drtillberg

Paperclip maximizing AI. It's so interesting that the long-form narrative of a trading house omits to dive into the detail of a single actual trade!

Similar function to a consent judgment[1]. Remedies can include citation for contempt, continuing supervision .

[1] https://www.lexisnexis.com/lexis-practice-advisor/the-journa...

I understood the parent to be commenting that Garmin is repackaging customer revenue as a securities product, i.e., their common stock, which they sell to investors. Point being that investors are the key stakeholder, not customers.

It's not a unique POV for a company to have, it's just it's maybe more a subject of laser focus for companies in this era.

Re: #2, that is active sonar, which is for useful for locating objects that are silent, e.g., rocks.[1] It also is very loud and disruptive for whales and dolphins.[2]

[1] https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/sonar.html

[2] https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4236

Luc Montagnier's theory is inconvenient in two ways: 1. it suggests that academic research concerning viruses is potentially catastrophically hazardous and 2. he predicted that the pandemic will dissapate all on its own because the manipulated aspects of the virus will not survive long.[1]

These are truly fascinating claims, especially the second, which despite the credibility and stature of the source, have been targeted rather than reported by traditional media outlets in the U.S.

[1] https://www.gilmorehealth.com/chinese-coronavirus-is-a-man-m...

Florida's positive test rates are in dispute due to large irregularities, specifically, failure to report negative results.[1]. Chalk up The Hill report to more goalseeked nonsense.

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/07/15/florid...

In practice, newspapers just have different thought leaders now. Once, reporters parroted "a government spokesman confirmed that" -- this was treated as pure fact. It wasn't perfect, but in the U.S. context it generally didn't seem far off the mark.

Now the narrative is provided by the opaque party apparatus of the DNC and GOP. This leads to one result-- factual inaccuracy. Media coverage of key issues thus has become little better than the political propaganda from non-free global rivals in the 20th century. Quite a fall.

If the hypothetical crisis divides up the Internet so, for example, U.S. users only can connect to U.S. nodes, and connect to U.S. miners -- and the same is true for Iceland and China and South Africa etc., it would become extremely perilous to trade value for the currency anywhere in the world, right? Because the geographically-separate chains cannot synchronize in any reasonable way.

A breakdown of the Internet by geography is definitely a crisis that should be on radar screens, and it wouldn't require anything like a total societal breakdown.

Then HAM TOR and whatever else would become essential to keep the network stable.

I'm cynical enough at this point to wonder whether the states will add these terrible losses to the COVID-19-related statistics to advocate for stricter and longer lock-downs.

So maybe we ban all references to nations of individuals that have in the past committed war crimes? Even the limited to recent history, the list is sort of long[1], but African nations seem to be well represented. As a convenient shorthand, maybe we just ban the African continent altogether?

/sarc

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_indicted_in_t...

For the next act we'll censor images of the pyramids of Egypt, which were constructed by slave labor. And then we'll ban texts of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which was influenced by an enlightenment thinker, Voltaire, who also supported the slave trade. And for our next act we'll ban images of Washington, D.C. with its columns and white marble, which glorifies Roman slave-owning society.

Of course bailouts from the Fed "make" money. When the Fed increases its balance sheet by $2T, it "made" $2T. Indeed if it devoted the entire bailout to buying paperclips or Renaissance art, or S&P500 common stock, the prices of those things would go up (or go down less). However, the question is whether the Fed is buying things that are in the public interest.

When the Fed creates $xxx billion it "makes" money. The real question is whether the Fed bought something worthwhile.

The fact that a market coalesced around the asset isn't that significant because the Fed can't withdraw from the market now without watching prices for the asset collapse.

A chaplin recently had to resign in apology at a distinguished academic institution for ... making factual and insightful comments about the George Floyd incident.[1] McCarthy eventually was shamed and disgraced by his casual destructiveness. "Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

[1] https://nypost.com/2020/06/17/mit-chaplain-resigns-over-emai...

I interpreted the report as: "There are 9 unguarded remote sites which, if damaged maliciously or accidentally, would lead to complete collapse of the U.S. as a nation."

And then experts focus on 2 unlikely generalized scenarios of an area EMP effect incidentally affecting the sites. As for the more obvious catastrophe of someone specifically targeting the locations? I guess that's being discussed separately?[1]

[1] https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/16/technology/sniper-power-gri...

The explanation in the article is reassuring and all that, but even still RH was allowing $700k+ margin on a $16k account. Maybe they feel the risk is low for covered-options writing-- and justifiably.

However, last I checked (some time ago) a purely cash account would have required literally $700k+ to execute this trade. Because, you know, stuff happens.

Only the operators know for sure, but the site is so extremely contrarian one cannot always read a negative ZH headline and infer an intent that traders sell, or a positive headline and infer an intent that traders buy. Often the intent seems to be just the opposite, i.e., sentiment is awful, trade accordingly.

>> the supercomputer simulations for the new study (35 years of calculations on a single PC)...

Was the simulation saved all these years on a floppy disk running on an old 386 PC?

Would have liked more explanation of the quote.

The fundamentals of Hertz are terrible, but the market as a whole doesn't trade on fundamentals anymore, so this is unexpected as a matter of degree.

Still, I suspect that despite the rhetoric surrounding this dead cat bounce, the nonzero Hertz stock price is more a result of market structure. I saw similar delayed declines years ago (when I followed the market more closely) in several contexts that I attributed to the interplay between the equity and options markets. In simplest terms, a decline that should happen on Friday is delayed until Monday after an options expiration. On smaller floats this delay in price action could last for months. I never fully understood the mechanism behind it-- whether it was large options-writers manipulating the market or just the natural outcome of options-writing activity.

TL;DR: Someone in this system besides Hertz probably is acting normally and rationally, and the Hertz price action merely is delayed by the market structure, specifically, options activity.

Taibbi is not alone in this, but he's prolific, consistent and the best. If he was anything less, traditional media relentlessly would tell us about his "fake news."

It says something about our moment in history that it would take a maverick and upstart working at the edges of institutions to say something true about the great issues of our time.

A competent lawyer can find a violation of Federal law violation in almost any impromptu government action, mainly violations of due process rights. The key substantive benefit of making such a claim, piling onto state law violations, is recovery of attorneys fees under Section 1983.

It's easy to see that each example in the article involved improper conduct that hopefully violated state law. State law decisions in each case hopefully would have been easy(ier). Constitutional law, on the other hand, sometimes is hard-- especially when there isn't a decision directly on point.

So, we get qualified immunity, where judges decline to allow the tail of (potential) attorneys fee recovery wag the dog of constitutional law challenges that involve complicated issues of both fact and law. No one loves litigation about attorneys fees except lawyers, and that's key insight in understanding the law of qualified immunity.

An alternate solution would be to adjust the incentives that litigants have to bring Section 1983 challenges in the first place-- possibly by making attorneys fees more generally available to litigants-- so that they reserve Section 1983 claims for those cases where they are truly decisive.

Edit: The article does talk about attorneys fees briefly, I corrected my comment. Thanks.

This.

Sweden's path has been conventional. The attention is coming from nations that executed extreme and even revolutionary policies of universal home arrest, "shutting" an entire nation like a coffee shop, and sending a 30%+ of the workers onto unemployment.

This ultimately comes back to the so-called "Trolley problem,"[1] which some posters in this thread have brilliantly acknowledged. Would we throw the whole world out of work, or imprison them, or bankrupt them, to save 1 life? If not, what is the limit or deciding principle?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

That's a seven day death rate.

The specific shortcoming its government is looking into, according to the article, was inability to "protect care homes where half of all Sweden’s Covid-19 deaths have occurred."

Sorry, don't need a society-wide lockdown to protect nursing and group homes, which are highly regulated and often government-operated.

Lies, bad lies, and statistics.

For example, MarketWatch has been pushing articles for months about discrimination relative to public health measures to generate a narrative critical of the U.S. travel ban earlier this year affecting flights to and from China.[1] Closer to home, you can look to the steady diet of fear-based public health reporting that the "news" outlet finally has explicitly disclaimed as non-factual (but always was defective) -- "Due to the rapidly changing nature of the coronavirus public health crisis, some of the recommendations included in this article may eventually become out-of-date."[2]. It's ok to be wrong, but the "news" consistently has been "wrong" in a manner that has generated support for particular political policies, even particlar drugs have become political lightning rods whose efficacy is not being investigated or reported in a fair and reliable manner.[3]

One can explain this, and explain that, but when the sum result is being locked inside for months on end, unemployed, blocked from major life events with a media wrongly cheeleading those policies with wrong and unsupported information, this leads to a loss of trust. I'm not saying the media outlets are on a lark; I'm saying they haven't done their jobs of reporting facts outside the filter of propaganda and political bias which has infected so much policy dialog.

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/no-chinese-allowed-racism-...

[2] https://www.boston.com/culture/lifestyle/2020/04/16/is-it-sa...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/may/28/questions-ra...

My takeaway is that "news" from commercial outlets like MarketWatch (the publisher here) largely is not fact-based. Compare to reports in February about waves of anti-Asia discrimination, correspondeding to a major and ill-advised Democratic information initiative.

I don't know if Twitter has bots or how they tilt. What I do know is post-coronavirus commerical "news" outlets have lost my trust, as has much of the political establishment, red or blue.

Everyone's situation is different. Unemployment isn't 100% and the class of 2021 won't have this gap. Think employers are rational enough to iron that out? Nah, you have more faith than me.

>its on the governments to provide the safety net until we have everything under control.

Let's be clear-- there is no true safety net for middle-income professionals. We can draw down savings and cross our fingers that this resume gap doesn't kill a professional career. And that's just the financial and career consequences. There definitely are other consequences of unemployment too.

I feel fortunate not to live in L.A. county but the public health response my state is not a lot less draconian. I just am astounded. I would love to wrap everyone and everything in bubble wrap as much as the next person to protect everyone from a very dangerous world but this is too much.

If insurers or sovereign wealth funds or newly unemployed need to raise cash by selling stock then ... naturally stocks like P&G should fall with the rest of the market ... because market action is determined in all but the long run by buyers and sellers, less so the companies that issued the stock originally (unless the company is buying or selling)

Don't discount the impact of reduction of air pollution on all causes of mortality. It's not often discussed, but every so often someone makes the connection between small particulates and heart attacks, etc.

The balance, nuance, respect for law-- this is absent from the public discussion in the U.S.