Buy a cheap unlocked smartphone and run GrapheneOS[0]. I want my smartphone to be like my linux computers where I run them for as long as the hardware works and is still relevant. My iPhone 12 is getting close to its end of life support, yet it is still working well. We should expect better from trillion dollar companies. So I'm not supporting them with dollars wherever I can afford not to. That and I think it's more enjoyable to run something off the beaten path. I like to explore the space a little.
I swapped out my MBP for an Asus Pro Art running linux last year and that's been working out pretty well. Hopefully my cheap motorola phone will be supported by GrapheneOS soon and that will work out too.
GrapheneOS will support future Morotola phones that meet a subset of their requirements, rather than existing phones. Less likely to be budget lines for now.
The cheap Motorola phones won't support GrapheneOS because they are missing some of the security features that GrapheneOS requires. The Motorola partnership is for some new phones: hopefully at a lower price bracket, but likely to be flagships or 2nd tier.
Oil spiked to $110/barrel on the WTI front month futures contract this afternoon, a $20 jump up from Friday. At this pace we'll be at $150 a barrel in a week or two. If oil infrastructure keeps getting hit, even if the strait of hormuz is reopened, it'll take a long time to recover from. That's on top of the continued call for regressive tariffs and a weakening labor market. I think we're heading for a recession unless things turn around quickly, which I'm not seeing any indication of.
I'm curious if we'll get TACO Trump, or if he'll double down on this?
My guess is that this time even if there’s a TACO you can’t turn back the clock on everything that’s happened. The tariffs are mostly an on/off switch. You can’t unbomb infrastructure.
My understanding is that, until the hits on Tehrans oil storage sites yesterday, the oil infrastructure has been spared. Nothing that isn't easy to repair.
Ie the price increase we've seen so far os mostly pricing the closing of the staits and the risk of reduced production production is halted due to running out of storage (ie akin to a cpu "pipeline stall".
But Iran got hit badly yesterday, with tar raining on the capital. If Iran retaliates against infrastructure...
The US is not acting rationally on Iran, this is on top of a history of acting irrationally with regards to past treaties. The game theorists would tell you that Iran should impose costs for this in one way or another, the main avenue of which is economic costs. Iran may extend this cost imposition to US aligned states throughout the Gulf.
It's a mess with limited exit ramps, Iran can likely keep bombing their neighbors and shipping blocked for years if they so choose.
There was no urgency in the invasion of Iran. It was done partly because Israel wanted it, and partly as a convenient distraction. Nothing material had changed from the last decade. The US embassy was given instructions to get people out of Israel the day before it happened, and anyone who was paying attention knew exactly what that meant.
Everything that is happening now was publicly predicted and modelled at least a decade ago. Look at Shimon Peres's continual warnings to the world regarding Netanyahu. This was expected and shouldn't be regarded as something novel. Just something abhorrent.
If the wells have been throttled back or stopped. There can be issues when production is reduced (or even worse stopped), restarting & resuming the previous production rates can be very difficult and time consuming. There’s a lot of complex multi-phase physics that can prevent the restart. Sometimes wells, just don’t restart.
I hope that you are right and we are just filling the storage tanks and waiting for the straits to re-open, so the hit to the market is minimised.
Iran do seem to be losing but that doesn’t mean the US is winning. The US needs to get the oil/gas moving through the straits and on the market, otherwise there will be big hit at the gas pumps and other economic factors.
Producers have already been announcing force majure to legally stop production.
Qatar gas being the big one for LNG. It'll takes them two weeks to restart four to get to full production. So a tight LNG market has 20% of the world production out for three weeks.
They asked Trump what he thought could go wrong. His only response was appointing a leader worse than the last. That took just over a week and now our $1b per day is going to skyrocket when troops are deployed. Trump has to focus on federalism of elections to stop from being nurtured in November. There was never a plan and he fractured his base. I am not sure how this helps average Americans. Perhaps we’ll have some conflict with Cuba soon and China enters the frame.
That it was a stupid operation with a predictably useless outcome. But we also said that about the whole invading Greenland stuff, and it ended like that. And about the war in Afghanistan. And I would presume, about the Vietnam war.
Seeme like Israel has very strong intel in Iran though. Not sure they got burned, they seem to have infiltrated deeply into Iran. Remains to be seen how it plays out in the end.
Why care about oil when alternate fossil-fuel-free technologies have become mature? This could very well be the last straw to push many nations (except the U.S.) to massively buy Chinese solar panels and Chinese EVs to be oil independent.
There is not going to be any shortage of plastics in the medium term.
Shale oil and gas production in the US produces vast quantities of ethane as a byproduct. This ethane is cracked into ethylene, a feedstock for making plastic. There is an oversupply of the stuff.
The overabundance is a big part of why it's just not commercially viable to do much with recycled plastic. Places will practically give away the virgin material because they have to find someplace for it to go to keep producing other things.
The amount of oil used for plastics or lubricants is insignificant compared to the use of oil as energy. In the United States, lubricants use ~0.5% of all oil, and all industrial feedstock about 1%.
It means the oil is being used for its heat content when combusted. Such heat may be used directly or be converted to mechanical work in a heat engine.
We burn 80% of the oil we take out of the ground. Oil production could drop 80% and we would not have to change anything other than demand for burning it.
but will iran accept the taco? at this point, it seems like it may get ideological for them, and they play a different war (jihad) which would require diverting prolonged resources. we may not be able to simply just leave and revert to normal.
The strait of hormuz is the opposite of protected right now. Insurance companies aren't willing to cover ships if they enter the strait to pick up a load of oil, so little commercial traffic is occurring.
The real cost should include the spike in oil prices, the world consumes about 100 million barrels a day, so every $10 increase costs the world a $1 billion a day. We're already up ~$10, and it might continue to rise depending on how things go. You probably should include LNG in there too. If this oil halt is protracted, your stocks and bonds will be dragged down as well.
> Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc?
We already have very efficient crop harvesting and Eli Lilly is nearly a $1 Trillion dollar company. Interestingly, the new medicine is designed to keep us from eating so many cheap calories (new weight loss drugs).
> Not everything has to be perfectly efficient but it just saddens me to see all these great minds doing what, adversarially harvesting margin from the works of others?
The traders and investors who work in this space also go to where they are need, aka where the big money is. So few of these folks are trading corn and soybeans, though some do, rather most are trading drug stocks, tech stocks, and recently sovereign debt related trading (e.g. things like gold and bonds). The focus is around the big questions of our time, like "Are AI investments going to pay off?", or "Is the US going to default/soft default?", and so on.
Deciding how a society allocates its resources, or places its bets, is an important function. Otherwise, you end up with planned economies by disconnected leaders, which often leads to massive failures and large social consequences. Unfortunately, the US is trending in that direction to some degree with it's giant fiscal deficits, tariffs, and tribal politics creeping into economic policy. Nevertheless, traders will weigh these outcomes in their trades, and you'll see a quick reflection from any major change in policy almost immediately, which is a helpful feedback mechanism. For example, the tariff tantrums caused by trump proposing 100%+ china tariffs where he crashed the markets last spring, leading to a moderation in policy.
I think the comment was a roundabout way of saying this is a clear market failure. There are more societally important things these people could be doing instead of shaving another ms off a transaction or finding minuscule option pricing inefficiencies. That the market is not correctly remunerating those options is the failure.
> For example, the tariff tantrums caused by trump proposing 100%+ china tariffs where he crashed the markets last spring, leading to a moderation in policy.
"Akshually traders are good bcuz they crash the market when the president does insane things" is not the own you think it is.
> this undervalues how financial engineering allows more ideas and companies to be funded
I think the comment is about the marginal utility of additional workers at Jane St over, perhaps, DE Shaw Research. The caliber and education of roughly the same kind of person might be applied to understanding drug mechanisms, or shaving off trading milliseconds.
Is the marginal benefit to the world greater if someone is advancing financial engineering? I don't think it's obvious that our increased complexity is, itself, yielding further increases in 'allowing more ideas and companies to be funded' except in the sense where already-wealthy people gain more discretionary income which they may decide to spend on their pet projects. Futures have existed for much longer than derivative markets; are we helping farmers more when we allow futures to be traded more quickly?
But I disagree that the limit is funding—it's simply a lack of concerted interest. We accept that we should spend tax money on rewarding certain financial activities, and we create a system that disproportionately rewards people who facilitate these activities. But we might restructure things so people are incentivized to do research instead of financial engineering.
I think the fundamental idea is that things of value need to be extracted or manufactured at some point and we're not set up to reward people studying new extractive tools or new manufacturing processes when those people could instead work on finance products.
I think these are totally different things. HFT firms and Hedge Funds are not "allowing more ideas to be funded". Finance in general can indeed be good but I think its much harder to argue for the net benefit of firms like Jane Street or Citadel.
It’s an important function, but the guys making these bets frequently pull down $10-$100M per year, each. That’s a huge toll to extract from the productive economy for playing this game.
And then there are the guys managing things like pensions, skimming a percentage every year, just because they happen to be locked into that position, meanwhile underperforming a basket of index funds. Just happily eating away at the retirement savings of thousands-millions.
This endless money-spinning & the larger monetary system is a big scam to steal from actual productive work. How is it fair to normal people that the whole system is rigged such that if they DON'T indulge in all this gambling (ignore the fact that most retail traders are on the sucker-end of the trade), they lose whatever wealth they've stored to inflation ?
Money is an IOU. It's not a secret that US central bank policy is to devalue those IOUs at a rate of 2% per year in order to artificially stimulate demand for production.
We can have different opinion on how much inflation is too much. But the universal consensus is that a little bit of inflation is good. It's ok if you think 2% too high. Maybe 1.25% is better.
But we cannot just dispute this basic economic model and thinking that 0 or negative inflation (which would cause the stop of investment), or no consensus(that would just cause more chaos) is better. That's just absurd
For decades before that policy, a policy even the Bank of Canada holds, inflation was crazy high. The 80s saw inflation, in Canada, briefly hit over 20%, and double digit inflation was a regular thing.
Everyone decided 2% would be a good rate to aim for, that more control was better, to prevent inflation from flying out of control.
Then some dude comes along and tries to spin it like it's a conspiracy to hurt people.
For some crops we have. But it would be nice to have more diversity, so that the cheapest food options wouldn't be just wheat and corn because they happen to be the crops that are most amenable to mechanized agriculture.
HN and other social media sites are closer to 99% free labor, 1% paid labor, like dang. Free labor writing comments, blog posts, voting/moderating, posting videos and so on. Imagine if HN or Youtube had to pay people to generate all that content[1].
I think the only pay most get, is that you get to enjoy the site content. But in the case of Youtube, they slap so many ads in front of it that you often end up paying for this free labor content just to get rid of the ads. HN doesn't do Ad walls, but is more of a sales funnel for YCombinator and harvesting whatever value they can from the data, so not so intrusive.
[1] Youtube does pay some of the more popular content creators
The explanation given is that cartel air drones entered US airspace.
I guess my question is, doesn't this happen all the time? I would think drones would be an easy way to fly a Kilo over the border to whatever dropspot you wanted. I wonder what the new wrinkle is?
I think it's worth correcting the record here because drone warfare is pretty different from what actually happened. What they identified and shot down was a mylar party balloon.
> The way the US government funds deficit spending is not by increasing money supply (though it could) but by issuing debt in the form of US Treasury bonds.
Sure it does. That Treasury debt is often bought up by the FED in huge tranches by increasing the money supply, they call it things like "unlimited QE (quantative easing)". For example, the FED announced unlimited QE on March 23rd, 2020 causing the stock market and real estate market to bounce. Trillions of new dollars were created in these last 5-6 years, and that's why everything costs more. The USG continues to overspend, and too often on dumb shit too (e.g. tax breaks for the ultra wealthy).
> US stock market index funds will crash when the US stock market crashes. That will require very large sums of capital to decide to move away from US capital markets. To give an idea of how much money would need to move - VTSAX alone is about $2.1 trillion, with hundreds of billions of dollars of shares of each Mag7 stock.
I'd like to make a technical note about markets because I see this mistake repeated in the comments. The money doesn't have to move out of the US markets to somewhere else for the stock market to crash. It only requires a destruction of confidence. For a hypothetical example, suppose the S&P 500 closes at 7000 on a Friday, and everyone loses confidence in the S&P 500 over the weekend (for whatever reason). The market can open on Monday 3500 with not a share traded before the open (no money was moved out of the market), and investor portfolio values are now cut in half. Since confidence is broken, nobody buys the dip, and the market closes Monday down to 3000.
It's an extreme example, but it's worth understanding the fundamental underpinnings. The markets are a confidence game. Sometimes we forget because we have good reason to be confident (e.g. in the S&P 500) and so it fades into the background that something like this could even happen, but it's not hard find these sorts of events in history.
You are correct, but only insofar as destroying paper value. If investors have a firesale because the market would prefer to realize whatever value might be rescued, even at a loss, but the proceeds of the sale stay inside the US, then that capital is more likely to be reinvested in the US once investor confidence returns. This is the underlying reason why most long-investors should continue to hold their positions despite short-term losses. The fact that NVDA has a $4.6T market cap, as a product of about 24 billion shares multiplied by about a $190/share price, does not mean that the market believes that all 24 billion shares could be sold for that $190/share price. That is a convenient fiction that falls apart when investor confidence bursts, but that does not in and of itself truly represent value destruction (Nvidia employees will still wake up the next day and go to work), at least not until second-order-effects kick in (e.g. Nvidia employees leave because their RSU packages are no longer competitive compensation). People who stay long in the stock market can wait for investor confidence to return, in which cash is reinjected into the stock market, and the losses in diversified portfolios are not realized. If the S&P 500 investor takes a 50% hit in a crash, decides to hold, then the S&P 500 rises by 140% in the next two years, then the investor who held will still realize a nice return.
The way in which that narrative does not happen is if the capital leaves entirely to be locked up in other investments; in the context of index funds which would anyway rebalance to rise with those other investments, if the capital leaves for other countries, to investments that are not covered by the index funds.
Correct. The price of the market is the price people are willing to pay. It is not directly related to the move of capital. That said prices are also a function of supply and demand, if there is no demand (e.g.) for US stocks then it is more likely price will go down. If everyone wants to sell US and buy Europe, e.g. because they think the European competitors to Apple, Google, Amazon, nVidia and such will outperform, then presumably the prices at which those companies trade will trend down.
Obviously data center bidders would prefer their activity to be kept in the dark, but does that make for good outcomes for anyone else except the bidders. First, the community would like to weigh in on whether they want a data center or not, often they don't. Then if they do, they'd rather have a bidding war than some NDA backroom deal with a single entity. All this does is serve Big Tech and Big Capital, and they don't need to run on easy mode, sponging off the small guy at this stage.
> the community would like to weigh in on whether they want a data center
This is the enabler of pure NIMBYism and we have to stop thinking this way. If a place wants this kind of land use and not that kind, then they need to write that down in a statute so everyone knows the rules. Making it all discretionary based on vibes is why Americans can't build anything.
I thought I made it clear, I'm not against data center build outs per se, a community might decide it's worth it to build one. If a community decides to go ahead with it, make it clear and open for the public to bid on it so the residents get the best deal available (e.g. reduced power bills, reduced property taxes, water usage limits, noise/light polution limits, whathaveyou...). These massive data centers are a new kind of business that most communities don't have much experience with, and I doubt they've had time to codify the rules. It sounds like the states are starting to add some more rules about transparency, which seems like a step in the right direction for making better deals for all involved.
The subtitle of the article tells us this is happening.
> Wisconsin has now joined several states with legislative proposals to make the process more transparent.
But it is a reactive measure. It has taken years for the impacts of these data centers to trickle down enough for citizens to understand what they are losing in the deal. Partially because so many of the deals were done under cover of NDAs. If anything, this gives NIMBYs more assurance that they are right to be skeptical of any development. The way these companies act will only increase NIMBYism.
> Making it all discretionary based on vibes is why Americans can't build anything.
Trusting large corporations to provide a full and accurate analysis of downside risks is also damaging.
I feel like the term "community" is leading intuitions astray here. The actual decision at question here is whether the local government provides the necessary approvals for a company to build what they want on their private property.
It's good and proper for the government to consider the impacts on a local community before approving a big construction project. That process will need to involve some amount of open community consultation, and reasonable minds can differ on when and how that needs to start. The article describes a concrete proposal at the end, where NDAs would be allowed for the due diligence phase but not once the formal approval process begins; that seems fine.
It's not good and improper for the government to selectively withhold approval for politically disfavored industries, or to host a "bidding war" where anyone seeking approvals must out-bribe their competitors.
Its the same argument for high-density hog farming. If the use of private property may impinge on the neighbors, either through invasive noise, or costs to public utility infrastructure (power, water) then the community ought to have some insight and input, same as they have input into whether a high density hog farm can open right on the border of the community.
Yes some people see the datacenters as part of an ethical issue. I agree its not proper for permits to be withheld on purely ethical grounds, laws should be passed instead. But there are a lot of side-effects to having a datacenter near your property that are entirely concrete issues.
If a government wants to penalize companies for unethical behavior, they should pass a neutral and generally applicable law that provides for such penalties. Withholding permission to do random things based on ad hoc judgments of the company involved is a recipe for corruption.
Clearly there needs to be room for both things to occur. You should absolutely begin with passing laws, but to think that the laws on the books can cover every situation is naive. When companies skirt the law and cause harm, there needs to be a remedy.
I don't agree. The benefits of a business environment governed by due process and the rule of law far outweigh the benefits of individual government actors having arbitrary discretion to fill the gaps. As we've seen clearly on the federal level this past year, once you create that discretion, the common way for corporate executives to "prove" that they're nice and generous and deserve favorable treatment is not good behavior but open bribery of public officials.
Bribery is illegal. What hope do you have for due process and the rule of law when it is being carried out as it is now? You can't use an extraordinary case to justify your belief about the ordinary case.
Also, we don't live in a world adjudicated by machines, there will always be discretion and the potential for special favors. No matter how much you tie the hands of regulators there will be some actor who will have the power to extort. Not to mention that regulation is not opposed to due process and the rule of law, but is the most important component of both.
Imagining a world without discretion is imagining a world where corporations can do as much irreparable harm as they want as long as there isn't a law against it.
I agree with you. this should be handled by the legislative process. but we should also agree that secret deals announced as a fiat acompli are pretty fertile ground for corruption also
Right, and as I said I agree with that. But is there any reason to worry that communities aren't getting the input they're entitled to? The article mentions one case in the Madison suburbs, where "officials worked behind the scenes for months" and yet the residents were able to get the project cancelled when the NDA broke and they decided they didn't want it.
You make this sound like a conspiracy. This is normal practice in economic development, check off boxes until announcing to the public. The public rarely has much power in voicing their opinion but data centers are the current evil entity.
There's a reason for that: they compete for resources but contribute relatively little back to the local economy. In that sense they're quite different from previous large corporate investments in a local area.
Again, I think it’s a muddy example. I have yet to see compelling data that on average data center are meaningfully raising rates and most of the rate increases are more due to the aging infrastructure in America that was neglected for too long.
If anything these should be examples on the failure of how these resources are being sold and good opportunity to build a better system.
In another life, I would do things like measure the cost in developer time of bugs making it into developer repos vs. the cost in time of running tests in CI to catch such bugs, so evidence based decision making. It was mostly ignored, and at first I was surprised. A multi million dollar organization of people making negative EV plays, which I chalked up to the political pressures being more important than the wastage. More on that later.
As far as estimates go, I've also struggled with the industries cult(ural) rituals. I tried to put forward a Gaussian based approach that took into account not only the estimate of time, but the expected uncertainty, which is still probably off the mark, but at least attempts to measure some of the variance. But again, the politics and the rigidity of the clergy that has built around software development blocked it.
On the bright side, all this has helped me in my own development and when I think about software development and estimating projects. I know that outcomes become more chaotic as the number of pieces and steps compound in a project (i.e. the projects normal curve widens). You may not even get the project at all as defined at the outset, so my normals approach is still not quite the right tool.
I think this kind of thinking can be helpful when working solo or in a small group who are exposed to market forces. But for solo and small groups, the challenge isn't so much about the estimates, it's about how you're going to fight a battalion of mercenaries hired by big VC money and Big Tech. They can often afford to be inefficient, dump in the market, because their strategy is built around market control. These aren't practices small players can afford, so you need to get creative, and try to avoid these market participant kill boxes. And this is why, coming back to my earlier point, that often times, inefficient practices and politics plays a big role. Their trying to marshal a large number of troops into position and can afford to lose a few battles in order to win the war. The big money plays by a different set of rules, so don't worry if their doing it wrong. Just recognize your in the army soldier!
It's sad how software organizations refuse to learn from history. The US Navy was using PERT to manage huge, risky projects back in the 1950s with pretty good results. It can give you a Gaussian distribution of project completion dates based on best / middle / worst case estimates for individual tasks with dependencies.
I swapped out my MBP for an Asus Pro Art running linux last year and that's been working out pretty well. Hopefully my cheap motorola phone will be supported by GrapheneOS soon and that will work out too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47241551