Monday 27, March 2023
Louis Vuitton Baby Socks
A snip at $700 for three pairs.
Or, £300 to the man in the funny hat.
This reminds me of the Plutonomy Citigroup report that came out in 2006, nearly 17 years ago! There is a Wikipedia page on it now. The basic thesis is that governments in many parts of the world have policies which are highly favourable to what we have to call ‘UHNW households’ (‘Ultra-high net worth’). These are the people who run ‘family offices’ and travel everywhere by private jet. It came out the other day that although our prime minister had paid over £1M in taxes in the last few years, his average tax rate was less than 20%, somewhat lower than a full-time worker receiving the adult minimum wage would pay (if you include both flavours of NICs).
AT1s behaved as designed (and as should have been expected)
I was at a conference thing where some bond guys got upset that AT1 (‘CoCo or Contingent Convertibles) holders got wiped out ahead of equity. Well, their argument is ‘bonds are senior to equity, we should get paid first.’ But actually, it ain’t necessarily so, as Matt Levine explains, here. Basically, AT1’s say in their prospectus that they will go to zero if the bank’s capital drops below a certain threshold, I think 7% or more of a bank liabilities. This happened in the case of Credit Suisse: they got zeroed, the equity holders got a tiny bit. Depositors and other creditors were OK.
This point has been made in a few places.
GPT-4 and its unforeseen consequences
I'm in the top 2% of users on StackOverflow. My content there has been viewed by over 1.7M people. And it's unlikely I'll ever write anything there again.
— Peter Nixey (@peternixey) March 26, 2023
Which may be a much bigger problem than it seems. Because it may be the canary in the mine of our collective knowledge.
A… pic.twitter.com/YNZvFtwyfu
StackOverflow got going too late to help me to be more productive as a programmer. I have used it quite a bit to help me figure out the fairly trivial coding problems that I encounter these days in my programming dotage. I suspect that the value of StackOverflow is much greater than is generally acknowledged. Nobody gets hired for saying that his approach to solving a tricky programming problem is to look up the answer on StackOverflow, but — I suspect — that this is most often what happens. Managers are happy that software gets written, programmers learn good new techniques, new tools and languages get adopted quicker as knowledge about how to use them diffuses quicker. It’s a win-win-win, which might turn into a lose-lose-lose if everyone starts using ChatGPT-X.
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