Slow Then Fast

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has been breathtaking. There are already impacts rippling outward from this that I’ve spotted on Mastodon. Quoting @annmlipton@esq.social: https://esq.social/@annmlipton/110000882966755391 #retoot:

Businesses are already getting damaged by this. If that glimpse from Mastodon wasn’t enough, let us go ahead and look at this screen-cap from the header to their home page at camp.com before their site went 503:

Businesses are having to hurriedly raise capital in any way they can. Silicon Valley Bank was insured by FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The problem is that insurance on accounts caps out at just a quarter of a million dollars per account. If you’re a startup with millions or even billions in an account you quite likely watched your operating cash get vaporized today.

I would start breaking out wget to write WARC archive files of various sites as things are likely to start disappearing. There is a proxy known as warcprox that is a bit of a kludge but it lets you capture things on the fly while you view them so that you can have your own miniature web archive. With supposedly thirty percent of YCombinator companies exposed to the SVB failure likely being unable to make payroll in the next month according to one set of comments, things are quite possibly going to start disappearing.

We can act like we can just ignore the pandemic situation but you can’t just skip the “demobilization” phase of an emergency. You can’t just play pretend like everything is magically normal again one day. The clock didn’t magically reset to 2019. The economy is still more fragile than it should be and we’re not on the same footing that we were pre-pandemic. The Secretary also said she’s got the department monitoring a few banks in the wake of SVB’s collapse so there is still a risk that this financial problem may yet spread.