My experience with this is that contract is usually better paid than perm, so when it comes time to convert to perm I am not willing to take the pay cut so I go contract somewhere else, or remain with them as a repeat contractor.
HR usually stops my clients from hiring me perm at 2X the rate they pay their full time employees, despite the strong demonstration of competence that I’ve shown over the last few months.
My clients are usually unable to make permanent employment with them more appealing than repeat contracting with them.
Loan to Value (LTV) is a percentage that tells you how safe a loan is. You divide the amount of the loan by the value of the building. So if I buy a building for 10 million with a 6 million loan and 4 million of my own money then I have an LTV of 60%.
This means if I go bankrupt then the bank can sell the building and get its money back.
If the value of the building halves because the rent halved then I have a 6 million loan on a 5 million building. My LTV is 120%. The bank cannot get its money back by selling the building.
No bank is going to give me a loan on a property with an LTV of 120% so I’m stuck with my current bank. My current bank then increases my interest rate because I am now a very high risk customer who can’t leave. This is very expensive for me.
One way out of this situation is to get my LTV back to 60% which means I need to reduce the loan to 3 million by finding 3 million to pay off part of the loan.
Another way out is to sell the building for 5 million then pay the bank one million, exiting the deal with a loss of 1 million.
None of these are good for me. I’ll do anything to keep the value of the building high by charging high rents even if no one can actually pay the rents and the building sits empty.
Long term I might be able to exit by getting permission to convert it to flats.
Don't forget that long term the current downturn is likely to end and so I will again be able to get the rent in a few years if I can just hold on for these bad years.
... which sort of assumes that the global downturn and the local downturn are completely unrelated.
Like, if a rent hike pushes out the tenant who has been there the longest, who has the most consistent revenue stream, in other words is the surest bet, then that, all by its lonesome, should be a pretty clear risk indicator to the bank.
The commercial market is functionally frozen and illiquid. Owners can’t come down without declaring bankruptcy, bankruptcy is bad for lenders because they can’t move the property for the loan amount so you essentially have a mass delusion because accepting reality would bankrupt much of the existing players and start a crisis
Cool idea, I tapped the vehicles / heavy equipment tabs expecting to be taken to listings. Nothing happened. Maybe these should all take you to a page that lets you sign up to see listings?
That structure is common. "Not X, but Y" plus "Rule of three." It's not that humans don't ever use that structure, but it's rare outside of LLM output.
Any single data point doesn't mean it was LLM generated, but they add up.
I like the Single responsibility part of SOLID. It makes the code much easier to reason about. The Liskov Substitution principle is also super important. Subclasses should fully replace the parent class.
The I and O of solid are fine and don’t cause too many problems.
But I agree that Dependency Inversion is a recipe for loads of pointless interfaces that are only ever used once. I strongly prefer the traditional pattern where high level modules depend on lower level modules, it’s much simpler.
Normally there are more than 2 actors, which changes the reward structure.
X spends resources to kill Y. This benefits X because X doesn’t have to compete with Y anymore.
However Z also gets the benefits because they don’t have to compete with Y either. In addition Z hasn’t spent any resources to eliminate Y so Z wins. The stable equilibrium is 100% strategy Z.
Most animals will use violence in self defence, or when fighting over a specific resource. They don’t kill to remove competition.
Chimps and humans are an exception to this. Likely it’s because the coalitional nature of human and chimp violence reduces the cost of inflicting the violence to near zero, and the costs are spread across the group, so it’s worth doing.
I’m curious why you dismiss the sentience argument with its “just numbers.”
I think our brains are just a bunch of cells and one day we will have a full understanding of how our brains work. Understanding the mechanism won’t suddenly make us not sentient.
LLMs are the first technology that can make a case for its own sentience. I think that’s pretty remarkable.
Making parents control devices is too much. People do what’s “normal” right now normal is to give unrestricted access to kids when they’re 10 or 11.
It takes incredible conviction and force of will to keep your kids off the phone till they’re 16. Fewer than 1% of parents manage it. The problem is that the teenager wants a thing that everyone else has and it’s hard to keep saying no.
I think internet connected smartphones should be illegal for kids under 16 to own or use. It’s a tough sell tho.
HR usually stops my clients from hiring me perm at 2X the rate they pay their full time employees, despite the strong demonstration of competence that I’ve shown over the last few months.
My clients are usually unable to make permanent employment with them more appealing than repeat contracting with them.
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