twoodfin

6 ms·

31.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
Also like sugary drinks, which our brains perceive as satisfying but are actually the opposite, LLM’s have been well-trained to produce text our brains (and up-voting fingers) perceive as lucid, logical, and authoritative despite the freque
32.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
So why don’t the Visa and Mastercard banks up fees across their entire card lineup? If they’re truly too big to give up no matter the fees they charge, they’re leaving money on the table. Of course, they can’t. If Chase started handing coll
33.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
Why do you think it’s a negative sum game? I don’t have any data, but my intuition is that overall high-fee, high-reward cards increase propensity for consumer spending by at least a few % beyond the fees/rewards. The merchants think s
34.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
I’m not really sure what you’re asking. CEO’s of S&P 500 companies are absolutely expected to perform. Those that perform well ultimately end up at the top of the compensation list. Some who perform poorly are still compensated based on
35.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
If you ranked the top 500 US professional athletes by salary and looked at the median (#250, so as here, you’re only looking at the “S&P 250”), I’d be surprised if the result were radically different. USA Today[1] helpfully has a ranked
36.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
The problem isn’t JavaScript: To competitively run web app code written in any language, modern CPUs depend heavily on speculative execution, caching, and other complex, stateful implementation techniques that are inherently susceptible to
37.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
Nobody was doing ads exactly like that decades ago, but celebrity endorsements in some form have been a staple of advertising for at least a century.
38.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
Sure, but ApolloFortyNine described Apple’s behavior as “slam dunk monopoly abuse”. A monopoly is not a dominant position, it’s an overwhelmingly dominant one.
39.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
The laws that define criminal fraud are themselves fraudulent?
40.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
I assume you mean approved by Microsoft. When they were found in the US to have a monopoly, they had around 95% of personal computer operating system share. Apple isn’t even close.
41.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
For hospitals (where the majority of US healthcare spending occurs), pricing transparency has been the rule for more than 5 years: https://www.cms.gov/priorities/key-initiatives/hospital-pric...
42.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
Which monopoly is Apple abusing?
43.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
It’s more like a politically palatable Rube Goldberg machine for transferring costs to those (well-insured through their jobs, the Federal government, rich supporting institutions and donors) able to pay.
44.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
The problem with AI writing isn’t the tics and the tells. The problem with AI writing is that it’s bad . The typical highly voted HN AI-written post has an annoying clickbait title, then jumps into a meandering chain of “so there I was” sc
45.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
If you’re only making a minimum payment consistently lower than your monthly spend + interest, your utilization will go up very quickly and you’ll look like a credit risk. This pattern is also not sustainable for the consumer; eventually th
46.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
Consumer credit % used of credit available. I mean you might also think the banks are issuing a bunch of dumb credit, but that suggests a problem with their financial state, not consumers.
47.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
Growing balance = greater % of credit used.
48.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
The credit bureaus score based on the % of credit you use (and of course that you pay on time). This is basically equivalent from a credit risk perspective, the banks don’t really care what % is interest vs. principal.
49.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
AFAIK, most or all modern cars which depend on OTA updates have their own built-in cellular connectivity, the ongoing cost of which is baked into the sale price and/or optional subscription features.
50.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
Right but those instances only happened because the existing owners approved the sales.
51.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
Was deeper! That surprised me, too. Now I want to learn more about deep water drilling.
52.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
Actually, it’s the anti-trust exemptions / lack of enforcement that allows the leagues (owned by the billionaire team owners) to decide who can and can’t own a team. Otherwise teams could and probably would be purchased by publicly-own
53.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
I wouldn’t worry too much. Imagine if all this capital investment in AI were instead being focused on solar build out. The vibes would be much more positive, but the return on capital for solar panels frankly looks paltry compared to what L
54.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
Sure, but absent the GFC, Bush-era tax rates + spending choices pushed the deficit to a low % of GDP we’d kill for right now. Do you think lower high-income marginal rates caused the GFC?
55.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
This is what I meant by stories you could tell. Other folks blame Glass-Steagall repeal, which happened during the Clinton administration. The Big Short blamed it on the invention of the MBS a couple decades earlier. IAE, nobody thinks it
56.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
The last pre-GFC Bush II year of 2007 had a federal budget deficit of $163B. The budget deficit in 2016, Obama’s last year, was $587B. The last pre-Covid Trump I year of 2019 had a $984B deficit. After Covid, Biden’s final full year deficit
57.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
That’s a really small data set to draw any strong conclusions from. None of these big swings between administrations had much to do with policy: Clinton inherited the end of the Cold War and resulting “peace dividend”. Obama inherited a Fed
58.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
They’re using wholesale prices. The entire flight was 27 minutes, peaked at a megawatt of power, and a wholesale megawatt-hour is $40-50 these days.
59.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
4.7% of the discounted future earnings pie of 3761 of the largest current publicly traded global companies. That’s still a lot, but “the global economy” over the horizon where those earnings are not discounted to 0 contains a lot more than
60.
by twoodfin 2mo ago
In what sense is there a “concentration of wealth”? Look at any large, highly profitable public company and the #1 owner is probably Vanguard funds.

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