Good for you! It’s fun when you realize it’s a constructed language that also tends towards precision. While accounting is not my favorite, financial models as a whole are incredibly powerful reasoning tools. On par, for me, with engineering or physics based first-principles reasoning.
Which financial models best describe reality in your opinion?
I'd always wanted to view affairs from a different lens, though I often feel the people who think everything revolves around bond rates or inflation numbers can miss the social picture of why things happen.
> Which financial models best describe reality in your opinion?
That’s a subject that fills many volumes on accounting, finance and economics. I don’t think you should be looking for one best theory, because there are valid differences of opinion in all these fields.
> I'd always wanted to view affairs from a different lens, though I often feel the people who think everything revolves around bond rates or inflation numbers can miss the social picture of why things happen.
The ‘social picture’ is what’s called welfare economics, which is a whole field in itself. I wouldn’t jump straight into welfare economics though, you’ll probably need to start with introductory economics to understand the basic terminology.
> Which financial models best describe reality in your opinion?
The most-powerful ones for individuals are the micreconomic mechanisms. Understanding how leverage, tranching and moving risk (and reward) across stakeholders and time, work, for instance. The necessary mechanisms and tradeoffs one must make, as well as the ones one should.
If you're looking for a formal model, it's the balance sheet. But not the accountant's. The financier's. Sources and uses, and uses and sources. Payments in, payments out. How do they balance over time; how do they change exposures to different layers of economic and legal control.
The primitives of these models are transactions and people. When you look through them, they're defining human wants and ambitions, faults and fears, patience and mortality.
That’s such an overly complicated answer. I’ve noticed people from a financial background often do this. Why? Does it make you feel special? Lmao.
It’s all basic stuff, often wrapped in jargon to throw people off.
If the fella wants to be properly informed, he needs a very strong understanding of fundamental microeconomic principles, along with macroeconomics. On top of that an understanding of financial accounting.
And… on top of that an understanding of corporate finance and valuation. Aswath Damodaran (look him
Up on YouTube) is the go-to person for this.
Only then you will form a complete picture of what’s going on and make well informed statements about the future.
It's such common language in business that I didn't even realize I was writing so much jargon. I hope you inspired some people to look up the terms. It's really not that hard to understand.... Even CEOs can do it.
With the way I've seen some companies run, I'm not so sure CEOs can lol.
It's been interesting so far. The tough part for me is a the literature is all wrapped in "make your company more successful and profitable", and to be honest I couldn't give a shit about it that. I'm doing this for me, and because (especially on the age of AI) understanding this stuff is more important than ever.
They can, but they might not. Richard Branson famously said he didn't know the difference between gross and net even though he was at the head of Virgin Records.
I'm just stating out on this, so I haven't gotten through everything I want to read yet.
Right now I'm reading Financial Intelligence by Karen Berman and and Joe Knight. There's different versions, but I choose the one "for managers". So far it's done a good job making the material understandable for someone who doesn't have a degree in finance. This the one that's more relevant to the post and will help you start understanding how companies operate at a financial level.
For personal finance I have read
I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi and A Random Walk Down Wallstreet by Burton G. Malkiel. The first sounds "click-batey" but that's because "I will teach you the boring effective way to manage you're finances" doesn't sell. The latter gets more into the weeds on investing. Bother are great (though Random Walk has been edited many times and the beginning of the book has become bloated, so I'd recommend skimming it a bit since it's just history on epic financial crashes).
I'm going to copy/paste a reply I left for another commentor, so I don't have to retype everything lol
I'm just stating out on this, so I haven't gotten through everything I want to read yet.
Right now I'm reading Financial Intelligence by Karen Berman and and Joe Knight. There's different versions, but I choose the one "for managers". So far it's done a good job making the material understandable for someone who doesn't have a degree in finance. This the one that's more relevant to the post and will help you start understanding how companies operate at a financial level.
For personal finance I have read
I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi and A Random Walk Down Wallstreet by Burton G. Malkiel. The first sounds "click-batey" but that's because "I will teach you the boring effective way to manage you're finances" doesn't sell. The latter gets more into the weeds on investing. Bother are great (though Random Walk has been edited many times and the beginning of the book has become bloated, so I'd recommend skimming it a bit since it's just history on epic financial crashes).
This was my favorite bit, "We're going to steal countless copy righted works and completely ignore software licenc... wait, what? You aren't allowed to turn around and do it to us! Stop that right now!"
Say hello to the future of the programming. It might take a few years, but eventually this will be standard procedure. You'll start seeing them in the interactions you have with the agent, then in comments, then maybe the agent will offer to throw together a nice little demo of something for you free of charge, just to show you your options.
Use the Neovim extension for VScode. It requires you to have Neovim installed, but it works way better then the Vim extension since it passes commands to neovim instead of using emulation.
It's funny because I miss this one all the time. I got use it in Sublime and VScode before making the jump to Neovim. I know you can get similar functionality from macros and what not, but it's just not the same.
"Google is doing this thing that is total bullshit, but now they're given you slightly less shit. What a win! Our glorious corporate overlords are so generous!"
What a joke. It's not a journalist job to shill for corporations
I try to be fair minded, but some things warrant strong reactions in my opinion. Journalists shilling for corporations exerting more control over a platform they already have too much control over is one of them.
The mods or whoever are welcome to remove my comment if they think it's too far out of line.
It's called the door-in-the-face technique. You ask for ten times what you want and get told to fuck off (the other person slams the door in your face). Then you ask for what you actually want, and having just told you to fuck off with the larger request, the other person is more likely to say yes to the smaller request.
The linked tweet leads to another tweet which leads to an article that doesn't say anything about OpenAI. It's talking about a new compression algorithm from Google potentially making memory usage 6x more efficient for LLM workloads.
Yeah that confused me, but the compression paper also doesn’t make a ton of sense since I doubt Google would have released it if it was actually such a competitive advantage compared to what other labs are doing. So I wonder what’s actually causing the price decrease.
reply