Home

  • I no longer consider interview offers that don’t come with a salary range

    I have a job, but in a market like this there’s no reason not to be looking out for a better one. Studies have shown that the best way to get a raise is to move to a new job, and although there’s costs involved the benefits can be massive, especially as American workers have taken a real-wage paycut of 3.2% this year when factoring in inflation. So I’ll humor any recruiter who wants to talk to me. What I won’t humor is recruiters who aren’t upfront about their salary range. Don’t be fooled, companies never start hiring for a job without already knowing what salary they’re willing to pay, budgets are written and approved long before they even start reaching out for resumes. So every company knows exactly what range of salary they’re willing to pay, but they want to use the asymmetry of a job search to pay less than the market rate for labor.

    Usually getting a job requires you to submit a resume, do a few interviews, and then see if you get hired. Companies want salary negotiations to only start after this whole process because they know it’s better for them than the worker. The worker has already spent several hours of their precious time applying to this company, so if they’ve made it to the offer stage they now have to decide whether they’ll accept a low-ball salary offer or go through the whole rigamarole all over again with another company and have no guarantee that that company won’t low-ball them as well. If the salary is transparent from the beginning, then workers won’t waste their time interviewing with companies that are below their salary range and so will be paid what they’re worth.

    For shitty companies that pay peanuts, making the salary transparent would kill them. No one would ever interview with them because the price they’re paying for labor is just too cheap. That means the company can’t hire any workers and eventually goes bankrupt and blames “no one wanting to work”. But if salary is not transparent, then shitty companies that pay peanuts can rope in suckers, string them along for some interviews, and then give them a low-ball offer and hope the worker is too tired of interviews to go out and look for something better. Companies that pay good salaries are also harmed by salaries not being transparent because workers don’t actually know if a good company pays well since they can’t reliably compare them to a shitty company.

    So if you ever see a company that won’t give you the salary range up front, it’s a shitty company trying to hide how little it pays. Good companies that pay well have every incentive to advertise the fact that they pay well so they can attract the best talent. For that reason, I never speak to companies that don’t tell me the salary range up front.

    ,

  • New game I’m playing: Cult of the Lamb

    Cult of the Lamb is an exciting little hack-n-slash mixed with base building game that I’ve been playing a lot of recently. The game opens up with your protagonist (the eponymous Lamb) being sacrificed to prevent the resurrection of an Evil God. Turns out killing the Lamb just sent them straight to Evil God instead, who resurrects the Lamb and tells them to kill all the False Gods who stand before them. From here the resurrected Lamb is handed a sword and some magic to start going nuts, as well as a few servants to build up a cult and become ever more powerful so they can slay their enemies and presumably resurrect the Evil God in turn.

    I haven’t finished the game but I assume once you resurrect the Evil God, everything is smiles and happiness forever and the Lamb just retires to running their cult. There’s no way the Evil God is actually the final boss you’ll be killing at the end.

    Anyway this game isn’t anywhere near the kind of thing I usually play, fast paced hack-n-slashers just aren’t my forte, and playing one with a mouse and keyboard probably brands me a heretic in most people’s eyes. Still, it’s a very enjoyable experience with an easy-to-use dodgeroll and a variety of enemy patterns to keep the game interesting. You can cancel sword attacks using the dodgeroll as well (though infuriatingly, not magic attacks) meaning most combat arenas turn into me rolling around like Sonic the Hedgehog on cocaine, hacking and dodging all the while. I actually learned that I get better at the game by taking things a tad slower though (your weapon has knockback and often cancels enemy attacks), so this isn’t always the best strat.

    Anyway when you’re not dodgerolling through the cultists of the False Gods, you’re managing your own cult to gather the resources needed to improve and expand your abilities. The two sides of the game (cult running and hacking/slashing) are actually way more disconnected than they seem, the combat bonuses you get from managing your cult are rather modest, but it’s definitely a fun way to take a break in between the hyperactive combat sections. Your cult is made up of cultists you randomly capture or save during combat sections, and as per usual they all need to eat, sleep, and stay healthy, and in return they will believe in you more which unlocks higher tiers of weapons and magic later in the game. But besides these very modest combat benefits, running the cult feels mostly like playing an entirely separate game. That’s not a terrible thing mind, because it’s still a fun game, it just doesn’t have as much combat benefits as it at first seems.

    The cult itself includes the usual Rimworld-eque activities of getting food, building beds, and making sure everyone is happy. I’m sure Rimworld wasn’t the first game of this type but it’s the first one I played and so everything reminds me of it. The unique selling point of this game though is that since you’re running a cult, you can make all sorts of arbitrary rules and regulations to make it more efficient or just torment your little cultists. You can hold feasts, you can appoint a tax collector, you can unlock the ability to murder any cultist you want (good for removing dissidents). All these rules can make your cult run just a bit more smoothly which lets your cultists level up more and will allow you to unlock those modest weapon upgrades for the combat I was talking about.

    To go back to combat, the last big selling point is the cards and weapons randomizer to keep the runs fresh and interesting. Each time you go on a “crusade” against your enemies, you will enter a dungeon with a randomly selected weapon and magic attack. They all have unique properties so two runs can feel entirely different depending on whether you get the hammer (slow as molasses but deals huge damage) or the dagger (quick strikes, lower damage).

    In addition, each weapons can have one of several unique bonuses such as stealing health, poisoning, or unleashing ghosts. You may then randomly find weapon shops in the dungeon where you can exchange your weapons for 1 of 3 others. But in addition to all this you will find card shops that will let you select 1 of 2 random cards for a separate benefit. These cards range from poisoning anyone you hit, to getting some extra health, to swinging your weapon faster or more strongly.

    The randomness of which weapons you’ll get combined with which cards you’ll get adds a huge layer of replayability to any run ensuring that no two crusades feel the same. And since you unlock higher level weapons and new cards through the cult, they form the major way that the two areas of gameplay interact.

    So the game is really two separate games that are both fun in their own right, but which somewhat combine to become greater than the sum of their parts. If I do have any quibbles they are minor, but for completeness sake:

    • I don’t like how choosing the rules of your cult locks you into that rule and can’t be changed. I also don’t like how you don’t get to see all the possible rules before you pick. In my first playthrough I chose a rule that locked me out of being able to murder cultists on demand, which later became a problem as I had a few dissidents running around and not enough wood to build jail cells to contain them. I then found that I had chosen another set of rules which didn’t actually synergize that well with each other, and that I’d prefer to have picked the “murder anyone” rule because it synergized pretty well with the “cultists gain faith when old members of the cult get murdered” rule as well as some others. I decided that even though it’s against the spirit of these types of games, I’d have a lot more fun by just restarting and choosing different rules
    • Speaking of restarting, I don’t like how the game has unskippable intros and tutorials to start off. Maybe there’s some option to skip them but I didn’t find any, so I had to rewatch the opening cutscenes and replay the opening tutorials before I could get back to where I wanted to be. In a game all about high-octane combat, starting a new game should put as few barriers as possible between you and the “good stuff” so it’s disappointing that this game has so much unskippable faffery to start off with. It’s not that the first sections of the game are bad mind you, they should just be skippable on repeat playthroughs.
    • The story is passable, which is both good and bad. Actually I guess it’s mostly good, since in less than a minute it sets up who you are, your goals, and your enemies, but still it isn’t going to knock anyone’s socks off but then it isn’t trying to.
    • I guess every game now wants to let you customize and name your little Rimworld-esque cultists, but to be honest I’ve never felt so disconnected from them as in this game. In Rimworld and other games, the cultists (colonists in Rimworld) are your main asset and avenue of gameplay. What they do IS what the game is about, so customizing them and watching them grow, level up, and die is fun and tugs on your heartstrings. Here the cultists are mostly devoid of personality and unique attributes, and there aren’t even good ways to wrangle them in the ways I’d like to (you have to talk to them individually to give them specific jobs). So customizing them does nothing for me, I’d much rather customize the Lamb (your protagonist/Avatar of Destruction) and give them a unique name and character model, but alas that’s the one character you can’t change.

    Anyway with all that said, it’s a fun little game that’s retailing for the equivalent of 2 shares of Ford ($F) common stock. So if you have 2 shares of $F go ahead and sell them to buy this, because it’s honestly a better use of your money.

  • Controversy time: I don’t like ESG investing

    ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) is a scoring system some folks have come up with to score which stocks you can “ethically” invest in vs those you shouldn’t. The problem I have is that it seems like a bunch of woo.

    The idea is that companies shouldn’t just try to make the most money, they should also protect the environment, advance social justice, and govern themselves responsibly. Yet I’m reminded again of how FTX (you know, the folks who stole investor’s money) got really high scores on ESG despite being a complete criminal enterprise. Other dicey factors seem totally ignored in ESG rankings as well, TotalEnergies SE ($TTE) is a French company directly funding the Russian Genocide of Ukrainians by continuing to ship LNG out of Russia and yet it’s considered a “leader” in the Social category. An otherwise identical company like Exxon-Mobile ($XOM) is considered just “average” in the Social category despite no longer operating in Russia since the war began, so it seems like a little genocide between friends doesn’t affect TotalEnergies’ ESG scores all that much. One wonders just what does affect ESG in that case.

    This may seem unfair, after all TotalEnergies is just trying to make money, right? And their LNG is in heavy demand by customers, right? Yet that is exactly what ESG scores are supposed to act against, the tyranny of capitalism to externalize all costs onto the rest of society. Tesla for instance is merely a 9/10 in the Environmental category because despite moving the largest number of cars in history off of fossil fuels, their cars use lithium and the mining of lithium hurts the environment. This is a cost that Tesla externalizes to the rest of us, yet it’s a necessary cost to run their business so they get an ESG ding. But it seems ESG scores are applied randomly and say more about the scorer’s personal biases than anything to do with the companies themselves.

    So here’s my advice: forget ESG entirely. If you want to invest ethically, then look at the companies you’re investing in and weigh the costs and benefits yourself. Does Apple adding new privacy features make up for the horrific conditions at the Foxxcon factories? Then go ahead and invest. But that’s a very personal ethics question that no one else can answer for you. If you instead export that question to some ESG-ified ETF, then you’re just letting someone else’s biases run your investment account. And those people might not know the first damn thing about Environmentalism, Social Justice, or Corporate Governance.

    , ,
    ,

  • Always double guessing my stock choices

    I don’t know if other folks do this, but every time I buy a stock I stop to double guess myself. If I see a stock that looks FANTASTIC, good P/E, good dividend, good growth, it may seem like a perfect buy. But I always stop and ask myself “if it’s such a great buy, why isn’t everyone else buying it, why hasn’t the price been pushed up?” Usually this leads me to double checking and realizing the reasons which I had not previously noticed. For instance, it was pointed out to me that Big Box retail stores are very highly valued right now, Walmart is selling at a higher P/E than Microsoft and Apple just for example. It seems that in the current economy, people are looking for the security of retails rather than the growth of Tech. But there’s no way Walmart is worth about 50 P/E, so it doesn’t make sense to buy it at this price point. Macy’s however ($M) is selling at just around 8 P/E. It’s a big box retailer with steady cash flow, doesn’t it look like a perfect buy? But why is it selling so low and Walmart is selling so high? I looked and Macy’s forward P/E isn’t so good, it’s expected to be around 10 or 12. So it looks like right now Macy’s is expected to be a shrinking company, and that’s why it’s being sold on discount. So now I have a better idea of exactly what bet I’m making, do I expect Macy’s P/E to go down that much or might they buck the trend and remain stable or grow? That will tell me whether I actually want to buy their stock or not.

    In a market as efficient as the stock market, there are rarely any free 20$ bills on the sidewalk, you always have to wonder “if this move makes sense then why isn’t everyone doing it?” and that will make you realize the downsides of the bet you’re making.

    ,

  • Short post, just want to vent

    I encourage anyone to read this tweet thread as it sums up perfectly my anger with how the FTX scandal is being covered. This is a news story about a crypto exchange doing what all crypto exchanges do, steal clients money to fuel their vices. And yet the framing in most stories you find will not be about how SBF stole client’s money, but about a “lack of controls” and “failures of governance” which are corporate-ese ways of downplaying SBF’s crimes and making him seem like just a CEO who couldn’t quite handle it. This cannot possibly be by accident, most journalists understand framing and most journalists on twitter are laser-focused on complaining about other people framing things in ways they don’t like. So why is the framing surrounding the FTX saga downplaying SBF’s crimes and normalizing his actions? Why are so many stories trying to focus attention on SBF allegedly raising new funds, instead of on the fact that he stole funds in the first place? Why is his opinions and personal life being written about with more detail than the lives he destroyed through theft? Go find some of SBF’s villains, it shouldn’t be hard. Write about them struggling to pay the bills because they lost it all in his exchange. Hopefully find some who have finally learned that all crypto is a scam, and write about how they had to lose their house in order to learn that lesson. Most of the journalists currently humanizing SBF and ignoring his victims would have screamed bloody murder if the same had been done to Bernie Madoff, so why the fuck are they doing it now.

  • You cannot time the market

    When you look at the stock market, it’s very human to want to “time” it, that you can buy a stock at it’s lowest point, sell it at its peak, and make oodles of cash. When Apple first IPO’d, it was selling for about 14 cents (when stock splits are taken into account) and it reached an all time high at closing of 180.96$ just within the last year. If you’d bought 1000$ of Apple stock at IPO, and sold them in January, you’d be a millionaire. Even if you weren’t born in 1992, if you’d bought 1000$ of Apple stock in January of 2019, you could have caught it at a price of 37$, giving you a nearly 500% return if you’d sold it in January 2022. This isn’t even taking into account the dividends paid by Apple, which would have increased your return even more especially if you’d reinvested them back into Apple!

    But timing the market is impossible, or at least that’s what mainstream economists usually think. It goes back to what I’ve said about The Efficient Market Hypothesis, the stock market is believed to approximate a random walk, therefore it is impossible to know exactly when the bottom is, for the market or for any stock. Therefore the hypothesis says it’s impossible to buy at the bottom and sell at the top except by dumb luck. Even if the hypothesis is wrong (Warren Buffett doesn’t believe it), it is still likely to be functionally impossible to time the market because no one can bring together all the knowledge of the entire economy to accurately declare “yes, this is the bottom”

    As a silly example, I follow a lot of stock twits on various social media forums, and the consensus in mid-October was that inflation was still roaring and we had a long way to fall. Since then the S&P 500 has gone up around 15%. Will it pull back down? Maybe, but maybe not. Either way, sitting on the sidelines and losing the opportunity to make a 15% free return a month in a half was probably a dumb move. If people could really, reliably time the market, then investing in mid-October to get a free return through late November would have definitely been the play. And if we’re due for a pullback then you could sell now and keep your winnings. Yet I heard not a peep of this kind of advice through mid-October, so I don’t think any of those stock twits could time the market.

    Even more silly of an example is looking back at the recent market crash of 2008. The market bottomed completely in march 2009 and rose from there, but it didn’t stop takemongers from claiming that we were due for an even worse crash any day now.

    I know my examples are just anecdotes, but basically I haven’t seen any single person who could reliably time the market over any timecourse whatsoever. Timing the market isn’t value investing it isn’t finding good companies at good prices, it would be going all-cash at the top and going all-in at the bottom, and doing this multiple times a year in order to maximize your returns on each up- and down-swing. You occasionally see hedge funds or take-mongers say they’ve gone all cash, but they then usually miss the bottom of the market by a lot and quietly re-enter it after the big gains have already happened, without ever admitting they were wrong.

    In these cases, the old adage is probably the most correct: time in the market beats timing the market.

    ,
    ,

  • Yes it’s OK that J Powell killed your puts

    I’ve been trawling through old internet posts, and I found something interesting from March 2020. I won’t quote it directly but the gist was this:

    I knew the market would crash due to Coronavirus, now that rat bastard J Powell comes in and pumps the market with free money, killing all my puts. What the fuck is this? Are you going to buy my puts from me now since they’re *distressed assets*?

    As should be obvious this comes from the time when the Federal Reserve announced they would take every possible measure, including buying “distressed assets” in order to maintain liquidity in the market. Obviously anyone who was hoping a liquidity crisis would create a market crash was SOL, but for the good of the nation as a whole it’s better that our economy keeps chugging than a few disaster capitalists make it rich.

    But it does raise a somewhat unfortunate truth: the Federal Reserve mostly buys up the assets of rich institutions that don’t need the help. The Fed buying someone’s underwater mortgage doesn’t actually help them, they’re still underwater and in debt, but it does help the bank that wrote the mortgage and is now facing a loss. The bank gets to offload the “distressed asset” (ie bad loan) and go use that money to make more money, while the mortgage owner just gets a new person they have to pay. It’s genuinely true that the Fed gives the greatest help to those already wealthy, and those of us not wealthy have to live with the consequences. Although all of us are helped in a way by the Fed maintaining liquidity in the economy, we aren’t helped to nearly the same extent as the banks that get to offload their bad decisions onto the government. I think it’s good that the Fed maintains liquidity, but I think there need to be more strings attached, demanding equity in exchange for liquidity would be a very fair trade in my book. And if banks don’t want the Government to own a percentage of them, then they can just refuse the free money.

    , ,

  • The ethics of stealing from your boss

    OK not really. But we all know that workers don’t always give their 100% for the company, we all know that some people who work from home (or even work in an office) will spend hours on their phone not being “productive.” But where’s the line? I ask this because when I log my time, I sometimes log time that wasn’t necessarily spent physically doing things for the company. Maybe I took a walk, maybe I was chatting with coworkers, maybe I even left and came back. But I had things to do late at night so I claimed I worked late into the night (which I did) even though maybe the entire night wasn’t “work” so much as “work, then play then work some more.” I don’t know, just wanted to think out loud.

  • Why is Sam Bankman-Fried being beatified?

    The above paragraph is an utterly insane ending to what should otherwise be an OK NYT opinion piece on Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). What’s insane to me is that SBF is getting media treatment like this which paints him as shockingly harmless despite the fact that he stole billions of dollars in other people’s money. Would Bernie Madoff have received this treatment? Would Jordan Belfort get this kind of treatment? Hell I don’t remember the NYT even treating legitimate investors like Mitt Romney this way. This SBF coverage is barely one step removed from beatification, covering up his sins and pushing his virtues to the fore in their stead. And the fact that he’s a thief and a crook? Well everyone makes mistakes, right?

    Let’s get one thing straight, everyone does not make the kind of mistakes that steal billions of dollars from thousands to millions of people. Generations of money managers have not regularly stolen money from their clients. If you think they did, point to me how much was stolen by traditional money managers this year versus how much was stolen by SBF and pals. The financial institutions of most countries (barring the obvious kleptocracies) are watched closely by their governments to ensure compliance with the rules and regulations, and this means that theft is not the norm, when it happens it is newsworthy.

    No, SBF is a once-in-a-generation crook and fraud. Someone who so brazenly stole from every one of his clients that his corporate governance was worse than Enron’s. He is not the kind of person who needs to be painted as a normal guy just like the rest of us who made a few mistakes, he is the kind of guy whose active and willful theft has left many many people much worse off.

    What is utterly galling about this coverage is how transparent it is, how obvious it is that this is not the way the NYT usually covers people who profit off of other people’s misery. As someone who has sounded the alarm on crypto for a while now (privately first, and then publicly here on my blog) I’ve long been infuriated by reporters who cover cryptocurrency like it’s “just another tech beat,” as if a Ponzi scheme whose only value is evading taxes should get the same dispassionate tone as the latest smart phone. But now I’m finding a “paper of record” going so far as to whitewash the sins of crypto’s greatest thief (so far) and I have to wonder if they’re doing it on purpose or they’re just stupid?

    Because the NYT has to know what this is feeding into, right? Trust in institutions is at an all time low, trust in news media is at an all time low, and carrying water for obvious crooks when you’ve previously maligned people in the exact same situation is exactly the way you get people to believe that you are filled with fake news and hypocrisy! Already I’ve seen conspiracy stories circulate that SBF’s favorable media coverage is because he donated so heavily to Democratic Party causes, or because he said all the right things to get a good ESG score. Coverage like this coming from the New York Times does so much harm to media trust precisely because it’s such a 180 turn from their usual fair, and without a good reason for saying why this Robber Baron needs to be humanized, it really does feed into the conspiracy theories that the only reason he’s getting this is because he said the right things in liberal spaces.

    ,

  • Tau vs A-beta in Alzheimer’s disease

    There remains, in the medical community, a disagreement over what exactly causes Alzheimer’s disease. If you even look at what kinds of drugs people are trying to make to treat the disease, there is no consensus on what mechanism the drugs should target.

    The above picture was taken from “History and progress of hypotheses and clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease” by Liu et al in 2019. This picture shows all the different clinical trials being run on Alzheimer’s disease, and all the different kinds of drugs people are using in those clinical trials. What’s interesting is that those drugs don’t all target the same or even similar things. Some drugs target Amyloid Beta, some target Tau, some target things you may never have heard of, like Neurotransmitters or the Mitochondrial Cascade. In most diseases we know what causes the disease, ever drug that has a clinical trial to treat COVID will in some way be targeting the coronavirus itself, because that’s what causes COVID. But there is no consensus on what causes Alzheimer’s disease, so the drugs that are in clinical trials all target completely different things.

    With no consensus, it’s hard to see a path forward for both research and drug discovery. There are a number of antibody-based drugs on the market today which are supposed to clear our either Amyloid Beta plaques or Tau tangles, but there’s no consensus in the field if those are even the causative agents of Alzheimer’s disease. So if you’re a drug company investigating this, you’d making a bet not only that your product will do what it’s supposed to (clear out tangles and plaques) but you’re ALSO making a bet that you know the One True Cause of Alzheimer’s disease and that 70% or researchers are just wrong when they think the causative agent might be something else.

    I’m not saying this is entirely a bad thing, I think it’s good that researchers and drug discovery companies are willing the gamble big to cure Alzheimer’s disease, despite knowing that the science isn’t even settled on what causes Alzheimer’s disease. But I am saying that I’m not exactly surprised that we’ve been studying this for decades with no effective cures in sight.

    ,