sevan

At a prior employer, we noticed that there were many customers getting essentially free service ($100-200 per month) by calling customer service hundreds of times per month and asking for credits for all sorts of things. They were generally very nice and just picked up $5-10 credits until their service was free. Beyond the free service, they were costing the company the expense of the service calls.

We started routing all of them to a small group of agents and flagged the accounts so the agents would deny them pretty much every time. It was kind of funny because we didn't tell them anything changed, but you could see that some of them noticed because they started asking which call center they were talking to. They would immediately hang up and call back over and over and just keep going back to the same place. Eventually most of them gave up.

Note: nobody here would/should feel sorry for this particular company, but I still thought it was funny to see these scammers get mad that we caught on to the scam.

I joked recently that I should put a ruinously large bet on Trump to win the election. That way, if he wins, I'll get a huge payout, which will soften the blow a bit. If Harris wins, I'd be broke, but at least I'd be happy that Trump lost.

Worst book I've quit is Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. What a horrible book!

Worst I've finished is Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, immediately followed by Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. I'll throw in a special mention for The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby. All terrible books that I finished only because they were required reading in school.

Maybe JD Vance turned the camera upside down.

One thing to keep in mind is that the reported GDP is net of inflation and the average market return is not. So, 2-3 percentage points of the gap is explained by inflation. We're also sitting at or near all-time highs from a valuation standpoint, so some of that 8-12% is explained by increased valuations. To get 8-12% going forward, we would either need to see a GDP boom or valuations have to keep growing.

That said, valuations do seem to go up at a higher rate than GDP over the long run, even with those issues accounted for. I'm guessing the rest of the issue is some combination of productivity growth and the fact that GDP is defined by national borders and companies are not. There is also likely some impact from credit cycles, particularly the fact that interest rates declined from 1980 to 2022.

So, is nvidia the cisco of this cycle?

Its an OK game. I got it on sale and don't regret the time spent playing it, but the controls are awkward and there wasn't much nuance to the story. There appear to be lots of potential story-line elements based on your decisions, but it was too slow and cumbersome to be worth a replay for me.

By comparison, I quit Heavy Rain pretty early, I seem to recall walking around yelling for my child for an extended period of time and that was the last I ever played it. IMO, Detroit is a much better game than that.

It looks like Steam has it on sale for $12 at the moment, which is less than I paid for it. I played it one time through for 12 hours, so $1 per hour of entertainment isn't terrible. Not a glowing endorsement, I guess.

Thanks, I'm guessing the benefit of subscribing is to create that persistent relationship. The free version from MS that I'm using times out after a while. I definitely get the problem of it making up experience for me when it encounters something in a job description that isn't referenced anywhere in my info. Honestly, I'd probably get more interviews if I just let it make up stuff, but I'm guessing that might become a problem for me later. :)

I interviewed for a job recently and asked why the position was vacant. They said the previous person died. I didn't have the courage to ask if the death was work-related though.

Can you share a bit about how you used it? I've used Copilot a bit to try the same thing, but it makes so many errors that I spend too much time editing and fixing them. Also, after running quite a few cover letters, I found that the text was repetitive and unnatural in a way that made it really obvious that it was an LLM writing the letter and not a person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen_movement

Morons who think their country's laws don't apply to them.

This is great information, thanks! In several cases it wouldn't have helped us because of the 3 day advance request requirement, but at least its an improvement. Still not as good as what auto mechanics are required to provide, but its a step in the right direction.