plus/minus epsilon

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.

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.

More than a year ago, Jack Dorsey that he would be funding a project called @bluesky, which would work with the crypto community to create a decentralized standard for social media. He gives a lot of motivation for the project, particularly focusing on the lack of consumer choice in content moderation and amplification. Fundamentally, the core insight of the project is that social media companies are currently a vertical integration of two different services:

For obvious reasons, I recently got interested in how to build websites that are widely accessible but also resistant to censorship. Naturally, my first instinct was to run off and come up with my own blue-sky designs of the most resilient, censorship-resistant website in the world. But censorship is not new and I realized it would be smart to learn from the past: in particular, The Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks, which both continue to operate even under immense pressure to shutdown.