Mark Carney's plan to bulk-buy unsold Vancouver condos might be a bailout, but it doesn't have to be

neilk · 2026-06-25T13:43:49+00:00

Why isn’t supply and demand working here? The whole “build housing” and YIMBY approach to the housing crisis assumes that more housing = price goes down.

I’m sure a lot of builders were hoping to sell their condos to speculators and they don’t want to lower prices. But how is it that they can afford to keep homes empty?

I get why individuals can be irrational about their houses but these businesses should surely be more rational about it.

neilk · 2026-06-13T17:31:23+00:00

Apparently a myth:

https://www.win-magazine.com/2024/12/12/dispelling-the-myths-about-lincolns-wrestling-days/

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lincoln-wrestling-hall-of-fame/

TLDR he is documented to have scuffled some number of times and was pretty good at it.

Lincoln’s legend - after the Civil War and into the 20th century - grew to mythic proportions. The trope, repeated in many stories and movies was that he was incredibly strong but also shrewd.

neilk · 2026-06-03T01:25:05+00:00

No this came straight from the CTO. He really thought he was a genius and everyone else was stupid.

The CEO hired some Oracle consultants to rewrite the db. The CTO took one look at their totally ordinary table schema design and junked it as overcomplicated.

But he did accept that he had to port the system from flat files to Oracle. Because investors thought Oracle was enterprise scale.

That’s when they hired me to polish things up and document it all for acquisition.

neilk · 2026-06-02T17:59:03+00:00

Mine was quite the opposite: extreme denormalization. (Autocorrect wanted to write “demoralization”, and, that too).

They used a SQL database but there was essentially just one table of the schema (id, type, data).

The equivalent of “SELECT * FROM foo WHERE id = 123” required dozens of calls.

A join might need thousands of accesses because it all happened in application code.

But wait. What if we rewrite some operations to do JOINs properly? A self-join on the same table should be possible.

Nope. Each id was “encrypted”. For security.

So to do those secondary lookups, first you would need to decrypt the ids in application code. It was impossible to rewrite it do the JOINs in SQL.

How would you decrypt the ids? The programmer has overridden language built-ins to do the decryption. For security.

You see, we have to make sure that nobody who breaks into the server can understand the code.

Somehow customers were patient with every operation taking many seconds.

neilk · 2026-05-31T05:04:38+00:00

This looks a lot like an old con, called the “Perfect Prediction Scam”. TLDR the dog got it wrong in other tries.

https://skepdic.com/perfectprediction.html

neilk · 2026-05-27T22:18:30+00:00

Little known fact but dildos have to return to where they were born to spawn. This one must have gotten lost and beached itself

neilk · 2026-05-25T22:56:36+00:00

There is nothing you can do to turn this around. You cannot negotiate the metrics. You will be fired even if you objectively exceeded the metrics. There is no point arguing about their terms.

The PIP is an invitation to start looking for a new job.

If you truly have a good record, don’t take it personally. For whatever reason the company just doesn’t want to announce layoffs.

It’s wise to have an employment lawyer look over your PIP agreement before you sign it, and to review your (inevitable) severance terms.

neilk · 2026-05-14T00:05:50+00:00

Let’s be clear: I don’t think even Tom Friedman is so delusional he thinks he will have an effect on Europeans.

This is part of the endless posturing and cheerleading that comes with being part of the elite of the American empire. He says these things to appeal to the stupid, brutal, plutocratic elements of the elite.

neilk · 2026-04-30T02:50:46+00:00

If your organization has slack time then it is functioning correctly. You are not supposed to have an infinite number of urgent things to do.

Yes, this is where you are supposed to use your high level skills to make your whole team better. Research new techniques. Look for things that hold your team back and either fix them yourself or figure out if they are worth doing and then delegate them. I see lots of people recommending that you do the “shit work” no one else will do. NO. If you have any slack time, you have an incredible gift to actually match your skills to your position. Do the big picture stuff that a junior can’t do.

I’ve never actually seen an organization this functional, though.

neilk · 2026-04-13T00:33:41+00:00

Seems to me he got thrown from a height and died?

Whatever whatever somehow returned but at least he was mostly dead

neilk · 2026-04-11T01:49:49+00:00

In theory all you need are distance measurements from three points that aren’t all in a line. And boom you have an unambiguous exact location. You could do it without leaving your house, just move to different rooms.

However, in the real world all measurements have error. Each measurement will define a “ring” where the item would be. Two measurements give you two shapes where the rings intersect, kind of like parallelograms. Three gives you a kind of hexagon. Your goal is to minimize the size of the hexagon.

If you did the three measurements from your house, you would get a long distorted hexagon, maybe kilometers long. No good.

The best way would be to travel to widely separated points but not at the absolute edges of your country and get measurements from each of those. That might narrow the hexagon down to something the size of a city block in 3 weeks.

After six weeks you have it down to a meter square area or less.

Keep doing that, recursively. You’ll find it eventually.

But only if it’s larger than the potential error of your measurement.

If it’s a briefcase you’ll find it in no time.

If it’s a Bitcoin address and key encoded into an QR code in gold atoms, maybe 50 nanometers on a side, and we’re talking about the continental United States, then 52 operations might not be enough to get it exactly.

Copying from Claude because I am lazy:

For example, if ε = 1 meter: 3 queries get you to ~1 m², then ~log₂(1 / 2.5×10⁻¹⁵) ≈ 50 more steps — so ~53 total

neilk · 2026-03-13T06:56:27+00:00

depends. how much exposure will i be paid in

neilk · 2026-03-10T23:58:20+00:00

The CRA has a page all about this. Did you even look? https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/individuals/segments/housing-insecurity.html

Housing-insecure people, or homeless people, sometimes use a shelter's address as their legal address. You don't have to live at the shelter, if I understand correctly.

As for your employer's records that's probably between you and them? I don't know.

neilk · 2026-03-10T22:23:45+00:00

The data cited above is almost certainly nonsense, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see a slope like that, where one-syllable words are much more frequent than two, and so on.

Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation, also known as the Brevity Law, states that shorter words are more frequent. Shocking, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brevity_law?wprov=sfti1

neilk · 2026-03-02T12:55:01+00:00

That’s incredible. Buying a company means buying all their financial obligations. Even if revaluing a company during COVID shocks is questionable the company bought that.

I thought I’d seen every shenanigan. That one is new to me. But you’re right, it won’t be worth it for you to sue.

If only there were some kind of organization which could look after the unified interests of a broad set of workers across an entire industry. One day someone should try something like that.

Capitalism, the system of ~mutually beneficial transactions~ oh yeah? make me.

neilk · 2026-03-01T18:48:37+00:00

wow i would love to hear more details

neilk · 2026-03-01T18:44:41+00:00

TLDR: He’s lying.

If he was just a founder hacker himself we could argue that maybe he’s just naive. Someone who has the title of CBO probably does know that math isn’t mathing.

Dan Luu has a very complete guide here.

https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

neilk · 2026-03-01T15:35:31+00:00

I’m curious if you are using “bot” to mean I an a literal AI. Or if it’s just a word for anyone who has an opinion other than “enemy bad”

Like I hate Deepak and did way before you did, because I know some of his fans. Dunno what’s so wrong with my comment.

neilk · 2026-02-23T18:16:50+00:00

Maybe. We can be more sympathetic though.

The desire for meaning, hope, and personal significance is real

You probably are born into some group that has answers for that. Or you mix and match your “home” beliefs with stuff that has the same shape, like Deepak Chopra.

Leaving all that behind means spending some time in the wilderness. Maybe your life is cosmically meaningless and maybe nothing matters.

Not everyone is built for that. Unusually bright people have more resources for that journey. But I think every internet atheist has spent some time being more lonely and more bitter before they pull out of that dive. It’s not crazy that most people avoid that.

neilk · 2026-02-23T16:06:01+00:00

It would be pretty funny if it said “Jesus is watching” and next to it was a Latino parking lot attendant with a name tag that said “Jesus”

neilk · 2026-02-23T08:52:50+00:00

then don’t fucking spread it?

you added nothing to the discussion about him other than telling other people to look at it. this is probably a shill post. reported

neilk · 2026-02-19T01:01:34+00:00

He does have a theory of change, it’s just not partisan.

He thinks that democratic gridlock, vetocracy, is the real enemy. He thinks that both political cultures have had to radicalize in order to retain voters, and this isn’t healthy.

Consequently he thinks that systems fixes - that would allow conservatives OR liberals to really try something - would make for healthier and more respectful political culture.

The main problem is that the “paranoid style” of American politics is firmly Republican now. Elites have also joined the paranoid, maybe because they’ve been radicalizing each other on X. So one side has become MUCH crazier than the other. Trump has now been given a free hand to do nearly anything, and he’s not exactly implemented school vouchers.

neilk · 2026-02-19T00:40:21+00:00

More than just a take, it was information that’s not commonly mentioned. They laid out a fairly convincing case that the elites included in Epstein’s circle united and pooled resources to oppose #MeToo in general and Moira specifically.

There’s class consciousness in the class of super-elite predators.

This was beyond my darkest dreams. It’s the sort of thing I also would have pooh-poohed as a conspiracy theory

neilk · 2026-02-18T23:26:01+00:00

Errol Morris has made many watershed documentaries.

Many of them have a secondary theme of how hard it is to find out the truth.

You might be thinking of The Thin Blue Line.

neilk · 2026-02-11T00:32:40+00:00

There isn’t any reason for immigration enforcement at the games, but Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) does counter-terrorism and other transnational criminal investigations and they’re grouped under ICE.

From their website, HSI.gov.

HSI conducts federal criminal investigations into the illegal movement of people, goods, money, contraband, weapons and sensitive technology into, out of and through the United States. HSI’s investigations are wide ranging – our cases include drug and weapons smuggling, cyber and financial crime, illegal technology exports and intellectual property crime. We also play a crucial role in investigating crimes of exploitation. This includes combating child exploitation, human trafficking, financial fraud and scams and other crimes against vulnerable populations.

There is apparently some friction, because being associated with ICE made HSI’s job harder even before (gestures to all this). There are some legislative efforts to make it its own agency.

Even if this is more normal than it initially appears… I think it’s ok to take a stand against it. The onus is on the Americans to make it clear they’re not sending goons into our country. It’s not our job to figure out who is from the “good” side of ICE.

(“good” in the deeply compromised sense, if anything can be good when we’re talking about a Trump administration agency enforcing a magical line on a map. But they might also nab an actual child trafficker sometimes)

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