temp-dude-87844 (u/temp-dude-87844)

temp-dude-87844 commented on How deep is the rot in America’s banking industry? finance.yahoo.com/news/de... · Posted by u/throwaway12245

lackbeard · 3 years ago

I wonder why that didn't happen in this case? Perhaps fear that would just trigger a run on the acquiring bank?

temp-dude-87844 · 3 years ago

The situation unfolded over a weekend, after SVB shut down Friday afternoon. The FDIC attempted to find a buyer on Saturday, and got at least one interested party, but couldn't close a deal. The Administration was getting anxious over the possible fallout: tech companies not meeting payroll, possible banking contagion, who knows what else? Then Powell/Fed proposed some novel mechanisms for temporary rescue. [1]

They worked together to put out a joint press release, and Biden gave a down-to-earth, rough-and-tumble speech about protecting depositors and kicking the failed executives and bad-luck shareholders to the curb, because this is "how capitalism works". It was an unusually blunt attempt to preemptively push back at the perception that this guarantee of FDIC-uninsured deposits will be branded a 'bailout'. (I predict that this attempt will fail and this will widely be perceived as a 'bailout' in casual and political discourse, which is the exact forum at which they've aimed this message.)

After 2008, the public gained awareness of the consolidation -- both forced and emergent -- that occurs in response to these sorts of crises. Public opinion views these outcomes unfavorably, because they seem unfair and irreversible, albeit no palatable alternatives have emerged that are acceptable to both to the public and government and industry incumbents.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/silicon-valley-bank-failure-depos...

temp-dude-87844 commented on Gas Leak in the Baltic Sea forsvaret.dk/en/news/2022... · Posted by u/chha

jcranmer · 3 years ago

Assuming the explosions are relevant, some possible causes, ordered somewhat (but not entirely) by my personal estimation of likelihood:

* Ecoterrorists -- I discount this mostly on the basis that they would have claimed responsibility by now.

* NATO sabotage -- this reduces strategic options for several EU countries (albeit a strategic option that isn't really being exercised and is almost universally disfavored).

* Russia sabotage -- this isn't terribly rational for Russia, but Russia has been unwilling to pursue rational options for a while. I can see someone in Russia thinking this will stoke anger in Germany (and the rest of Europe) that may create European pressure to force Ukraine to end the war (which is the most viable path I see at this point for Russia winning the war).

* Ukrainian sabotage -- pretty much the only actor for whom sabotage makes rational sense. Especially if it is a demonstration of Ukrainian cyberwarfare capabilities.

* Poor maintenance -- this strikes me as unlikely because NS1 is quite new infrastructure (2011), so it would have to be extremely substandard to have failed this quickly, and I believe most of the construction was done by European and not Russian firms, so I don't think that's at all plausible. But there may be some failure modes I'm not thinking of here.

temp-dude-87844 · 3 years ago

If you subscribe to the point of view that Russia's war on Ukraine isn't actually about Ukraine, but about causing lasting pain in Europe, then this action is perfectly rational for Russia.

It drives the market prices up (anything that spooks market participants will), and creates an ongoing situation that adds pressure on governments to act.

temp-dude-87844 commented on Nagorno-Karabakh’s Myth of Ancient Hatreds (2020) historytoday.com/miscella... · Posted by u/diodorus

temp-dude-87844 · 3 years ago

A balanced summary of the lead-up to the First (1988-1994) and Second (2020) Nagorno-Karabakh war.

Note that this is article is NOT about the recent escalation on 2022-09-13 when Azerbaijan attacked inside Armenia's internationally-recognized territory, in territory unrelated to the Nagorno-Karabakh question, clearly well past ridgelines used for the border. Technically the border is "undemarcated", but it's a cheap claim that this is a mere border dispute.

Instead, many of the actions of Azerbaijan since the November 2020 ceasefire agreement have been applications of Salami Slicing and Borderization: occupying chunks of the Republic of Armenia bit by bit, to pressure Armenia for a settlement more favorable to Azerbaijan. Specifically, Azerbaijan wants a route between its mainland and its longstanding exclave Nakhchivan (which borders Turkey).

Article 9 of the 2020 ceasefire agreement provides for such a transport connection, but does not use the word "corridor" in reference to it. This is contrasted with the 'Lachin Corridor', mentioned several times in the ceasefire agreement, which provides a connection between Armenia and the Armenian-ethnicity areas of Nagorno-Karabakh. Since 2021, Azerbaijan has unilaterally begun using the term 'Zangezur Corridor' to refer to their desired connection, anchoring their expectation that its guarantees would be similar to that of the ceasefire-defined 'Lachin Corridor'. Despite several rounds of working groups and mediation, no progress has been made on a solution acceptable to both Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan has the upper hand, with superior military and economy, less democratic government (top-down leadership), and a better geopolitical situation. And it's been steadily bullying Armenia to get its way.

temp-dude-87844 commented on Okta and Auth0 Blocking Cuba, Iran, N Korea, Syria, Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk support.okta.com/help/s/a... · Posted by u/joelittlejohn

cpursley · 3 years ago

I don't get it. If we're insisting that Crimea, Lugansk and Donetsk are Ukraine and the people are Ukranian, then why block/sanction people there who have no control over the situation?

temp-dude-87844 · 3 years ago

Two reasons:

- To inconvenience the institutions of the occupier just in that area (Why just there? To avoid removing their incentives to change and to avoid crippling your own companies who provide a service there. If you sanction the occupier fully, they'll double down, perceive it as an escalation, and your own companies will be significantly hurt. They'll find an alternative, and once they do, they won't need your service any longer, so you lose leverage.)

- To frustrate the local populace so that even the milder ones have additional incentives to oppose the occupying regime.

temp-dude-87844 commented on Poland plans to seek $1.3T in reparations from Germany for WWII axios.com/2022/09/01/pola... · Posted by u/gmays

seiferteric · 3 years ago

Seems like maybe that section of the border was specifically carved out to include the mine maybe?

temp-dude-87844 · 3 years ago

Incredibly, this isn't actually true, though it's tempting to think so from looking at the shapes on the map.

The border actually follows the Lusatian Neisse, and then the Oder river, except in the vicinity of the port city of Szczecin; this is the border set by the Allies at the Potsdam Conference after the end of World War 2.

The mine on the eastern side of the river became Poland, but it was still supplying a power plant on the west side of the river in East Germany [1]. Later, in 1962, Poland built its own power plant [2].

The Soviets and the Polish wanted to push this border as far west as possible, while the western allies wanted to set it was far northeast as possible to more closely approximate the German-Polish ethnic divide at the time. Various compromise options were proposed, following various rivers, but in the end the western allies agreed to the Soviet proposal. Germans in these territories gained by Poland were expelled. (Meanwhile, the Soviets took the eastern half of previous Poland and made it [3] part of the Soviet Union, specifically the constituent republics of Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania... it was a messy time.)

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraftwerk_Hirschfelde [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tur%C3%B3w_Power_Station [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kresy

temp-dude-87844 commented on SoftBank’s losses reveal Masayoshi Son’s broken business model bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/herbertl

hackerlight · 3 years ago

It's called dumping. You have artificially low costs temporarily in order to put competitors out of business. Once that's achieved, you then increase prices.

I'm actually not sure how dumping would work when done by Uber, though. Individual taxi drivers will go out of business, but there's little barriers to entry to new taxi drivers starting out again once Uber starts to flex its pricing power. Of course the picture changes if Uber starts to lobby for regulatory protection. You have to look at the micro details of the market to see whether there's a problem there.

temp-dude-87844 · 3 years ago

Bigger cities typically regulate taxis and sell licenses to operate to taxi companies, who then employ or contract the drivers.

Uber was always an unlicensed taxi scheme. Their planned business model was to ignore the law to reduce costs, then sell rides below cost until everyone else is out of business.

temp-dude-87844 commented on GitHub-Next githubnext.com/... · Posted by u/rahulpandita

jacquesm · 3 years ago

Those things were fair use, what Microsoft is doing is copyright violation pure and simple.

temp-dude-87844 · 3 years ago

This should absolutely be litigated to stop the blatant laundering of copyright under the guise of fair use.

Copilot's API is surfacing snippets of work without licensing information attached alongside. It can be shown in discovery that Copilot does access the origin work.

The sooner this is slapped down, the sooner we can avoid addressing the even more troubling question that exists today: is someone who used Copilot to throw together a bunch of code infringing copyright of works where those portions originate?

This is a complex problem with no satisfying conclusions... how could one be violating copyright if they never accessed the 'copied' work to copy? Copyrights aren't patents. Infringement requires copying.

Using Copilot launders the user's awareness of the origin works, yet making the Copilot users liable for widespread "accidental" copying would be troubling.

temp-dude-87844 commented on Turkey’s inflation soars to 73%, a 23-year high, as food and energy costs rise cnbc.com/2022/06/03/turke... · Posted by u/TekMol

ajsnigrutin · 4 years ago

How many piplines do we (EU) have from other countries that will provide us oil, after we totally stop importing it from russia? Won't the price hike hurt us too, possible even more than russia?

temp-dude-87844 · 4 years ago

There are no pipelines that cross the EU's external border that transport crude oil from outside the EU into the EU, except the ones that are fed from Russia.

Before the UK left the EU, there was technically one such pipeline from Norway, but it was mainly used to supply an oil export terminal located in the UK, rather than for importing oil into the UK for domestic consumption.

Europe expects to rely on sea transport to import oil after foregoing use of oil from the Russian pipelines. This is why the landlocked countries of Hungary, Czechia, and Slovakia were concerned during the sanction talks, though Hungary's Orban has exaggerated the concern to obstruct sanctions and/or to score dubious Realpolitik points.

Hungary's only alternative is the Adria pipeline that starts at a port in Croatia; it can be used in either direction and has sufficient capacity to meet current demands. Czechia's only alternative is the IKL pipeline that starts at a pipeline junction and tank farm in Vohburg (near Ingolstadt) in Germany. Slovakia's only alternative (if my research is accurate) is to be supplied through Hungary, using the Adria pipeline and a soviet-era connection between Hrkovce and Százhalombatta to be run in reverse mode.

temp-dude-87844 commented on Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source opensource.org/open-sourc... · Posted by u/TangerineDream

temp-dude-87844 · 4 years ago

I get why the OSI published this post. They have a vested interest in the conversation and I agree with their points.

But the battle for the narrative has already been lost when people consider this to be a problem with 'open source'. Rather, it's a problem with software that's being given away for reputation brownie points. Here, the author showed exceedingly poor judgment towards users of their software, and this should result in the loss of goodwill and respect towards the author and the forking of their works if the license allows.

Open Source didn't enable this behavior. The author's poor judgement and the author's lack of need to care for the users of one's software is what didn't dissuade this behavior. In this case, it was giveaway software causing harm. In other cases, it's commercial software pushing hamfisted changes users don't want, because the users aren't empowered enough to fight it. The reason commercial software would avoid this particular type of stunt is because it's poor business sense to harm one's direct customers.

So what of Open Source? Open Source allows anyone to review or modify the software that engages in this behavior. So the community can salvage the author's good contributions and better custodians can carry the software forward.

Open Source also allows anyone to discover these cases proactively. Of course, almost nobody does this, because we as an "industry" have gotten used to four troubling trends, and ridicule those who aren't on this "bleeding edge":

* thinking that software that costs $0 to obtain incurs no additional costs

* not auditing our dependencies

* being unconcerned about the sheer quantity of dependencies

* blindly updating dependencies

It's a sad but predictable development that the field of Open Source software has basically merged with the community of authors actively looking to give away software for $0 (for fame or to upsell advanced features). Basically, the Open Source movement was too successful (in its advocacy and in raising the demands of the customers of software), and it has largely subsumed and supplanted the formerly-separate fields of shareware and trialware software.

This development is what truly hurts Open Source: so much software but too little emphasis on (or even demand for) curation, massive imbalance of contributors to users, the decreasing influence programming-language-specific spaces, and increasing dominance of the "move-fast-and-break-things" culture.

The way forward is to achieve stronger curation, more focused maker spaces, tighter (as opposed to larger) communities, and an outreach effort to re-establish the philosophical distinctions between Open Source and freeware.

temp-dude-87844 commented on CISA: Shields Up cisa.gov/shields-up... · Posted by u/mooreds

zelon88 · 4 years ago

Kinda sounds like: "Hey we just poked the bear. Here is a bunch of vulnerabilities that we've been using on rainy days. We think we've burned these vulns so it's time to patch them now. Please hurry."

temp-dude-87844 · 4 years ago

Reading the list of vulnerabilities that were added on March 3 to the "known exploited vulnerabilities catalog" [1] makes me want to go full Commander Adama and never network any computer ever again.

[1] https://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog