derf_

Interest rates were kept at historic lows for a decade because the 2008 crisis caused available credit to absolutely implode, which destroyed a huge swath of the effective money supply. Leverage ratios at banks went from north of 40:1 to closer to 10:1. Without ZIRP and QE and all of the rest, we would have had outright deflation, kicking off the kind of deflationary debt spiral that made the Great Depression so bad.

That kind of dramatic destruction of credit did not happen during the pandemic. The banks were fine [0]. What happened was that the economic output of actual goods and services collapsed. So high levels of stimulus led to more money chasing fewer real resources, and you got inflation instead.

This should not have been a surprise.

[0] Modulo a few like SVB that blew up a couple of years later because they had forgotten that interest rates could also go up.

It is not just about what you are working on. You need to understand what everyone else is working on, and more importantly, what they could be working on (their capabilities) and what they should be working on (the org's priorities). When you find yourself being dragged in to meetings to write roadmaps, estimate schedules, and contribute paragraphs to the annual budgeting process, you know you're on the right track.

He does have one thing right, that this is about reputation, because you cannot just go out and unilaterally take this authority. It has to be earned. Having a large number of lines of code written, commits landed, and tickets closed can be a means to that end, but it is not in and of itself the goal.

There have been over 70 incidents of overt domestic default since 1800. The United States defaulted in 1790, when a portion of the interest it owed was deferred for 10 years, and technically defaulted again in 1933 when it abrogated the gold clause.

I was really happy Thomas Davies added quantization matrices to the spec, because if he hadn't, I would have had to. Fortunately, he did a good job. I am glad someone is finally using them. Don't sleep on per-segment quantizer deltas, either.

Source: I lead Mozilla's technical contributions to AV1.

Unlike a thumbnail, higher-resolution layers can be predicted from the lower-resolution layer, so those bits are not wasted. That is not possible by layering <img> elements.

The exact same logic applies to devices you buy. These companies have shown they do not have any integrity. So why would you want buy something from them that is "smart" and never sleeps?

Whether or not that is true, I have no idea. One would expect there to be enough diversity of trade that on the balance it cannot be that lopsided, but maybe that's wrong. It is certainly possible for one side of a trade war to be hurt both coming and going, without any logical inconsistency.

The CPU can fail if the heatsink falls off! That is something that happens (I've had one come off in my hand that was being held on by nothing but hopes and dreams, fortunately not while the CPU was powered on). More likely in a desktop tower form factor.

No, the Pentium M (Banias / Dothan) also needed multiple cycles for basic SSE2 ops (with a few exceptions like PUNPCKLQDQ or PMOVMSKB), a full four years after Katmai (source: I owned one, and wrote SIMD on it for codec libraries).

I can also find decades' worth of quality books for prices that sometimes drop below $1 (though popular / rare books are frequently sold for more than their original asking price now, but inflation-adjusted, that is still a good deal, and much less than a new book). There is no reason to expect that just because something was just published recently that it is worth many multiples the cost of an older book. I will still buy new books to support authors I particularly like, but as prices keep going up, I find I am becoming more and more selective.

And finally, physical books do not spy on me or show me ads, or otherwise try to coerce me into an abusive relationship, like every other form of entertainment seems to attempt to do these days.

Debt is senior to equity. For private credit to start taking haircuts, the equity has to have already gone to zero. At that point, this will already have been everyone's problem for some time.

Internalizing things like how data dependencies matter, how expensive it is to increase the width of your vector elements (and how to avoid the need), how to turn conditions and branches into masks, or simply things like "division does not exist" becomes a lot easier when you have spent at least some time trying to use SIMD yourself.

There is no practical limit to the price of the index. Shares may represent some claim on those things you mentioned, but shares outstanding have been steadily shrinking for decades, essentially since the dot-com boom [0]. Meanwhile, governments have been printing money like it's going out of style, and most of it has been ending up with the wealthy, who, lacking any practical way to spend it all on consumption, use it to bid up asset prices. It is no wonder that the price of a shrinking pool of actual resources [1] has risen dramatically when measured in a growing supply of money (which is only a relative resource, not a real one).

One could certainly look at the rise of the 401k as a retirement vehicle, and conclude that at some point those flows are going to reverse. One could also look at the US SSA statistics on the number of workers per retiree, and its trend over time, and paint a pretty grim picture, but is that enough to offset the combined forces of inflation and the compounding wealth of the ultra-wealthy?

Man, I don't know, either.

The good news is "nothing" is all you need to know to invest in an index fund.

[0] This has actually reversed recently with the AI boom, but it is the first time in a while that companies have tried harder to raise capital to grow the pie than to buy back shares to return cash to shareholders.

[1] Rather, a shrinking pool of claims on those resources, each claim increasing its value measured in real resources as companies buy back shares, an effect Buffett famously loves.

But it is nice to hear that you have been thinking of us, too.

There are other monetary schemes that allow for negative nominal rates (100% reserve-backed lending, a.k.a. The Chicago Plan, or the gold or silver standard, etc.), and in those one does not need steady inflation. There was basically no inflation for most of the 19th century, when most currencies were backed by gold or silver. That had other drawbacks: for example, a relative inability to control the money supply. An expanding money supply following the California gold rush helped fuel speculation during the railroad boom, and the inability to expand the money supply on demand exacerbated the ensuing panic of 1873. Governments at the time did not believe it was their job to dampen the impacts of the business cycle, however.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the right to anonymous speech is inherent in the first amendment [1] [2]. See also The Federalist Papers or Common Sense, without which the US might not exist at all.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/362/60

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/93-986.ZO.html

At the height of the Great Depression (1936), some economists proposed The Chicago Plan to separate the provision of credit from the money supply by eliminating fractional reserve banking, giving better control of the increases and contractions of credit, the elimination of bank runs, and a dramatic reduction in debt. There was a recent (2012) paper from the IMF [1] that seemed to find this actually is pretty sensible, although I do not claim to be smart enough to understand all of the implications.

[1] https://www.imf.org/en/publications/wp/issues/2016/12/31/the...

And also lose $50 of tax revenue. I do not see how the government is any better off here.

Insurance prices risk. If risk goes up, so do prices. They will not lose (much) money (or not for long) [1], your insurance will just get a lot more expensive, maybe to the point you can no longer afford it. If the government tries to control prices, then insurers will just exit the market, or the only entrants will be severely under-capitalized, merely providing the veneer of insurance (e.g., because your mortgage lender requires it). This is already happening in Florida and Louisiana [2]. These insurers will simply go bankrupt in the event of a catastrophe, and you will be stuck with the loss.

[1] Technically, in a competitive environment, many insurance companies will operate with a (small) underwriting loss, but they make up the difference by investing the float during the time between when they collect the premiums and when they pay out on claims. They will not operate with an unbounded loss.

[2] https://www.wsj.com/finance/small-insurance-company-hurrican...