tjpaudio

Things are going to be bad until people can go back to work, that much is certain. Whether there is a speedy bounce back after things are back to normal, or if we experience economic stagnation, is anyones guess. The metric to watch is m2, the federal reserve's measure of the velocity of money. Basically, a healthy economy in our system is one where money changes hands quickly. Saving money is bad for the economy, which is why the federal reserve has the mandate of maintaining steady positive inflation. Unfortunately, this availability of this measure is lagged a month or two. It could be that when people go back to work, they go on a spending spree after being cooped up for months, or it could be that pandemic scares people into being more fiscally conservative.

Same with WSJ, gym memberships, magazines, tv providers, cell phone providers... Lots of things.

While, yes, it is annoying whenever companies do this, it is interesting to me that OP's life has been insulary enough that this is shocking to them.

To anyone with a detailed understanding of the current limits of machine learning, this should be no surprise; unsupervised learning is far from solved and ML in its current state will always be plagued by the cat and mouse game of edge cases. The reality is the industry has decided to go this way anyways because it has a good profit outlook if you can get it to work, which is the only thing funding the endeavor. Consider two ways of going about automated transportation:

1) AI. The car independently makes decisions and drives itself. 2) Networks. The car communicates with a grid to make decisions.

Why did we go for #1? Well, thats easy, capitalism. Consider:

AI: - Company gets to own the intellectual property to form a temporary monopoly. - Easier to sidestep governments involvement. - No need to build large infrastructure

Networks: - Shared, less opportunity for monopoly formation. - Will need the government to cooperate. Governments are slows.

If I had to guess, we will eventually go the network route. The research used for AI will drive safety features and failsafes, but not the meet of it. Anyways, why accelerate a line of stopped cars one at a time with autonomous vehicles when you could accelerate the entire line of cars simultaneously with a networked setup?

Thanks for the post, tipped me off to the current rock-bottom ram prices to max out the ram of my desktop I built 5 years ago.

This article makes me think of the engineer at one of my past jobs that not only subsided on the free office poptarts, but also would butter them. I like to think I am a very open minded person but I had a hard time taking that guy seriously with anything.

While I agree with the author's sentiment that it hasn't really panned out for professional work, the title is not right. When the iPad came out, I dumped my Apple stock before the quarter where they would report on sales. The stock at the time was heavily forward valued on lots of iPad sales happening. Apple had failed to gain traction with all it's previous ultra-mobile computing products in the past, all of them marketed for productivity. Why would this one be different? Tablets were available in the stores, but they weren't selling. I figured it would be another case of the early adopters getting overly jazzed about a product nobody wanted.

I was wrong. The iPad saw adoption by the everyday consumer. Give it to the kids so they could play games, watch videos and stop bothering mom. Mom liked how simple it was to check her email. Etc. They created an entire new market. THAT, is not a failure.

Oh come on now, really? I have a piece of farmland in the middle of nowhere and let me tell you, even digging a hole out there is harder now than it was 100 years ago because of the things you find buried. Subways in 200+ year old cities? I can't even imagine. What do you do when your borer, designed for medium size rock and dirt runs into a 4ft wide brick and cement wall the city forgot about 40 years ago? This happens! Also, back 100 years ago we were talking brick, cement, some steel, and thats it. Today there is a vast array of engineered materials and machinery that didn't exist back then. It's not 1,000s of unskilled workers with shovels anymore, its hundreds with technology and mostly engineers.

Thats great and all, but also not queue theory.

Maybe less literal than you are thinking. A background in mathematics opens you to many lucrative careers.

Kind of a textbook description of queue theory if you were taking a stochastic processes class. If the author really is suggesting this for use in retail line situations, he is out of touch because... retail managers have no idea what queue theory is. If they did, they would be making much more money, and not working in retail. Staffing is more of a function of how many people you can get on the clock without getting yelled at by regional managers (who also do not know queue theory) for overstaffing.

I would write this author off, this is a rant and nothing more. "We now live in a different economic universe than we did before the crash. Falling unemployment no longer drives up wages..." Wages are certainly going up in places with low unemployment, its just not distributed as evenly as it was in prior history.

What I don't get about these scams is what is preventing them from working with the bank to reverse the fraudulent transfers? Sure I get that in these instances money is usually moving between the banking systems of two different countries, but just like we have extradition treaties, how is this not a thing?

There are like a million blog style posts for these basic intro to ML with pandas & python type thing. It's so prevalent that I am starting to wonder what the motivation is?

Expiration vs. freshness. When I buy coffee or anything at a supermarket, the expiration date is about as far into the future as you can get. When I order on amazon, it's always much shorter. Coffee is a great example. It's usually months fresher if I buy in store. Not an issue per-say but you are totally buying the end of life stuff.

It's been my experience that nearly all items with expirations on amazon are either near the end of their shelf life or past it. Coffee, candy, supplements, whatever. It's very obviously used as a dumping ground. It's crazy to me that this isn't common knowledge by now.

If you are good at doing something, in this example that something being making money, ceasing that activity means doing something you are less good at. I don't think many people have the discipline or curiosity to say: "Well that was fun, I figured it out, time to learn something new". It's a brain thing, we get a dopamine reward by succeeding. Moving on requires breaking that addiction. In my opinion, it's not unlike any other addiction.

My personal experience has been it's a grueling exercise in trial and error to find what works. To have the opinion that its all bull is certainly justified, we for sure don't know the formula, but I propose that it's there, beckoning to be figured out. Just to stretch and keep active is not detailed enough. It's identifying problem areas, working on them every day, but also working them especially hard and taking time off when you have flare ups. Staying active, but not blindly... Finding the right amount of movement that causes no issue, and increasing ever so slowly, and backpedaling when you mess up, and reducing the number of times you backpedal because every time you have to it works against you. Doing this every day, being patient, being at terms with some things take years. 4 years ago my back dr told me I should stop doing all physical things - the pain would never go away. I said screw that. Its been 7 years now. I rock climb, I lift weights, I hike, I surf... No pain. It's possible.

This is something I have long suspected. I have definitely heard of instances where friends subsequent MRIs have shown regrown cartilage in the knee, but years later. And it doesn't happen for everyone. The friends that regrew, they were runners, they took their injury seriously, they kept moving but were very serious about maintaining flexibility, diet, hydration, etc. I think if you wear down your cartilage, but do nothing to address the tightness that caused the wear in the first place, then you will not see regrowth. The fact that this is an interesting research finding is reflective of somewhat a sad fact in my eyes: people generally do not take care of themselves, instead hoping for surgery or a pill or procedure. Few will add an hour of rehabilitative work to their daily routine and instead just live with the issue forever and complain. I have herniated discs, torn bicep tendons, had tendonitis nearly everywhere at one point or another, sublexed my knees, but nearing 40 I still am active as ever with no daily pain. Some of these injuries took me years to recover from, but recover I did.

To be fair, and whether you agree with it or not, the point of the executive order was to screw them in this manner. So, it's a feature not a bug as far as the government is concerned.

Established, no, because establishing it would be akin to correctly predicting peak oil. As a matter of pure math with the banking system we are globally bought into, that is fractional reserve banking, yes you need ever-increasing GDP or people will be unable to pay back loans and everything collapses. New technology, new resources, etc. stave this off from happening. It is absolutely true that there are finite resources on earth, but when we run out to the point that it impacts our financial system is anyones guess. Hence the meteors comment.

M1 is for measuring velocity, not growth. Velocity of money tends to better model the health of an economy than does GDP.

I see you took my use of the word stuff quite literally. Services are stuff too, and get included in M1 and consumer spending. I'm not wrong.

This is a really complicated question. Some things to consider:

1) Capitalism needs ever-increasing consumption to sustain itself. Imagine a metric: amount of stuff consumed by a person on average. If that number doesn't increase every year, you get a recession. Keep an eye on consumer spending and M1 (the velocity of money). (btw, this is why the long term view of capitalism is grim, it ultimately cannot be sustained. but who knows maybe we learn how to harvest metals out of meteors and we all have our own private jets in 100 years. that would be great for capitalism)

2) Most recessions are triggered by a catalyst. The most recent one was caused by financial instruments that over-leveraged real-estate. It won't be that this time, but there are others at play now. Student debt defaults could rise if unemployment dips, causing another lending crunch, but likely only debt holders would be hit hard (localized recession). I am also keeping my eye on the overnight repo market - banks are holding less cash and it's causing some interesting new problems at the fed, but unclear how that could ripple to the economy. Certainly the trade war could push up the cost of goods as well and cause consumer spending to dip. A lot of economists have been searching for a catalyst scenario but there doesn't seem to be one.

3) Slower growth could be the new-norm. There is a large chance financial assets won't see the kind of appreciation over our lifetime that our parents saw. It is possible that 1970's era stagflation could return.

4) Liquidity trap, maybe? The aforementioned fiasco that unfolded this past week in the repo market would signal a potential risk.

Are we headed to a recession? Hard to say.

The president, any president, does have the power to affect all corners of the economy. The tax overhaul is a good example, that affected everyone to some extent. I do not think anyone is saying the entirety of the economy is based on his policy but there is no question he can move the needle.

There are what, about ~2,000 billionaires in the world? Of those, I don't believe any of them would hold a billion in BTC. From what I can tell, it has been ruled out that this is from any of the exchanges. Is this a possible nation-state transaction?

"When an index fund investor sells, they’re technically selling their holdings in direct proportion to their weighting in the index. So there is literally no market impact"

This is a straight out false statement. Who is this guy again? Oh yea, he has his hands in passive investment big time.

I'll try. Price discovery means finding out the value of a stock by people bidding to sell and buy it. Historically, beating the stock market is hard to do, so one strategy is to just go along for the ride, buy a little of everything. This is what ETFs do. You're not bidding your guess of the value a company should have, you are just saying "hey, I'll pay what that other guy is willing to pay". Now, thats not a problem necessarily, but if the majority of people are not placing their own bids, and everyone is just saying I'll take what the market rate is, then the price of a stock isn't really tied to anything. This is the world we are in today. ETFs have become so massive, some of them are starting to be the majority shareholder of the companies in their portfolio. Now let's say our dear leader really tanks the economy and everyone rushes to sell their ETFs. The companies most effected by whatever policy fuckup are not the only ones that go down, the whole market will go down. Scary stuff.

It's not elitism. ACH is a term that should be familiar to anyone even remotely informed on the topic. It's ok to read articles on things you are unfamiliar with but it is also on you as the reader to educate yourself when you read on topics that you are unfamiliar with.

If every detail was explained in layman's terms, reading would be terribly boring and nuanced technical writing would be dead.

The article is written for people interested in the very specific topic of the technical workings ACH transfers. It seems absurd to me that you would try to write this article to an audience that hasn't even heard of ACH. I think the only thing you are missing is that you are not the target reader.

I believe the news here is a resurgence of growth in a mortgage type that has otherwise been declining or stagnant the last 10 years, not so much an alarm about the current state of affairs. So what you said is correct and all, but I think you miss the point.