/dev/chat - 2019-09-24

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7:17 AM

@Biswapriyo not al of the kernel, some of the header files have other licensing options (in part for this scenario)

for example, include/linux/uinput.h is GPL-2+

some projects do what you mention, for example libevdev has copies of a couple of kernel headers

in other cases, e.g. joystick, new #defines are copied from the kernel sources and used if the system headers don’t define them — that way, newer kernel headers are used if available, so it doesn’t matter if the copied values get out of date

5 hours later…

12:45 PM

Saw a bumper sticker this morning that took me a minute to decipher (correctly). It said "EartH" and I read it as "eh, art!" instead of I assume the intended "Earth is art"

1:01 PM

In the category of strange and horrible Indian things. The govt just shut down the bank I regularly use (it's not my only account), for no apparent reason. As in, I can't withdraw any money. The bank appears as far as I can tell to be doing ok. I just looked at their accounts last month.

Well, it was doing ok till it was shut down. I suspect that it may not survive this.

5 hours later…

5:33 PM

@FaheemMitha Does India have some sort of deposit insurance, or are you just SOL if it shuts down?

@derobert I think that particular bank falls into a category where they have a small amount of coverage. But it's a small proportion of what I have as a deposit.

Well, then I hope it turns out OK.

The strange thing about this is that to all appearances the bank was doing fine. In fact I looked at their most recent yearly report just last month.

@derobert I think you may have misunderstood what I said> :-)

The insurance cover is quite small.

I think US Banks are covered up to USD 100K, correct?

Which is itself not such a large sum.

$250K since ~2009

@derobert Oh. Ok. Well, I hope that the insurers actually have that money available.

@derobert You are a well-informed person. Does this kind of thing happen in the US?

5:37 PM

US ones are covered by the US government. So, if they don't have the money available, there is a much bigger issue!

Oh, and so, the bank isn't actually visibly in trouble, which is what makes this so weird.

Obviously, if it was, I would have not been banking there.

But the Govt (well, the Reserve Bank to be precise), has effectively shut it down. Well, it's still running, but they can't make loans, and can't give customers any money.

Supposedly the reason is underreporting of bad loans. But that's just a rumor.

I think somewhere near a thousand different US banks failed circa 2009–2010, typically what happened here is that the government would shut down the bank on Friday, and by Monday everyone's accounts (up to the insurance limit) were moved to a new bank.

I think I'm done with Indian banks.

From now on, I'm going to stick with large international banks.

@derobert Interesting. And if people had money over the insurance limit, they lost it?

Again, just to be clear, this bank isn't actually failing, as far as I know. In fact, as banks go, it's seems to have been doing quite well. Particularly in the last 20 years or so.

@FaheemMitha Well, they lost access to it for a while, while the bank was liquidated. Then got most or all of it back.

But given the govt actions, I think it's likely to be in trouble from here on out.

@derobert I see.

In fact, the Indian govt seems to really dislike the entire cooperative sector. Perhaps because they aren't either owned by the state, or are large corporations.

5:43 PM

Well, non-insane reasons to shut down a bank that has healthy financial statements would be some criminal activity (e.g., money laundering) or fraud (said statements were fictitious). I have no idea what the chances of it being a sane reason in India are...

And I think one can be sure that the Indian govt won't be so caring. Particularly recently, they combine extreme brutality with characteristic Indian inefficiency.

@derobert Like I said, they were apparently under-reporting bad loans. I guess that would fall into the category of fraud.

But there are lots of banks which very high levels of bad loans that continue working, and nobody shuts them down. This includes some large private banks.

But like I said, I think I'm going to stick with large internationl banks from now on.

At one point I considered opening an account with DBS, and I wish I had done so now.

I can't imagine anyone shutting DBS down, no matter what happens.

I just didn't realise that banking in India was so dangerous. Though I suppose the demonetization thing should have alerted me.

Oh, and these banks do get audited regularly, which makes me wonder what the auditos were doing. But, India.

There's a limit to what auditors can reasonably find. Even competent, non-corrupt ones.

Anyway, this has increased my already healthy levels of paranoia.

You should at least be able to find plenty of banks in stable countries where you can get guaranteed deposits. Though of course you'll then be exposed to currency fluctuations, etc.

@derobert I would have thought they would be able to dig in to the details.

I assume the bank can't actually refuse them information.

But people in India often can't be bothered with the details. Or they were bribed to look the other way.

5:50 PM

@FaheemMitha Probably not. But your yearly audit can't take the auditors 3 years or a team of thousands to complete.

@derobert Yes, sure. But does it really require so much time and effort to do a through audit?

I don't actually know what's involved.

Not sure about a bank one (which is probably more extensive), but the normal corporate ones involve the auditors mainly looking at financial statements & records, reviewing transactions, and reviewing the company's own financial procedures. It's not really designed to detect well-concealed fraud.

@derobert Sounds like they should make more of an effort.

More effort costs more. In a normal, non-bank, company you'd only have that more extensive audit done if there was some suspicion something is wrong.

@derobert I thought the point of an audit was to try to find problems.

But perhaps I've got that wrong.

As apparently I got the safety of my bank wrong.

6:03 PM

Sure, it's to try to find problems. But obviously it can't find all problems. No general audit is going to detect if some maintenance guy once defrauded the company by getting reimbursed for an extra 50¢ light bulb which he then took home and used. It'd be ridiculous to pay auditors to determine if that happened. That's a silly example, of course...

But ultimately you have to pick a point at which you say: the costs of having the auditors dig deeper outweigh the likely benefits. So stop.

@derobert Sure, but I would have thought that macro problems would not be that hard to find. Of course, I know very little about accounting.

Though I've been trying to read an investment book. It doesn't really look hard. Just boring.

It's not about accounting per se. But accounting does of course figure largely in investing.

In a way it's the same thing. You're trying to figure out of the company is financially sound.

Accounting is supposed to be boring. It's concerning when it isn't!

@derobert Lol. I meant intrinsically.

Anyway, I'm glad to hear that the situation is the US is not so bad. I mean, you've troubles enough already.

I used to work with someone who enjoyed the investing side of it. The interesting bit is more about learning how the company you're thinking of investing in works, more about that industry and their competitors, and then trying to figure out how the financials fit in and make projections to see if you think the marked under or overvalues it

I suppose we all do, really.

@derobert Was your friend good at it? And did he do it all himself, or was he influenced by what others were saying?

6:14 PM

@FaheemMitha I'm not sure, he might have beaten the market a little. Surely not if you counted all the time put in to it, but if its your hobby you don't count the time. He did most of it himself, but of course that doesn't involve ignoring everyone else. If someone else does an analysis, you can often learn from analyzing it.

This week our troubles are just what to be more surprised about, that (1) the Orange One tried to bribe the Ukraine into investigating a potential political rival or that (2) his negotiating skills are such that he apparently failed.

@derobert From analyzing the analysis?

@derobert I think whether it is worth it depends on (a) how good you are at it (b) how much money you are working at it.

And over here, the options aren't great, at least in terms of managed investments.

@FaheemMitha Yeah. Those are spreadsheets full of calculations and projections. So you can certainly learn from someone else's.

@derobert I guess.

I'm still at the early part of that book. But it sounds like it involves integrating a lot of material.

Investment decisions, I mean.

Or you can take the easy approach, which empirically works just about as well: Call Vanguard and put your money in an index fund.

Personally, I'm lazy, so I have index funds.

@derobert Does it really work about as well?

6:21 PM

@FaheemMitha Yep. At least in rich countries, I'm not sure what research has been done in India.

@derobert Well, that makes one wonder why people would do anything else, then.

That's a good question. I think you have to ask a psychologist about that. But, e.g., we have a huge managed mutual fund industry in the US. There has been a fair bit of good research showing you're better off in an index fund. And yet managed funds are still pretty popular...

@derobert I wasn't thinking about mutual funds. I was thinking of managing it oneself.

It's seems surprising that targeted effort can't do better than, essentially, random.

(Trying to find breakdown of how popular each is, best I've found so far is p. 99 of umass.edu/preferen/You%20Must%20Read%20This/MalkielJEP2013.pdf but that's 2010, where 70% of assets in funds were still in managed ones.)

@FaheemMitha It is surprising. If you don't have to pay yourself, then maybe you can do a little better (but you have to be good at it, which the average person isn't)

@derobert Well, I am reliably informed (as in, everyone says), that you have to be willing to put in the work.

And I suspect it is a lot of work.

I wonder if having a math/stat background helps at all.

6:32 PM

It definitely helps building the financial models

Despite my bank debacle, I generally consider myself a careful person who does his homework.

Of course, given that my bank has been shut down, I could be wrong.

You apparently need to diversify your bank account holdings :-/

@derobert Clearly it was a mistake.

I'm going to be much more careful in the future. And I need to keep reminding myself that I live in India.

But as far as I can see, there was really no warning.

And like I might have said above, I was just looking at the bank's accounts last month. And I've never received anything but good service from them.

Unlike a lot of other banks.

Like I said, big international banks are probably they way to go.

Well, that's why you diversify investments: sometimes weird stuff happens, and by holding more than one company, you reduce your risk. Sometimes a meteor hits corporate HQ, no one can predict that. If you can't get insured accounts (or if insurance eventually pays but freezes your account for weeks), sounds like a reasonable approach to take with banks too.

I'm not sure if you really need to look for "big" as much as insured by a reliable insurer (which in many places is the home country's government)

6:49 PM

@derobert I need an account in India. In India there is no such thing.

If you mean a bank account in a foreign country, I suppose that's an option, but it makes things much more complicated.

The point of big international is safety in size, and hopefully reasonable customer service.

E.g. DBS. Which is enormous. And it's hard to imagine it closing. Though I suppose anything is possible.

Actually, I think it might be backed by the Singapore Govt. But I'm not sure.

Presumably an international bank's home is not in India. I'm not sure if you really need to (or want to) find a huge one then.

I'm not really familiar with DBS. But when a bank is so big it's hard to imagine it possibly failing, then it's a crisis for that country if it does...

But a crisis for Singapore is not a crisis for the whole world.

@derobert No, but some international banks have branches in India. DBS has a branch in Bombay.

So one can open an account there.

@derobert Well, that wasn't really my point. Just that SG seems like a relatively well-managed place.

Of course, I could be wrong, again.

@FaheemMitha Certainly well-managed compared to India :-)

@derobert Probably most places are better managed than India.

Particularly with the current govt, which is somehow managing to be worse than the Congress party, which wasn't exactly popular.

I wouldn't have thought it possible myself. But as they say, where there is a will, there is a way.

It seems there is currently a worldwide experiment in how bad can politicians get...

You've got Modi, we've got Trump, UK has Johnson, ...

6:59 PM

@derobert Couldn't have put it better.

Greece had an early start, as did (and still does) Turkey.

But those are just three examples. I'm sure there are many more.

Yep. Israel had an early start, too. And Venezuela.

@derobert But really, most pols are generally a disaster. India is probably worse, but then it has a lot of other problems.

The US Presidents are a pretty horrific lot, for example.

I'm not sure about the UK PMs. The Conservative party seems generally dire.

7:25 PM

"The Wire" has a relatively intelligent piece about the situation, but they seem like a generally good outfit. But really, without information, everyone is just basically guessing.

And if there is a general moral to this story, it is - stay with the rich people. The Indian Govt doesn't mess with the rich. But it doesn't care about the poor. Regardless what it might say.

In the sort-of good news category, the Supreme Court ruled against Johnson.

2 hours later…

9:29 PM

@FaheemMitha Yep. We can look forward to Bercow yelling at MPs about how they'd behave better at their kids' school again as soon as Wednesday.

@derobert Hi. Still at the computer? Home now?

Nah, at work still. Though about to leave.

Ah. I must admit, I'm not fan of either the British or politicians, but I did find Bercow kind of amusing.

But perhaps that's just a reflection how terrible they are these days, as already noted.

Compared to Modi, Trump, and Johnson (not to mention whoever is currently running Israel), it's not hard to look good.

I mean, you basically just have to appear to be halfway human.

@derobert Anyway, have a good evening.

@FaheemMitha Errr.... Simpsons did it? :-P

@derobert What?

9:37 PM

Kang and Kodos Johnson are a duo of fictional recurring characters in the animated television series The Simpsons. Kang is voiced by Harry Shearer and Kodos by Dan Castellaneta. They are green, octopus-like aliens from the fictional planet Rigel VII and appear almost exclusively in the "Treehouse of Horror" episodes. The duo has appeared in at least one segment of all twenty-eight Treehouse of Horror episodes. Sometimes their appearance is the focus of a plot, other times a brief cameo. Kang and Kodos are often bent on the conquest of Earth and are usually seen working on sinister plans to invade...

@derobert More of an explanation would be appreciated.

I'm tired, and it's been a pretty bad day.

I should try to get to sleep, though I'm not sure I will sleep.

"You have to vote for one of us!" ("It's a two party system")

They were halfway human while they had their human suits on :-)

@derobert That's not an explanation, though I concur with the general sentiment.

@derobert Ah, ok. Explanation.

I liked the "It's a two party system. You have to vote for one of us."

Ah, yes. Treehouse of Horror.

Not really that different from the reality we're living in.

It's possible that the Simpson writers can see into the future.

That's not so much seeing the future as much as things are always the same.

@derobert Hmm. Possibly. Though recently things seem to be reaching a new low.

Take the UK for example.

9:45 PM

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@MichaelHomer I see the Simpsons is what gets people out of the woodwork.

@MichaelHomer well, yeah, there was that one...

And yes, I've seen that one. It was all over the news at the time.

You've got to admit, it's kind of creepy how accurate it is.

I mean creepy in a good way.

It's also, no matter how bad you consider Trump, how far back do you have to go before he'd actually be better than the average person? For most things, I think its well under 100 years.

And just think how much better than Andrew Johnson he is!

@derobert Yes, but the past is the past. I don't think it's reasonable to compare people living now with people in the past.

@derobert I don't know anything about Andrew Johnson.

9:54 PM

Andrew Johnson was acquitted on impeachment solely because the president pro tempore of the Senate who would have replaced him was seen as crazy with his wacky ideas like "everybody should be able to vote" and "people should be able to form unions"

@MichaelHomer I see. And that wacky person's name was?

Benjamin Wade, I think

Yes

@MichaelHomer Thanks. Never heard of him.

You know more about US history than I do.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Johnson of course. He became President after Lincoln was assassinated, and his policies (at least in retrospect) were to pretend the Confederacy didn't lose the war.

I really only know him as the person who didn't replace Andrew Johnson

9:59 PM

E.g., he was fine with the Black Codes which were totally not slavery because they were called something else.

So Andrew Johnson was pretty bad, then?

@derobert Never heard of those either, as far as I can remember.

Yeah, he was pretty bad by today's standards. Not nearly as much by 1865's.

I do know that the South tried to reconstitute slavery after the Civil War, and partially succeeded for a while. And partly for that reason, a lot of blacks left the South. But I'm obviously fuzzy about the details.

He was impeached for firing the Secretary of War

It's funny. I lived in the Triangle for a good number of years. And it always seemed like a fairly peaceful place. I guess there really are no such things as ghosts. Either that, or I'm really insensitive to them.

@MichaelHomer Is that all?

10:02 PM

Which seems a bit mild, all things considered

@MichaelHomer Well, yes. Trump done that kind of thing, and plenty of other stuff.

That's the difference between the vast majority of the House and Senate hating you (as with Johnson) vs. a majority of the House and who knows about the Senate, maybe a slight majority (with Trump).

And it's true, the US has improved a bit over 200 years.

I hear even the 1950s was a pretty bad time, for example.

As showcased by films like "Pleasantville".

I am unfortunately required to go there in a couple of weeks and I'm not happy about it

@MichaelHomer You're requited to go to the 1950s?

10:06 PM

If that's what you call Tennessee

Outside of Nashville, probably...

Memphis

That's probably post-1950 too.

@MichaelHomer You're required to go to Tennessee in a couple of weeks and you're unhappy about it?

Yes

10:08 PM

Oh. Might I ask why? Much of the South isn't great, but 2 weeks is hardly any time at all.

You can enjoy the local color. Or colour.

I think NZ does British spelling, right?

Conference. Substituting for a colleague who's got family medical issues, so last-minute

Yes

I really liked living in the Triangle, though granted it's hardly the typical South.

But I think I've mentioned that before.

I did meet some scary people there. Who'd sort of wandered in from outside.

Metaphorically speaking.

10:59 PM

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