Should I be suspicious that Wealthfront Cash accounts will fail as well?
What about Fidelity Cash Management Accounts?
>Wealthfront isn’t a bank, but we work with partner banks to get you an industry-leading APY, the security of FDIC insurance, and a full array of fee-free, no-strings-attached checking features — all wrapped up into one label-defying package we call a Cash Account.
>The Fidelity Cash Management Account is not a bank account. It is a brokerage account that allows you to spend, save, and invest. The account offers competitive rates as well as spending and money movement features including a free debit card, checkwriting, Bill Pay, and more.
Just casually reading r/fidelity on Reddit (which is a subreddit run by Fidelity) would make me run fast and far from using their cash management account for anything. Widespread check fraud has caused Fidelity to be extremely cautious -- read slow -- in giving people access to checks they deposit into their CMAs. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, at least Fidelity is being cautious about taking care of their customers' money, but it's created a good deal of pain and anger for people who are depending on Fidelity for everyday banking-style transactions. I'll invest with Fidelity, but I prefer to keep my everyday money in a traditional bank or credit union.
These could have similar issues with gaps in FDIC protections due to money is being “managed” by intermediaries or because of the type of account. Their fine print discloses as much.
As a sibling comment points out, Fidelity is seemingly a reputable enterprise with other business that would be adversely effected by poor management of this product and the reputation harm that would come with it.
Among other features Wealthfront are trying to manage around the $250K FDIC limit for you by moving your money into multiple insured accounts - this is probably a new area with not enough regulation.
Any comment on what issues there are with paying somebody to open accounts for you with, I assume- a power of attorney allowing them to do explicitly that?
At that point the only thing at risk is fraudulent use of said POA, and whatever funds are held outside of actual accounts.
> At that point the only thing at risk is fraudulent use of said POA, and whatever funds are held outside of actual accounts
Which exactly the reason why the FDIC didn't intervene in the article: the Fintech startup didn't deposit the unaccounted(!) millions of customer funds into FDIC-insured accounts. The law should be tightened up to prohibit claims of FDIC protection without meeting the reporting and deposit process requirements.
The two scenarios:
1) handing a business your life savings to manage, a
2) authorizing a company to manage your finances so they're in FDIC insured accounts
Are completely different. There's no laws to update, and the FDIC isn't skittering out of paying on a technicality.
And, frankly, if anybody reading this is looking at option #2- do yourself a favor and get an accountant and a wealth manager that both have fiduciary duties. Might as well find a lawyer as well.
Fidelity is very regulated, and large. If something happened it would be a systemic event that the government would definitely get involved. Wealthfront may be fine too, I just don't know.
To put it differently, Yotta’s customer’s misfortunes are because they are poor and not politically connected. If Fidelity fails, their customers are rich and they vote: they must be made whole.
Kind of like the SVB failure. SVB customers were made whole. Systematic risk and all that.
Fidelity’s brokerage business would be covered by SIPC, which would include its cash management accounts. They also likely sweep cash out to FDIC-insured accounts. More importantly though, Fidelity is large enough that you’re unlikely to need that insurance, and that’s really how I’d prefer to approach this.
Yeah we can look at 2008 and say no institution is safe, but if there’s risk everywhere, I’ve just got to try and minimize that as best I can. Fidelity didn’t give me any sort of scare that year fwiw. Disclosure: I’ve been using Fidelity for basically all of my money for most of my career now, including cash management.
>(When I talk about a program that is so many lines long, I mean a program that needs to be about that long. It’s no achievement to write 1,000 lines of code for a problem that would be reasonable to solve in 10.)
Why do you think people become CS professors? One of the reasons is that they don't like working in the industry and maybe don't even know how to program.
That sounds like the correct response if he knows anything about the field: shitty peripherals are an unsolvable problem from top to bottom. The hardware sucks, the software sucks more, there's absolutely nothing you can do to fix it as an end user (unplug it and try again is where "debugging" ends), and the production chain will never improve along the quality axis because the margins are tiny and people are very price sensitive.
Oh yeah, that is interesting. I would guess an artifact from the pictures. Maybe those are the lines where they joined the different pictures together into 1 picture. I would think they could do a better job than that though.
You can, somehow, view this # in the magnetic field map picture too. First I thought this was an artifact, but I highly doubt that they would leave such an amateur thing behind (and even amateurs don't get tricked into this). Besides from the visible picture and magnetic map, I don't seem to find any correlation with the other pictures.
You raise an interesting point. Every job that I worked in the last 10 years offers "real" Google Chrome on a Windows PC. I never considered that they would pay Google for it, but I guess Google could add a bunch of nice admin and security features that would be useful to mega-corps but retail normies don't care about. That is probably well-worth the 6 USD per month per user. In a modern corporate workplace, a huge amount of your day is spent using web apps... running in Google Chrome (or Electron!). It like a WebVM that runs inside of Microsoft Windows (from the perspective of corporate IT folks).
Isn't what you're proposing exactly what led to this being a major problem? The automated systems disabled themselves, so people had to use the manual way, which was much less efficient, and 1,500 flights had to be cancelled.
They are referring to air crew procedures, not ATC. WHen the crew of an aircraft encounter a failure that doesn't have a common simple response, they consult a procedure book. This is something professional crews are well acquainted with and used to. The problem in the article was with the air traffic control system. They did not have a proper failback procedure and it caused major disruptions.
I think breaking a law is more unethical than not breaking a law.
Also, legality isn't the only difference in the VW case. With VW, they had a "good emissions" mode. They enabled the good emissions mode during the test, but disabled it during regular driving. It would have worked during regular driving, but they disabled it during regular driving. With compilers, there's no "good performance" mode that would work during regular usage that they're disabling during regular usage.
> I think breaking a law is more unethical than not breaking a law.
It sounds like a mismatch of definition, but I doubt you're ambivalent about a behavior right until the moment it becomes illegal, after which you think it unethical. Law is the codification and enforcement of a social contract, not the creation of it.
But following the law is itself a load bearing aspect of the social contract. Violating building codes, for example, might not cause immediate harm if it's competent but unusual, yet it's important that people follow it just because you don't want arbitrariness in matters of safety. The objective ruleset itself is a value beyond the rules themselves, if the rules are sensible and in accordance with deeper values, which of course they sometimes aren't, in which case we value civil disobedience and activism.
Also, while laws ideally are inspired by an ethical social contract, the codification proces is long, complex and far from perfect. And then for rules concerning permissible behavior even in the best of cases, it's enforced extremely sparingly simply because it's not possible nor desirable to detect and deal with all infractions. Nor is it applied blindly and equally. As actually applied, a law is definitely not even close to some ethical ideal; sometimes it's outright opposed to it, even.
Law and ethics are barely related, in practice.
For example in the vehicle emissions context, it's worth noting that even well before VW was caught the actions of likely all carmakers affected by the regulations (not necessarily to the same extent) were clearly unethical. The rules had been subject to intense clearly unethical lobbying for years, and so even the legal lab results bore little resemblance to practical on-the-road results though systematic (yet legal) abuse. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that even what was measured intentionally diverged from what is harmfully in a profitable way. It's a good thing VW was made an example of - but clearly it's not like that resolved the general problem of harmful vehicle emissions. Optimistically, it might have signaled to the rest of the industry and VW in particular to stretch the rules less in the future.
>I doubt you're ambivalent about a behavior right until the moment it becomes illegal, after which you think it unethical.
There are many cases where I think that. Examples:
* Underage drinking. If it's legal for someone to drink, I think it's in general ethical. If it's illegal, I think it's in general unethical.
* Tax avoidance strategies. If the IRS says a strategy is allowed, I think it's ethical. If the IRS says a strategy is not allowed, I think it's unethical.
* Right on red. If the government says right on red is allowed, I think it's ethical. If the government (e.g. NYC) says right on red is not allowed, I think it's unethical.
The VW case was emissions regulations. I think they have an ethical obligation to obey emissions regulations. In the absence of regulations, it's not an obvious ethical problem to prioritize fuel efficiency instead of emissions (that's I believe what VW was doing).
Drinking and right turns are unethical if they’re negligent. They’re not unethical if they’re not negligent. The government is trying to reduce negligence by enacting preventative measures to stop ALL right turns and ALL drinking in certain contexts that are more likely to yield negligence, or where the negligence world be particularly harmful, but that doesn’t change whether or not the behavior itself is negligent.
You might consider disregarding the government’s preventative measures unethical, and doing those things might be the way someone disregards the governments protective guidelines, but that doesn’t make those actions unethical any more than governments explicitly legalizing something makes it ethical.
To use a clearer example, the ethicality of abortion— regardless of what you think of it— is not changed by its legal status. You might consider violating the law unethical, so breaking abortion laws would constitute the same ethical violation as underage drinking, but those laws don’t change the ethics of abortion itself. People who consider it unethical still consider it unethical where it’s legal, and those that consider it ethical still consider it ethical where it’s not legal.
It's not so simple. An analogy is the Rust formatter that has no options so everyone just uses the same style. It's minimally "unethical" to use idiosyncratic Rust style just because it goes against the convention so people will wonder why you're so special, etc.
If the rules themselves are bad and go against deeper morality, then it's a different situation; violating laws out of civil disobedience, emergent need, or with a principled stance is different from wanton, arbitrary, selfish cheating.
If a law is particularly unjust, violating the law might itself be virtuous. If the law is adequate and sensible, violating it is usually wrong even if the violating action could be legal in another sensible jurisdiction.
> but that doesn’t make those actions unethical any more than governments explicitly legalizing something makes it ethical
That is, sometimes, sufficient.
If government says ‘seller of a house must disclose issues’ then I rely rely on the law being followed, if you sell and leave the country, you have defrauded me.
However if I live in a ‘buyer beware’ jurisdiction, then I know I cannot trust the seller and I hire a surveyor and take insurance.
There is a degree of setting expectations- if there is a rule, even if it’s a terrible rule, I as individual can at least take some countermeasures.
You can’t take countermeasures against all forms of illegal behaviour, because there is infinite number of them. And a truly insane person is unpredictable at all.
I agree if they're negligent they're unethical. But I also think if they're illegal they're generally unethical. In situations where some other right is more important that the law, underage drinking or illegal right on red would be ethical, such as if alcohol is needed as an emergency pain reliever, or a small amount for religious worship, or if you need to drive to the hospital fast in an emergency.
Abortion opponents view it as killing an innocent person. So that's unethical regardless of whether it's legal. I'm not contesting in any way that legal things can be unethical. Abortion supporters view it as a human right, and that right is more important than the law.
Right on red, underage drinking, and increasing car emissions aren't human rights. So outside of extenuating circumstances, if they're illegal, I see them as unethical.
> Abortion opponents view it as killing an innocent person. So that's unethical regardless of whether it's legal.
So it doesn't matter that a very small percentage of the world's population believes life begins at conception, it's still unethical? Or is everything unethical that anyone thinks is unethical across the board, regardless of the other factors? Since some vegans believe eating honey is unethical, does that mean it's unethical for everybody, or would it only be unethical if it was illegal?
In autocracies where all newly married couples were legally compelled to allow the local lord to rape the bride before they consummated the marriage, avoiding that would be unethical?
Were the sit-in protest of the American civil rights era unethical? They were illegal.
Was it unethical to hide people from the Nazis when they were search for people to exterminate? It was against the law.
Was apartheid ethical? It was the law.
Was slavery ethical? It was the law.
Were the jim crow laws ethical?
I have to say, I just fundamentally don't understand your faith in the infallibility of humanity's leaders and governing structures. Do I think it's generally a good idea to follow the law? Of course. But there are so very many laws that are clearly unethical. I think your conflating legal correctness with mores with core foundational ethics is rather strange.
the right on red example is interesting because in that case, the law changes how other drivers and pedestrians will behave in ways that make it pretty much always unsafe
That just changes the parameters of negligence. On a country road in the middle of a bunch of farm land where you can see for miles, it doesn’t change a thing.
Ethics are only morality if you spend your entire time in human social contexts. Otherwise morality is a bit larger, and ethics are a special case of group recognized good and bad behaviors.
What if I make sure to have a drink once a week for the summer with my 18 year old before they go to college because I want them to understand what it's like before they go binge with friends? Is that not ethical?
Speeding to the hospital in an emergency? Lying to Nazis to save a Jew?
Law and ethics are more correlated than some are saying here, but the map is not the territory, and it never will be.
There can be situations where someone's rights are more important than the law. In that case it's ethical to break the law. Speeding to the hospital and lying to Nazis are cases of that. The drinking with your 18 year old, I'm not sure, maybe.
My point though, is that in general, when there's not a right that outweighs the law, it's unethical to break the law.
unless following an unethical law would in itself be unethical, then breaking the unethical law would be the only ethical choice. In this case cheating emissions, which I see as unethical, but also advantageous for the consumer, should have been done openly if VW saw following the law as unethical. Ethics and morality are subjective to understanding, and law only a crude approximation of divinity. Though I would argue that each person on the earth through a shared common experience has a rough and general idea of right from wrong...though I'm not always certain they pay attention to it.
I think you're talking about something different from what sigmoid10 was talking about. sigmoid10 said "manipulate behaviour during those benchmarks". I interpreted that to mean the compiler detects if a benchmark is going on and alters its behavior only then. So this wouldn't impact real life use cases.
I agree that ethics should inform law. But I live in a society, and have an ethical duty to respect other members of society. And part of that duty is following the laws of society.
What about Fidelity Cash Management Accounts?
>Wealthfront isn’t a bank, but we work with partner banks to get you an industry-leading APY, the security of FDIC insurance, and a full array of fee-free, no-strings-attached checking features — all wrapped up into one label-defying package we call a Cash Account.
https://www.wealthfront.com/cash
>The Fidelity Cash Management Account is not a bank account. It is a brokerage account that allows you to spend, save, and invest. The account offers competitive rates as well as spending and money movement features including a free debit card, checkwriting, Bill Pay, and more.
https://www.fidelity.com/spend-save/fidelity-cash-management...
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