> The US is so fractured we couldn’t take on Zimbabwe right now.
No need to be so dramatic.
1,324 karma · joined November 11, 2013
No need to be so dramatic.
And at the economic and government level, there exists a calculus for determining the "value" of a citizen to determine whether to address a situation.
There's a good Planet Money episode on this. [1]
"They say a human life is worth about $10 million."
It's a pretty messed up thing to try and determine, the dollar value of a person's life, but if you have to make tough policy decisions then it's a tool.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/04/15/835571843/episode-991-lives-v...
However, I agree with the parent - you actually have to have great products and services that delight to become big and relevant... and stay big and relevant. This enables your sexy branding to be effective. Your sexy branding doesn't make your products and services better. It just lures consumers in, but that only works for so long unless you deliver on your promise. A brand is a promise kept as the old saying goes.
This is from 7 years ago but a pretty good: The Twilight of Brands - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/twilight-brand...
"the rise of brands was a response to an information-poor environment. When consumers had to rely on advertisements and their past experience with a company, brands served as proxies for quality; if a car was made by G.M., or a ketchup by Heinz, you assumed that it was pretty good. It was hard to figure out if a new product from an unfamiliar company was reliable or not, so brand loyalty was a way of reducing risk. As recently as the nineteen-eighties, nearly four-fifths of American car buyers stayed loyal to a brand."
"Roku, a maker of streaming entertainment devices, has thrived even though its products have to compete with similar ones made by Apple (which is usually cited as the world’s most valuable brand)."
So let's say you buy Apple (just the name and branding and nothing else) - you still aren't going to be shit without everything else.
We aren't in an information poor environment. Consumers would know the brand was sold and that the quality could not be trusted.
Here's a documentary about naked short selling and failures to deliver if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kpyhnmd-ZbU
Here's an economist, PhD and former DTC who authored "Naked, Short & Greedy" and has been trying to sound the alarm on naked shorts and phantom shares for decades: https://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2020/03/how-phantom-shares-o...
From that article - "The world‘s biggest stock fraudster, Bernie Madoff, wrote from prison February 3, 2012, “It was perfectly proper to short [my clients’] securities or purchase those positions back from those clients or others with any profit or loss recorded on my books. … The point is that this was my practice prior to the time that I fell into my crime of staying Naked Short. The fact that the prosecutor and Trustee seemed clueless of this is why my frustration is so great.”
GameStop may have gone the way of Toys R Us and countless others.
The shares shorted don't align with what should have been available. You can tally up institutional ownership, make some guesses on retail and use the short numbers available from various sources. It doesn't add up. You can also look at SEC failures to deliver.
None of this sounds like an elaborate fantasy to me. The information is out there.
Now, will anything be fixed? Definitely not unless it's exposed. Kind of what this is all about.
They have the known brand in a huge and growing industry.
They have a revenue sharing agreement on digital sales.
Will sell more PC gear and expand product selection. Invest in better customer support like Ryan Cohen did with Chewy.
On the financial side recently - "The gaming retailer's global e-commerce sales increased 175%, representing 34% of the company's total net revenue during the quarter. During the same period last year, e-commerce made up just 12% of total sales." [1]
So still a long way to go but people are mostly betting on Ryan Cohen, the team he's assembled and shifting to be more e-commerce heavy.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/23/tech/gamestop-earnings-q4-202...
Although there are indeed issues with peers (and witnesses). I was in a large lecture hall some time ago and someone came in to do an staged purse snatch. You couldn't see the person's face and they were moving fast.
When the class was shown a lineup to say who it was, most all agreed it was one of the suspects. When asked why, they said he was tall (he was much taller than the others in the lineup).
And that was the whole point. People will try and identify based on little info and they make the incorrect assumption that the lineup they were presented with actually has the real perpetrator!
So if you presented a lineup (maybe an impartial organization other than the police) and made it really clear to the witnesses that the perp may very well NOT be in the lineup, you would probably fix a lot of bad identifications. And you wouldn't have detectives trying to influence a decision. That would be a good start.
He got obliterated on his suggestion that they have suicide support (A rep called the support hotline and it went straight to voicemail). He said "I admit to always improving". Was extremely shady if there was no wrongdoing.
Chamath said "I remember when I met the @RobinhoodApp founders when they were raising their Seed, Series A and Series B. I passed. Why? Optimize for integrity whenever possible because integrity compounds and assholes will fuck you." [1]
I think we'll find out a lot more about Vlad and his operation in the near future. I do not wish them luck on their IPO.
He writes like that because he's part of the system. It's so entrenched it's all self preservation and tons of money influencing the media to say what they want them to say. But it's hard to parse because the experts that are feeding seemingly sensible info are former Goldman Sachs or similar.
Jim Cramer bragged about how he manipulated stock prices at a hedge fund and if he was short you can't "foment", on your own, an impression that a stock is down but you do it anyway because "the SEC doesn't understand it". You trick the "moron longs" and "spread a rumor on Apple because the writers want that story and Apple isn't going to comment on it". "this is what's really going on in the market that you really don't see". "what's important when you're in that hedge fund is to not do anything remotely truthful because the truth is so against your view that it's important to create a new truth". It's absurd. [1] And this guy is still on a major network with major influence.
If you are looking at that Archegos situation objectively, you would say clearly - that's fucked up for them to do with other people's money. Not Levine.
Yet when "normal" people risk their own money on something he disagrees with, he's writing a big diatribe about how ridiculous it is. When banks play with their money, nothing to see here people. They might have been doing a rational move.
Or in this article "yes credit suisse did two bad things" and "Still it is strange to characterize this as primarily securities fraud against the shareholders, to think that the problem here was lying."
Just characterize it as securities fraud secondarily I guess Matt?
I like his insight into the system but he does way too much early PR damage control and apologies for the embedded players and not enough objective commentary. But again, he writes for Bloomberg and is former Goldman Sachs.
> most deposits can be withdrawn on short notice.
Except for the fact that person A deposits $X in the bank and person B has $X withdrawn, nothing physical happens. It's just an offset on the books and enables them to keep very low cash reserves.
"As of March 2020, the minimum reserve requirement for all deposit institutions was abolished, or more technically, fixed to zero percent of eligible deposits. The Board previously mandated a zero reserve requirement for banks with eligible deposits up to $16 million, 3% for banks up to $122.3 million, and 10% thereafter. The removal of reserve requirements followed the Federal Reserve's shift to an "ample-reserves" system, in which the Federal Reserve Banks pay member banks interest on reserves that they keep in excess of the required amount." [1]
Very little value added at all but much extracted.
Bloomberg terminal subscriptions with $20k+/year licenses as one small example. The equivalent of an Oracle to many on here and the licensing most despise but for some reason nobody questions this guy? Or Bloomberg/CNBC/similiar in general? Or anyone peddling any financial stuff? Would we just trust a big co enterprise salesperson that's been around the block? No we wouldn't.
Anyway, he said of Archegos before:
"But one thing I want to say about the banks is that if you were one of Hwang’s prime brokers and you had perfect information — about how big he was and how concentrated, about how many banks were financing him, about his effect on stock prices, about Viacom’s stock offering, etc. — you might still rationally do this trade, if you were confident you could get out first."
You'd have to be part of the system to make a statement like that.
Banks take deposits and list them as assets. And then get risky with that money they have relatively low cash reserves for. And when they screw up, it costs them less than what they gained. It's ridiculous.
The financial engineers' version of rational is reckless.
Your suggestion that you can safely just quarantine and not be a risk to others is flat out wrong because you are at your most contagious 24-48 hours before you have symptoms.
Also you may not have immunity after you sheltered and recovered.
I'll agree with you that the response was pretty terrible though.
"research suggests that people who are infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, are at their most contagious in the 24 to 48 hours before they experience symptoms." [1]
[1] https://medical.mit.edu/covid-19-updates/2020/10/exposed-to-...
The author's title is unfortunate: "Never use environment variables for configuration"
Not everyone is writing CLI scripts. Some are writing multi-environment software for the web. Some people care about git and distributed teams.
Let's say you backup and migrate a db which has config in the db. Well your other environment is using the wrong config! Now you're possibly using prod SMTP credentials and sending notifications to the wrong people because all you wanted to do was have live content and do some testing or show debug messages because you're on a test environment.
Web frameworks which have the HTTP host in the database drive me nuts. Why do you need that? Your webserver is responding on a domain name. Why do some store the absolute url in the db. It makes no sense. For the 3 people that want to serve up domainA.com but have all links readily be domainB.com maybe that makes sense.
Don't get burned people. For most things, just ignore this article, keep your secrets out of version control and keep your code ready to deploy to multiple environments. Decouple that. Your app should be able to work with various configurable services (SMTP, push notifications, database, etc) and you don't want that config in version control.
So either a file that's outside of version control with variables you set per environment or actual server environment variables.
Environment variables in many web languages are just namespaced globals. Still better than global variables. They serve a purpose.
The author has this:
int first_argument;
int second_argument;
void add_numbers(void) { return first_argument + second_argument; }
While it helps the author's agenda, that's not a legitimate example.
A real example would be a service provider which a developer would understand to have the sole purpose of pulling from environment or config values to initialize.
You wanted a Twilio client? Well, we know it needs some keys. Use environment variables. Boom. Everywhere you ask for this Twilio client you get the same instance with the config that that environment needs.
This is not a problem. It works well. Better than any alternative.
Author also says this "Environment variables is exactly this: mutable global state."
For some CLI applications maybe. But for web languages this is not accurate. Some languages, yes, you can mutate the env variables at runtime. But your code shouldn't rely on any mutable env vars. You can load those env vars into a config. Even cache it. Not allow mutations. Many modern frameworks support this or you could implement it yourself.
And if you have a CLI that really needs to be explicit about the environment vars to run? And not be different the next time you call it with no env vars? Well maybe take those as arguments?
Plenty of CLI apps that store config in json and have a wizard to set those credentials. AWS CLI as an example.
Now you got JSON as the author wanted. That can work across platforms. But guess what? You work on multiple clients and hosts and next time you call it? Well you might not be expecting that it had config for another client or app.
Same problem. The state was mutated. You called it again. You potentially got burned. Now you have to do the CLI wizard to reconfigure. Or you pass in explicit params if allowed.
Definitely a consideration if you are writing such a program. Do you make it explicit with arguments and options? Load from ENV vars? Have some CLI wizard and save to JSON?
The author's suggestion of JSON is no reason to toss out ENV vars. Just solves slight differences between Windows and Unix. Which is why you can program a CLI wizard if you care about that problem.
We don't need to say no to env vars because we want CLI app users across different platforms to have the exact same API. Setting up a JSON file is really lame to use a program. Which is why you see cli wizards when you run them.
Or things like "aws configure". And you still have CLI arguments and options availabe.
Also, I don't follow the spirit of your comment. The United Nations came out of WW2. And the US is a key member of those coalitions against any malevolent regimes.
Just how it works. A direct threat isn't a thing anymore of relevance when you're a member of a coalition.
Also there are tons of options to flip if you want to put in some work and have the funds. Not that hard when the price per square foot grossly exceeds the cost to build.
How is that, or even the 250k individual comical? Also, that's the gain that has no taxes AFTER fees/commissions. It does not get "eaten away".
You can also do 1031 exchanges, opportunity zones with real estate, or put it into an LLC. A lot of flexibility and tax strategy available.
You will have a commission in the expense ratio indefinitely.
But yes, definitely a decent option if you want to put your money in real estate with less headache.
Now if they could get a stronger offer by still keeping it on market, and they're only the listing agent, then yes a new offer of like 50k more isn't going to mean that much for them. They'd rather get it sold. That is messed up too because that delta is meaningful for the owner.
From what the parent said, they stopped taking calls because they wanted to represent both sides. It's fucked up.
"This buyer has a higher down payment". "They have more reserves if it under appraises". etc.
Price doesn't always win. And it shouldn't. But there are a lot of shady agents that do shady things.
Put 10% down on 1M. Goes up in value to 1.5M in a few years. Boom. 500K gain on 100k. Not that uncommon.
Also, if it's your primary, then tax free income up to that 500k if filing jointly when you sell if you lived in it for 2 years. Hard to beat.
It's where they change how they treat someone based on the color of their skin while alleging they're an ally.
They think they need to save or help them because they think they're incapable of doing things like getting ID at the DMV, voting or using the internet. They're the ones that use terms like African American and have never had real talk with some black friends, if they have any at all.
They say they're for equality but they don't treat other races or ethnicities as equals. Maybe it just makes themselves feel good, maybe they have a lot of guilt, maybe they feel like they're part of the solution.
And certainly, some people could use more help than others, but it's dangerous, unhealthy and unfair to start with the assumption that someone is incapable of something or treat them like a victim to feed their own savior complex or agenda.
People who are physically handicapped don't even want people coddling their life. Why do some people assume they need and want their help with everything?
Many Europeans object to calling themselves Europeans.
Ex: From my travels and conversations - the English don't refer to themselves as Europeans. I asked them what continent they lived on. Doesn't matter.
In "GME round 1", S3 was reaching out to CNBC to correct them, saying most of the shorts are NOT covering. [1]
The 100%+ was based on low float numbers or algorithms developed by companies like S3. Morningstar, as an example, currently reports the float at 27.29M. So their SI is 52% right now.
Nobody really knows what it is at any given time. We have 2 week gaps in data.
So yes, round 2, there appears to be a big drop in shorts, but who knows. There's a battle going on. After round 1, nobody would want a high short volume come reporting time.
So what's the actual short volume. And what are the positions on those? Nobody knows.
S3, from their algorithm estimates 20.52% right now. [2]
They were really quick to get that up when it happened but not so quick to alter the headline they want.
Isn't it more newsworthy that it bounced back so quickly? It's up over $100/share since Monday. Currently up $20/share on the day and will be on the short sale restriction list tomorrow.
That big dip today puts it on the short sale restriction list so tomorrow will be interesting.
AMC also had a similar big dip at about the same time as GME.