The Top Gear enthusiast in me loves that you included Koenigsegg in this conversation.
But including a company that hand-builds a handful of hypercars annually in a conversation about the auto industry in Sweden is not the flex you think it is.
> You seem to have a few of your own: "Canada only has to patrol its northern border"
the Canadians do not aggressively patrol the southern border because that is where all of the people are -- unlike the north -- and because the reality is that the entire Canadian military is basically a speedbump for if/when the US invaded in earnest.
Americans: X country is only a speed bump for our awesome military.
Also Americans: Have never managed to win a single war on their own while usually fighting underdeveloped tribes whose most advanced equipment is sandals, while at the same time both allies and enemies have a billion jokes on how bad they actually are.
You need a special kind of personality to be this confident while currently losing a war, one that is, well, associated with Americans.
Erm, they can stay in NATO with the other European members just fine. It's the US that is making noises about leaving. NORAD is another matter, but the US and Canada can each run their own radars - the targets are south of the 49th parallel for the most part.
America threatened both Canada and Greenland. Both NATO countries. It is engaged in murders of boatsmen, it started an illegal war that literally harmed countries around the world, it kidnapped a president just so it can blackmail is former right hand and is intentionally causing humanitarian catastrophe in Cuba to blackmail its government.
There are cheaper ways to hedge inflation. Also, people with careers don’t really need to hedge inflation especially.
In 1960 rent was about 10% of median income. Today it’s more like 30%. This might sound bad but in 1960 food was 30% of median income and today it’s around 10%. Prices are always relative, it’s impossible for everything to get cheaper. There’s no reason to assume rent is especially prone to this except that it has been over a certain period. Other periods it has been the opposite.
The markets with rent control have astronomical increases in rent when compared to markets without rent control. Also, you lose supply when there is a unit that it doesn't make sense to renovate because the future rent won't be high enough to cover it. So it remains unrented instead.
I mean, I would argue that's why rent control exists in the first place: Because there is a market with astronomical increases in rent (not the other way around, like you are suggesting)
"We take full responsibility for the architectural decisions that allowed a single upstream provider action to cascade into a platform-wide outage, and detail below what happened, how we recovered, and the changes we are making to prevent this from happening again."
My guess is they will be switching away from Google Cloud. Because anything else would be nuts.
I know hating GCP is hip, but why do only a minority entertains the possibility that Railway did really something off to trigger some alarms?
The calibration of the alarms might be off, and that's acceptable, but in the end if something can be held wrong, somebody will hold it wrong.
I did the same thing in the past, albeit in a much smaller scale. There's no shame in being wrong and admitting as long as it results in progress, so this stance of "we do nothing wrong" from both parties is getting a bit old now.
In theory as a government employee you already fear getting in trouble with OGE (Office of Government Ethics) and in normal times this is truly enough. Nobody wants to have a conflict of interest or fail to disclose investments etc. However nothing is normal under the current administration...
I was a GS-15 before (same level most CTOs in government have). Maybe senior executive service roles (SES) might not concern themselves with ethics violations.
In any case the vast majority of government employees are on the general schedule.
Every large company should ban employees and contractors from trading on prediction markets. There are so many ways an employee could make money on prediction markets. Causing outages is probably the easiest, but anything that would get the company in the news would do it.
Yeah that’s why I said prediction markets, not stock markets. In a prediction market you’re betting directly on something like “AWS has a major outrage on or before May 12th”.
The US federal workforce is ~2.2 million people. Banning them all from trading on prediction markets isn't the right move. A cafeteria worker in some suburban admin office likely has no inside information they are going to trade on. Members of congress and other high level positions on the other hand should be banned.
Why stop at prediction markets? Trading in markets is heavily tied to information or information processing advantage so probably all assets should be held by the government to avoid conflicts of interest involving self interests.
Reducto ad absurdum doesn't work here. You have to show that there's a desire and a rationale for going from limiting betting markets like Kalshi and limiting "investment" markets, which you haven't done. What you have left is a salty quip.
There's an obvious opportunity to use insider information or insider influence to create a particular outcome on Kalshi. Like I could trade on the likelihood of a power outage in my city tomorrow or the next day and then in order to make good on the "trade" I could just drive a vehicle into the substation. Or I could do something more insidious. But the fact that my incentives are aligned by Kalshi with me blowing up a power substation means that Kalshi is a net negative even though individuals could make money from it.
There's a difference between betting on the outcome of an event and investing in a company, although companies like Kalshi and Polymarket like to try to erase that difference. Investments are all notionally conditioned on a company meeting performance goals, and that incentive is aligned with the desire of company employees to also meet performance goals. Companies also generally align around some kind of useful output like washing machines or clothing which are beneficial in some way. What is useful about betting on the color of the sky at sunset in Lisbon on September 28th?
You are apparently very happy with a market that is defined by an economist who views it as you view the prediction* market.
Prediction markets are useful in their own right because they help people plan with information independent of themselves and more accurate and less biased than other sources. That is very similar to a market allocating a societies future allocations through rewarding holding of past investments. Both actually have many of the same problems and elimination of either can not prevent insider trading on information or significant resources being wasted on zero sum game aspects or faults in how such simple systems of reward function layers allocate as well.
(If you plan to propose to a partner in September might it not be helpful to have an opinion about the night of the 28th? Is that more or less important than the OTC penny stock for a probably defunct mine that possibly has copper? But why not pick equivalent strong points. If you are planning purchase like a next auto might you find future energy market related bets helpful to estimating long term risks for your choice?)
I don't agree. When the senators walk into the cafeteria talking about the bill they're about to pass, the cafeteria worker can easily overhear their insider information.
Avoiding insider trading on prediction markets seems like an intractable problem to me.
But including a company that hand-builds a handful of hypercars annually in a conversation about the auto industry in Sweden is not the flex you think it is.
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