konne88

TLDR: 80% of kids used to be potty trained by age one. Nowadays parents train later, because diapers are so convenient that its feasible to wait until the kids are older where it's easier to train them. This provides massive revenue to diaper companies.

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This seems roughly plausible. I have never been successful at training 1 year olds to be potty trained, because there is so much exposed poop & pie involved over such long times, that it's just way easier to push it back by a year or two when they can figure it out more or less by themselves.

Maybe back then diapers were so bad, that there was always a lot of exposed poop & pie involved anyway, so potty training didn't really make your life any worse.

I'd probably say those extra billion in revenue are well earned.

I didn't expect such a misleading intro from Knuth. It reads like Claude solved Knuth's math problem. In reality, Claude generated various example solution, and Knuth then manually generalized that to a formal proof. What Claude did is certainly useful, but it would have been nice to be clear about the scope of the contribution in the intro.

But it also doesn't apply to small companies:

The CCPA applies to any business, including any for-profit entity that collects consumers' personal data, does business in California (regardless of where it is located), and satisfies at least one of the following thresholds:

Has annual gross revenues in excess of $25 million in its most recent tax year;[11] Buys, receives, or sells the personal information of 100,000 or more consumers or households; or Earns more than half of its annual revenue from selling consumers' personal information.[12][13]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Ac...

He's not completely wrong though. I was assaulted (pushed and fell to the ground) for asking someone to turn down their music at a pool. And I think I've asked less than 20 people in my life to turn down their music.

I do believe that Wikipedia is one of the least biased sources out there, but there is definitely bias. Here is a concrete example. Compare the introduction paragraph of the English circumcision article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision) with the German one (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zirkumzision).

The English intro talks a lot about medical advantages of the procedure: "reduced rates of sexually transmitted infections and urinary tract infections. This includes reducing the incidence of cancer-causing forms of human papillomavirus (HPV) and reducing HIV transmission among heterosexual men in high-risk populations by up to 60%; ... Neonatal circumcision decreases the risk of penile cancer.[14] ... Some medical organizations take the position that it carries prophylactic health benefits that outweigh the risks," and has one sentence of it being controversial worldwide "others hold that its medical benefits are not sufficient to justify it."

The German one has not a single sentence in the intro about advantages, but a whole paragraph on how it's controversial. "Die Zirkumzision als Routineeingriff ist besonders bei Minderjährigen umstritten, ... Von vielen Kinderschutzverbänden und einem Teil der Ärzteorganisationen wird die nicht medizinisch begründete Beschneidung abgelehnt, da sie den Körper irreversibel verändere und bei nicht einwilligungsfähigen Jungen nicht im Einklang mit Gesundheitsschutz und Kindeswohl stehe.[6] Im angelsächsischen Bereich gibt es schon länger eine gesellschaftliche Debatte zwischen Gruppen von Gegnern der Beschneidung („Intaktivisten“-Bewegung) und Befürwortern. Umstritten sind insbesondere medizinischer Nutzen und Risiken, bei Kindern auch ethische und rechtliche Aspekte sowie die Beurteilung im Hinblick auf die Menschenrechte, vor allem das Recht auf körperliche Unversehrtheit."

I'm not sure who's right, but it's hard to not see some bias here.

This must be the first good looking government website I have ever seen.

We should all copy from the Haskell community. Instead of coming up with a random name like "append" for a List function, we should appeal to our deep intuition of monoids and use the much more intuitive "<>".

I have proven quite a few theorems in Lean (and other provers) in my life, and the unfortunate reality is that for any non-trivial math, I still have to figure out the proof on paper first, and can only then write it in Lean. When I try to figure out the proof in Lean, I always get bogged down in details and loose sight of the bigger picture. Maybe better tactics will help. I'm not sure.

You don't know. Even with the best theorem provers, your definitions are still trusted. The best way I've found to help with this is to keep your definitions simple, and try to use them to do things (e.g. can you use your definition to solve other problems, does it work on some concrete examples, etc).

I think a big problem is just how US suburbs are built. Growing up in Germany, there were sidewalks, protected crossings, and public transportation everywhere, so I was just always expected to go to school and visit my friends on my own. Now that I live in the US, it's often hard to let your kids roam free, because there is a real danger of them being hit by a car.

That seems a little strong. We spend like $50/month on paper plates, which are compostable, and I get back many hours of my life that I can use to create valuable experiences with my kids. I don't think that's anymore morally wrong, then say, going on a vacation.

I would disagree that Brex (and many others in the space) aren't offering banking. I can deposit money, I can withdraw it, I have a credit card, I earn interest, etc, they seem to offer everything a traditional bank would.

To your point about risky investments, like stocks, I agree that that's very sketchy. But I think even very prudent banks that don't invest in stocks etc still take on a lot of risk, like we see with the bank collapses caused by the high interest rates these days.

He seems to say that the fractional reserve system is the only way society can work. But is that actually true? Quite a few banks (e.g. Brex) now allow you to keep your money in a money market fund, which invests in short term US treasuries that are protected by the full faith and credit of the US government. Importantly, in this setup, you own all the assets and the bank just acts as a custodian. And you tend to get better interest. That just seems so much saner than the bank being allowed to invest your money in risky and illiquid assets, and then we just hope that those investments don't lose too much money, or that a lot of people don't want to withdraw their money all at once.

Having 4 kids ages 5 and under, while also running a startup, I can confidently tell you that disposable dishes are the true answer to efficient dishwasher management.

"One can’t imagine flagship products like Search or Books ever being shut down."

I can totally imagine Books being shut down.

I'd be curious to. Wikipedia seems to says that this might be mostly marketing speak. 'The term "3 nanometer" has no relation to any actual physical feature (such as gate length, metal pitch or gate pitch) of the transistors. According to the projections contained in the 2021 update of the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems published by IEEE Standards Association Industry Connection, a 3 nm node is expected to have a contacted gate pitch of 48 nanometers and a tightest metal pitch of 24 nanometers.'

Thanks for the thorough writeup! I agree that our implementation seems to solve your use-case.

Let me provide you with a bit more context about the house buying use case. When buying houses you need to keep a chunk of money (around $60k) available to wire next day for a "good faith deposit" in case you're the winning bid, and it's quite a waste to keep that money in a checking or savings account (since the house buying process can take months).

Great question. The motivation will differ from person to person, but I can give you the reason why I'm using it.

I live in a high cost of living area, so I used to keep ~20K in my checking account at all times to pay for rent etc. All the rest of my money I invested in a total market stock index fund. The checking account balance is just a small fraction of my overall balance, so the FDIC insurance really didn't help me.

Financial Choice has two benefits for me. 1) I now get to invest those ~20K which gives me a ~1-2K expected annual return without any hassle, and 2) I can just keep all my money in my Financial Choice account, so I don't need to bother moving money between a checking and brokerage account anymore.

Good question. Here's the difference. When you withdraw money from Charles Schwab and there's no cash in your account, it creates a margin debt. You then have to pay that margin debt back manually, and you pay interest until you do. With Financial Choice, we automatically sell your investments to cover your withdraws so you don't build up that margin debt.

We've heard from a few users that they would like to keep some of the money in cash. I think that's a reasonable feature which we should add support for. In a sense, keeping a fixed amount of cash in your portfolio is really just investing in a mix of securities (similar to how people invest in bonds & stocks), which seems like a perfectly reasonable choice for people with a certain risk/reward profile.

I completely understand your desire to avoid sales of your long term investments that may have huge capital gains. To deal with that, you can configure us to sell shares in a tax sensitive way, where we will sell shares with a low tax burden first, so if you have a greater inflow into your account than outflow (which would be the case for a SDE DINK), we will usually just sell recently bought shares that haven't accumulated any capital gains, and all the shares with a high tax burden will never be touched.

Thanks for the positive feedback :)

If you withdraw money using a Fidelity debit card (without Financial Choice), from a brokerage account without any cash in it, that withdraw will create a margin loan that you have to manually pay back and that you also have to pay interest on.

If you withdraw money using a Financial Choice debit card, that withdraw will automatically trigger a sale of your stock in the appropriate amount, so that you won't be building up margin loans.

All good questions.

Yes, cash debits and checks lead to an automatic sales of securities.

You can configure the liquidation, e.g. to the Tax Efficient strategy, which minimizes capital gains taxes by selling shares with the lowest returns first.

We sometimes can't sell quickly enough, e.g. when you withdraw money at the ATM on the weekend, and then you would be paying for a margin loan until we sell your securities (usually the next trading day). It's just Fidelity's normal margin rate, we don't add any spread on top of that.

Manually moving money around is possible but it has some drawbacks. 1) Even with the best manual management, you do need to keep some buffer of money for unexpected withdrawals, and that money earns you essentially zero returns. 2) Fine grained manual management is pretty tedious.

We're focusing on consumer first, as you mentioned it's a bit easier to get into, but I definitely agree with there being an opportunity for businesses as well.

Large purchases work pretty much the same way as small purchases (you get the money instantly, then we sell your investments to cover the withdraw), except that you may run against the $100,000/day limit on electronic funds transfers.

Completely agree on the phrasing, we can do a lot better there.

Thanks for playing with it, and the signup workflow feedback. Fidelity is unfortunately a requirement right, but are planning to transition to our own platform in the medium term.

We haven't really considered the path of selling ads or marketing data. Our current thoughts around business model are closer to Wealthfront (which charges 0.25% of assets under management) or Acorns (which charges up to $5/month for advanced services).

1) You will usually pay short term capital gains tax every time you spend money. Note however that your taxes will only be a fraction of your gains, not your total assets. E.g. if you have $1,000 gains in a year and pay 35% short-term capital gains tax, you will make $650 post tax. If you have $0 gains, you will also pay $0 in tax.

You can configure which of your shares we will sell first. If you set this to Tax-Sensitive, we will sell shares with a low tax burden first, so if you have a greater inflow into your account than outflow, all the shares with a high tax burden will never be touched and they will eventually be classified as long-term capital gains.

2) Money market funds only allow you to invest in low risk/low reward securities. We allow you to invest a much broader set of securities (including bonds, stock, ETFs, etc).

I personally used to keep about a $20K balance in my checking account, and I was actually surprised by how much a difference it can make to invest that. If you have an investment with an expected annual return of 5%, that's a $1K / year that you are missing out on.

We've also seen users who needed to keep much larger amounts of money in their account for relatively long periods of time, because they were shopping around for a house or trying to buy a new car.

If you put in $50K, and it gained 10% your account would now have $55K. If you withdraw $2K, you could be taxed on the 10% profit on that $2K, so $200. So if your tax rate is 25%, you'd pay $50 in taxes because of that 2K withdraw.