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Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
I work for the Internet and am an advisor to . These are my personal opinions unless otherwise noted.
東京都 Tokyokalzumeus.comJoined February 2009

Patrick McKenzie’s Tweets

Bits about Money will be back today with a deep dive into First Republic's old line of credit program, discussing the strategy, how it related to the deposit franchise, and connecting "making good loans to customers who can pay them back" to the banking crisis.
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“Who do you use for DNS?” To save you some command line sorcery, it is DNSimple. They’re large enough to be competent and small enough that I expect them to laugh at someone claiming to be me trying to pretext CS into transferring out my domains.
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GCP’s firewall product, presuming there is one, is one promotion cycle away from being sunset. I trust Amazon and MicroSoft to maintain theirs until the heat death of the universe.
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It occurs to me that I’m reacting as if this is their DNS product not their web-page-builder-in-a-box product but *shrug* the org I knew with a Domains account used it as DNS until I migrated us (mostly for reasons unrelated to dispreferring Google).
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I hate feeling like I’m piling on but it’s hugely important to understand that implicit and explicit guarantees of continuity of service from Google are obvious untruths.
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News you can use if you have hypothetically made the (poorly considered) decision to rely on Google as an infrastructure provider.
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"In an unexpected announcement today, Google Domains is “winding down following a transition period,”" *unexpected* 🤣 9to5google.com/2023/06/15/goo
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“Aren’t you being a bit harsh on this U.S. institution for being unable to read Japanese? Is that a reasonable expectation for them?” They have an office in Tokyo because it is a financial center servicing the world’s 3rd largest economy. This is entirely a competence problem.
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“Does crypto solve this?” To the extent they handle their KYC and AML obligations by ignoring that they have KYC and AML obligations. The thing I want is %{+}^{+ing competent administration of those obligations. (Or I’d accept a different KYC/AML regime!)
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Once the professionals get talking this will be very easy to resolve via e.g. “So you will of course accept a one paragraph letter in English from the CPA who signed the tax return confirming the two relevant numbers” “Oh come to think of it we don’t need that *close ticket*”
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Currently trying to pierce the veil of underpaid and not very competent CS people and get put in touch directly with Compliance to have a “Look, asked and answered, put it in the file and let’s move on with our lives” conversation.
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Raspberry for the U.S. financial institution which a) believed I was doing something hinky sending yen to Japan, b) asked me for documents substantiating my use (tax payment), then c) complained that they cannot read the documents because they are in Japanese. *sigh*
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Policymakers would consider that something akin to insubordination, in this telling. I buy it. There are many other orgs in the world that treat engineers like peons. (Software people have been busy crushing them in detail for the last two decades.)
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Also a good note: tech employees are a subset, and not a particularly influential subset, of the mere implementers of policy rather than the movers and shakers who set it. There is no functioning channel for them to say “The thing you asked us to do will have negative results.”
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Also appreciated the point made that private industry expects to spend >> 90% of the software development lifecycle post-launch, with substantial ongoing change to software. The government, on the other hand, expects to spend 90% pre-launch and budgets ~nothing for changes.
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(This is similar to my previous point that government payroll modernization projects fail so frequently because no stakeholder allows themselves to confront decades worth of spiffs, set asides, negotiated benefits, etc. The state cannot make legible *to itself* its pay policies!)
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The example given is that a state unemployment insurance (UI) scheme is not a binder of rules designed to coherently address the state’s goals. It is 90 years of memos modifying previous memos, accumulating like sediment. Plus court cases, etc. What are the rules? “All of it.”
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A particularly important point is that the symptom “failed software modernization project” is often just visible evidence of incoherent policy, which was the case for decades but not legible until one was forced to actually attempt to implement the policy.
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“Can you give a concrete example of anti-social behavior?” Buying a TV from Best Buy to watch the Super Bowl then returning it the following day. Buying 5,000 garments per year and returning 4,950 of them.
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“Returning things isn’t anti-social behavior!” See this is you, a normally socialized human being, thinking that everyone else is a normally socialized human being, when that is extremely not the case.
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I think this overstates the case, but I do know that increase in (for lack of a better word) anti-social behavior is driving interest in IT and Ops investments to track returns by customer with more granularity, which has found super-Pareto distribution every time it was tried.
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Within 5 years, the uniquely American "return it within 30 days for a full refund, no questions asked" policy which is standard in the United States will be dead.
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I understand that the friendly neighborhood saleswoman needs to get her salary from somewhere but as a general rule of thumb all the good things for her to pitch are bad things for you to buy. (This is extremely, extremely the case in my adoptive home vis financial services.)
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Me: “I am given to understand that Japanese people, partially through their government but also on their own accounts and through various intermediaries, are one of the largest holders of Treasuries.” Bank: “Oh you seem to know a lot about this.” Me: “*sigh*”
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Me: “I am afraid that is not a competitive interest rate, especially since you will build a substantial fee into the FX quote on the dollars.” Bank: “Who offers a better rate?!?” Me: “The United States of America, among others.” Bank: “Oh that’s right they will do biz w/ you.”
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Bank: “You seem like someone who wants to save in dollars!” Me: “Oh dear.” Bank: “So much easier to understand than yen!” Me: “Oh dear.” Bank: “Can we interest you in a 2 year CD?” Me: “… Strictly hypothetically, at what rate?” 2%.
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FWIW, Ruriko and I use a variant of this. I prefer numbers for communicating state but she doesn’t so instead it’s a “I expect to drop some balls?” “How many?” “I will definitely get the kids to school.” sort of qualitative update.
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This is a phenomenal shorthand for one of the most vital things any couple needs to be able to communicate effectively if they have hopes of weathering any even mildly difficult circumstances together twitter.com/julianakilrose…
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It would also certainly occasion lawsuits because conversion is a tort (has a specific legal meaning here, does not refer to converting Foo to Bar). But Binance has a tolerance for tortious behavior and general lawlessness that few financial institutions have.
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If you owe a debt to your user denominated in Foo and you profess to actually have sufficient Foo, needing to update your contracts to give you the right to unilaterally redenominate your debts into Bar is… a curious choice.
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Interesting choice for a company which claims that it actually possesses all of the assets which it custodies for users.
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Binance updated its TOS (binance.com/en/terms) within the past week to say that it might "in its discretion convert such Digital Assets [that it's delisted] to a different type of Digital Asset."
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The trillion dollar company Purchasing department will have questions but people are smart enough to successfully sell them toilet paper, and this is exactly as interesting to Purchasing as a toilet paper purchase order.
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News you can potentially use: I now know a handful of full-time OSS maintainers, all largely supported by a main support contact with one of AppAmaGooBookSoft for $100k-250k per year. This is pitched internally as cheaper than maintaining internal experts and then put through.
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