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- Lots of private work.
- Bought 2023 platinum season pass to six flags.
- Officially done with the world cup after this arg/mex game today. I try to find something watchable in soccer every few years on the biggest stage, but the flopping+boredom is simply a combination for an unenjoyable sport. Will try again in 2026, I guess. It takes 2 seconds of video review to determine if a player is acting. 5 game suspension. Problem solved.
- Played with harnesswealth and a few other calculators.
- Nemo is ocellaris. My platinum storm is technically ocellaris, but my orange/white/black clownfish are perculas. Others are frenatus (tomato), biaculeatus (maroon), clarkii (clark’s), perideraion (skunk), more. Bubbletips are compatible with many, but my long tentacle anemone will probably only host clark’s/skunk/saddleback/maroon (and sebae only clark’s/maroon).
- Ordered liveaquaria: rose bubbletip anemone, bluetip sebae anemone, sally lightfoot crab, saron shrimp, tiger cowrie, sailfin blenny.
- Live food research. Worms, bugs, artemia, more. Ordered some.
- Would love to have a full refugium in my sump cabinet, I just don’t have the space. I’ve experimented with copepods before (and phytoplankton to sustain them) so that I’d have a continuous supply of food streaming to the display tank, but could never sustain the population. I’d need a light in the stand, as well as pumps, plumbing, live rock/sand, etc. It’s called a “refugium” because it’s basically a mini version of your display tank, but allows refuge because creatures can live here without being preyed on by the fish. Grow extra algae, worms, plants, amphipods, etc.
- Brine shrimp hatchery. Also called sea monkeys, or artemia. Basically add eggs to tank water (needs light, heat, ph, salinity, flow/aeration, etc all the same). Incubate for about a day until they hatch, then separate the shrimp from eggs/other and add to tank. You could do this directly in your tank, but need to avoid the return pump crushing everything, filter, the egg waste, getting eaten before hatch, etc. Easier just to do separately.
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- Did some research on Pipe, the ARR-backed financing company. All 3 founders stepping down. Citing “inexperience”…but one allegedly lent 80M from pipe to a btc miner last year.
- Mr Dodgy tournament. 32 players, 2×16 round robins, then 16 knockout. 5+0 format. Magnus, dubov, grischuk, keymer, esipenko, svidler, more. Chaos.
- (duh) Remember bonds are securities. Fixed income.
- The fox sports streaming service for world cup is garbage. Invalid token signatures, bad cookies, unknown error codes. Have to go incognito or clear every day. Just switched to other streamers.
- USA/England tie 0-0 after 90min.
- Lots of private work.
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- Thanksgiving. Made a pork center cut loin, glazed with maple honey. Made scratch roasted garlic sauce. Called family.
- NFL, world cup, chess.
- ISDA = international swaps and derivatives association. The ability to participate in much larger deals.
- Curated contacts.google.com. Merged all suggestions. Added details. Deleted junk contacts. Deleted labels. Added birthdays so they’d show up in gcal.
- Lots of private work.
- Baking powder is alkaline. Add it to the dry rub. Increases the skin’s pH, allowing proteins to break down easily, making skin more brown/crispy. Baking soda does the same thing, but adds a weird flavor.
- Upgraded to ios 16.1.1.
- Watched the big short for the first time in a while. Summary below.
- Mortgage-backed securities. MBS. Like bonds. Like any other securitization process (think equity in companies). Act as the intermediary between borrower and lender. Wrap a bunch of mortgages (loans) into an MBS instrument and sell it. The buyer acts as the lender (investor) and the seller takes a small cut. The end user is the homeowner, paying interest as expected.
- This is a type of CDO, collateralized debt obligation. There’s MBS, ABS (asset-backed), etc. There’s also CBO (bond), CLO (loan), etc.
- There are tranches of credit ratings. A scale of risk. AAA -> AA -> A -> BBB -> BB -> B -> CCC etc. AAA is the lowest risk. Risk increases down the scale (but so can return, of course).
- There’s allegedly some bad incentivization in the ratings market too. You could get a higher grade by working directly with the agency (paying…).
- MBSs started as high quality (in the As).
- MBS returns were great, but it’s a finite market. There are only so many houses and people with enough money to pay mortgages safely.
- So lenders started dipping into the less-reliable bucket. Subprime lending. Giving home loans to people with bad credit. A bubble that feels fine now and bites later.
- These risky mortgages started bleeding into the MBS, causing the majority of mortgages in bonds to be in the Bs (way lower quality).
- That, plus many had adjustable rates that would begin trigging in 07.
- CDS is insurance for a loan. They’ve existed since the early 1990s. The buyer is usually the lender. They pay extra. As expected. They’re getting insurance. The seller is usually a bank who prices the risk of default. If the borrowers of the loans default, the seller of the CDS pays the buyer. The bank pays the lender. It’s a hedge. Without this, the default means the lender loses. With this, they pay a little extra for the insurance.
- But CDSs can apply to any risky investment. Michael Burry wanted to short the housing market (due to the above), so he went around to a ton of different banks and bought CDSs from them. He gets paid if mortgages (borrowers) default. It costs him extra money to buy these. In his case, it’s an investment, not an insurance policy. It’s a little weird, that’s why it was a new use case; basically buying an insurance policy on someone else as a potential payday (since he wasn’t the lender doing a hedge). The banks just expected to get paid an expected premium by selling these instruments, since the likelihood of default was perceptibly low.
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- Registered for AWS re:Invent (next week).
- Speed Chess Championship started. Really weird format. It’s a 1:1 multi-mode match every few days.
- Called and emailed motogrrl to extend my ducati parking through dec and jan.
- Wild Wild Country on netflix. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Nuts.
- Lots of private work.
- Committed sbsc lines for thanksgiving week.
- Did an analysis of the nominal sbsc statistics but restricted to only this season so far (11 weeks). Used that to submit my picks.
- Underdog 54, favorite 43.6.
- Home 49.1, visitor 48.4.
- Best coverers, in order (everyone over 50% cover, 10 total): titans, giants, pats, cowboys, bengals, commanders, seahawks, jets, lions, falcons.
- Overperformance: cowboys (8!!), jets, seahawks, pats, bills, jags, titans, commanders, 49ers, chiefs.
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- Submitted GeminiEarn withdrawls. We’ll see if they close in the next week.
- I’ve mentioned it before (I believe), but I’ve been dabbling with no alcohol for a few months now. Feeling like superman. Will continue this. Full sobriety december?
- Updated sbsc banner.
- Lots of private work.
- Went on a haunted tour around greenwich. Anne Charlotte Lynch House (Poe stayed there), The Hangman’s Elm (nw corner of wsp, hangings happened there), Brown Building (Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, killed 146 people), the Murder House (Twain lived here and saw ghosts), Marie’s Crisis Cafe (when Thomas Paine died), Chumley’s (haunted speakeasy), Cherry Lane Theatre (off broadway, haunted).
- Did a bunch of model building. StochPy in python. Sent Aladdin request.
- Route53 increased its annual prices by $1.
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- Sports all day yesterday. World cup opener, qatar/ecuador. Today US first game. NFL. Niners tonight. Warriors rockets, first road win! Champions Chess Tour Finals, magnus.
- Sidenote – soccer is such a boring spectacle. >90min can be highlighted in <30sec. Watching grown men writhe in agony from zero contact is really uncomfortable. Lots of running. Little action. Ties allowed. Just not an enjoyable sport.
- Tons of private work.
- Research in isoftpull, veriff, salesforce, tons of lateral products. Looking at loanpro as well.
- Remember grayscale has a bunch of trusts and funds and ETF products to allow the avg investor to get crypto exposure through standard brokers. But their parent is Digital Currency Group (DCG), like many of the others. Do…the reserves exist?
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- Supercontest. One of the matchups wasn’t clickable on mobile (worked fine on desktop): https://gitlab.com/bmahlstedt/supercontest/-/issues/167
- Did breathwork sitting down today (instead of lying down) to test on-the-go practices. Was ok, but I prefer fully horizontal.
- Submitted arrive-alive guarantee claim for yellow & purple wrasse.
- Did a bunch of research on 409As and tender offers (how to run them as if I were the finance team).
- Lots of private work.
