JanisL

You have to give a place and a time frame for these things, there are some places that did see 40% yearly inflation for multiple years in there (along with years of say "only" 10%). So while year on year inflation isn't consistently running at 40% it is still running very hot. Specifically some of the areas outside the major cities have seen spectacular inflation in house prices. A colleague of mine sold a house in Ontario for 200K CAD or so in 2016, same place now recently sold for a bit under 500K. While that's not quite 40% year on year it's close. Sure this is just an anecdote, the place could probably have sold for more the first time around especially if more renovations were done, but there's a lot of such anecdotes and I think that's why people throw around numbers like 40% because that's what they've seen lately and perhaps lack the numeracy or data to look at the bigger picture more accurately. In fairness the inflation in that broader geographical area of that anecdote is "only" 110% over the last 5 years. But the fact that 110% inflation can have happened in 5 years across a broad geographical region is just nuts.

But yeah there's places like Barrie Ontario that are like +70% in 5 years, Hamilton 70%, Oakville 68%. All those three are around +30% in the last year. Then there's some places that were previously cheaper areas like Niagara falls that's +93% in the last 5 years.

Toronto for comparison is around 70% over the last 5 years but 15% in the last year which shows that the Covid situation has meant that inflation of property prices in the major cities has slowed compared to areas surrounding. Given that wages haven't gone up much these numbers in the real estate markets are just nuts. I can't imagine this is good for the stability of the broader banking system over there.

Canada has seen staggeringly high real estate inflation in many places lately. There have been places that have seen 100%+ increases in prices over just the last few years.

Currencies exist to fill a need. Legal tender fills the need to be able to pay taxation obligations. Other currencies can exist for other needs, see scrip for an example of this.

I think it's important to note that dollars weren't directly convertible to gold for regular citizens for many years before 1971 which is the date that the window was closed entirely.

I think in part its because hours are extremely easy to measure compared to productivity in many complex work environments.

Commercial banking has been steadily declining for quite some time, it's a long term trend that this is just continuing: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USNUM

The thing that's always surprised me about Tether is the confidence people have in it without a fully transparent accounting being available of their collateral. Also they by their own admission in 2019 they only had 74% of the liabilities covered but people still seem to have confidence in them having 100% reserves. Collateral issues have been known since at least as far back as 2019: https://www.ccn.com/tether-lawyer-shocker-only-74-backed-by-...

Also: https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed

Start from first principles and look at the economic data directly (understanding game theory is a crucial piece of this). Make sure to ignore the narratives as these tend to obscure the understanding of the fundamentals (since most people pushing various narratives about the market are driven by vested interests rather than educational interests).

Thank you for making this!

Have a look at some maps of plate tectonics. The huge Australian plate collides with the Sunda plate along a boundary which is much closer to Indonesian landmasses compared to the Australian ones.

OpenStreetMap can be quite good: https://www.openstreetmap.org

It seems like blogging is a hard thing for people to monetize, especially for some topics that aren't so "sponsor friendly"

Not much damage in Melbourne, at least so far (hopefully nothing bigger happens, this comment is a couple of hours since the main shock). A few poorly built brick walls have toppled in some places but that's about all.

I think there's some important context here for people reading this from overseas, geologically Australia is extremely stable as its far from any tectonic plate borders and there's very few large earthquakes here. This quake is one of the largest to happen here. Many people here have never experienced the sort of whole building shaking type of experience we just had.

Depending on workload you will need to watch very carefully for burnout and other mental exhaustion issues if you do this.

Entirely depends on the organization, I used to think this too but then I encountered some organizations (granted ones with entirely dysfunctional procurement processes) where switching technologies was easier and less risky to schedules than going down the procurement process. The risk of missing deadlines and blowing out schedules is the factor that tends to be on people's minds when procurement is brutally slow.

A lot of it is path dependency whereby various practices turn into processes, regulations and laws. On top of this narratives form that guide peoples thinking as to what the right financial decisions are, then people can start to believe these narratives over time without questioning them. Eventually companies can create certain processes or habits on the basis that those narratives need to be true: https://www.epsilontheory.com/what-do-we-need-to-be-true/

Handing over code comes with some very real costs, I think it would be naive to not consider these costs.

I think this blog post is highly relevant https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...

I'm not sure if this comment was in jest or not but I've seen both of these things happen in real projects.

In my experience of these things the environment at many banks greatly reduced the effectiveness of technical software staff. For example when I went to do some workshops for a bank a while back on data science, half the room didn't have their access approved to get the data and a third of the room didn't have access to the big data platform and many couldn't install any analysis software on their work laptops and it had been over 8 weeks since their project started. People who are really passionate about technology will find this sort of situation quite annoying.

Ebay has become less and less friendly to sellers for a number of years, I'd imagine a lot of people would like more options in this space.

If someone has had to work every day it hardly sounds like a vacation, what sort of arrangement is in place that would have someone put up with something like this?

Student debt is structurally not the same as other debt because it's non-discheargeable and this changes a lot including who is offered the debt in the first place.

Price stability compared to what though? I think this is an important question because currency risks are going to be relative to your other options. If you live in a place where the local currency fluctuates like crazy anyway, or worse debases substantially each and every year, there's a lot less to lose from crypto instability compared to if you live somewhere with a stable local currency.

Well on the surface it might seem like it but there's a huge amount of nuance here. What happens if the act of writing these IOUs creates a situation where economic activity can happen that creates real wealth (or destroys real wealth)? This hints at one of the crucial dynamics when debt interacts with money which is that the value of money is not constant over time in a debt-based monetary system.

WeWork has always been propped up by a large flow of investment money.

Why would you want 100 people to have wealth instead of just one? I feel there's some related questions about utility being non-linear that matter here

Given how cheap phones have got I find it appaling that the default isn't to just provide a work phone to the new employee.

If it's cheap to buy a phone then I think the management at the company absolutely should be buying the phone, I just fail to see why the employee should be forced to install something on their own phone for work.

It sounds all this "efficiency" ends up in the favor of the company and in a way that just seems out of balance.