quasirandom
Joined 5 years ago
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Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
Who said anything about a border? A person was arrested in Seattle for throwing a Jose Cuervo bottle imported from Mexico. The importation was the "foreign or interstate" nexus. Do you own anything that is not imported? That's legal nihilism.
Comment · 5 years ago
What's the difference between the US and a despotic regime? We have a gulag system. There is a degree of legal nihilism that borders on lawlessness. For example, the DOJ charged someone with a federal crime for throwing an imported tequila bottle. When the laws mean anything and nothing, you have rule by fiat. There's corruption everywhere...
Comment · 5 years ago
> The difference being that then we saluted getting access to raw data, whereas now we are being conditioned to consider them "misinformation".
I like this point. I wish it would be reported as an "influence operation" rather than "misinformation". The most effective propaganda is 80% true.
Comment · 5 years ago
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Comment · 5 years ago
Its been a while, but I just read an article arguing the case that Len Sassaman was a Satoshi. It was a neat article, so I watched one of Len's Defcon talks about remailers from waaay back in the day.
In his talk, Len mentioned that most remailer security analysis assumes homogeneous Poisson email arrivals. He pointed out how bad an assumption that is for email.
I still think it was a solid assumption in the Bitcoin white paper.
https://leung-btc.medium.com/len-sassaman-and-satoshi-e483c8...
This kind of thinking has infected corporate America, which is optimizing return based measures--typically IRR--rather than profit based measures. That kind of thinking will lead you to believe offshoring your fabs is a good idea, because is reduces assets in the denominator.
On the other hand, financial thinking can help you better understand the world. One of the more powerful insights that comes to mind is Merton's model of corporate capital structure. It turns out that equity is "equivalent" to a long call on firm assets and debt is "equivalent" to a risk-free bond and a short put on assets.
Seeing things this way tells you something about how firms are run. Equity owners (management) have an incentive to increase asset volatility, which increases the call value. This value is taken straight from the bond holders short put. This is why you see buybacks in situations where buybacks seem crazy (Intel in 8/2020).
https://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/ssundaresan/papers/Mer...