seibelj

Yes I'm sure all of these mortgages would be identically offered with such generous terms without the government being involved every step of the way

The government guarantees them. Banks would never offer this product otherwise.

It’s not that the interest is higher now! It’s that it’s fixed for 30 years no matter what the interest rate environment is! Plus it can be paid off early and refinanced when it suits the borrower!

I don’t know how more clearly I can state why this is a glaring subsidy for the rich. I’m sure in a free market these would just appear by themselves /s

It has to do with the absolute size of the mortgage. Fixed rates go as high as $770k borrowed. You have to be well-off to carry a $770k mortgage, and the value of this subsidy to that type of borrower is unneeded.

The only reason you want this is because tax payers subsidize your mortgage (assuming standard fixed-rate US mortgage). No other country offers this, and it’s clearly a handout to the upper middle class. In a free market your mortgage rate would rise with inflation, or to get a fixed rate (for 30 years!) you would have to agree to a rate far above current inflation.

One reason I’m highly skeptical to claims of monopolies, especially in an industry as dynamic and volatile as tech, is in 5 years you already have competition from new upstarts (TikTok) and old hands (Apple and Amazon) that makes claims of digital advertising “dominance” by Google and Meta outdated. The monopoly claims were suspicious from the beginning but now it looks pretty absurd.

Advanced auto-complete and sort-of right concept art is not going to disrupt the world nor the software industry. We have had algorithms trained on machine learning do IMO way more socially affecting things like decide what news and videos we watch, who gets approved for loans, what politicians say - but this gets way less press or thought.

You will never replace software engineers just as you will never replace writers and artists no matter how “good” the machine generated stuff gets. There is no soul there and it only appears interesting at a superficial, “that’s sort of neat” level that doesn’t hold up. No one is buying master works of AI, they spend their weekend reading real books and blogs from real people.

It’s 2022 - where is my self driving car? Where is the tens of millions of job losses from AI predicted that necessitated UBI (see the entire presidential thesis of Andrew Yang)?

It does get a lot of hype and raises a lot of VC money though!

This book is timeless, it is abstract and the topics apply to Java or the latest fad language.

One good thing about HN is quality material can be reposted. The rules say once per year the same topic can be discussed.

Given the absolutely dismal state of higher education and how shittily it prepares students for the workforce, posting books like this regularly for the next generation is very helpful.

I will be better.

I still feel like absolutely bonkers stuff is posted about crypto and they get a pass - extremely low-effort lies and drivel - then I post my counterpoint hot take and it’s “You flame bait moron!”

Similarly I am passionate about China and communism given… the murders in my family… but again, we are supposed to call out certain topics but not others.

My defense, but noted on I’m on my final final warning.

This is a solid book. It isn’t even really about game programming, it’s more about data structures and code organization IMO. Someday I need to post my Ultimate Programming Book list - this will be on it.

You get paid a fixed salary and can’t make a penny more until your union-negotiated contract says you can (more years of labor). You basically can’t get fired. Your job never changes and you can’t improve your job. You do the same thing day in and day out waiting for retirement.

So you can screw with some people, maybe get a bribe to help them. It isn’t unreasonable to see why government employees are unhelpful - the system is dumb, wasteful, and nothing they do can fix it, and leaving the job means they will never have it as cushy again.

Property is great because the government subsidizes fixed rate 30 year mortgages - you beat inflation on the backs of tax payers. I own a lot of property!

I thought he was mostly saying the stores themselves are unsafe for workers and customers, and the perception of Chicago being dangerous makes people not want to work at corporate. Plus the never-ending tax increases and general denigration of private business from the Mayor (although common in many major cities) which pushed out many other corporate headquarters for Miami and Austin.

> “We have violent crime that’s happening in our restaurants … we’re seeing homelessness issues in our restaurants. We’re having drug overdoses that are happening in our restaurants,” he said. “So we see in our restaurants, every single day, what’s happening in society at large.”

> “It’s more difficult today for me to convince a promising McDonald’s executive to relocate to Chicago from one of our other offices than it was just a few years ago,” he said. “It’s more difficult for me to recruit a new employee to McDonald’s, to join us in Chicago than it was in the past.”

> And when it comes to returning to the office, he said, “one of the things that I hear from our employees [is] … ‘I’m not sure it’s safe to come downtown.’”

> Kempczinski pointed to several high-profile corporate departures from the city, including Boeing, Caterpilllar and Citadel, which all recently announced plans to relocate their headquarters. He said that mayors and governors from other cities and states have reached out to McDonald’s to consider doing the same.

I mean META stock is down 60% YoY and the revenue is the same. Hard to argue what is "manipulated" vs. perception

If the only use case for crypto was to buy sandwiches then it wouldn't be a trillion dollar asset class. That isn't the main use case at this point

Some people don’t trust the government, other people do. I like a liquid, fungible asset not controlled by the government. Statists don’t. It’s a philosophical debate more than a technical one at this point.

Business and capital are about connections. If the idea requires high startup costs then that is a moat unto itself.

If the idea is truly, really, honestly so amazing that anyone who heard the idea could beat you, then it sounds like the idea combined with your unique situation (skills + connections + prototype) isn't that great. Otherwise, what's stopping someone else from beating you?

I have an idea - faster than light travel! The idea is nothing without execution however...

NoSQL, Ruby, microservices, meteorJS, Haskell... various technologies and languages that were fads on HN. Rust is currently in vogue but a backlash will hit at some point. I like Rust but it isn't the second coming of Christ. Honestly I prefer C for my low-level programming but that's me.

It’s pretty obvious the reason gas prices went down was because of the enormous drawdown of the strategic petroleum reserve. Post-election that will stop and it will go back up.

Here’s a podcast discussion with someone in Lebanon and how Bitcoin works there

https://saifedean.com/podcast/bitcoin-in-lebanon-with-thomas...

Article explaining the p2p money changers in Lebanon that use crypto

https://restofworld.org/2021/the-cryptocurrency-dons-of-beir...

You can't have your stock down 60% YoY (META) without consequence. There is a whole lot of fat at both of these companies (and really all large firms that never had any bad quarters) and a reckoning has to happen

I've heard rumors that Meta and Google have massive layoffs coming as well. Good luck out there

Given how insanely high the bar is in creative industries, I’m not sure how deep a purely AI generated graphic can succeed

Self driving cars followed the same pattern - the demo is decent but the 99.9999% case necessary for real-world usage is perpetually out of reach

VPNs are "data mixers" - by combining all your traffic with others, it becomes harder to determine who sent which packets.

Honestly, why can't we just have the government know every single website we visit immediately? We all have nothing to hide

Men and women are different. Can’t change that fact. Anyone who has children notices immediately that there are innate differences between the two (although if your memory is even fractionally good you should remember your own childhood).

Why do gladiator sports (MMA, American football, boxing) remain popular? Men enjoy beating the shit out of each other. It’s not to say women can’t do the same, it’s just that on average men like beating each other up more.

If you start extrapolating, there are all manner of differences between the genders. But this is somehow professional suicide to mention any of them if you work in elite industries.

This “revelation” that men and boys need help, and specific types of help, is only shocking to the Brookings institution set and the types of people who get their news from elite sources. If you live among the hoi poloi this is not controversial whatsoever.

True satisfaction comes from massive sacrifice and personal investment. I enjoy getting drinks with friends and having good conversation, but what I'm truly satisfied with - I can die tomorrow without regrets - are my children, my marriage, building a business, completing my education, becoming proficient in new skills, buying property... things like this. You should be able to live in the moment, but if the moment is all you have and all you've done, life is without purpose.

Kings were limited by the nobility. The English monarch was an extremely weak king. Not all monarchies were despots like in North Korea.

How to understand central banking and the fiat currency system:

All money is a coin created by a national government. USD is America Coin, Sterling is UK coin, Yen is Japan coin, etc.

Within the boundaries of the nation, everyone uses the national coin.

All goods and services are produced somewhere. If produced and consumed in the same nation, the same coin is used.

Things get interesting with international trade. All countries cannot produce every single last thing they want. So they have to purchase from other countries. And the other countries require the use of their own coin when buying their goods and services.

Exporters get paid in their nation’s coin, which becomes an important source of foreign currency for the central bank / government. More exports = more conversion into the nation’s coin = more forex. If a car exporter sells cars, the central bank will facilitate payment to them in local coin, but the central bank will take and store the forex.

Things get very interesting (and corrupt) with imports. In any given nation, there is only so much forex. If you try to acquire more forex (like USD) by printing more local coin and then trading it for USD, you will get inflation. So countries with well managed central banks try and avoid this. So who can use the limited USD to import what they want becomes subject to political will. Often politically favored firms get access to the USD to buy the goods and materials they need, which they then sell locally. If there simply isn’t any more USD to buy stuff, competitors can’t enter to be an importer.

As the most important good in the entire world - oil - is traded almost exclusively in USD, every country has an everlasting and unquenching thirst for USD. This gives the US enormous power, as it can print more money with way less risk of inflation than other countries can. It also lets the US get ever cheaper goods and services from abroad with such demand for a good that takes a mouse click to produce (USD).

Bitcoin (and other cryptos if they can be successful) is extremely dangerous to this model because it is not controlled by any government. It is exactly like the old gold system, except way better because you don’t need to protect the gold with soldiers and vaults, move it with huge ships, and so on. It’s gold on the internet.

If goods start being priced in Bitcoin directly, it will be akin to the old global system of everything being priced in gold.

But in general, think of fiat money like coins and central banks as a single centralized validator node that has sole authority to mint new coins.

If the tech industry was unionized like the trades:

"Sorry, I can't merge this pull request, these config files are managed by the DevOps union and only they can review this code."

"I know the system is down and our customers are failing, but we don't work weekends."

"I can't give you a raise because you are maxed out for your 4 years of time put in here. Everyone with 4 years time gets paid exactly the same rate."

"Sorry you are getting laid off - these other (less skilled) people have more time here than you. We lay off based on seniority."