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dcftoapv

137 karma · joined March 7, 2020

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dcftoapv··on Uber and Lyft shutdown in California averted as judge grants emergency stay
What rail? The one into Inglewood? Super helpful for everyone involved.

I'm not arguing the measurement of 1 mile versus 1.5 miles with you. You are nitpicking to confuse the argument and it doesn't change the point in the least.

I have lived in LA long enough to see proposal after proposal made, the taxis protest, and the proposals get canned. You can talk about lack of influence all you want, but they have gotten their way every time they made a statement for the last several decades by threatening to shutdown airport traffic. They are nothing but thugs.

dcftoapv··on Uber and Lyft shutdown in California averted as judge grants emergency stay
No, it's not. Nothing you wrote contradicted anything I said. The ultimate passenger destinations are less than 1 mile from the airport. They do not include connections to ongoing transportation other than cars, buses, and taxis. It cost $4 billion for something that adds little to no value.

LA taxi drivers were actively protesting outside of the airport when the original train was proposed. Stop lying.

I agree with you. It is bizarre that they have any influence whatsoever, but they do, and they have been forcefully exerting it for decades.

dcftoapv··on Uber and Lyft shutdown in California averted as judge grants emergency stay
Every other city in the country has figured out rail transportation. The FAA could have been pacified if there was any political will to find a real solution. Blaming the FAA because they rejected one design is pure bs.

GM most definitely ran a campaign through the '50s and '60s designed to increase the use of buses as a replacement for street cars. That's not anywhere close to debatable and LA was not the only city that went along with it.

And if you're going to continue to claim that corruption is not the driving force behind these decisions then I would love your explanation for BH doing everything in their power to prevent and delay a rail line because they didn't want homeless people to be have easy access to the area. It's all about money, not the common good. Nobody here is planning for anything other than their own pocketbook.

dcftoapv··on Uber and Lyft shutdown in California averted as judge grants emergency stay
I'll continue to blame the minority interests that are doing everything possible to keep LA transportation stuck in the stone ages, thank you.
dcftoapv··on Uber and Lyft shutdown in California averted as judge grants emergency stay
Also a frequent flier. It sucked before but the solution was 100% designed to benefit cab drivers. Moreover, it absolutely fucked up the entrance to the airport which went from long, but doable, to dozens of people missing their flights per-day bad.

I live in Playa Vista and had a 1.5 hour trip to LAX in November. I was this close to driving through there at 3am and stealing every one of their traffic cones.

dcftoapv··on Uber and Lyft shutdown in California averted as judge grants emergency stay
@tom No, it's not being built. The train that is currently under construction will connect the airport terminals to a cab stand and car rental station less than a mile from the airport because LA taxi drivers threw a shit fit when they suggested building a train into downtown and Santa Monica.

By the way, we're paying $4 billion for that. $4 billion to carry passengers less than a mile from the airport so they can then take a cab...

LA cab drivers are all unionized now and they had their entire hand stuck in this process. It was corruption as an art form.

Our government sucks.

dcftoapv··on Uber and Lyft shutdown in California averted as judge grants emergency stay
Maybe, but this law will prevent Uber from ever turning a profit in CA, so it's far easier to just shutdown operations, and move their headquarters.

I live here, pay taxes here, and vote here. I am actively rooting against the state right now.

dcftoapv··on Uber and Lyft shutdown in California averted as judge grants emergency stay
The Los Angeles taxi union prevented (read: bribed and coerced) the state / city government from installing a train from LAX to DTLA because they were rolling in cash.

Then, they got pissed about Uber, and had a rule enacted that forced passengers to take a bus to an external lot which turned the world's worst airport congestion into a way worse situation.

It is not unrealistic to think that they are a driving force behind this situation as well. California is corrupt as fuck, from GM paying LA to take out way more efficient train lines so they could sell buses to Beverly Hills preventing LA from building a subway. It makes living here absolutely miserable.

dcftoapv··on 20yo Robinhood Customer Commits Suicide After Seeing $730K Negative Balance
Maybe, but the spirit of the law was intended to prevent incidents exactly like this
dcftoapv··on 20yo Robinhood Customer Commits Suicide After Seeing $730K Negative Balance
It is illegal to provide investment advice and sell investment products without license for a reason. This young man is exactly that reason. People are stupid and they trust other stupid people.
dcftoapv··on 20yo Robinhood Customer Commits Suicide After Seeing $730K Negative Balance
I love options trading, but I used to work for an options exchange. I don't write uncovered positions because I can't afford the tail risk.

/r/wsb, on the other hand, loves tail risk, long or short. That subreddit needs to be shutdown by the SEC. It's serving as an investment advisor for a significant number of young people, whether it masquerades as satire or not.

dcftoapv··on Video Games and the False Sense of Achievement
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dcftoapv··on Fast high-level programming languages
I was confused by this as well. Java is my go to language when I'm trying to do things the right way.

Results in clear code, easy implementation, and good performance 95% of the time.

dcftoapv··on Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
I've seen this movie before. The title should really be: "Twitter will allow employees to work from home until a hedge fund forces Jack Dorsey to step down as CEO and Marissa Meyers fires everyone who hasn't been coming into the office"
dcftoapv··on Why is the stock market rallying when the economy is so bad?
Adding in a little more nuance. Free cash flow to equity is discounted at the cost of equity. The cost of equity increases as future cash flows become riskier. However, costs of financial distress tend not to get baked into valuations unless they are obvious because they are not part of the normal valuation process.

This is why it might be possible that the stock market would not decline as much in 2020 / 2021 as it did in 2008 / 2009.

However, something seems fundamentally wrong with valuations at the moment, I cannot put my finger on it, and so I'm overweight fixed income until I'm more comfortable that things are going to turn around.

dcftoapv··on Teenagers are better behaved and less hedonistic (2018)
I graduated from high school 2010 and spent most of my time sneaking around my parents' back to find alcohol and get in a quicky with my girlfriend. I guess you could say it set me back, but I was never on the ivy track in the first place. I can confidently say that I have a wildy more successful career than our valedictorian and I work for our salutatorian's biggest competitor at the same career level.

I am not nearly as smart as either of those people, but if you have drive then you'll turn out just fine. Getting into Harvard is not the end all, and I wouldn't trade those years for anything.

I agree that grades are money, but burning out at Harvard will set you back more than 'only' getting into BC.

dcftoapv··on Social distancing slowing not only Covid-19, but other diseases too
Agreed, but this study can certainly be used as part of a larger triangulation. A guy I worked with pointed out that this was happening in Japan about a month ago: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/02/21/national/influe...
dcftoapv··on Fed reinstates multi-trillion dollar bailout program for Wall Street
Yeah, you're right. I didn't think any sane person that's eligible for an SBA loan would be complaining about a 4% interest rate. Private unsecured small business loans run like 20%.
dcftoapv··on Fed reinstates multi-trillion dollar bailout program for Wall Street
I misread this comment; my bad.
dcftoapv··on Federal Reserve slashes interest rates to zero
Given the guy that I just responded to called liquidity injections foolish, you should want to take your chances with the fed.

If the fed hadn't announced that action last night then the hell that would have rained down on Monday would have gone down in history with Lehman and Black Monday.

dcftoapv··on Federal Reserve slashes interest rates to zero
The issue is that the vast majority of people don't want to be educated in economics. They publish the minutes of every signal one of their meetings. You are free to sit down and read absolutely everything they do and the reasoning behind it.
dcftoapv··on Shelter in place for Bay Area counties
Lets start with the things we probably agree on: - The US healthcare system is wildly inefficient - The US has certain societal advantages in dealing with this outbreak that China doesn't (i.e., we are more spread out, we are more likely to take individual transportation, etc.) - China has certain societal advantages in dealing with this outbreak that the US doesn't (i.e., they can order mass quarantines and mobilize people in a way that the US cannot)

Keeping those in mind. Yes, we might get off easy. Yes, it might turn out worse for us. No, the outcome will not be 100% correlated to government effectiveness.

That said, the US healthcare system still leads the world in research, funding, talent, etc. Is it more expensive? Yes. Is it the best system for public health? No, probably not. But we do have our own advantages.

Immuno-suppressant therapies that are being used as a last resort for COVID 19 were developed by Genentech. Roche and Genentech are leading the way on development of a vaccine. The US healthcare system is home to some of the world's foremost experts on drug development and patient care.

We are undoubtedly better off in dealing with this than many other countries. We're probably not the top percentile, but we are most definitely among the top 5-10%.

dcftoapv··on Shelter in place for Bay Area counties
Don't trust Chinese statistics. They are manipulated to say whatever the government wants them to say. This is the same country that starting running empty production facilities so economists couldn't predict GDP impacts.
dcftoapv··on Shelter in place for Bay Area counties
Okay sure, but to sit here and definitively say that a minority of US voters prefer limited government is patently untrue.
dcftoapv··on Shelter in place for Bay Area counties
Fair
dcftoapv··on Shelter in place for Bay Area counties
I'm not going to sit here and defend the US government's approach to this situation. Not producing test kits, not investing in additional medical supplies earlier, etc. Those were the wrong decision.

That said. Italy basically denied having a problem until they couldn't anymore. China's safety net health system did everything they could to cover up the crisis until it exploded in their face. Other countries haven't been doing much more to prepare than the US.

People like to hate on it, but the US government still functions are a comparatively high level while maintaining a degree of individual freedom that other countries do not.

dcftoapv··on Shelter in place for Bay Area counties
"It’s pointless to say one has an good outcome when it’s only now beginning to grow."

It's also pointless to say that we have a bad outcome when it's only now beginning to grow. We don't know how this is going to turn out, but the US is not in a worse position to deal with this than most other countries.

Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc. responded well because they already had to deal with SARS. They had infrastructure in place to respond to an outbreak exactly like this one. The US didn't have that experience, but we're catching up.

Moreover, we still don't know if China has actually weathered this storm. It is very possible that this could tick back up once they start going back to work. If that happens then all of this effort could end up as nothing more than a stall on the inevitable.

dcftoapv··on Shelter in place for Bay Area counties
It's been awhile since I looked at these stats but as of like 2008 more people identified as Republican than Democrat.
dcftoapv··on Shelter in place for Bay Area counties
Okay, sure. Lets talk about fiscal. Italy's going go re-enter another sovereign debt crisis because they were already in recession before they shut down their entire economy.

Lets talk about medical. I haven't heard anything about hospital bed shortages in the US yet. Again, not saying we won't get there, but China had to build entire new facilities because they didn't have adequate infrastructure.

Lets talk about essentials. American stores might be temporarily out of toilet paper, but Wuhan is currently dealing with dramatic food shortages.

dcftoapv··on Shelter in place for Bay Area counties
China and Europe have public healthcare and social safety. They've been much worse off than the US so far. I'm not saying that won't change, but to sit here and shit all over America's approach to limited government is a premature celebration.
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