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"Exclusive: Trump's approval hits new 36% low as fuel prices surge amid Iran war, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds"

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-approval-hits-new-36...

In the US, I would imagine a tragedy such as this would be litigated and end in a financial settlement potentially including economic, pain & suffering and punitive damages, well before a decision allocating blame by a jury.

1. Is this a one off event due to Block's unique business environment?

2. Will other tech firms consider such large layoffs in the near future?

This feels rich. Compare:

Adyen: $29.408B right now at Yahoo Finance.

PayPal: $41.51B right now.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADYEN.AS/

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PYPL/

For elite colleges, it is a pithy aphorism that the hardest part is getting in.

I miss the old Whole Foods.

Really impressive tech. I don't understand the insurance ramifications of installing and using this system.

Comma's website links to a 7 year old reddit thread: https://comma.ai/support#will-my-insurance-cover-my-car-with...

As a driver, if in an accident, could someone reasonably assert that you were not paying attention?

It is instructive to ask why voters are uninterested or incapable of selecting honest politicians?

Or another way to state my point: voters are getting exactly the politicians they voted for. There is no majority-constituency that seeks a different group - because majority voters already have the ballot power to select different politicians.

Bringing down asset prices is what is necessary for younger workers to have a chance. As it is - young people will be perpetual wage slaves and never build capital (e.g. home equity, retirement funds) like previous generations. The fear, anger and despondency evident in people who are delaying family formation, delaying medical treatment, hiding their true self while others boast of yachts, and gulfstreams and Aman resorts on instagram, and question whether someone's identity is worthy - all of it is profoundly sad.

But lowering asset prices is a nearly politically impossible lift.

Left-wing populists will promise to deliver. But will ultimately fail. Populism ultimately is a rejection of elites. Elites who are currently failing the public. But you musn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

My objection is that left-wing populism with its rejection of economic elites, rejection of capitalism and the big-tent embrace of "all" is isomorphic to right wing populism with its rejection of science (antivax), embrace of nationalism and focus on homogeneity. Economists have good ideas. Capitalism is what built the water system that nourishes NYC. A movement embracing "all" will find itself eventually fractured by vote-bank politics as tribal affiliations will dominate in the end.

I am personally focused on thinking about how rewire the financial plumbing over succumbing to either left or right wing populist movements.

Anyway - Mamdani is a forceful, and commanding speaker. His victory speech last night was truly an American original. I think he's trying to point the vector towards a better life for more people and that is a good thing.

Something is observably wrong. The ratio of rent to income has drastically changed against workers - this is destructive to society.

But the cause is deeper than rent price controls, minimum wage and worker protections.

After the 2008 financial crisis, western central banks digitally printed trillions of dollars (Quantitative Easing) to refloat our financial system. The collapse of 2008 was itself the result of perverse incentives leading to banks stuffed with bad mortgages due to speculative housing manias after the collapse of the Dotcom bubble and 9/11.

The response of flooding the financial system with trillions of printed money after 2008 for years was a political choice - supported by Democrats, Republicans and President Obama.

Wealth inequality is the result. It cannot be fixed at a local level through local policies. It cannot be fixed by Congress through policy or tax tweaks. It is a problem with the financial plumbing itself.

First - a rent freeze directly transfers inflation costs to the property owners. It is a tax by another name.

Second - there is no similar freeze on property taxes - or the expected inflation in maintenance costs, insurance, and so on. Again - a tax on property owners by another name.

Third - starting with a rent freeze is an indicator of a property owner unfriendly administration. Any builder would have to calculate this into their expected returns on capital investment.

You can see this in California with its mandated $20/hr fast food minimum wage. Restaurants responded by cutting workers or cutting hours.

https://www.nrn.com/quick-service/california-lost-16-000-res...

"It has been almost one year since California implemented a $20 minimum wage for quick-service restaurant workers, and industry experts have been debating the long-term effects the wage jump would have on the industry’s job market.

As it turns out, thus far, the 33.3% wage increase for fast-food workers in California has resulted in almost 16,000 job losses — a decline of 2.8% — across the limited-service food industry from September 2023 (when AB 1228 was signed into law) until September 2024, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Since the law went into effect in April, California’s limited-service restaurant industry has seen an employment rate decline of 2.5%."

Of course Krugman got that wrong. It is funny.

But economists don't disagree about the effects of price controls. These are easy to observe and model. These concepts are also taught to Economics undergraduates all over the world - often in their first Microeconomics class. They are not controversial.

Here is a Khan Academy video: https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/microec...

The underlying cause of impoverishment where inflation of housing, healthcare, and education is outpacing income is an expansionist monetary policy. ZIRP (Zero interest policy) along with QE (quantitative easing) pushed ever increasing amounts of printed money into the system. No one is touching the root cause. Not Mamdani, not Democrats and not Republicans.

https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2010/12/08/13190...

"Jon Stewart Busts Fed Chair Ben Bernanke On 'Printing Money' December 8, 201010:39 AM ET By

Frank James

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is so busted.

Comedy Central host Jon Stewart added his voice to others who caught the central banker contradicting himself over whether or not the Fed is "printing money" through its actions to bolster the economy.

On 60 Minutes this week, when asked by reporter Scott Pelley about the Fed's $600 billion purchase of Treasury bonds that is meant to lower interest rates further, the Fed chair said:

BERNANKE: Well, this fear of inflation, I think is way overstated. We've looked at it very, very carefully. We've analyzed it every which way. One myth that's out there is that what we're doing is printing money. We're not printing money. The amount of currency in circulation is not changing. The money supply is not changing in any significant way. ...

Twenty-one months earlier on the same program and to the same reporter, Bernanke said something quite different:

Asked if it's tax money the Fed is spending, Bernanke said, "It's not tax money. The banks have accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. It's much more akin to printing money than it is to borrowing."

"You've been printing money?" Pelley asked.

"Well, effectively," Bernanke said. "And we need to do that, because our economy is very weak and inflation is very low. When the economy begins to recover, that will be the time that we need to unwind those programs, raise interest rates, reduce the money supply, and make sure that we have a recovery that does not involve inflation." "

Increasing supply brings down prices. But a builder will not build at a loss or an imminent threat to their rental income from expansion of rent freezes.

A city with an expanding rent-freeze is not inviting new supply.

The underlying cause of runaway asset price inflation is ZIRP and QE. Renters experience it as rent increases outpacing wage increases - this is socially destructive. But neither Mamdani (DSA) or Democrats or Republicans are willing to touch Federal Reserve QE.

Senator Schumer (D-NY) famously said in 2012 to Ben Bernanke (Federal Reserve Chair): 'Get To Work Mr. Chairman' - encouraging him to start Quantitative Easing 3 (QE3) - a program to digitally print $40billion and eventually $85billion per month of "money" and injecting it into the financial system.

Rent control is always initially popular with the people who are already in apartments. But it is longer term effects on supply and quality that are corrosive.

An alternative is Austin:

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f...

"Austin rents have fallen for nearly two years. Here’s why.

Austin rents have tumbled for 19 straight months, data from Zillow show. The typical asking rent in the capital city sat at $1,645 as of December, according to Zillow — above where rents stood prior to the pandemic but below where they peaked amid the region’s red-hot growth.

Surrounding suburbs like Round Rock, Pflugerville and Georgetown, which saw rents grow by double-digit percentages amid the region’s pandemic boom, also have seen declining rents. Rents aren’t falling as quickly as they rose during the pandemic run-up in costs, but there are few places in the Austin region where rents didn’t fall sometime in the last year.

The chief reason behind Austin’s falling rents, real estate experts and housing advocates said, is a massive apartment building boom unmatched by any other major city in Texas or in the rest of the country. Apartment builders in the Austin area kicked into overdrive during the pandemic, resulting in tens of thousands of new apartments hitting the market."

My understanding is that he is proposing a 4 year freeze on about 1 million units.

https://www.curbed.com/article/zohran-mamdani-housing-rent-f... archive: https://archive.ph/hnK4Q

"The 34-year-old democratic socialist’s pledge for a four-year pause on any increases on the city’s 1 million or so stabilized units, effectively giving a reprieve to about 2 million stabilized tenants, was at the center of his campaign"

I'm not directly familiar with Berlin. But this story about shortages is the expected outcome:

https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/germany-must-build-32...

BERLIN, March 20 (Reuters) - Germany, lagging in its building goals to alleviate a housing shortage, needs to construct 320,000 new apartments each year by 2030, a study on Thursday showed.

Mamdani's and by extension, his voters', ignorance about the effects of price controls in markets will be an interesting real-time political experiment. When the inevitable unintended outcomes become to emerge who will be blamed?

https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/resources/apart...

https://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform

Quoting Paul Krugman (Nobel prize winner and liberal columnist at the NYT).

"The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and -- among economists, anyway -- one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the American Economic Association found 93 percent of its members agreeing that ''a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing.'' Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand. Sky-high rents on uncontrolled apartments, because desperate renters have nowhere to go -- and the absence of new apartment construction, despite those high rents, because landlords fear that controls will be extended? Predictable. Bitter relations between tenants and landlords, with an arms race between ever-more ingenious strategies to force tenants out -- what yesterday's article oddly described as ''free-market horror stories'' -- and constantly proliferating regulations designed to block those strategies? Predictable."

https://archive.ph/k4h7J#selection-475.0-475.1011

I think this friday, October 10th and friday, October the 24th are paydays for Federal employees this month - and I hope everyone gets paid on time.

How will the Federal workforce manage their own cashflow if either or both paydays are skipped?

Outside of just wanting privacy for its own sake, there are many, many reasons to keep social media profiles private: health privacy, sexual orientation privacy, relationship privacy, location privacy, financial privacy, etc.

“To facilitate this vetting, all applicants for F, M and J non-immigrant visas will be asked to adjust the privacy settings on all their social media profiles to ‘public’”, the official said.

Yes and no. There are encumbrances and liabilities that emerge that cannot be removed. Diseases, children, aging parents, accidents are all things that happen and can sometimes eat up all available resources.

Here is the thing - the last times were always true. It's just that during youth it doesn't feel that way. Life seems endless. It never was.

Further detail from Stanford here: https://irds.stanford.edu/data-findings/staff-headcounts

"Methodology & Definitions Staff Headcount Staff headcounts include all regular, benefits-eligible university employees. With rare exceptions, employees must be appointed at 50% FTE (full-time equivalent) or more for at least six consecutive months in order to be eligible for benefits. The Professoriate and employees of SLAC are not included. Employees with multiple jobs are counted only in the job that is tied to their benefits, typically the one with the largest number of standard hours."

MIT 2024: 11,886 students. 17,490 Staff.

MIT Staff to student ratio: 1.47

No medical school.

The 17,490 number includes 4,500 Lincoln Lab staff. Backing those out. We get 12,990 MIT Staff.

So an MIT Staff to student ratio of: 1.09

https://facts.mit.edu/employees/ https://facts.mit.edu/lincoln-laboratory/

Here is a 2024 article from the Stanford Daily: https://stanforddaily.com/2024/03/13/behind-stanfords-double...

In 1996: 13,811 students, 1488 faculty, 5881 total staff.

In 2024: 17,529 students, 2323 faculty, 16,527 total staff.

In 28 years: 27% increase in students 56% increase in faculty 281% increase in total staff

The ratio of staff to students is nearly 1:1

This is insane.

What is it that makes this possible in Japan? And why doesn't it happen in the US?

I'm sorry for you and your family. This is a catastrophic thinker's literal nightmare.

At what level of $$ investment do angel investors, Silicon Valley VCs and/or boards expect professional, periodic audits?

This is what I personally want to see in non profit board meetings: cash flow, headcount, categorized expenses and a balance sheet. I also want to see a copy of a bank account statement attached to the board docs validating the cash flow numbers. This is not a proper audit - but this builds a paper trail where the CEO is snap shotting an org's financial health in writing at a period in time.

What does a VC who has invested $8M expect in terms of audit?

I don't believe so anymore - at least not in California.

https://www.hoover.org/research/californias-businesses-stop-...

"Between January 2022 and June 2024, employment in US private businesses increased by about 7.32 million jobs. Of these 7.32 million jobs, about 5,400 were jobs created in California businesses—representing about .07 percent of the US figure. Put differently, if California private-sector jobs grew at the same rate as in the rest of the country, they would have increased by over 970,000 during that period, about 180 times greater than the actual increase."