ctchocula

The headline is editorialized way beyond what the article is about:

> A new survey of 57 of the world’s biggest private banks and other lenders, conducted by Deloitte and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, offers the fullest picture yet of this opaque corner of finance. Banks don’t always break out such lending on their balance sheets, and there is no central tally of how much is outstanding. The report finds that stock-based lending, better known as Lombard loans to borrowers in Europe and Asia, is increasingly available to those lower down the wealth scale.

> ...

> In mid-October, Charles Schwab said its pledged asset line product available to people with at least $100,000 in nonretirement assets drove a 35% surge in bank-loan balances, to $72.3 billion in the third quarter. A spokeswoman said usage grew after Schwab launched a fully digital process three years ago that can get the loans approved within minutes.

Mixing "buy, borrow and die" up with a pledged asset line is ridiculous and clickbait to the point of disrespect for the reader's intelligence. The former is a boutique product used by the uber-rich (net worth in 9 figures minimum) to get around estate tax. They're certainly not using a pledged asset line, which is available to you and me but doesn't do anything for estate taxes.

The cynical read into this is WSJ is trying to whitewash the "buy, borrow and die" strategy using "hey, if the same strategy available to the plebs, then it must be morally justified, right?"

Talk about leaving us on a hanger. You can't write all that and not share a single story.

Married filing separately (MFS) tax brackets are just MFS divided by 2, which is worse than Individual tax brackets.

Also various things get cut in half e.g. SALT cap phase-out income limit, mortgage deduction limit that MFS is almost never worth it except in a few niche situations and it acts as a last resort option if you are no longer on speaking terms with your spouse but haven't divorced yet, yet need to file taxes for the year.

Thanks!

One follow-up: Any recommended go servers to play on? OGS, Fox, Pandanet?

Given all the interest in sudden interest in go in this thread, anyone have a sure-fire method to improve at go from double-digit kyu to single-digit kyu and amateur dan level?

Certitude can be framed a bit more positively.

For example, someone on HN said they work out every day, not because they think it will make them super buff, but because they consider it a virtuous thing to do. If they miss a day, they will forgive themselves and try their best to pick it up the next day. They consider doing this virtuous act to be the end in and of itself, while treating any health benefits as a bonus.

I quite like this mental model for some reason I can't quite put my finger on. Maybe it's the similarity to virtue ethics, which was always for elites and I have an elitist streak.

That article's TL;DR is bad theories "external invasion" and "volcanoes", and sets against it the current historian consensus: "climate" and "internal instability".

That sounds a lot like what Wilson is implying.

A fascinating read. Thank you for sharing!

> Let's start from the other end. Just a pawn and two kings. It's possible to describe some quite succinct rules for when that's a draw versus a win for the side with the pawn. Agreed? Club players know these by heart. You could write that doen as invariants. As long as the side with the pawn stays inside the "green zone" of the state space, there is nothing the other side can do to void mate.

The flaw in this line of reasoning is that it's easy to come up with a theorem that works for KP vs K. However as the number of pieces increases, it becomes impossible to distill all the branches of possible moves into a simple theorem like that. If what you said were possible, endgame would be a simple flowchart, but look at how much time even GM players use in endgame and how often mistakes are made, and you'll recognize Chess endgame is not distillable into a simple flowchart when there are even as few as 7 pieces on the board.

Given the above, the only option is enumeration, if you want to prove that in all cases the outcome is White win or draw.

Tesla IPO'd at 1.7B and is worth 1.4T today. Giving you the benefit of doubt since it would be closer to a 1000x gain rather than the 100x gain that you didn't buy right at IPO, I will point out that there's a world's difference buying in at 1.7B, because there's still room for the stock to 1000x, but there's not much gain to be had buying in at 1.7T valuation.

Even the most highly company in the world Nvidia is less than 3x that valuation, so it's not a good comparison with Tesla's IPO.

Direct indexing will soon be able to provide that functionality of giving you S&P 500 stocks minus A, B and C companies you don't want to hold. However, cheap and reliable direct indexing brokerages aren't out there yet. Hopefully more competitors show up and help lower the prices for everyone.

This reminded me of those booths they have at company holiday parties where they take a photo of you, convert it to a line drawing and have the robot draw it out for you to keep. Very cool hack!

I had this same feeling. Same with reading a biography of Kurt Vonnegut. Before reading it, I thought of them in idealistic ways. They had multiple affairs and weren't such great people, even though they both wrote really, really well.