murgindrag

I expect inflation to remain high for a while, and I think concerns about it (if not for self-fulfilling psychological, which are very real and significant) are overblown. I think this stimulus, and the resulting inflation, DID help the economy, relative to the alternatives. The critical thing was to avoid structural damage:

- Businesses going under

- People losing jobs

- Mortgages going under

... and so on. All of this DOES directly impact the productive output of the economy.

Inflation does distort the economy a little bit. It makes some of us poorer (those with cash), some of us richer (those with debt), and leaves some neutral (this with hard assets). But I think this distortion pales relative to the alternative.

Imagine you're a business with 5 million dollars in revolving debt, at a 2% interest rate. You have $100k in debt service costs.

If interest rates go up to 5%, you have $250k in service costs. Most businesses operate close to break-even (in efficient markets), and many will immediately go under. If businesses go under, that triggers a recession cycle: Those businesses lay off employees, who stop buying, driving down revenue for everyone else. People anticipating layoffs/furloughs/etc. stop buying. Hiring goes down too, since businesses start planning for rough times.

People buying on credit (anyone with a credit card debt) also find purchasing much more expensive, together with higher bills on existing debt.

A whole bunch of business opportunities also disappear in a poof of smoke. If a business has even a 1% expected real return, and interest rates are zero, it makes sense to borrow money to start that business (especially if inflation is also high, giving effective negative interest rates). If a business has an expected 1% return and interest rates are 12%, then I'm bleeding money. For these kinds of opportunities, think less SV startup, and more just normal businesses (e.g. I buy something and sell it a month or two later).

All of this piles on to form a recession.

I was surprised by the quality of the Coway Airmega 200M. Good reviews, but looked sketchy:

- Super-quiet

- Sensor does actually speed it up with even trivial amounts of pollution. You sneeze in the same room, or spray some hairspray, and woosh.

- Washable prefilter, carbon filter, HEPA filter

I have a super-high-end air filter from 2-3 decades ago, and I'm surprised by the progress. The cheap 2020 unit is better.

As far as I can tell, COVID has two predominant modes of spread:

- Extended time indoors, with high viral loads. It spreads ridiculously well with no protection (even among the vaccinated).

- Isolated superspreader events, where one person infects many, even with distant contact.

Filters would seem to target the latter more than the former.

There are two theories:

- We're borrowing money, and we'll need to pay it back. That's scary.

- Money is bits in a computer, and from the perspective of the US government, it's like video game currency. Debts and deficits are fiscal instruments.

Which of these is correct, or something else, is TBD. I think a big part of the question is who holds the debt. I'm a lot more worried about foreign debt, and I'm a lot less worried about debt as a financial instrument to pay interest on de facto savings accounts.

> If you aren’t interested in maintaining your app annually, don’t publish apps on Apple’s store.

That's exactly what I do. I avoid the app stores like the plaque.

> (I am not sympathetic to your situation, because as a user of apps, I am exhausted of crappy apps and bottom-of-the-barrel behaviors from developers. I understand that others may feel otherwise, and that’s fine too, just as long as those feelings do not get in the way of being a responsive app developer.)

I think the word here is 'entitled.' There are a few different groups here:

- Bottom-of-the-barrel scammers, whom I have no sympathy to

- Little kids and amateurs, who might want to put something out and move on

- Graduate students and research projects

- Little not-for-profits

- Internal-use small businesses and enterprise apps, where a they might be developed once and forgotten about for decades (yes, plural)

In my case, I don't need to have an app on the app store, and I don't care for Apple's behavior, so I don't have an app there. That hurts Apple (and you, if you're an iPhone user) more than it does me.

You're also confusing strictness with timelines. I'm all for super-strict policies. Just with:

- Backwards compatibility (e.g. grandfathering) of older apps

- Plenty of notice

As much as I like the change, the 3-month window seems unreasonable. I don't currently have AppStore apps, and these kinds of whiplash changes are part of the reason.

Microsoft, for all its faults, is much better than Apple or Google here.

Businesses take planning and strategy, and these things lead to drop-everything fires.

Economies rely on stability.

Well, modules can be designed to protect my security, or to harm my security (e.g. to enforce DRM). I'm unclear on how "real TPM" functionality helps me. If it helps secure Microsoft, and hurts my security, that's a good reason to not use Windows.

I have not found good docs on what TPM exactly does in Windows 11, but people I trust tell me to distrust it, so I do.

Serious question: How does YC work with companies like this?

It seems like a YC standard-form offer doesn't make any sense to a company like Ginko at the stage it entered YC.

Stereotype much?

Allergies.

You end up with a large segment of the population who sneezes a little bit, which is sort of annoying but sort of okay.

You end up with a small segment of the population with asthma attacks, anaphylaxis, and other life-threatening conditions.

Universal use of dogs would mean that there would be people who simple cannot travel, ever, anywhere beyond driving distance.

There's a small war between extremist dog-owners (the ones who believe dogs are people too, and sneak them into all sorts of places dogs aren't allowed as "activism") and people with severe allergies.

This is incredibly true.

Homes don't even need to be that small. Buying a chunk of land with enough trees to build a home is <$5k, if you're willing to live in the middle of nowhere.

You need the equivalent of a Ph.D in zoning, permitting, and municipal regulations to do that, though.

And if each high school class, as a year-long class project, build a home, I think my kid would get a better education and we'd have more homes.

Plus, most people need to bring in specialists to do all the maintenance because we have no idea how our homes work. I'd like to run ethernet in my house, and I have no idea what's inside my walls, how to get in there, or how not to break things. That's embarrassing.

If a side effect of COVID19 were getting rid of flu and colds, I'd be very very happy.

It doesn't look like it will be, but it'd be nice.

I actually think all the contact tracing stuff would do it. If we had zero tolerance for colds and flues -- we quarantine everyone who gets them and their contacts -- we'd end up at close to zero cases, and close to zero actual quarantines.

I actually think steady-state, we'd need fewer quarantines than the number of people flu kills. Flues kill 60k per season. I think 60k quarantines would be more than adequate for containing it.