throwawayFinX

I think there is a 20/80 split between blue collar and white collar workers here at the HQ in Westphalia. So mostly a cubicle-farm of sorts.

I asked around and my german colleagues tell me it is a Bavarian thing with the beers.

> 4pm doesn't mean that work ends then though. Many people continue working after that beer.

We are also offered a beer a few times at official Company events etc. and most can have a beer and do proper work after. It is also legal to drive after a single normal-sized beer.

Haha interesting! Which sector are you in?

I work for a German-owned industry corporation (in a nearby EU country) and would get fired for having a friday beer with colleagues if not at company-arranged “friday bar” or some other event :)

No national law requires this strictness, but +95% of companies in my country have simular rules in place.

My German colleagues are mostly serious when saying “Kein Bier vor vier” (i.e. no beers before 16:00/work ends).

This surprises me. Are you speaking from a US point of view?

In many west european countries it is forbidden to consume alcohol in work hours, except at company-arranged events etc. and/or to be intoxicated.

For a comparative overview of the practical differences: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9779578/

There are tools available for direct formal analysis of the system as implemented (and not “just” a model of it).

With e.g. the C bounded model checker CBMC, your model language is also C. Frama-C is another approach (Hoare-like, axiomatic logic). Klee works on LLVM IR etc.

Stronger proponents would perhaps suggest extracting the implementation from the model etc., but you don’t have to drink all the koolaid at once to get many of the benefits.

And not all your software needs to be formalized either, to get many of the benefits.

I’ved succesfully used CBMC and Klee on C code for verifying important parts of embedded safety/mission critical software on resource constrained HW (i.e. no OS, static allocation, single to double digit kilobytes of RAM etc.)

Formal methods rock!

The parent is not wrong:

The total number of children in the world has already peaked (2017?) and is now dropping.

The population growth should still continue for about a human lifespan from here (50-80 years depending on who you ask).

That last growth is just those children growing up and becoming adults. I.e. They are the “last big generation”.

We will see the population drop again, if we dont fuck up the planet before that happens.

I think you would have difficulty finding countries in the world where fertility rates (children born pr woman) are not dropping.

Bangladesh went from 5.5 kids pr woman in 1985 to 2.1 in 2017. This is a global trend.

I think it’s broadly accepted that WW2 forced or accelerated inventions such as: jet planes, radios, synthetic rubber, radar, the Jeep, duct tape, nukes.

The cold war -> the space race.

Drone tech/military AI in Ukraine is perhaps a more recent example.

This is also (slightly) incorrect.

When trading the VIX, you are trading the implied volatility not the actual (realized) volatility.

VIX represents the implied vol of options on S&P500 expiring 30 days into the future.

Trading the realized volatility is not easy :)

dr1ver is correct here and you are not.

Actual volatility (not implied!) is much easier to predict than price.

It’s also much more difficult to trade than price changes. So your intuition about this is correct though.

It is not super difficult to predict tomorrows volatility sign (up/down compared to today) with +60% success. Even textbook GARCH models do well here.

If you could do that with the price, you’d quickly become filthy rich.