611–620 of 690 posts
Take for instance providers' backlogs. Anyone having studied process scheduling knows how the size of your tasks, precedence, interruptibility, number of processors, and scheduling algorithm make a huge difference. The covid disruption affected all those factors.
One major claim of Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith's "Rationality in Economics" is "the profit-maximizing firm will fail in finite time." The book is excellent, one of my favorite econ books, and is Smith's somewhat dense but well-written explanation for and interpretation of economics. His main thesis is that "rationality" is not a "constructivist" property of various agents, being possessed by any (or every) individual…
All of this funny stuff is mostly people trying everything they can to get capital gains instead of income so they can pay a 25% tax rate instead of a 39% tax rate. When you're talking about billions of dollars - 14% is a lot of money.
From the perspective of the average person - the tax code probably makes sense. If you already pay 39% tax on your income, and THEN you have to pay 39% on your capital gains and half of your capital gains are actually just inflation - it's like you're getting taxed on your tax! True inflation has likely been ~4% since 2008. The S&P average is ~7.25% per year. So half of the "capital gains" the ordinary index fund investor would pay are just inflation.
But the .1% are different. You don't make it into the .1% with a ~7.25% return and a laborer's salary. You need to be making ~30%+ returns for decades. Or, ~10,000% for a few years (a lot of the successful VC-funded entrepreneurs).
Half of their capital gains aren't inflation. Barely any of it are. Effectively, there tax rate is ridiculous low compared to the average Joe.
And what's worst - the Fed is causing so much of that inflation. Would Tesla be a $1.1T company today if the Fed wasn't pumping up asset prices, lowering interest rates, and making future cash-flows absurdly and artificially valuable? No. And yet, Elon Musk gets to make $100Bn on paper - and he can take loans against those gains with It really seems like this is a completely separate world - and it's >30% of US wealth - and it should be dealt with separately.
All of this talk about supply chain issues are totally missing the point in my opinion. So many articles (and tweet chains I guess) have been written about supply chain issues, yet every one of them seems to ignore the elephant in the room which is demand for goods vs services. Over the course of the pandemic there was a staggering re-balancing of consumer spending [0] from services to goods, to which supply chains h…
The same rebalancing happened in Europe, and Europe doesn't have close to the issues the US has regarding supply chain. Europe's major ports are automated and operate 24/7, port to hinterland relies much more on rail than trucking. Overall, the US supply chain was already very fragile and outdated.
Okay, it doesn't technically do that, the Jones Act just requires you to use a US-owned US-built US-crewed US-operated ship. These ships, in general, don't exist. Oh, sure, there are a few that go back and forth to Puerto Rico, and there are a few wastewater ships running up and down the East River in New York, but no one would dream of using ships like these for general cargo. They are not up to modern container-shipping standards. Puerto Rico pays a premium for a few of these freighters and tankers but generally does more to import goods from the Caribbean and Central America than from the US; when there are hurricanes, the President has to issue a waiver so they can move disaster recovery supplies in from the mainland.
Fish shipped from Alaska are unloaded on the east coast in Canada, where they put on trucks, and the trucks are put on a carrier train which makes a round trip back and forth for the length of the cargo terminal to qualify as being "shipped by Canadian rail" for US legal purposes, and then the trucks drive into the US with the fish. A related law afflicts cruise ships, which always stop somewhere in Canada, Alaska, or the Caribbean, on their way between US ports.
One of the premises of the Jones Act was that it will preserve American shipbuilding for national security™ purposes. This has more or less utterly failed. However, Joe Biden's campaign promises specfically called out fortifying the Jones Act so that it would be even stronger, so, don't hold your breath on change.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you don't want to find out that you're out of stone when your bots stop autoreplacing your walls and the biters flood in But stone is used in more than just walls. You also use stone to make concrete. So what do you buffer? Do you buffer stone? Cause buffering stone didn't actually solve anything (your "stone reserves" are the mine itself. If you really wanted to see "how good" your reserves are, you check how many…
This type of buffering actually leads to the sort of supply chain bottlenecks we are experiencing. If the demand for stone suddenly rises to a point where much more walls and concrete is demanded, you get a massive delay in the production line because the stone needs to get mined and transported and crushed and transported &c before it even reaches the wall factory. It's not entirely dissimilar to the chip shortage w…
I argue that your style of buffering causes the delays we see.
If Ford hoarded 1 year of chips, not only would Ford not be making cars, nor would anyone else be making cars. Every single chip made last year went into a car: and pretty much every car was sold.
We are limited at the chip manufacturing level. The only solution is to make more chips. This process of spinning up chip production takes months to years.
Blaming JIT for showing us the answer is backwards.
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That being said: we do have substantial buffers where it counts: dealership lots. We don't actually have a car shortage yet, just a dramatic increase in car prices. We're all looking ahead to the future to see a lack of production because we're actually more forward looking than we give ourselves credit for.
One major claim of Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith's "Rationality in Economics" is "the profit-maximizing firm will fail in finite time." The book is excellent, one of my favorite econ books, and is Smith's somewhat dense but well-written explanation for and interpretation of economics. His main thesis is that "rationality" is not a "constructivist" property of various agents, being possessed by any (or every) individual…
It's greed. I'm not religious or spiritual, but I am really talking about a serious psychological/spiritual disease that has infected our society. It's not just about getting enough to survive, or even enough to thrive, but there are so many actors out there out to get as much as possible that they simply cannot be satisfied anymore. Their stomachs are bottomless pits.
How else can you possibly explain multiple individuals being worth more than $200 billion (Sixty. Thousand. Lifetimes. Of Wealth), and yet it is not enough for them. They must command huge empires, the boards of which must "motivate" them with more money. These people have serious psychological problems. Like, please, just disappear to your islands and enjoy the rest of your short lives, please!
The entire world economy has been just one massive casino, one huge get-rich-quick scheme. And TV too. Fame and fortune without working for it, getting famous with no talent or skills. Think of how many millions and billions of people worldwide have been programmed to think they can and should be millionaires and that it can happen at the drop of a hat?
And now, a CEO has 1000x the pay of a median worker. They're all mini warlords, their plunder is bullshit bonuses and hollowing out business after business. A huge pump-and-dump scheme.
Just a couple decades ago, people dreamed of simpler lives. Plumbers, electricians, doctors, lawyers, engineers, small business owners. People dreamed of a kitchen renovation and saved up money for years to afford a new garage or that nice car at retirement. They couldn't imagine becoming YouTube starts or overnight millionaires because of some reality TV show or viral video.
Everything is fucked and it's because everyone thinks they are getting rich tomorrow. It's a mad dash to grab as much as possible, and people don't even enjoy the stuff they do have!
Society is sick and decades of neglect are coming due; the blighted pillars are crumbling.
All of this talk about supply chain issues are totally missing the point in my opinion. So many articles (and tweet chains I guess) have been written about supply chain issues, yet every one of them seems to ignore the elephant in the room which is demand for goods vs services. Over the course of the pandemic there was a staggering re-balancing of consumer spending [0] from services to goods, to which supply chains h…
Considering almost every article I read about the causes cites the shift from services to goods (to the point of feeling like it's filler at this point), I wonder how we are reading such different sources. I'm thinking about sources like the NYT.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The US has now outsourced most of the production of goods to places in other countries. I think that is the point (or one of the points): it's not just logistics and spare capacity - it's a much more complex set of issues. This isn't something accounting practices or "less greed" would solve, as seems to be implied in the Twitter thread. Would you have voted for a party that spent $1b annually on mask manufacturing…
"mask manufacturing subsidies for masks nobody even bought? Who could have foreseen that demand spike?" The entire industrial capacity of USA, country of 300 million people, could produce zero Meltblown, so it could make zero masks. Do you think it's acceptable? People talk about conflict with China while we depent on them for toilet paper to wipe out butts, it's like a mentall ilness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The assumption that stock prices don't matter, because company ABC doesn't necessarily depend on it 'for now' - is just wrong I'm afraid. If Apple crashed to 1 cent it would gut the entire market. Even just that crash alone, the amount of money wiped out, retiree savings etc., other companies would be valued lower and then the mass selloff would crush them as well. Apple may not need to 'raise money now' but it very…
One of the two is true: 1) The market value of a company is true, aka the owners of this company must be taxed for the real value growth in their portfolio (since it constitutes income), even if they do not sell 2) It’s a casino, a share is just a ticket that may worth nothing or a billion. In that case we don’t need tax protections. The owners of the tickets must be taxed only when they cash out. The governments sho…
And, it's ridiculous to try to tax unrealized gains in most situations, it's unfeasible the moment you try t put a policy around it.
It's a non-starter and any attempt at legislating it will fail badly and make the politicos that tried to do it look like clowns.
The tools we already use are much more effective.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't know if a slight price increase in graphics cards is the key issue to worry about at this point. The price increase in graphics cards isn't related to this. GMs trouble selling cars because they don't have enough chips to finish off the cars is a problem related to the pandemic and planning like the posts on Twitter note. The lack of new cars available has driven up prices on used cars. This is all supply c…
> The US has now outsourced most of the production of goods to places in other countries. I think that is the point (or one of the points): it's not just logistics and spare capacity - it's a much more complex set of issues. This isn't something accounting practices or "less greed" would solve, as seems to be implied in the Twitter thread. Would you have voted for a party that spent $1b annually on mask manufacturing…
Many people did (only at the $450MM level/annually). It was considered standard practice to have the federal government purchase large quantities of N95 masks to have in case of an emergency. GWB started the program, and Obama distributed 100,000,000 masks during the H1N1 crisis from the stockpile. I will say that restocking the pile took a cut after 2010, Congress cut its funding and Obama's team didn't fight for it. And what funding they did get didn't seem to get prioritized into masks.
It's hard to find someone loyal to their employer. The only loyal low level workers that I know they work in the public sector or NGO. Is this a usual feeling in other countries?