Viewing profile — hectorr

Yeah. Prop 13 massively depresses housing turnover and reduces property tax revenue, which means they need to collect more from income tax. Malcom Gladwell's excellent podcast on g…

The question isn't who gets their money back, the question is who has to pay and/or take on the risk. In 2008, the banks were largely bailed out by taxpayers. In this case the hack…

Fulfillment is a hard thing to quantify. Maybe unemployed people feel bad because they aren't doing anything, or maybe they feel bad because there is nothing for an unemployed pers…

Yes. This isn't Wall Street is bilking the common man. This is one side of Wall Street trying to squeeze the other side, and appealing to the public to help their case. It's a toug…

Has anyone tried Roon Labs? It's a high end library manager that partners with Tidal.

Not really. It's still too hard to do from both a regulatory and technical standpoint. There is enough liquidity and infrastructure around BTC to be feasible, but the regulators sq…

The 2 is more important than the 20.

Maybe all asset classes are undervalued relative to the currencies they are priced in.

This is not good. But you have to know what the standard ratio is, and how things breaks down demographically, to know how bad it really is.

I agree with you, this is all true in theory, but this definition also excludes non-dividend stocks that offer no governance controls. Like Snap, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. In …

If you want extrinsic rewards, you need to provide extrinsic value.

I have very mixed feelings about what Manning did. I also respect the moral courage it took to do them, and to face the consequences.

IIRC Clapper (NSA) was asked a question by Wyden (D-OR) about a classified program in an open hearing. Wyden knew the real answer from a previous classified briefing, and forced Cl…

It's not just about a massive conflict kinetically disrupting those supply lines. Influcencing those supply lines is a key tactic in the day-by-day posturing and low-level conflict…

Depends on the interest rate and your opportunity costs.

There are a lot of bad reasons for this, and a lot of bad impacts, but there is at least one benefit for humanity: American healthcare dollars create intense competition to do to d…

A lot of them are, for the reasons you point out. But they really are not that different than other financial instruments in kind, just in maturity. What does it mean to own a shar…

I thought Matt Levine's daily had a good take: "The deep message is that if you define criminality based on your negative perception of some disliked group, then your criminals are…

I don't give money to panhandlers, I think it encourages bad behavior. But to anyone who asks, I look them in the eye, and say "sorry, not today". I'm surprised how few people do t…

He's providing an economic benefit to society - internalizing (to consumers) the externality of IOT botnets. It's now on the consumers to further internalize to cost to manufacture…

Connecting critical life support systems to the internet, and not having any contingency for an outage, sounds a lot like malpractice. Hospitals have fail-safes, and if they don't …

This is a lot of finance works. You offer a consumer product full of awesome features and freebies that is a loss-leader, and make up for it on interest. Cash back when you finance…

Isn't this why we pay for all those fancy color scanners?

While this is true, it is extremely hard to do in practice. You have to get good information, make sure it is good information, convince a market that it is good information, and t…