JauntTrooper

I have an Enron-branded calculator.

It's one of those cheap ones companies used to give away at convention booths.

I've always toyed with the idea of re-programming it so that the math comes out all wrong. 2+2=7.

Matt Levine will never run out of material.

Lead paint has a similar problem. It tastes sweet, which is why so many children end up eating paint chips.

You're are assuming she didn't understand the situation when she took the job.

I think it's much more likely she did and decided to take on the challenge to turn it around.

People in the industry knew they were in trouble. (I remember some of my banking colleagues talking about it last year). That's probably why it was so hard for them to fill the CRO job.

SVB had declined almost 66% in 2022. They were the 4th worst performer in the S&P 500. Their balance sheet concentration and mix made them an outlier in the industry and unusually exposed to rising interest rates. Its failure wasn't inevitable though. It had a strong brand and deep customer relationships with one of the primary engines of the US economy. If they could raise enough capital to fix their balance sheet, they could weather the storm.

She was a regulator that worked on stress testing banks after 2008 and could help them decide on how much capital they truly needed. It turns out it was a lot, and when they finally did announce details of the capital raise, investors got spooked and it triggered a bank run.

If one of the primary justifications for ending remote work is team-building and serendipitous water-cooler discussions, shared dinnertime seems like the optimal place to encourage that.

It really seems like the internet as we know it is about to break down under an never-ending ocean of ChatGPT spam.

Trust and curation should become even more valuable than they are today.

Intro to Financial Markets, taught by Burton Malkiel.

As an impressionable 20 year old with no background in finance, it introduced me to passive investing, Vanguard, the efficient market theory and the power of compound interest.

It's funny, 20+ years later I still think back to some specific lectures in his class whenever I encounter the CAPM or Black-Scholes in my day job. Prof. Malkiel helped me develop a healthy skepticism about claims in finance that has served me really well in my career and my personal finances.

I'll admit it, I subscribe to chess.com. I pay $31 / year.

I mainly joined for the unlimited post-game analysis and puzzles. I also like the app, it's fast and intuitive. Lichess is great too, nothing against them.

Aw, that brings me back. It's so nice to meet another wotmudder in the wild!

This is insightful. I used to listen to several hours of podcasts a day, but it was mostly while commuting and at the gym. When I switched to remote work and outdoor runs during the pandemic, I fell out of the habit, and I haven't listened to one in months.

It is online and still quite active! Drop into the discord and say hello.

I spent many of my formative years on wotmud.

I think it depends on which part of the tech sector you look at. Crypto has a very similar vibe.

I think the 'need to impress people' is often used as an excuse to splurge. Maybe it's more expected for salesmen like financial advisors, or small business attorneys that are dealing with retail clients.

I'm a fairly senior investment banker (Managing Director, group head), and I drive a 14 year old Honda. None of my co-workers or clients have ever seen my car or been to my house. I don't wear a watch.

Some of my co-workers will wear bespoke clothes and flashy jewelry, but it's not required, and mid-tier conservative suits and shoes are fine.

Good comment. I would add that our Sun is alone, while up to 85% of solar systems are at least binary. It's possible multi-star systems make life more difficult. Similarly, Earth's magnetosphere may be uncommon, since we don't see a similar one on Mars or Venus. And maybe Earth's rotation is uncommon and many planets are tidally locked.

I wonder, though, how this stacks against the sheer size of our galaxy. There are 100 - 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, including about 4 billion Sun-like stars. Plus we keep revising estimates upward when it comes to exoplanets. Recent observations seem to indicate that 33% - 90% of Sun-like stars have rocky planets at a distance where liquid water is possible.

Are features like an unusually large Moon or a protective gas giant so rare that our planet and solar system are truly unique?

To add to this point, John Rockefeller's daughter Alice died of dysentery at 13 months old.

I assumed he meant like a free trade union, not political integration.

One interesting story that's gotten a little lost in the chaos is that after Sequoia invested in FTX, Bankman-Fried also invested $200M into two Sequoia funds:

https://www.ft.com/content/993942cb-1a7e-4689-9d9d-8434d4a74...

I've definitely noticed a shift in the investment banking industry over the past two months.

Upper management is being much more assertive in their push to get everyone back in the office, away from the current 'hybrid 3-day a week but not really enforced' model to 'we need everyone back 5 days a week in all hands on deck mode to navigate the coming recession.'

10% of $10,000 is $1,000, but you have to pay federal income taxes on it.

So you're looking at getting $600 - $800 to tie up $10,000 for a year, and you have to go through hoops and a cumbersome website to do it.

It's a better deal than other fixed income investments right now, but with an after-tax return that's guaranteed to be worse than inflation, it's hard to get excited about it.

Yes, some US cities have additional income taxes beyond what you pay to the state. New York City, for example, has a city income tax, as does Yonkers, NY.

At one of my prior firms, pre-pandemic, they fired a remote worker because she moved from one state to another. We thought this was insane because she was one of our best employees and the workflow wouldn't change since she was already remote. The company's logic was that they didn't have any employees in her new state, and they didn't want to take on the additional tax, legal and administrative burden and risks of expanding into that new state.

I remember hearing similar economic arguments in 2006 - 2012 about gold and silver.

I often wonder if those same people moved into Bitcoin.

I think it's mainly that Mars has an atmosphere, which helps shield it from radiation and asteroids, regulates the temperature, and creates weather like wind and even carbon-dioxide snow. The Moon basically doesn't have an atmosphere, which makes it a much harsher place to survive.

Mars also has more gravity than the Moon, has a day-night cycle, and has subsurface water, all of which would likely be very important to a long-term human colony.

Economic growth does not need to be extractive, nor is it zero sum. A vaccine is worth more than the sum of its parts. So is a bridge.

We can achieve economic growth through productivity growth, increasing outputs without increasing inputs through design and efficiency gains.

The economic growth we've experienced over the past 250 years has been an extraordinarily positive development in human history. We are experiencing serious consequences from this growth most notably climate change and the extinction crisis. We should absolutely consider the ecological costs of economic growth and work to minimize them. However we should try to fix these without dismissing the engine of economic growth that's lifted humanity out of the miserly wretched existence we experienced through most of human history.

I think coffee is a lot more subtle than fancy beers. There are pretty big differences in taste among craft beer styles and breweries, and exploring the variety is part of the fun.

I love coffee, but don't differentiate it nearly as much. I can enjoy a fancy expresso just as much as a cup of supermarket coffee.

Twitter has a binding agreement to get its shareholders cash at a price that’s nearly 50% higher than todays closing price, a value that the board concluded was superior to their standalone prospects and other alternatives. Why wouldn’t they enforce the agreement and close the deal?

Breastfeeding doesn't necessarily happen automatically. It can take practice, time and effort for the mother and baby to learn how to do it. It is easy for the mother to get really frustrated, especially after surgery when she's in pain and sleep deprived. Do what you can to support her while she's figuring it out.

Breastfeeding is healthier and absolutely worth it, but don't be ashamed if you need to resort to a little formula sometimes. There's a weird, toxic culture that's grown in recent years where women are shamed if they formula feed, even if it's just as a supplement.

We've given birth at hospitals in 3 difference states, and in each one there was an uncomfortable tension between the lactation consultants and the doctors/nurses, who would often given conflicting advice. It took a couple of weeks for our first baby to learn how to nurse because he was in the NICU, so he had formula. The other two picked it up quickly, but we still supplemented with a little formula in the hospital the first couple of days because they lost too much weight (10%+) and were dehydrated.

Most of the lactation consultants we encountered were often scoldy, pushy and dismissive, and would treat my wife as a failure for allowing her kid to drink formula (even when the doctor strongly recommended it). It was really weird.

The totals are a little misleading because there is partisan gerrymandering on both sides, so they somewhat balance each other out. Courts have also been highly involved in rejecting the most brazenly disproportionate maps, but that may soon change next year due to the newly constituted Supreme Court.

The bigger problem is that it incentivizes partisanship and extremist views in uncompetitive districts because the representative is effectively decided in the party’s primary election, not the general election which has higher turnout and a more representative electorate.

Also the fact that 90%+ of congressional seats are safe except for the occasional primary opponent discourages accountability. Our districts are so distorted, they make no geographic sense. And it means a large percentage of our population is permanently disenfranchised, which dampens voter participation. It really is one of the biggest structural problems of our democracy right now.

Eliminating partisan gerrymandering would go a long way.

Less than 10% of congressional districts this year will be competitive (defined as the most recent presidential election margin was within 10 percentage points). Only 41 seats!

I haven’t really seen a realistic plan to do it though.

1) Accuracy - their accuracy is unmatched. Seriously, reliability is the #1 reason I value Bloomberg. I've used most of their competitors and I almost always have to double/triple check primary sources if I'm going to publish the data in a high profile report, but I can rely on Bloomberg.

2) Speed - they are extremely fast to publish market news. Their reporters are very good and have a lot of primary sources and scoops, especially for companies that may not be otherwise newsworthy.

3) Excel integration - their Excel plugin is huge, it's almost like it's own program. Many of our spreadsheets are built around them. You can pretty much export every data field in the exact format you want if you know what you're doing

4) Support - they have staff available to answer questions 24/7, and their staff is extremely knowledgeable. It's the most amazing customer service I've ever experienced. Imagine you're a new analyst at an investment bank, fresh out of school, it's 1am, you've been told to put together a model and you have no idea what you're doing. You type HELP HELP in a Bloomberg terminal and they'll not only help you, but they often will make the spreadsheet for you.

All that said, their user interface is terrible (though it has its fans, and it is extremely fast once you've learned the shortcuts) and accessibility is cumbersome, especially if you're working remotely or want something fast from your desktop. But I'm still a huge fan. I don't even use it for trading, I mostly focus on equities and mergers, though they would be the first place I'd check if I needed info on fixed income or derivatives too.

I figured VR would bring back arcades.

New equipment may be too expensive and novel for home purchases, but an arcade could invest in those fancy omnidirectional treadmill and VR gloves.

The demand is there. People pay $30+ for a spin class, why not VR lightsaber zumba?

Video games in the 80s and movies started off in commercial locations before becoming cheap enough for home use. I'm not sure why VR hasn't followed their model. I've assumed it was because the tech isn't there yet.