Brinens and Things

[cw: apocalypse, corporate bullshit, (fairly mild) illness]

[not an April Fools post]

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[Substack; Wayback] (by Matt Glassman)

At the heart of the book is a simple proposition. Imagine I offered you a choice. You can have $500 no questions asked, or you can roll a die. If you choose the die and it comes up any number but 6, you get nothing. But if it comes up 6, you get $5000.

This book is not about the people who take the $500. But it’s also not about the people who think for a couple of minute and choose to roll the die.

This is a book about the people who instantly grab the die, can’t imagine not instantly grabbing the die, and think anyone who doesn’t instantly grab the die is somewhere between irrational and insane.

The me of a month ago, when Scott Alexander asked this hypothetical, thought about it for a bit, didn't come to any satisfying conclusions, then took the $500 with a vague sense of this being the Objectively Incorrect Decision and some self-loathing.

The me of today has been through quite a bit more training on this subject! The me of today has practised taking appropriate risks!

The me of today thinks about it for a bit, pulls out an arcane-looking calculator, types some numbers into it, then says--

"That's above the half-Kelly wager for my bankroll."

--and walks away with $500 and a clear conscience.

It's traditional in my household to put a chocolate orange out on the New Year's Eve dessert table: you can usually get them at a good price during post-Christmas sales.

I did, indeed, find them at a good price during this year's post-Christmas sales! And the batch they were selling didn't expire until May 2026!

So I bought two of them, and now we have *next* year's NYE orange already sorted out.

(I put a note on my calendar for 2025-12-23 reminding me that we already have one. I may, next year, rotate in a 2027 orange and repeat the cycle; but if I don't find any chocolate oranges in stock at a good price next year, it's no big deal.)

Man, they did *not* know in 1983 that the faint buzzing sound in the background of "That's All" was going to sound exactly like a smartphone alarm, huh.

[Bloomberg] (main article by Matt Levine; quoted section from Moody's)

Moody’s tool has revealed thousands of directors who are as young as zero or older than the world’s longest-living person on record. One listed director — at 943 years old — would have been born in the 11th century. This director is allegedly a minority shareholder and beneficial owner of a Belgium-based business services firm that incorporated in 2018.

all of the other immortals must be so mad at this guy

you can't just fucking *tell* people you're 943 years old, dude, we've been *over* this


(on the other hand, it doesn't seem like anyone is believing it, so maybe you *can* just tell people you're 943 years old)

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[Bloomberg] (main article by Matt Levine; quoted section by Sridhar Natarajan)

Wall Street firms usually grumble in private after getting punished by regulators. Anthony Melchiorre’s Chatham Asset Management is dragging its advisers into a public legal battle for $100 million.

The $6 billion hedge fund is demanding that Adviser Compliance Associates not only cover Chatham’s costs for settling a US probe last year, but also damage to its business. In an unusual lawsuit, Chatham claims the outside consultant, founded by former regulators, failed to prevent trading practices that ran afoul of authorities. …

“Chatham sought, received and followed advice from ACA that certain trading practices did not run afoul of the SEC’s cross-trading rules,” Melchiorre, 56, said in a statement through a spokesman. “ACA gave it improper advice and failed to flag these trades as problematic.” The hedge fund intends to vigorously pursue the matter, holding ACA accountable, he said.

man, imagine having recourse when your financial advisor advises you to break the law

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[Bloomberg] (main article by Matt Levine; quoted section by Elizabeth Lopatto)

“Short … [Reddit],” wrote one r/Wall StreetBets user. “They have not proven that this user base or data set can be monetized.”

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[Bloomberg] (by Matt Levine)

By the way, there’s a very funny anecdote in Scott Patterson’s Chaos Kings in which Nassim Nicholas Taleb goes for a walk with some colleagues at Universa, Mark Spitznagel’s black-swan fund. “Taleb, sweating in his professorial jacket in Miami’s eighty-degree heat, spotted a penny on the pavement in front of a parked steamroller — and picked it up, laughing at the inside joke.” The sort of thing that could only happen to Taleb.

oh my god

I live less than an hour's drive north of the zone of totality.

Brother wasn't interested in going out of his way and Mom is conserving her spoons for tomorrow's trip to Toronto (they watched the 99% eclipse from our backyard instead), but Dad and I went down to an arbitrary small town within the zone to watch.

It's pretty neat! I wouldn't trek across a continent for it, but it's nice to have the experience.

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Mom asked me last night if I was excited. I've never really been one for excitement *prior* to events. Also I was worried that if I let myself get hyped up I'd just be more disappointed to find it cloudy.

(There won't be another total eclipse anywhere in Canada for about 20 years, and there won't be another within day-trip distance of here until the 22nd century.)

I awoke to a concerningly grey-white sky, but it cleared up in plenty of time.

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We arrived forty minutes early, to give us a bit of time to poke around the shops and maybe try some food (though we eventually decided against this). The traffic was light, and the streets were not very crowded; there were enough knots of people with eclipse glasses scattered around to have some sense of solidarity, though. (I heard one person applauding during totality, and a dad excitedly giving his kids a science lesson.)

Excitement *prior* to events is not my style, but I did feel some giddiness as the light began to turn to "sunset".

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From my perspective it was neat-but-not-overwhelmingly-emotional to look up and see the black sun with its corona, but like, if I did not know what was happening that would sure freak me the fuck out.

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My phone, at least with its default camera settings (and I don't know which ones to tweak), was not up to the task of taking a picture of totality. I *did* get some pictures of the crescent sun, though. For example:



(I saw somebody else taking pictures by pointing his phone through his eclipse glasses, tried copying him, and was kind of surprised to find how well it worked. (Vastly better than last time.))

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Thanks to blog reader Jenn for sharing her pack of eclipse glasses with us. <3

Do people with bus commutes, just, have frequent kinesthetic hallucinations when they close their eyes? Is that just a normal part of day-to-day life? Does it go away after a while?

It's not especially bothersome, but it's weird. It's like a Tetris effect, but in my vestibular system.