That is impossible because each Vanguard mutual fund is a distinct legal entity. Assets cannot be moved between funds. See Vanguard safety for more details: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Vanguard_safety
The default settlement account, Vanguard Federal Money Market Fund, has incredibly low credit risk because its assets are short-term US Federal gov debt and Federal Reserve repurchase agreements. [1] Neither of those entities have substantial default risk. Further, the global financial chaos of significant defaults from either of those entities would likely render FDIC insurance ineffective because too many banks would fail simultaneously due to their assets in those classes.
Homeownership cannot be both affordable and a good investment because a good investment has returns that at least beat inflation. That implies housing costs for new buyers will become increasingly expensive in real terms.
Think about how cars generally depreciate over time such that a used car becomes more affordable. During the pandemic, this trend broke to supply side disruptions and used cars actually started to appreciate. Housing always has supply side constraints to zoning regulations to guard the entrenched interests of existing homeowners, and thereby housing generally appreciates in value.
The closest that we can come to balancing both affordability and investment interests in a growing area is to constantly increase housing density. Then the land itself can appreciate in value as larger buildings are built in a fixed footprint. Yet the price of an individual unit of housing can stay roughly constant in real terms due to the ever increasing supply.
Exactly! We are all already the beneficiaries and casualties of the unearned rewards and punishments due to the randomized genetic combination we received at conception. Kathryn Paige Harden brilliantly explains this ethical challenge in her book, “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality”, https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190808/th...
> In recent years, scientists like Kathryn Paige Harden have shown that DNA makes us different, in our personalities and in our health—and in ways that matter for educational and economic success in our current society.
> In The Genetic Lottery, Harden introduces readers to the latest genetic science, dismantling dangerous ideas about racial superiority and challenging us to grapple with what equality really means in a world where people are born different. Weaving together personal stories with scientific evidence, Harden shows why our refusal to recognize the power of DNA perpetuates the myth of meritocracy, and argues that we must acknowledge the role of genetic luck if we are ever to create a fair society.
As a professor of clinical psychology, Harden is well situated to introduce us laypersons to the overwhelming strong evidence that genes matter. Notably, even biological siblings only share 50% of their genes with each other. Therefore the randomization in genetic combination alone can create differences in innate strengths and weaknesses among children with the same parents. A lottery is the appropriate metaphor for the lack of control any of us have in the genes we’re bestowed at conception.
Genetic engineering may offer an equalizer, but that presents its own ethical challenges. Harden instead argues that we should design a sufficiently robust welfare state to counteract these natural inequities. She presents a Rawlian framework (ie, veil of ignorance) to argue for why we should not accept genetic privileges and disadvantages anymore than we’d accept other injustices.
Yes, and if their banner ads for donations focused on that then many of would be more comfortable donating. Our concern is their deceptive ads that give the impression that Wikipedia is struggling to pay the bills for serving Wikipedia.
I'm generally in favor of unions as a one of many tools for helping workers get a better working arrangement.
Yet I personally don't see the need for this tool in tech. The labor market has been red hot for years with demand exceeding supply and numerous options for each worker. Firms and their management seem exceedingly responsive (sometimes to a fault) with regard to addressing worker requests.
Sure there are still plenty of suboptimal tech employers and no firm is ever perfect for every worker. Yet worker choice seems to be sufficient to let tech workers find a firm that meets their requirements.
Some people are still choosing employers that many of us would reject, yet those workers are likely just prioritizing different things. Some people want to maximize their pay or progress more quickly in their career. Some people might even want to center work in their lives and seek a demanding employer. Whatever; to each their own.
There's plenty we can do to improve things and therefore fighting a losing war against money in politics is a distraction that simply wastes our limited time and effort.
Yep, if direct political donations are banned or highly limited, then SBF (and Thiel) will just fund a bunch of media startups that promote their preferred policies and candidates. These firms can appear to be profit seeking ventures while staffed with ideologues who are incentivized to optimize reach and influence.
Universities have mixed incentives at best in terms of certifying graduates. A degree program that routinely failed a high portion of students of the program would soon find few students entering the program. Because universities see students as a customer first, there is a strong incentive to give the customer's the product that they're paying for.
University degree program do care about rankings, which entails some concern about the quality of graduates awarded a degree. But they mainly address that by filtering students at admission time. Some program still have weed out courses to nudge students into alternative programs early on. But once the student is committed to the program, there is a strong incentive to award a degree regardless of their demonstrated capabilities.
> 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!
Yes, it is unfortunate that ordinary Russian citizens are being harmed by the sanctions. But that is unavoidable and an acceptable side effect of weakening Putin’s war machine. We need to eliminate his ability to wage an inhuman war of aggression and asphyxiating the Russian economy that power’s his war machine is our best available option.
War, including economic war, commonly involves massive harm to civilians. That includes civilians who oppose the war and are powerless to stop it. If the western powers and their allies could surgically snuff out Putin’s war machine without harm to innocent Russians then they would. Unfortunately that option is not available. So we accept that innocent Russians will suffer as we drain the financial blood from Putin’s war machine.
Agree that hopefully Spotify can resist calls to stop distributing content that other users find objectionable. As you point out, fashion will change and hopefully it does so in a way that shuns calls for censorship.
While I agree in principle with this line of thinking, I do worry that this will just lead to platform fragmentation. My thinking is that if Spotify (or any other platform) gives in to one online mob then that will only encourage more future mobs. I imagine that there are numerous podcasts and artists that some group finds objectionable. E.g., I imagine many cultural conservative prudes find music with a lot of profanity to offend their sensibilities. Should Spotify start removing artists if such a mob forms and demands such an action?
The end result is that a content distribution platform will have to curate a specific brand that targets specific consumers and only distributes conforming content. Whereas we currently have a half dozen or so music streaming services that all have roughly the same content, we’ll soon find content fragmented across 20 different platforms; each corresponding to a specific slice of consumer preferences. Many of us will have to subscribe to multiple services to get the content we seek and will not be able to mix content. E.g., many of my current playlists on Spotify would be split across several disjoint streaming platforms.
Instead, I think platforms should never be reactive in calls for dropping content. Instead they should have a general principle of broadly distributing all but the most extreme fringe content. They can regularly update their principles used in determining what content they distribute, but that should never be done as a quick reaction to some mob. Otherwise they’ll constantly be facing a series of outraged customers that want the platform to stop distributing some content that those outraged user’s don’t even consume. And I believe that will only result in platform fragmentation as distributors curate a brand around specific segments of consumers.
I agree that Spotify has the legal right to stop distributing any content they find objectionable. Anyone arguing that Spotify’s action is a first amendment violation is simply wrong. A private entity, like Spotify, can decide what content to distribute at their own discretion. I don’t think many people are making this argument.
Instead, I think many of us are arguing that Spotify shouldn’t exercise that option just because of an outraged online mob. That includes those of us that aren’t particular fans of Rogan and wouldn’t be affected if we couldn’t consume his content anymore. Many of us are arguing that as a general principal; don’t give in to a short-lived and irrational angry mob.
I am arguing for Spotify and other content distributors to ignore angry mobs because I worry that eventually such a mob will come for something I do value. E.g., I listen to plenty of music that includes gratuitous levels of profanity. I imagine that such music greatly offends many people, chiefly culturally conservative prudes. Should such an online mob form and demand Spotify stop distributing some of my favorite music then I hope Spotify resists that mob.
Maybe one day I’ll even be a member of such a mob demanding that some platform stop distributing something that offends my sensibilities. While my emotions of hate and outrage may cloud my rational judgment, I hope the platform will have the courage to tell me and my compatriots to pound sand. If we don’t like the content, then we don’t have to consume it.
*Edited to fix a mistake as pointed out in a reply.
They aren't forcing any single property to be a duplex. Instead they are preventing a ban on allowing the property to be a duplex. The property owner can still choose to build a single family home at their discretion.
The comparable car example would be preventing a local ordnance that bans minivans. The car buyer can choose a car or minivan based on their discretion if such a ban is prevented. Some localities don't like minivans for whatever reason and would like to ban them, thereby forcing everyone to buy cars.
I worked at a company that migrated a 100 PB Hadoop cluster to GCP for assorted reasons despite many years of success with colocation. I wasn't involved in any of this, but the team's decision process makes sense. You can read through their decision making in these blog posts:
One big point was challenges of maintaining multiple colocation sites, with cross replication, for disaster recovery. Since Hadoop triple replicates all data within one DC, this requires 6 times the disk storage capacity of data size for dual DCs. In contrast, cloud object storage pricing includes replication within a region with very high availability such that storing once in cloud storage may be acceptable. Further, you also need double the compute, with one of the DCs always standing by should the other fail.
Exactly! There are numerous applications where SQLite is replacing an ad hoc file-based solution, with nebulous at best durability and atomicity, let alone scalability. Like an application that would otherwise persist state in XML/JSON/protobuf and have to manage the challenges of regularly persisting and reading state; challenges with become unwieldly as the data size grows.
This is not a challenge commonly faced on on the enterprise server side, hence why many of us cannot imagine a use case for SQLite. Our workloads involve multiple readers/writers for both scaling and availability. An RDBMS cluster is the obvious choice.
But for mobile/embedded, all the data is local to a single device and commonly also a single process. In this case, an RDBMS would add unnecessary overhead. Additionally, there's desktop software that has to work with relatively large datasets, which require reliable persistence and efficient searching/reading. Adding an RDBMS would complicate installation and support.
Further, researchers and data analysts benefit from SQLite databases when the data is too large to hold in memory, yet not large enough to warrant a proper data warehouse. Even ~100 MB datasets can benefit from SQLite if you're performing a lot of random writes/reads or want to execute complex queries. There are other alternatives such as Apache Arrow, but SQLite is tried and tested option. It can be populated and queried similar to SQL-based data warehouses, and it also includes secondary indexes, an efficient query engine, and fast random writes with durability and atomic transactions.
There's a reason why SQLite can reputably claim to be the "Most Widely Deployed and Used Database Engine" with an estimated one trillion SQL database in use. [0]
As an investor in Miso Robotics[0], the company that makes Flippy, I'm quite excited by these developments. From what I've been reading about the kitchen automation industry, I believe we may be less than a decade away from fully autonomous restaurants. Basically, small buildings that are effectively made-to-order vending machines. Here's some background on the industry from an earlier comment of mine if anyone's interested in learning more.
There has been significant R&D investments in kitchen automation in the last decade and we're just starting to see the amazing results. As covered in Dec 2020 article, Future Restaurants Will Fit In A Shipping Container And Have No Humans In The Kitchen. [1]
> “Starting in the next two years, you’re going to see an explosion of really high quality, small footprint delivery kiosks — think high quality vending machines, kind of express menus,” Miso Robotics co-founder Buck Jordan told me recently on the TechFirst podcast.
> “But then I think around year five or seven, you’re going to start seeing a lot of … all new-build kitchens being completely reinvented, fully autonomous, no humans in the back of house, 25% the square footage, probably fits in a shipping container, completely changing the entire industry and potentially disrupting the franchise model.”
> “The future’s already here,” he says. “We have standalone machines that can cook a pizza in less than three minutes from scratch. We have automated Boba tea bars hitting the scene. And all these things just make it easier for customers to get low-touch food options faster and close to home.”
White Castle has been experimenting with this tech and in October 2020, announced that they would roll out the robotic fry cook to 10 new locations. [2] See [3] for a short video, showing the robot in action. There is also the Creator restaurant in San Francisco, which has a fully automated burger chef. [4,5]
Amazon Go has already solved the problem of automating retail. [6] As a customer, you don't interact with any employees. You scan in with your app as you enter, cameras automatically detect the items you select, and it charges your account when you exit. Go stores still have employees, including people stocking the shelves and someone available to help people as needed. Nonetheless, they still require fewer employees and can therefore offer lower costs.
I used to frequent two of the Go stores when I lived in San Francisco. They are incredibly convenient and offer the highest value in terms of value for cost. Quite hopeful that they'll expand out to my current city soon.
Getting people out of this menial work will drop costs to consumers, while improving consistency, quality, and cleanliness. I can hardly wait for what this sector will look like in just a decade.
In this attempt, I hope the organizers take the time to listen to many workers to understand their employment concerns as well as concerns with unionization. In the previous attempt, I found their website sorely lacking in specific demands, https://bamazonunion.org
The messaging seemed to be generic arguments in favor of unions combined with some general Amazon and Bezos criticisms. Even reading through the linked reports, didn't seem to provide a particularly convincing argument. E.g., they begin their concerns about workplace safety with
> The report notes that between 2013 and the time of publication earlier this year, seven workers had died at Amazon facilities. According to the report, two were crushed by forklifts in the warehouses, one was run over by a truck, one was killed by a driver in its parking lot, one suffered a fatal heart-related event during an overnight shift, one was dragged and crushed by a conveyor belt, and one was killed and crushed by a pallet loader. Two more Amazon workers were killed just weeks ago when a warehouse in Maryland partially collapsed during a storm.
While workplace deaths are certainly concerning, nine deaths in eight years for a workforce that is now up to 876,000 workers [0] suggests these deaths are exceedingly rare and may not be something most workers are thinking about. Further, there’s already OSHA requirements for workplace safety and I’d imagine all firms, including Amazon, want to avoid worker deaths and will make the necessary changes.
I think a union will need to address the specific demands of the workers they will be representing rather than generic arguments for unionization. Further, Amazon may be a particularly challenging workplace to organize since they already pay exceedingly well for unskilled labor, with a starting minimum rate of $15/hour and surprisingly good health benefits. [1] For many workers, Amazon may be the best job they’ve ever had and these workers may be concerned about risking the situation.
This includes risks like Amazon shutting down a unionized warehouse, which should be illegal, but there are workarounds. More likely, Amazon would just not grow a unionized warehouse and instead grow nearby ones to control labor costs. This would include building new warehouses if necessary.
Amazon may also be particularly aggressive in automation investments for a unionized warehouse, which would allow them to justify layoffs for redundant workers. Some analysts have even proposed that Amazon may be able to have “dark warehouses” (i.e., warehouses that keep the lights off) with full automation within 10 years. [2] Union concerns may lead them to invest even more aggressively in automation tech.
In general, I want to see workers' concerns addressed at all firms, and unionizing may be the best approach for this Amazon warehouse, but I think this will be challenging and will require organizers to put a lot of thought into the specific demands that the majority of workers want.