Re: "it's about saving the planet" - according to Jevons paradox [0] if the cost of AI will decrease its total usage will increase. Definitely not saving the planet in this scenario.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Anybody who is eligible to vote can vote. How is this not democracy?

Selecting who is eligible to vote is one of the most obvious ways to manipulate the outcome. At the extreme, you can have large scale slavery in a system with voting, but it’s not a Democracy.

Who gets to decide on expanding an interstate or zoning has a huge impact when the votes are counted, so drawing lines on a map is suddenly where the power lies not with the people.

Democracy falls apart when the vast majority of people just don't give a care.

And with representative democracy, it's impossible to give a care about more than one or two things.

Democracy needs to exist before it can fail, but there’s a wide range of systems possible that will give more or less power to the general public.

Representative democracy tends to large numbers of parties with proportional representation give far more power to the voters than a two party first past the post voting system. On the other hand having zero input on who specifically ends up being a representative is problematic in a different way.

It’s interesting just how many different reasonable systems you can come up with and how few of them have ever actually been tried.

LOL’ed IRL at “ In a future blog post I hope I can tell you about how we produce our own power and you should too.” Producing own power as a pre-requisite for running on-prem is a non-starter for many.

"It's really not hard to create your own coal power. Our engineers have built a small coal power generator and simply get coal from our mines (which I'll describe in a future blog post)."

LOL'ed again IRL :).

Yikes. I think the biggest news is that these data center bonds are getting investment grade. The reason for this is not because their prospects have improved [0] - the reason is because they need more investors to buy them. Pension plans who can only buy investment grade bonds may be enticed to buy these bonds. And this way these bonds will make their way in pension plans. When defaults will start happening on these bonds expect bailouts - because we need to bailout pension plans.

It is eerily similar to the mortgage crisis in 2007-2008. Low grade mortgage bonds were given AAA rating and there were too many of these which then caused the crisis.

[0] the article mentions how more Date Center recent bonds required a higher interest rate. This implies the risk increased (during the same time Feds lowered the rate), hence the prospects for Data Center bonds diminished.

I agree. A good engineer would think about all possible corner cases (). Security is another set of corner cases.

() Just yesterday I had to correct a PR because the engineer did not think of some corner cases. All sorts of corner cases happen in real life.

I think these days the easiest thing is to take a HELOC loan backed by the property. Do not withdraw money from HELOC and pay the $125/year fee. This puts a lien on the property. (The article alluded to this solution by noting these scammers avoid properties with a mortgage).

I eas thinking of purposefully not paying some kind of invoice to trigger a lien but this way seems more legitimate

great

now you made banks interested in supporting these scams

I do not know in what country you live, but in the countries I lived in if you chop somebody's property you will go to jail.

But the guy did it himself. Must have gone insane.

Ignoring the entirety of the rest of this story, I desperately want to know why: "Fortunately it landed in the garden on the other side." was so notable.

Because it didn't land on someone's head?

Yeah, I read this as "fortunately it didn't land on anyone and didn't damage any valuable property." (Value judgements about gardens aside...)

"The victim did it to themselves" is a famously bulletproof defense. I don't know why people don't try it more often.

This is the typical tall tale that used to travel in every neighborhood as a warning, especially to scare kids from doing some things. Kids eat up these stories. Probably doesn't work that much in the age of phones and "pics (shorts?) or it never happened".

Unfortunately, we’ve reached the era where pics and shorts are very much no longer proof. In a few minutes you could generate video of that exact scenario.

I have to say that China will probably be a major force in reducing carbon emissions. Yes, China burns a lot of coal; but they also produce and deploy a lot of solar, wind, and soon nuclear energy. Someone else said it better: future will run on China’s batteries.

Why you could not refinance when the rates went to 0%? In the US a lot of people did that in 2009/2010 and then again during COVID

Refinancing and loans work differently outside of the U.S. what I don't remember is exactly how. If I recall, you can't refinance without paying

Well, you can go to another bank so that they can cover your mortgage and open a new one with new rates/conditions.

That you can do anywhere as long as you have a collateral/guarantor.

Prepayment penalties are illegal for the vast majority of loans that consumers can get in the US, which makes it a no-brainer to refinance any time the payment saving exceeds the cost of writing a new loan.

The Trump admin has floated the idea of allowing prepayment penalties in home mortgages, BTW.

Would you mind posting a link where Trump wanted to allow prepayment penalties? This sounds unbelievable.

Every home owner in the US would be against it (especially the ones who got their mortgages in the past two years at relatively high interest rates).

Crap, I was wrong. Bill Ackman is trying to convince Bessent to do it. So while it may happen, it isn’t coming from inside the admin.

One argument is that it could allow for lower rates, BTW. (This is true, it very well could).

And also, if it happened it would be for newly issued mortgages. Existing mortgages have language in the contract that you couldn’t just unilaterally change

How would prepayment penalties lower interest rates ? I really do not see how.

The same way callable bonds command a higher interest rate than non-callable do. If the bond holder can just decide that tomorrow it’s cheaper for them to pay off the bond vs pay me the coupon on it, it’s worth less to me as a buyer. I lose if interest rates go lower (bond is paid early) or higher (I am now holding a bond worth less than a newly issued one).

If you look through the bond market you will sometimes see bonds issued by the same company or agency both as callable and non-callable, the callable bonds are usually .5-1% lower even when issued on the same date.

Your lender definitely wants to get paid back, but they don’t necessarily want to get paid back right now. Because then they have a pile of money and they need to find something to do with it.

Consumers have a tendency to pay loans back early when the bank doesn’t have any more profitable alternatives. Consumers also have a tendency to NOT pay loans back early when the bank does have more profitable alternatives.

But you know that the first situation is worse for the bank than the second situation. So they do account for this, to a degree, when they give you a loan. In theory they would be willing to give you a lower interest rate if you gave up your prepayment option. In theory. In reality? Who knows.

Sounds right but another big factor is to get some predictability.

Demand for mortgage varies over time, regulations change. It's a long term product, banks like to know with high certainty that when someone signs up it will be X earned over a period, not maybe X minus we don't know over an unknown period.

They are in the business of capital efficiency. Lack of control makes capital less efficient, or at least more expensive to keep efficient.

Overpayments (in the UK) are often not allowed, when they are, the borrower needs to arrange it when the loan is taken, and for a fee.

Refinancing is a right, but the fine prints told borrowers at what penalty.

I think a lot of laid-off programmers would settle for any job in this environment... It is a employer market definitely.