chernevik

Probably a polite way of saying she screwed up.

She had a reputation as an indifferent navigator and aviator which is consistently downplayed.

Which is silly, because the whole point of integration testing is to show your bricks don't fit together as expected.

I don't understand how a lawyer who revised witness testimony is walking around free.

Toss in jail and throw away the key.

It isn't as clever as it thinks.

If an omnipotent God could arrange such an explosion, and we presume Him loving of all sentient creatures, He could easily arrange His explosion to avoid harming His creatures. Such a story wouldn't happen in the first place.

But what if He did? Anyone reading the Bible -- as certainly a Jesuit would have -- knows there is no theological requirement in Christianity that God value a life as humans value a life. "My ways are not your ways, says the Lord." St Paul is explicit that the notion that Pharaoh was created entirely for the demonstration of God's power by Moses does not contradict the justice of God. (Nor does he say Pharaoh was created for that purpose; he doesn't know, and treats the possibility as a hypothetical.)

Nor need the civilization's members be created simply for some demonstration. Perhaps they suffered the judgement of Sodom and Gomorrah. Perhaps the nova was the End Of The World for _that_ civilization, a component of its Second Coming, just as (Christians believe) our world will eventually experience. Genesis, Exodus, Paul, Revelations each provide precedents for such an apparent catastrophe. The priest can easily imagine any number of explanations consistent with his faith. (Indeed one might be the light of one world's closure illuminating the opening of another, reminiscent of the Greek's beacon signaling the fall of Troy in Aeschylus' "Agamemnon".)

Whether we look at the story from God's end or the priest's, it doesn't make any sense.

The reader doesn't need to _like_ any of those possibilities. The point is that the values by which we like or don't like anything are not necessarily the same as those of God. C.S. Lewis imagines a devil overseeing temptation during WW II saying "I am not in the least interested in knowing how many people in England have been killed by bombs. In what state of mind they died, I can learn from the office at this end. That they were going to die sometime, I knew already. Please keep your mind on your work." ("The Screwtape Letters".) For Lewis, death doesn't mean the same thing to God as it does to us.

Still more, the Christian thinks the perspective by which we judge doesn't know all that He does. Many very clever people have pointed out that a super-intelligence will think differently than we do. Boethius argued (in the sixth century) that God's different experience of Time can explain the apparent contradictions of omniscience and free will. That lightweight Godel argued out that what is logically contradictory for us, trapped in sequential thought, can be resolvable by an infinite knowledge that is beyond sequence. More recently (and casually) Vernor Vinge posits (in "A Fire Upon The Deep") that the study of super artificial intelligences will be classified as "theology".

And the reader doesn't even have to buy any of that. That's what tolerance is about, we're all free to form our opinions and arguments as we think best.

But it is just ignorant to, well, ignore those opinions and arguments that we don't agree with.

And it is remarkable how many supposedly intelligent, curious and tolerant people become so ignorant of what careful and intelligent people have thought when the topic is theology.

Because downvotes are heavily used to say "I don't like this" rather than "this is not relevant".

I've complained to HN about this and proposed solutions. They don't care.

Doesn't matter even if true.

Anyone wanting to be taken seriously on "disinformation" would get as far away as possible from a place like Harvard in the first place.

Shakespeare's Brutus speech is brilliant, turning "Brutus is an honorable man" from econium to deadly sarcasm.

"[Shakespeare's] version of Mark Antony's speech is probably the greatest written speech ever"

Let us not forget the Gettysburg Address, which is the pivot point not of a factional quarrel but a national repurposing to equality, and shorter to boot.

Quibbling can be fun!

There was a time when even union members and liberals agreed that a public sector union was a nonsense concept. I think it was JFK that first permitted them, and since then they've grown to such enormous political power that questioning their existence has become wrongthink.

In theory public sector unions cannot legally strike or engage in work actions but this constraint is ignored whenever they find it inconvenient.

They create a feedback loop between public expenditure and political power which is very bad for liberal democracy.

https://archive.is/GBdPm

Very interesting walk-through showing the sort of credit SVB was providing startups.

Sometimes the process is the punishment.

What a shame. I'm by no means a photographer but I found their reviews incredibly helpful.

I've taught courses on SQL to newbies and learned a lot from it.

My rule for the slide deck was "don't use a term you haven't explained". So I'd write a slide and check for new words. If I really needed them I'd have to add a slide before that introduced and explained the term.

Figuring out exercises that got students oriented to the concepts was another trick. People really don't get stuff until they've done it for themselves.

By the end of the second day I had people writing joins on their own.

College was by and large killed when politics confused the correlation with higher income for cause. We've since wasted a lot of time and money "educating" people who didn't want and couldn't profit from college, and in the process muddied standards so as to pretend they actually belonged. At this point college has been watered down to a huge waste of time and money.

The market and society are beginning to correct and that's a very good thing.

I think the VCs would have helped not SVB but their own portfolio companies. The amounts involved would have been small and the VCs would not want to admit to their own investors they were idiots.

Failure of a number of regional banks does not threaten the whole system but the handful with sketchy solvency / liquidity.

I think you're describing money market funds, they take your cash and put it into very short-term commercial paper and t-bills. Google says they're managing something like $3 trillion these days. Places like Vanguard, Fidelity and Schwab offer them and you can write checks against them.

And many banks make lots of money on fees and various services. It's problematic because no one likes ATM fees and minimum balance fees, and the politicians get involved.

Anyone interested in such a thing would just keep their money in T-bills via a money market fund. Fast access, zero credit risk, but there is the hassle of sweeping/topping up the bank account used for transactions.

I understand many banks offer "insured sweep" accounts that do just this but of course this costs them cheap deposits. Go ask the various VCs why they didn't press SVB to make this service available to their portfolio companies.

Banks use deposits to fund loans and profit by the difference in the rates paid by the loan and the depositor.

It's a pretty good business model with a stable deposit base, but SVB got a huge influx of deposits and mismanaged it.

Why weren't the likes of JP Morgan competing with SVB for this business?

And notice that in 2018 SVB was explicitly relieved of the increased regulation accompanying the "systematically important" label.

I'm sure they weren't lending to zero revenue companies but there are lots of new small companies with some revenue and capital that need some momentary liquidity: credit lines, bridge loans to next equity funding, etc. And loans/services to people with stakes in such companies. Need a loan to fund exercise of options in a private company that's doing well? SVB might do something like that, Citibank not so much.

A knowledgeable bank can safely make such loans but no regulator will.

You're entirely right about the hostage scenario.

Ultimately the VCs that guided their portfolio companies to use SVB and neglect obvious cash management are responsible for the anxiety. I suspect they would have stepped up to fill any gaps, which would have been less serious than claimed; making payroll was never seriously threatened.

But before then they were happy to let some useful idiots clamor for a depositor bailout that would absolve them of that responsibility.

Unmentioned are the regulatory implications of 100% deposit insurance.

A regulator liable for ALL the deposits becomes responsible for ALL the assets. Regulators are generally conservative, and loans to new companies with strange ideas and no track record don't look so good to them. SVB's underwriting of startups depended on regulatory freedom to take risks not entirely understood by regulators, with corresponding risk that those loans might fail. Some career bureaucrat will not look kindly on a bunch of loans to the likes of nextbigthing.com.

That underwriting didn't kill SVB. But restrictions on it are likely to follow -- the bureaucrats lack the judgment and knowledge to approve anything without a proven track record.

The SVB depositor bailout may have spared startups some anxiety and complication (the bulk of their cash was never at risk), but it may very well prevent the replacement of SVB. The startup community will likely regret its weekend of panic and special pleading.

(There is also the problem of politicization of credit allocation, which we saw in 2008 when mortgages to low-income and subprime borrowers contributed to (I don't say caused) the housing bubble that brought down the whole mortgage market. But this will be of less interest/concern to the tech startup community.)

Yes, the excesses of the French Revolution were entirely caused by Louis XVI.

The lengths to which people will go to justify revolutionary slaughter are really something.

Yes, Caesar's death opened the field for Octavian. But Octavian was such a political genius that we can easily imagine him assuming dictatorial power after Caesar no matter how long the latter lived, and institutionalizing in substantially the same form.

The question for the VCs is not, "why did you advise your portfolio companies to leave SVB?" It is, "why did you not advise your portfolio companies to hold their capital in a t-bill money market?"

This obvious step for capital protection was somehow neglected by venture capital firms who pride themselves on advising their portfolio on a host of mundane business issues. A VC would be considered mad if one of its companies didn't run financing docs through a lawyer, or handled payroll on its own. This should have been one of the most obvious and simple items on the checklist. Yet somehow it was not.

Why not?

The failure of any bank should have been a shruggable matter for every startup funded with capital. Instead it was portrayed as an existential issue for all. (This was entirely and obviously false, but let that pass.) If it were an existential threat that was a lapse of the VCs supposedly guiding these business novices.

I very much suspect that the hue and cry for a bailout was driven in part by VCs eager to cover this lapse. And to suppress attention on the relationships with SVB that lead them to recommend their companies provide SVB with cheap deposits rather than prudently protect their capital.

The answer to a bank run is not "stand by your bank". It is "be indifferent to what happens to your bank in the first place".

Unions are needed to provide the social structure to suppress worker dissent against a strike and to label all willing to work on terms offered as "scabs".

"Union solidarity" is an important cover story for a host of behaviors that would otherwise be simply shocking.

This. VCs advise their portfolio companies on any number of mundane business arrangements and cash management should on that list.

I strongly suspect that SVB's relations with the VCs interfered with this obvious item.

sorry

Pretty small shoe.

These seem to me very different cases but of course you have a right to your own take