was
1yr ago
It's not super clear to me that a decaying body releasing gases (while in a tight container) actually extends the breathable atmosphere meaningfully for the remaining occupants.
was
1yr ago
To explain this relationship further to the layman audience, let's say the interest rate (which is directly related to yield) on Treasuries is 0% (and for simplification, that's the only other investment option, and the market doesn't price in any potential for that interest rate to change), and you buy a $100 bond that promises to pay 2% interest over the next 30 years. You're buying the bond and anticipating getting $182 at the end of 30 years!
The day after you buy the bond, the interest rate on Treasures gets raised to 5%. Now, in order to get $182 in 30 years, someone can just buy $42 worth of Treasuries today. So your "bond" is now worth less than $42 -- because why would they buy your bond when they could buy the Treasuries instead?
was
1yr ago
It's more a historical thing. 25 years ago, when startups were less of "a thing", a lot of traditional banks didn't approve a startup account because the below looks really weird if you're used to servicing traditional businesses.
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Someone with no commercial history or credit
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Who wants a credit card
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Then who one day deposits millions of dollars
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And the next months dollars get sent out and the bank balance goes down
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With minimal consistent income
These days it's more that you ask some random person in the startup world, VC, or lawyer, and they go "yeah, a plurality of the people I know use SVB" and that's not where you spend your precious hours as a founder trying to differentiate your company so you just go with the flow.
Though, next week every single founder is going to be taking money out of First Republic, Citizens, Fifth Third, Capital One, BNY Mellon, etc. and wiring it straight to JPM. I suspect there will be a broader bank run.
was
1yr ago
It's not the lack of cash, it's the timing of it.
Directors of a company are criminally liable if they ask people to work knowing they have no means to pay them. Wednesday is March 15 (payday, for work done March 1 - 15). That means companies unable to make payroll #2 in March need to furlough or have layoffs before start of work Thursday.
How many will be able to secure funding from VCs (who may themselves have funds tied up in SVB) before Thursday?
was
1yr ago
If the FDIC or other banking entity does not cover deposits, any business that depends on SVB and has a > $125K bimonthly payroll will have to do furloughs or layoffs. That's basically any business above ~15-20 people.
Directors of a company are criminally liable if they ask people to work knowing they have no means to pay them. Wednesday is March 15 (payday, for work done March 1 - 15). That means companies unable to make payroll #2 in March need to furlough or have layoffs before start of work Thursday.
There's something on the order of 1,000 series A or higher deals per year (even in 2022, decreased from 2021). The average time between raises is about 2 years. Thus, conservatively there's something like 2,000 venture-companies that have > $125K bimonthly payroll, and many small businesses that use SVB but are not venture-backed are not counted in this.
SVB purportedly services 50% of all startups per their advertising. From a survey of my VC and startup friends, it seems reasonable to assume that 25% of that are extremely dependent on SVB (e.g. payroll, no cash sitting elsewhere, and incoming customer payments aren't going to cover anything).
If these assumptions hold, we're looking at around 10% of the entire startup ecosystem laying off effectively everyone in March (e.g. either by going under, or reducing headcount so drastically that they're cashflow positive... which for most startups would be extremely painful). Another large batch will effectively go under in April (e.g. they have one months' payroll at another bank but that's it).
So in the short term we're talking about somewhere on the order of tens of thousands of jobs. A lot of future value creation is lost. Sure, some of these startups are the Juiceros or latest crypto scam, but others are meaningful companies that provide meaningful services. The latter group typically doesn't get as much press because they're optimizing for value rather than hype.
In the medium term, if you're a business that requires having an account with a >$250K balance, why would you now use any bank other than JPM? Sure you can do "diligence" on your bank, but SVB had an A rating from Moody's and a "buy" rating from JPM. Now obviously those are bullshit but for anyone claiming that this collapse was obvious -- please share a screenshot of your brokerage account where you made tons of $ shorting SVB.
So the default will be to go with JPM, rendering most small and medium-sized banks uncompetitive.
At the end of the day, SVB's shareholders will (and deserve to) get wiped out. Their bond creditors and such will mostly (and deserve to) get wiped out. I am not for bailouts of either of those parties. And maybe how we think about the banking system where depositors are creditors should be re-interrogated, because who the fuck is wanting to risk all their money for like a 0.5% interest rate? But I do NOT think startups and small businesses deserve to be randomly decimated.
was
1yr ago
The difference is that saving the environment requires a coordinated action, but saving a kid in India does not. Any modestly well-off person from the U.S. can do it. So the fact that they don't is a revealed preference (vs. just a consequence of tragedy of the commons).
EAs use this contradiction to convince people to do more (by pointing out what you would do for someone in front of you). I don't have this contradiction -- I wouldn't do shit for many people in front of me either.
And yes, I stand by my assessment of Barbara Fried. Instead of passing a drug test to demonstrate purity of body, upper-class welfare leeches must pass a similar test put together by a granting agency to demonstrate purity of mind.
Here's her bibliography: https://law.stanford.edu/publications/?primary_author=Barbara%20Fried&page=1
was
1yr ago
Yes, there's definitely some people that care.
But the vast majority just profess to care and their actions (i.e. revealed preferences) suggest otherwise.
I have to admit, I don't care about other people as a general rule.
I care about some people: my wife and kids, my parents and siblings, close friends, social circle, coworkers (in descending order). Outside of that I care about people based on the value they bring. That can be direct value, e.g. the mailman who delivers packages, or indirect value, e.g. the people working at USPS's sorting center.
But I don't care at all about the people who bring negative net value. The homeless guy drugged out of his mind? If he died tomorrow I literally wouldn't feel sad at all. The single mother welfare-leech churning out 4 kids? Nope. Sam Bankman-Fried and his mother (who I consider her the upper-class equivalent of a welfare-leech)? Gone. Just fucking Thanos snap hordes of inner-city gangs and Women's Studies majors away.
I not only don't care about them, I fundamentally don't understand why people do. Does human life have intrinsic value? Yeah, some. But surely we all agree -- not that much right? Or else you would take all the money out of your bank account, go to one of the slums in India, and start saving lives left right and center at maybe $100 a pop? And at least that little kid in the slum has the potential to be the next Srinivasa Ramanujan, whereas the 65 year old homeless drunk who shows up to the ER every two weeks has no chance?
(Obviously this is not to say that I want those people removed -- that sets a dangerous precedent because who decides?)
was
1yr ago
I will admit this isn't an effortpost:
As is common knowledge and more deeply discussed elsewhere in this very comment section (e.g. https://www.themotte.org/post/349/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/62270?context=8#context), Google got "scooped" by ChatGPT not because they were beat on the technology side, but because they were beat on the productization side. Some are comparing this to Xerox PARC, where Xerox invented or incubated many elements of modern computer technology -- the GUI, the mouse, etc. -- but, being blind to their actual utility, got "scooped" by Apple and others and subsequently lost out on trillions of dollars of market value.
What's deeply, deeply hilarious to me is: during this entire time, Google management were so busy posturing, and their internal A.I. safety teams were so busy noisily complaining sexism / racism / phobias of various sorts (not so much human extinction), and they developed such a reputation for being a place to coast, that despite 130,000 elite-educated, overpaid people sitting around ostensibly unleash their brilliance, they're now in a position where Microsoft has a puncher's chance (realistically, maybe 5 - 10%) of catching up and even surpassing Google's decades-long search dominance. Even better, competing with Microsoft now means that Google might have to cannibalize a $100B / yr line of business, whereas Microsoft cannibalizing Bing means it sacrifices maybe a ham sandwich / year line of business.
was
1yr ago
Google Maps -- outside of the U.S., restaurant reviews (which derive from that) surpass Yelp.
Google Drive -- at our company of about 100 people we no longer routinely use Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. (granted, most of the executives and salespeople still have Microsoft licenses as they may need to send a Word or Excel document).
Android
Chrome
I don't know if that any of the above are "super successful" relative to Search, but then very few things are. But that's the core of their complacency -- anything they build gets compared to a trillion dollar, 90% margin business. For example GCP is a clear miss on a relative scale (relative to AWS and Azure) but still would be a multi-billion dollar company in its own right.
Granted, there are a lot of total whiffs too.
was
1yr ago
Remember when the Democrats had Biden look at the camera, break the fourth wall, and say "do I look like an extreme leftist to you?"
They know that as long as Biden has the looks and mannerisms of an upper-middle-class grandpa with a touch of dementia, most people will map him to "harmless and with good intentions".
In reality, Biden is a lifelong politician who has likely never worked an honest day in his life. All the things you cited reinforce that. The fact that his son Hunter is all sorts of fucked up to me also reinforces that (although only as part of a constellation of data points; it is far from conclusive by itself).
was
1yr ago
What's the over / under on whether (conditional on actually being guilty), Hunter Biden is actually investigated, convicted, and serves a sentence comparable to what a "regular Joe" would serve?
I would give something like 1:1000 -- or about the likelihood that the true "alt-right" has some sort of overwhelming awakening and victory (if a Mitt Romney or even Ron DeSantis-type Republican were magic-wanded into the Presidency tomorrow, I do not think he or she would push for much beyond some media noise).
On a related note, what would other people give as the odds ratio of the "alt-right" gaining some sort of overwhelming victory in the next 10 years? To me it seems like this would require some extreme sequence of events, for example DJT is assassinated by the FBI [1] and an overwhelming evidence trail comes to light.
[1] Dear Secret Service, I am not advocating for this to happen, it is a purely hypothetical scenario.
was
1yr ago
I used to look at the declining number of Christians in the U.S. to conclude that people were becoming more rational.
Now I realize that religiosity has just transferred -- slavery was the Original Sin, racism is the Devil, and we are all guilty unless we Repent (become anti-racist) and Jesus (black people) alone can forgive us.
It's so tiring.
was
1yr ago
The person you're responding to is so deep in their own fantasy scenario that they're already rolling out the gotchyas for something that they just straight made up lol.
"Let's assume a hypothetical scenario in which all smart people just punch themselves in the face once a day. Well if they're so smart, how come they keep punching themselves in the face once a day? Riddle me that, ace, riddle me that!"
was
1yr ago
One cause of the IQ-denier (and extending beyond that, denial of racial differences in IQ distribution) fallacy / fantasy is assortative socializing.
Lots of top-tier VCs don't subjectively think IQ is a strong selector because -- by the time a founder gets to Series B, they've been pre-selected for high IQ (1).
Lots of CEOs don't subjectively think IQ is a strong selector because -- by the time they interview someone for an executive position, that person has already been successful and thus has been pre-selected for high IQ.
You don't even have to be that high up. If you're an engineer at Google, your friend group and work group are probably all people who are fairly high performing individuals. So you might notice that there are fewer black people in that group, but the black people that you do interact with probably feel about as smart as everyone else (2)
Conversely, in my experience, if one talks to ER doctors, cops, public school teachers, or other people who are exposed to relatively large and relatively random slice of society, and one is really careful not to use the words IQ and wait until they've had a couple drinks, each of them will readily attest that some people are just plain smart and some people are just plain dumb.
1 - Or at least high enough to come off as quite smart in a superficial conversation not in one's domain.
2 - Not really true when I talk to non-woke people, but for the woke, at least smart enough that it's easy for them to dismiss any differences as those of education or environment, etc.
was
1yr ago
By two counts:
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Mainstream ideas on content moderation would be to remove anyone that posts some sort of swastika. I would only ban a person with significant publicity who singlehandedly could cause a large advertiser exodus.
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Mainstream ideas on what causes "experience degradation" expands over time, e.g. first swastikas, then failure to use gendered terms, etc. I would optimize for the experience of the, say, 1 S.D. above-average tolerant person rather than the 1 S.D. below-average tolerant person.
The corollary of point 2 is that sites get more tolerant over time in my view (as people become desensitized to seeing mildly offensive views), but less tolerant over time in the current paradigm.
was
1yr ago
Yes, let's make sure Twitter gets bankrupted / regulated out of existence, that'll show those censors!
To be clear (copied from another post of mine):
"If I were Musk and you posted that on Twitter, I wouldn't care. Nobody knows who you are and I agree the image is largely harmless. Maybe some NYT journalist compiles the '500 incidents of anti-Semitism' but it can largely be shrugged off since only the disproportionately-loud chattering class cares what the NYT says.
If you're Kanye West and have been actively in the news for being anti-Semitic, recently required my intervention to un-ban, and have been posting progressively "edgy" things, then you're damn right I'm going to ban you to maintain the commercial viability and existence of my platform."
was
1yr ago
I guess this is how conversations go when both sides frame things uncharitably?
was
1yr ago
Uncharitably, the other side of the table sounds to me like "I get to feel superior on some edgy corner of the internet, and then whine about it as my side continually loses battle after battle in the culture war".
was
1yr ago
I'm not trying to maximize free speech Y-intercept; I'm trying to maximize free speech AUC over time.
If it's 1995 and your goal is to allow for maximum degrees of freedom in human sexuality / sexual identification, you first amplify only homosexuality (mildly to moderately unacceptable relative to the population's current position); only once that's accepted do you amplify transsexuality. If you skip step 1 there's a huge negative reaction that works against your goal.
P.S. Thank you for framing it as a question rather than other commenters who just made a bunch of assumptions.
was
1yr ago
I disagree that posts can be judged in isolation.
If I were Musk and you posted that on Twitter, I wouldn't care. Nobody knows who you are and I agree the image is largely harmless. Maybe some NYT journalist compiles the "500 incidents of anti-Semitism" but it can largely be shrugged off since only the disproportionately-loud chattering class cares what the NYT says.
If you're Kanye West and have been actively in the news for being anti-Semitic, recently required my intervention to un-ban, and have been posting progressively "edgy" things, then you're damn right I'm going to ban you to maintain the commercial viability and existence of my platform.
You're trying to maximize free speech Y-intercept; I'm trying to maximize free speech AUC over time.
Totally agree. The practice of Medicine just isn't that deep. It's some pattern recognition (sick / not sick), extracting the right features from the patient (patient says "man my chest feels weird" and figuring out if they mean chest pain, shortness of breath, etc.), heuristics (this cluster of signs and symptoms matches this), and then a short decision tree (D-dimer --> CTA).
It turns out that at the end of that relatively shallow decision tree, if you can't figure it out, 99% of the time it's not because there's a Dr. House moment waiting on the other side, it's because nobody knows. Sometimes that's -- well we've discovered that you have stage IV pancreatic cancer. Here's a clinical trial but otherwise that's the end of human knowledge. Sometimes it's "well, I don't know why your chest feels weird, but we've ruled out the bad stuff so let us know if it gets worse!".
And obviously there's bad doctors who can't go through that without fucking something up along the way. Maybe there's even a lot of them? But outside of a small handful of surgical subspecialties (like you do open heart surgery on babies), I would guess that there's not much difference between an 90th percentile doctor and a 99th percentile doctor -- and almost certainly not between 99th percentile and 99.9th percentile.
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