zopa

> So "consumers" are always said to "pay" as companies "pass through" increased costs due to goods, regulations, etc.

It isn’t always said, because it isn’t always true. If the business you’re looking at has profits, then it has pricing power, and the conditions for 100% pass-through don’t exist.

By Monday morning? With protections in place against fraud or double-dipping? It wouldn’t be as easy as you think.

(And for the nth time, SVB isn’t being propped up. The owners are losing their whole stake.)

> If these statements are true, can someone explain how it's possible that despositors are fully protected, far beyond what FDIC insures, without the taxpayer bearing any of the burden?

No one can tell you what will happen because to my knowledge the FDIC hasn’t told us yet. They may not have settled on a final outcome yet — there may be multiple options still live — finding a buyer for the assets of the bank, for instance. All this statement is saying is that they’ve verified that even in the worst case, the resources exist to make the depositors. whole.

Meanwhile,’bullshit’ is a strong claim. And I’m not going to fight you on the trustworthiness of government officials in general. But someone who’s been at this as long as Yellen isn't going to blow the Treasury Department’s credibility on a dumb, easily-discovered, get-you-through-the-day-and-then-fall-to-pieces sort of lie.

> The "heads you win tails we lose" deal we give to bankers, which we don't give to anyone else, is fundamentally evil, and we have to stop bowing to their terroristic threats that if you don't give us this deal you're all doomed.

That’s not what’s happening here. The bankers — investors in SVB — are getting wiped out. The FDIC is protecting people and companies with accounts at the bank, not the bank itself.

If a bank loans you money and you use it to build a house, or start a restaurant, then in due course there will be:

  - new money, created by the loan; and
  - a new, valuable asset — the house or restaurant — worth very roughly that amount of money. 

Case by case these won’t always balance, but we trust private banks and borrowers to get it broadly right in aggregate. It all works out except for when it doesn’t.

But somebody had better be creating money in a growing economy. Otherwise the stock of desirable stuff will grow while the stock of money remains constant. And once that happens, people start hoarding money rather than doing the hard work of investing in new productive assets. But creating new productive assets is where the growth comes from, not to mention a big chunk of the jobs.

I doubt bank-created money is the only way to avoid deflation and depression. But it’s about the least centrally-controlled alternative I can think of.

> and that's exactly what we see in the article, right?

I think we see the opposite! We start with a naive and non-hierarchical view of relatedness: trees are tall woody things, fish live in the water and have fins. And the piece argues that we should let go of our common-sense categories and use the descent-based ones, like the biologists do.

Anyway --- I didn't say that ancestry is the only factor. I said it was natural, and useful. Epigenetics is fascinating, really! But it's not 'blasting out' of anything, it adds a bit of detail and complexity around the edges. A sense of proportion is important; we shouldn't miss the forest for the...never mind.

The solar panels would shade out all the photosynthetic plankton below, no? Nothing large-scale on Earth is zero impact.

I’m not yet persuaded this is relevant, at all. This isn’t a case where hierarchy fails us: we have a perfectly good and natural hierarchical model of speciation based on descent from common ancestors. That model doesn’t give us the common-sense notion of a tree, but that’s fine: so much the worse for common sense.

If instead we used a D&G rhizome that “connects any point to any other point” — we’d be dropping the notion of time (ie, ancestors precede descendants). Which when we’re talking about evolution, seems bad.

If horizontal gene transfer were a big part of the story here, that’d be different. Or if your ecology has time travel, or interstellar exchange ala Butler’s Xenogenesis, then sure, rhizome away.

> it's not particularly callous to want to feed your family

Callous is callous regardless of your motive. It might be justifiable to be callous if that's what your business circumstances demand, but that doesn't change the effect on those customers.

A bit of a difference in motivation between a hobbyist and a VC.

> The problem is not that companies are able to increase prices and improve their margins. That's good!

That's going a bit too far. Under perfect competition there aren't any profit margins: everything sells at marginal cost. Real-world markets won't be like this, but they can get reasonably close. If there are large and increasing profit margins, that's a sign something has gone wrong.

Also, we need to be realistic about natural monopolies. Sometimes the competition we want isn't in the cards, and treating the symptoms really is the right answer. If that necessary-but-low-volume medication has sharply declining costs with increasing production, as many things do, there just aren't going to be enough suppliers to build a competitive market. Competition policy is great, but it can't do everything.

Sure, but it’s wildly counterproductive. The result is free-floating negativity about all the possible solutions. Until we’re meeting the scale of the problem, we should all be focusing on “yes, and”

If thorium is cheap, there should be plenty of funding to go around. If it’s expensive, what’s the point?

I’d also be interested to hear roughly how much public funding you think is implied by the article. My takeaway was that it suggested: 1) some geological surveys, 2) maybe some regulatory fixes, 3) a bunch of private investment. All of which are the next thing to free by government standards.

So many people here cheering for their preferred carbon-free energy source like it’s a sports team. It’s bizarre.

We’re going to need to do lots of different things. There’s no need to fight about it; everybody’s favorite will have a chance.

Wind and solar are a great source of electricity, but not everything is easy to electrify right now.

Also —- we have massive amounts of human and physical capital invested in digging flammable stuff out of the ground. If we can redirect some of that away from breaking the planet and into hydrogen, that’s a huge win, even if it’s not what we’d go after if we were designing our energy mix from scratch.

You’re saying we should judge things on their substance as a whole, and not by superficial details?

Persuasive! I wonder if we could apply that insight to any other field of endeavor…

Yes, and as I don’t want metaphorical chemotherapy for the country I’d prefer we chose a different metaphor. An analogy shouldn’t just be some strained parallels, it should lead us in useful and not destructive directions.

A bad one. What's the insight here? If a body were a nation-state, it'd be a totalitarian hellscape where life is cheap, individuals exist only to support the collective and some populations are invaders to be exterminated.

If we’re just doing literary criticism, sure, fair enough.

In actual practice, as here, ‘vote with your wallet’ stands in for “people are choosing this, nothing to be done.” And ‘voting’ stands for collective action to change the choices on offer.

But sure, starting a company’s great too. Though with concentrated markets and high barriers to entry, that won’t always be feasible: I wouldn’t want to start a printer company, and that’s probably not the worst case.

Of course not, but that's a pretty naive view of how politics works. (Naive and cynical at the same time is a nice trick.)

On second- and third-tier issues, politicians take their cues from friendly activists and interest groups, for whatever "friendly" means to that particular elected. Think about how many politicians' reelection messages are basically bullet-points of small-bore asks delivered. Each individual item may not win many votes, exactly, but they create a general sense that the candidate is engaged and effective. And perhaps more importantly, it's hard for potential opponents to build support when the incumbent is delivering for the most engaged voters in the district. Anyways a politician needs to do something while in office; it might as well be the stuff that people they respect want.

So: you frame this issue, and how it's confluent with the broader [Democratic/Republican] outlook. You clarify the desired legislative outcome. You show some public support, which takes many fewer people than you might think, and set up some meetings. Hopefully you find a sponsor. Then repeat as necessary to get the bill introduced, voted on, and maybe even passed.

None of this is easy; it's a ton of work, and by no means guaranteed of success. It's especially difficult in today's US where so much gets bottled up behind partisan showboating. But it also happens all the time. See the traction the right-to-repair movement is getting.

I think we vote when we vote. The relative prices of true ownership and subscriptions aren’t random: they’re set by companies trying to shape a market where they can extract recurring revenue. Normal cash-constrained people are going to do what’s individually rational; it’s not reasonable to expect most people to pay a premium in the hope that it might actualize the market we’d prefer.

If we want a different slate of choices we should use the collective power we have to make it happen. ‘People vote with their wallets’ is just a way for self-interested companies to shift the blame.

The trouble with the aliens is that it’s too good an explanation. Inscrutable beings with tech we don’t don’t understand works as an explanation of just about anything, so if we allow that in our explanatory toolbox we’ll end up crying “aliens” for all sorts of hard-to-explain phenomena. In most of those cases we’d have found a mundane explanation if we looked longer and thought harder. Non-falsifiable, broad spectrum theories like aliens and magic need to go last on the list, down below “we don’t know yet, let’s gather more data,” or we’ll end up fooling ourselves.

If there really are aliens, eventually we should have enough evidence that we can build specific, falsifiable theories about particular, well-defined entities with at least rough bounds on capabilities. But we’re not close to that point yet.

> While that's true, i think crimea and the associated warm water port (sevastopol) is of strategic value.

Russia already had naval basing rights is Sevastopol, before the invasion of Crimea. I don’t think the strategic explanations hold up.

It’s not only the balloon you have to worry about, it’s the missles you shoot at it.

It’s not an “attitude”, it’s an objective fact about how capital project go in the US right now.

I’ve got theories, but I don’t really know what the best way is to fix that. We probably need to try a bunch of things, and I’m all for that.

But drivers running red lights kill people. I’m for for the ideal, elegant solutions, and also for the imperfect incremental ones. I really don’t think worse-is-better, if that’s what you’re advocating, is appropriate.

I don’t think the risk/reward works out here. Lots of people had knowledge of the search; if any one of them goes to the press, then a minor public embarrassment becomes a career-ender, at best. Public agencies leak too much for this sort of thing. Not to mention that they could have just not announced the loss if they wanted to hide it.

Roundabouts and public transit improvements cost millions or billions and take years or decades to roll out. They’re great, and we should build them, but there’s a lot to be said for quicker, cheaper solutions in the mean time.

Sure, but what about all the students with mediocre and/or overworked teachers? If our plan assumes the best-case scenario, we're going to have problems.

0.5 atmospheres isn’t a problem: that’s about what Everest Base Camp is. The sulphuric acid might be a bit unpleasant though.

Set it in Universe N+1 of a multiverse and mix in a tiny dusting of metals and such from Universe N.

Or maybe it’s a synthetic population III star, made for unknown purposes by a now-vanished civilization. You’re allowed to make up whatever you need to get the story going.