sandoooo

The interesting part of the story is that the people with $700k mortgages - I'd hesitate to call this class 'the wealthy', more like the 'above-average middle class' - are getting hit with a double-whammy: their wages are paying for the mortgage subsidies for the poor which are driving their own mortgage needs off the market.

Next stop: universal health care. Then the real gnashing of teeth starts.

The fundamental difference is in incentives. If your incentive is to generate profits, you don't want to lend to the high-risk needy because you'll lose money. If your incentive is to provide another form of social security, you're willing to subsidize.

The problem comes when you force a business that really wants to align to the profit incentive (banks) to provide social subsidy by effectively charging their profit-generating customer base a premium. 1. They're incentivized to do the bare minimum necessary. 2. They're incentivized to stick to the letter and not the spirit of the law. 3. The transfer of wealth from paying to subsidized customers is opaque and nobody can do proper accounting.

This is a major source of corruption and inefficiency. It's the sort of problem that's all over the place whenever the private sector is forced into providing this sort of opaque cross-subsidy.

If I were to re-do this from scratch I'd privatize all the banks and let them do just the profit-making part, and have social programs solely as a function of the government, with a set yearly budget.

Ah, I see what you're saying.

This suggests a wide availability of alternative, reasonable-risk passive investments with 15% yield, which seems unusually high. What is this investment, usually? Stock buybacks?

Addendum: y'all like to list the one or two items that have sentimental value, but have you considered the vast graveyard of junk that you've left behind that has zero value to you sentimental or otherwise? Your hoard of long-term personally-significant items is probably fewer than you can count on one hand. Where's that old t-shirt you bought five years ago? How many USB-chargers have you lost track of?

why 15%? It seems to me that it would trend towards 100%, maybe a bit less to account for risk averseness. Not saying you're wrong, but it is counterintuitive.

I think the chance of you wearing the latter for more than three years before it's lost or you're bored of it or it's forgotten in a drawer somewhere is pretty low.

Longevity is overrated. People don't want to wear the same watch for a lifetime, no matter how fancy.

Legibility is a bell curve. The author could have stopped earlier, sure, but at the cost of reaching a smaller fraction of the audience.

Words are cheap. No trees were harmed. No need to be stingy.

The thing about second-order thinking is that once you recognize it, you start seeing the lack of it everywhere. And, congratulations, you're now struck by the urge to fix it somehow.

This sucks, by the way. You'd probably be happier and have more friends if you didn't notice. Once the screaming stops, somebody has to tip the pee out of the shoe. And that's you now, peeman.

clickbait title. Proposed new title:

"Coronavirus: British government makes contingency plan in case one fifth of UK workers 'off sick at same time' "

Perhaps some sort of code-camp.

You know what would quickly increase happiness and quality of life for a whole bunch of people? If you would just donate your entire life savings to charity tomorrow. Your not doing that is clearly detrimental to all those people you would have helped. Please consider happiness, quality of life, ethics, etc, and stop chasing profit.

It's an update on their incredible journey.

It depends. The difference vs traditional engineering software is in how much deviation from reality there is, and how much you can tolerate. Both of these depends on what exactly you're simulating and what sort of results you're looking for.

For example, Nvidia published a paper a while ago using Flex as a simulation environment for training AI to perform robotic tasks:

https://www.roboticsbusinessreview.com/ai/nvidia-researchers...

It's a widely-used and widely-studied method, so the popular implementations are pretty optimized and the toolkits extensive. Unless you have some fundamental insight/optimization specific to your problem, I don't think it's actually worth it to roll your own. Easier to just start with something open sourced and build a small module on top.

Nvidia is rolling FEM into Physx[1] - exciting stuff! GPU-accelerated FEM is going to be a game changer if they didn't cut too many corners in the pursuit of speed.

I wonder if it can be coupled with FleX...

[1]: https://news.developer.nvidia.com/announcing-nvidia-physx-sd...

1. You're proposing a linear increase in taxes to solve the problem of exponential growth of entitlements. Eventually you'll run out of GDP.

2. Doctors don't come out of assembly lines. Professionally trained medical staff is the biggest component of the Medicare blowout, and there is no easy way to increase supply in the short term. Dumping a lot of dollars into the Medicare system just drives up costs for everybody while shifting the limited supply of medical care around. From the perspective of the tax-paying middle-class, they'll be paying more into the system AND get worse medical care. That's the real political non-starter.

It is also the period in which deliveries out of China and Chinese-influenced countries slow down to a crawl. Basically everybody's gone home and nothing gets done for a while. Pretty obvious if you use ebay for a while.

If the US ever decides to invade China, or if Taiwan decides to declare independence, it would probably happen within this window.

Building slack into the supply chain would be a very inefficient way to stockpile for emergencies, compared to actually stockpiling for emergencies. As you've said, it would make no sense in the case of the iPhone. The McKinseys of the world are absolutely right about this.

The problem is that the old system created a positive externality (coincidentally storing a bit of inventory for emergencies, though inefficiently and in no way planned) that the new one doesn't. It's the sort of thing that should be fixed by government incentives.

Much of it could be part of strategies. It's meaningless without knowing the overall positions.

The only way to actually do this would be for some pundits/funds to come out and say they have built a massive short position on the SnP, just like all those Tesla shorts that got on TV from time to time. Is there any?

sure, but how much of it are actual shorts and how much of it is just hedging against long positions? it is a meaningless metric unless it's lopsidedly in favor of puts, which it isn't.

The problem is that defunding Medicare / SocialSec on a large scale is effectively defaulting on government's debt obligations and has the same effects as defaulting on treasuries. Defense will probably go first, since it's technically discretionary spending, but it won't be anywhere near enough because SS and Medicare balloons fast and will put the squeeze on all other government spends.

Eventually something will give. No idea which part though.

I'm suspicious of statements like this because there never seems to be any money placed where all the talk is. There were lots of people saying the same thing a couple of years back, too. They seem to still be around and haven't lost their shirts.

Are you buying long term puts on the SnP? Is anybody?

You can print an unknown but finite amount of money before hyperinflation sets in. It's not actually free money, just another finite resource that can be drawn - the credibility of the US government's promise to pay.

And like every other finite resource that doesn't come with an accurate accounting system, it is being overexploited, and will come back and bite us all eventually.

For pure mp3 playing, foobar2000 is like winamp except still getting updated, with less ugly (more OS-conforming) UI. For even more simplicity, there's no reason you should need a separate app for mp3s and movies, and mpc-hc is the best no-nonsense media player.

>In one case, a technology company looking for a partnership with Huawei sent over a presentation deck with confidential information about its business in order to generate commercial interest with Huawei. From the indictment:

> Immediately upon receipt of the slide deck, each page of which was marked ‘Proprietary and Confidential’ by Company 6, HUAWEI distributed the slide deck to HUAWEI engineers, including engineers in the subsidiary that was working on technology that directly competed with Company 6’s products and services. These engineers discussed developments by Company 6 that would have application to HUAWEI’s own prototypes then under design.

Well, yeah, what the hell else are you supposed to do when some supplier sends you a highly technical slide deck, except discuss it with your engineers working on the same thing? I seriously can't fathom why anybody involved here would have any expectation to the contrary.

Why is there no multilevel parking? All that space can't be cheap. Is there zoning laws against it?

Dropbox?

It is more accurate to say that the US government has mandated law-enforcement backdoors that means any telecom equipment provider has covert access, Chinese or otherwise. And now that this is the case they would really rather that you stop using the Chinese ones (and use instead US companies, who also have access to the backdoors and are willing to share it with the US government).

As a practical matter, it all depends on your threat model: are you more likely to get into trouble if the US government knows your secrets, or the Chinese one? How much of a premium are you willing to pay to minimize this risk either way?

Well, we might in 2000 years.

Knowing the culture and relative status dynamics would have helped. Undergrads are lower than the worms beneath your feet as faculty, and shouldn't be invited to faculty gatherings lest they drool on the carpet.

By not figuring out what the faux pas's are for the local ecosystem, he was setting himself up for failure. If it wasn't this talk it would have been something else.

I don't think it counts if it can't actually edit text, i.e. open and save at minimum.