graedus

> One of the largest problems towards this is the 40 year smear campaign that neoliberals have been on against unions. Somehow they got the working class to believe that each special individual is better on his own when bargaining against a massive corporation.

There's a great book about this effort called Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60.

edit: Here's a snippet from the summary: "In Selling Free Enterprise, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf describes how conservative business leaders strove to reorient workers away from their loyalties to organized labor and government, teaching that prosperity could be achieved through reliance on individual initiative, increased productivity, and the protection of personal liberty."

> we have more millionaires and billionaires in political positions than ever

I was curious about the numbers on this in terms of congress members. It doesn't appear that anyone in congress specifically is actually a billionaire as of 2016[0], but over half of them are millionaires as of 2014[1]. Of course there are non-congress members that are billionaires (Trump, DeVos, Ross, some governors, etc)[2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_members_of_the...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/us/politics/more-than-hal...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_richest_American_polit...

edit: added information

> AI wins on the strength of better decision-making and novel strategies in Chess and Go, though. I have no doubt we'll see this in RTSes in the near future as well.

Yes, likely! I wasn't doubting it's possible or even likely. Only that seeing an AI do flawless 1000 APM stalker micro and macroing perfectly, while pretty cool, is not as exciting as seeing an AI use a novel strategy (edit: especially one that a human could theoretically execute)

It is certainly a real advantage, but I think the argument is that it's not as interesting as an AI that could win on the strength of better decision-making, or the innovation of novel strategies, etc.

> Every dollar-denominated investment incurs inflation risk, including any sort of cash account like a dollar saving/checking account.

You're right, inflation risk isn't particularly relevant when comparing treasuries vs checking accounts or cash. Those are all exposed.

> For example, while they're growing, every withdrawal will be matched by a great amount of deposits. So they'll always have the cash in hand to satisfy withdrawals.

Ha, if we can just assume they'll have money pouring in faster than withdrawals, even when markets experience turmoil, there's very little to worry about! I don't know exactly how sure we can be about that - or at least, for how long.

> Absolutely. I would keep an emergency fund in an FDIC-insured bank account somewhere else.

Wise, and it sounds like we're on the same page. All I was arguing is that there is some risk here that's being glossed over by selling it as just-another-checking-account-except-you-get-more-money. Maybe small/unlikely risk, but you're not getting 3% for free. You can always just go buy some IEF or TLT or actual treasuries too.

> Sure, but you can buy US treasury bills, and then your risk is "lose some money if the US government defaults", which is very low.

There are all kinds of other risks associated with buying US treasury bills besides the US government defaulting, which is why you get paid - but you're right, the risk is low so you get paid a low amount. You have opportunity costs during the time that your money is locked up in treasuries. You also incur some inflation risk. If we are specifically talking about T-bills then we're talking about treasuries with maturities of less than one year, meaning that particular risk is low. There is interest rate risk. If you have an emergency and need to convert back into cash before the maturity date hits, you have to sell them on the market, where you may lose money if interest rates have increased. If you're investing in the treasuries via an ETF or via a broker, you are incurring additional counterparty risk.

> If you look at the current treasury yields, they are very close to 3%.

The 10-year bond is 2.91%, the 20-year bond is 3.05%. Investing in a 10 or 20 year bond is obviously different than having a checking account which can be emptied at any time without penalty and without having to go to the market to find a buyer, so there's a large maturity mismatch that's being incurred by your counterparty, RobinHood (assuming they are in fact investing in long-dated treasuries).

> If they go bankrupt because of an unlikely combination of events - lots of deposits coupled with a very sharp and unexpected decline in treasury yields - SIPC will pick up the pieces and make sure you get your cash and securities up to $500k.

The part where they pick up the pieces could take weeks or months; if you need the cash before then, you're in trouble. If you can afford to wait, you're right, no big deal. I don't expect RobinHood to go bankrupt tomorrow, but if they were wiped out as part of a wider financial crisis, it's possible that under those conditions you'll need access to your cash quicker than you think.

> When the return is higher, the risk must have gone up too, somehow.

I want to emphasize this point. You are never* getting returns for free, you are getting paid to take on some risk. If someone is trying to sell you "risk-free" returns that are higher than widely-known market rates, they are lying to you by downplaying, omitting or obfuscating the risk associated with those returns, and warning bells should be going off in your head. Proceed with caution.

* You can of course find better risk-adjusted returns than the market by way of information asymmetry in your favor. Suffice it to say that is not the case with a consumer financial instrument aimed at "the masses" (not high net worth individuals).

Doesn't it follow that if you're able to evade the plain meaning of the law, then the law as written (or its enforcement) is ineffective, or "bad"?

I was about to remark that it reminded me of the 2016 indie game Inside. According to Wikipedia, "[Inside] is the spiritual successor to Playdead's 2010 game Limbo."

Interesting - would you mind talking a bit about why you chose Algo for professional use and Streisand for personal use? I've been meaning to research them both more closely, but just getting by on manually configured SSH tunneling for the time being.

In case it wasn't clear, user 21 was responding to user garblegarble with alternatives to the Intel NUC8i7BEH (~$484 in the US), not the Mac Mini.

But yes, the decked-out i7 Mac Mini is really expensive! As noted elsewhere in the comments (and in the article), a big chunk of that cost is in Apple's 1TB SSD pricing - ticking that option adds $800 over the 128GB SSD for some reason.

Yeah, and that's one of the best consumer models available! I believe the WD Black 1TB is in the same league for performance and price as well.

Yeah, the model you linked has a i3-5005U - a very large step down from a i7-8559U. Still, could be sufficient depending on what you need it for.

Depends on which model. I got one earlier this year with a 7th gen core i5 processor: NUC7i5BNH with a i5-7260U, 2 cores, 4 threads, 15W TDP. Now you can get them with 8th gen core processors like these (among others):

  i5-8259U, 4 cores, 8 threads, 28W TDP
  i7-8559U, 4 cores, 8 threads, 28W TDP
  i7-8705G, 4 cores, 8 threads, 65W package TDP
  i7-8809G, 4 cores, 8 threads, 100W package TDP

The last two have fancy integrated graphics and only come in a larger form factor with a skull on the side.

edit: conciseness, formatting

To be a little more descriptive, it's a dashcam video from a vehicle driving near Bagram Airfield, and you see the plane crash in a way that makes it clear that the entire crew are killed.

Some more detail from the Wikipedia entry[0]:

"On 2 June 2013, investigators from the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation of Afghanistan confirmed the load shift hypothesis as the starting point: three armoured vehicles and two mine-sweeping vehicles, totalling 80 tons of weight, had not been properly secured. At least one armoured vehicle had come loose and rolled backwards against the airplane's rear bulkhead, damaging the bulkhead. This also crippled key hydraulic systems and damaged the horizontal stabilizer components - most notably the jackscrew, which rendered the airplane uncontrollable.[10] Control of the aircraft was therefore lost, with the abnormal pitch-up rotation, stall, and crash to the ground ensuing.[1] The damage made it impossible for the crew to regain control of the aircraft."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Airlines_Flight_102

These are cool. FYI some of the images are displayed at the wrong aspect ratio. The final example in particular is pretty squished, I recommend opening the image in its own tab.

An alternate view I've seen is to look at the last 30(+) years as a giant bull market in bonds that is slowly, finally, coming to a close[0][1]

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-10/is-the-30...

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamsarhan/2016/11/16/is-the-30...

Yeah, I really like that one, it can produce nice dense graphs that display a lot of history at once. It even shows stats about the CPU cores as well.

Agreed, nice site. On Windows 10, the sliders do not work in Firefox 62.0.3, and they do work in Chrome 69.

> Don't write clever code, write readable code.

Good one. Clever code is really tempting. It feels cool to do something in one line instead of six and call it a day. In many cases, the mature thing to do is to know how to do the cryptic one-liner, but write the six lines anyway for readability and comment them.

> An example, the collision of the Milky Way with Andromeda is likely to produce no collisions of solar systems.

I was curious about this, so I found this source[0] via wikipedia:

"Although the galaxies will plow into each other, stars inside each galaxy are so far apart that they will not collide with other stars during the encounter. However, the stars will be thrown into different orbits around the new galactic center. Simulations show that our solar system will probably be tossed much farther from the galactic core than it is today."

Interpreted literally, it would seem this at least leaves open the idea that a star passing through any other star's solar system and, say, sending its planets into wildly different orbits or flinging some into interstellar space, is meaningfully more likely than a star actually physically hitting another star, but I haven't seen the math. I wouldn't be surprised if they're both extremely unlikely - the diameter of our solar system appears to be about 8500 times larger than the diameter of the sun, which may not change the odds in any significant way.

[0] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/milky-way-...

The latter. Certainly, Sanders isn't powerless, he's the most popular politician in the US. However, he's only one of one hundred senators, almost all of whom are beholden to or influenced by—to varying degrees and on varying issues—the members of "the billionaire class", as he would put it. Bezos's net worth is currently over $160 billion. Q.E.D.

In a world where wealth distribution was flatter, and the richest person alive had access to like $100 million (a lot of money!), that would be one thing. The distribution is not so flat in our world, to put it mildly. Not to be pat, but money is power, and I think it's important to grasp the orders of magnitude at play here.

I'm absolutely astonished at this definition of "punching down"!

Here's a 15 hour old HN thread asking this exact question and getting over 500 comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18054574

I'd be interested in reading Mozilla's blog post series you referenced. Is this an example?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16169236

Same with Chrome and Firefox in Win10. Even Chrome's device/touch emulation doesn't work. It does work on iOS Safari. Can't say I've seen such weird event handling in a while.

> I don't get however why you don't consider the current model compact.

Are you referring to this?

> This is not a portable device.

The way I read it, drewg123 wasn't saying that this particular keyboard is not compact compared to other keyboards. Rather, a keyboard in general doesn't need to be particularly portable, so why attempt to shave an extra inch off by eliminating useful keys?

Thanks, that's an interesting bit of history, I hadn't noticed that before.

Off-topic but ultimately related, here's another "fun" Hank Paulson moment as he talks about inequality with Robert Rubin and Sheryl Sandberg (and I believe Tim Geithner is just off-camera to the left):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln33wtom1Ow

Other way round - he's Goldman alum

I saw this in context, but in the end it doesn't make the piece defensible. The "counter opinion" was that you shouldn't buy (pre-order) the card yet. It's not like it was an NVIDIA hit-piece, just entirely reasonable advice about cards that aren't released yet. "Just pre-order it and don't wait for reviews and benchmarks, by the way here are NVIDIA's claimed performance figures aren't they great" is pretty suspect coming from the editor-in-chief a reviews and benchmarks site.

Edit: also just some really insane lines in there: "When you die and your whole life flashes before your eyes, how much of it do you want to not have ray tracing?" ???