kabulykos's comments

kabulykos | 7 years ago | on: Facebook has asked U.S. banks to share financial information about customers

Your unsourced assertion does makes sense. WF isn't well positioned to survive any further SNAFUs — technical ones in particular. Plus I don't think of them as being primarily focused on their CC business in a way Chase, Citi or Amex are. More a complement of their retail banking and mortgage businesses.

kabulykos | 7 years ago | on: Link Between Alzheimer’s and Herpes

Most nascent lines of research probably shouldn't be used to make life choices anyway.

kabulykos | 7 years ago | on: EU copyright law proposal rejected

What's scary about it? The risk individual (natural) persons might be rude to each other based on political opinions?

Dude — already happening.

kabulykos | 7 years ago | on: Cities don't have to offer huge subsidies to companies like Apple and Amazon

Positive results for social policy. Questionable results for economic policy.

Historically the latter has been driven by physiological particulars of a state — availability of farm land, coal mines, etc. Has anyone actually thought through how that transitions to a primarily services-based economy?

(Aside: if state governments are a market, then the Senate is socialism, lol)

kabulykos | 8 years ago | on: Becoming a Steelworker Liberated Her, Then Her Job Moved to Mexico

Lesser divisions of government don't run militaries that might prefer autarky in the event of large conflict.

kabulykos | 8 years ago | on: Becoming a Steelworker Liberated Her, Then Her Job Moved to Mexico

While there's definitely signs of geographic stickiness nowadays, I wish someone would age-adjust those statistics — above a certain age people tend not to move at all, and we have way more people above a certain age nowadays.

kabulykos | 8 years ago | on: Becoming a Steelworker Liberated Her, Then Her Job Moved to Mexico

The old CFO at my firm was awarded the first year of annual cost-cutting savings as his bonus. Executive comp can be weird, but at a public company it's probably not a loss-leader.

kabulykos | 10 years ago | on: Governor Brown's housing proposal could mean sweeping Bay Area changes

The cost to deploy most services does not increase linearly with the tax base. Usually it's capital expenditure.

Maybe (but not necessarily!) the number of police can grow linearly with the growth in taxable property. But police cars and police stations must be acquired from scratch. Same with sanitation workers vs an expanded water treatment plant, bus drivers and buses.

Some of those costs can maybe be amortized via debt issue (bonds), but the cost of servicing those would still be borne by the community overall and not necessarily the newcomers' taxes alone.

When a new development is proposed, it's the developer who's there in the moment, hoping to make business and a profit. The prospective-and-still-hypothetical newcomers are not yet there to make a case that housing be built for them. So it's not insane that the developer be put in a position to minimize negative effects of new building.

This isn't a perfect system, and it's certainly one that can be abused by nimbys as everyone now knows. In particular things get unintuitive for (usually older) folks who are house-rich but cash-poor ... accommodations might leave them with a house worth more, even as a fixed income prevents them from absorbing, say, increased taxes. But, since Proposition 13 passed in 1978, California has been pretty clearly biased towards disproportionately helping out those sorts of people though. Can't say we weren't warned.