bfg_9k

Whats so hard about taking the iPad out of they're hands? or laptop or whatever, once you catch them on sites they shouldnt be on?

I mean, the guy was constantly high on nootropics and they had no idea what actual investments FTX made. I'd imagine most of the time was just spent untangling that web, his case was more or less a slam dunk.

I find it so weird that you say public companies being 'evil' (which is to turn a profit) is a problem, yet you also say you'd like for companies to exist on the public market so that the public can access some of the upside.

It's the old totalitarian playbook. Make everyone a criminal then selectively apply the law.

There doesn't need to be a solution that works for everyone. It doesn't matter how many barriers you put in place, people will always get scammed - so don't punish the other capable 85%.

And yet people don't realise that Epstein was talking in clear text for years through a gmail account that the government could access - and the powers that be didn't do anything about it. It's got nothing to do with protecting children, it's about controlling and monitoring the population.

Awesome read. I always love Poszar's work, it's a shame that these days he's no longer working at CS - since most of his work is now stuck behind a paywall.

1P is closed source and have had a number of breaches in the past. Bitwarden have had none that I'm aware of, and they're FOSS. I however have been preferring ProtonPass lately (also FOSS) and really like the layout over BW.

No, it's not. Person A buys stock 1, stock one goes from $10 to $15. Person A makes $5. Person B buys it at $15 and then it pays a $1 dividend, person B makes $1. It's not zero sum, everyone can win.

Because stock trading isn't zero sum.

Speech?

An interesting article that confirms something I've often been annoyed about - in Australia most of the top universities don't use GPAs but WAMs (weighted average marks).

In a GPA system whether you get 100 or 85, you get an A which results in a 4.0 GPA. In Australia, it's simply a weighted average number (so there is a big difference to employers when reading a resume that has an 85 WAM or a 95 WAM). I guess the flip side 'benefit' is that there's a marginal difference between 84.5 and 85, whereas that's 1 whole GPA point in the US.

To add on to that, from what I've heard, broadly speaking in the US getting an A is the result of turning up to class and doing the homework. Here, you've got to really go above and beyond what they teach you to get anything close to 85. The somewhat aggravating part of that is given how large the foreign student market is here (it's our 3rd biggest export industry), it results in grade inflation at the low end. Teachers/ lecturers will find all sorts of ways to get students an easy 40-60% worth of marks and then absolutely crush students in the final.

In other words, it's very very easy to pass classes, but exceedingly hard to do very well. If I had to approximate, the mean mark in most university classes would be around 60-65 with the standard deviation being something like 8 marks (meaning the top 2.5% of students get above 80ish). Compared to the 60% of students getting A at Harvard.

Principles don't exist in a vacuum. When viewing someone else, you only consider them 'principled' because of the context they exist in.

In a world where everyone donates 50% of their pay check to charity, the person who donates 25% is considered selfish.

If they were run well, then you wouldn't be able to improve on them by buying them.

Of which, some of that is PE funds. KKR for instance is publicly listed.

They don't receive bonuses until they exit.

Right, which implies that the business was not run well, or at the least didn't reach its full potential.

It's most certainly not the same. An asset manager going broke because they bought some bad loans is infinitely better off for the public at large than a bank becoming insolvent and depositors losing their money.

For the owners? Yeah, they do typically. For the service they provide stakeholders other than the owners? Probably not.

Believe it or not, businesses don't exist to provide you a "good service" they exist to make money. So yes, they do in fact force firms to operate better when they attain a higher EBITDA.

Until the definition of why a business exists changes, you can purely measure a business success over how much money it makes for the owner, legally.

Should that be the case? No, I don't agree. But as it currently stands, that's how things are.

Read Matt Levine's newsletter, it's a VERY simple business model built on financial engineering (it's rare they do something "novel"). But broadly, if you've got money in any sort of mutual fund, pension or retirement asset, the people managing your money WILL have some sort of allocation into PE funds. Even if you own a stock standard ETF like SPDR, PE funds like KKR are publicly listed.

That was Broadcom and not a PE fund?

But imagine a world where every strong business goes private and only failing businesses are public.

That's the opposite of what happens with PE. PE firms don't buy fairly priced, well run businesses. They (typically) buy underpriced, poorly performing but cash flow heavy businesses that would benefit from leveraging up and making operations more lean.

Think about it, if a business is fairly priced and well run, PE firms have no incentive to buy it because where do they generate returns?

I don't like PE firms but there's no doubt that they force businesses to operate better, and ultimately that benefits people like you and me who have retirement savings, because PE firms aren't getting their money out of thin air.

Regulations are what lead to private credit being what it is today. Post Dodd-Frank banks are unable to take on a lot of the lending risk with these style of transactions anymore which paved the way for asset managers to create the shadow banking system that exists today.

A 25% move in crypto isn't a catastrophic swing. Nor is $6bn in liquidations for some leveraged traders.

If they're going to liquidate anything because they need the cash, it will be US treasuries first, since they're the easiest to sell in the largest amount of size.

What concerns me is China can absolutely trigger a market meltdown in equities

Agreed - if they wanted.

as well especially pull the rug out from entire companies with a flip of a button ex) SVB

They didn't cause the collapse of SVB, SVB collapsed because of rising inflation and piss poor asset liability matching.

My money says China is getting ready to take Taiwan but not in the way many in the West envision in their WW2 fantasy.

How do you think? I'm curious

Also we might be seeing the start of the end of CCP.

Don't know if I agree with this but I am curious as to why you think it

He, himself? I agree. He's a snake in the grass. His message is 100% correct though.

Anonymity enabled the troll culture

And so what if it did? That's the price we collectively pay for a free internet.

Would you agree that as a guiding principle for good government no one should be forced to associate with anyone they don't want to or disallowed from associating with anyone they do want to?

For an individual? Sure. For a business? Morally/ ethically, no. If you have a business model predicated on only being profitable when you pick and choose your customers, then that business model is unsustainable and shouldn't exist. It's complete crap that I get banned from a casino or betting app simply because I know how to profitably bet on things.

If it's not profitable to serve someone like me, then don't serve the product at all. It's like an all you can eat buffet, you shouldn't be allowed to ban someone from there simply because they eat too much. Set time limits, or whatever else you need to do, but don't market it as "all you can eat".

Traditional businesses don't have this problem, Apple makes the same amount of money regardless of who they sell an iPhone to, it's predatory businesses that have this issue.

if they can't ban good bettors they'll either swap the odds to juice bad bettors even more or go out of business.

Good, do that then.

The idea that government can force you to do business with people you don't want to do business with is broad and dangerous.

Governments have been doing stuff like this for a long time. Look at how the legal profession works.

I don't think they should ban it, but they shouldn't be allowed to ban good bettors.