levthedev's comments

I disagree. There is no such thing as a "lean" site that is as popular as Wikipedia (top 5-10 US depending on the day). I believe they are likely the leanest website in the Alexa top 30. The only site that I see that is leaner in the top rankings is Craigslist, currently at #38 in America, and Craigslist is a famously, fantastically, uniquely lean site (in some people's opinions, even to a fault).

Hosting costs for Wikipedia are "only" $2.3m, but imagine the legal expense they have, fighting likely millions of takedown requests, malicious lawsuits, complying with local laws and regulations in China, Russia, etc, paying a team of top software engineers to handle running a top-visited site (that by the way, has almost no downtime), a security threat model that includes nation-state actors, and the responsibility that if they fail (by being hacked, or sued, or DDOSd, or whatever), they will have let humanity's library be harmed.

I just can't understand how any casual bystander can complain about Wikipedia or their funding/organizational model. If you don't like it, just don't donate money.

I have to object to this. Wikimedia as of their audited 2019 financial statements (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...) already has ~$53m in short term investments, leaving ~$101m in "cash and cash equivalents", which notably often includes Treasury bonds, CDs, etc, anyways. So they are likely already investing all of their cash into safe, low-yield investments already.

Even if they weren't, the ~$154m they have free for investments, would only gross ~$1.2m in 10 year Treasuries, or at most $5-6m in relatively higher-yield investment grade corporate bonds.

Looking at their expenses in 2019, even if you cut donation processing expenses to $0, cut awards and grants to $0, cut travel and conferences to $0, strip out depreciation and amortization, and cut their $46m payroll in half to $23m (which at a fully loaded cost of $200k/employee, is only 115 employees for one of the most widely used websites in the world), you would still be looking at annual operating expenses of ~$45m.

There is absolutely no way that Wikipedia/the Wikimedia Foundation could survive without any donations - they have $154m between cash and investments, and would need to support $45m in annual operating expenses, even with these fantastically high budget cuts. That means they'd need to net, after taxes, almost 30% return on their assets every year, just to tread water, and only after cutting their budget essentially in half.

Wikipedia has 51.1 million articles in 291 languages, is something like the 5th most visited website in the US, 10th in the world, and they manage to do this without running any ads. Can't we be thankful for the incredible human library of knowledge they've built, and chip in a few dollars if we are able, instead of complaining and telling them they should not accept donations?

WeWork, for the most part, does not own actual real-estate assets. They mostly have actual real-estate liabilities - leases.

They do own a relatively small amount of property, like their partial ownership of the Lord and Taylor building, which for reference is now considered a huge mistake (it's bleeding money).

This is technically true, but sort of misses the mark. Costco does not price goods such that their Cost of Goods Sold + Operating Expenses = their Membership Fees + Non Alcohol Gross Revenue, Alcohol Gross Revenue to be their main source of profit. They do price goods such that their COGS + OPEX = Gross Revenue, leaving their membership fees to be the main source of profit.

In other words, you can say that any given vertical worth $Xbn of their revenue was their profit, if you are convinced that Costco actually models their pricing around that vertical section of their revenue. But in reality, everyone knows that the section they model around is membership fees - everything else is break even and the fees are profit.

The interest rate on deposits was previously -0.6%, and now is -0.75%. Hope that clarifies if you were unsure.

What is the advantage to buying Tether with Krones instead of just converting them to USD? I think people jump to crypto as a solution when oftentimes the financial markets have already had the same solution for hundreds of years (in this case, foreign exchange).

Full email thread on the Wayback Machine (worth the read) https://web.archive.org/web/20080112204313/http://www.centos...

Boglehead investing is generally the safe and correct pick for the average investor, but large corporations, hedge funds, banks, and so on, all require hedging.

A simple example is a corporation that buys goods in China and sells them in the US. This corporation does not want to lose money due to a poor USD/Yuan exchange rate, so they hedge that risk by buying a financial instrument that guarantees them a certain USD/Yuan exchange rate.

Does the average Joe ever need to hedge currency risk? No. But large institutions do. And this is just a single risk; hedging is not just used for exchange rate risk, but also for credit risk, interest rate risk, asset price risk, liquidity risk, disaster risk, political risk, and so on. Any kind of risk can be priced (see for instance, health insurance and car insurance for consumers, a mechanism by which large corporations price the bulk of consumer risk), and there are many trillions of dollars that belong to groups that especially dislike certain risks, and therefore wish to hedge them.

I believe they are, by some fairly loose accounting definition (i.e., not counting back office expenses, capital expenses, etc), profitable on non-pool rides in core US cities.

Don't do this. See the other response as to why.

Sure, if you think that rates are going to drop next year, and would like to secure the 10 year rate instead of risking that.

Another way to express it: if today, you believe the average rate over the next 10 years will be lower than the current 10 year rate, you should buy the 10 year treasury.

This is a tiny bit simplistic as it ignore liquidity/volatility differences between buying a 10 year treasury and buying 20 6-month treasuries or 10 1 year treasuries.

There was a less extreme yield curve inversion a few months ago, which is likely what you're referring to. But it wasn't so far reaching as the current inversion, which puts the 1 year Treasury over the 10 year.

It's a sci-fi book with an impressive sense of scale. Every hundred pages or so the story zooms out; from one man's life, to a country's struggle, to a global calamity, to an interplanetary and then galactic crisis, and finally to even higher dimensions.

It does this while threading characters from each stage of "zoom" into future stages, creating for a lot of interesting cross-over plots and sub-plots.

As other commentator's have said, it also wove together Chinese culture with science fiction and history with drama very fluidly.

It was, for me personally, a very "fun" read. Kept me excited at each chapter, and I genuinely didn't know what to expect next. I highly recommend to any sci-fi fans out there, even those like me, who initially didn't think they could stomach around 1,000 pages of a translated-from-Chinese sci-fi novel.

That doesn't make any sense. Why would someone have interviewed at Google before doing a bootcamp like Lambda School, which is specifically meant to teach someone (with almost zero experience) programming? If you've made it to a Google onsite, you probably don't need to go to a bootcamp.

Is it not possible to limit your algorithm's maximum time change for each school? Say, capping the change at 1 hour, and finding the best result of that set of times. Even if it is not as good as the 100% optimized solution, it seems like more palatable while also being an improvement.

Presumably, you are already doing that, by limiting the start/end times from 7am-10am, or something similar. In this case, instead of a global time restraint, there would be a local time change restraint +-1 hour for each school.

Two great books.

California Sunday is my favorite.

https://californiasunday.com

I think you're being too harsh. Sure, there are a number of poorly run soup kitchens. There are also some excellent ones! And even the poorly run soup kitchens ostensibly do good - they certainly use the money that funds them more efficiently than most other enterprises, and they of course provide food to the hungry.

Maybe your choice is to be hungry rather than go back to a soup kitchen. That's fine, you're entitled to that opinion. But I don't feel that your experience should deprive others of the choice - I know some people who rely on soup kitchens so as not to starve, and they certainly would prefer to have soup kitchens than not.

Many people rebind caps lock (or another easy to reach key) with escape. This way they can quickly change modes.

Also, most beginners use insert mode too much. If you find yourself going into insert mode just to change a letter or word, try learning shortcuts instead (r for replace, ciw for replace word, diw for delete word, and other neat command combinations).

See my above comment - please don't pay them $1000 to learn this technique.