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Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
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17 May, 4 tweets, 2 min read
How it started and how it’s going:

I came to SF about four months ago to help out with VaccinateCA and then VaccinateTheStates.com

The work isn’t over yet (half the country to go!), but our part in it has stabilized enough for me to go back home.
Shoutout to Ruriko, who had been watching the kids solo for 4 months during a pandemic. When I told her there was a small chance a project I was working on was the most important thing I’ve ever done she says “Then you need to go.”
Now flying back into a city currently under a state of emergency and quarantining for two weeks, during which (to state the obvious) the work will continue.

At some point I’ll get back to writing again.
Ignore the tense errors here; it’s been a long day (and few months).

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More from @patio11

Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
15 May
Tether's new problem is the same as the old problem: bank account whackamole. The fundamental service sold is a bridge between assets outside US banking system and inside them.

Deltec no longer a functioning bridge, just like Noble, CCC, Taiwanese banks and others previously.
The strangeness on their balance sheet is directly downstream of "How do we avoid Compliance departments?"

e.g. "Fiduciary deposits" are likely assets Tether beneficially owns, probably abroad, titled in the name of someone who the Compliance department doesn't know is alter ego
Not a new strategy, either; previously it was USD held in a trust account titled to their General Counsel at the Bank of Montreal.

But eventually a billion here, a billion there, Compliance departments wake up and start asking hard questions.
Read 5 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
14 May
It seems astoundingly unlikely to me that Tether’s “commercial paper” is the thing you’d actually expect to be called that, because what US-based contra convinced their compliance department to let them sell bricks of X00M at a time to Tether Limited.
Particularly after the NYAG settlement.

Commercial paper is a gigantic market and there are many buyers who have not just been fined $1X million for being involved with money launderers and covering it up; why take the risk versus just Bloomberging it over to a boring MMF.
Far more likely to me is that it’s actually just a receivable from an exchange or OOC desk which has all the counterparty risk you suspect, and which exists in the first place because *neither party can settle that trade in dollars.*
Read 6 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
12 May
I’m a big fan of this as a SaaS person, because manually creating invoices is the “missing link” for a lot of SaaS companies which service web signups but also have more bespoke arrangements available.

It was no fun managing these separately at my companies.
The bespoke things include everything from “Call us for enterprise pricing” to “You want our $500 a month account but for a year with a pre-pay discount and also want us to train you at a day rate? Uh, yes, we can do that, now I just have to figure out what buttons to push.”
“When’s the last time you actually made an invoice, Patrick?”

Two hours ago, to get a donation for Vaccinate The States through a supplier qualification process.

Founders never ever get away from this sort of quotidian stuff, and the more software eats it, the more...
Read 4 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
10 May
A popular misconception about herd immunity is that it's a binary thing.

The goal is achieving broad *exponential decay* of the pool of coronavirus infections and then limiting the spread of further flareups.

The vaccination effort is like building firebreaks.
"We may never achieve herd immunity" is often written from the perspective of people who think that is akin to creating a solution to the problem of fire.

That isn't the goal; the goal is containing small fires such that they're tractable to standard firefighting techniques.
The *alternative* to this is that we spend the next several years watching for smoke and then Shut Down Everything if we detect a sudden increase in it locally.

We should urgently, urgently, urgently prefer accelerating the vaccination campaign.
Read 4 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
7 May
"This is the most satisfying cow clicker I've ever played." -- @obra , our COO, on the UI which we use to dedupe locations, after we added e.g. a leaderboard to it.
I'm reminded a wee bit of that Neal Stephenson (?) book where you'd grind up experience hunting sneaky goblins trying to blend into the stream of visitors to a city except the goblins were actually fraudsters and the visitors were actual IRL e-commerce transactions.
Read 5 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
5 May
No UI choice I have ever seen is as user-hostile as this interaction.
1) Why would you even ask me that if you are capable of calculating it, like freaking any computer is. Just derive it from the birthday if you can.

2) If you calculate it, by all that is holy, you had better actually get your math right.
I hate you so much right now, web application.
Read 6 tweets

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