Micro is doing a Bruce thing.
The entire problem with landlording is owning property imo. Perhaps it’s owning more than you can use. Owning a vacation home is much much worse than owning a rental. And I don’t think it’s worse in any way than employing someone and I think generally employers are broadly more scummy than landlords.
And any conceivable world without rental property, including the best possible anarchy world, either has more people living without decent shelter or has some oppressive state.
The distinction between “landlord” and “someone who owns property” is paper-thin.
Would this be a bad spot to mention that the reason I want to have a job I can do anywhere is so I can bounce back and forth between an apartment in Montreal and the house I’m currently in?
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Dunno. I don’t think that modest landlording is bad really. It’s a matter of whether or not you own a ridiculous amount of anything. Owning a high rise building is ridiculous. A duplex is definitely not. Owning a small home and an apartment or a cabin or something is not bad and certainly not worse than two people living in a 4000sf house somewhere.
Does this mean you still have to work full-time? Doesn’t seem much like freedom. Freedom-wise it seems a lot better to work part of the year where you make the most $/hr and then be really free the rest even if it means you can’t afford the Montreal apartment.
I’m kind of drunk and it’s NYE here in STRAYA but I just want to put a post here to lol at this whole landlord conversation and indicate that I’m willing to pursue it in depth when I’m back in the US in a few weeks if anyone still gives a shit. I work for a real estate development firm that also manages all our projects in a variety of asset classes, but just don’t want to get into it while on vacation.
Freedom-wise the best thing would be to walk away from family obligations and just fuck off to Montreal for good. The two residences scenario is the compromise position where I spend part of my time where I want to be and the other part in a place I hate but don’t feel like I can leave completely yet. How much I work and how much I earn are secondary to those goals.
Ok. Can’t give advice on that. You’re pretty private and I don’t know your family situation. I certainly understand family obligation. I’m not doing anything other than what my kids need me to do until they are out of the house and I’m not rushing them out in any way, but that day is coming some time probably in the next few years.
Good article on the global supply chain mess
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Part of my responsibilities at work are purchasing chemicals and equipment for our processes. Hasn’t been a great year, what used to take up a small portion of my time is now probably a couple hours a day. Can’t get some shit, other items we’re getting price increases every month and we’re busier than ever so of course our usage has gone way up.
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But but but … I was told ending the extra unemployment was going to fix everything!
Part of my job at work is keeping an eye on dairy markets and providing daily market updates and periodic reports to the rest of the company. Watching the dairy market over the last few months has been absolutely wild. Block and barrel cheese have since started to come back down to pre-2022 price levels (though they aren’t quite there yet) while butter has absolutely skyrocketed. Market prices for dry whey isolates and dry milk have basically not moved in years. There are multiple reasons for this and some of this comes down to some contextual advantages of cheese and dry dairy over butter with respect to how futures contracts for dairy commodities are written but those issues shouldn’t have too much of an effect on spot pricing. The biggest issue causing this disparity at the moment seems to be that cheese has had an easier time recovering from the supply constraints around sunflower oil. Prior to the invasion the Ukraine was the world’s largest exporter and producer of sunflower oil and Russia was the second largest. Sunflower oil is a critical component in the production of both cheese and butter. Procuring sunflower oil has basically become impossible for any dairy manufacturer who wasn’t already getting it supplied predominantly out of somewhere like China, Brazil or Argentina and substitutes have needed to be found for the vast majority of manufacturers. The R&D process and testing for viable substitutes has gone a lot more smoothly for cheese than it has for butter, as well as incorporating those alternatives into the production process has been mostly painless for cheese production while that question has mostly remained unaddressed for butter. There are a lot of reasons we’re experiencing inflation right now depending on which goods we’re talking about but I thought this would be an interesting bit from the dairy world that does a good job of highlighting how the same shortage has had dramatically different effects on two fairly similar-ish goods.
i didnt write this but my friend that works as an econ guy for some company wrote this today
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r/agedlikemilk
LOL that tweet was from 5 days ago?
The fact that banks holding low risk investments can be run on seems to be a problem.
Can someone explain the interest issue? I know they ate heavily invested in lower percentage bonds , and now interest rates are much higher, but I am missing a “?” In there were why a is a problem because of B. Why is this differential panicking account holders?
- SVB has to sell its bonds at a loss to cover customer’s withdrawals.
- Other customers notice that this is really bad if SVB has to sell a lot of bonds at a loss and they withdraw as well.
- Repeat until SVB is bankrupt
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they definitely already knew they were in trouble, paying Forbes to put them on their list was likely a last ditch effort to inspire confidence
short explanation: SVB owned a bunch of long-term bonds which are very sensitive to interest rate increases compared to short term bonds. tech crash last year lead their customers (tech companies) to start withdrawing their money, SVB had to sell their bonds at a huge loss to pay these withdrawals which caused even more panic.
better explanation from levine:
And so if you were the Bank of Startups, just like if you were the Bank of Crypto, it turned out that you had made a huge concentrated bet on interest rates. Your customers were flush with cash, so they gave you all that cash, but they didn’t need loans so you invested all that cash in longer-dated fixed-income securities, which lost value when rates went up. But also, when rates went up, your customers all got smoked, because it turned out that they were creatures of low interest rates, and in a higher-interest-rate environment they didn’t have money anymore. So they withdrew their deposits, so you had to sell those securities at a loss to pay them back. Now you have lost money and look financially shaky, so customers get spooked and withdraw more money, so you sell more securities, so you book more losses, oops oops oops
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Obviously, donks control finance
I did see that ROKU had 26% of all their cash in SVB, almost none of it insured.