I've read about this strategy and am giving it a shot this year.
If I understand it correctly, the reasoning is that until the late summer, the underground root system is putting its energy towards growing the stalks and leaves, so you _want_ it to grow as much as possible. If you trim daily, you'll never let it get into the rapid growth stage where it's really depleting its energy reserves. In other words if you trimmed daily or monthly til the end of time, eventually you'd kill the plant, but it might ironically die more quickly if you trimmed monthly.
It's a bummer knowing that it'll be hard to fully eradicate it given how widespread it is in the area (I'm also in Massachusetts), but I guess there aren't really any permanent victories in life when you think about it.
This is a bit like saying earnings going up isn't good for stockholders, because they would have been charged a higher price to buy the stock if people had known the earnings were going to go up.
Once you've taken out a fixed-rate mortgage, inflation absolutely has the effect of reducing the value of the debt you owe. It's more if you're about to take out a mortgage that you're rooting against (expectations of) inflation, as lower inflation will also serve to decrease the prevailing interest rate.
It's just like any hiring process: get referrals from people you trust, look at prior work (previous purchases/sales in this case), learn the right questions to ask when interviewing.
Sarah & Duck and Bluey are my favorite kids shows, but they're very different. S&D is more quiet and contemplative, whereas Bluey tends to be more playful and energetic. My daughter grew out of S&D and into Bluey at around age 4.
I used to be frustrated that the parents in Bluey seem to have endless energy and attention to devote to their kids – at least with S&D, I didn't feel like there was such a lofty version of parenting with which to compare myself. But I've come to realize that the playful and fun dad in Bluey is a much better role model, for me personally, than the dads who are just sort of vanilla and kind (Daniel Tiger, Doc McStuffins), not to mention the dads who are just awful (Peppa Pig). Physical comedy, imaginary play, and committing to the bit, are all great for having fun while also connecting with young kids. Sarah and Duck obviously didn't teach my any of that, so it's been a useful change of pace as my daughter has gotten older.
The unlimited energy becomes a little more realistic from season 2 onwards, but I was annoyed too, and maybe even felt guilty... prompting me to address those emotions. Totally on point for the show
> It sounds like a lot of it just went to unprofitable SaaS companies
U.S. GDP is north of $25 trillion and has grown 75% since 2009. Annual VC investments appear to be in the $200-300 billion range, from a quick search - presumably not all of it going to unprofitable SaaS companies. I'd go with the statistics over the gut intuition here.
> U.S. GDP is north of $25 trillion and has grown 75% since 2009.
Cumulative inflation since 2009 is 42.5%. Real GDP from Q3 2009 to Q3 2023 is up 37.8%[0], and that's with the base effect of 2009 having been a deep recession.
And looking deeper into the sector breakdowns, from 2009[1] to 2022[2], the lion's share of gains in GDP were from the information, finance, professional and business services, and government categories. Some, like manufacturing, have had no growth in real terms over that time.
The homeownership rate is lower now than in 2009[3]. Food is nearly 50% more expensive[4], higher than overall inflation. The cost to produce food is 51.8% higher[5]. Construction materials are 75% higher[6].
So yes, there are a lot of indications to suggest that proportionally, not as much capital was invested into the parts of the economy that are composed of atoms, not bits.
There are plenty of never-profitable businesses that have gone bankrupt in the past. See e.g. pets.com from the dot com bust. And this downturn has seen "functioning" businesses like SVB and First Republic go under too. So I'm not sure this time is different, at least to the extent you're suggesting.
I do agree that this era of low interest rates has led to some companies getting absolutely massive without ever turning a profit. But hey, that playbook worked for Amazon. Most tech companies have substantially lower capital requirements than WeWork, and can weather this sort of downturn as long as they have a reasonable cash position. Sure, Uber might not make back the amount of funding it's burned through, but that's different than it having a business where the unit economics will never work out.
You write in a tone of contradiction, but I'm having trouble understanding how your points relate to mine. I don't believe I said that never-profitable businesses were unique to this era, or that the only business failures lately have been ridiculous ones.
I also think Amazon is distinct in that they chose to not have profits because they saw better uses for the money. Bezos could have declared big profits long before he did, and there was a noisy contingent of investors who were agitating for it. Bezos instead chose long-term investment in ways that upended our notion of commerce, and whose effects are still playing out.
I think that's very different than WeWork and Uber, where a lot of investor money was burned on subsidizing the core business. At least in Uber's case there was a theory, which was basically, "Use the rise of mobile to capture the global taxi market (while externalizing the capital costs to the desperate) and then use pricing power to extract Google-size monopoly rents." Maybe not a great theory, but at least something articulable. Whereas WeWork never made any sense as a business beyond a hazy "Uber for offices" handwave.
Amazon is perhaps one of the best executed businesses. Their retail logistics physical footprint is insanely huge and chews billions in capital. They chose to reinvest their profits to stronghold their logistics position.
Protecting bike lanes is a hugely impactful problem that is also far more expensive to solve. That doesn't mean we should be dismissive of a solution to a less impactful (but still important!) problem. Think how many orders of magnitude less money it would take for a municipality to buy and loan out some bike sweepers than to fully redesign its bike lanes.
I go to https://www.reddit.com/r/bikewrench for bike maintenance Q&A. The responders there are often extremely knowledgeable, although it doesn't have the article structure of Sheldon's site.
I frequent that subreddit as well, but one needs to be very careful to navigate the cargo-cult very very wrong "solutions". Some of these sound right on their face, and thus get parroted, but don't really work out.
Overall I agree, and usually the right answer will filter to the top, but not always. Here's some of the main groupthink pet peeve ones off the top of my head:
- Gorilla Tape for tubeless. Reality is that it's porous and absorbent and the adhesive is hard to remove, and can pull the cosmetic layer off carbon rims. It works, but with all sorts of bad side effects. Standard tubeless (polypropylene strapping) tape applied properly rim wall to rim wall works far better.
- A screwdriver is just fine for removing a crown race from a fork. (This almost always mars the fork, and while on a cartridge bearing fork this is mostly cosmetic, it can do damage and is bad looking. Shows lack of attention to detail.)
- Contaminated disc brake pads can be cleaned to like-new by applying heat. I've never once seen nor heard of this actually working long-term. It's always a "well, it might work" that turns up negative. And the outgassing of burning off break fluid isn't good to be around.
Then the litany of "how's this dent in my frame?" with the inevitable and loud "it's metal it can dent and be fine".
Adjusting water chemistry is extremely prevalent in brewing. For example, if you've ever had a hazy IPA, part of the softer bitterness comes from high levels of chloride in the water. The cost of common brewing salts (gypsum, calcium chloride, etc) is a small fraction of a penny per beer.
I'm guessing that the beer brewer you spoke with was talking about the cost of buying distilled or RO water, as opposed to the cost of the water adjustment itself. It's probably a lot more economical if you're cleaning and reusing graywater, vs. trucking in distilled water, or running municipal water through an RO filter and essentially paying twice for water treatment.
You're saying that if a bank paid $100m for low-yielding bonds in 2021 which are now worth $80m, those bonds should be valued at $100m on the bank's balance sheet. What if a different bank pays $80m today for the same bonds? Should they be able to show an immediate $20m increase in their book value because those bonds are "worth $100m"?
This thread with NPV is confusing the liquidity issue with the profit of the bond investment. The issue for this bank was not if this was a good or bad investment in the long run (these bonds might very well turn out to be a good investment the day they are paid back on), the issue here is that the bank's customers wanted to withdraw their money and there was not enough liquidity/cash in the bank so they had to sell something and the best/only thing they could sell was the bonds which right now were worth only $80m and the customer wanted their $100m.
The problem is that they are worth $100m if held to maturity (you get your $100m back, ergo their value is $100m if held to maturity), but the current price is $80m, because who wants to buy a bond at 0% when you could get around 5% at the next Treasury auction.
They're worth $80m today, and then maybe $82m next year, $84m the year after, and so on until they're worth $100m at maturity. (Obviously these numbers depend on current and future interest rates, and you'd be earning some interest in the meantime).
As I was trying to point out to the parent commenter, conflating "$100m today" with "$100m at maturity" leads to clear contradictions, like saying that a bank could earn $20m on paper simply by buying bonds trading below par value. Or to put it another way – if bank A holds $100m face value of 10-year bonds yielding 4%, and bank B holds $100m face value of 10-year bonds yielding 2% (but worth, say, $80m at market price), how can you claim that those banks are on equally good footing?
Valuing liquid bonds at par value is pretty clearly a hack to reduce volatility and increase confidence in banks' balance sheets, even if some people in the comments seem to view it as a more logical way of accounting. (Although to be clear, I don't mind companies doing their own fuzzy math as long as they give investors enough information to do proper due diligence. It's similar to the non-GAAP earnings that a lot of tech companies report.)
>As I was trying to point out to the parent commenter, conflating "$100m today" with "$100m at maturity" leads to clear contradictions, like saying that a bank could earn $20m on paper simply by buying bonds trading below par value. Or to put it another way – if bank A holds $100m face value of 10-year bonds yielding 4%, and bank B holds $100m face value of 10-year bonds yielding 2% (but worth, say, $80m at market price), how can you claim that those banks are on equally good footing?
Equal assets should never be thought to mean equal footing. The banks will show the same number for assets locked up for 10 years, but the banks will also show that they have different returns listed on their finalcial statement for the HTM assets, and different revenue from capital!
You cant and shouldnt expect to bank comparison to be easily reduced to a single measure, or for that measure to tell you something that is captured elsewhere.
It is like expecting an athlete's height to tell you something about their speed or strength.
HTM assets tell you the nominal value of assets they are holding to maturity.
It is not intended to show how much they could raise if they had to liquidate it today. It is not intended to show what that yield is for their bonds.
There are separate line items for that.
If you change the valuation of the bonds to market value, then you lose sight of the mature value of those bonds.
Replacing athlete height with athlete BMI tells you something different.
Not only that, but the value could drop even more if an inflationary spiral happens... Bank prime loan rates have been higher than 20% in the past, which means a $100m bond 5 years out could go as low as $33m in value... a 67% haircut!
Clearly, US Treasuries carry risk that's not been accounted for.
> US Treasuries carry risk that's not been accounted for.
US treasury debt is approximately the safest. The risk was that SVB might need cash before the bonds matured. The regulations encouraged SBV to do this. Now the Fed put is re-imagined, and we shuffle on while mumbling 'nobody could have imagined'.
If I understand it correctly, the reasoning is that until the late summer, the underground root system is putting its energy towards growing the stalks and leaves, so you _want_ it to grow as much as possible. If you trim daily, you'll never let it get into the rapid growth stage where it's really depleting its energy reserves. In other words if you trimmed daily or monthly til the end of time, eventually you'd kill the plant, but it might ironically die more quickly if you trimmed monthly.
It's a bummer knowing that it'll be hard to fully eradicate it given how widespread it is in the area (I'm also in Massachusetts), but I guess there aren't really any permanent victories in life when you think about it.