17 ms·

Even More Bay Area House Party

311 points by mjirv 4y ago

opportune 4y ago
The anti stock is actually a great idea, I am surprised Wall Street doesn’t do this already to create synthetic longs. Unfortunately it would be hard to collateralize since there is technically no limit to the dividend, similar to a sold call, but just like a sold call you could collateralize with an equivalent sized long position. That could probably be useful for tax optimization (similar to how many of the crypto lending services require full or over collateralization of the underlying, with the market generally being people who want to spend appreciated crypto without realizing a gain). Congress would certainly eventually address this, but there would be a few glorious years of deferred capital gains. It could also be extremely useful for market making - when you can’t get a share to sell to fill or collateralize an order, you generate a synthetic long and anti stock. But you’d probably have to get some system in place with clearing houses where you eventually replace the synthetic long with a real share. IIUC this is pretty close to how the system works already. I want to go to this party, IME most Bay Area parties are just really awkward nerds trying to suss out who is making the most money
- 6yyyyyy 4y ago
  >I am surprised Wall Street doesn’t do this already to create synthetic longs. A comment on the post covers that: It's called a "bucket shop", and it's illegal.
  - monero-xmr 4y ago
    Synthetix has been running a bucket shop for a long time. They added stocks through Kwenta but got spooked and removed them. https://synthetix.io/ https://synthetix.io/
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > Synthetix has been running a bucket shop for a long time Well, this is an awkward moment to be in a car with a connected friend from Adelaide!
      - TeMPOraL 4y ago
        Invite them to our HN bashing on defi subthread party here!
        JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        Given Synthetix is based in NSW, the bashing will come in a more formal forum.
  - SilasX 4y ago
    I don't see how this is describing the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market) The Wikipedia description of a bucket shop says that it's gambling market on stock prices. The anti-stock idea in the article is a security where the holder is obligated to pay out the same dividends as the underlying stock. Not the same thing, AFAICT.
  - julkali 4y ago
    Not relevant to the discussion but why is it illegal? Would save a lot of transaction fees ...
    - ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
      Probably because the counterparty is the dealer, so the dealer has to manipulate prices and terms in their favor to turn a profit. Also, since no actual stocks trade hands, there is no effect on stock price and no investment value.
  - acover 4y ago
    There are derivatives that settle in cash[1]. How do they differ from a bucket shop? [1] - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cashsettlement.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cashsettlement.asp
- seanhunter 4y ago
  > The anti stock is actually a great idea, I am surprised Wall Street doesn’t do this already to create synthetic longs Wall Street already does do this (and basically anything else you can think of that “Wall Street doesn’t do”). There are (at least) two forms. Firstly an Equity Swap[1] and secondly a Total Return Swap[2] (which is just Wall Street’s Swiss army knife tool for synthetically being long/short the return on some asset or basket). If you just want to long/short the price return (and don’t include dividends which are mentioned in TFA) then there are also contracts for difference (CFDs) where the parties swap the price return on an equity. When I was in this business those were usually used because of tax differences between capital gains and other types of tax. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/equityswap.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/equityswap.asp refers to it as having an index on one side and a rate on the other side, but there’s no reason not to have a single stock rather than an equity index and we used to do these 15 years ago when I worked in equities [2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/totalreturnswap.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/totalreturnswap.asp Edit to add: There are also “dividend swaps” where the parties just swap the dividend return on the asset if you only care about that stream. This is sometimes helpful matching investors who have tax or other structural problems with receiving dividends with others who just want a dividend income stream without the asset price risk.
  - pram 4y ago
    Yeah I was thinking of CFDs but they don't exist in the US afaik.
    - rich_sasha 4y ago
      They do, as do TR swaps. They may not be advantageous for tax reasons. For example, at one point, trading equities via swaps carrier a tax benefit to the end user, at no significant cost to the bank arranging this. Lots of institutions used that for trading. But later, the tax advantage was lost, while banks were forced to treat these swaps as a proper credit liability, thus depleting the pool of available capital. So people stopped doing this. This is about 10 years outdated so I'm not sure what status quo is, but as a hack, this definitely exists in the US.
  - 4y ago
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Weren't all the big shorts essentially synthetic longs? (Edit: Context: the movie "The Big Short")
  - seanhunter 4y ago
    The actual big short (haven't seen the movie) was on a credit default swap index[1] (it was on one of the CMBX series which have commercial mbs as underlying[2]. There are also RMBX series for residential mortgages). CDSs are a swap (ie they are synthetic by definition) where one person is long the risk (short the protection) and one person is long the protection (and therefore short the risk). So the concept of who is long and short can be a little confusing. [1]Source: worked at Goldman as a strat (quant developer) on the mortgages desk at the time. I knew and worked with pretty much all of the people involved although I was based in London. The actual person who came up with the research behind the short idea was a fellow strat and brilliant econometrician[3] and most of the trading guys fought him like hell over it only to later found hedge funds and pretend that it was their idea all along. [2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cmbx_indexes.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cmbx_indexes.asp [3] Michael Marschoun https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Michael-Marschoun-2015589984 https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Michae...
- mlla 4y ago
  Dividend derivatives have been a thing for quite a while. When Covid lockdowns started in 2020, EU mandated that EU banks are not allowed to pay dividends and Société Générale took quite a hit: "SocGen said it lost about 200 million euros on products related to the cancellation of dividend payments in the trading business." [1] Some more information about available dividend derivatives on EUREX: https://www.eurexchange.com/resource/blob/80940/d5a6e620224a920b26b0903305aa4755/data/presentation_dividend_derivatives.pdf https://www.eurexchange.com/resource/blob/80940/d5a6e620224a... [1] https://www.straitstimes.com/business/banking/socgen-posts-surprise-loss-as-equities-traders-are-wiped-out-in-rout https://www.straitstimes.com/business/banking/socgen-posts-s...
Apocryphon 4y ago
Fake. No one in this dialogue uses the words "lindy" or "mid."
- carabiner 4y ago
  God I first saw lindy here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34098353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34098353 Still don't know what the fuck it means in regards to diet. The wikipedia page shows a bunch of equations.
  - andrewflnr 4y ago
    I didn't know anyone was using it as a descriptor like that, but in that context it seems to mean eating foods that have been around long enough to prove they have staying power and aren't harmful over any measurable time scale, or somesuch. Not sure I agree, but I sure understand the motive.
  - qohen 4y ago
    Still don't know what the fuck it means in regards to diet. Probably this: https://twitter.com/lindydiet/status/1297211546934939651?lang=en https://twitter.com/lindydiet/status/1297211546934939651?lan... The wikipedia page shows a bunch of equations. That's about the Lindy Effect, which is something else entirely (the only food connection is that it was named after a NY deli).
    - ragazzina 4y ago
      > 5) Eat animals that are vegetarians I can't think of a carnivore animal that is commonly eaten. Chicken? But not really carnivore when raised in a battery cage.
      - rich_sasha 4y ago
        Most of the fish we eat AFAIK are predators. Salmon, tuna, herring, cod, haddock, pollock...
      - 4y ago
swyx 4y ago
> the fact is, we live in a world where a tiny number of people have an outsized amount of power. We - by which I mean the loose network of left-wing radicals - tried our best to solve it politically. But we couldn’t. So now we try a different tactic. Whenever a tech billionaire is at the top of his game - raking in billions of dollars, buying up newspapers, considering a run for Governor - we send him an invitation to the Innovation Forum. He’s honored! He always thought of himself as a practical man of business, not the sort of person who goes to Innovation Forums and pontificates to thought leaders about the future of mankind. But maybe it’s just that the world is finally recognizing his genius! So he clears his calendar for a few days, puts off inventing a new superlaser, and attends the Forum. And then a little later, he gets an invitation to the Tech Futures Colloquium, and he thinks - yes, I deserve to go to that one too. And so he clears his next week’s calendar . . .” “And then you invite them to so many Colloquia that they don’t have time to accrue more money and power?” “You’d be surprised how few it takes! At that level, you spend most of your time just keeping on top of what you’re already doing. A Forum or two a month is enough to bring most billionaires from actively expanding their influence to just treading water. Sometimes they even get addicted. Like Peter Thiel; I don’t think the poor dear has made a business decision in years.” my god. Scott just made the case for Innovation Forums.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  That exchange mentions Musk but perhaps Twitter is the ultimate Innovation Forum.
jasonhansel 4y ago
[flagged]
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  "Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it." - Moses Maimonides
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  As someone with zero context on any of this, what is this?
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    The author of the linked article is a heretic from left-wing ideological orthodoxy, and therefore you should disregard anything he has to say on any topic whatsoever, no matter how well or poorly argued. After all, you don't want to associate with heretics, right?
    - tptacek 4y ago
      While not endorsing the sentiment that we should disregard literally everything this author ever says, there are a variety of ways to be a "heretic from left-wing ideological orthodoxy", and "racial supremacist" is a particularly bad one. The objection isn't simply that the author doesn't believer workers should own the means of production.
      - HideousKojima 4y ago
        I don't see Scott arguing for "racial supremacy" in any of the quoted emails though? He said he thinks genetic differences in intelligence are likely real, which is fundamentally different from "race x is superior to race y."
        4y ago
iseanstevens 4y ago
I’ve been to this party a number of times. Pretty good snacks.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
kneebonian 4y ago
I laughed out loud at this and from now on whenever anyone is straying into nonsense territory I will loudly and excitedly exclaim "A land value tax could've solved the resurrection of the Christ." Although honestly the "immortality as an STD" is a close second.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > Although honestly the "immortality as an STD" is a close second. It's a natural extension of the ideas I saw the other day, when someone on HN posted an article about death and immortality. The article, by IIRC some renowned scholar, talked a bit about biology, self-preservation and starvation responses, and then segued into germ line cells, proclaimed that those are effectively immortal if you look at them in a certain way - the same way as in "immortality as an STD" case here - and then the author concluded it's good enough as immortality for them, and they're happy with it. I'll see if I can find the article again. EDIT: here's the subthread with it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33352697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33352697.
perardi 4y ago
…I realize this is an extreme parody, but if this is even close to a Bay Area party, I’ll stick to my Chicago scene, thank you very much. Less AI alignment discourse, more house music and ketamine.
- 0_____0 4y ago
  Depends on who you know and where specifically you are. I have been to house parties in Mountain View that resonate with this. And loads of parties (mostly SF/Oakland) that had music and K. And the occasional crypto douche.
  - et-al 4y ago
    Occasional crypto douche? I’ve got to be more selective about the parties I’m attending. It’s closer to 33% crypto for me.
    - 0_____0 4y ago
      You’re in a weird tech bubble. Bay IME is very diverse but also very Scene-ey. Well worth it to break out and diversify. I wish I had when I was there, I ended up moving cross country and making more intentional decisions about my starting set of friends here.
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  Unless the Risk Management Guy is visiting from Chicago that clearly didn’t take place in the bay
  - rexreed 4y ago
    It's one of those ironic Meme shirts sold on Etsy. Same dude sells Lehman Bros Risk Management (2008) shirts.
    - dilyevsky 4y ago
      Ok that went over my head. Then definitively bay area
pfoof 4y ago
Note for myself in the future: avoid all invitations to forums and colloquia
mastax 4y ago
I usually avoid things like this because they're usually not this well written. Worth the time.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  Yea, this was surprisingly thick and decadent sarcasm. I loved it! I read: > “That’s so cheems mindset,” says the woman he’s talking to. Her nametag says ‘Astra’, although you don’t know if that’s her real name, her Internet handle, or her startup. ...and I knew I had to stop what I was doing and finish the read. The other two "house party" links [1] [2] were equally rich. 1: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-bay-area-house-party https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-bay-area-house-p... 2: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/another-bay-area-house-party https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/another-bay-area-house...
  - reducesuffering 4y ago
    Scott's writing is well-liked because most of it is similarly clever and humorous.
  - badcppdev 4y ago
    Thank you for that: > “I quit my job at Google a few months ago to work on effective altruism. I’m studying sn-risks.” > “I can’t remember, which ones are sn-risks?” > “Steppe nomads. Horse archers. The Eurasian hordes.” > “I didn’t think they were still a problem.”
pcrh 4y ago
Sounds like a lot of undergraduate parties...
Animats 4y ago
[flagged]
- AYBABTME 4y ago
  Do you attribute a lot of intentions like this to Asian women as a general practice?
- tangjurine 4y ago
  What's "The Third Department"?
  - prawn 4y ago
    Presumably this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army#Third_Department https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army#Thi...
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
This is the only thing in the last 10... 18 years I've read that makes me want to move to the bay area. And I live in a place where 32 degrees is a fine April day.
janalsncm 4y ago
It would be cool if there was an app that created parties as engaging and diverse as these. In my experience people mostly know each other from work, and it’s not nearly as cross-functional.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  This. Or if not an app, then a way to reliably become participating in them as an adult. I would've loved to be even a fly on the wall of TFA's party. To talk with people with insightful ideas, interesting side-projects, captivating stories, deep models of the world, or encyclopedic knowledge of some random topics. Geeks of all trades. I've experienced something like this once, when couple things mixed up: I was finishing my degree, helped build and run a local Hackerspace, and with the Hackerspace crowd, we mixed up with the local maker and startup communities, both of which were also just forming. For a few years, we've had events and parties somewhat similar to TFA, with people from all kinds of fields, with all kinds of ideas and goals, mixed together, talked and chilled. Ultimately, though, this amorphous maker/hacker/entrepreneur/scientist/artist community started to cool down and split back into multiple, more focused ones. Scientists got back to doing science^W^W chasing grants, makers and artists went to do whatever they do, startup people focused on $$$ and marketing, objective value be damned, and our hackerspace got back to tinkering with Arduinos and 3D printers and feeling smugly superior. I do miss those times, miss those parties. Miss those people, who cared about something interesting, who wanted to do something good - and if not good, then at least fun in an intellectually stimulating way. In contrast, normal conversations with normal people are all just who likes what meal, what's on Netflix, who's dating/marrying/cheating on whom, who has children, who's throwing a wedding, where do we go for vacation, etc. In other words, it's a social equivalent of writing CRUD apps. Yes, it's probably important in many ways, but it is soooo mundane and boring as fuck.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    I'm torn on this: When I originally moved to the Bay Area, it felt refreshing to finally be Among Nerds. My previous hometown had billboards on the highway that said things like "Don't Shake Your Baby" and "Are You Going To Hell?" whereas the 101 had billboards advertising iPhones and programming frameworks. I thought to myself, wow, culturally this is a big step up! But then you go to a few of these "meetups" and you get steeped in the tech culture, and the banality of what everyone is doing here, and you find that people in these parties are just as self-centered, vacuous and insufferable as where you came from--except in addition to droning on about themselves, they throw in words like "blockchain" and "hustle", talk about their sour beer collection, how they might start taking ukulele lessons next month, and how their next startup is really going to crush it in the market this time. Not as stereotypically annoying as the people in this satire article, but very close intellectually to "who's throwing a wedding".
quickthrower2 4y ago
Poes law, never a truer word said than in jest, etc…
saagarjha 4y ago
I should have gone to bed an hour ago but you don't get high-quality satire like this every day…
yownie 4y ago
This was great!
tomgp 4y ago
People wear name tags at house parties?
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  In Washington DC, people keep their ID badges from work on. That's so you can tell who outranks who and who's worth schmoozing.
wonderwonder 4y ago
As an outsider, are silicone valley parties really this ridiculous?
- acover 4y ago
  No
- plorkyeran 4y ago
  Scott Alexander is deeply embedded in a very unusual and small subculture.
ElfinTrousers 4y ago
I lived in the Bay Area after the first dotcom bust and before the second boom started. The parties were better then. Perhaps coincidentally, there were very few techies at them.
hahnchen 4y ago
> People talk about “fuck-you money”, the amount you’d have to make to never work again. You dream of fuck-you social success, where you find a partner and a few close friends, declare your interpersonal life solved, and never leave the house from then on. Still, in the real world you clock into your job … everyday This is unfortunately very relatable
- marssaxman 4y ago
  That line gave me a little moment of stomach-clenching horror: the loneliness... I think that would like be my personal hell. People really are different!
- shagymoe 4y ago
  So you're "unfortunately" in the position where you can retire and still lead a rich life? Boo hoo Maybe you should retire and use that time to gain some perspective.
  - conro1108 4y ago
    They aren't saying they unfortunately _have_ fuck-you money, they're saying they unfortunately relate to wanting to have a small social circle and not have to "deal with it" anymore
    - shagymoe 4y ago
      Cool. It doesn't _read_ that way.
      - JonathanMerklin 4y ago
        FWIW, I read it that way. It's not a sequence of "finish the game of social success" coming after "finishing the game of financial success", it's a complete replacement of which game the author/commenter wishes to finish.
      - conro1108 4y ago
Balgair 4y ago
I love the comments here, especially the ones where people run with the obvious satire and try the idea on for size. The 'nerd-sniping' ratio for this article must be one of the highest I've seen on HN. https://xkcd.com/356/ https://xkcd.com/356/
mrandish 4y ago
The satire is so spot on it burns. So glad I managed to escape the bay.
sizzle 4y ago
At first I thought this was written by Chat-GPT

311 points by mjirv 4y ago

The anti stock is actually a great idea, I am surprised Wall Street doesn’t do this already to create synthetic longs. Unfortunately it would be hard to collateralize since there is technically no limit to the dividend, similar to a sold call, but just like a sold call you could collateralize with an equivalent sized long position. That could probably be useful for tax optimization (similar to how many of the crypto lending services require full or over collateralization of the underlying, with the market generally being people who want to spend appreciated crypto without realizing a gain). Congress would certainly eventually address this, but there would be a few glorious years of deferred capital gains. It could also be extremely useful for market making - when you can’t get a share to sell to fill or collateralize an order, you generate a synthetic long and anti stock. But you’d probably have to get some system in place with clearing houses where you eventually replace the synthetic long with a real share. IIUC this is pretty close to how the system works already. I want to go to this party, IME most Bay Area parties are just really awkward nerds trying to suss out who is making the most money

6yyyyyy 4y ago
>I am surprised Wall Street doesn’t do this already to create synthetic longs. A comment on the post covers that: It's called a "bucket shop", and it's illegal.
- monero-xmr 4y ago
  Synthetix has been running a bucket shop for a long time. They added stocks through Kwenta but got spooked and removed them. https://synthetix.io/ https://synthetix.io/
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > Synthetix has been running a bucket shop for a long time Well, this is an awkward moment to be in a car with a connected friend from Adelaide!
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      Invite them to our HN bashing on defi subthread party here!
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        Given Synthetix is based in NSW, the bashing will come in a more formal forum.
- SilasX 4y ago
  I don't see how this is describing the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market) The Wikipedia description of a bucket shop says that it's gambling market on stock prices. The anti-stock idea in the article is a security where the holder is obligated to pay out the same dividends as the underlying stock. Not the same thing, AFAICT.
- julkali 4y ago
  Not relevant to the discussion but why is it illegal? Would save a lot of transaction fees ...
  - ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
    Probably because the counterparty is the dealer, so the dealer has to manipulate prices and terms in their favor to turn a profit. Also, since no actual stocks trade hands, there is no effect on stock price and no investment value.
- acover 4y ago
  There are derivatives that settle in cash[1]. How do they differ from a bucket shop? [1] - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cashsettlement.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cashsettlement.asp
seanhunter 4y ago
> The anti stock is actually a great idea, I am surprised Wall Street doesn’t do this already to create synthetic longs Wall Street already does do this (and basically anything else you can think of that “Wall Street doesn’t do”). There are (at least) two forms. Firstly an Equity Swap[1] and secondly a Total Return Swap[2] (which is just Wall Street’s Swiss army knife tool for synthetically being long/short the return on some asset or basket). If you just want to long/short the price return (and don’t include dividends which are mentioned in TFA) then there are also contracts for difference (CFDs) where the parties swap the price return on an equity. When I was in this business those were usually used because of tax differences between capital gains and other types of tax. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/equityswap.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/equityswap.asp refers to it as having an index on one side and a rate on the other side, but there’s no reason not to have a single stock rather than an equity index and we used to do these 15 years ago when I worked in equities [2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/totalreturnswap.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/totalreturnswap.asp Edit to add: There are also “dividend swaps” where the parties just swap the dividend return on the asset if you only care about that stream. This is sometimes helpful matching investors who have tax or other structural problems with receiving dividends with others who just want a dividend income stream without the asset price risk.
- pram 4y ago
  Yeah I was thinking of CFDs but they don't exist in the US afaik.
  - rich_sasha 4y ago
    They do, as do TR swaps. They may not be advantageous for tax reasons. For example, at one point, trading equities via swaps carrier a tax benefit to the end user, at no significant cost to the bank arranging this. Lots of institutions used that for trading. But later, the tax advantage was lost, while banks were forced to treat these swaps as a proper credit liability, thus depleting the pool of available capital. So people stopped doing this. This is about 10 years outdated so I'm not sure what status quo is, but as a hack, this definitely exists in the US.
- 4y ago
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Weren't all the big shorts essentially synthetic longs? (Edit: Context: the movie "The Big Short")
- seanhunter 4y ago
  The actual big short (haven't seen the movie) was on a credit default swap index[1] (it was on one of the CMBX series which have commercial mbs as underlying[2]. There are also RMBX series for residential mortgages). CDSs are a swap (ie they are synthetic by definition) where one person is long the risk (short the protection) and one person is long the protection (and therefore short the risk). So the concept of who is long and short can be a little confusing. [1]Source: worked at Goldman as a strat (quant developer) on the mortgages desk at the time. I knew and worked with pretty much all of the people involved although I was based in London. The actual person who came up with the research behind the short idea was a fellow strat and brilliant econometrician[3] and most of the trading guys fought him like hell over it only to later found hedge funds and pretend that it was their idea all along. [2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cmbx_indexes.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cmbx_indexes.asp [3] Michael Marschoun https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Michael-Marschoun-2015589984 https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Michae...
mlla 4y ago
Dividend derivatives have been a thing for quite a while. When Covid lockdowns started in 2020, EU mandated that EU banks are not allowed to pay dividends and Société Générale took quite a hit: "SocGen said it lost about 200 million euros on products related to the cancellation of dividend payments in the trading business." [1] Some more information about available dividend derivatives on EUREX: https://www.eurexchange.com/resource/blob/80940/d5a6e620224a920b26b0903305aa4755/data/presentation_dividend_derivatives.pdf https://www.eurexchange.com/resource/blob/80940/d5a6e620224a... [1] https://www.straitstimes.com/business/banking/socgen-posts-surprise-loss-as-equities-traders-are-wiped-out-in-rout https://www.straitstimes.com/business/banking/socgen-posts-s...

Apocryphon 4y ago

Fake. No one in this dialogue uses the words "lindy" or "mid."

carabiner 4y ago
God I first saw lindy here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34098353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34098353 Still don't know what the fuck it means in regards to diet. The wikipedia page shows a bunch of equations.
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  I didn't know anyone was using it as a descriptor like that, but in that context it seems to mean eating foods that have been around long enough to prove they have staying power and aren't harmful over any measurable time scale, or somesuch. Not sure I agree, but I sure understand the motive.
- qohen 4y ago
  Still don't know what the fuck it means in regards to diet. Probably this: https://twitter.com/lindydiet/status/1297211546934939651?lang=en https://twitter.com/lindydiet/status/1297211546934939651?lan... The wikipedia page shows a bunch of equations. That's about the Lindy Effect, which is something else entirely (the only food connection is that it was named after a NY deli).
  - ragazzina 4y ago
    > 5) Eat animals that are vegetarians I can't think of a carnivore animal that is commonly eaten. Chicken? But not really carnivore when raised in a battery cage.
    - rich_sasha 4y ago
      Most of the fish we eat AFAIK are predators. Salmon, tuna, herring, cod, haddock, pollock...
    - 4y ago

swyx 4y ago

> the fact is, we live in a world where a tiny number of people have an outsized amount of power. We - by which I mean the loose network of left-wing radicals - tried our best to solve it politically. But we couldn’t. So now we try a different tactic. Whenever a tech billionaire is at the top of his game - raking in billions of dollars, buying up newspapers, considering a run for Governor - we send him an invitation to the Innovation Forum. He’s honored! He always thought of himself as a practical man of business, not the sort of person who goes to Innovation Forums and pontificates to thought leaders about the future of mankind. But maybe it’s just that the world is finally recognizing his genius! So he clears his calendar for a few days, puts off inventing a new superlaser, and attends the Forum. And then a little later, he gets an invitation to the Tech Futures Colloquium, and he thinks - yes, I deserve to go to that one too. And so he clears his next week’s calendar . . .” “And then you invite them to so many Colloquia that they don’t have time to accrue more money and power?” “You’d be surprised how few it takes! At that level, you spend most of your time just keeping on top of what you’re already doing. A Forum or two a month is enough to bring most billionaires from actively expanding their influence to just treading water. Sometimes they even get addicted. Like Peter Thiel; I don’t think the poor dear has made a business decision in years.” my god. Scott just made the case for Innovation Forums.

Apocryphon 4y ago
That exchange mentions Musk but perhaps Twitter is the ultimate Innovation Forum.

jasonhansel 4y ago

[flagged]

HideousKojima 4y ago
"Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it." - Moses Maimonides
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
As someone with zero context on any of this, what is this?
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  The author of the linked article is a heretic from left-wing ideological orthodoxy, and therefore you should disregard anything he has to say on any topic whatsoever, no matter how well or poorly argued. After all, you don't want to associate with heretics, right?
  - tptacek 4y ago
    While not endorsing the sentiment that we should disregard literally everything this author ever says, there are a variety of ways to be a "heretic from left-wing ideological orthodoxy", and "racial supremacist" is a particularly bad one. The objection isn't simply that the author doesn't believer workers should own the means of production.
    - HideousKojima 4y ago
      I don't see Scott arguing for "racial supremacy" in any of the quoted emails though? He said he thinks genetic differences in intelligence are likely real, which is fundamentally different from "race x is superior to race y."
      - 4y ago

iseanstevens 4y ago

I’ve been to this party a number of times. Pretty good snacks.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

kneebonian 4y ago

I laughed out loud at this and from now on whenever anyone is straying into nonsense territory I will loudly and excitedly exclaim "A land value tax could've solved the resurrection of the Christ." Although honestly the "immortality as an STD" is a close second.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
> Although honestly the "immortality as an STD" is a close second. It's a natural extension of the ideas I saw the other day, when someone on HN posted an article about death and immortality. The article, by IIRC some renowned scholar, talked a bit about biology, self-preservation and starvation responses, and then segued into germ line cells, proclaimed that those are effectively immortal if you look at them in a certain way - the same way as in "immortality as an STD" case here - and then the author concluded it's good enough as immortality for them, and they're happy with it. I'll see if I can find the article again. EDIT: here's the subthread with it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33352697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33352697.

perardi 4y ago

…I realize this is an extreme parody, but if this is even close to a Bay Area party, I’ll stick to my Chicago scene, thank you very much. Less AI alignment discourse, more house music and ketamine.

0_____0 4y ago
Depends on who you know and where specifically you are. I have been to house parties in Mountain View that resonate with this. And loads of parties (mostly SF/Oakland) that had music and K. And the occasional crypto douche.
- et-al 4y ago
  Occasional crypto douche? I’ve got to be more selective about the parties I’m attending. It’s closer to 33% crypto for me.
  - 0_____0 4y ago
    You’re in a weird tech bubble. Bay IME is very diverse but also very Scene-ey. Well worth it to break out and diversify. I wish I had when I was there, I ended up moving cross country and making more intentional decisions about my starting set of friends here.
dilyevsky 4y ago
Unless the Risk Management Guy is visiting from Chicago that clearly didn’t take place in the bay
- rexreed 4y ago
  It's one of those ironic Meme shirts sold on Etsy. Same dude sells Lehman Bros Risk Management (2008) shirts.
  - dilyevsky 4y ago
    Ok that went over my head. Then definitively bay area

pfoof 4y ago

Note for myself in the future: avoid all invitations to forums and colloquia

mastax 4y ago

I usually avoid things like this because they're usually not this well written. Worth the time.

ryandrake 4y ago
Yea, this was surprisingly thick and decadent sarcasm. I loved it! I read: > “That’s so cheems mindset,” says the woman he’s talking to. Her nametag says ‘Astra’, although you don’t know if that’s her real name, her Internet handle, or her startup. ...and I knew I had to stop what I was doing and finish the read. The other two "house party" links [1] [2] were equally rich. 1: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-bay-area-house-party https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-bay-area-house-p... 2: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/another-bay-area-house-party https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/another-bay-area-house...
- reducesuffering 4y ago
  Scott's writing is well-liked because most of it is similarly clever and humorous.
- badcppdev 4y ago
  Thank you for that: > “I quit my job at Google a few months ago to work on effective altruism. I’m studying sn-risks.” > “I can’t remember, which ones are sn-risks?” > “Steppe nomads. Horse archers. The Eurasian hordes.” > “I didn’t think they were still a problem.”

pcrh 4y ago

Sounds like a lot of undergraduate parties...

Animats 4y ago

[flagged]

AYBABTME 4y ago
Do you attribute a lot of intentions like this to Asian women as a general practice?
tangjurine 4y ago
What's "The Third Department"?
- prawn 4y ago
  Presumably this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army#Third_Department https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army#Thi...

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

This is the only thing in the last 10... 18 years I've read that makes me want to move to the bay area. And I live in a place where 32 degrees is a fine April day.

janalsncm 4y ago

It would be cool if there was an app that created parties as engaging and diverse as these. In my experience people mostly know each other from work, and it’s not nearly as cross-functional.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
This. Or if not an app, then a way to reliably become participating in them as an adult. I would've loved to be even a fly on the wall of TFA's party. To talk with people with insightful ideas, interesting side-projects, captivating stories, deep models of the world, or encyclopedic knowledge of some random topics. Geeks of all trades. I've experienced something like this once, when couple things mixed up: I was finishing my degree, helped build and run a local Hackerspace, and with the Hackerspace crowd, we mixed up with the local maker and startup communities, both of which were also just forming. For a few years, we've had events and parties somewhat similar to TFA, with people from all kinds of fields, with all kinds of ideas and goals, mixed together, talked and chilled. Ultimately, though, this amorphous maker/hacker/entrepreneur/scientist/artist community started to cool down and split back into multiple, more focused ones. Scientists got back to doing science^W^W chasing grants, makers and artists went to do whatever they do, startup people focused on $$$ and marketing, objective value be damned, and our hackerspace got back to tinkering with Arduinos and 3D printers and feeling smugly superior. I do miss those times, miss those parties. Miss those people, who cared about something interesting, who wanted to do something good - and if not good, then at least fun in an intellectually stimulating way. In contrast, normal conversations with normal people are all just who likes what meal, what's on Netflix, who's dating/marrying/cheating on whom, who has children, who's throwing a wedding, where do we go for vacation, etc. In other words, it's a social equivalent of writing CRUD apps. Yes, it's probably important in many ways, but it is soooo mundane and boring as fuck.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  I'm torn on this: When I originally moved to the Bay Area, it felt refreshing to finally be Among Nerds. My previous hometown had billboards on the highway that said things like "Don't Shake Your Baby" and "Are You Going To Hell?" whereas the 101 had billboards advertising iPhones and programming frameworks. I thought to myself, wow, culturally this is a big step up! But then you go to a few of these "meetups" and you get steeped in the tech culture, and the banality of what everyone is doing here, and you find that people in these parties are just as self-centered, vacuous and insufferable as where you came from--except in addition to droning on about themselves, they throw in words like "blockchain" and "hustle", talk about their sour beer collection, how they might start taking ukulele lessons next month, and how their next startup is really going to crush it in the market this time. Not as stereotypically annoying as the people in this satire article, but very close intellectually to "who's throwing a wedding".

quickthrower2 4y ago

Poes law, never a truer word said than in jest, etc…

saagarjha 4y ago

I should have gone to bed an hour ago but you don't get high-quality satire like this every day…

yownie 4y ago

This was great!

tomgp 4y ago

People wear name tags at house parties?

ElfinTrousers 4y ago
In Washington DC, people keep their ID badges from work on. That's so you can tell who outranks who and who's worth schmoozing.

wonderwonder 4y ago

As an outsider, are silicone valley parties really this ridiculous?

acover 4y ago
No
plorkyeran 4y ago
Scott Alexander is deeply embedded in a very unusual and small subculture.

ElfinTrousers 4y ago

I lived in the Bay Area after the first dotcom bust and before the second boom started. The parties were better then. Perhaps coincidentally, there were very few techies at them.

hahnchen 4y ago

> People talk about “fuck-you money”, the amount you’d have to make to never work again. You dream of fuck-you social success, where you find a partner and a few close friends, declare your interpersonal life solved, and never leave the house from then on. Still, in the real world you clock into your job … everyday This is unfortunately very relatable

marssaxman 4y ago
That line gave me a little moment of stomach-clenching horror: the loneliness... I think that would like be my personal hell. People really are different!
shagymoe 4y ago
So you're "unfortunately" in the position where you can retire and still lead a rich life? Boo hoo Maybe you should retire and use that time to gain some perspective.
- conro1108 4y ago
  They aren't saying they unfortunately _have_ fuck-you money, they're saying they unfortunately relate to wanting to have a small social circle and not have to "deal with it" anymore
  - shagymoe 4y ago
    Cool. It doesn't _read_ that way.
    - JonathanMerklin 4y ago
      FWIW, I read it that way. It's not a sequence of "finish the game of social success" coming after "finishing the game of financial success", it's a complete replacement of which game the author/commenter wishes to finish.
    - conro1108 4y ago

Balgair 4y ago

I love the comments here, especially the ones where people run with the obvious satire and try the idea on for size. The 'nerd-sniping' ratio for this article must be one of the highest I've seen on HN. https://xkcd.com/356/ https://xkcd.com/356/

mrandish 4y ago

The satire is so spot on it burns. So glad I managed to escape the bay.

sizzle 4y ago

At first I thought this was written by Chat-GPT