nostrademons

There has been a tendency for each of the last 4 presidents to do the opposite of their campaign slogans. GW Bush was "Compassionate conservatism" in 2000, and then he started 2 wars and radically expanded both the federal budget deficit and the federal government. In 2004 it was "A safer world and a more hopeful America", and look where we are now. Obama's 2008 slogans included "Change", "Hope", and "Yes we can", and then we got more of the same, proving that no we couldn't. His 2012 slogan was "Middle class first", and then 2012-2016 featured the evisceration of the middle class. Biden's 2020 slogans were "Build back better", "Restore the soul of the nation", and "Our best days still lie ahead", and none of those seem particularly descriptive of what actually happened 6 years later (though I'll grant that the Biden presidency was a normalcy reprieve after COVID and Jan 6).

Donald Trump's slogans were "Make America Great Again" and "Drill baby drill", and so of course he's been destroying America and kickstarting the green revolution through high oil prices.

Depends whether you expect this conflict to continue.

If these are the opening salvos of WW3 or even just a protracted regional Mideast war, yes you should get the EV. Experience in WW2 was that it became impossible to get petrol & diesel at any price. Supply lines would often be disrupted, and what petroleum products were available were usually allocated to the military.

If tensions die down after the midterms and eventually a peace accord or even stalemate is reached, you're looking at about 2-3 years of current prices. It'll take time to rebuild production in most Middle Eastern countries, many of which have had large oilfields, pipelines, and tanker loading facilities destroyed. You'll have to run the financials yourself of how much an EV costs, how much life you have left in your existing vehicle, and what local gas and electricity costs are, but I believe most EVs don't pencil out economically if it's just 2-3 years of current gas prices.

A third option is that everybody else (notably China and India) switches to EVs. If this happens gas will go down in price through reduced competition for it, and so you may be able to enjoy cheap gas for the remainder of your vehicle's lifetime. But note that in this scenario, you probably want to switch to an EV yourself, as eventually parts, repairs, and infrastructure for gas cars will become impossible to find.

Note that it is now outside of the control of the POTUS or U.S. military whether this conflict continues. They can prolong it, but they can't stop it. Recent aggression has been driven by Iran and its proxies, who are demonstrating that there is nothing the U.S. can do about it.

This doesn't work as long as hostilities continue, since as we've seen so far, pipelines are extremely vulnerable to drone and cruise missile attack.

It would be interesting if AI actually did optimize the P&L at most companies.

Right now, the vast majority of office jobs are bullshit jobs, because the director who holds the budget is incentivized to maximize headcount rather than P&L. The job is not strictly necessary, but if the money is not spent, it disappears, and so the director has an incentive to ensure everything is spent.

The reason these jobs can continue to exist is because of poor information flow within the organization. Directors distort both the importance and required resources for the projects they're working on, making them seem harder and more lucrative than they actually are. It's notoriously difficult to credit an actual transaction back to a particular product feature that made someone buy, so there is no actual verification of these. Then these project proposals are looked at by an FP&A analyst who has maybe 5 minutes to evaluate each, so of course 100 headcount to maintain a 3-screen CRUD mobile app seems reasonable.

A rational, omniscient AI would look at this and say "This is ridiculous. I can code this app in 50ms." And so if we actually did put AI in charge of the P&L, they would likely fire 100% of the employees, as well as doing other shady stuff like charging all stored credit cards multiple times, gaslighting consumers as to the existence of the product, and DDoSing the court system.

But again, this strengthens my thesis. So the AI has now fired 100% of the humans in the workforce and is running amuck with the financial system. What do the remaining 100% of unemployed people do? Start trading their skills for old-fashioned analog currency, like gold coins or even paper dollars. They just disconnect the AI, turn off the computers, and go about their daily business.

"Money flows through markets, not into markets."

That said, there is a meaningful difference in terms of who has control of the money, and what they choose to do with it. Bank reserves are a red-herring; before the investor chose to buy either AI or government bonds with it, it was sitting in a bank deposit where the bank had parked it in short-term Treasuries. But prices are set on the margin (because again, money flows through markets, not into them), and so it is the act of that investor choosing to buy AI company bonds rather than government bonds that sets the relevant interest rates of both.

A related confusion is that the bank reserves are parked in short-term T-bills, whose interest rate is largely controlled by the Fed, while the investments we're talking about are AI corporate bonds vs. long-term government bonds. These are three different asset classes that trade on three different markets with three different interest rates.

It's always possible to make the number go up by divorcing the number from any real-world meaning. I think the "Singularity", as AI proponents call it, will actually happen, and will likely happen pretty close to its predicted date of 2029. It's just that the form it'll take will be "I'll have your AI talk to my AI", AI botnets clickfrauding AI ad networks, AI newspapers serving up content to AI social media users, AI job boards reading AI generated resumes of people that don't actually exist, AI agents at work generating walls of text that are summarized by AI email readers and then are never read by humans anyway. Meanwhile, actual humans go fuck off to raise their kids while being paid by AI finance and HR departments that have no idea if you're actually working, because AI mouse-jigglers will provide a convincing simulacrum. Of course, the AI-inflated currency won't buy anything that you actually want, and so all actual commerce will function on personal relationships, barter, and local currency, kinda like it did in pre-industrial times.

But in terms of real products that affect people's lives in positive ways, capitalism has a problem. There are going to be fewer real people in the future, which means a shrinking market for everything, which makes it harder to justify technological improvements and amortize their R&D costs over a large market. Many of the incentives in capitalism assume growth; when that assumption is violated, the game theory collapses to everybody fighting over a share of the shrinking pie before it disappears.

Then you have to time the market. Cash or short-term treasuries right now, moved into long-term treasuries when rates finished going up, moved into stocks when the economic damage becomes apparent. Getting the timing right is left as an exercise for the reader.

Higher interest rates basically mean that asset prices will crash, at least in real terms. The value of an asset is the discounted value of all future cash flows; as the discount rate goes up, the value goes down, particularly for assets (like AI stocks) where the cash flows are far in the future.

Unfortunately the right asset to hold depends on why rates are going up. If you believe that rates are going up because we're in for high inflation rates ahead and so bondholders need to be compensated for expected face-value depreciation, then you should buy hard assets (gold, oil, Bitcoin) or stocks that generate a lot of cash now (utilities, FANGs, commodity producers like oil companies). But if you believe that rates are going up because the Fed is going to hike rates and get inflation under control, the right asset to hold is cash. Every other asset will lose value as rates go up and cash becomes scarce, and then you can pick them up cheap when we get the inevitable steep recession.

A rule of thumb is that it's never worth taking out insurance on something that you can afford to replace in full yourself.

Note though that in many cases, insurance is mandated by law. In many states you have to have auto insurance. If you have a mortgage you usually have to have home insurance. The cost of medical treatment is such that a single accident can cost more than your lifetime earnings, essentially forcing an automatic bankruptcy. Indeed, the reason for the auto and home insurance mandates is often to pay for liability coverage in case you get sued for somebody else's medical treatment.

Given the dealings that I've had with the insurance industry, it seems that many companies realize that their function is just to tick the legal box. They have skeleton or nonexistent claims-handling departments that employees are frequently laid off from. The goal is to slow-walk any claims past the statute of limitations, so that nobody gets paid out anyway, but they can continue to collect the premiums because the government requires that everyone have insurance. (But then another phenomena is that people are increasingly ignoring the government too, such that they now offer "uninsured motorist coverage" to make up for cases where you're hit and hurt by someone who illegally doesn't have insurance.)

I would agree with this solution, and also think that these other reforms to the legal system are necessary:

1.) The cost of the court system needs to go way down. It's not okay to have justice be a luxury good; every citizen needs to have a way of adjudicating and enforcing their rights.

2.) Laws need to be enforced uniformly. Right now the usual outcome for the squeaky wheel that files a lawsuit is that they get paid out in a decent settlement, the case is dropped, and the corporation goes right on screwing everybody else who doesn't bother to enforce their rights. Or it becomes a class-action lawsuit where the lawyers get $40M, the plaintiff gets $10M, and every other member of the class gets a check for $100. If a judgment for a class-action lawsuit is $10M, every member of the class should get $10M, not just the plaintiff. If this bankrupts the corporation, so be it: maybe their business practices were invalid to begin with.

3.) Relatedly, laws that are never enforced should fall off the books so we don't get this kind of "regulation by enforcement" that can be used to arbitrarily punish people, as well as wholesale shifts in the legal regime based on which party is in power.

4.) It should be easier to collect on judgments. It can take years for a judgment or settlement to clear your bank account in the U.S. Some people don't have years, particularly those with health conditions or living on the edge of poverty.

In the Bay Area they tend to be for AI companies, though I'm pretty sure I've seen at least one for an AI lawyer. (Meaning a general-practice lawyer that is actually a datacenter, not a human lawyer who practices AI law.)

It's actually kinda fun to look at the public transportation ads and see what they say about each major metro area. In the Bay Area most are for enterprise software vendors. In Boston most were employment ads with some obscure scientific or mathematical puzzle where if you solved it, it redirected to a biotech or software company's jobs page. In Baltimore, it was mostly for bail bonds.

The inflation fears are part of the vicious cycle. The typical mechanism by which a government would get rid of inconvenient amounts of debt denominated in their own currency is to monetize it and inflate it away. Bond purchasers know about this, and build inflation expectations into the interest rates they are willing to accept. This increases the amount of interest the government has to pay, which makes its financial position even more precarious, which builds in future expectations of either a default or a soft-default through inflation, which pumps interest rates even more.

It is possible to break this cycle, but it requires getting spending under control. As long as you operate in deficit, it requires finding private capital to finance future operations of the government. That private capital will require interest commensurate with the expected future devaluation of its principal to lend; otherwise they are just suckers. If you can bring spending into balance then you can hike rates and bring inflation under control and you'll be somewhat insulated from what bond purchasers are willing to accept, but if you can't then increases in rates just increase government spending as well.

Japan operated at extremely high levels of debt-to-GDP because their deflationary trap turned all major Japanese corporations into large net savers. Why would you hold debt when you have to pay it back in more valuable yen in the future? That created a very large oversupply of private capital, which crowded into government bonds as the spender of last resort.

That's correct. The root cause is that the government is making promises it can't keep, which make those promises worthless. The correction is usually that that government falls, and a new government starts making smaller, more achievable promises that restores trust in it.

It can be! If you've got a crack legal team at your disposal, you can absolutely sue over insurance denials that put your health at risk. The problem is that most folks who need an insurance plan that regularly denies them also don't have the money to afford a crack legal team to sue the insurer. (If you're that wealthy, typically you would just have a private physician that you're paying directly, who has no problems treating you promptly because that's what they're paid to do.)

This is representative of a general problem with the legal system today. It's too expensive, and operates too slowly. When the economics of cheating people were that you might be able to cheat 10 people before you pick on the wrong guy who has a lawyer that puts you out of business, you have an incentive to follow through on your contracts and do what you say you'll do. When the economics became that you can cheat 10 million people before you pick on the wrong guy who sues you, it becomes rational to take the money from those 10M people and use it to outspend the guy who sues you, or at least just pay him off so he goes away. And so our western notions of democracy and contract law get subsumed into a feudal system where only big corporations get protection of law, and you must join the local protection racket to slot into that system.

This is pretty standard procedure in a lot of industries:

Health insurance will often initially deny coverage, either in the pre-approval or when you get the bill, but if you firmly follow up and hold their feet to the policy they will reverse that.

Even if you're uninsured, healthcare providers will usually settle medical debt for about 10c on the dollar if you threaten bankruptcy.

Home/auto insurance will often give you a black hole for claims; the adjuster won't get back to you for months at a time. But if you keep calling them enough to be annoying, they will usually eventually pay out.

Contractors will often fail to fix shoddy workmanship until you threaten to report them to the local licensing board.

Cops will often ticket you, but a surprising number of tickets get reversed if you contest them in court, oftentimes because the cop doesn't even show up. One of my friend's parents in high school vowed never to take a speeding ticket lying down; he was 5-0 on contesting them.

The IRS will come at you with the interpretation of tax laws that is most favorable to them given the data they don't have available, particularly if you are high-income. But if you actually know the laws and can show hard data (statements/receipts), you can usually get the bill they claim you owe reduced by 80%+ or even to $0.

Colleges will often increase their financial aid packages by thousands of dollars if you have a competing acceptance and are like "Well, I would love to attend your school, but financially it's hard for me to justify paying $X more than this other school I got into."

Companies will often increase their compensation offers significantly, sometimes by hundreds of thousands of dollars, if you turn down their offer.

It's all negotiation. They put forth an initial low-ball offer because most people accept it. If you make it clear that you are one of the folks who will make a stink about it, they'll often increase their offer significantly to get you to go away.

FWIW a bunch of friends of ours live in a development with metal roofs (built late 1970s) and they said it's been great. It just works, no leaks, no repairs necessary.

There's probably a bit of selection bias in both directions: metal roofs that don't work get replaced with shingles and are no longer metal roofs, while metal roofs that do work have owners that don't think about them much and don't complain about them.

It works great if your goal is to pump up your install & conversion numbers so you can raise the next round of VC at 3x valuation. After a couple rounds of this, your VCs, in turn, can then use the valuation increase to tell their GPs that the value of their fund has increased by 10x. The GPs can use your reported valuation increase to report that they earned a 11.6% real return on the fund this year (13% nominal, using the reported CPI of 2.4%, which of course is nowhere near the actual increase in life's necessities but does show that you can get TVs cheap), and that therefore they beat their benchmark and should get their full bonus. Then the pension funds that invest in them can tell the state that everything is fine and of course every retiree will get everything due to them.

It's bullshit all the way down. The most valuable bullshit is the numbers that you can sell to someone else who is looking for bullshit. They're not lying; they are merely reporting what they are being told, and you can't fault them for trusting their ad networks / investees / LPs / LPs / pension plans.

I usually see full-stack and DevOps roles as being a creation of the startup and early growth phases of a company. In those phases, the market and product definition is changing rapidly. Whatever you lose in reduced technical depth of these engineers, you gain in reduced communication costs, faster ability to make changes, and additional context and ability to spot efficiencies because they understand the full stack. And these companies are usually default-dead anyway, so if they screw things up and cause an outage, it's no worse than if they build the wrong product and have no users.

I've never seen a DevOps role in Big Tech (I've ping-ponged back and forth between the startup and FANG worlds a few times), and usually a full-stack engineer is someone very senior who designed a lot of the product when it was young and stuck with it for a decade. Instead there's usually a clear SRE/SWE split, and hyper-specialization, enough that someone might actually become the expert on one particular screen of a mobile app.

If you're frustrated with the de-specialization of roles, it's entirely possible you're working at companies at the wrong stage of their lifecycle. Move to a big company and the struggle is to avoid becoming pigeon-holed into one very specific task (and then laid off when the structure of the product changes so that task is no longer necessary). Such a career change can be challenging at first because your career can get specialized to "working for startups and early growth companies", and then big companies won't even look at your resume. But if you try enough places and say in the interview that you're looking for a place where you can really specialize and develop expertise, you can often find a manager desperate enough to take a chance.

LLMs are another issue. I'm worried that they're going to make the economy very unstable because the whole reason a firm exists is to capture institutional knowledge and the LLM captures that institutional knowledge in the model, where a.) it's not specific to a differentiated business and b.) it's subject to model-collapse issues. Could easily see the whole technological world collapse through lack of expertise, but if that happens it's a bigger problem that you can only fix by developing the expertise yourself.

It's a civil offense, but that's different from it being legal. It just means that it's up to the company itself to sue you to collect any damages, and government enforcement bodies aren't going to touch it.

The issue most ToU violations have with enforcement is that it's hard to show damages. If you just accessed their service with a fake name or downloaded some data for personal use, you haven't really harmed the company. So what are they gonna do, spend $10M to sue you for $0? So they just handle it internally by banning your account and discontinuing your use of the service.

But if, say, you did a DDoS attack that caused an outage costing them $100M, or you did large-scale scraping to set up a competitor that puts them out of business, and they can identify you, they absolutely will come after you in court for that money. The economics is different: now the damages they show is much more than the cost of litigating the case.

Nurses do actually end up spending more time with patients, it's just that they spend more time with rich patients.

The actual, tangible form this is taking right now is concierge medicine, home health aids, private practice, etc. My wife's (very good) ob-gyn had enough of working in institutionalized medicine where she's paid about what a L4 FANG engineer makes and pretty much has to follow the script that the health-care system dictates, and quit. Now she does perimenopause consultations for FANG execs at $1200/hour.

My uphill neighbors are in their 90s. I think the wife was in VC or something back in the 70s and 80s. There's a steady stream of nurses and home health aids up to their property. Seems like they've got a full care team working out of their home.

Across industry and industry, we see the same pattern. The mass-market product gets cheaper and less labor intensive, at the expense of any human touch. Everybody displaced, if they're any good and wants to stay in the field, moves up-market to do custom professional services for rich people. They pay for it, because if you want people to do good work for you, you have to pay them more than they can get otherwise.

No. ToU is a part of contract law. Basically the website is providing a service for you. In exchange for your use of that service, you agree to be bound by the terms. This implicitly creates a contract between you and the website, with the terms laid out by the ToU. This sort of implicit contract is legally controversial - normally for a contract to be valid there needs to be affirmative signatures from both parties, as well as consideration (money) exchanged. In the U.S. at least, "click-wrap" (where you must affirmatively click "I agree") and "scroll-wrap" (where you must scroll through the whole ToU before the product unlocks) ToUs are generally considered enforceable, but "sign-in wrap" (where creating an account binds you) and "browse-wrap" (where there's a ToU link) are very dubiously enforceable. But we're talking about Google here, and they make you click through the ToU and say you agree whenever you unbox a new Android device or create a Google account, and then have it apply to all usage of Google services.

Enforcement can be quite challenging because typically if you provide a service over the Internet you don't have any idea who is using it beyond their IP address and any registration data they provide, but this also means that when companies do have a known violator and can show significant monetary damages, their legal departments come down like a ton of bricks.

If you want your mind-blown, read up on feto-maternal microchimerism:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8762399/

tl;dr: All boy moms will have some proportion of XY cells lodged in their bodies until they die. And this can result in them showing up as genetically male on a DNA test, simply because they once gave birth to a boy. When you get down to a cellular or molecular level, notions of "sex" or even "individuality" are far more blurry than our mental models admit. Sorta like recent findings that by cell count, humans are only about 43% human, and the rest is the bacteria making up our microbiome, and that our microbiome can have significant impact on our behavior.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-43674270

I think the issue is the ToU violation, not copyright.

Latinx is terrible, though, because it is something no native Spanish speaker would ever say. It's an example of the exact same sort of cultural imperialism that most of the people who like to say latinx rail against.

The term that Hispanic queer and non-binary communities use is latine, which is pronounceable, follows normal Spanish grammatical rules, actually arose from the communities being discussed, and pluralizes easily to "les latines".

It used to be (late 00's) that wikis had a big advantage in search results because backlinks were weighted heavily by the ranking algorithm and the dense connectivity of wikis meant that there were always a zillion backlinks to pages on a wiki.

Entirely possible that this is caught in a malfunctioning webspam filter. A wiki is largely indistinguishable in structure from an SEO link farm; indeed, any abandoned wiki can be and usually is turned into a link farm by bots. Maybe Google decided that its default was going to be to ban all wikis until a sufficient mass of evidence comes that it's trusted. Which, again, sucks for search quality, but the web and Google Search have both been pretty much dead for the last ~5 years anyway, we just rely on them anyway.

It's on the list. #34 out of 72, middle of the pack. Within the U.S. Chicago, NYC, Philadelphia, LA, and DC are above it. Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Phoenix are below it. They seem to weight heat-stress pretty highly in their rankings, hence why all the TX/AZ cities are at the bottom and are joined by South and Southeast Asia.

The list is a little weird in that I can't find any population-based reason why Miami would even be on it: it's almost the top-10 U.S. cities by population, but missing San Diego or any SF/BayArea city, while Miami & DC are #41 and #22 respectively. If you go by metro area it explains why Miami & DC are there and why Dallas & Fort Worth are condensed, but not why Atlanta is missing and San Antonio is included.

Explaining the intellectual position without saying that I accept it (my actual views on this are "it's complicated"):

Arguments against KYC usually go hand-in-hand with the belief that AML statutes are a constitutional overreach and grant the federal government powers that they should not have. The logic is that the government's only role is to provide a stable currency and enforce contracts, and that anything else is involving the government in business that it has no business being in. What's done between two consenting parties should remain between two consenting parties.

Note that such a position usually doesn't have a problem with banks having information on their customers, for the purpose of judging credit risks. But it holds that such information should only be used for judging credit risks, ie if you are just depositing and withdrawing money that has already been earned, the bank should be agnostic to this. And they also object to this information being shared with a central clearinghouse where it can be used to cut off all access to the banking system rather than just one specific bank who objects to the source of funds.

Most Americans are unaware of both how many people live outside of the United States and how bad things can get there.

Waiting for Skynet to break out of its sandbox and kill us all...

It said it was AT&T, which probably implies AT&T Fiber. Gigabit fiber.