Elliot | 2022-04-03 02:36:18 UTC | #120 https://www.tiktok.com/@medievalfilthcauldrons/video/7081791023852178734 You can get 11 day old ground beef at Olive Garden! ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-03 17:52:25 UTC | #121 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8 Starts by talking about governments printing money, spending more money than they have, and inflation. He measures the power of a country by 8 factors which he said he "averages". So it's just the kind of problematic thinking that CF criticizes. They must be that are normalized and/or weighted first before averaging. Something must be done to try to convert between the different dimensions. He didn't mention that though. His factors are themselves complex things like "trade" or "education" that are presumably weighted averages of many other factors. Or else judgment calls using intuition. He basically thinks there are repeating cycles in human affairs. While I don't fully agree with that, it can happen if people don't understand the causes of typical cycles and how to avoid them. The US government does seem to be falling into some of the standard patterns and traps (and has been for a long time) such as devaluating their currency. It's basically about the rise and fall of empires which he blames a lot on finances, and somewhat on the rich people getting lazy/decadent/etc. as a few generations on top go by. I do think he's raising (unoriginal) concerns that are worth consideration. (He actually really makes it sound like original research but he wasn't really saying anything new.) His final two conclusions were we need to spend less than we earn and treat each other well. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-04 23:17:55 UTC | #122 https://www.androidauthority.com/gsuite-legacy-free-edition-3093722/ ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-05 02:18:30 UTC | #123 http://thinkingcomplete.blogspot.com/2022/04/book-review-very-important-people.html ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-09 17:10:59 UTC | #124 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHQE0ILci4o ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-10 20:16:30 UTC | #125 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d5d_HXGeMA Huge container ships is the opposite of the **small batch sizes** Goldratt talked about. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-11 17:56:27 UTC | #126 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqn3gR1WTcA ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-12 05:12:21 UTC | #127 https://www.tiktok.com/@washingtonpost/video/7081328079238647086 Facebook using a proxy to covertly plant lies about TikTok in local news. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-14 17:44:15 UTC | #128 https://jonathanstark.com/daily/20220413-2359-to-send-or-not-to-send ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-15 22:31:30 UTC | #129 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oztYUNAbbDg ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-18 02:52:45 UTC | #130 https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einsteins Essay claims we have a shortage of geniuses today and that most geniuses come from aristocratic tutoring. Many geniuses didn't go to school until they were teens, and had multiple tutors first (including sometimes their parents). EDIT: part 2 https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/follow-up-why-we-stopped-making-einsteins ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-18 20:01:21 UTC | #131 https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/writing-for-outlets-isnt-worth-it Interesting discussion of how awful editors are, how places like *The New Yorker* consistently want to cut 60% of your article, how pitching articles is a lot of the job (and is shitty), and how most writers don't care about the final article as long as they get published and paid. https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/how-to-get-2000-substack-subscribers Tips for getting to 2000 substack subscribers: start with over 2000 twitter followers. Also write stuff that popular people will like and promote. Also have spent the last decade writing for mainstream publications like The Atlantic. lol. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-19 05:15:34 UTC | #132 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdHJmMKle2w (long) ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-20 04:15:48 UTC | #133 [An open letter to Tim Cook about Final Cut Pro, signed by editors and post-production pros around the world by Scott Simmons - ProVideo Coalition](https://www.provideocoalition.com/an-open-letter-to-tim-cook-about-final-cut-pro-signed-by-editors-and-post-production-pros-around-the-world/) > *Kafai has been editing films for 30 years. Since the beginning, he loves FCP classic and he could never find a better NLE. Even when he edits the TOP2 box office Chinese film (WOLF WARRIOR 2, $870M worldwide), he still uses FCP7. Asking him about FCPX, he said the software is promising but not ready yet for big budget films. He wants to co-sign this letter to encourage Apple to improve FCP. Almost the whole Chinese film industry relies on FCP7 and wish they can switch to FCPX.* > – From Kafai Cheung, Editor omg. FCP7 is from 2011. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-21 20:52:50 UTC | #134 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-20/elon-checks-his-pockets > Litquidity put out a league table of dinner allowances, where a $35 allowance (Centerview, Morgan Stanley, etc.) was good, $30 (Evercore, Greenhill, Lazard, JPMorgan, etc.) was fine, and $25 (Goldman, Jefferies, Deutsche Bank, Citi, etc.) was bad. Goldman was bad, and there were headlines about Goldman’s cheap meal allowances and disgruntled bankers. Nobody did a league table of free breakfast and lunch at investment banks, so Goldman got no points for being generous with breakfast and lunch. 3 So Goldman sensibly added $5 to bankers’ dinner allowance, saving the bankers $5 per day, and removed the free breakfast and lunch, costing them considerably more than $5 per day. The result was a good Post headline and congratulations from Litquidity. The bankers are strictly worse off, but Goldman looks better in the rankings, which is what it is optimizing for. I don't like doing lame things just because other people are being dumb and looking at local optima. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-22 03:38:14 UTC | #135 https://coteditor.com ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-05-22 15:20:05 UTC | #136 A post was merged into an existing topic: [Creating & Editing Video, Audio & Animation](/t/creating-editing-video-audio-animation/840/14) ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-22 21:46:10 UTC | #137 https://www.tiktok.com/@real_time_science/video/7079035143444516142 EDIT: Is that labelling fraud? What methods should be used to determine whether it is or isn't? ------------------------- Lebowski | 2022-04-23 20:41:22 UTC | #138 I think the right method to determine if it's fraud is to compare it to the definition. I think there are at least two relevant definitions: technical/moral, and legal. I think the technical/moral definition of fraud is a false or intentionally misleading representation designed to produce financial gain. Regarding the non-GMO label on products for which no GMO alternative exists, it's not false. But it is intentionally misleading & designed that way to help sell a product. So I think it meets the technical/moral definition of fraud. I don't know what the legal definition of fraud is and whether it meets that. I'd look up the relevant laws if I cared enough about whether it was legally fraud or not, like if I was considering suing the companies putting the non-GMO label on products for which no GMO alternative exists. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-24 15:29:57 UTC | #139 https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl Keyboard brightness controls on Mac for third party monitors. Also: https://designcompaniesranked.com/resources/is-this-retina/ ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-24 17:00:18 UTC | #140 https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1517262810723536899 University fires actual good professor who does outreach with a good blog. In other words, he works a ton of unpaid overtime doing something effective on his own initiative. He'll be OK I guess because he's getting $4,400/month on Patreon for his blog. But the university actually got (presumably by dumb luck) one of the good historians who can write clear explanations about stuff (I bet at just a regular professor salary, not a high salary) and they are giving up that. You should not fire your professors whose articles and lectures provide enough value for the internet to pay them a whole salary! Imagine if Jordan Peterson worked for you at a regular professor salary and then you fired him. That would be idiotic. This is a mini version of that. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-26 17:06:13 UTC | #141 https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-is-fertility-down-and-what-can ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-26 18:11:01 UTC | #142 https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/the-future-of-substack Relevant to my work. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-29 00:19:53 UTC | #143 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePV5bECTt5A I posted a comment: > World of Warcraft speedruns are done with in game time. The timer only runs when you're logged in. For long runs, you have a limited time, like a week, to finish a run. This is problematic because stuff happens in the game world while you're logged out. In particular, you can kill a group of monsters with a 10 minute respawn timer, then instead of running to another group of monsters you can log out for 10 minutes then kill the same group again with no travel time. And repeat. It's not fun at all for the runner but it gets a better time. You can also log out while traveling on an automatic vehicle like the zeplin, tram or ship. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-04-30 16:15:14 UTC | #144 https://www.tiktok.com/@4cats_and_a_baby/video/7090965575953927470 https://www.tiktok.com/@4cats_and_a_baby/video/7091715102168206638 She says she remembers being a toddler and shares about what it's like. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-05-06 20:51:13 UTC | #145 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOqTjL4x7FA I posted a comment: > A big problem with MMOs is it’s hard to design good content for flexible group sizes. Also, a group size of one is mostly bad/boring. Good tactical combat comes from group vs. group or group vs. boss (which usually has adds but at least has many complex abilities). > > Flexible group sizes actually make it easier to play with your friends (imagine doing a 5man WoW dungeon, whenever you want, with no waiting or strangers, with 1 or 2 friends when you don’t have 4 friends online). > > A solution MMOs haven’t tried (that I’m aware of) is allowing players to control multiple heroes at once. How can the UI enable that? RTS-style controls with selection groups and issuing orders to the currently selected unit(s). These controls have been used for some RPGs like Baldur’s Gate. This would make LFG less needed. If WoW-type controls are desirable when playing one hero, the game could support switching between two sets of controls. (RTS controls work better with one hero for controlling summons, mercenaries, an NPC army fighting by your side, etc – a game could be designed to use those things more and let you control them if you want to or AI can do it by default.) > > With built-in multi-hero-control with actual good controls (not stacking heroes in the same place and repeating your keypresses to all apps), you can tackle group content alone or with any number of friends, at the cost of it being harder, which for some people is worth it or even a benefit. It also makes the game more alt-friendly (e.g. you can powerlevel your alt with your main, or gear multiple alts at the same time). > > Are some people capable and willing to get good at multitasking with RTS-style controls? Yes we know that because some people are good at RTS games, and some RTS players do like RPGs too. Also I was a hobbyist game developer on The Kingdom of Kaliron (TKoK), an RPG map for Warcraft 3. That was an RPG (designed as basically a simplified WoW) with RTS controls. A lot of people chose to simultaneously control multiple heroes sometimes, often for farming lower level content to counteract the difficulty increase (older content is also the hardest to find other players for). I recently wrote more about this as suggestions to Frost Giant, a group of ex-Blizzard people making a new RTS: https://www.reddit.com/r/FrostGiant/comments/u6vn28/rtses_and_rpges_suggestions_for_frost_giant/ In it, I suggest that real-time-with-pause controls would allow people to control many alts at once with much less challenge, so they could e.g. do 40man raid content with a few friends or even alone. Pausing and issuing commands during pauses would presumably have to be limited to instances. > > A downside of playing multiple heroes is you may need to scale overworld enemies based on the number of heroes present so you can’t trivialize enemies by bringing many heroes. Or a limit of controlling 3 or 5 heroes max might work. You don’t need scaling in instances because they have a limit on the number of heroes that can enter and are balanced around the max group size. TKoK scaled by hero count. Controlling multiple heroes can be problematic in PvP too, but one solution is just disable it for PvP. Another potential downside is people feeling disadvantaged if they don’t exploit controlling multiple heroes to maximum benefit at all times. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-05-08 01:51:26 UTC | #146 https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2007/07/the_most_important_article_on.html ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-05-11 05:44:52 UTC | #147 https://www.tiktok.com/@mom.uncharted/video/7096176400280915205 ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-05-21 01:20:03 UTC | #148 6 posts were merged into an existing topic: [Creating & Editing Video, Audio & Animation](/t/creating-editing-video-audio-animation/840/3) ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-05-13 18:11:52 UTC | #150 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-13/elon-musk-trolls-twitter Lots of interesting stuff from Matt Levine in Money Stuff today including Musk tweeting about maybe not buying Twitter and Terra/Luna crypto crash stuff: > Safe assets are much riskier than risky ones. This is I think the deep lesson of the 2008 financial crisis, and crypto loves re-learning the lessons of traditional finance. Systemic risks live in safe assets. Equity-like assets — tech stocks, Luna, Bitcoin — are risky, and everyone knows they’re risky, and everyone accepts the risk. If your stocks or Bitcoin go down by 20% you are sad, but you are not that surprised. And so most people arrange their lives in such a way that, if their stocks or Bitcoin go down by 20%, they are not ruined. > > On the other hand safe assets — AAA mortgage securities, bank deposits, stablecoins — are not supposed to be risky, and people rely on them being worth what they say they’re worth, and when people lose even a little bit of confidence in them they crack completely. Bitcoin is valuable at $50,000 and somewhat less valuable at $40,000. A stablecoin is valuable at $1.00 and worthless at $0.98. If it hits $0.98 it might as well go to zero. And now it might! They make it really fragile/brittle to make it seem stable. They try to hide all variance and won’t let it go down a bit, so all it can do is be stable or crash all the way. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-05-15 14:08:15 UTC | #151 https://wiscprivacy.com/publication/vca_mute/ ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-05-17 03:57:11 UTC | #152 https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/ur2gfz/buffalo_shooting_witness_called_911_and/ many, many stories about 911 incompetence in the comments ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-05-18 16:18:12 UTC | #156 Matt Levine argues (reasonably!) that Elon Musk is a bad faith actor, a chronic lawbreaker, and a liar. This is primarily regarding the Twitter deal. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-17/elon-musk-does-not-care-about-spam-bots Twitter stock is currently at $37, but the deal is at $54.20, indicating stock market investors have little faith in Musk fulfilling his contractual obligations or the courts enforcing the contract. If either of those happens, Twitter stock is worth $54.20 (minus a little bit for the time delay between now and when you get paid). ------------------------- doubtingthomas | 2022-05-20 22:20:43 UTC | #158 [quote="Elliot, post:156, topic:464"] Twitter stock is currently at $37, but the deal is at $54.20, indicating stock market investors have little faith in Musk fulfilling his contractual obligations or the courts enforcing the contract. [/quote] This is known as a merger arbitrage and some hedge funds have this as their primary strategy. It's their specialty. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXxeyOVpnCU This video also explains almost same stuff. I found the video entertaining because of the subtle digs Patrick kept taking at Elon. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-05-21 03:17:28 UTC | #159 https://www.tiktok.com/@ilana_jacqueline/video/7098447608510680363 ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-05-21 06:18:03 UTC | #160 https://www.tiktok.com/@iamfaithgardner/video/7096149891558149422 ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-05-23 16:38:35 UTC | #161 https://ghost.org/changelog/5/ The CF articles site uses Ghost. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-05-23 16:52:34 UTC | #162 https://www.slowboring.com/p/understanding-effective-altruisms ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-05-26 20:09:41 UTC | #163 https://jonathanstark.com/daily/20220526-1531-reader-question-re-how-many-deliverables-do-you-include-in-your-proposals ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-05-28 02:44:16 UTC | #164 https://www.tiktok.com/@golloria/video/7102070537781792046 ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-05-30 15:57:10 UTC | #165 http://neural-reckoning.org/reviewing.html ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-05-31 03:01:17 UTC | #166 https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMN1xrKvn/ ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-05-31 19:21:29 UTC | #167 https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/how-to-make-your-conversations-hyperproductive Advocates meta discussion to organize conversations mid conversation ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-05-31 21:13:00 UTC | #168 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wua96SI6SBE&list=PLPAVYgFfeddJzax1X4VUj69Z1Vs4PqGlA&index=2 ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-06-04 00:54:06 UTC | #169 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAUyU-MLQA8 wtf YouTube ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-06-04 00:54:57 UTC | #170 https://reddit.com/r/youtubers/comments/v41vlv/tips_tricks_here_is_a_checklist_you_can_use_for/ Things YouTubers take into account ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-06-12 20:19:02 UTC | #171 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4hwFBPyS5U ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-06-13 01:11:43 UTC | #172 https://jonathanstark.com/daily/20220612-2104-ditcherville-99---how-much-will-it-be-for-the-website ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-06-16 16:11:49 UTC | #173 https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/06/long-covid-chronic-illness-disability/661285/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=news_tab&fs=e&s=cl ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-06-16 16:49:02 UTC | #174 https://www.tiktok.com/@imtiredude/video/7106540586995338538 People in the comments agree: ![image|303x499](upload://jREfu5Kcugi6I2x6u0NPBP1MfMA.jpeg) ![image|690x488](upload://fdseFO54NLJurIplD8ACX0G7R4S.png) ![image|690x166](upload://nP0OcqrCnK79WRl3NMQPJD38ylw.png) ![image|466x500](upload://Ado4Zjy3BMHBRUctQMm49eZHDpa.jpeg) ![image|402x500](upload://zbOd2QSJ6ud6ZX7k2Fjj2YIv9vf.jpeg) ![image|690x418](upload://AdjjTOUcdmXjv51jTNPO3CXnZOJ.png) There is a little dissent: ![image|529x500](upload://26nxSXtmvNo7Ae9vcoG62aGOjou.jpeg) Two of those don't deny being catcalled a bunch when underage. They just say they still get it at later ages like when they were legal teens or early twenties. That actually potentially agrees with some of the other comments saying e.g. they get catcalled at 24 because they look 16. Anyway wtf? Maybe it's a good example of how men don't fully know what it's like to be a female? Or maybe just chess club members like me didn't know? Many men actually are involved in this dynamic (but don't really understand what it's like for their victims), but men can also opt out of being cat-callers. By contrast, girls can easily get catcalled in sweatpants or other casual clothes or school uniforms (I've been reliably informed that avoiding skirts, not wearing makeup, having messy hair, etc., does not opt them out.). ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-06-17 16:35:43 UTC | #175 Biggest chess tournament of the year starts today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yocnT4xu4k ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-06-17 18:42:51 UTC | #176 https://www.tiktok.com/@theresavandamstylist/video/7110187368702922030 i just made a grammar practice vid b4 watching that. kinda related. ppl r so bad at words. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-06-17 22:22:00 UTC | #177 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT7_SxJ3oSI ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-06-19 19:53:23 UTC | #178 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFg1grh_4Dc ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-06-20 04:17:05 UTC | #179 https://www.tiktok.com/@jessica_ann_pin/video/7110712023108816170 ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-06-20 16:51:45 UTC | #180 https://www.sciencealert.com/most-humans-can-learn-how-to-echolocate-in-just-10-weeks-experiment-shows ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-06-21 15:25:53 UTC | #181 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/08/lockdown-exploded-tiktok-books-revolution-booktok ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-06-24 20:40:44 UTC | #182 https://frankjfleming.substack.com/p/clearance-rate Funny short story. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-06-29 20:29:34 UTC | #183 A post was merged into an existing topic: [Elliot's Microblogging](/t/elliots-microblogging/191/130) ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-06-30 00:05:31 UTC | #184 https://www.tiktok.com/@thenursery_nurse/video/7113876615234358533 cruel parents ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-04 00:34:22 UTC | #185 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObDAXqg9O3U Casinos are predatory. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-04 18:24:21 UTC | #186 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XASoTbvYjf4 ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-10 18:32:34 UTC | #187 https://www.barrons.com/articles/recession-cars-bank-repos-51657316562 > he says he has never seen so many people making $2,500 a month owing $1,000 a month in car payments. > Lopez says banks are in turn leasing more land to handle an expected car-repossession surge. > “A lot of the banks—they’re smart. They control the market, like diamonds,” Lopez says. “As repos pour in, they only release them so often,” he says, meaning auto prices will probably remain stubborn even as economic growth wanes and more repos mean more used-car inventory. https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/vvencq/car_repos_are_exploding_thats_a_bad_omen/ ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-10 23:07:16 UTC | #188 https://www.tiktok.com/@gregfoster22/video/7116591731130469678?_t=8TrOSebJaVx There are a lot of really wtf lyrics, including several from the Beatles. ------------------------- Lebowski | 2022-07-11 00:13:54 UTC | #189 [quote="Elliot, post:187, topic:464"] https://www.barrons.com/articles/recession-cars-bank-repos-51657316562 “A lot of the banks—they’re smart. They control the market, like diamonds,” Lopez says. “As repos pour in, they only release them so often,” he says, meaning auto prices will probably remain stubborn even as economic growth wanes and more repos mean more used-car inventory. [/quote] I don't know anything specific about the car market. But with regard to houses, that's not what goes on with "repos" (house foreclosures). I expect (but don't know) similar dynamics apply to cars. So I'll write about houses but would assume similarities with cars. Banks have rules about how much they can lend given how much reserves they have. When they take back a house, the value of the loan still counts against what they can lend, but they're not getting any income from it. So they don't want to own the house. They're in the business of lending and collecting interest and owning the house interferes with that. Banks might actually want to own a house where the loan was only, say, 50% of the house's value. When the bank does eventually sell such a house they'll make enough to offset the loss of interest over the time they held it plus the costs of sale. But that's a rare situation because most of the people who default on a house payment have a loan balance at or above the house's actual value. They're they type of people who don't keep up on maintenance. They take cash out whenever they actually start to build equity. Etc. People who have their house half or more paid off don't let things go to the point that the bank takes the house. If they can't make the payment, they sell & keep the extra cash themselves. So most of the time a bank takes back a house they're going to lose money vs. if the loan was paid as agreed. When banks do take the house for non-payment they have another problem with selling it. Each house is different. It's not a commodity that you can accurately mechanically price. Set it too high and it won't sell and will further degrade & eat expenses while sitting. Set it too low and the bank takes too much loss vs. the loan amount. So it takes skilled people to look at the houses the bank takes back and decide what they should sell for, manage the process of selling them, decide when a price adjustment is needed, etc. Banks do use Realtors for the actual selling, but they need someone from the bank to work with the Realtor on pricing and respond to offers. For houses these people work in the bank's REO department (for "Real Estate Owned"). I don't know what they are for cars. How many of these people does the bank have on staff? It varies, and in good economic times when hardly anybody stops paying these jobs get cut to save money. When there's a sudden increase in banks taking back houses, the people in the REO department get completely overwhelmed. That's what happened in the 2008 housing crash. The banks had like 10X the number of houses they had staff to handle. It's hard to hire more, because at the time one bank is overwhelmed with foreclosures chances are all the other banks are too since it's a result of the broader economy rather than a single bank. It takes a while to train for that job too. While they do train new ones of course, it doesn't happen as fast as the bank would like to get the houses sold. So instead, inventory sits on the bank's books until they have the staff to dispose of it properly. So "only release them so often", at least with regard to houses during a housing crash, was a function of staff shortage rather than lack of desire to sell. For about 3 years (2008-2011) not only were banks losing interest income from all the bad loans, taking a loss from almost every house they did sell, but every month their houses sat in inventory they were losing value since the housing market kept going down. They badly wanted to move them but couldn't. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-11 18:50:28 UTC | #190 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-07-11/the-price-of-not-buying-twitter Paywalled but you can get a free email subscription to the newsletter. If you already did that, you can read this one, from today, for free. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-11 21:56:08 UTC | #191 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7sVxu0aw9U I don't think buying Twitter was a clever plot (to create an excuse to sell Tesla shares, then back out) as I've seen Redditors and UEG claim. Nor do I think it was a clever plot to cover up negative news stories then back out as UEG suggests. I think Musk thought he could get a good deal then changed his mind. Rather than being clever, he failed to think very far ahead and/or was badly wrong about future market conditions. And he doesn't actually care much about a free speech platform or he wouldn't be backing out now. I don't think it makes any sense to have a clever plot where you commit yourself to specific performance to pay tens of billions of dollars, and sign that contract, and then try to back out. Otherwise I thought the video was good. I have followed details of this stuff. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-12 17:18:03 UTC | #192 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoWcQUjNM8o ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-12 18:16:44 UTC | #193 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-07-12/i-was-told-there-d-be-a-cake-merger Summary of the first section: In 2020, a company signed a deal to buy a company, similar to Musk’s. Then they tried to get out of it for the same reason as Musk (changes in market conditions made it look like a worse deal). They made similar excuses to what Musk is trying, plus they sabotaged the debt financing from their bankers because the contract said they only had to close the deal if they got the loans. They did very badly in court, lost on everything, and were ordered to buy the company anyway despite not having their financing currently available, so they did pay full price and buy the company (apparently, when they were actually trying to get loans, they still could). The judge who handled that case has since gotten a promotion to the top and will be the one to hear Musk’s case. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-12 18:18:36 UTC | #194 Not so efficient markets and investors: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4135861 > Do institutional investors invest efficiently? To study this question I combine a novel dataset of over 16,000 startups (representing over $9 billion in investments) with machine learning methods to evaluate the decisions of early-stage investors. By comparing investor choices to an algorithm’s predictions, I show that approximately half of the investments were predictably bad—based on information known at the time of investment, the predicted return of the investment was less than readily available outside options. The cost of these poor investments is 1000 basis points, totalling over $900 million in my data. I provide suggestive evidence that over-reliance on the founders’ background is one mechanism underlying these choices. Together the results suggest that high stakes and firm sophistication are not sufficient for efficient use of information in capital allocation decisions. (I have not read more than the abstract which I quoted.) ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-18 19:27:14 UTC | #195 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-07-18/elon-wants-to-fight-the-bots Musk is wrong in the Twitter lawsuit; his position is dumb and bad faith; and it will undermine the rule of law if he doesn't lose badly. There's an important hearing tomorrow. Levine wrote a good response to Musk's initial response to the lawsuit. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-18 20:25:45 UTC | #196 https://fortune.com/well/2022/07/09/can-you-get-covid-outside-outdoors-omicron-ba5-ba4/ > the latest dominant COVID subvariants have a reproductive rate of around 18.6, tying or surpassing measles, the world’s most infectious viral disease ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-19 15:14:26 UTC | #197 https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/the-secret-of-the-universe Interesting broad, basic explanations about where the elements come from (the big bang and particularly nuclear fusion) and what mass exists in our universe. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-19 19:48:36 UTC | #198 https://www.tiktok.com/@chevrolet/video/7120986801359080750 Large corporations generally shouldn't leave the comments enabled for their ads (which says something bad about them). So many people hate them. And they have so many known flaws that they don't fix which people can comment on. Sometimes they do leave the comments on. The comments on this car ad are really harsh. Here are the first few I saw: ![IMG_1824|409x500](upload://qSSV3VXQKUZd8qZ8mKui9F1Nddr.jpeg) ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-21 19:59:53 UTC | #199 https://www.tiktok.com/@cartoonyourmemories/video/7122458409076591914 Amazon refuses to take down products with stolen art designs. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-21 22:12:37 UTC | #200 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQmqVVmMB3k ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-22 17:31:22 UTC | #201 3 posts were merged into an existing topic: [Vegetable Oil Is Bad?](/t/vegetable-oil-is-bad/1435/2) ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-22 21:47:47 UTC | #202 https://liveboz.substack.com/p/on-sarcasm good, insightful post (except the unargued praise of degree-based epistemology over decisive arguments, and i'm skeptical of blaming The Daily Show) ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-22 21:50:05 UTC | #203 Same author: https://boz.com/about > As I have been writing I’ve found myself fighting a desire to make myself look better. A big part of me wants to present myself as some kind of sage who has always been wise. But that isn’t true. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-27 20:14:32 UTC | #204 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPKdBrYMe5s ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-29 17:37:41 UTC | #205 https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/07/why-dont-we-drink-other-animals-milk-the-dairy-of-camels-buffalo-pigs-sheep-and-goats.html ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-29 20:12:19 UTC | #206 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64eEcz5dj1s lots of big companies are awful ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-30 20:35:54 UTC | #207 https://www.tiktok.com/@riadaaraes/video/7124729090216561966 ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-30 20:39:22 UTC | #208 https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/27/tech/tiktok-watchdog-moms-wellness-parenting/index.html ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-07-31 20:04:21 UTC | #209 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jSKgp3tEzY ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-08-02 22:20:19 UTC | #210 https://www.tiktok.com/@miracleformax/video/7122922126528646446 unreasonable insurance companies killing the occasional kid ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-08-05 16:31:53 UTC | #211 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0AUxqJ0vTQ If you watch 50 shorts from a YouTuber, YouTube still won't recommend their longer videos to you (and vice versa, I think). This level of segregation between shorts and regular videos seems terrible. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-08-07 22:22:50 UTC | #212 I like people streaming themselves doing real work/projects. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZdPpQW8f1Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK4sUnqyIDU ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-08-10 16:12:21 UTC | #213 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-ing#Uses ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-08-10 16:19:45 UTC | #214 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uses_of_English_verb_forms#Uses_of_nonfinite_verbs ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-08-18 20:37:17 UTC | #215 https://www.tiktok.com/@pissedmagistus/video/7122889958410439941 ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-09-27 00:16:15 UTC | #216 https://www.tiktok.com/@asapscience/video/7147785555915394310 ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-09-28 03:35:16 UTC | #217 https://www.tiktok.com/@jasonkpargin/video/7147691247854144814 ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-09-29 16:00:32 UTC | #218 https://www.tiktok.com/@ilya42_/video/7145917186694008065 He also gave an update in comments: > Next day I was fleeing the country. The journey took me more than 50 hours. I was awake for the whole trip. But now I'm safe. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-10-01 14:58:16 UTC | #219 https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvmybv/private-texts-reveal-worlds-rich-and-famous-groveling-to-elon-musk High status people often aren't great people and often don't have enviable lives. Read their [texts](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23112929-elon-musk-text-exhibits-twitter-v-musk) and see for yourself. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-10-12 15:42:15 UTC | #220 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3zYXD8RyB6fv2czFz/cfar-s-new-focus-and-ai-safety In 2016, The Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR, a rationality research organization connected with Less Wrong) announced: 1. They want to focus on "AI Safety" more than they care about rationality. 2. They care more about influencing high status people and politics than about helping regular people be more rational. Sigh :frowning: Quotes: > Here's a short explanation of our new mission: > > * We care a lot about AI Safety efforts in particular, and about otherwise increasing the odds that humanity reaches the stars. and > Would you rather: (a) have bad rationality skills yourself; or (b) be killed by a scientist or policy-maker who also had bad rationality skills? ------------------------- internetrules | 2022-10-14 06:13:45 UTC | #221 [quote="Elliot, post:220, topic:464"] and > Would you rather: (a) have bad rationality skills yourself; or (b) be killed by a scientist or policy-maker who also had bad rationality skills? [/quote] I originally thought that the quote meant something like: ***Would you rather: have bad rationality and be alive because important people have good rationality, OR: good rationality and be dead cuz the important people have bad rationality?*** But re-reading the sentence, I noticed the "also". So instead of choosing between either you or important people having good rationality, your actually only choosing whether the important people have rationality or not, and you in both scenarios don't have rationality. ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-10-14 18:55:51 UTC | #222 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchange-and-stack-overflow-have-moved-to-cc-by-sa-4-0 ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-10-15 19:48:47 UTC | #223 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPYO5tAtKx8 ------------------------- Elliot | 2022-10-17 17:14:07 UTC | #224 https://www.vouchercloud.com/resources/office-worker-productivity (i think title is a typo and they meant 2h 53m) -------------------------