I said "not crazy", I didn't say normal. Do the math. 4% a year, compounded over 18 years, is 102.6%. 4% a year in the US is above inflation, but not crazy.
1,475 karma · joined December 12, 2016
Of course context matters. I don't trust a smile from a used car salesman. I trust a smile more from someone I am playing basketball with, or that I pass while hiking in the woods as they have no incentive to deceive me. And if I don't get a smile from someone I pass while hiking in the woods I would be more on my guard.
This chart from the same wikipedia article seems to show that inflation adjusted (dotted line), the prices are less than 30% higher than in 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case%E2%80%93Shiller_index#/me...
That index is not adjusted for inflation.
People could get no down-payment mortgages, could get mortgages with bad credit, could get mortgages on houses they couldn't afford, because all the mortgage originators just fudged the paperwork. No one wanted to find a reason to not provide the mortgage.
Everyone being able to buy a house heated the market up, and as people got used to the market going up and up, it was seen as a good investment, and more people bought more expensive houses they couldn't afford, and mortgage originators did more shady things to make it happen.
A lot of these mortgages were adjustable rates that started at a really low rate, and in 3 years could shoot up to a much higher rate. An optimistic consumer wouldn't worry much about that. But when the time came, some people couldn't pay the crazy increase in their mortgage. The foreclosures coming onto the market depressed the market.
So the bubble finally popped, and someone owned a house that they bought for $750,000 with no money down, an adjustable mortgage for the whole $750,000 that started at 4% and in three years shot up to 8%, and when that happened the house could only be sold for $450,000. So they just stopped paying the mortgage and walked away. The foreclosures further depressed prices, created a very nasty cycle.
I worked in land records at the time, and the standards for the mortgage originators were just horrible. Not bothering to record mortgages in the correct town, not bothering to do a lot of things.
There are a few movies that are really interesting that described what happened, real life thrillers IMO. "Margin Call" is awesome, "The Big Short" explains what happened really well and is pretty funny at times, and "Too Big to Fail" is from the regulators point of view. It's kind of awkward but still really interesting.
Unless you are New Zealand :D
Sure enough, a few weeks later we were perma-banned from adsense. Destroyed all hope for my business. At no point did we get to communicate with a live person. Fortunately I had set up an LLC and used the Federal Tax ID from the company instead of my own SSN or I would have basically been blackballed from internet advertising forever. I disputed it, owning up to what happened and explaining how I couldn't undo it. The robo-response was that my dispute had been rejected, ban was permanent.
I bet this destroyed so many people's hopes and hard work over the years. When you have a million followers, it will take serious fraud to cause a problem. When you are a nobody starting out, figuring things out for the first time, you make one mistake and you are done forever. I realized that if anyone didn't like a less popular uploader they could just make a new account, and click on their ads until they got banned. Pretty horrible.
I haven't been involved with adsense since, but if they don't provide the ability to disown clicks they should add that. There is a lot of testing that goes on when you are building a product.
The threat analysts say, we need to destroy Iran's ability to make nuclear weapons. The nuclear weapons specialists say, the part where we can best do that is by somehow breaking their centrifuges. The centrifuge technician they call up says, "well, x RPMs will really ruin those things. And it would be hard to tell if they did it like this..." Then the software guys make the code that ruins the centrifuge, and the red team incorporates it into their fancy worm, with specs on what exactly to look for.
Ultimately, it was kind of a failure in that anyone found out about it. Maybe there were better programs, and because they were better we never heard about them at all. But still it's pretty amazing :)
Certainly people can change and improve themselves. I don't believe "once an x always an x" for anything I can think of.
Turns out, what I am saying is all backed up by a study which took about a minute of Googling to find: https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4426#affil-auth
"Here we provide empirical evidence for a gradual escalation of self-serving dishonesty and reveal a neural mechanism supporting it. Behaviorally, we show that the extent to which participants engage in self-serving dishonesty increases with repetition. Using functional MRI, we show that signal reduction in the amygdala is sensitive to the history of dishonest behavior, consistent with adaptation. Critically, the extent of reduced amygdala sensitivity to dishonesty on a present decision relative to the previous one predicts the magnitude of escalation of self-serving dishonesty on the next decision. The findings uncover a biological mechanism that supports a 'slippery slope': what begins as small acts of dishonesty can escalate into larger transgressions."
What he should have done was a) coordinate a time with me when he was off work anyway or b) ask for a day off. He doesn't need to explain why, he could have said it was a personal day, it's not his bosses business. I don't expect someone to work two jobs simultaneously, we'd have easily worked it out.
I no longer run my own business. When I am looking for new employment, I do my current job, and do my job search when I can fit it in. If I need to take time off I take it. That didn't even occur to you?
I used to own a business, and I hired people that I knew, nice people. I learned that I should never hire anyone who was not trustworthy, to myself or others, it's just not worth it. One of my friends attended part of the hiring process by telling his current employer that he was sick. This raised red flags in my mind, but I thought, surely he wouldn't do that to me, his friend? Later he did sloppy work and hid it from me with lies, the company almost fell apart. One of many similar stories.
If you have a habit of convenient lies, when the pressure is on and the fear is in your gut, you're going to lie. Don't lie to yourself about it :)
But put developers in prison for 20 years because the car crashed, that's untenable. You wouldn't have decent standards, you just wouldn't have anything at all. What kind of developer would put themselves in that position? Everyone makes mistakes. All complicated software has bugs. You would only have software made by fools, and marketed by fools, that was much more dangerous.
If someone makes software that reduces accidents from 10% of drivers per year to 0.1%, they still cause 100,000 accidents a year in the USA, maybe a few thousand fatalities. Give them the electric chair right?
If you are going to punish them for the mistakes, will you reward them commensurately for success? For every life they save, can you give them a life?
For example, the car is driving me somewhere, and there is a wreck on the other side of the road. Foolish human nature takes over, I take control of the car to slow down and look at the accident. I am overriding the cars autonomous software. The car in front of me is doing the same thing, but slows down even more. My car senses a collision about to happen, and takes control by applying the brakes, ignoring my input on the gas. Once the clear danger is over, the car must give control back to me, but only if I continue to choose to override its normal operation. Otherwise it will resume driving itself.
This is basically an application of Asimov's "three laws" concept.