Even More Bay Area House Party
astralcodexten.substack.com
astralcodexten.substack.com
Although honestly the "immortality as an STD" is a close second.
It's a natural extension of the ideas I saw the other day, when someone on HN posted an article about death and immortality. The article, by IIRC some renowned scholar, talked a bit about biology, self-preservation and starvation responses, and then segued into germ line cells, proclaimed that those are effectively immortal if you look at them in a certain way - the same way as in "immortality as an STD" case here - and then the author concluded it's good enough as immortality for them, and they're happy with it.
I'll see if I can find the article again.
EDIT: here's the subthread with it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33352697.
This is unfortunately very relatable
Unfortunately it would be hard to collateralize since there is technically no limit to the dividend, similar to a sold call, but just like a sold call you could collateralize with an equivalent sized long position. That could probably be useful for tax optimization (similar to how many of the crypto lending services require full or over collateralization of the underlying, with the market generally being people who want to spend appreciated crypto without realizing a gain). Congress would certainly eventually address this, but there would be a few glorious years of deferred capital gains.
It could also be extremely useful for market making - when you can’t get a share to sell to fill or collateralize an order, you generate a synthetic long and anti stock. But you’d probably have to get some system in place with clearing houses where you eventually replace the synthetic long with a real share. IIUC this is pretty close to how the system works already.
I want to go to this party, IME most Bay Area parties are just really awkward nerds trying to suss out who is making the most money
A comment on the post covers that: It's called a "bucket shop", and it's illegal.
Well, this is an awkward moment to be in a car with a connected friend from Adelaide!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)
The Wikipedia description of a bucket shop says that it's gambling market on stock prices. The anti-stock idea in the article is a security where the holder is obligated to pay out the same dividends as the underlying stock. Not the same thing, AFAICT.
[1] - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cashsettlement.asp
Wall Street already does do this (and basically anything else you can think of that “Wall Street doesn’t do”). There are (at least) two forms. Firstly an Equity Swap[1] and secondly a Total Return Swap[2] (which is just Wall Street’s Swiss army knife tool for synthetically being long/short the return on some asset or basket).
If you just want to long/short the price return (and don’t include dividends which are mentioned in TFA) then there are also contracts for difference (CFDs) where the parties swap the price return on an equity. When I was in this business those were usually used because of tax differences between capital gains and other types of tax.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/equityswap.asp refers to it as having an index on one side and a rate on the other side, but there’s no reason not to have a single stock rather than an equity index and we used to do these 15 years ago when I worked in equities
[2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/totalreturnswap.asp
Edit to add: There are also “dividend swaps” where the parties just swap the dividend return on the asset if you only care about that stream. This is sometimes helpful matching investors who have tax or other structural problems with receiving dividends with others who just want a dividend income stream without the asset price risk.
For example, at one point, trading equities via swaps carrier a tax benefit to the end user, at no significant cost to the bank arranging this. Lots of institutions used that for trading. But later, the tax advantage was lost, while banks were forced to treat these swaps as a proper credit liability, thus depleting the pool of available capital. So people stopped doing this.
This is about 10 years outdated so I'm not sure what status quo is, but as a hack, this definitely exists in the US.
(Edit: Context: the movie "The Big Short")
[1]Source: worked at Goldman as a strat (quant developer) on the mortgages desk at the time. I knew and worked with pretty much all of the people involved although I was based in London. The actual person who came up with the research behind the short idea was a fellow strat and brilliant econometrician[3] and most of the trading guys fought him like hell over it only to later found hedge funds and pretend that it was their idea all along.
[2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cmbx_indexes.asp
[3] Michael Marschoun https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Michae...
Some more information about available dividend derivatives on EUREX: https://www.eurexchange.com/resource/blob/80940/d5a6e620224a...
[1] https://www.straitstimes.com/business/banking/socgen-posts-s...
Less AI alignment discourse, more house music and ketamine.
I swear, literally every time I set foot in SF city limits someone offers me drugs... usually harder ones than I'd prefer. No, I don't want coke and some ADHD meds FFS. And no, we're not going to fuck. Married, thanks. I miss SF being about weed and psychedelics. God damn I can't wait to leave the Bay Area...
The bay is a diverse place with all kinds of communities and parties. Definitely no shortage of house music and ketamine for those that are interested. Or metal and biker bars if you prefer. Smoke a spliff outside the craft brewery, drink tall cans at the street fair, hang a piñata in the park for your kids, etc.
The unnecessary swipe of calling them insufferable. Use of deliberately obscure terms as an additional reason.
And the parties I go to are…well, they have some novelty outside of sex and memes.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cm485RMuEIj/
Plenty of sex, though!
Very much an older millennial.
Whoa you’re so cool man
“And then you invite them to so many Colloquia that they don’t have time to accrue more money and power?”
“You’d be surprised how few it takes! At that level, you spend most of your time just keeping on top of what you’re already doing. A Forum or two a month is enough to bring most billionaires from actively expanding their influence to just treading water. Sometimes they even get addicted. Like Peter Thiel; I don’t think the poor dear has made a business decision in years.”
my god. Scott just made the case for Innovation Forums.
Still don't know what the fuck it means in regards to diet. The wikipedia page shows a bunch of equations.
Probably this:
https://twitter.com/lindydiet/status/1297211546934939651?lan...
The wikipedia page shows a bunch of equations.
That's about the Lindy Effect, which is something else entirely (the only food connection is that it was named after a NY deli).
I can't think of a carnivore animal that is commonly eaten. Chicken? But not really carnivore when raised in a battery cage.
> “That’s so cheems mindset,” says the woman he’s talking to. Her nametag says ‘Astra’, although you don’t know if that’s her real name, her Internet handle, or her startup.
1: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-bay-area-house-p...
2: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/another-bay-area-house...
> “I quit my job at Google a few months ago to work on effective altruism. I’m studying sn-risks.”
> “I can’t remember, which ones are sn-risks?”
> “Steppe nomads. Horse archers. The Eurasian hordes.”
> “I didn’t think they were still a problem.”
I would've loved to be even a fly on the wall of TFA's party. To talk with people with insightful ideas, interesting side-projects, captivating stories, deep models of the world, or encyclopedic knowledge of some random topics. Geeks of all trades.
I've experienced something like this once, when couple things mixed up: I was finishing my degree, helped build and run a local Hackerspace, and with the Hackerspace crowd, we mixed up with the local maker and startup communities, both of which were also just forming. For a few years, we've had events and parties somewhat similar to TFA, with people from all kinds of fields, with all kinds of ideas and goals, mixed together, talked and chilled.
Ultimately, though, this amorphous maker/hacker/entrepreneur/scientist/artist community started to cool down and split back into multiple, more focused ones. Scientists got back to doing science^W^W chasing grants, makers and artists went to do whatever they do, startup people focused on $$$ and marketing, objective value be damned, and our hackerspace got back to tinkering with Arduinos and 3D printers and feeling smugly superior.
I do miss those times, miss those parties. Miss those people, who cared about something interesting, who wanted to do something good - and if not good, then at least fun in an intellectually stimulating way. In contrast, normal conversations with normal people are all just who likes what meal, what's on Netflix, who's dating/marrying/cheating on whom, who has children, who's throwing a wedding, where do we go for vacation, etc. In other words, it's a social equivalent of writing CRUD apps. Yes, it's probably important in many ways, but it is soooo mundane and boring as fuck.
But then you go to a few of these "meetups" and you get steeped in the tech culture, and the banality of what everyone is doing here, and you find that people in these parties are just as self-centered, vacuous and insufferable as where you came from--except in addition to droning on about themselves, they throw in words like "blockchain" and "hustle", talk about their sour beer collection, how they might start taking ukulele lessons next month, and how their next startup is really going to crush it in the market this time. Not as stereotypically annoying as the people in this satire article, but very close intellectually to "who's throwing a wedding".
There are older people who still have this social circle. Some artists, for instance.
Sometimes I think that _I_ must not be as interesting as I used to be, or maybe I'd get invited to those parties!
That’s pretty unlikely in my opinion. Some of the most interesting people I know aren’t “party” people even though I enjoy talking to them.
> “This is an amazing party!” you shout. “How do you know all these people?”
“I don’t!” he shouts back. “I’m trying Partyr. It’s a new all-in-one party-throwing service. You give them an address, a time, and an ideal number of guests, pick from one of their preset themes, and they make everything happen.”
“Including the guests?”
“If needed! The idea is, you have some friends you want to impress by throwing a big party. But you don’t know how many of them will come. And you don’t want only two or three people to come, and then it’s really embarrassing. So you set an ideal number of people to come to the party. Then you see how many people RSVPed, and if it’s less than your ideal Partyr sends you enough guests to make up the difference.”
“Where do they get the people? Are they employees?”
“No, you sign up to be on standby for their service, and they send you a text if someone needs you.”
“How many of the people here tonight are paid Partyr guests?”
“About half, I think. I got most of the RSVPs I wanted, I just thought maybe with a few more people it could seem extra popular.”
“You definitely succeeded there!” You grab a guest on their way to the food table. “Hey, are you here with Partyr?”
“Yeah,” she says. She’s a tall woman in a fashionable dress. “This is my third time with the service. They always come through.”
“What’s it like?”
“It’s pretty great. You tell them what times and days of the week you’re available. Then if they have a need, they text you a day or two beforehand and tell you where to go. You get to eat other people’s free food, drink their free alcohol, and meet a lot of cool people. Sometimes you meet the same Partyr standby guests a few times in a row and make friends with them. Sometimes they even pay you a stipend. I got to say, it’s a pretty great deal.”
“Have you ever used them to throw a party yourself?”
“Oh no, there’s no alpha left in generic Partyr parties. I have my own methods.”
And I live in a place where 32 degrees is a fine April day.