plus/minus epsilon

While this might be more commonly known outside of the US, the numerous and comically incompetent assassination attempts of Queen Victoria were, until tonight, unknown to me. This blog post quickly lists them.

I’ve been curious for a long time about how nonprofit organizations play a role in the housing market so today I decided to read the published financials of Mercy Housing, one of the largest nonprofit developers in the US.

Given that an HOA is a relatively simple business, it feels like it should also be simple to tell if an HOA is “properly run” in the sense that it’s expected to be solvent in the long-term without Special Assessments.

A long time ago, I read (what I think was) a blog post about how war is waged in the modern world that stuck with me. I've tried pretty hard to find it again but haven't been able to, so this blog will be my attempt to remember and think through the same points.

I’ve been learning about bonds and wanted to do some simulations and look at real data to try to understand them better.

During my time in San Francisco, I've witnessed multiple bicycle accidents and had my own near-misses. I've also had a lot of fun facetiously claiming that the city should ban bicycles and trying to start arguments with people about it. While doing that, I might have accidentally convinced myself that it actually makes sense. Here's why,

When I was doing the research for my last blog post, I was reading the website for Pacific Coast Banker's Bank and saw that one of the products they offered under "Loan Hedging" was called a back-to-back swap for converting fixed-rate loans to floating-rate. I had no idea what that was and I couldn't see what problem it solved, but I thought it sounded cool at least.

Today I decided to read Sterling Bank's most recent 10-Q, to get a better understanding of how a savings and loan bank works. This blog goes through it at a high-level with commentary and graphs.

Something that's a lot of fun for me is finding convincing visions of the future that are also dystopian. The best example of this I've found recently occurred to me while I was listening to a Tesla earnings call, where Elon Musk justified Tesla's market cap with recurring revenue from the future robo-taxi industry. Musk's theory of the future, and it's dystopian ending, goes like this:

I used to work on the Crypto Team at my company, and while I was there I got introduced to a lot of different crypto projects and asked to evaluate if they were something it made sense for us to support. The answer was usually no.