Kephael

Bike equipment is ridiculously high margin. Motorcycles and mopeds are extremely common commuting vehicles in much of the world, yet i'm surprised motorcycles aren't more popular since they offer much more capability and are a better value.

Jassy needs to go back to being a sportscaster. All he knows how to do is keep Amazon stock down and money-pit projects running in perpetuity.

The bridge flyover reminds me of SimCopter, some of us like retro gaming and don't mind a little jankiness. Especially since this can give you a convenient base to work with.

Exactly, interest rates must come down due to the government debt burden. This debt burden creates a strong incentive to force rates to zero, but we have to pretend the Federal Reserve is independent.

Separately, I think Jerome Powell is one of the worst Fed chairs as he is most (but not exclusively) responsible for what happened to the housing market by creating a lock-in effect and focusing on their CPI basket.

I don't understand the cost either, apparently it only costs around a billion dollars to build a skyscraper? The Burj Khalifa only cost one and a half billion dollars when completed in 2010. I don't know that there's criminal activity here, but the cost of this is rather surprising to me. I knew the Federal Reserve was being renovated, but I thought it was something closer to a hundred million dollars.

Children and teens don't buy their own smartphones, they get them from their parents.

The Bay Area companies have been driving the economy forward for several decades now, it's been economically dominant since the mid 1990s. Consider more 'recent' companies like Google, Facebook, and older companies like PayPal and eBay. We already had the dotcom bubble pop, but that was more akin to a bump in the road.

It's not the overall metro area GDP itself but rather per capita, the people in the Bay Area are simply much wealthier and higher income. This is also true in the Puget Sound region, but not to the same extent. This difference in population is why they don't have an interest in a Zohran of sorts. State run grocery stores and public transit are really not a concern to most people as their lifestyle is much different.

The Bay Area is far wealthier and much more economically relevant than NYC. NYC has a very large low income population. NYC doesn't have nearly as strong of an economy, financial services and trading firms are increasingly leaving. Whereas the Bay Area, particularly the peninsula, is home to the companies shaping the future like OpenAI and Nvidia along with a huge number of quality startups.

Seattle upset their police force and made them quit, they then had to pay overtime to fewer remaining officers which increased their spending.

There's no shortage of 'talent' in the US, particularly Amazon tier L4/L5 talent. Also, it was always less expensive to hire offshore regardless of H1B fees.

This is a bad marketing idea to compare a golf cart like this to a Toyota Tacoma. There is practically zero ground clearance and a unibody frame, this will high center in places where I regularly drive my Tacoma. Tacoma wins on ruggedness, lower total cost of ownership thanks to a significantly lower price and having limited depreciation.

Unless these are priced at under $30,000 for the AWD, these will flop commercially.

If the CAFE standards could be fixed, we could get ICE and hybrid trucks that are smaller and more affordable, the EV route is too expensive and the products are strange.

That will kill the open web for conversations. It will be a sterile, censored place and real conversation will move elsewhere.

This is nonsense, you could buy a nice car and a home 50 years while working at the post office. Because we have faster computers and smartphones does not make us wealthier.

There were cranes everywhere back in 2017, now the cranes are mostly gone. My rent increases every year, generally by 10%.

Google has been doing the same thing. The fact is that these companies simply have too many employees and they aren't able to properly utilize everyone.

It's the same deal in Seattle, I don't even bother reporting this stuff to the police. Elsewhere, the police would respond and it would show in statistics.

Depositors failed to do their due diligence, the bank offered 'sweet heart' deals to get customers. Depositors should lose their pants and have to wait for the FDIC to liquidate before getting any funds.

No one deserves free, unlimited, zero risk access to depositors. If you want to do that, you should buy bonds, short eurodollars as hedge, and get loans against the bonds. None of this is free.

Funny thing is, part of why SVB blew themselves up was they bought a bunch of long term mortgage backed securities paying low rates so now those securities have lost a ton of value if they were to liquidate them (which the FDIC will be doing shortly).

But I don't think the Fed engaging in QE constitutes a bailout.

Sure you do, banks fail and you shouldn't expect more than $250,000 of coverage.

Yeah, you can short eurodollars or maybe something else to hedge risk. At a certain point, you need to be sophisticated enough to manage your funds.

The bank has long term bonds that they loaded up on during the Covid interest rate lows. It's not possible for the uninsured depositors to get anything near 100% of their deposits since these bonds have lost much of their value. Unless there is a bailout, no depositor is getting anything near 100%.

There's no such place, smart cameras will be ubiquitous. They are too useful and inexpensive.

There are very specific coding expectations for applied scientists and research interns at these companies. They are not going to allow someone to skip these.

This is wrong, for a programming interview FAANG and friends care greatly about mitigating legal risk and would not treat them any differently. Interviewers typically have their own questions and may have only glanced at the resume.

I haven't been to a physical bank to do any business in close to a decade. This looks like a USPS bailout package for what's largely another useless service other than doing package delivery. The "unbanked" can sign up for something like Ally.

Yeah, the US has nothing like the "Soccer hooligan" culture that's found in Europe. I'm not sure why someone would think high school sports are a massive deal. I think it's due to media depictions of small towns being engrossed with them.

Why is it inherently good? If we import 50 million poor people what do you think would appeal to them? Why wouldn't large groups just vote themselves access to other people's wealth? If 51% of people vote to steer a ship into an iceberg should this be accepted because of democracy?

Democracy is a religion, look at Singapore and China and compare them to the West.

Why has this peaked? If you don't think there is a far-right that is suppressed, angrily stewing, and heavily armed you are living in a fantasy world. The kindling is all there, just because they have been deplatformed from mainstream social media does not mean they do not exist.

Yes, the fact that this is happening due to demographics and not positions "evolving" is obvious. Many recognize immigration as a tool to help Leftist parties all throughout the Western world. Eventually those who have been disenfranchised and blamed for all the ills have had enough it will certainly come to violence. Reactionaries really do not have to engage in "Democracy", democracy certainly does not last forever.