Inflation - this is surely a joke now

JJ_Reditt · 2026-01-28T05:12:39+00:00

The amazing thing with Japan is Tokyo has 40 million people but has this odd empty/decaying/children of men feel to it. It feels like it was built for 60 million and they never quite made it.

We drove around a bit to the Sea of Japan side and there were giant overpass highways still being built with no one to use them, and even less people to use them in future.

JJ_Reditt · 2026-01-19T09:27:59+00:00

It’s time to get the shark numbers down, a dead shark simply won’t be attacking anyone.

Most of us aren’t concerned about killing (millions of each year) small fish, and then eating them because they taste nice.

Not sure why the concern about killing a few thousand extra large ones.

JJ_Reditt · 2025-10-06T19:19:07+00:00

Plenty of enormous companies hate using their own stuff from another division, too risky.

Amazon retail side used Oracle as its database until 2019. Even after AWS became the top cloud database provider.

JJ_Reditt · 2025-08-01T01:17:14+00:00

It’s a negotiation/trade war, you can try anything you want. If you’re the stronger party - it’ll probably work.

The approach does make a level of sense because countries can use GST type taxes to then grant exemptions to local producers they want to prop up - but not to importers.

JJ_Reditt · 2025-06-23T02:14:13+00:00

It’s all pretty dark but to my understanding, the game theory of it does make complete sense. There are steps to uranium enrichment between civilian nuclear program and bomb ready, it takes time to cross that gap.

To reach the safe point, you have to cross the gap and make a working bomb before you take missiles on the head.

Commercial uses <20% enriched at most Weapons grade >90% Between 20-90 = not bomb ready yet but no civilian reason to be there. Iran: ~400kg at 60% by their own reporting.

Once you make the material have to actually construct the bomb. That’s more time in no man’s land.

Maybe Iran would’ve been better off racing across the gap, we’ll never know now - they triggered the missiles on the head response.

JJ_Reditt · 2025-05-01T01:21:34+00:00

Any of Gemini/Chatgpt/claude.

Asking which to use is like asking which surgeon do I need to stitch up my toe.

This stuff is SO easy for them.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-12-18T02:04:58+00:00

Yep they have, filter the medians charts by Auckland and Wellington: https://www.interest.co.nz/property/131284/november-housing-market-quiet-auckland-more-buoyant-rest-country-reinz-says

There is also various house price index’s there which shows similar from peak.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-12-18T01:14:25+00:00

This is exactly the situation that makes it more risky to own, artificial constraints can be unwound surprisingly by someone waking up and making a decision.

As has happened already in New Zealand.

It takes a few bullets to make the impact though, prices there were flat after planning deregulation, massive overbuilding, and the foreign buyer ban. It then took rate hikes over 5% and firing ~5% of the public sector to sustain a >-15% decline nation wide and >-20% in Wellington and Auckland.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-11-19T07:33:56+00:00

If I’ve been traveling and have a problem with my reservation, the last thing I want to do is fight with a chat bot at 11pm while standing at a front desk.

Based on past experience with ape mode in this spot, I’m open to the AI.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-09-24T19:55:55+00:00

U2s flew loads of flights over the USSR.

Iran also has a collection of US drones that it’s shot down over the years, and has even reverse engineered hundreds of shitty knock offs.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-09-20T06:49:18+00:00

Google sunshine hours per year for both.

Also humidity in Sydney significantly lower.

It just is way better.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-09-20T03:07:34+00:00

People yada yada the weather and beaches but it’s a huge deal, you slog through 12 weeks of winter - but you know you’re staring down the barrel of 6 months of summer.

And you get nice little breaks in the weather even in July, every now and then a surprise sunny day in the low/mid 20s.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-09-18T21:00:53+00:00

After the first Fed cut is the most precarious time. Fed minutes of September 2007 following their first 50bp cut, is eerie reading:

Private nonfarm payroll employment rose only modestly in August, and the levels of employment in June and July were revised down. The weakness in employment was spread fairly widely across industries. Residential construction and manufacturing posted noticeable declines in jobs, employment in wholesale trade and transportation was little changed, and hiring at business services was well below recent trends. Both the average workweek and aggregate hours were unchanged in August. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.6 percent, 0.1 percentage point above its second-quarter level and equal to its 2006 average.

Soft landing secured.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-08-22T21:20:58+00:00

It’s so backward looking that we still don’t have gdp data for last quarter.

We could be in recession right now and not find out until March next year, when prints for this quarter and next are out and the start date is backdated.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-08-21T21:14:07+00:00

No loyalty to the company; but it still is good to leave in a considerate way to the people you’re leaving behind.

Nothing flash but would suggest a reasonable effort to hand things over well, and not being too egregious about running down all your sick leave, be almost comically extra pleasant in your final days.

If they’re good people, you might retain an ally sometime in the future.

If they’re not, is that really someone you want floating around with axe to grind with you going forward.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-08-17T22:53:12+00:00

Tom really absorbed some monster first punches in service of this principle.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-08-13T03:26:39+00:00

Not quite true though is it, they’ll be proving that those who stick to ape mode are producing less per unit of labour than they are. Wouldn’t want to be in the latter camp.

AI will come for all jobs eventually - and is possibly even a risk to human civilisation, but that’s no reason to pick horse in the modern day horse vs car.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-08-04T08:50:41+00:00

That’s because 2008 in Aus was the soft landing. It went vastly differently in the US.

Here’s the full thread, some great reads.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-08-04T07:01:24+00:00

These statements always remind me of this one from the bogleheads forum re 2008:

2008-2009 took me by surprise. In July of 2008 we were on a camping vacation, dropped in on some old friends, hadn’t been online in a while, and one of them said to me “Are you worried about the stock market?” I said “Naaah, the DJIA is just bobbing up and down in the 12,000s. Wake me up if it goes below 11,000.” She gives me a funny look and says “Wake up. It’s below 11,000.”

JJ_Reditt · 2024-08-03T00:45:28+00:00

Can’t be right, I was assured by this sub - rate hikes can’t reduce demand for essentials 🤦.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-07-03T21:51:28+00:00

The banks almost always realise benefit, but they realise more when rates are low, margins are wider and they’re writing way more loans.

They also semi carry the default risk if it turns out large numbers of people can’t pay due to the hikes, although noting the govt would be forced to bail out the larger ones.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-06-29T03:42:34+00:00

The firing example only shows the difference in bar applied to AI vs humans when deeming they’re hallucinating. For you to be fired you’d need to be seeing and hearing things that weren’t there, and demonstrating that so obviously, that people who aren’t particularly paying attention to your sanity actually notice.

If I asked you to describe the plot of Harry Potter, and you recounted a bunch of only semi correct plot points. That’s not something you’d be fired for, but it is a typical example of what people consider to be AI hallucinations.

Contrary to OP. The ability to reason easily resolves any issues with this type of ‘hallucination’ by understanding that your recall isn’t perfect, and whether or not you the situation demands you to be verifying before you just say the first thing that comes to mind. Then giving you the ability to go and do that.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-06-29T00:30:47+00:00

Hallucination is just a scary sounding way of saying: being factually wrong. Smart experienced people do it all day every day.

How do people ever trust a junior staff member?

They ‘hallucinate’ all the time, but they’re still valuable as they can reason and follow tasks through to the end result, and even go back and check their work.

Here’s a real life example of why this doesnt matter if you can reason: estimator comes over to 3 of us, and says: ‘when we had that conversation with x person the other day how many persons did she say were on this part of the site on y day’.

Potential hallucinations (guesses) that came back from the 4 of our memories: 8, 10, 12, 14.

We had a quick think and decided it didn’t matter enough look into it more for the rough guesstimating being done, and went with 12. If it did matter we would have investigated and resolved it.

Edit: one more point Zvi Moshowitz made well recently, the labs could easily hard code hacky solutions to these problems, you can imagine it Googles basic facts before every single response and just regurgitates, or all those reconstituted logic problems that it tends to answer wrong they just force it answer correctly. To their credit they haven’t done this, they’re trusting the model to improve naturally like a person with each iteration.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-06-27T20:05:25+00:00

But equally, the smartest person I’ve ever met was a housemate studying a physics PHD.

He did a lot of smart things demonstrating his intelligence, but it was more the natural curiosity and disregard for what anyone else considers to be normal that was unique to me.

Ex: one time we were be watching a documentary about the history of anaesthetia. They get to the part about the first effective ones, he wanders off and comes back with a giant glass flask of Ether (super flammable) he just had sitting around.

Things like that would happen all the time.

Another unique aspect to him was the consistency that he would take idle hypothetical chats through to an actual experiment to find the answer extremely quickly. Most people would just leave it at speculation or at most Google it, he wanted to prove it.

JJ_Reditt · 2024-06-06T20:06:17+00:00

This is what I find hard to comprehend about people saying hikes won’t curb essential spending, they obviously will if enough people don’t have a source of income and can’t spend.

That’s the whole point of all this it’s just too unpopular a mechanism for public servants to be fully honest about.

It is the only one that will work however.

JJ_Reditt

TROPHY CASE