#money stuff

[andmaybegayer]

oh fuck I thought the intro to today's Money Stuff was going to be a metaphor for some crypto bullshit but no an actual metals futures market was backed by actual bags of rocks.

#money stuff

[cyle]

When I first graduated from college, and was broke, I got a lot of phone calls from fundraisers for my college, asking me to donate. I was like “you have billions of dollars, and I have tens of dollars, and you want me to give you money?” And they were like “okay, fair, but we don’t really want the money. What we want is to be able to report that a high percentage of recent alumni donate, because that makes us look good. If you send us a dollar, then you count as a donor, and we juice our numbers.” I never did it, or found that rationale all that compelling (look good to whom?), but I suppose it was my first exposure to accounting manipulation.

big same

(from monday's money stuff)

#money stuff #matt levine #trying to catch up on this week's newsletters

[shacklesburst]

This, from last week, is one of the best stories you’ll ever read about how regulation works:

Congress passed legislation intended to make life better for people allergic to sesame seeds. Instead, it made things worse.

The bill, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and signed into law by President Biden in 2021, requires manufacturers to label sesame on their products starting this year.

In response, some companies began adding sesame to products that hadn’t included it in the past—saying it was safer to add sesame and label it, rather than certify they had eliminated all traces of it.

People with sesame allergies say the result is fewer sesame-free food options, as well as new and unexpected risks from sesame in foods they used to eat without worry.

The issue is that it is hard to eliminate trace amounts of sesame, and the law now requires food manufacturers to label sesame as an allergen. Not putting sesame on the label effectively constitutes a promise that there is no sesame in the product, and if there is a little bit then you get in trouble:

Advising that the product “may contain” sesame on the label isn’t a practical solution since a trace amount of sesame detected could trigger a recall, the bakers group said. The Food and Drug Administration considers “may contain” a voluntary advisory that isn’t a substitute for good manufacturing practices meant to ensure that a product is allergen-free, and finding an undeclared allergen could be grounds for ordering a recall.

But if you say that the product definitely contains sesame, then you are immunized from trouble. So you just chuck some sesame into everything, change the labels, and you’re fine. It is easier to make sure that there is sesame than that there isn’t, so that’s what companies do.

Everything is like this? There are huge areas of regulation where the most straightforward approach is to look at the giant book of rules and say “no thank you, I want out of this entirely.” Making non-sesame food products is a heavily regulated business with huge risks if you mess up; making sesame-based food products just lets you escape from that regulatory regime, so you might as well throw in some sesame.

#money stuff #quotes #indeed every regulation is like that #can confirm

[facelessoldgargoyle]

Sometimes readers of this column email me with questions or ideas. A fairly high percentage of these questions and ideas are about how to insider trade. In general I try to avoid answering those questions, because (1) nothing in this column is legal advice and (2) I certainly do not want to give you advice about how to do crimes and not get caught.

matt ur crushing the entrepreneurial spirit

#Matt Levine #money stuff

[actuallylorelaigilmore]

© Reza Farazmand

#i've been trying really hard this year to be happy and not feel super deprived #while ALSO trying not to spend money so i can chip away at debt #so while i love these comics every time this one really hit me #(i don't anticipate finding any giant coins anytime soon but it's such a nice idea! a+ savings plan) #reza farazmand #comics #money stuff

[bethanydelleman]

Mrs. Norris managed to save a lot of money over her married life!

The original combined income of the Norrises was about £1000 pounds, £350 from her dowry of £7000 and the rest, about £600 probably, from the Mansfield living. We know Mr. Norris had hardly any private fortune.

By her husband's death, she has at least £12,000 in investments, since Sir Thomas says she will have £600 a year as a widow.

She has saved £5000 in 20 years. If she wasn't a horrid miser, I'd be impressed. Also, the income of Mansfield Parsonage significantly increased, since we know that Thornton Lacey is worth £700/year when Edmund is to have it and Sir Thomas says that will be less than half of his income. Mansfield must now be worth £750-800.

While there was a lot of inflation during this era, it was also possible to raise the income of a living by improving the attached farmland (gleb) and by ensuring that full tithes are being collected. Mrs. Norris, I am certain, would make sure she was getting her due!

#mansfield park #money stuff #mrs. norris #jane austen #I have a feeling that Mr. Norris never enjoyed dinner at home

[pastamic]

Help Two Queer Disabled People Keep Their Car

GoFundMe

Hi!

I try not to post stuff like this here bc I keep this blog for fandom, though I always try to reblog others posts of this nature. My health has been worse in recent months and I've been missing work a lot more bc of my seizures coming back, and of my dysautonomia getting worse. We got a call from our car company saying that they've sent our account to collections and that because of late fees and missing this months payment, we owe about $2k to them and they want $635 by the 23rd or they're going to repossess the car. We use the car to get me to work and get me to my appointments. My dysautonomia makes it so I pass out when I stand up so the bus isn't a particularly safe option so even if you can't donate please share this around as much as you can. We didn't even get a call until about two days ago and I don't get paid until the 27th so we're kind of scrambling to figure out what to do.

#gofundme #personal post #cars #car stuff #money stuff #please reblog

[7thedisasterdyke]

If I suddenly received 100,000 dollars, I would be set for life. I would continue to work, I’d move out of the US, but a house for cheap, and live life to the fullest extent possible.

On 100k.

An amount that most multi-millionaires find ridiculously small.

100k gets me anywhere really. I could do anything. The first thing I’d do is go on vacation probably. I’d take life at a slower pace and work only part time through college.

And multi-millionaires see it as chump change, to be spent on a 100-year-old bottle of wine or something

The discrepancy in America is ridiculous

#7 #money stuff

[gudamor]

Generally the way it works in financial services firms is that if you are a senior enough employee, and you quit to go work for a competitor, your old firm will

(1) prevent you from starting work at the competitor for a few months and

(2) pay you your salary during those months.

This is called “gardening leave,” and for some high-powered job changers, it is very annoying: They have big plans to get a running start at their new firm, and being held out of the game for months is a huge disadvantage. For other, somewhat less high-powered job changers, this is amazing: You get paid a big salary to not work. I wrote a few months ago about a guy who joined my investment-bank desk after a long gardening leave, stayed for a bit, then quit to go back to his old job, after another period of gardening leave. How I admired him! He had life figured out

-- Matt Levine, Money Stuff

#matt levine #money stuff #finance #this is the life #guess I chose the wrong field

[cyle]

been waiting for Matt Levine to write more about AI, and he doesn't disappoint

"Wells Fargo is using large language models to help determine what information clients must report to regulators and how they can improve their business processes. “It takes away some of the repetitive grunt work and at the same time we are faster on compliance,” said Chintan Mehta, the firm’s chief information officer and head of digital technology and innovation. The bank has also built a chatbot-based customer assistant using Google Cloud’s conversational AI platform, Dialogflow."

Do you think that Wells Fargo’s customer chatbot pushes customers to open more accounts to meet its quotas? Do you think that its regulatory-reporting chatbot then reports it to regulators? Soon Wells Fargo may be able to generate and negotiate billion-dollar regulatory settlements without any human involvement at all. ... Isn’t this sort of exciting? The widespread use of relatively early-stage AI will introduce new ways of making mistakes into finance. Right now there are some classic ways of making mistakes in finance, and they periodically lead to consequences ranging from funny embarrassment through multimillion-dollar trading loss up to systemic financial crises. Many of the most classic mistakes have the broad shape of “overly confident generalizing from limited historical data,” though some are, like, hitting the wrong button. But there are only so many ways to go wrong, and they are all sort of intuitive. ... Now some banker is going to type into a chat bot “our client wants to hedge the risk of the Turkish election,” and the chat bot will be like “she should sell some Dogecoin call options and use the proceeds to buy a lot of nickel futures,” and the banker will be like “weird okay whatever.” And that trade will go wrong in surprising ways, the client will sue, the client and the banker and the chat bot will all come to court, the judge will ask the chat bot “well why would this trade hedge anything,” and the chat bot will shrug its little imaginary shoulders and be like “bro why are you asking me I’m a chat bot.” Or it will say “actually the Dogecoin/nickel spread was ex ante an excellent proxy for Turkish political risk because” and then emit a series of ones and zeros and emojis and high-pitched noises that you and I and the judge can’t understand but that make perfect sense to the chat bot. New ways to be wrong! It will make life more exciting for financial columnists, for a bit, before we are all replaced by the chat bots.

🔥

#matt levine #money stuff #still trying to get this matt levine fandom off the ground

[shacklesburst]

If you want to make a 2x levered bet against Bitcoin, soon there might be an ETF for that.

gosh darn it, Matt, I would love nothing more, but I also don't want to throw away more money betting levered against the most consistently volatile investment vehicle in modern history than I would throw away betting on it

#mine #money stuff

[eternitysoup]

As I write this, my stomach is killing me because I had to stay up late and drink a RedBull and eat some donuts. What was I thinking? Anyway, onto my thoughts this morning.

Frugality is a hard necessity to master. Or maybe I'm just stressing because it's the 1st of the month, and I'm paying off some debts while watching our paycheck shrink just hours after it hit the bank. The first thing we did was pay back my sister and our neighbor: $300 and $420, respectively. They are great lifelines for loans when we need them, and I don't want to jeopardize anything like that. Someone who will lend you a few hundred bucks until payday without interest is just indispensable in these times.

The second thing I did was pay off the phone bill entirely. I had been making half payments on it for a while, but it didn't stop them from cutting it off last week. So this paycheck, I doubled up and paid everything off, past due $108, and current due $118, so I don't owe anything more until May. Having a phone is very important, even if I never leave my house. Also saw a notice that they are raising their base prices on my bill. Fun.

The third bill to be taken care of this morning is the electric bill. I'm still so miffed that last month, TXU charged me $25 because they charged my empty debit card instead of using the checking account I know I had set up in their app. I blame them, but I probably missed a step or a button somewhere.

After paying the electric bill, I took care of the Xfinity bill for $144 since it was due on the 3rd anyway.

I sat down and started going over our monthly pet supply order from Chewy. The dog needs new supplements, and we have to buy different cat food this time since it seems like the little girl cat throws up with the current brand. We're switching from Iams to PurinaOne this month to see how it does, and it's also on sale for a good price.

Funny thing, while I was doing my Chewy order, it said, "Orders over $100 get a free $30 gift card," so I used the promo code, and it increased my total amount. They charged me more tax and also took away my other discounts for brand loyalty with our American Journey dog food. My order was $280 before the promo and $285 after it. I opted to keep the promo, though, because I'm still ahead $25 with how it all shakes out, and the gift card will definitely be used in May.

That just leaves rent for $897, four credit card payments of about $50 each, and various small subscriptions like Hulu ($9), PS Plus ($17), YouTube ($25), and my FFXIV subscription ($15). I'm also aiming to put $100 in savings. So that leaves about $557 for the month for food, household items, or anything else that may come up. I definitely don't want to spend that entire remainder if I don't have to.

Side note: Absolutely forgot we have to return the old comcast equipment, still. Some of that stuff has been in our closet a year.

#journal #my blog #blog #life #my journal #my stuff #my post #finance #financial #money stuff #budget

[actuallylorelaigilmore]

This beautiful cat belongs to a childhood friend of mine who supported me through some rough teenage times, and I wish I could afford to help more than I can this holiday season, so I'm sharing in case anyone else would like to help and is able to.

#signal boost #gofundme #iggy the cat #money stuff #oh cats

[c-dock]

Woo. Got approved. Time to be a professional.

And I also have a commissions page:

#money stuff #help a starving demon out

[summersfirstsnow]

I think the world would be a better place if I never had to apply for anything, ever.

#life is just one damn application after another #jobs #school #money stuff #applications applications everywhere #... that first tag sounds like I'm complaining about apps and you know what I also hate apps #down with both applications for things and apps for things #and now a word from the blogger

[andmaybegayer]

If you looked at Robinhood and said “their marketing is terrible and their financial model is ridiculous,” in some important senses you were not wrong. But it went public at $32 billion, so in the most important sense — for a venture capitalist — you were wrong.

#Money Stuff #economics thunderdome