ilinamorato
@ilinamorato@lemmy.world
- Comment on [deleted] 1 day ago:
I miss Sprog. That’s about it.
- Comment on $1.8 trillion was wiped out from the US stock market yesterday, where did it go? 1 week ago:
You’re very kind, thank you.
- Comment on $1.8 trillion was wiped out from the US stock market yesterday, where did it go? 1 week ago:
Yeah, all ownership and money is made up, and the value of everything is more-or-less arbitrary. But for the sake of this question, the value of one is more real than the other.
For one thing, the transactions representing “market value” are not all going to happen today. The combined value of every company’s shares on US exchanges is something like $75T, and on a really really good day maybe like $1T is going to actually change hands. If all of it ever did, the market value would probably fluctuate, but it would stay about the same because all of those shares are still out there and they all have a selling price.
But for your house, well, you may well actually sell it today. If you do, you will actually (yes, insert all the asterisks here) get all of that money out of your asset, and after that the asset is worth nothing to you because you don’t own it anymore. Its value is real and attainable.
That value fluctuates with speculation, sure; but if the economy were to collapse, having a house to live in is still of use. A piece of paper saying you own a hundred-millionth of a corporation which no longer exists isn’t, save as tinder. That gives real estate some floor of value that a stock could never have; it’s very unlikely that they would ever stop tracking the fact that you own a home just because the value went to zero, but they regularly delist companies from the NYSE and NASDAQ.
And the other thing is, I’ve done a pretty poor job of pointing out that we’re talking about two different types of valuations here: one is the valuation of an entire market, while the other is the valuation of a specific asset owned by an individual. When talking about the $75T valuation of the stock market (and its $1.8T loss), we’re talking about the former; its analogy in real estate isn’t a single house, it’s the housing market as a whole. But when talking about a single mortgage, the analogy is to a single stock share.
When the market lost $1.8T in value, the only individuals who lost any money were the ones who had the misfortune to sell when the price was lower than they paid for it; but their losses didn’t contribute to that valuation loss (other than indirectly), they were an effect of it. It’s entirely possible for an individual to lose money in a bull market or make money in a bear market.
On the other hand, if your individual home loses value, it has…well, um, lost value. If you sell it when its value is lower than what you paid for it, regardless of how great the market as a whole is, there’s no way for you to make money in that transaction (yes, asterisk, I’m sure there are ways in which that might still be a financially beneficial choice, yada yada). Its value directly means something to you in a way that the market value doesn’t.
Anyway, I’ve used a lot of words but not been super clear, so I guess I should stop for now.
- Comment on Why do cops still ask for registration during traffic stop? 1 week ago:
More than that, it’s different in every state. iirc some states have stopped sending paper registrations entirely, while others practically still require women to have a note from their fathers. Somehow those fifty different systems have to talk to one another, too.
So not only do they have to get the House and the Senate to agree on something, and get the President to not veto it, they also have to get every single state to actually prioritize and fund the change across each jurisdiction (and there are a total of 3,244 counties in the US, so that’s another layer of complication).
It’s like turning the Titanic, but the Titanic is towing 50 boats behind it, each of which are towing dozens to hundreds of boats behind them. And the captain of the Titanic is senile, and half of the tiny boats in the back are actively sinking, and the iceberg is currently cutting into the hull, and…
- Comment on Why do cops still ask for registration during traffic stop? 1 week ago:
This is the correct answer. Last time I was pulled over the officer only asked for my license, actually.
“May I see your license, please?”
“Yes sir.”
“Thanks. Are you aware that your passenger brake light is out?”
“No sir.”
“Get that fixed as soon as you can. Here’s your license. Drive safe.”
In fairness, I’m a middle aged white man, so I’m aware that I run basically every police interaction in easy mode.
- Comment on $1.8 trillion was wiped out from the US stock market yesterday, where did it go? 1 week ago:
Functionally, to the people who shorted stocks or sold while it was still high. But more accurately, it goes nowhere; the “market value” isn’t an actual number, it’s just a shorthand for “how much all the people currently playing the stock market are willing to spend on stocks.” They count up all the shares of every stock currently issued, multiply it by the amount people are willing to pay for those shares, and that’s the market value. When it goes down, that money doesn’t “go anywhere,” because it never actually existed to begin with; it was just describing how much confidence people had in the market.
The people who short stock or who sell high are the ones who have played the game so as to benefit when that confidence drops, so they get some actual money out of the deal; but they didn’t “make” $1.8T yesterday. That’s just how much less confident investors in the American stock market are.
- Comment on $1.8 trillion was wiped out from the US stock market yesterday, where did it go? 1 week ago:
The mortgage example is a little bit different. True, that money “didn’t exist” before you signed the loan (loans do increase the money supply), but it’s still “real money” inasmuch as it’s secured by the asset that is your home, and backed by the other assets that the bank holds (i.e. other people’s secured mortgages), and pays out real, actual, spendable cash, since the builders still need money to buy two-by-fours, for instance. The person who pays the mortgage probably never actually touches any of that money, but it still has at least some basis in reality. Fractional reserve banking feels kind of stupid, but it’s been around for long enough to be a plot point in It’s A Wonderful Life, more or less with no major issues.
With the stock market (and pretty much all speculative markets), it’s different. That money exists even less than it exists for a mortgage transaction; speculative markets don’t increase the money supply the same way that bank loans do, because the money isn’t based on anything in the real world at all.
To illustrate: a stock can lose value without anything changing hands at all. If you buy a stock for a hundred real dollars on Monday and that company does something stupid on Tuesday, your share could lose half of its value even though nothing changed hands that day. If you sold that stock on Wednesday, you might get only $50 of real money back. “Where did the money go?” Nowhere. I mean, functionally, the person (or bank or whatever) from whom you bought the stock on Monday still has the other $50, but they didn’t steal it; it’s just that now, there’s nobody who wants to spend $100 to buy it from you anymore. That money isn’t secured by anything or backed by any objective source of value. It’s entirely subject to whims and vibes, which economists call “market forces” to feel better about themselves.
When people talk about “market value,” it’s those whims and vibes they’re talking about: how much people are willing to pay for shares. There are
X-million shares out there which people are willing to buy for $Yeach; multiply those two numbers and you get the total market value. So when a market “loses value,” it doesn’t mean that any actual money has gone anywhere, it means that nobody wants to spend that much to buy into the market anymore;Yhas just gotten smaller. If every bank account in the world was suddenly frozen and no money could move anywhere, the market could (and almost certainly would) still lose value.Now, in all likelihood a good chunk of money has actually gone somewhere in addition; the people who shorted the stock and who sold early while it was still worth a lot are the ones who have it now. But that’s not where it was lost, because that’s not what “market value” actually measures.
- Comment on What is behind the current Lemmy meme about 4 being a private key? 2 weeks ago:
I think their analogy is still good. Just add “…and your door opens onto Times Square.”
That doesn’t quite get the full scope, but it does imply the danger pretty well. Plus, if you add in “…Times Square of robots, and the robots are all thieves, and your most expensive possession is visibly sitting right inside, and…” it starts to get pretty unwieldy.
- Comment on What can I put on a street lamp to stop the light in one direction? 4 weeks ago:
If you do something to the light pole, it’s only a question of when the city will restore it to its original state, not if.
Counterpoint: If you do a good enough job, the government may not notice
- Comment on The book I borrowed and was reading became unavailable in the US *while I was reading it* 1 month ago:
Exhibit A for “If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing.”
- Comment on DLSS 5 comes with a massive 50-60% performance hit, so I hope you like lower frame rates with your dose of AI image enhancement 2 months ago:
No worries, I get it. I was pretty brusque too.
I think it’s fair to phrase the performance hit that way, since you can turn it on and off with the same hardware. With it off, you get (X) frames per second. With it on, you get (X * 0.6) frames per second, or even less. That’s a pretty clear performance hit, and one that tells a fairly meaningful story about what’s actually going on. Now, that’d be one thing if the results were good, but nothing I’ve seen from DLSS5 has looked good enough to make that kind of a hit feel reasonable; in most cases, I think it looks actively worse.
The argument that it’s an evolving technology seems somewhat reasonable. But DLSS is at least seven years old, and has had four releases that actually do work in that time. And really, all technology is evolving, it’s just that most other companies still release what feels like finished products.
Or at least products that don’t accomplish the opposite of what they were intended to do; DLSS was intended to improve framerates by allowing the GPU to render a lower-resolution frame and have it cheaply upscaled to a higher resolution. With DLSS5 making framerates worse, it seems like they’d have been better off calling it something different.
- Comment on DLSS 5 comes with a massive 50-60% performance hit, so I hope you like lower frame rates with your dose of AI image enhancement 2 months ago:
Your rage is brainless, and proof that you know you don’t have a real argument. It’s hilarious to me the nonsense hills that people will die on.
The story says “50-60%”. You don’t like that math? Take it up with Nvidia. The length of this conversation is already way out of proportion to my interest in it.
- Comment on DLSS 5 comes with a massive 50-60% performance hit, so I hope you like lower frame rates with your dose of AI image enhancement 2 months ago:
“50-60%” is literally “a majority,” I don’t know what to tell you. Math.
- Comment on DLSS 5 comes with a massive 50-60% performance hit, so I hope you like lower frame rates with your dose of AI image enhancement 2 months ago:
oh no way
all I have to do is tank my gpu performance, and I get a non-deterministic result, plus it looks substantially worse?
dang yo, where do I sign up
- Comment on German joke 2 months ago:
English and German derive from a common root language, so I’d honestly be surprised if there weren’t some that do.
- Comment on A reminder 2 months ago:
Rich people do that sort of funny math all the time when stating their wealth, though. It’s all fake and made up.
- Comment on A reminder 2 months ago:
Yeah, we poor folks would have to do that, but rich people live on fractional reserve income and stuff, and they never subtract their liabilities from their assets when reporting their wealth. I’m okay with fudging the numbers for the point.
Definitely agree that $10m is the new bar for this.
- Comment on A reminder 2 months ago:
Oof, allergy season, eh? I get it.
- Comment on A reminder 2 months ago:
That’s a fantastic word. I’ll take that, thank you.
- Comment on A reminder 2 months ago:
Rich people ignore their debt when making their wealth calculations all the time. I’m just following suit.
- Comment on A reminder 2 months ago:
Agreed. I’m actually pretty close to being a millionaire “on paper,” since my house is worth $600k and I’ve got about $100k in retirement. But the house is mortgaged, and I can’t touch the retirement for another 25 years. If I had three very good months, I could probably just barely become a millionaire. But if I had three moderately bad months, I would likely default on my mortgage.
Replace the "m"s with "b"s and this is spot on.
- Comment on That's just science 2 months ago:
I’m about a kilometer from the ocean right now (I’m standing in front of the window through which I can see it), and it’s a partly cloudy day. When the sky is clear (as it was five minutes ago), the ocean is a rich, saturated blue or even teal. When it’s cloudy (as it is currently), I can see that it’s a cool gray color. I might call it a very dark, desaturated cyan at most. So from my observation it has to be the opposite: the relative blueness of the ozone and the water must be the less dependent factor, and the color of the sky the more dependent one.
It’s tricky, though. I guess I might be in a place with weird salinity or plankton or something.
- Comment on That's just science 2 months ago:
You’ve got it partially backwards. The sky is blue because of Rayleigh scattering, but it doesn’t reflect the ocean; the ocean is blue because it reflects the sky.
Incidentally, I’ve heard it said (I think it was xkcd) that we use the term “Rayleigh scattering” because it sounds silly to say that the air is blue (via the mechanism of Rayleigh scattering); so maybe that’s part of it?
- Comment on Does the USA have gifted schools or was Spider-Man Homecoming lying? 2 months ago:
Seconding this explanation. It’s exactly right.
Rich folks can likely influence any situation but magnet != private school for rich kids.
That’s not to say there aren’t private schools for rich kids. There definitely are. But that’s not magnet schools, and it’s not where Spider-Man goes.
There was a whole scandal a few years ago where a bunch of people, including Aunt Becky from Full House, was caught paying to get her kid into Stanford. That’s university, not secondary; and maybe someone who wasn’t so splashy about everything might’ve done better. But it illustrates the point: we at least try to maintain the illusion of being meritocratic.
- Comment on YouTube won't let me search for music by musician unless I remove the word "naked" from her name 2 months ago:
The characters in the comment are “LBRY.”
- Comment on YouTube won't let me search for music by musician unless I remove the word "naked" from her name 2 months ago:
You must be fun at parties.
- Comment on California just passed a law forcing mandatory DRM in 3D printers 2 months ago:
I don’t think they know what it’s designed to stop. Seems like this is pretty clearly just a piece of conspicuous legislation passed just to make it look like they’re actually doing something.
- Comment on California just passed a law forcing mandatory DRM in 3D printers 2 months ago:
Any such algorithm would be patched out of a jailbroken version of the firmware in minutes. 3D printers are already running on FOSS, so this is worse than useless. Anyone who wants to print a working gun will be able to do so trivially.
- Comment on It's great to see a politician that's progressive and Not a Millionaire. 2 months ago:
Because they’ve made her a distinct target. They attacked her for wearing a borrowed dress to the Met. They’d leap at the opportunity to tear her down if they had any evidence that would survive scrutiny (since they’re already doing it with evidence that doesn’t).
- Comment on It's great to see a politician that's progressive and Not a Millionaire. 2 months ago:
I absolutely did. There’s no way to reasonably guarantee that the people who are making laws that affect companies and individuals aren’t using that power for their own enrichment.