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Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
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25 Mar, 6 tweets, 2 min read
"Purchase a car with a financial product that you probably don't fully understand" is the dominant way of buying cars, but this is still amusing to me.
Note that this is a *very non-trivial problem* if you transact in Bitcoin and allow transactions to be reversed, and that none of Tesla's choices are great here.

"I will refund the exact Bitcoin you paid me" means they're writing options to people who speculate in BTC. Not fun.
"Work that math out for me, Patrick."

Assume one Tesla = one Bitcoin = $50k on transaction day.

If the price of 1 BTC goes to $100k, the buyer goes to Tesla and says "Um yeah I'll take that Bitcoin back, thanks", making $50k riskless profit off of Tesla's loss.
If the price of Bitcoin goes down to $500, that's Elon's problem now; the car buyer is still owed one (1) Tesla.
So this "Look, if you treat your Tesla reservation like an option on Bitcoins, we've designed it to be literally the worst possible option on Bitcoins. Please, please, please: don't try this." is actually a quite reasonable policy.
Note that consumers whose unit of account is Bitcoin should be happy with this policy: in no circumstance do they not end the day with one Tesla or one Bitcoin. Consumers whose unit of account is dollars but who transact in Bitcoin because YOLO I guess also guaranteed Tesla or $.

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More from @patio11

Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
24 Mar
If you have unvaccinated older relatives/friends/community members/etc, a useful thing you can tell them:

"Your pharmacy might have the vaccine. Why don't you ask them [the next time you get your medications]?"
It is extremely non-obvious to people who don't work in healthcare that pharmacies will have the vaccines where general practitioner doctors largely will not, that it might be something they are not forward about, and that no one considers it their job to tell you "OK, your turn"
(And this functions as *sigh* another mechanism by which people who have high-quality access to healthcare / sufficient education and status to have someone explain how things work / etc get allocated the vaccine preferentially.)
Read 6 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
24 Mar
The low keening wail you hear is the sound of every maritime insurance underwriter in the world, screaming in unison.
At this very moment there are highly paid professionals going through 17th century legal decisions looking for any precedent that would support this being an ‘act of God’ (and thus, excluded from coverage by the insurance policy).
“It’s a systemic risk! The entire point of the ‘act of God’ clause is to avoid us having liability over our entire book at once!”
“In the entire history of maritime courts, had the poor decision of an identifiable sailor made in good faith *ever* been an act of God.”
Read 5 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
22 Mar
Reading something interesting where I'm gradually moving from "Ahh this person and I read a lot of the same people; the influence is obvious" to "Oh wow, not actually the causality; they specifically read me."
(I will not be more specific because writers sometimes get persnickety about this sort of thing, particularly entirely uninvolved writers, and I don't want to cause anyone grief for totally innocent snowcloning of a bon mot from a HN comment.)
(Interestingly the culture of professional writing includes microcultures where repeating another's words without acknowledging them is a sin which cries out to heaven for vengeance and ones more akin to music where effectively everything is a riff, remix, mashup, etc.)
Read 6 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
19 Mar
Common comment I get from technologists:

"If one is very good at building software, one could easily succeed at running a software business."

I feel like I have nuanced thoughts there.
Are there transferable skills? Yes, certainly. Are you going to be better positioned at running a software business than similar you w/o software ability? Yes, certainly. You'd be a better poetry blogger, too, than a hypothetical code-less you. It's a metaskill, like writing.
Are most e.g. Google engineers who go into business for themselves likely to be successful? Well, complicated question. Many of them are going to be quite happy with that transition. Many of them are not, and going to go back to what they did previously.
Read 8 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
19 Mar
I wonder how many billions of dollars every year are wasted due to friction in paying taxes.

Just at the payment step. Where you know how much you owe, why, and which authority you owe it to, but now you have to get them the money.
I just had a clock-definitely-running conversation with a Dangerous Professional where we discussed, for ten minutes, the *strategy* necessary to pay a particular government what I owe.

Good golly. This would be inexplicable if I didn’t work in payments. Since I do it’s a farce.
“Maybe you should just take the hit for late payment and physically walk cash into the office after the pandemic is over?”
“ARE WE ACTUALLY DISCUSSING THAT?!?”
Read 4 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
18 Mar
It took a huge amount of effort from several people on the team, but we seem to be ahead of the ground truth curve with regards to the March 15th eligibility expansion. That was a bit of a nailbiter.

My favorite chart:
"What's the sudden drop?"

That's ~2 people reviewing two call centers of calls for one day for accuracy / consistency, making manual corrections, and then pushing the lot live a bit after midnight.
We know from experience that there is a productivity and accuracy curve with callers, so as our initial agents in the call centers season and as we add more agents, we'll have more calls than we know what to do with... nah, I'm pretty sure we know what to do with them.
Read 5 tweets

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