tfehring

47 ms·

511.
by tfehring 6y ago
The run he's describing there is fundamentally the same as a run on retail banks. Retail banks in the US are pretty much run-proof due to the FDIC, but that's not the case for the shadow banking system.
512.
by tfehring 6y ago
Genuine question - why is it a given that there will be latency issues? It looks like the satellites are only ~350 miles, or a little less than 2 light-milliseconds, from Earth's surface.
513.
by tfehring 6y ago
Makes sense, thanks for clarifying.
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by tfehring 6y ago
The point of disbanding the Minneapolis Police Department (your 3rd link) is to work around police protections like minimum force size and union protections that are codified in the city's charter. The plan is to remove and replace, no
515.
by tfehring 6y ago
It's not obvious that the current process does better than chance at detecting genius, though - at the margin, the formal and informal tests used for admissions are far better predictors of your parents' tax bracket than of your o
516.
by tfehring 6y ago
Spots at elite universities are constrained for the sake of artificial scarcity, not because of financial considerations.
517.
by tfehring 6y ago
Do you and/or your investors have preferred stock/liquidation preferences? If so, that dramatically reduces the value of employees' stock and creates a misalignment of incentives, and my impression is that that misalignment h
518.
by tfehring 6y ago
https://www.iaea.org/publications/8181/management-of-agrofor... The abstract seems to validate both the parent comment's claims and your experience: > The studies show that the integration of trees and cr
519.
by tfehring 6y ago
They didn't explicitly say that capital is entitled to a return, but the comment pretty clearly indicated an asymmetry between capital and labor. You could invert the wording to the following > You aren't de facto entitled to
520.
by tfehring 6y ago
So capital is entitled to a return but labor isn't? Why the distinction?
521.
by tfehring 6y ago
UBI isn't socialism. The incentive for productivity under UBI is called capitalism, and it means that the people who want to live more than slightly above the poverty level will continue to work, and the people who want to get rich wil
522.
by tfehring 6y ago
I think you're understating the impact of discount rates here. Long term interest rates are down ~70 bps from their previous all-time low in 2016 and something like 130 bps from their average over the period you're describing. Tha
523.
by tfehring 6y ago
This is true but incomplete. The S&P500 is basically at the same level as mid-February, and even if expected earnings for, say, mid-2021 forward are the same as they were in February, the missing earnings between February 2020 and mid-2
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by tfehring 6y ago
"Probability of becoming rich" is a weird thing to optimize for. If a rich person being rich costs you a fixed and relatively small amount - say $1,000 - every year, that wouldn't materially affect your chances of becoming ri
525.
by tfehring 6y ago
If you get it, regardless of your age, there's a relatively high probability that you will directly and indirectly infect enough people to kill at least one person. I don't want that responsibility on my conscience. Also, while th
526.
by tfehring 6y ago
Presumably only part of the issue was that he wasn't wearing a mask, while the bigger factor was that he was in an environment with lots of non-mask-wearing people in relatively close proximity.
527.
by tfehring 6y ago
That sentence immediately reminded me of this: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/another-dull-quarantine-... I wonder what share of cases have been spread by people "letting their guard down."
528.
by tfehring 6y ago
For what it's worth, I'd expect that leverage to come back to bite you in the ass in a rising interest rate environment. Granted, we haven't seen a sustained period of rising interest rates for 40+ years, but it's not ob
529.
by tfehring 6y ago
To the extent that they're advertising - or even just increasing the availability of - derivatives trading to unsophisticated retail investors, I agree with you. But taking unlevered long positions in individual stocks is not that much
530.
by tfehring 6y ago
Madison is a strange example to hold up considering that there's a drastic, almost Boulder-esque shortfall in housing supply, mostly driven by NIMBYism. It's still an awesome city - I'm in the process of moving there - but I
531.
by tfehring 6y ago
Whether Uber's business is providing taxi service or just providing a platform for independent drivers to connect with clients, intuitively it seems like the work drivers do is clearly within the usual course of Uber's business. W
532.
by tfehring 6y ago
Drivers are more than twice as likely to cancel rides requested by black passengers than rides requested by white passengers. Any such "obsession" in this discussion is a reflection of observed reality, which is clearly not colorb
533.
by tfehring 6y ago
> This would be more reasonable in the era of 10-20 years in the same company or industry. Needing to job hop every 2-3 years for a decent raise, and software skills applying to a vast array of industries, makes it less reasonable IMO.
534.
by tfehring 6y ago
This is a great point, and reasonable people can disagree about when an application's abuse or potential for abuse crosses the line. The same goes for pivots or for general-purpose code that's used elsewhere. (Is it ethical to con
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by tfehring 6y ago
> So management bears no blame for requiring illegal work be done, on pain of termination? No, I wouldn't say that. In many cases, management and engineering share the blame jointly and severally since they both have an opportunit
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by tfehring 6y ago
The programmer still decides whether that code gets written, since they’re the one writing it! If you write or review a piece of software, even if the spec was written by the PM/business, you’re endorsing whatever that spec says and al
537.
by tfehring 6y ago
In sufficiently complex systems, you can always blame someone else if you're motivated to do so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IssR_J0QWr4 But ultimately there's always a software engineer involved in the creati
538.
by tfehring 6y ago
> I think people can handle the truth. I disagree. Look what happened when to toilet paper, which was less scarce and less important than PPE.
539.
by tfehring 6y ago
It’s not trickle-down in the sense that people traditionally talk about trickle-down, since it’s explicitly conditional on hiring. And it’s keeping people employed at a cost of ~$224k per job, which presumably makes it far more expensive th
540.
by tfehring 6y ago
I don’t really buy this explanation because vitriol against vegans is alive and well even in regions and communities where vegans are effectively non-existent. N.B.: I grew up in rural Wisconsin and have never knowingly met another vegan in

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