makomk

22 ms·

181.
by makomk 4y ago
I've seen this argument made a few times, and it's nonsense. SVB didn't fail because they paid out 4.5% APY on their money market accounts; that's pretty safe for them because they can easily earn that much from low-risk
182.
by makomk 4y ago
You're right that without the bank run SVB probably wouldn't have collapsed on Friday and might well have held on for a few more weeks or months. That's not really enough though; in order for pulling your money early and park
183.
by makomk 4y ago
It's not moving the goalposts - this is an actual, real, and extremely sneaky loss. Having bonds that will pay out say $100 in eight years time is pretty much exactly equivalent to having the reduced value of those bonds now (say $80)
184.
by makomk 4y ago
This seems to miss the point by a mile. The reason this backstop is necessary is because without one, pulling your funds is the rational decision as soon as it's "not even clear" whether the bank is in good enough shape to ba
185.
by makomk 4y ago
Not nearly the same kind of losses, I don't think. The drop in value of bond-like investments is heavily affected not just by the change in interest rates but also the duration: long duration bonds drop much more heavily because the to
186.
by makomk 4y ago
They are, and this is a full-on solvency issue, not just a liquidity one. Think of it this way: suppose you have an investment that pays out $100 in 2031, plus a low rate of interest that due to interest rates increasing substantially in 20
187.
by makomk 4y ago
Having the entire reserve as cash wouldn't exactly help here - imagine if 30% of USDC's total reserves was in Silicon Valley Bank, rather than just 30% of their cash. (I think I've pointed out before in discussions of Tether
188.
by makomk 4y ago
Yeah, arguably duration risk is pretty much the stogiest, most old-fashioned banking kind of risk that could possibly have tripped them up. Long-term loans and short-term deposits is basically what banks traditionally do.
189.
by makomk 4y ago
This doesn't work either. Remember, the reason that the market value of the T-bills in their reserves has dropped is that the interest rate on them is lower than the current interest rate that people can get by buying them now, so the
190.
by makomk 4y ago
Higher interest rates decrease the value of long-duration bonds even in nominal terms. Think of it this way: because the interest rate on a bond is fixed at issue, and because newer bonds now have higher interest rates, your existing bonds
191.
by makomk 4y ago
Those government-mandated, ultra-safe capital reserves look like they're actually the big problem that's going to bring down banks right now. Banks have stuck a bunch of their reserves in really safe, predictable, high quality lon
192.
by makomk 4y ago
The UK has built a huge amount of offshore wind generation - in fact it had the most in the world until quite recently, and is currently second only to China. This just isn't a complete solution because wind is intermittent, and in par
193.
by makomk 4y ago
That only works on short timescales, which isn't the main problem because there are so many ways of solving that (for example batteries or thermal storage for home heating).
194.
by makomk 4y ago
It's the fundamental problem that needs solving in order to achieve what this announcement claims is the ultimate end goal of all this - a "net-zero carbon economy" for the country as a whole - and it has been the fundamenta
195.
by makomk 4y ago
That's not an easy fix at all. One of the forms of fraud they're worried about is people who aren't actually living in Denmark claiming benefits - generally by actually living in another country with lower cost of living and
196.
by makomk 4y ago
The more usual reason why devices would be making an IPv4 request despite having an IPv6-supporting connection is precisely because the server doesn't support IPv6 - either the network it's on doesn't support it, or it's
197.
by makomk 4y ago
We had a whole, massive global financial crisis that was essentially caused by the fact that this does not work for housing because the risks are so heavily correlated: a large chunk of society finds that they cannot afford the downpayments
198.
by makomk 4y ago
The truth is that it's not possible to to push renewable electricity generation up to arbitrary levels by just continuing to build more and more of them, especially with the mix that Germany ended up going with, because not only are th
199.
by makomk 4y ago
The write-up I saw suggests that revoking the Windows bootloader would cause existing install and restore images to fail to boot even with Secure Boot disabled because it checks its own signature, which would be pretty amazing if true: htt
200.
by makomk 4y ago
Of course they are. If I remember rightly, the EU's NO2 emission standards for vehicles were substantially laxer than the US in order to protect the German car industry and its investment in diesel engines. This resulted in most major
201.
by makomk 4y ago
Those packages are only in Debian testing, and I think RDNA2 GPUs are the only consumer-level GPUs with reasonably good support in ROCm (and then probably only some of them). AMD also dragged their feet for a long time on supporting RDNA af
202.
by makomk 4y ago
The general goal of all the windfall taxes I've seen proposed is precisely that the money used goes back to ordinary people so it can be spent instead of supposedly being wasted sitting around in the bank accounts of the super-rich. Th
203.
by makomk 4y ago
It really isn't, publications like the Guardian have just misled people about how the economy works and why corporations make profits in situations like this. It's basically a direct consequence of two things: people cannot buy st
204.
by makomk 4y ago
Even in an ideal world where there's no fundamental difference in the cost of producing 1000 units or 5000, companies aren't going to be able to sell 5000 at the same price as they could 1000 when doing so exceeds their current ca
205.
by makomk 4y ago
From what I can tell, the big reason that supermarkets in mainland Europe can work around this by ordering from different suppliers is that they're willing to pay their suppliers more and pass the cost increase on to their customers ,
206.
by makomk 4y ago
One big reason that demand is low is that the current generation of GPUs are way too expensive, with top-end GPUs about twice what they used to cost a few years ago, very poor improvements in performance-per-$, and anythign below the top en
207.
by makomk 4y ago
There's also a fully open source Bluetooth stack for the Nordic chips (Apache nimBLE) compared to the non-commercial use only but with some vague and possibly not yet available exception for the RP2040 license of the BTstack used here.
208.
by makomk 4y ago
Well, this explains that one really annoying intermittent bug that I was having in some asyncio-based code.
209.
by makomk 4y ago
The whole idea that this could all have been funded from a windfall tax pretty much came from Labour, which is how they're relevant. Also, the fact check I linked to specifically addressed the "investment loophole" - closing
210.
by makomk 4y ago
Actually, in a way it does. The idea that the reason the government's plan required borrowing so much money was because they'd refused to impose a proper windfall tax was a lie by the opposition Labour party (that was repeated unc

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