cbayram

Playing out this scenario:

Will missing payrolls result in layoffs/resignations? Thus, increasing unemployment rate that the FED desires. If contagion doesn’t spread outside of tech/startup, does the government have any incentive to intervene? Maybe this is not too big to fail.

A sale seems like the most likely scenario out of this liquidity problem (insolvency). It’ll be dirt cheap and has to make sense to its buyer.

edit: Even with recent downturn in tech, there is still sizable value in having tech as banking clients.

Rising interest rates is what’s different this time around

Per provided link https://www.usds.gov/apply: "During the COVID-19 pandemic, most people at USDS are working remotely from many locations across the country. During normal times, we ask that you make Washington, D.C. or the surrounding area your base during the work week."

Per provided link https://www.usds.gov/apply: "Salaries in government change every year. For 2023, you may be paid up to $183,500 depending on where you are located in the United States."

There are various approached you could take; CSS transition/animation, d3,...

Here is a quick dirty example of shuffling using CSS transition [1] on the left offset. https://jsfiddle.net/h2urfsjb/

It puts each character of a word in its own absolutely positioned span tag and maps its left offset.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Transit...

"American culture encourages the process of failure, unlike the cultures of Europe and Asia where failure is met with stigma and embarrassment. America’s specialty is to take these small risks for the rest of the world, which explains this country’s disproportionate share in innovations." - Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan

We use Echo/Alexa to play music, games, set timers/reminders, query for information. We get annoyed with up-selling and ads when issuing commands. The proliferation of fake reviews/products on Amazon has eroded any confidence in ordering anything via a voice command. It is a lazy, shallow and ineffective path to potential revenue. It lacks vision and creativity. There are missed opportunities in creating more sophisticated multi-command workflows. Ones that do not involve peddling what Amazon is already selling.

What problems should a sophisticated home assistant solve? It should curate and offer SOLICITED services; find me washer dryer, fridge, plumber, landscaper, house/pet sitter, house cleaner, mechanic... It should present these to me visually to choose from. It should remember and be ready to automate any subsequent request for the same service. This could be done via integrating with reputable third-party providers like Angie's list, thumbtack, google flights, aggregators... Alternatively, Amazon should build reputable service provider network itself. People need goods and services. Provide a path to solicit, opt-in to targeted curated offerings/ads. As important, provide the ability to opt-out when no longer necessary. Unsolicited ads are often inaccurate, invasive and damaging noise. Earned reputation and trust is gold.

It’d be great if modern society could make smaller vehicles for personal use. Average number of occupants on the road has to below 2.0, seems terribly inefficient. The industries and costs associated w car ownership would have to adjust too for this too happen. Legislation is also necessary to deal with mutually destructive nature of not wanting to be on the same roads as larger fortified vehicles; i.e. lanes/roads dedicated to smaller personal vehicles. Above all, as a society, we have to start giving a damn about environmental destruction. Rethink the status quo, rethink urban planning, rethink overuse of plastics, rethink leaf blowing...

What about GM’s role in benefiting from this fraud? By forming a partnership with this fraudulent entity:

1. GM put up no cash but received an 11% stake in Nikola (worth over $1 billion) .

2. Nikola will pay GM $700 million to manufacture up to 50,000 Badger electric pickup trucks (and a future fuel-cell version), production that will help GM achieve economies of scale.

3. GM keeps 80% of the regulatory emissions credits from sales of the Badger and can bid on the sale of the remaining credits — helpful in offsetting GM's continued sales of gasoline-powered trucks and SUVs.

4. GM will also supply the fuel cell systems to Nikola's future big semi-trucks.

Whether GM was part of the fraud from the get go, or happened to stumble upon it and willingly participated in it remains to be determined by SEC and DoJ. Given the current times, I would not be surprised the administration letting GM, an American company, keep its loot.

Nevertheless, this seems like a smart fraudulent roundabout way for a flailing company to secure public market funding, subsidies and business without the burden of its own brand or financials. Will this become a new blueprint in crony capitalism should authorities fail in prosecuting and unwinding this fraud?

Hindsight bias.

We are in a pandemic and this won’t be the last. Gov’ts and society are scrambling to contain the virus, save lives, economy and society. Pandemics sow seeds of mistrust among neighbors, xenophobia and society starts falling apart. Be kind, compassionate and constructive if you can help it. This is about self-preservation. If there was ever a case for “move fast, break things”, this is it. Your location data is already whored out to target you in every which way. We have tremendous data and tech capabilities. We should absolutely use them to effectively track and quarantine the contagion. For me the threat of terrorism and Patriot act was bullshit reason to erode our rights and liberties, but this is different. We should absolutely revisit these encroachments on privacy by out gov’t in a post-mortem and legislate accordingly.

When it comes to gov’t, I share a healthy dosage of mistrust. This is one of the reasons I support the second amendment. But remember that the gov’t are of the people and for the people. It is THE institution to defend our individual selves against threats we can’t individually battle. As Michael Lewis puts it, we have got to stop gutting the gov’t due to reactionary fear-mongering and mistrust. We are only robbing ourselves and our children of their future. This is a reason to feel patriotic for me.

Potentially narrow down and identify asymptomatic spreaders of the virus in early forming geo clusters. This information could lead to more effective quarantine measures early on or post containment to avoid further outbreak eruptions.

Temporary ripples, but mainly not much. What happens? Opportunities for people and local geographies, innovation. Words of Nassim Nicholas Taleb ring in my head. Failure is healthy to the overall health of a system. When you hide risk and prop up failure, it blows up spectacularly. Never has there been so many bureaucrats benefiting from the benefit of the true harbingers of innovation.

“Supermarkets sell food staples such as bananas or milk at less than the cost at which they were purchased in order to draw customers to their business. These items are typically strategically placed far from the entrances of the store to enhance this effect. In the case of milk, supermarket chains often refuse to pay market rates to avoid making a loss.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader

This. Imo, this passive aggressively skirting around the issue is just giving one some petty satisfaction. Chances are likely the the interrupter isn’t aware. Tell the person not to interrupt bluntly if that’s your gripe.

Feels like capital from emerging markets is being reallocated into T-bills and co.

Because politics is about feelings. The aim is for you to empathize and identify the politician. Conversely, evoke disgust and fear against your opponent. It’s the weakness of humanity being exploited.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns6YSvCsVJM

For me languages were learned out of necessity. If possible, my suggestion is to move to a region where the language is spoken. Immerse yourself, perhaps there is a community that speaks the language nearby. Go to their cultural festivities and such.

Second, make mistakes, butcher the language and express yourself without care embarrassment. Don’t focus on 99% mistakes, it’s the 1% you learn and retain that add up over time.

Third, do not learn the language by being in a room full of non-speakers. Grammar can be learned on your own if you wish to get technical.

Lastly, optionally, when ready read books in that language to your level.

Solid model as long as one profits

Abuse is probably too strong, but it's definitely an aggression.

To the contrary, I think abuse is rather weak. I’d go further. Advertising is raping of the mind. Regardless of the medium (billboards, mail, spam calls, video, audio,..) the mind and senses are deviously polluted and raped with unwanted content without any consent.

Shorting and then telling the herd is exactly what’s done. Once you take the short position, you want to scream at the top of your lungs and bring about that catalyst/trigger asap. Spread rumors, write hit pieces, etc... Observe the half-baked hit pieces on TSLA by Chanos and co.

When right, these people will dampen the bubbles and falls preventing catastrophe of greater magnitudes.

Most of the confusion and frustration rises from lack of understanding of the runtime execution and not the language; in case of JS:

- execution flow and temporality of the code excecution(async, promises, etc...)

- interoperability and boundaries of JS with the DOM, styling and HTTP(WS)

This hold true for most languages; concurrency, parallelism, etc... The devil and mastery is in the learning execution environment.

The static nature of writing code to represent dynamic, living state machines presents a gap and confusion.

My advice is to learn core technologies really well; JS, DOM, HTML, CSS, HTTP(S)/WS(S). Once you do this, you’ll quickly understand and debug tomorrow’s frameworks.

Any code analysis initiatives in your pipeline?

Securitization of mortgage debt is why you can buy a house with a 30 year fixed rate mortgage at 4.5% (and a non-trivial reason why 30 year fixed is available at any price).

No, this is the reason why I can’t buy a house using my responsible savings after years of hard work. You are eroding the value of my savings. The massive increase of money supply chasing the finite asset is the reason why the ordinary American is forced to use your product in the first place.

You should consider yourself lucky that you have any BoA shares to hold onto after the subprime meltdown.

Let’s not kid ourselves, providing liquidity to these markets isn’t done out of good faith. All lenders are doing is hiding/shifting risk. This does not mean the risk goes away, but rather creating massive systemic risk much more catastrophic to society.

Interest risk is covered with interest rate swaps; floating vs fixed.

Is BoA a bank or investment bank? Should it take deposits in pay a fixed return, add its markup and lend it out what they have as responsible, vetted business loans?

Look, I’m not arguing the efficiencies of the status quo. I’m empathizing and voicing the risk and serfdom the ordinary individual and communities endure. When an individual defaults, lender isn’t the only one who suffers. Between the 4.5% interest plus 1-2% property tax realized every year, you hope that your property value rises by 5.5-6.5% every year before you break even. Should your primary dwelling be viewed as a financial instrument? How about profit sharing rather than usury upon sale of the house if you really want to assume the risk? Or partial settlement refund if the home never went up in value? It’s difficult to realistically consider these options as the foundation of our financial system is based on interest and inflation.

Sure, I can see that. Without not knowing their argument, I can see the following pressures on sustaining current price levels:

1. Investor money swooping up property for rental purposes.

2. Home owners refraining from selling in a buyers’ market. As long as they are able to make payments on their leveraged debt.

But there is no denying that higher interest rates put a downward pressure on home prices due to debt being more expensive and investment money finding more promising returns elsewhere; i.e. bonds.

Some other downward pressures I could see impacting housing markets are:

1. Lack of wage increases

2.Baby boomers dumping homes on the market over the next decade

3. Insolvent municipal/state public pensions. Money on these IOUs gotta come from somewhere. Bonds and cuts are one way, raising taxes is another.

Good. Home prices have been out of control.

Cheap money along with mortgage lenders have done nothing but push home prices to absurd levels. Local governments are complicit in this exploitation as property taxes rise/reset, giving them a skin in the game. The only suckers are the home owners, new and existing alike. They are being exploited by usury and repayment of an unreasonable debt on a home ,which without lender money would cost significantly less. Some long term residents are being priced out due to rising taxes. Remember, the home value gains aren’t realized until you sell whereas the interest payment and property taxes are each and every year. This dynamic is turbulent and bad for health and continuity of communities.

Car and student loans are similar. It’s not suprising that tuitions are out of control. Like with housing, the school administrators are complicit. Student loans are perhaps worse. One can’t default on a student loan but the rates are 6-7%+ nevertheless.

Securitization of debt in dwelling, education and transportation are just three examples of exploitation of the individual. The irony that some of this liquidity is your very own retirement funds is not lost on me. A self-feeding loop. One must work their entire life, often in misery to repay these absurd prices. For me this is enslavement. Ideals aside, this is reality. Such is the system and life. It’s survival. Having this perspective helps me refrain from being trapped and make sensible decisions.

What’s the justification for this premium on this debt? “Umm, we provide liquidity to the very asset bubbles we create. We assume the risk of default on the loan which in reality Uncle Sam insures is against. Oh and also, we can use that money in one of the other markets that exist for us to exploit.”

Tell me again, what risk are these institutions really taking?

END RANT

My thoughts:

You are there to burn brain cycles for a fixed pay, a high pay at that. Experienced older crowd demands higher pay. Most gigs could care less about their experience; 95% of the gigs consists of mundane task completion and pump out code demanded by often micromanagement processes.

Older crowd is more likely to question, call out bs, and demand work life balance.

Young are more impressionable, willing to burn the candle night after night. 24-hour long hackathons on soda and pizza anyone? This is unhealthy in so many ways lol. This says more about the profession rather than ageism. Name another profession where people willingly accept working under such unhealthy circumstances, especially off the clock. Lunch at your desk is the norm.

Fuck it! Frankly, the profession is ideal for a (wo)man-child, crippling any mature, healthy social development. End of the day, it's you and the computer 1v1. No one outside IT/tech gives two fucks about your abstraction flame wars, coding practices yadi yada unless bottom line is suffering. They'll throw bodies at the problem. Meanwhile Stfu and code.

The stoic says prepare for the famine during feasts.

I'm also partial to WebStorm. Local history feature of Eclipse derivates has saved me enough times to make it a core pre-requisite when considering another IDE. Fwiw, VS Code has better typescript support.