I am an investor in equifax. Let me clear up a misconception on where the data comes from. Half the data comes from large enterprise customers, who “sell” the data in exchange for Equifax doing I-9 verification for free. The other half comes from 39 payroll companies. Every single payroll company except for Rippling and Gusto sell paystub data to Euifax. (Rippling will start next year). Those are exclusive revenue share deals. You cannot be a competitive payroll provider without the revenue share from Equifax. So before you blame your employer, they might not be selling it directly and even if they opted out, your payroll company will sell it anyway.
The actual buyers of payroll software don't care and if you think people are going to evaluate their potential employer based on what payroll solution they use, you are wrong.
This may not be correct. My current company uses Gusto for payroll. Pulling my data, I see everything. I am confirming with Gusto support its sourced from them.
Confirmed with Gusto. They send data to WorkNumber.
"...for the purpose of automating employment and income verifications. This feature helps streamline the process for employees who may need to provide proof of employment or income for loans, credit, or public aid."
That's good to know. The company I work for currently uses Rippling; I will mention this upcoming change and suggest that we should consider switching to Gusto.
Perhaps you would find it to be more palatable if it were phrased as: "You cannot be competitive as a company if you do not serve the wants and needs of the customer."?
But, of course, that says the same thing. These companies are scumbags because that's how the customer wants them to behave. In this case, because it makes executing payroll cheaper for the customer, which is a highly desirable trait to the customer.
The customer often does not have the luxury of making perfectly rational choices.
IBM for example waits to fly you out to orientation in Armonk before they show you the binding employment contract with dubious clauses.
These businesspeople know this. Introducing pressure and a sense of inevitability of poor conditions is part of the game. And they know that it's scummy. But Ayn Randians will defend them to the grave as they eschew the responsibility to build a stable enduring economy for one that disproportionately rewards them.
Framing it as the customer wants this level of strongarming is the same as saying they want bloody revolution when it inevitably follows. What customers actually want is for scumbags to be banned from leadership roles in the economy, and for toxic business strategies to be regulated out of relevance.
It is indirect instead. The employer tells the payroll company: pay employee $x (and handle deductions, retirement contributes etc ...) The payroll company then has this data and can resell it. I would expect the contract the employer has with the payroll company explicitly allows for the data sharing.
Most highly-paid people have no idea how much privilege this affords them.
You wonder why so many businesses are nice to you? It’s because they’ve already looked you up and know you’ve got a high income and are a millionaire.
Write a personal check for your next automobile? Sure thing, you can drive it off the lot a few minutes later. They won’t even bother cashing the check for a week or two.
Try doing something like that as an hourly worker, even if you’ve got the money in the bank.
You wonder why so many businesses are mean to you? It's because they've already looked you up and believe from the data that you won't be a good customer.
The dealership can also just call the bank to verify funds. Which would be reasonable and non-discriminatory all without needing a third party and wouldn't involve your salary at any level. Aside from this it's the financing company that cares, not the dealership, who only wants the car off their floor credit plan.
So what you're saying is it _shouldn't_ matter if you have money, because if you're a low income earner, you should be treated poorly, and you're happy to be personally invested in a system which creates this outcome.
It not only should be regulated but you should feel a little gross for saying any of this outloud.
I know text can be flat, nuance and tone lost that would not be lost in conversation, but I'm confused by your reply Akira. I can't read any endorsement of the system in the comment you're replying to, I read it as agreeing with you in disapproving of unequal treatment
Last time I bought a car I was surprised to learn I didn't need to go to the bank and get a cashier's check but could just write a personal one. I assume that verification processes have improved sufficiently that they had confidence the money was in my account.
This is also why certain homes get hit in high-end burglary crews. There are multiple crews hitting those who purchase precious metals with physical delivery (like gold American Eagle coins). It is not all positive. Considering how few victims even bother to report such crimes, it is terrifying.
From what I understand from my cousin, a career criminal, there are entire theft rings working off of databases such as these. He knew mostly of car-related theft rings, but I hear about safe-cracking burglaries quite often, usually stealing Rolex watches or precious metals.
Because they get details on items in your safe, that you thought were hidden. The second you buy precious metals with physical delivery, you get not only the criminals who break into houses in your wealthy area, but also the criminals who specialise in stealing and selling the things you just bought.
And if they dont have the data they can monitor behavior towards you from those who do have it. Those who get to drive of with their new car vs those who may not.
What? Criminal gangs have access to databases of purchasers of jewelry and precious metals? Then they B+E, safecrack, and rob them? That’s an insane claim to make without any source besides your cousin.
We shouldn't be oblivious to those advantages and disadvantages, since then we can't decide as a society whether those advantages and disadvantages should remain or be altered. That alone is a good reason to regulate this away.
Or at the very least, require Equifax to send free physical mail notifications to everyone when their data is accessed, stating when, by whom, why, and what answer was given. (Physical mail because there's no other predictable way for the general population.) Yes, I realize this would be financially unsustainable for Equifax as they currently operate, but that's their problem to solve. Even as someone who myself has excellent credit and many years of high income in my file, they're creepy and shouldn't be catered to at the expense of our privacy.
True, but when do you even have it explained. Last time I was purchasing a car for wife, the clerk simply made a crack about how my information is now all theirs ( I forgot the exact phrasing ). And those are people who are motivated to make sure you buy so thus incentivized to make sure you are not put off.
And don't even get me started on an average person. I get blank stares when I go on a privacy rant. At best, they simply do not have time to care.
That sounds like the most unappealing exchange imaginable. Yes, let me lose both bargaining power with new jobs while simultaneously painting a target on my back, all in exchange for companies being more willing to take my money.
Now this is some remarkable gymnastics. Are you also an investor in Equifax or have some other financial interest in similar services? If not, I'm very curious to hear how you tied yourself into this knot.
I find that I have struck a nerve with some folks.
I have no connection with the industry at all. But that doesn’t prevent me from understanding the implications.
Equifax does this stuff because it is profitable. It is profitable because companies buy it. Companies buy it because they can put the information to use for their benefit. In doing so, some consumers are harmed and others benefit.
Also, for the record: I don’t often buy cars, but when I do I choose the best financial option. Sometimes that would be financing, other time it would be writing a check. One factor that everyone should consider it that your free time has a higher dollar-per-hour value than your work time.
Sure, consumers benefit so much that the example you were able to produce is the ability to write a personal check to purchase a car. Totally notable benefit relative to the violation of a person's expectation of privacy.
Last time I bought a brand new car (~8 years ago?), the dealer told me I couldn't pay more than $X amount, using credit cards, on the car, so I still needed a bank check for the rest (they wouldn't accept a personal check either).
In my experience, it used to be a cashier's check for the balance (if there was a deposit). But a couple years ago at least the dealer I bought from was fine with a personal check. Don't know if it was just this dealer or if personal check verification processes have improved.
Haven't they heard of bank transfers? In Europe you can use SEPA and if you warn the bank in advance, they're basically instant even for large amounts.
I recently bought a car and they were happy to let me put up to 100% of the purchase on a card so long as I paid the card processing fee (something like 2 or 3%).
My regular dealership even has a card surcharge for service these days. Given the rebate I get it's pretty much a no-care for smallish bills. But when I bought the car from another dealer was a bit surprised I didn't need to run to the bank to get a certified check.
I'm not going to pay by card for a huge purchase, and have the card company take 3% off the top. That's just a dick move when you can just write a check that does the same thing.
Why would I care if I'm not paying for the surcharge and I get a rebate from it? I've had a few large purchases recently where a credit card was the norm. If the business prefers a check that's fine too. I'm not going to push it. It's just business. A lot of businesses want my money and are happy to take a credit card number which is often simpler for them. I don't know their costs associated with handling checks and it's not really my concern.
That's not a tip. It's a "processing fee" assessed by credit card companies (a revenue stream). The 3% charged on top of a large purchase like a vehicle goes to the payment processing provider (the credit card company). To cover the cost of professing fees, most dealerships often offer a cash discount (meaning they will quote a lower price if paid by check).
1. The guy who owns the dealership doesn't get the credit card fee
2. If they charge you extra for using a credit card, they're breaking even
3. If they _don't_ charge you extra for using a credit card, they're paying 3% of the purchase cost to the credit card company (so, $1,000+)
So yes, it's a dick move to pay via credit card for any purchase in the thousands of dollars, if you have the option to pay by check or debit card. I always offer to pay by check if I know the money for the CC will come out of their pocket.
Don't really care. It's not my responsibility as a customer to make assumptions about how businesses prefer to get paid. They can add surcharges or just not accept credit cards at all. As someone who has been making some large household purchases this summer, my experience is that it's perfectly ordinary and expected to pay by credit card.
I'd just add that I routinely book flights, hotels, and so forth in the thousands of dollars range on credit cards and I doubt they would want anything different as a payment type.
If you get your personal data report, you'll see that it tells you who looked you up. It is not every business you've worked with. It is not even every background check that has been done on you.
I'm not saying that rich people do not have privilege - they do. But it isn't because your local car dealer looked up your earnings data.
"Oh, aren't you happy we live in a world where the rich are explicitly treated better because they carry around a big sign saying 'I am rich' when interacting with corporations?" No. I am not.
I don't think that's generally the case, AFAIK the example of the matrix exponential example a bit further up would not be really distinguishable as a type from a regular matrix (with exponential elements).
Not to overcomplicate things, but anyone planning to save money for >12 months should be using the BOXX ETF (https://etfsite.alphaarchitect.com/boxx/) to convert the interest income into a long-term capital gain. Even if you end up cashing out before the 12 months, you are still going to pay the same taxes as with a savings account, so there is truly no downside.
For a detailed report on the mechanics behind the BOXX ETF, Bloomberg just published this article:
https://archive.is/8kq0G
It is not a perfect solution for everyone. You do need to take into account your income tax rate and your capital gains tax rate.
The archive owner wants takedown requests to be forced to be cross-border, so he wants to know where the request is coming from so he can serve from a server in a different country.
Cloudflare blocks the extension to DNS that allows that. If you don't care, you can set your DNS to bypass Cloudflare for those domains only.
I’ve known this for a while now but it never ceases to amaze me. This must be up there with “no copyright intended” in terms of misguided compliance strategies.
It's always appeared to be a matter of perspective, to me.
That being said, by "Cloudflare has issues with archive.is" I very literally meant that they have issues with the DNS records served to them by Archive.is. (i.e. They do not support EDNS.)
Can someone explain it a bit better? I am not quite sure why in addition to spx this fund buys options on Bookings? Also, where is the risk in this strategy, besides counter parties risk.
The Bookings options are explained in the Bloomberg article. They use offsetting bets so that one generates a large gain and the other generates a large loss (either way the stock moves). Then the gain is offloaded through an in-kind redemption (not a taxable event for an ETF) and the loss is kept on the books to offset any other taxable gains in the fund. I guess you could worry what happens if the stock doesn't move, but since they get to pick the timing, that seems unlikely to be an issue in practice.
I can think of at least a few risks that one would not have with T-bills besides counterparty risk. You have management risk: they have said what their strategy is and what they will do, but what if they don't? I would also ask who is on the other side of these trades and how big that market is or can be. Alpha Architect's own explainer implies that box spreads can also be used to borrow money and that this might be cheaper for the borrowers than margin loans, which makes some sense, but it seems like a pretty esoteric instrument to use for that. Most of their argument is an appeal to the efficiency of markets, which might be true until it isn't. Finally, there's regulatory risk. They think this works under the current rules, but a regulator might disagree with that. If someone does not like it a sufficient amount the rules could be changed, just like there's already an exception for "original issue discount" that makes zero-coupon bond income like Treasuries count as interest income, not capital gains, even though no interest payments are ever made.
I'm not in finance, though, I'm just some guy, so take all of the above with a grain of salt.
This is hilarious. It's not as risk-free as an FDIC insured HYSA account though. I don't care what the ETF tracks - being an ETF that tracks something comes with some additional risk.
Yes to that. And this may be my own risk-averseness, but I don't have complete confidence in all these derivative instruments anyway. I don't have time or sufficient interest to look into the construction of ETFs and how their holdings are managed, so I will opt for a mixture of stock-picking, index funds, bonds, ETFs, and just plain old savings accounts at banks I can see on the cold hard cement of the city. I try to be diversified in which financial instruments I choose. It seems most people have blind faith that X or Y instrument are constructed, managed and regulated in a reliable and trustworthy way. They entrust their money into weird mechanisms where they believe they own AAPL stock but actually it's just a derivative slice on precarious terms (fractional shares or other slimey broker-made nonsense).
You can certainly over-engineer your solution, but just watch the world and see how "you would have fared" in situations that affect others.
For example, everything goes to shit if Rogers goes down so hard that no electronic payments of anything works; so maybe some percentage of an emergency fund should be literal cash on hand.
What's the rate of return that way? The 5% coming from the bank is pretty nice and is easily understood. I scrolled to the end of that BOXX page and even watched the video, and I still don't understand it.
The short answer is that if you could answer that question in advance to a high accuracy, you could make billions as bond trader. In theory, you get paid similarly to regularly going out into the bond market and buying US government bonds that expire in the next few months, but with a potential tax savings twist. (I am a random Internet dude, not a tax lawyer.)
The returns supposedly track the short end of the yield curve on US Treasuries. That would make sense, as theoretically, the net premium of a box spread is equal to the net present value of the payout (under the no arbitrage assumption). That net present value should be very close to the yield on a zero-risk asset over the same time period. They're using 1 to 3 month options, so in theory, they get yield close to short-term US Treasuries (the market prices a near-zero probability of the US defaulting on its bonds in the next few months).
I haven't looked into the tracking error between SPY box spreads and the short end of the US yield curve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_spread#cite_note-2 says the yield averages about 0.35% above holding equivalent maturity US Treasuries.
Though, it sounds like they're using box spreads composed of American options, so I wonder how they deal with early exercise risk. You only get bond-like performance from a box spread if you don't have early-exercise risk. The further out of the money they place their strikes in the box spread to avoid early exercise risk, the lower the liquidity they get, and higher trading costs.
The tax trick is that they also enter into a delta-neutral trade on a high-value single stock. (They don't use and index for this part because they want the difference between the winning and losing parts of this trade to be as large as possible, so they want volatility in the underlying asset.) At certain points, they realize the losses on the losing half of that trade (reducing tax liability), and perform a tax-free in-kind exchange of units (shares) in their ETF for the winning half of that trade. Of course, they don't know in advance which half will win and which will lose, but it doesn't matter. The brokerage buying their ETF in order to make the tax-free exchange bumps up the price of the ETF, very close to the value of the winning leg of the tax-saving trade.
Note the several caveats above (and probably some I missed) in comparing with US Treasuries yield.
Which is before taxes. Just like the 5% HYSA is before taxes. In the case of BOXX this is going to be 0-20% (depending on your income) whereas the HYSA tax will be 10-37% (depending on your income).
I only just learned about this in Matt Levine's newsletter [1], and assuming they don't get regulated out of existence, it seems almost too good to be true. The effective tax-discounted rate of return on a 5.6% interest-bearing account is really only 3.5% because it's ordinary income (paying taxes of .37 * 5.6). But as long-term gains it becomes 4.3% (paying taxes of .238 * 5.6). And while it is compounding you pay no taxes at all.
I keep thinking about parking cash in box spreads on SPX directly -- pay net $98,000 in option premium now and earn $100,000 in a few months, effectively lending to the market at the rate implied by highly liquid option prices.
The section 1256 tax treatment is especially cool not so much because of the 60/40 taxation but because if you have several consecutive years of 60/40 gains you can edit your past year's income by incurring a current year loss and having a carryback loss.
If a developer is replacing a 2 story, 20 unit building with 20 parking spots with a new 5 story, 50 unit building, they shouldn’t be able to have more than 25 parking spots, as that is already a net increase from the status quo and will thereby increase traffic and congestion (the street isn’t getting wider…). The logical fallacy here is that it assumes those 25 units without a spot won’t just street park.
Which I would agree with but they Bay Area is in deadlock when it comes to roads and public transportation.
You cannot build better roads because cars are bad, so rush hour is just a polluting nightmare. You cannot have better public transportation because there will be at least one person that going to block it for any number of reasons.
The Bay Area has and continues to spend a lot of money on roads and public transportation. You can argue its not enough, but improvements absolutely have been made recently, and a lot more is in progress.
I am not saying projects have not been completed or that money has not been spent. My view is it is far too difficult in the Bay Area to make significant progress because it’s too easy to derail projects. I look at how many years we keep pushing out the Silicon Valley Bart extension. How long the Richmond district bus lane. There is change happening but it’s far too slow.
Too many cars will just add to congestion and make the surrounding spaces less desirable. You could address this with a congestion charge, but that has problems of its own. Limits to parking in some key spots around transit can then be a workable alternative.
Just because I have a car doesn’t mean I intend to drive it in the city. There’s a whole world out there and a lot to do that requires a car. So if I live by a train that’s good for commuting to the city I’m now stuck only doing that? What about the many things I do that have nothing to do with that?
> I don’t think people with infants and toddlers expect them to ride a bike. Taking kids around to their clubs and sports, etc isn’t practical.
Tons of parents around here use cargo bikes - my son went to daycare ~5 miles away on the back of mine and still hops on the back for longer trips in grade school. With e-assist it’s faster than driving, way less stressful and expensive, and the difference is that kids love getting on bikes in a way that they don’t riding in cars because they can see so much more of the world.
>I don’t think people with infants and toddlers expect them to ride a bike. Taking kids around to their clubs and sports, etc isn’t practical.
Obviously, you've never been to Japan. I see infants and toddlers on (their parents') bikes all the time. Parents regularly carry 2 kids on a bike with them.
you really think so? i get the free market angle, but what about the local optimum risk? People want parking because they need parking. and they need parking because they need cars because everything's unwalkable because there's too much parking...
I am sure we all have different views here but parking maximums seems to discriminate the most towards low income folks as you would classify them. Those who are not working normal 9-5 or have employment that does not follow the Bart stops.
Sorry to disappoint. Would have been difficult to make it this feature rich and have as explicit errors if I wrote it in C.
Reasons for choosing rust were:
- Error handling style, easy to include context
- Easy to import and use syntax highlighting library
- Some level of inherent UTF-8 validation and support
- Easier to make the ed-runtime support pluggable IO and UI
i thought i like rust, compiling this program was very weird. it took multiple minutes on full CPU load and even after cargo finished there was still a build process using one CPU core on 100% until i killed it.
That sounds strange. Could you give reproduction instructions? (OS, architecture, rust version)
Maybe there's some kind of upstream bug I should report.
I used x86_64 GNU/Linux, NixOS, cargo 1.78.0-nightly (ccc84ccec 2024-02-07).
When deleting the target directory and running `cargo build`, all the dependency crates build pretty fast. But then the build script takes ages. And somehow runs twice.
In the target/debug/build dir are 2 different build-script-build executables, that produce the same outputs (compressed_syntaxes/theme).
I thought it might be related to the `cargo:rerun-if-changed` stuff in the build.rs but it's the same with those lines commented out.
I can confirm that it created two binaries of basically every dependency and I don't know why (tried to look into it but couldn't find anything), but at least in my case both don't run. (I looked at the running process ID and command line while reproducing. It was the same binary running in the same process the whole time for me.)
There is a bit of a gotcha that if you build a debug build the build script will be less optimized. This makes a debug build take nearly 4 minutes total on my computer due to how much processing is done in the build script. A release build only takes roughly 2 minutes total due to the optimized build script.
(The "cargo:rerun-if-changed" tells cargo under which circumstances it is necessary to rerun the build script. It doesn't change its behavior on a fresh build.)
Please check if it really does run twice, and thus changes process ID and command line. (I run `top`, press shift+v for process tree, c for command line and go look at the cargo process to find the build-script run.)
Apple Health does a great job of integrating with EMR providers. I can see notes from every doctors visits, my blood test results, Covid tests, and so on all integrated into one app. I can see my sodium levels have gone down since 2019 in a plot chart, or when was the last time I got sick.
The thing that most people don't realize is that the legally enforced HIPAA protections they take for granted no longer apply when they request their medical data from a healthcare institution and store it in a third party app -- like Apple Health.
The only thing protecting your medical records from being data-mined and monetized is Apple Health's privacy policy and (current) technical architecture. You've seen examples of it in the news with women's period tracking apps, but it'll become even more common as apps start leveraging APIs opened by the 21st Century Cure's Act.
I'm not a tin-foil hat wearing engineer, but I can forsee a day when Apple's reputation of being "Privacy-conscious" might not be worth as much money as the medical data they've collected from their customers.
It's one of the reasons why I decided to build my own open-source PHR, so that the incentives between the software and me as an individual are kept in alignment.
Hmm, I would like to see a citation on that second comment. You can look at Frontier's last earnings release, they spent $168M of build Capex to pass 332k homes, or $506/home passed in the last quarter. Note that "passing" a home is not the same as connecting a home, there is additional cost involved there. And Frontier has tremendous cost benefit from the fact that they already own the telephone poles that they can reuse and have been doing this for decades at massive scale.
If you think the entire cost of laying fiber is just the cost of boring/digging, then you don't know what you are talking about.
The thing is they keep saying it IS the digging that is hampering them (we know that to be false). The one I saw a few weeks ago they ran about 1000ft of cable in under an hour. Most of that was getting the machine off/on the trailer and reterminating the lines.
I'd like to see a citation on the "imminent" domain comment as well. It seems far-fetched to me that the Federal government would take away local control from counties and municipal governments to issue permits and inspect their right-of-ways, just because a utility company was awarded a grant.
