fwlr

59 ms·

691.
by fwlr 4y ago
One thing we want from banks is to store our money and provide it to us on demand. Another thing we want from banks is provide lending to the average consumer (mortgages in the large and credit cards in the small). A bank can do both of the
692.
by fwlr 4y ago
“ You can image-bash together faces from examples and get something mostly-right simply through pattern copying. … You cannot do the same with hands, because rendering them plausibly requires at least intuition and approximation of inverse
693.
by fwlr 4y ago
I’m not going to be using this site to guide my opinions of VCs, I don’t generally outsource that much of my opinion-making to 3rd parties. But it does broadly reflect my opinions, you could get a very rough “general direction” picture of h
694.
by fwlr 4y ago
Sure, I’m not trying to prescribe the reader’s takeaway here.
695.
by fwlr 4y ago
“Has anyone here ever tried drawing hands?” It’s not for naught that there’s a common meme around AI hands https://imgur.io/tf43ecd?r (Alt text: Human asks robot “can an AI draw hands?”, robot counters “can you?”.) I rememb
696.
by fwlr 4y ago
I think this is a common misperception whenever a research body makes an announcement on race like this. It is not that there is no there, there. In fact there is so much there that race fails as a concept because it is (ridiculously) ins
697.
by fwlr 4y ago
I’m trying to say that a journalist set out to make a banker look like a corrupt hypocrite, the banker made the journalist look like a fool instead, and then the newspaper committed a hilarious act of mild betrayal by publishing it.
698.
by fwlr 4y ago
For the people who can’t see the page - I don’t have it open anymore, but it was someone asking for help to figure out what version of certain libraries was used in the BrickLink studio software, since some flags they expected to work weren
699.
by fwlr 4y ago
I think you might find Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions interesting; he argues that it’s only about half of society that has this view you describe (expecting people in authority to be somewhat saintly, self-sacrificing, or monk-like
700.
by fwlr 4y ago
He says in the article that he quickly realized the 50 billion threshold was too low and began advocating to raise it. Why would you expect him to follow the part of his legislation that he thinks is a mistake, after he succeeded at fixing
701.
by fwlr 4y ago
Fair enough. Sorry for accusing you of equivocating.
702.
by fwlr 4y ago
From the article we are discussing: “ You passed the biggest financial regulation in a generation. Then you went to work on the board of directors of a bank, and then after that you supported weakening certain requirements. ” “No, no. Wrong
703.
by fwlr 4y ago
The laws of armed conflict are in fact actual literal laws (largely set down by the Hague and Geneva Conventions), so legality is absolutely the question. In addition, there are two meanings to the phrase “act of war”, and you’re equivocati
704.
by fwlr 4y ago
Maybe that was their plan, yeah. Barney’s argument seemed to be “if you’re tough on banks as a legislator it’s good to go work at a bank after leaving Congress; if you’re soft on banks as a legislator it’s bad to go work at a bank after lea
705.
by fwlr 4y ago
It’s worth noting that the interviewer didn’t start out planning for a debate about members of Congress working in fields related to their congressional activity. The original plan was to pin the subject for his hypocrisy in trying to weake
706.
by fwlr 4y ago
I cannot believe the New Yorker published this complete evisceration of their own reporter. “ Let me put it this way. As a congressman, you passed the biggest financial regulation in a generation. Then you went to work on the board of direc
707.
by fwlr 4y ago
“when they lock an account, it's frozen for 10-15 days and then when it's closed they send a check in the mail” Sounds like their compliance team has concluded you’re in breach. Pretty sure that 10-15 days is there because it allo
708.
by fwlr 4y ago
An exploding mortgage wrapped in mortgage insurance has exactly the same shape as a conventional mortgage from a fractional reserve bank. The insurer would be doing something like “fractional reserve insurance”, i.e. only holding some fract
709.
by fwlr 4y ago
“ as Fed interest rates rose, the interest rates on deposits (i.e. individual savings accounts) did not increase at all” Very true “due to bank executives wanting to harvest more of that pie for themselves.” Eh, needlessly inflammatory and
710.
by fwlr 4y ago
Personally I had always assumed “directed energy weapons” was a cover story for investigations into whether Havana syndrome was a more conventional attack on US embassies. Imagine some hard-to-detect chemical that causes mild brain damage,
711.
by fwlr 4y ago
Executives cashing out their stock right before their company fails seems pretty self-evidently bad. Captains go down with their ships, they shouldn’t be the first people on the lifeboat.
712.
by fwlr 4y ago
“ Of course that magic doesn't actually exist.” Yeah, like I said, this is the disconnect. Assume for a moment that magic does exist. Maybe aliens come to Earth and hands the government a stack of gold from outside the solar system wo
713.
by fwlr 4y ago
Yes. The case for synthesizing carbon fuels from atmospheric carbon is immensely strong - we need to do carbon capture of some kind, and investing in this method will also retrofit the entire world to zero emissions. Other plans for reachin
714.
by fwlr 4y ago
There are smaller tests for liquidity, but the specific major stress test that SVB lobbied themselves out of is the DFAST (the Dodd Frank Act Stress Test) and it does not test liquidity. It takes the scenario of an adverse economic situatio
715.
by fwlr 4y ago
Everyone will say they are “unrealized” losses. Some people (let’s call them “busters”) will argue this means real losses that already happened but banks are allowed to pretend it hasn’t. Other people (let’s call them “holders”) will argue
716.
by fwlr 4y ago
Unfortunately we cannot simply play dictator and insist people who don’t like or trust nuclear power must put up with “a Chernobyl next door to every school” (or similar charged rhetoric). The Outback is one of the few places I can imagine
717.
by fwlr 4y ago
Answered in the comment you’re replying to: “Alternatively, you could run the massive carbon capture plants on solar energy instead of nuclear, and still ship these “completely clean conventionals” worldwide. It would mean building 3x as ma
718.
by fwlr 4y ago
I do see where your definition of a bailout is coming from, I don’t think it’s that weird. Perhaps the disconnect is that I’m assuming people would not hate a bailout that they actually genuinely really don’t pay anything for; they would pr
719.
by fwlr 4y ago
De-regulation of existing 1960s era nuclear tech is bad and shouldn’t happen, I agree.
720.
by fwlr 4y ago
Think of the current coal power industry as essentially “digging a lot of pre-sequestered CO2 out of the ground and putting it into the air”. This plan limits the coal industry to only using what’s already in the air, while we build paralle

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