birb_cromble
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User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
2d ago
Taking a long position like you are is not comparable to your suggestion of a short. Shorts have uncapped risks and a much more specific time horizon. "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" is much more true for shorts. There were people who shorted tech stocks in the 2001 bubble and went bankrupt because they missed the crash by few months. There were similar people during the housing crisis. That doesn't mean they were directionally wrong - it means that timing is hard.
birb_cromble
2d ago
The biggest issue was the fact that I was doing rotations and mirroring on images that were too big to fit into memory all at once. Not only did I have to learn the math, I also had to figure out how to do it in chunks. The tiffs were tiled. The jpegs were not. It was not a good time.
birb_cromble
2d ago
Oh believe me.
I didn't go into engineering for a reason.
birb_cromble
2d ago
I work in software and I was doing a bunch of image processing on tiffs and jpegs.
It probably would have been easier if the project didn't also have a tight deadline, and my manager at the time wasn't also implying that my job was riding on it.
birb_cromble
2d ago
Learning Latin was bad enough. Please don't make me go through another classical language.
birb_cromble
2d ago
Vampire the masquerade was a big nerd thing at the time, especially in the artistic side. Anne Rice was still taken seriously too. Horror in general was a surprisingly big deal then compared to now.
Somebody introduced me to Warhammer for the first time in the 90s. Thank God I didn't take to it.
In the 90s, the nerd/punk overlap mirrored the nerd/metalhead overlap of the 80s. The live music scene was going through something of a golden age with the festivals starting back up in earnest (Lollapalooza, Lilith, HFStival, Woodstock 99).
Cell phones existed, but not everyone had them and they didn't work well. As I write this, how much of this 1980s nostalgia is a top-down consensus campaign by writers who just don't want to deal with how cell phones negate 90% of the easy ways to create danger and tension in a narrative?
birb_cromble
2d ago
Good luck teaching yourself matrix math, complex variables, calculus, circuit theory and laplace analysis on the job.
I had to teach myself matrix math on the job. 0/10 - would not recommend.
birb_cromble
3d ago
only the most left-liberal people want transgender to be normalized in society
Sometimes I wonder if there's a cultural disconnect here. When I go into big blue cities and encounter transgender people, they're usually just awkward people trying to live their lives. When I encounter them out in the sticks, they're frequently weirdos who seem hellbent on making me a non-consensual participant in their fetish.
Is it possible the "transgender intolerance" of the right is a self reinforcing feedback loop? The sane transgender people move to the cities where they're more accepted, which makes them look better to the people there, but leaves the bad actors out in the country where they get off on making other people uncomfortable? Which in turn makes the people out in the country less tolerant?
birb_cromble
3d ago
And Fetterman, of course, is far from the only person to start out on the populist left and end up right-of-center... Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald are journalists who made the switch.
I often wonder about this framing. Did Fetterman, Taibbi, and Greenwald really "make the switch", or did the American left move left faster than they could keep up?
In 2006 I was a solid Democrat. I wasn't at the extreme end of the party, politically, but my views fit comfortably inside the envelope of party orthodoxy. I feel well represented by guys like Jim Webb and Howard Dean. Since then, I haven't really moved rightward - hell, I may have even shifted left on topics of corporate regulation and tax law. Nonetheless, most political scales would say that I'm not a Democrat anymore. Somewhere around 2015 they started increasing the number of things you had to believe to be a Democrat, and at this point the list is so large and incoherent that I just can't do it anymore.
birb_cromble
4d ago
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026036936/spaceexplorationtechnologi.htm
SpaceX S-1 is public. Reading over it so far, I'm not particularly impressed. I'm surprised that rents from anthropic are their biggest source of revenue right now, beating out starlink. Any predictions on how this IPO goes?
birb_cromble
4d ago
Current spending is $665.18 lower than it was on the same day last year.
I have two big expenses (car insurance and the second half of my home repair bill) coming up, so I expect to overshoot again in the next eight weeks. In the meantime, I'm going to try to keep spending down to mitigate that.
birb_cromble
5d ago
I'm the Bartolatta case, were there any particularly spicy ballot measures this year? Democrat turnout was unusually high in my district, but it was due to local school board drama rather than anything related to the primaries.
birb_cromble
5d ago
Current spending is $665.18 lower than it was on the same day last year.
I have two big expenses (car insurance and the second half of my home repair bill) coming up, so I expect to overshoot again in the next eight weeks. In the meantime, I'm going to try to keep spending down to mitigate that.
birb_cromble
5d ago
When you drink way more with friends, is it over the same time frame? It's easy to lose track of time when you're having fun with people you enjoy spending time with.
birb_cromble
5d ago
If the hand of god reached down and stripped out all corruption from America, Donald Trump would still be a billionaire
Are you going to seriously claim that a guy who did real estate and development in New York City, in the 1970s and 80s, bares not a whiff of corruption?
birb_cromble
5d ago
I've beaten the S&P by about 1.5% over the last 20 years. I do it with a fairly simple buy and hold strategy of broad market index funds, and a few tilts into growth and value funds, along with some real estate funds. The main thing is that I just... don't sell. I may stop putting more money into a fund, but I don't sell it. The market is pretty cyclical, so it seems to work ok.
birb_cromble
6d ago
The 0 down/0% APR is great if there's no prepayment penalty and you're 100% certain you can pay it off in time. A lot of people take that deal, then don't pay it back and get hit with back interest.
I don't know if I'd recommend an index fund though, you can lose principal in a down market.
birb_cromble
7d ago
My mechanic just sent out a notification that their allocation of motor oil is being cut by the dealer network, and to expect higher prices as a result. I looked online, and rumors abound that AutoZone is experiencing a similar problem.
This got me thinking about just how pervasive petroleum and petroleum byproducts are in the modern supply chain. The last time we saw prices like this was 2008-2012, and I'm struggling to make a comparison. The fallout of the financial crisis was so strong that it masked a lot of the effects.
What do you think will happen if the strait stays clogged up for another month? Six months? A year?
In the short term, I think we're going to see a lot of industries try to normalize a "fuel surcharge". I'm already seeing it locally from landscaping companies. I could see big logistics companies like Amazon try it as well. Beyond that, I don't think I have any predictions that are worth saying out loud.
birb_cromble
7d ago
Rural mid Atlantic?
birb_cromble
7d ago
That is what dogs are for raising children.
My malamute used to earn her keep by killing rattlesnakes in the wood pile. I'm pretty sure I'd get a visit from the county if I made my kids do that.
birb_cromble
8d ago
You got lucky. My one cat drools like a Saint Bernard when she's happy.
birb_cromble
8d ago
Several years ago, my bank card was compromised, and when I went to use my credit card, it automatically locked because of "suspicious activity". This all happened on a three day weekend when I couldn't straighten it out easily. It taught me the value of having some cash on hand for essentials.
birb_cromble
8d ago
Audiences can actually get upset about a story not being realistic because the author was too accurate and didn't fit their misunderstanding.
My favorite example of this is older movies where they put hoofbeat foley over scenes where people are riding horses through a sandy desert. Hooves don't make that sound on sand, but people got uncomfortable watching scenes where the audio cue wasn't there.
birb_cromble
8d ago
This is going to play merry hell on owner-operators. Nobody's going to want to underwrite one guy with one truck.
30 year Treasury yields are popping off
This doesn't seem like a great sign. It does make me wonder what kind of risk premium you'd accept before buying a 30 year right now. My gut feel, given current conditions, is that 5.2% is too low. I might start thinking seriously about it at 6%, but if we hit 6%, I think we'd have enough other problems that I might not have the money to spend on one.
More broadly, I'm getting concerned about stagflation. Inflation is persistently coming in above targets, consumer sentiment is in the shitter, and outside data center construction, the economy has been more or less flat for about six quarters now. Am I being overly pessimistic here?
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