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MichaelConlon

15 karma · joined June 25, 2019

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MichaelConlon··on US judge will not block Biden administration ban on noncompete agreements
The title doesn't make this clear but this was a decision made by the FTC not by an executive order. There's still an argument that can be made about the extent to which the executive branch vs. legislative branch should be deciding these kind of things which would be fair but it's not Biden personally mandating this change.
MichaelConlon··on Federal Reserve to increase interest rates by 75 basis points for the third time
While it is not technically "creating" new money it is expanding the supply of money (credit) in the economy. In the above example you still have $1000 owed to you and the company/person receiving that loan now has $900. That's a total of $1900 of "real" money generated from your $1000 deposit. The balance sheets net out to zero but there is in effect an extra $900 now in the economy.
MichaelConlon··on Class Bullshitters
Just throwing another opinion in the mix. I think it's healthy to recognize one's own work in addition to that dumb luck. It's certainly lucky that we liked computers but it's also true that a lot of us worked hard and took advantage of our lucky situations. That's not to say we succeeded on hard work alone, far from it - luck is a crucial part, but it's also unfair to not give yourself a little credit sometimes.
MichaelConlon··on New York Fed Again Upsizes Liquidity Plans for Turn of the Year
You're correct in that it means that the bank messed up. The idea is that this is for (relatively) small amounts to cover reserve funds for a short period of time. This may happen because large deposit accounts decided to withdraw unexpectedly or loan repayments stopped coming in. Ideally this is to be used for a day or maybe a week. However, you're correct that there is certainly potential for abuse in the system if a bank is doing this repeatedly every day for months or more. I'm not sure what, if any, measures are in place to prevent that abuse.
MichaelConlon··on New York Fed Again Upsizes Liquidity Plans for Turn of the Year
The cash reserve system was introduced to protect against a 1920's style bank run. The idea being that a bank should have enough liquid assets to cover 10 or 15% of their customers pulling all of their deposited funds out of the bank.

The goal of a bank is to make as much money as it can with it's assets. It's in the banks interest to loan out as much as it safely can while staying above the reserve requirements. If a bank were to dump it's assets to ensure it met reserve requirements it would likely sell at firesale prices which could drive down the price of those assets for the rest of the market. By taking a loan from the Fed and using those assets as collateral that scenario is avoided. It's also worth noting that these loans are not free, the Fed does charge interest.

So the bank avoids dipping below reserve requirements (and flooding the asset market) and the Fed earns a small amount of interest.

MichaelConlon··on No to Chrome
They are not the same product[1].

uBlock was the original tool but was handed over to another maintainer some time ago. The original developer of uBlock, being unhappy with the direction of the tool, forked the repo and made uBlock Origin which he maintains and is often considered the better product by people here

[1]https://ublock.org/faq/

MichaelConlon··on Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game
Bitcoin uses proof of work [1] to verify transactions on the network. For someone to effectively rewrite the network they would need to control 51% of the total computing power (in hashes/sec) on the bitcoin network.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work