Just found out the EPA has released Level IV ecoregions for the whole USA. 967 of them.
My brain is liquefying in pure joy. Look at the colors!
*slams desk*
FUCKING BRING BACK FORUMS. THEY RUN ON BASIC WEB SERVERS. IT JUST NEEDS PHP/MYSQL. THEY STILL EXIST. THEY DEPLOY OUT OF THE BOX. STOP ALLOWING THE MODERN WEB TO MAKE MONOLITHS.
TECH PEOPLE ESPECIALLY. FUCKING RUN YOUR OWN SHIT.
BRING BACK FORUMS.
In case you weren’t aware, sting rays are basically puppies.
oh hey I know these guys! they’re in a little tide pool at the Monterrey Bay Aquarium and they’re super sweet. If they see you standing next to the pool they’ll jump up out of the water and splash you until you pet them
Christ alive
i love how only a FRACTION of these have any recognizable gendered cultural meaning and yet she has built that meaning in herself and keeps them completely separated
This post haunts me because some of these names are, like, fine?? But some of them are HEINOUS. And it makes me think this woman actually has no idea what makes a name cool or not, and just had a dictionary open when she was filling out the birth certificate. Like Fern? Fine, already a name. Oak? Totally fine, I wouldn’t blink. But if you name a fucking girl fucking Vessel, that is a hate crime
Someone who's good at the economy but not in a "we gotta kill homeless people to make the line go up" way, what's the deal with the silicon valley bank going bankrupt
So, Silicon Valley Bank is a bank that focused on serving business clients in the tech sector, both startups and the venture capital firms that funded them. Lotta money there, right? Right! Well, they spent all that money making more money , and not very much of it doing things like building infrastructure or making their services actually, like, good. Which is a problem.
The way banks work these days, when you hand them money they don't just put it in a room and lock it up. It's all electronic anyway, so there's no really much to lock up. Instead, they add numbers to your balance and take that money and use it for other things. IE you put $100 in your savings account, they write down "You have $100" and occasionally update it as your savings earns interest, then they take that same $100 and hand it to someone else as a loan. This does mean that they don't, technically speaking, have your $100 anymore. If you hit up an ATM and pull your $100 out, they'll hand you someone else's $100. That is normal and expected bank operation, and as long as they aren't idiots it isn't a problem.
Recently, some badly-timed business decisions on their part sparked a bank run. Bank runs are when depositors at a bank all freak out and try to pull their money out at the same time. If no one is putting money in and everyone is pulling money out, and they don't technically keep all that money on hand... well, that is a capital-P Problem. They can't hand you someone else's $100 if that person is also asking for their $100 and so is everyone else.
Now, we know this is a problem. This made a very big fucky-wucky about 90 years ago when the Great Depression happened. So in the wake of that clusterfuck, the government created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC. FDIC insures deposit accounts (checking, savings, CDs, etc) up to $250,000 per bank per person. Even in the event of a massive bank run and every single person pulling out every single dollar all at once, you will get your $250,000 back. Above that, it depends how much money the bank can scrounge up and how many people it has to make good to.
Now, the reason this continues to be a capital-P Problem for SVB is that thing I said right at the start.
Silicon Valley Bank is a bank that focused on serving business clients in the tech sector, both startups and the venture capital firms that funded them. Lotta money there, right?
$250,000 is a pretty hefty chunk of change for an individual human person. If you have that kind of money in cash, you're probably not keeping it all in a bank deposit account anyway, because it's earning 0.01% interest and therefore getting chewed down by inflation constantly. But a business may absolutely need to keep that kind of cash on hand, because that is the cash they're using for things like, oh. Paying employees.
So while we can point and laugh at Silicon Valley tech bros and the kind of cowboy startups that try to pay their employees in beer and worthless stock options losing money, this is also hitting a lot of ordinary people via their employers' sudden loss of payroll funds. Etsy, for instance, used SVB, and now their ability to pay all the folks selling their work on Etsy is, to use a highly technical term, super fucked up.
FDIC is doing their do, which means that depositors will be getting back their up-to-$250,000. This is, like all processes involving money, highly bureaucratic and slow-moving. It kind of has to be, because when there is a chance to be handed money, there are loads of people who will lie their asses off in order to get in on the action. So FDIC has to validate all the depositors and make sure their balance claims are genuine &etc before they can fling money around, and they're working on selling off everything SVB owned in order to make them make good on it as much as possible. But in the meantime, folks aren't getting paid and also it's making people in the business world look nervously at the rest of the financial sector, because banks are a pretty incestuous pile of daisy-chained handjobs. The last time there was a Big Bank Problem was the 2007-2008 crash, and the collapse of a couple big financial institutions took down a ton of big respected money names. So everyone is freaking out.
This is all correct.
Here is another layer:
The amount of money that a bank is required to keep on hand, just in case, is regulated. The government has a vested interest in keeping the banking system running, right? So they require the banks to keep a percentage of the assets (their member's money) set aside so that if there *is* a sudden rush of withdrawls or an investment turns up bad, then they can still pay.
Because here's the deal: Big banks dont just use members' deposited money for loans. They also use it to invest in other businesses. They are betting that the business that they have invested in via stocks, bonds, or whatever (or loaned money to or all of those things) will do well and pay back their investment plus extra.
Federal regulations tell the banks to set aside a portion of their total money so that it WON'T be loaned out OR invested.
Well, back in 2018, Congress and the President (guess who!) decided that regulations were actually terrible and got rid of a bunch of them. Their goal was to stimulate the economy by making it easier to do business. Unfortunately, a lot of those regulations were made in the first place to stop terrible things from happening. (Like bank runs. Or mass poisoning via poor food production practices. Or train derailments because of over stressed infrastructer and increasingly stressed, understaffed workers. Just to name a few examples.)
One of the regulations they tinkered with was the amount of money that banks are required to keep in reserve. They lowered that amount by a lot.
Surprise, surprise, banks were like, "holy snap, we can spend so much more money now!!!" And promptly did so, using all of the money above the new, lower, legal cap for things like loans and venture captial investments. Aka, risky investments. High risk, high reward.
SVB did this, and made some bad investment choices. They lost a bunch of money. Because of the relatively recently lowered regulations, SVB had way less money on hand, meaning they couldn't absorb the loss from their bad investments. A few important people (ngl i forget who) advised folks to take cash out of their accounts.
In the world of electronic echanges, no one needs to physically go to a bank to get their money. They just pop on the app on their phone and do an electronic transfer.
The withdrawls quickly became a full on Bank Run as word spread and EVERYONE raced to get their money out while there was still money to get.
SVB fell in less than 48 hours. This is *shockingly* quick.
So the problem isnt just that everyone all together ran off to get their money from the bank, it's ALSO that the bank regulations got lowered and SVB used every extra cent they could to bet on other businesses and then when they lost that money they didnt have much left over to give to people when they demanded their money back.
