kryogen1c

> if you could have valued their government bonds at face value rather than market value, they had plenty of money

that is not technical definition of insolvency. if you can cover your debts but need time to do so, thats the definition of being illiquid, not insolvent.

my understanding of their books is that they could not cover their debts. the change in market conditions drove down their bond portfolio to the point of insolvency.

> SMB and Signature bank suffered from a liquidity crisis rather than a solvency crisis

did you mean SVB? they were insolvent, not just illiquid.

> Insolvency is a state of financial distress in which a business or person is unable to pay their bills.

This isn't true. If you eat at a restaurant but forget your wallet, you can't pay your bill but you're still solvent. You have assets to cover your debts. "Can't pay your bill" is too broad a statement to be meaningful. There are many complicated financial instruments and needing time to make a payment doesn't automatically make you insolvent.

> seems like a fuzzy distinction

Not really. Insolvency is by definition time independent. If you owe more than you have, you're insolvent. It doesn't really matter if you might make enough to cover the difference in the future.

In practice, you might get away with it if no one forces the issue upon you, but that doesn't change the math of whether or not you could pay your debts.

Liquidity is different. It is time dependent by definition. Some things take time to structure, deal, and sell. You can also get away with this in practice.

They can both have similar effects when they happen, but their causes are sharply different. I have a house I can sell to cover my mortgage, but couldn't sell it in less than a couple weeks or maybe even months. Illiquid but solvent.

> People keep talking about how 'this is a solvency crisis because if SVB had to sell everything today, they wouldn't cover liabilities'

This is not accurate, and the inaccuracy is the difference between solvency and liquidity.

If svb had longer (ie weeks), they still wouldn't be able to cover their debts. Its not a matter of needing time to arrange buyers for their assets; their inability to pay isn't related to liquidity today or tomorrow, it's related to their asset's value. If they snapped their fingers and marked to market all their assets, they would be in debt because they're insolvent.

> When I was 9 I thought I was a dinosaur.

This undersells how sinister underage hormone blockers are, because being a dinosaur is not a normal part of human development. identity confusion, especially during puberty, is normal for a significant percentage of people - millions.

Doctors administrating these blockers cross well past malpractice and into evil. If you are permanently altering children - the people we don't let buy cigarettes or alcohol, vote, or drive - without years of therapy first, you deserve jail time.

> the concern about experience is negated because there will always be enough experience in the body

This is a circular argument. The concern about infinite term career politicians is non-accountability and entrenched institutional corruption. Saying "well the institution has its own inertia and will still function" doesn't solve the original problem.

> After all, presidents get 4-8 years. Does this mean they’re so unable to do the job they outsource

I mean... yes? Presidents have a huge sprawling infrastructure that supports them. If there's anything the back-to-back presidencies of Trump and biden has taught us, it's that the organization surrounding the office of President largely run things anyway (Trump because he was dangerously unhinged and biden because he's grossly mentally deficient).

In fact, if it wasn't for the wildly unconstitutional expansion of power in executive orders in the past two decades, Presidents would have even less impact than they do already.

> It’s certainly possible to design term limits that avoid various pitfalls.

I think term limits are an attempt to treat a symptoms, rather than a problem. Career politicians are dangerous because of legal outside influence. I think campaign finance is the right place to strike. Money, via ads and other means, shouldn't be able to influence elections.

> I'd prefer term limits too

Fwiw, I used to think this until someone pointed me to a study about how short term limits increase reliance on outside sources like lobbyists. I don't remember the study so I can't link it, but it seems intuitively obvious. Can't become a subject matter expert in 4 years, and for sufficiently complicated jobs you're barely competent by then.

> Yes. Hunger is a bodily function and it's not necessarily regulated correctly

We're talking about a spectrum of people. The OP is correct an overwhelming majority of the time. The vast number of overweight people are not disregulated to the point self-control is not possible.

Of course, you are also correct some small percentage of the time. Some people need some help, and some people need serious medical intervention.

The core issue is that weight crosses into some discussion about identity politics and suddenly we're no longer talking about what's good or bad for you physically. "Big is beautiful" is simply wrong. You might be attracted to people who are fat or who smoke, but personal attraction isn't related to what is objectively bad for you.

> the anthropic principle

How interesting. Can't exactly run a placebo controlled double blind experiment against the full state of the universe, hm?

I've never thought about the universal preconditions that must be true for me to be thinking about them. This is shifting my whole worldview, thanks!

> if a complex system has found some kind of steady state there must be some "restoring forces"

I think this is one of those things that is True with a capital T.

If you start with the premise that life is valuable, it is eventually derivable. Life tries to exist, and since existence is path-dependent making a change is likelier to be wrong than right.

> They're evil and disturbed.

I wouldn't say evil, but reading through the comments makes it clear a lot of these people need therapy.

Surprisingly, it reminded me a lot of right wingers dressed up in body armor with a rifle that couldn't run a mile to save their life (or the life of the man next to them). Theres a performative element to both; They're LARPing, trying to regain a sense of control and meaning.

> Where, exactly, are these good cops and what are they doing?

I can't believe this comment is not only not flagged dead, but actually is the top reply here. Sometimes HN really is a caricature of liberalism.

I mean, seriously. Where are any good cops? ANY? And what are they doing?? This is so profoundly ignorant I'm not sure where to start.

- youve never seen someone tearing down the interstate going 40mph faster than surrounding traffic? Or swerved all over road? Or ran red lights? Who do you think is taking care of those problems?

- you know literally 0 people who are or were criminals and know 0 people who've been victims? I've known murderers and drug dealers. People get robbed, fights break out, domestic disputes happen.

Im not a fan of the current state of policing in America, but policing is hard and extremely dangerous; there are more guns than people here. Someone has to enforce the rule of law at their own peril. You don't have have to ignore the bad to take the good, but don't act like it's not a useful, necessary, and dangerous profession. Don't be a child.

Don't get me wrong, I'm much more anti-woke than the average HNer, but there appears to be something to this, at least in my head.

In imagining what I would call various Europeans, I would probably say Germans or English people or Italians, or people from Spain, but I would definitely say the French and there seems to be some hint of negativity to it.

My perception of the French (there it is!) is that they are haughty and condescending, especially of americans. I also carry some patronizing admonition about their military role in the world wars.

You can criticize this for being preconceived and ignorant - you'd probably be right. I'm not rationally arguing, just exploring my own headspace and finding some emotional validity in TFA. It would be woke garbage to make the claim that prefixing "the" in front of everyone is dehumanizing, but I at least only do that selectively with the apparent intent to marginalize.

Remember like three weeks ago when the twitter files showed US congress texting and calling back and forth with the heads of major corporations? About how congress was polling in response to those corporations' actions and what they were both gonna do about it?

Yeah no one else does either.

> toggles are reserved for cases when you turn on a feature or service, and checkboxes just modify

Oh wow. I've never thought about this before but that is very intuitive.

Toggles have a physical, analog equivalent, like a switch or lever. Checkboxes don't really map to meatspace; they're strictly a logical construct.

Makes sense that toggles do big changes and checkboxes tweak.

> The problem is that most people call a mild cold or even an abortive infection "flu".

This is one of a class of problem I've identified as "stuff i learned in my childhood that is simply wrong".

For some reason, I grew up with the impression that vomiting and/or GI issues could be the flu, or the 24 hour flu. I'm not entirely sure how respiratory viruses with fevers became confused in such a manner.

> real people

There's a lot of braindead crypto hate on HN, but these are very real and salient points.

I work in IT. I have to reset people's passwords after a 3day weekend. The other day, an employee typed their password into a phishing email because the real person they were emailing got compromised in the middle of their email exchange.

Crypto banking is simply a nonstarter for these people. There was an article on HN about how scammers cost 10B$ last year. A bank where mistakes are permanent and irreversible will never be mainstream.

> I'll never forget the open contempt Meta has shown for me as a user of their products.

Even better was when messenger split off from fb proper into its own app, but still showed a notification bubble with red exclamation marks (or some such, it's been a while) that you couldn't dismiss. clicking opened the page to install the messenger app.

I deleted my account.

Quite right. If there is a fire in your house, it is still an emergency even if you have an extinguisher and evacuation plan.

> There are no non cloud options if MS Office anymore

This is wrong.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...

Additionally, if you're a business There are various non-cloud volume licensing options available.

"Sbf worked closely with tax accountants and lawyers" is a very different argument than "sbf's parents knew about taxes"

> the son of 2 tax experts

I'm no SBF apologist, but this is about the silliest argument you could make. What does what his parents did have anything to do with anything? I don't know anything about my parents' field of expertise.

> doesn't seem like a big deal, this is just confirming what was already known?

This story kept me up last night. I think it's the biggest news story I've seen in my lifetime, and everyone seems to be missing the point. Forget Snowden, Lewinsky, or traunched CDOs.

The failure mode for capitalism is not national farming quotas starving 10 million people to death or a national ethnosocialist genocide. We have to worry about the unregulated concentration of power/capital; monopoly busting is one critical aspect of this. Another related aspect is capital's effect on the regulators, on politics.

What we see here is both parties, and the white house proper, with a direct and open line to executives of some of the biggest multinational tech companies in existence. This is not consulting jobs following an exit from politics, or hundred thousand dollar speaking deals at business conventions. Sitting members of congress are emailing corporate execs from their cell phones. They're discussing congressional polling data in a near real-time way. Theyre asking twitter (and presumably meta and others) to selectively moderate partisan political posts. DURING ELECTION SEASON.

This is insanity. Forget Russian interference, this is real, documented, American interference. The regulators and regulated are publicly in bed together.

We must grab an axe and sever these ties immediately. This is the formation of a true ruling class. Get the money out of politics NOW.

> headline news?

this is really the crux of your question. gun violence in America is a multifaceted problem, but if your source of information is headline news, you will get 0 meaningful information.

> Do thieves and robbers get shot on a regular basis

this depends drastically on the local/state laws. San Francisco, for example, does not issue permits to carry concealed firearms and openly carrying firearms is illegal. California is simply a very gun unfriendly state, so you will almost never see a citizen defend themselves from a robber with a gun there. Even if you can carry a gun somewhere else, as a sibling goes into more detail, there are various laws with wildly different requirements to be able to employ lethal force. They range from requiring you to attempt to run away first to allowing lethal violence in defense of your property (like a vehicle with cameras in it).

for what its worth, gun violence in america has little to do with so-called mass shootings that make the headlines or the hated "assault rifles". the story of gun violence in america is something like 90% pistol shootings in economically damaged, inner city slums.

> There's also a huge difference between "just asking questions" and "just asking questions"

What is that?

Let's pretend I'm a card carrying jackboot wearing nazi. What question could I just ask, in bad faith? How come black people commit more crime? How come more black people are in prison?

Those are actually fantastic questions that, seriously considered, could lead to some significant societal change.

I can't think of an instance where the good/bad faith of the asker has any bearing on the question.

I never did this personally, but I worked with civilians that did 9 80s. If management isn't willing to consider "exotic" schedules, 9 80s seem like a really good starting point and a pretty sweet deal

In the US nuclear navy, the power plants have to be manned 24 hours a day both operating and shutdown. Ships in maintenance periods also generally go through a phase where ship personnel have to support maintenance work around the clock. Additionally, some parts of the training pipeline are run 24 hours a day.

I say all that to say that while I am not a subject matter expert, I have a significantly above average amount of experience working various types of rotating shift work as well as duty rotations (a duty rotation is working 24 hours every 2, 3, 4, or 5 days depending on available manpower. Yes, you read that right - for a month, I was at work 28 to 32 out of every 48 hours).

Forget 4 8 hour days, I would work 4 10 hour days right now in a heartbeat with no discussion or regrets.

1) it is invaluable to have a normal working day where you can do tasks - change your oil, get your haircut, go grocery shopping without a crowd, see a matinee, the list is endless.

2) the scope of weekend trip you can plan across 3 days instead of two is exponentially higher. So much room for activities.

3) time after the working day just isn't that useful. Drive home, eat dinner, now it's 630/7pm. Waste a couple hours, go to sleep. After a 10hour day, the time after work is precious and useful to relax, but then you get a whole other day off.

It surely isn't for everyone, but it surely is for a lot of people. The thing that blows my mind is no one is even willing to try.

Thanks for connecting the dots, I was doing this research before I found your comment. I knew I had searched for covered telecom equipment last year.

Also, I didn't know the covered list was being updated. Does anyone know what AO Kaspersky is? Is that the official corporate name for the anti-virus Kaspersky?

> It now takes 2 seconds to start on an 8-core computer with a PCIe 4 NVMe SSD.

The same is true of the snipping tool, which I find truly astounding.

Microsoft is really staying on track for alternating good and bad OSes.