• 1 Post
  • 45 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle

















  • The article is behind a paywall but…

    Wealthsimple isn’t even a bank, let alone the next big bank. They are not a deposit taking institution. Their ‘savings account’ is just an agreement with a number of actual banks to accept deposits from Wealthsimple on behalf of their clients. Wealthsimple is merely acting as an intermediary.

    Being a true deposit taking institution comes with a lot more regulation and institutional sophistication. Never mind the fact that deposit taking is only one side of what truly defines banking: aggregating demand deposits to enable lending. I’m sure Wealthsimple is looking to get into that game, but since they aren’t deposit taking I’m sure it will just be a pretty wrapper around another actual bank just like their ‘savings accounts’.

    Is Horizons ETFs the next big bank because of their CASH.TO ETF? Horizons is doing a very similar thing through a different vehicle.

    Having said, Wealthsimple has clearly created a competitive product suite. But their ability to offer these products fundamentally relies on other organizations (e.g., Mastercard, Big 5 banks) to do the heavy lifting. Wealthsimple’s competitive advantage is in product design and advertising.


  • In a way these observations cut more deeply into the foundations of cosmology than dark matter. Indeed, I’d argue that dark matter challenges the standard model of particle physics more than the standard model of cosmology.

    These discoveries of large scale structures challenge the assumptions that the universe is homogenous at a large enough scale. This assumption, along with isotropy, are what lead to the FLRW family of metrics describing spacetime at cosmological scales. Dark matter and dark energy only come in to the picture once you try to fit the parameters of the FLRW metrics to our observed universe.


  • Ontario, Canada this year is supposed to be choosing which of 2 proposed storage sites will be chosen for development. Nuclear power is a major part of the grid there, representing something like 35% of capacity and 55% of output. The generation facilities are geographically well situated, with one station being <100km away from a proposed storage site and two others within 250km.

    I wonder what kind of risks there are with accidents during long distance transportation. Ships sink, trains derail, and trucks have accidents.