You can't just add up future value and current value of things. The future value is in future dollars, they are different from current dollars. You owe depositors their current dollars.
Yes you owe the depositor in current dollars, and that's why the bank failed. But I was responding to the parent about it not mattering if the bond is held to maturity - it does matter.
The problem SVB had is that there was no market buyer for their bonds at a price they needed today. They deserve to fail for that but that's not the part of the discussion I am responding to.
What I am responding to is the idea that there is a myth about the value of the bond. Here is what might happen, in a very simplified way:
- Depositors need their cash today
- SVB can't sell their assets to meet this need, and so the bank is fails and is dissolved (already happened). Let's make this simple and say SVB owes the depositor $1000, can sell for bonds for $800 today. If they can have wait the bonds will return $1200 later.
- The FDIC steps in with all their capital. They say ok - depositor here is your $1000 today and you are now whole. But we will not sell the SVB bond today to cover that $1000, instead we will hold the bond and wait for it to mature at $1200. Thus the depositor is whole, and over the long term no money is lost.
No regular market participant step in to provide the $1000 because they can get a better return on their money in other ways. But the government can do this because their goal is not maximizing return on capital, but instead stabilizing the system.
The government needs to get its money from somewhere. If it spends the taxpayers' money, that money cannot be spent on other things. So instead of doing things that are useful to society, like maintaining roads, the money is just sitting there until the bond matures. If it creates money out of thin air, the effect is the same, except that now every market participant pays (in the form of increased inflation). So in either case, the losses are socialised.
Of course, you can still argue that stabilising the system is worth it.
I can imagine some unintended consequences from this. If I'm a hard-going reviewer, people might choose to avoid me, and I'll be compensated less. Conversely, if I'm easy-going, people might find ways to get their papers to me.
I suppose there can be some other layer of reviewer meta-review to account for this, much like the role 'acceptance rate' has come to have for journals and conferences. But, following Goodhart's law, even that has come to be gamed now that a meaning - a proxy for journal prestige or quality - has been placed on it.
I am curious. If it's not too personal - you seem to be someone who reads a lot and synthesises it together into interesting output. You appear to have some control and resistance to the attention stealing machine, and haven't succumbed to the traps we're bemoaning elsewhere in the thread - tiktok, instagram. What use you make of hackernews and reddit appears to be controlled and productive. Is that a fair assessment? Was it ever a struggle? How did you do this?
It's a struggle, and reading long-form content remains challenging. I've an 180,000 book I'd very much like to be reading and ... keep finding myself distracted from it. I'm nowhere near the level of effectiveness and productivity I'd like to be, and I'm constantly fighting various mediated platforms as well as my own psychology in this.
(It's only one of many on my rather intimidating stack....)
The mainstream social media sites never much appealed to me. Facebook always seemed sus, Twitter, more problem than solution. Instagram and TikTok seem well below my age cohort, and I've engaged with either in a very limited fashion --- occasional content that pops up, but no accounts or apps.
My principle mobile device has no interactive account-linked services. I do use Pocket (which ... has issues: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_...>). I'll read a fair bit of HN, for example, but have to go to another device to actually respond. It's also an e-ink tablet / book-reader, rather than a phone. I've installed very few apps: Termux, a podcast app, a feed reader (which frankly isn't much use), Internet Radio (listening to BBC 4 presently with Liz's exit), Pocket, as mentioned. Little else. Not even email, as yet. That said, e-ink and tablets whilst improvements over emissive, colour-enabled, phone-based mobile devices won't excise you of your own daemons and frailties. It still takes work.
Shutting off WiFi is a huge boon. I don't do it nearly enough.
I disable all notifications where those exist.
Increasing general hostility toward any form of intelligence and informational benefit of the Web are their own strong incentives to curtail usage.
Reddit has shown a constant and increasingly dark series of patterns for years, with a sharp inflection about four years ago. My subreddit is now largely a testament to that fact, and I've almost wholly abandoned use of both it and Reddit at large. My experience is that sites whose goals don't match mine tend to match it increasingly less with time. See: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/8rq08y/i_wont_...> and <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/9ebkjh/current...>, both of which point to other long-standing concerns.
- I'd really like to have tools for better monitoring and reviewing what I've read and researched over time. Amongst Pocket's many, many, many failings is that it Is Not At All This But Should Be. Reviewing previous reads ... one often finds that many of them really weren't all that significant. Letting information stew for a bit is often useful, it filters out much uncertainty and bullshit. One notion I'm still looking to properly implement is what I call "BotI", or Best of the Interval. Selecting top items by a period --- week, month, year, etc.
- I have some guilty pleasures. An Imgur binge every so often (a few times a week or month) can give some contact with current trends. Again, not used via an account. Mastodon and Diaspora* have been my principle social outlets. Both can be time sucks, and I try to aggressively filter what I follow, mostly through a curated "highest interest" list or aspect (Diaspora* terminology, similar to Google+ Circles), of people who post with low frequency and high(er) salience. I'll adjust and prune those aggressively.
- I'd been active on Google+ from inception to death, which was an ... interesting experience. It was by stages novel, useless, interesting, useful, and finally, disappointing. Something of a cautionary tale. There were numerous premonitions of what have emerged since as failings of social platforms. Most of the darker aspects of which, I have to say, Google seemed to handle well, though overall adoption of the platform and Google's incoherent strategy regarding it seem to have been the principle fatal blows.
Curious that you have a negative view of that. When I come across a word I don't know I am usually too lazy to look it up, and so I infer its meaning. But I don't know if I infer it correctly! I'm convinced this is how we end up with word meaning mutations; the traces of which, of course, are the object of etymology.
Coordinating a mapping from reality to our internal world of ideas is hard enough without basic disagreements on the meanings of words. I find it hard to take joy, as some descriptivists do, in words that also mean their opposite!
I like the idea of writing a word and its page number inside the back cover of a book for looking up later but I never seem to have a pen to hand either.
> so I infer its meaning. But I don't know if I infer it correctly! I'm convinced this is how we end up with word meaning mutations
Sometimes. Sometimes something more intricate happens.
是 is, in modern Chinese, the verb "to be". Like other Mandarin verbs, it works in pretty much the way an English speaker would expect, coming after the subject of the sentence and before the object: "I am an American": 我 [I] 是 [am] 美国人 [an American].
That's also how verbs work in Old Chinese. It isn't how predication works, though; where modern Mandarin has (thing)是(other thing), Old Chinese says (thing)(other thing)也. "Lao Tzu was a man of Ch'u": 老子 [Lao Tzu] 楚国人 [a man of Ch'u] 也 ["was"]. 是 is an important word in Old Chinese, but it's not even a verb - it's the proximal demonstrative pronoun, "this".
How does that turn into the verb "to be"? Well, "this" is often used to refer back to a complicated noun phrase. So you see a reanalysis:
鱼出遊从容是鱼乐也
鱼 [fish] 出遊 [come out on a pleasure trip] 从容 [(and) relax]。是 [this] 鱼乐 [fish happiness] 也 ["is"]。
鱼 [fish] 出遊 [com(ing) out on a pleasure trip] 从容 [(and) relax(ing)] 是 [is] 鱼乐 [fish happiness]。
The meaning of the utterance didn't change at all (though we forgot that it was supposed to end with 也). But the meaning of 是 inside it changed quite a bit.
- You have a word, and it has a meaning. The nature of this kind of thing is that this word will be used more often in some contexts than in other contexts.
- Someone who knows the meaning perfectly well extends it a bit in a straightforward way. For example, "illuminate" primarily means to shine light on something, making that thing easier to see. But it can be used in an extended sense to refer to making a "murky" concept easier to understand. Anyone who knows the primary meaning will understand why the secondary meaning makes sense.
- So now we have one context where the word is likely to mean one thing, and another context where the same word is likely to mean something a little bit different.
- But the world changes. The old context may become less common. As that happens, what was a metaphorically extended meaning may turn into the ordinary primary meaning.
- All of this happened without anyone learning the wrong meaning of the word. It was always being used correctly. But the meaning shifted anyway.
Thank you, I enjoyed your illuminating comments, and for the search phrase "semantic shift". I should have been more cognizant of metaphorical extension, having recently read [0] which claims "tall" went from "swift" to "vertically large" via "skillful" ("tall of hand") then "exaggerated" ("tall story").
Since some people are complaining about the difficulty curve, you could randomly generate puzzles and rate them, and players, with Bayeselo (or similar; like chesstempo does). Then you have to use this ratings data to somehow discover how quickly to increase the difficulty of puzzles presented to the player (for example, perhaps select one with a 0.8 prob of success every time).
Actually, thinking about it some more, a player's rating should increase over time as they learn, while a puzzle's (true, latent) rating should be fixed, so you should allow for that.
