the US treasury secretary was on calls about whether to bail hedge funds out of gamestop to prevent cascading financial system failures. arguably there is nothing that is too dumb to be written about finance. dont let anyone discourage you.
Various government agencies are on calls to bail out various players in the financial system all the time and will continue to be. That isn't dumb per se.
Not at all. Goldman Sachs had and has plenty of regular folks as counterparties for their credit cards (branded as Apple Cards, I think). These regular folks don't get bailed out.
It was tongue in cheek. But, when someone says that, they generally mean a counterparty who owes money to GS, not the other way around. And I don't think goldies lost money on archegos.
> But, when someone says that, they generally mean a counterparty who owes money to GS, not the other way around.
All the examples I brought up are about counter-parties owing money to GS.
> And I don't think goldies lost money on archegos.
At most trivial amounts, yes. Goldman got out of the position really quickly. But your earlier claim was a bit more universal than that.
Goldman ain't stupid: if there were a treasury 'put' on Goldman's counterparties (and Goldman knew that), then Goldman would exploit that and monetise that 'put'. Instead of getting out early as they did in real life, they would demand and get ridiculous compensation for staying in the position, and then enjoy the bail-out.
(Disclosure: I used to work for Goldman for a few years, but not as a proper banker. I liked the place, but I also think they are much less important than people think they are. And I suspect Goldman is partially playing into the perception, because being a villain is cooler than being a middling also-ran bank.
You might like the book 'What happened to Goldman Sachs'. They have never been the same since the IPO in the late 1990s.)
ive spent much of my life sitting alone in cafes, some places i became something of a fixture. what made me welcome was i never used a laptop, always left the copy of whatever newspaper or magazine i was reading behind in their pile, tipped well, and kept to myself.
i used to leave my copy of the weekend FT or the economist at one and there were people who would wait for me to be finished with it. others would have been reading it for months without knowing i was the one who supplied it.
friends knew where to find me and could show up and sit at my table for a bit on their way places. covid policies killed most of those cafes in my city, and nothing can replace a multi decade family run restaurant that anchored a neighbourhood. its part of why i don't forgive what happened. it was my culture they dismantled in their hysteria. i am glad nature is healing and younger people are learning how to be welcome and open to the serendipity of participating in the city. i was worried i was the last of the boulevardiers. get a book, turn off your phone, dont look at the prices and just sit somewhere for a while, eat and drink as much as you enjoy, and just be a quiet pleasant presence. the world rewards it.
I think the author is talking about "exoteric" meaning, which is for public consumption, and "esoteric" meaning, which is for the initiated. Even though they say they aren't dogwhistles or shibboleths, these Straussian memes are closely related, as the accusation asserts that there is an "esoteric" meaning to something beneath its "exoteric" face value.
I kind of regret calling it Straussian because of the baggage that comes with that label. The key differentiator here compared to exoteric/esoteric is the stabilization mechanism: social costs to either upgrading one’s own understanding, or upgrading someone else’s understanding. That’s what keeps the readings differentiated and therefore the tiered structure stable. Keeping the structure encourages the memes survival, because it widens the acceptability of the message to meet audiences where they are. I think I need a few more examples and I ought to make this point a little more explicit.
the conversation about what a privacy enhanced way of relating to tech is hasn't really matured much.
on one hand its being relative to a list of specific threat actors you avoid. on the other, its maintaining a role with leverage vs your devices and services.
privacy doesnt catch on as product because you have to navigate an inferior relationship to those threat actors first, and nobody aspires to that unless they already have a kind of alt cyberpunk underdog mentality and attitude.
the non-punk or normal, leveraged position is like a business or first class lounge for tech. calm, negotiable, amenable, hidden and exclusive power, craft, affiliation and signalling.
most privacy tech and apps are still in the mall ninja cyberpunk mentality, with some slightly self important NGO/public sector affilation signalling with Signal. The aesthetics of privacy need to evolve to drive more meaningful tech imo.
online age verification is disingenuous and a pretext to give governments the hard coded technical option to regulate speech and association.
there's a great game being played out by these users of force against the advocates of desire. everything about the bureaucracies pushing digital ID is unwanted. this isnt about age verification tech, its about illegitimate power for unwanted people who are actuated by forcing their will on others.
we should treat these actions with the open disgust they deserve.
online age verification is disingenuous and a pretext to give governments the hard coded technical option to regulate speech and association.
there's a great game being played out by these users of force against the advocates of desire. everything about the bureaucracies pushing digital ID is unwanted. this isnt about age verification tech, its about illegitimate power for unwanted people who are actuated by forcing their will on others. we should treat these actions with the open disgust they deserve.
there should be another "browser" with better observability features. wasm is turning browsers into a hypervisor for virtual machines that run containers for a variety of languages now, including R.
great that these products are finding a way, but there seems to be an opportunity to do this right.
ive been invovled in privacy for decades and not once has anyone named the parties behind the bills or authors of it, or who lobbies and uses leverage over lawmakers to push these bills through.
they are persistent and have continuity through generations, organize across borders, influence manufacturers and even pressure individual developers.
tech doesnt secure privacy. finding these people and calling them out directly might.
im of two minds, where on the one hand having some basic physical competence and responsibility can only improve civil servants, but on the other, the civil service is now stacked with radical partisans, and arming them and organizing them as paramilitaries is going to go exactly how you'd expect.
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