etc) to a stupid start-up with egregious ToS, just because "send it by mail and let the employee back it up" was too simple. Thanks !!!

It's very cool, and I can really see myself use that, but not in that form of deliverable.

See the best place I learn and read through materials is when I'm commuting. Far away from a console.

Could you envision a way to deliver this as a web app linked to e.g. an OpenRouter/Anthropic/OpenAI API key?

I have a vibe coded script which creates a git worktree + zellij pane with a specific layout + a virtualenv per feature. "tmuxinator" style.

The zellij layout includes panes for OpenCode, a shell, a neovim, inotify tests, etc.

I cycle through the zellij sessions during agent prefills.

Textmate (and its revolutionary text-snippets) were the catalyst to my migration

Hooo damn TextMate snippets, that brings back memories. Hard to convey how hyped I was to use these. That is also what drove me to Mac at that time. I remember writing hundreds of those snippets for every possible C++ construct, and <tab> to fill in variable name, type, loop counters and so on.

That depends if you trade cash or synthetic.

I think most people trade synthetic, just because it's faster and you don't have to wait for settlements, but maybe that is different if you trade onshore (I am a foreign investor).

Anyway if you are synthetic your margin is most likely shared between shorts and long on the same instrument, so no, you wouldn't be called.

"Tech stocks are growth stocks", that's pretty much how the market sees them anyway.

So essentially, they are not expected to be boring businesses yielding stable dividends to investors. That's your aristocrats stocks postioning: J&K, P&G, etc.

What is expected from tech stocks is the opposite: small to no dividend, reinvesting inflows into ever growing new businesses and technologies. A tech stock distributing dividends to shareholders instead of reinvesting in new projects would be seen as a mark of failure to innovate, incapacity to grow.

Absolutely not.

For RSUs companies do not purchase at exercise date, they issue new shares (or use previous buybacks).

And for stock options, the employee pays the strike, so it's even a positive cash flow.

Facebook doesn't get the money when you buy a share of META

Technically no, but in reality yes, because shares are used as currency.

For instance, META does not acquire companies using cash, they use their own shares as payment. The higher the stock price, the lower the dilution.

Same thing for stock options and RSU.

So, it's true that stock prices don't translate 1:1 to cash inflows, but wherever stocks are currency (employee compensation, benefits, acquisitions, etc), it does translate.

You are not entering a contract with a long put

Yes you are, and options are complicated. Actually, the mere fact that you think they are "simple insurance" is enough proof to me that you probably don't understand it enough to safely buy one.

You are buying a contract

Oh right, you've bought a PUT, now the fun part: you have to manage your position/exposure, could you enlighten me how you do that?

Could you explain me why buying a SpaceX PUT in a high IV regime (e.g. soon after IPO) will have it drop 40% when the IV decreases after 1 month, even though price moved in my favor? It should be simple, it's just a simple insurance product right?

Seriously. Someone, likely not super financially literate, ask a simple question about how to neutralize a stock exposure, and your answer is to advise buying options? Just stop.

I thought about that a lot too, and in the end I think it just comes down to stupid economics: What do you want them to do with all this money?

1) Most top US tech companies are flooded of money. Everyone dumps money in the SP500.

2) This money has to go somewhere. You can't just redistribute it as dividends, otherwise it's an admission that you won't grow and giving you more money would be a 0 sum game.

3) So you have to invest it somehow, somewhere.

4) Obviously you can spend that money buying whatever company you can.

5) Once you've bought realistically enough, you just hire more, and people will think that there should be some kind of linear relationship between resources spent and revenue growth.

6) You can also do grand projects, like the metaverse, convert all you software to blockchains, become AI native, etc. and dump billions on these.

So essentially it's all about projecting growth and potential.

also don't control the ETF basket

The ETF is this case follows the index, so there's really no surprise.

I would still probably go with the long put strategy

Just, don't. There is a world of complexity between a simple short, and entering an option contract with non linear pnl.

I switched to ZMK circa 2024, and never looked back at QMK. I am the proud owner of a Corne wireless from typeractive, and it's such a beautiful product. The nice!nano are also a welcome addition.

There is a growing community of enthusiasts starting to sell ZMK powered boards from traditionally QMK based designs, so if you're interested, Etsy is where all of this is happening. MochuKeeb is a good example.

Thanks a lot for your part in the journey to modern, wireless custom keyboards Nick!

Inheritance tax in practice is implemented above a certain threshold.

There is nothing wrong with striving to give a heads up in life to your kids, on the contrary, it's a core, visceral instinct of parents to do so, and removing that would be alienating.

There is a certain level of wealth though, where the "heads up" transforms to an unstoppable compounding lever.

France for instance has a progressive inheritance tax (starting at 5%, up to 45%), triggered for children inheriting at 100k€ per parent. In practice, 50% of the population inherits <70k€.

Also, the proposed Zucman tax in France for instance is triggered starting at 100M€ wealth. At these levels, a mere 2% risk free investment yields 2M€ annual income, this is enough to both compound and enjoy a very luxurious lifestyle. This level of wealth is unstoppably compounding, and that is why it is proposed to tax it.

If you don't, well you end up with a US situation, where disproportionate wealth (and thus power, influence) end up in the hands of random citizens with their own agendas, possibly (likely) orthogonal to the interests of the majority.

The irony is that PEs exist largely because of pension funds.

The irony goes way deeper than that.

A large part of PE clients are university endowment funds.

Harvard for instance has close to $60B in its endowment fund, 40% of which is invested in PE. At this point, Harvard is more an investment fund, with a university as side business.

Your calculation is bogus, you are 1) assuming infinite money 2) assuming infinite time.

1) When you say "add sustained regular $2500/mo contributions", you forget that compared to buying your place, you also have to pay rent, most likely at the same amount you would pay back your mortgage assuming same quality of life. So either you have a free $2,500 to spare (in which case you could also have invested that amount in the buying case, or borrowed more), or you have $0 to invest.

2) You cannot just take the expected value of two different returns distribution and assume you would earn it in both cases. That would assume you have infinite time to wait for the average rate of returns to converge. If your life depends on said returns, you cannot just say "oh nevermind I'll wait another 15 years to withdraw". In your example, stock market returns are immensely more volatile than real estate.

If you take the money you'd use for a down payment and mortgage and invest it instead (after paying rent) you end up in about the same place.

That is not the right way to see it.

If you have the cash to buy upfront, then yes, real estate is not that good an investment, unless you have a loaded portfolio already and want to diversify a bit, get some high inflation hedge, etc.

The real value of buying a home is leverage. That is, most people cannot go to a bank and borrow $500k. The bank will just not make a blank loan like that without any idea of what you're going to do with it.

Buying a home though is well understood and borrowing is made relatively easy.

For most people, buying a home is the only way they have to actually get significant leverage from borrowing.

Reminds me of 25 years ago, the default BitchX config on most distributions contained something that would crash the client with a message "I did not read the configuration".

If someone remembers what it was actually, that would really bring back memories

No, he's disingenuously talking specifically about income tax, on interests.

Capital gains are on realized gains. Based on the difference between purchase price and selling price.

The thing is, wealthy people don't have interests bearing investments, because they don't need the cash right now. They either have unrealized gains (shares, real estate, etc), or interest bearing products wrapped in marked to market vehicules with reinvestment (ETFs, life insurance, mutual fund, etc).

Unrealized gains are not taxed as long as you don't sell them. If you need cash, you can borrow against them, so problem solved.

As for interest bearing investments, most companies nowadays use buybacks instead of dividends to avoid withholding taxes.

Hahaha this is so bogus.

Americans really struggle to understand how tax work outside of their country.

First, the whole premise of income to wealth tax equivalence is non sensical, because interests are rarely literally in the form of coupons/payments, but rather left as compounding value. This is the whole point of share buybacks, reinvested ETFs, etc; and Paul Graham knows that of course. If you are rich, you don't need the cash of your investments, so you don't want to trigger taxable events, so you are effectively at 0% tax rate and just let it compound.

Currently the country with the highest marginal income tax rate is Denmark, at 60.5%

This is the most BS statement ever, and would only be believable to Americans with no understanding of how foreign country do taxes. Which is at best very naive of him, or highly disingenuous. This is because "tax" in the US is essentially employee paid, whereas most other countries split the bill between employer and employee at a higher proportion. The result is the same, but the employee part only is labeled "tax", the employer part being often called "contribution".

When comparing across countries, you have to look at the tax wedge (super gross to net), not the tax rate (gross to net).

And if you do that, well the US has a lower tax wedge than even the most generous European countries (Ireland).

In France for instance, the tax wedge is close to 70% for the higher bracket. Yes, that means if your employer pays $100, you get $30. And that's in a country with 20% VAT compared to US ~8%.

Not to mention, except super rich little little business-hub countries (Hong Kong, Singapore, Ireland, Malta, Cayman Islands, etc), pretty much all _developed_ countries have some form of wealth tax, it's just common sense.