P00RL3N0

You may be right on the negative real yield. My thinking was that, ceteris paribus, if expected inflation is rising I would expect interest rates to rise as well. QE has likely been playing a large role in muting this effect.

I'm honestly surprised inflation hasn't been worse than what we've already seen. 10-year treasury yields are still well below their 2019 levels and are currently below their levels from Q2 of this year.

I think part of the problem is that many companies hire external staffing companies and expect them to find the "perfect candidate", and not someone who is "good enough". This combined with the Great Resignation means that both candidates and employers are likely being extremely picky with who they choose hire / work for. As someone who was recently on the market, it was rather strange to see so many companies desperate for talent whilst also being frustratingly meticulous with hiring decisions. I made the joke to myself that companies are being far pickier with their next hires at the moment than most people are with their romantic partners. The arbitrage opportunities in the market for human capital right now are just staggering.

The argument, at least to me, appears to lean heavily on a false dichotomy: You can either be smart, have good ideas, or some blend of the two. Yet he begins with a counter-example in the case of Einstein.

I remember watching a YouTube video from The Wall Street Journal where they had configured 100 bot accounts to essentially crawl TikTok to study how it develops profiles for each user. For most users it may seem rather innocent, but in the video the user was modeled to be someone struggling with depression and towards the end of the simulation was being fed mostly depressing content.

I think recommendation engines can be useful for discovering content, but using gradient descent to do this can also be extremely dangerous. There is seemingly no control for when the recommended content is slowly pushing someone towards self-harm or other acts of violence.

If I want full ownership of my data, meaning I don't want it managed/hosted by Snowflake, doesn't that mean that snowflake will reference my S3 bucket as an external table? How exactly am I going to be saving money? Snowflake will have to index my S3 bucket, most likely doing a poor job at doing so, all the while charging me for S3 requests just to create an index that I'm already maintaining. My company has strict contractual obligations regarding data de-identification that I have written code to securely index. We use S3 to store de-identified data and the index to query data we have in S3, meaning that we run no risk of our customer data being identified even if attackers acquired access to both the index & S3 bucket. Snowflake may not be trying to handle our use-case, but the corporate account executive spamming my inbox was dead certain that it was our panacea. I'm failing to see where they fit in and I'm glad that my manager listens to me. I also don't see the arguments that Snowflake is beneficial because it is cloud-agnostic. I can count the number of cloud-agnostic employers I've had over my career on 0 hands. If I can't set up Lambda triggers to puts to my S3 bucket, then snowflake is a hard no from me.

This isn't actually how monopolies work. Theoretically, monopolies cannot just charge what they want for a product, unless demand is perfectly inelastic. i.e. At some point, people (consumers) will stop paying or move to a substitute.

I've been doing audio mastering as a creative hobby for about 5 years but I've never done anything professionally. I was literally just contacted early this morning (EST) regarding an opportunity to do some work professionally for an indie record label so I am going to see where that goes. There is a "Full-Time Effort" clause in my employment contract that might require me to get permission from my company to do it, but I'm hoping it won't be an issue either way.