> The issue has arisen from idle cash sitting in customer accounts at brokerage firms and large banks, which “sweep” otherwise uninvested funds into interest-bearing alternatives in order to generate income. The SEC is looking into whether the firms steered those clients into sweep accounts that paid little or no interest, and whether the financial advisers at those groups had a fiduciary duty to advise clients they could make higher returns if they moved their cash into other accounts.
Yes. Before brokerages were part of banks, cash in a brokerage account was usually stored in a money-market fund, with whatever interest money market funds were paying. Once merging with a bank, cash was swept into an in-house bank account.
This didn't matter much when money market funds were paying near zero interest.
But the zero interest rate era is over. Except for demand deposits in banks, which pay well below money market rates. Often near zero.
That's what's going on here.
It's a conflict of interest created by the end of Glass-Stegall, which kept brokerages and banks apart.
My parents instilled in me a mild distrust of banks. It's for this reason that I get my statements mailed to me each month, and each month I reconcile what's on the paper with what's in my spreadsheet.
Guess what? Every year I find a mistake in at least one bank statement. And it's always in the bank's favor. Sometimes it's a few cents, but once it was a few hundred dollars across multiple errors.
When I've told people this in the past, I've been dismissed with "Oh, I use Venmo instead of a bank, so it's always right," or "Oh, it's too hard to figure so that out."
I simply don't understand people who blindly accept what an app or web site tells them about something as important as their own money.
I know they don't teach balancing a checking account in high school anymore, but you should be able to add and subtract to get through life.
Unless you hold a lot of money, you're at the mercy of someone actually caring to fix it, and if not an annoying and possibly expensive lawsuit
It's not I trust the bank, its just the times they've stolen under $500 from me they've more or less said 'fuck you deal with it' and after that I can just work to make the cash back a lot easier than I can sue for it. So I just closed my accounts and did that.
Fighting the banks over chump change sounds nice in theory or if you can start a class action but if not it's kind of like suing the cops, basically a wild goose errand for anyone but someone with a lot of time and a pro bono lawyer.
Somewhat related story about banks just saying "fuck you deal with it."
I left a subscription and long story short I got charged an extra $119, which was the monthly fee at the time. I reached out to the business over and over again and eventually they just said they were not refunding it unless I came back as a recurring customer, which I wasn't interested in doing. I submitted a charge back, submitting all my supporting information that the charge was extraneous beyond what I had agreed to pay, and eventually after a few months the bank (Discover) agreed with me and claimed the chargeback was settled.
Fast forward nearly a year later and boom a $119 charge pops up on my card. Discover tells me that the retailer had appealed (a process I was never notified about and didn't get a chance to respond to), that they accepted the appeal and the decision was final.
The wrinkle in this is that at the time I was in the process of digging out of a high five figures in credit card debt and this card had a ~$25k balance month to month so they were getting about $600/mo in interest from me. I called a manager and said "I have been paying this off at the rate of $2-3k/mo and plan on continuing to do so if you reverse that charge, otherwise I'm transferring the balance to another card and the interest ends today."
For whatever reason they were totally willing to throw that money away over $119, so I transferred the balance and closed the account. It is totally believable to me that they would do more or less the same thing with stealing money from cash accounts, if not intentionally then at least negligently and not taking the time to properly investigate.
Most of the mistakes I see are things like restaurants charging more than what was on the bill, and if you paid with a credit card, these are usually very easy to dispute. From actual banks, I haven't seen any problems, and yes I check whether the interest and dividend payouts are correct--they always are.
The article here is about banks defaulting customers to low-yield sweep accounts, but it doesn't look like they are actually under-paying interest. The accounts just don't pay a lot of interest. Honestly, the customer should know how much interest their sweep account pays and move that money to higher interest accounts if that's important to them. Whenever I put cash in a brokerage that I'm not going to use for a while, I always take the time to move it from the cash sweep account to an interest-bearing account. Buyer beware!
I see it less as an issue of blind trust and more of an opportunity cost I guess. While it does raise my blood pressure that banks can slip in these little mistakes that almost always favor them, I don't see myself ever investing as much time and effort as you did to verify the numbers every month.
Maybe once these AI agents get reliable enough, it might be a fun side project to automate the verification process.
> Every year I find a mistake in at least one bank statement. And it's always in the bank's favor. Sometimes it's a few cents, but once it was a few hundred dollars across multiple errors.
How much time have you spent on this overall compared to the amount of money you saved by noticing these errors? I certainly don't think it's fair for banks to get away with this, but I'm not convinced that tracking things at that level of detail would be worth it for most people
How do we know that banks are making these errors if no one checks? It might be a few bucks on your account here and there but if that happens over millions of customers... That's a nice little scheme for banks to get away with.
We don't, unless they take a large enough mount that someone notices anyways. To me, that's more an argument that there should be more regulation here (Glass-Steagall was mentioned in another comment, which doesn't directly address this specific issue but it helps address perverse incentives in general) than the idea that people should have to spend time on this. Given how vital banks are to modern life and the number of purchases that an average household would need to check against each month, this seems like a case where the common good is better served by holistic changes than telling people "just do the work yourself". I'm politically more on the left than the average person though, so obviously opinions here will differ.
Startup idea: we audit your financial accounts for you. Do a Plaid-style link, and we take it from there. Charge whatever antivirus subscriptions cost.
Of course the startup also charges banks to find errors in the customers' favor.
I'm really curious to know what type of bank errors you are talking about. If they are true errors then they should not be biased either way. i.e. sometimes they would be biased on your favor. But if they are always biased in their favor then maybe they are not really errors?
So it seems that over multiple years and considerable hours spent on this chore, the payout was a few hundred dollars? Assuming it was corrected? That's not a great cost/benefit ratio.
My understanding is that most[1] other satellite devices use a centralized dispatch center who have experience with backcountry emergencies.
Speculating obviously, but that article makes it sound like Apple might have tried do something else and that whatever they came up with is more equipped to deal with frontcountry issues.
(Important caveats: I have family and friends who work in healthcare and drug discovery, so I’ve got a tiny bit of layperson background on this, but this is far from my field and I’m far from an expert)
If this caused anyone to be interested in what happens to snowflakes after they fall on the ground, The Snow Grain Photo Library[1] has a library of photos of snow in various states of decomposition and metamorphosis.
I think you may have just re-discovered Disruptive Innovation (sometimes also called Disruption Theory): incumbents over-serve their customers by adding lots of features, complexity, and cost. Upstarts can attack them by focusing on only a few core features and/or low price. The incumbents can't respond without annoying their existing customers who have grown accustomed to all the features the incumbent provides.
YouTube seems to be playing the boiling frog experiment with people. I started YouTubing in 2006 and there were no ads. Then, eventually they added monetization and you could place a single ad at the beginning of your videos. Now I see video with 10x two ads interspersed. You have to constantly click to bypass them. It's getting incredibly annoying, and it just seems greedy, especially coming from Google.
That, combined with generally treating their content creators like they are completely disposable. I hope someday someone disrupts YouTube. It seems to me, besides the "network effect", the main difficulty here is unfortunately the cost of bandwidth. I could host a reddit clone from my home machine or some cheap VPS if I wanted and scale up to several thousand users, but video content at 5 megabits per second... How do you get bandwidth cheap enough to host that? Are there hosting providers that will just serve files over HTTP for super cheap?
Up front disclosure, I am the founder of a video hosting company.
I think you have very quickly found the reason for YouTube boiling the frog. Bandwidth, encoding, and storage all have costs associated with them. They are not simply free and so YouTube has to pay for these costs somehow.
There has been a mindset shift in the Internet at some point where originally people paid for premium services, and then it swung to everything for FREE. But nothing is actually free, what happened is a tradeoff in who pays from the end consumer/producer, you, to advertising companies.
So it's now up to all of us as users of the Internet whether we are happy with that deal. I personally am not, as allowing someone else to shape my thoughts in exchange for free services is not something I believe is beneficial to humanity. I'm doing my part, but it's up to each and everyone else to make their choice and do their's. Or don't if you are satisfied with the current deal.
On the storage front, it seems to me like you could get around that a bit by not keeping content forever. You could make a more ephemeral video hosting site.
As for paying for content, I think there's an opportunity to combine ideas from YouTube with Patreon. Tipping or supporting specific content creators you like. You move away from an ad-driven model towards a model where you get some basic content for free, but you can pay extra for more content.
These are good ideas. Our theory is that by simplifying the complexity of video hosting, it makes it viable for more people to test against various business models without having to do the heavy lifting of figuring out video encoding, delivery, and storage just to start. Basically similar to the role that WordPress, et al provided for websites themselves.
There is likely some new model that doesn't require fully ad-based or fully premium paid. We work with customers every day who are iterating on a variety of business models. I think in the end we will see a disaggregation of YouTube just like we have seen in many other once complex and costly spaces in tech.
Also manual moderation is pretty expensive, as is dealing with the copyright lawsuits and to top it off the patent licenses for streaming video in the first place.
Content, advertising, and bandwidth (along with other technical services) operate as entirely different types of economic goods, in multiple senses, but especially in terms of elasticities, rivalousness, appeal, and excludability. There's also the role of attention and content and service ranking.
Content is a public good in the economic sense: zero marginal cost, high fixed costs, nonrivalous, and poorly excludable.
Advertising is a rent (to advertisers) and an imposition (to its audience). There's an active aversion to it, the content is very often deceptive, manipulating, and against the recipients' true interests. At the same time, as more attractive audiences are driven away (and they will be) those who remain are subject to ever more, ever lower quality ads for ever more manipulative or harmful products and services.
Bandwidth and availability must meet or address peak demands which are infrequent though often predictable. Users' decision criteria, as with highway traffic, externalise most costs, whilst benefit is privatised, incentivising overuse. Provisioning must be based not on some average utilisation, but on probability of availability and service quality, with additional nines costing orders of magnitude more to provide. That risk environment may itself be quite variable.
The consequence is that demand, revenue, and cost components follow vastly dissimmilar dynamics, making the business exceedingly difficult on market terms, and incentivising numerous pathological behaviours.
Well, hosting videos is an expensive operation. You have 2 options to pay for the resources you're consuming: Trade your time (ads) or trade your money (subscribe). The latter is worth it if you're using YouTube a lot.
it's called uBlock Origins, available for all major browsers, try it, you'll be amazed. Haven't seen an ad on youtube since last decade (preemptive snark comment - current decade started on 1st Jan 2011 and will end on 31st Dec 2020).
I've been running ad blockers for... well, since they were created. I have no idea how anyone lives without them. But YT in particular has started bypassing all of them. I'm down to using just Firefox with the YT enhancer plugin, because it's the only thing that manages to skip the ads for me now. And I'll quit using it if that breaks.
I have personally not seen an ad on youtube in years, bar the video recommendations on the home page and the 'sponsored content' some channels bake into their videos. On desktop, I use uMatrix for more granular blocking + uBlock Origin for hiding empty frames, and I use Youtube Vanced on Android.
I'm using ubo on desktop and adguard on ios/android. No ads on YT ever, and very rarely I see ads on sites. Do you have your lists well-updated? What blocker did you use before?
The author doesn’t spend much time on _why_ re-orgs “almost always make some people unhappy, cause employee departures, and stifle productivity,” but I’d claim it’s organizational politics. Every re-org has winners and losers, almost by definition: there can only be so many people in charge, and likewise not everyone can work on that cool new feature. This is particularly true in relatively stagnant organizations: your best chance to move up the hierarchy as a manager might be during the once-in-a-blue-moon re-org. _Of course_ zero-sum shifts in organizational status of a bunch of imperfect human beings are going to be political.
The central thesis seems to be that by “involving the team members that would be effected from the beginning and making it their decision,” the discomfort around re-orgs will be avoided.
I might be missing something obvious from the article, but I have a hard time believing that adding more imperfect humans (in fact, all of the imperfect humans the organization has!) into the mix and letting teams self-organize would reduce awkward politics rather than making them worse.
A few other reasons reorgs can "almost always make some people unhappy, cause employee departures, and stifle productivity": A. Most orgs have multiple unmapped communication channels that smooth operations. With reorgs those get broken and have to be reformed and operationally remapped, which creates mayhem in day-to day productivity B. Change is unsettling even when welcomed; C. The view of how work gets done and why is highly localized. Reorgs often clean up only certain hierarchical levels of this how/why coupling.
I've been on the short end of re-orgs. I get that for the good of the business that some of the changes needed to happen, but where it really hurt was it came across that management didn't know what we were doing, and made it seem unimportant/useless. They shifted the focus of the team to a thing that literally every single member of the team the previous week said they didn't want to work on, and in a few months realized someone needed to focus on the original thing and tried to shift back. The company prides itself on internal mobility, by that time every person but one had quit or transferred.
I don't read it as self-organize, cause then everyone would choose to work on the new shiny, but there should be some amount of discussion that happens as input to the reorg, rather than too late when everyone is gone.
These (fairly specialized) ski boots have a boa lace system as part of their closure system, which uses a central dial to tighten a continuous metal lace. It's not automated, but it's close.
For what it's worth, though, I didn't find them that much faster to put on than normal three-buckle boots.
That does not match my experience (but n=1 and all).
In my case, the result of the sleep study where I didn't really sleep was, "hmm ... it looks like you might have insomnia." (No kidding). No drugs were offered -- or forced -- during the study.
The New York Times has a fairly detailed rent-vs-buy calculator that makes it easy to see the effects of changing some of the variables the author talks about in the article.
This is sadly a bit outdated - the 2018 tax code changes significantly hit the owning case in certain markets and the NYT calculator may view owning as ~10% better than it should be for high-income married individuals.
Yeah, running that tool produces exactly the opposite conclusion from the article. Renting is easily 50% higher than the break-even price provided.
An interesting experiment: go back and use the article's numbers for "what does the future hold?" That is, 2% home price growth, 2% rent growth, 8% investment returns. For me, those numbers say I could rent for $5,000 and come out ahead. Using the recent-history numbers for where I live, the price craters to $1,500.
I know the article says "circumstances may vary" a dozen times, but I think it's still pretty misleading, especially the P/R section. High and rising housing prices go hand in hand with large rent increases, and rent growth dominates pretty much everything else in this calculation.
I live outside of DC now and it's very expensive. Rent is constantly being pushed up and up, no matter how good of a tenant you are. I'm hoping to buy again later this year to lock in a stable monthly payment.
> The issue has arisen from idle cash sitting in customer accounts at brokerage firms and large banks, which “sweep” otherwise uninvested funds into interest-bearing alternatives in order to generate income. The SEC is looking into whether the firms steered those clients into sweep accounts that paid little or no interest, and whether the financial advisers at those groups had a fiduciary duty to advise clients they could make higher returns if they moved their cash into other accounts.