marvin

69 ms·

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by marvin 6y ago
Fascinating, thanks for the info. In Norway, fixed-rate mortgage agreements are always made with a clause mandating settlement of the interest difference, in the case of refinancing or early repayment. The customer therefore has no leverage
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by marvin 6y ago
An honest assessment would conclude that our laws are too creditor friendly. They allow lenders to take on more risk than they otherwise would have. I don't know how our delinquency rates compare to the rest of the world, but there&#x2
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by marvin 6y ago
I've never understood mortgage refinancing in the US. Isn't the lender taking a loss when you refinance, since their 20-year asset will now pay less in interest than before? How does the lender make up for this loss, if the debtor
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by marvin 6y ago
In Norway, personal bankruptcy requires an application to the debt enforcement office (a local government authority). If the application is accepted, the debtor gives up all their assets and submits to paying all of their earnings towards t
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by marvin 6y ago
It isn't that cheap anymore. New undersea cables to Europe means we can export/time arbitrage a lot, and that increases prices.
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by marvin 6y ago
Well, if you work for a publicly traded company, you could always spend part of your salary on put options on your employer.
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by marvin 6y ago
I almost can't believe we were laughed and scoffed at for wearing a mask in March. Whether we had a respiratory infection or not. My biggest takeaway from the epidemic is that herd conformity is a ridiculously powerful force. Never und
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by marvin 6y ago
The discussion is (de facto) coerced vaccination vs. voluntary. I think that enough people will voluntarily vaccinate that the population-level effects of insufficient vaccination will be small. If so, the points about "endangering the
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by marvin 6y ago
I'm sure that Norway would keep a registry of those vaccinated as well (almost the inverse); we already do for other vaccines. Although there has never been any sort of politics or coercion involved. Sharing it is another matter, thoug
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by marvin 6y ago
Completely off topic, but: Do you have a blog or a twitter feed? I've been reading your comments on HN for a while, and you often have insights and observations that I find valuable.
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by marvin 6y ago
I've had the sense that growth investments are almost completely closed to the public in the United States. This trend has been gradually solidifying ever since the dot-com bubble, and has reached its logical conclusion today. The only
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by marvin 6y ago
What you'd really want is a machine you can buy that provides you useful goods and services at almost-zero maintenance cost. The stock market is sort of a proxy for this wish: You have excess capital, and you want to invest it in somet
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by marvin 6y ago
Famous last words, but: I wouldn't be entirely surprised if, in 10 years' time, we'll hear the same lamentations about the stock market as we do about housing. "The older generation climbed up there and pulled up the lad
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by marvin 6y ago
If Donald Trump tweets something, you might get hurt if you go ahead acting under the assumption that he was wrong, without checking for yourself first.
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by marvin 6y ago
I noticed something funny when going through it in a Tesla for the first time. The three parts have slightly different inclines, and the transition between them is sharp. Don't remember exactly, but I think the first part is uphill, th
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by marvin 6y ago
Nope, that's what it looks like :) I haven't been there, but check out this photograph of the Vallavik tunnel in West Norway for another example of render-like architecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valla
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by marvin 6y ago
I didn't say that you were wrong , or dismiss your viewpoints. I'm pointing out that there is a broader debate here, which has value but is misunderstood by many. Freedom of speech as a philosophical concept spans wider than its
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by marvin 6y ago
This is the canonical meme of free speech, but there's a corollary that is becoming increasingly relevant. People who repeat what you just wrote usually seem to ignore it: If every arena where people actually meet is privately owned,
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by marvin 6y ago
I wonder if you could do that kind of thing on a large scale. Require a small contribution, say $1 a year, and use the proceeds to hire a moderation team that was deliberately coached to allow controversial arguments but prevent malicious
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by marvin 6y ago
GP's is not claiming that overweight or transgender people are inhuman. That statement is exactly the type of extremist stance that is causing this debate in the first place. Hell, they aren't even claiming that they are in fav
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by marvin 6y ago
I turned the wipers on with my first try, wearing a face mask, without knowing what the voice command was, and English isn't my native language. You do need to speak loudly, and there's an unfamiliar concentration aspect to using
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by marvin 6y ago
What a super fascinating demonstration this thread is of why OnlyFans could never have been a Silicon Valley company. I'm not going to risk getting pulled into any of the ten different arguments going on here, beyond stating that I con
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by marvin 6y ago
The thing about "unknown unknowns" is that they are unknown. It's like asking "what could possibly be outside the edge of the map, surely it's more of the same". This isn't a matter of water flowing downhi
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by marvin 6y ago
Seems like people prefer to downvote rather than try to give a compelling answer to the question "is the literature on long term side effects of mRNA vaccines extensive". If the argument towards this question is overwhelming, sure
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by marvin 6y ago
That's the most level-headed response I've heard yet. Most people just equate my worries to those of an antivaxxer and move on. These new vaccines have a 90% efficacy. It's probably a no-brainer to give them to someone in the
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by marvin 6y ago
The part about parts spontaneously forming a bicycle is a nice soundbite, but reverse transcriptase (an enzyme) is used by RNA viruses to do just that.
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by marvin 6y ago
Okay, we've researched mRNA medicine since the 90s. But have similar medicines been given to a million people? Have those been tracked for three decades? We're talking about scaling that up by a factor at 10-100+, and giving it to
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by marvin 6y ago
Yep. That was her point. From the responses you’d think I was talking about brain chips injected by Bill Gates, but I suppose this is the result when a layman attempts to explain something unfamiliar to other laymen.
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by marvin 6y ago
My partner, a biochemist, has mentioned the potential possibility of RNA viruses causing the RNA of the vaccine to stabilize as some sort of DNA structure. Normally RNA is quickly broken down by RNase, but apparently RNA viruses have a mech
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by marvin 6y ago
Most who claim that HN has a rabid and irrational pro-Tesla cult must have missed the last seven years of incredibly critical commentary. I started noticing in 2015. Maybe I'll put together a montage one day. The claims of a pro-Tesla

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