dereg

Bernanke has his fingerprints on every large central banks' response in the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. He flooded the system with liquidity to prevent what he observed in the Great Depression. Was he successful? Yes. We didn't suffer from a recession anywhere near the magnitude of the depression. Did you like how he did it and what happened as a result? I'm guessing you didn't.[1]

Part of the fun of economic and monetary history is following the umpteen competing explanations for recessions and bubbles and piecing together a mosaic of all that seems to make sense. Bystanders have the luxury of not writing those papers unlike academics, who often chain themselves to their own work/school of thought.

Every monetary theory is based on a very limited set of observations. Policies borne out of those theories are even more scarce. I don't expect anyone to be right or wrong all the time. In my opinion, the best way to understand economics is to have a base set of principles and be theoretically promiscuous.

[1] I tend to be a free market fundamentalist so I didn't like it either. That doesn't mean it didn't work.

You can feel however you feel about Bernanke during his tenure as Fed Chair. He was certainly hard to like at times, perhaps sometimes too smug. But his work laying out the pernicious effects of deflationary feedback loops as as an academic is probably one of the most influential works of monetary economics out there.

I suggest people actually reading his papers before making a knee jerk reaction.

This is burying the lede here, which is that you can correlate the transactions to on-chain data to dox customer addresses and transactions.

I did not miss that in my comment.

Yes, this is what I was talking about. It was an avoidable tragedy.

My point is that the political imperative leads politicians on both ends to take on many unfunded liabilities without planning for continuity or completion. I'm hoping that the extended storage for this is well accounted for and immunized against the whims of the next administration.

If COVID taught us anything, the government is going to let these drugs expire useless, incinerate them, refuse to replenish them, and import loads of fakes when an actual crisis hits.

Snark aside, this may not be the case this time around. Relevant snippet:

> 2004 Project Bioshield Act and $290 million in Project BioShield designated funding to purchase this supply of the drug. Amgen will maintain this supply in vendor-managed inventory. This approach decreases life-cycle management costs for taxpayers because doses that near expiration can be rotated into the commercial market for rapid use prior to expiry and new doses can be added to the government supply.

I'm guessing $290M covers both the cost of the drugs as well as storage for some number of years. Would be nice to know for how long.

Forgive me for not RTFA first but I'd like to collect some impressions here. What platforms are people seeing the most suspicious behavior on? I've found that an overwhelming majority of my Reddit engagements are garbage. Most clicks spend less than a couple seconds on my site.

I agree with your criticism. I want to add one more: GDP is a measure of activity. Measuring lights on satellite images is a state. So somehow this study is correlating stock (# of lights) to a flow (economic activity). Seems like a pretty basic comparison error.

There have to be a gazillion other caveats - something stinks about this study. This content sings to many of their readers who cant moss an opportunity to tell others that china’s books are cooked.

You'll get it when you have kids.

There’s no complex modeling required here on an interest rate swap. The payout on swaps is easily calculable and the range of outcomes knowable. There’s not much overlap in the context of what Buffett talked about and what happened here besides the word “derivatives” and the idea of exogenous shocks tending to lead to outcomes outside your range of modeled assumptions.

I’d be glad to engage more but it seems like you are fixated on a slant and cannot be convinced otherwise.

I think the equivalent would be if, a very modestly able coder, were to insist on this forum that nobody should ever have loops in their code because sometimes they do weird things.

That's a good question. Many companies want to get to as close to fully funded as possible so that they can offload the pension from their balance sheet and transfer the risk to an insurance company.

Agree, I edited it out. I was so annoyed that I went too far with that statement. While they wouldn’t necessarily have been wiped out, they would have needed to make a LOT of calls.

It’s a completely incorrect explanation. There’s no moral hazard here, they weren’t risking pension or funds through the swap agreement. The reason why the answer isn’t clear is because pension math is boring. The thing is, you can’t fully grasp the truth unless you’re willing to engage in it.

This is demonstrably untrue and yet you proffer it as fact. The pensions benefit from rates rising, because higher rates decrease their liabilities more than it decrements the value of their bonds. The pensions have, as a result, entered swap positions go hedge themselves against rates falling. The only issue is that the sudden drop in the gilt has created a feedback loop in the gilt sell off.

There is a reason why explanations of what went on are so complicated… It’s because pension math is extremely boring. However, you cannot understand the situation, even intuitively, without going into the nitty-gritty to try to learn the plumbing.

Your mistruth is incredibly corrosive to discussion on this site. @dang please keep an eye out.

Edit: I’m reading through the comments here and virtually everyone has it wrong. The pensions made what should have been a good decision to hedge their liabilities. They made a bad decision in terms of forecasting their liquidity needs in a high-stress rate scenario.

Don't look at the word "margin call" and assume they did something wrong. Simplistically, if you're getting called on a hedge, you're probably making money, just less of it. On a position like this, the fund faces a "margin call" every day. It's called variation margin, and all that means is the position's PNL is settled on a cash basis, daily. You may be thinking of a margin call in terms of a retail investor naked shorting a stock that has subsequently tripled in value. It's nothing like that. Variation margin "calls" are part of the structure of the instrument.

I've consulted pensions. Saying that pension fund managers did this to "pay themself large bonuses" is laughable – pension fund managers aren't compensated like other areas of finance so the incentive is always to be more risk averse because they want to keep their jobs.

Edit edit: I don’t mean to say these pension mgrs don’t deserve criticism. It’s just that what I see is so off mark.

This is great. I really love all my Matisse generations. On the other hand, I find DALL-E to be uniformly bad at recreating Edward Hopper. Almost none of the generations capture the spirit of his work. It's especially obvious when you run the same Hopper prompts on Stable Diffusion. I wonder why.

I don’t think you (nor parent) read the actual post.

1. The problem presented is not that parking apps exfiltrate data from your phone, it’s that anyone can throw your plate number into it and get notified of when you pass through specific areas.

2. Your solution would not address the problem. Problem is not one of data portability, but the fact that your license plate may be registered in a system without your consent or awareness. The convenience of the service is directly at odds with privacy/security, and the post is asserting that the gain in convenience achieved through the current implementation is not worth the perils of the unfettered tracking possible through it. It provides non-governmental solutions to ameliorate the issue.

Does the character work or not work? For me, the character works. Why do we need to be talking about his race again?

> I'm almost certain they cast these shows specifically so they can find someone on twitter to say something racist [..]

I cannot imagine being this cynical about something that is, at the end of the day, an Amazon Prime show.

edit: removed judgmental tone

I feel the same. I've been entirely tuned out of LoTR/internet culture and so I went into the show with zero expectations. I was surprised by how much I liked the show.

When I read this review, the author's complaints are all trivial. The three examples of the show being terrible are: 1. Elron and Durin are really good friends, 2. Galadriel looks suspiciously strong, and 3. the Hobbits aren't reacting the right way to a broken ankle.

I'm sure this type of article plays well to a person with a disposition, or someone who has been steeped too deeply into certain internet subcultures.

If you liked his review of Spirited Away, you will also like his review of Metropolis. I liked that he enjoyed movies from all genres as long as they accomplished what they set out to do.

> The movie is so visually rich I want to see it again to look in the corners and appreciate the details. Like all the best Japanese anime, it pays attention to little things. There is a scene where an old man consults a book of occult lore. He opens it and starts to read. A page flips over. He flips it back in place. Considering that every action in an animated film requires thousands of drawings, a moment like the page flip might seem unnecessary, but all through the movie we get little touches like that.

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/metropolis-2002

This is great and would have saved me so much anxiety in the past.

> We would only see this on a massive sell off when Tether can't prop up the price fast enough with their reserves (by buying USDT with USD). This almost happened on May 11 of 2022.

This did not almost happen. Do you enjoy writing fiction?

It basically means that the Federal Reserve stopped purchasing US Treasuries and agency mortgage backed securities. These assets are now rolling off their balance sheet as they reach maturity.

A few things off the top of my head:

- Mac touchpads have near-perfect wrist detection so you almost never get an errant input.

- There is virtually no input lag. It’s especially crucial when scrolling long pages. On a Mac, you can flick the touchpad and the page will scroll all the way down.

- Furthermore, they perfectly recognize up to 10 fingers. There’s a lot of great software that allows you to set shortcuts to different mouse gestures like 3-,4-, 5-finger swipes, tip-taps, and more.

- There’s a really smooth acceleration curve that allows you to be extremely precise with the mouse while also allowing it to span great distances when needed.

Like the other poster said, there are so many subtle differences that amount to a gargantuan delta between the two experiences.

For all intents and purposes, a M-Series MacBook running Parallels is the best Windows laptop you can buy. I say this as a Windows productivity maximalist.

It’s 2022 and Windows touchpads and touchpad drivers don’t hold a candle to my 2011 MacBook.

It’s simple to replicate a lag. Just take a series of photos or a 4K video. It takes a non trivial amount of time for the phone to process it.

Turn off scene detection.

I’m really curious what the GPU miners are going to be doing with their cards. Today may be as big a moment for gamers as it is for ETH devs.