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> I have this theory that there's institutional money burning a hole in various institution's collective pockets.

That was very much the case before the Fed started raising interest rates.

The term "zero interest rate phenomenon" was created to describe it.

Now that rates are up, people sitting on piles of money can just put it to work in more traditional lending (e.g. buying bonds) instead of needing to look around for weird startups to put it in.


Create a private right of action. If creator A can show that AI trainer B used their works (e.g. like how we've seen Getty watermarks show up in AI generated pics), then they can sue for $X dollars.



Not for the task at hand. The initial d was divided down from an unsigned 32-bit timestamp in seconds from the Unix epoch (hence the 1970.) It accounts for 2000 (leap) and 2100 (not leap), after which the u32 overflows.


> As a rule of thumb, leap days come around every four years. But there are exceptions to this rule. For example, at the turn of every century we miss a leap year. Even though the year is divisible by four, we don't add a leap day in the years that end in 00. But there's an exception to this rule too. If the year is a multiple of 400 then we do add in an extra leap day again. At the turn of the millennium, despite being divisible by 100, the year 2000 did, in fact, have a 29 February because it was also divisible by 400.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240228-leap-year-the-im...



Factors that I see from the article that are driving up shopping costs/delays:

1. Unexpected problems in key canals. (Houthi attacks on the Suez route and drought on the Panama route.)

2. Possibly some market manipulation by carriers. (The article gestures in this direction but doesn't actually claim collusion to fix prices.)

3. Demand is really high. This drives the congestion in key ports that the article mentioned.

The article text doesn't emphasize factor 3 much, but the subtext of that is everywhere. And that's actually a good thing. Lots of things being shipped means lots of economic activity means lots of jobs etc etc.

tl;dr The world is complicated and sometimes multiple factors combine to make things like this flare up.

My bet: We are going to be fine. The actors in this system will adapt, especially from price signals. Supply of shipping will go up a bit, demand will go down a bit, people will find alternate routes/ports/methods for getting their goods where they want them.


We did a book club on this at work a few years back. I found it extremely repetitive.


You're not just "picking a startup". That early, you're also a big factor in whether it succeeds. Betting on yourself is different than buying a lottery ticket. (Maybe just as irrational for a lot of people, but still.)


Advanced sports stats have the notion of "contribution above replacement value", the idea being it isn't just what you do, it's what you do relative to whoever they could (relatively easily) replace you with.

The startup failure/success rate already have some level of "smart, motivated staff" baked in. So you're really making a bet on how much better you are than the average early stage startup employee.


You (not “you”, but the persona for this discussion) are not special and will likely fail, based on startup failure rates. Certainly, you will put effort forth, but that is only tangential to odds of success. If you enjoy the experience and don’t need monetary resources, sure, knock yourself out. Just recognize the opportunity cost, that the odds are stacked against you, and if you succeed, you were as lucky as you were skilled.

I’ll take the lottery ticket over me any day, not because I suck, but because I am human. Even exceptional humans fail. I don’t drink the exceptionalism koolaid.


People, especially sw devs, love this narative but it's just not true. It's not all luck like the lottery but the combination of things outside your control might as well make it so for early employees at a startup. But hey, you did get that vp of whatever title...


I don't think it works if we're narrowly focused just on wages, but I don't know why that has to be the only focus. If we as a society want to support people having a baseline quality of life, then let's pay for it together rather than pushing it all on employers.

I don't think we put enough money behind it today, but the Earned Income Tax Credit is designed to do this while minimizing the disincentives for people to work. https://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-the-earned-incom...


>If we as a society want to support people having a baseline quality of life, then let's pay for it together rather than pushing it all on employers.

Baseline quality of life isn't decided just by pay. I find that society doesn't support people having a baseline quality of life when it comes to areas other than pay, so it makes me question the motives of society in the case of pay.


It's about deterrence. Imagine you're considering committing a crime. You're looking at the upside and the downside. The equation on the downside looks like this:

risk = size of punishment * probability of being caught.

So how do you deter a potential criminal who is unlikely to get caught? You have to jack up the size of the punishment to compensate for that low probability.

Economist Gary Becker started this school of thought in the 60s and it's been implemented and debated in a million ways since then. Example: https://masonlec.org/site/rte_uploads/files/JEP/Readings/But...


In other words he's not being punished for what he did; he's being punished to dissuade others from copying him. I think people should be punished for their actions and not to increase utility of society.


FWIW, I've read that multiple people committed suicide in despair of the financial ruin caused by SBF's fraud. So he did do things worthy of hefty punishment.

Stealing money may not inherently "feel" like a real crime, because money (especially digital crypto money) is a very intangible hypothetical thing. It does not resonate with our lizard brains like violence does.

However, it is a real crime. And harsh punishments like prison time are needed to remind us of that.


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