That is impossible because each Vanguard mutual fund is a distinct legal entity. Assets cannot be moved between funds. See Vanguard safety for more details: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Vanguard_safety
389 karma · joined December 6, 2008
[1] https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-fun...
Think about how cars generally depreciate over time such that a used car becomes more affordable. During the pandemic, this trend broke to supply side disruptions and used cars actually started to appreciate. Housing always has supply side constraints to zoning regulations to guard the entrenched interests of existing homeowners, and thereby housing generally appreciates in value.
The closest that we can come to balancing both affordability and investment interests in a growing area is to constantly increase housing density. Then the land itself can appreciate in value as larger buildings are built in a fixed footprint. Yet the price of an individual unit of housing can stay roughly constant in real terms due to the ever increasing supply.
> In recent years, scientists like Kathryn Paige Harden have shown that DNA makes us different, in our personalities and in our health—and in ways that matter for educational and economic success in our current society.
> In The Genetic Lottery, Harden introduces readers to the latest genetic science, dismantling dangerous ideas about racial superiority and challenging us to grapple with what equality really means in a world where people are born different. Weaving together personal stories with scientific evidence, Harden shows why our refusal to recognize the power of DNA perpetuates the myth of meritocracy, and argues that we must acknowledge the role of genetic luck if we are ever to create a fair society.
As a professor of clinical psychology, Harden is well situated to introduce us laypersons to the overwhelming strong evidence that genes matter. Notably, even biological siblings only share 50% of their genes with each other. Therefore the randomization in genetic combination alone can create differences in innate strengths and weaknesses among children with the same parents. A lottery is the appropriate metaphor for the lack of control any of us have in the genes we’re bestowed at conception.
Genetic engineering may offer an equalizer, but that presents its own ethical challenges. Harden instead argues that we should design a sufficiently robust welfare state to counteract these natural inequities. She presents a Rawlian framework (ie, veil of ignorance) to argue for why we should not accept genetic privileges and disadvantages anymore than we’d accept other injustices.
Yet I personally don't see the need for this tool in tech. The labor market has been red hot for years with demand exceeding supply and numerous options for each worker. Firms and their management seem exceedingly responsive (sometimes to a fault) with regard to addressing worker requests.
Sure there are still plenty of suboptimal tech employers and no firm is ever perfect for every worker. Yet worker choice seems to be sufficient to let tech workers find a firm that meets their requirements.
Some people are still choosing employers that many of us would reject, yet those workers are likely just prioritizing different things. Some people want to maximize their pay or progress more quickly in their career. Some people might even want to center work in their lives and seek a demanding employer. Whatever; to each their own.
University degree program do care about rankings, which entails some concern about the quality of graduates awarded a degree. But they mainly address that by filtering students at admission time. Some program still have weed out courses to nudge students into alternative programs early on. But once the student is committed to the program, there is a strong incentive to award a degree regardless of their demonstrated capabilities.
> Safe assets are much riskier than risky ones. This is I think the deep lesson of the 2008 financial crisis, and crypto loves re-learning the lessons of traditional finance. Systemic risks live in safe assets. Equity-like assets — tech stocks, Luna, Bitcoin — are risky, and everyone knows they’re risky, and everyone accepts the risk. If your stocks or Bitcoin go down by 20% you are sad, but you are not that surprised. And so most people arrange their lives in such a way that, if their stocks or Bitcoin go down by 20%, they are not ruined.
> On the other hand safe assets — AAA mortgage securities, bank deposits, stablecoins — are not supposed to be risky, and people rely on them being worth what they say they’re worth, and when people lose even a little bit of confidence in them they crack completely. Bitcoin is valuable at $50,000 and somewhat less valuable at $40,000. A stablecoin is valuable at $1.00 and worthless at $0.98. If it hits $0.98 it might as well go to zero. And now it might!
War, including economic war, commonly involves massive harm to civilians. That includes civilians who oppose the war and are powerless to stop it. If the western powers and their allies could surgically snuff out Putin’s war machine without harm to innocent Russians then they would. Unfortunately that option is not available. So we accept that innocent Russians will suffer as we drain the financial blood from Putin’s war machine.
Agree that hopefully Spotify can resist calls to stop distributing content that other users find objectionable. As you point out, fashion will change and hopefully it does so in a way that shuns calls for censorship.
The end result is that a content distribution platform will have to curate a specific brand that targets specific consumers and only distributes conforming content. Whereas we currently have a half dozen or so music streaming services that all have roughly the same content, we’ll soon find content fragmented across 20 different platforms; each corresponding to a specific slice of consumer preferences. Many of us will have to subscribe to multiple services to get the content we seek and will not be able to mix content. E.g., many of my current playlists on Spotify would be split across several disjoint streaming platforms.
Instead, I think platforms should never be reactive in calls for dropping content. Instead they should have a general principle of broadly distributing all but the most extreme fringe content. They can regularly update their principles used in determining what content they distribute, but that should never be done as a quick reaction to some mob. Otherwise they’ll constantly be facing a series of outraged customers that want the platform to stop distributing some content that those outraged user’s don’t even consume. And I believe that will only result in platform fragmentation as distributors curate a brand around specific segments of consumers.
Instead, I think many of us are arguing that Spotify shouldn’t exercise that option just because of an outraged online mob. That includes those of us that aren’t particular fans of Rogan and wouldn’t be affected if we couldn’t consume his content anymore. Many of us are arguing that as a general principal; don’t give in to a short-lived and irrational angry mob.
I am arguing for Spotify and other content distributors to ignore angry mobs because I worry that eventually such a mob will come for something I do value. E.g., I listen to plenty of music that includes gratuitous levels of profanity. I imagine that such music greatly offends many people, chiefly culturally conservative prudes. Should such an online mob form and demand Spotify stop distributing some of my favorite music then I hope Spotify resists that mob.
Maybe one day I’ll even be a member of such a mob demanding that some platform stop distributing something that offends my sensibilities. While my emotions of hate and outrage may cloud my rational judgment, I hope the platform will have the courage to tell me and my compatriots to pound sand. If we don’t like the content, then we don’t have to consume it.
*Edited to fix a mistake as pointed out in a reply.
The comparable car example would be preventing a local ordnance that bans minivans. The car buyer can choose a car or minivan based on their discretion if such a ban is prevented. Some localities don't like minivans for whatever reason and would like to ban them, thereby forcing everyone to buy cars.
* https://liveramp.com/developers/blog/google-cloud-platform-g... * https://liveramp.com/developers/blog/migrating-a-big-data-en...
One big point was challenges of maintaining multiple colocation sites, with cross replication, for disaster recovery. Since Hadoop triple replicates all data within one DC, this requires 6 times the disk storage capacity of data size for dual DCs. In contrast, cloud object storage pricing includes replication within a region with very high availability such that storing once in cloud storage may be acceptable. Further, you also need double the compute, with one of the DCs always standing by should the other fail.
This is not a challenge commonly faced on on the enterprise server side, hence why many of us cannot imagine a use case for SQLite. Our workloads involve multiple readers/writers for both scaling and availability. An RDBMS cluster is the obvious choice.
But for mobile/embedded, all the data is local to a single device and commonly also a single process. In this case, an RDBMS would add unnecessary overhead. Additionally, there's desktop software that has to work with relatively large datasets, which require reliable persistence and efficient searching/reading. Adding an RDBMS would complicate installation and support.
Further, researchers and data analysts benefit from SQLite databases when the data is too large to hold in memory, yet not large enough to warrant a proper data warehouse. Even ~100 MB datasets can benefit from SQLite if you're performing a lot of random writes/reads or want to execute complex queries. There are other alternatives such as Apache Arrow, but SQLite is tried and tested option. It can be populated and queried similar to SQL-based data warehouses, and it also includes secondary indexes, an efficient query engine, and fast random writes with durability and atomic transactions.
There's a reason why SQLite can reputably claim to be the "Most Widely Deployed and Used Database Engine" with an estimated one trillion SQL database in use. [0]
There has been significant R&D investments in kitchen automation in the last decade and we're just starting to see the amazing results. As covered in Dec 2020 article, Future Restaurants Will Fit In A Shipping Container And Have No Humans In The Kitchen. [1]
> “Starting in the next two years, you’re going to see an explosion of really high quality, small footprint delivery kiosks — think high quality vending machines, kind of express menus,” Miso Robotics co-founder Buck Jordan told me recently on the TechFirst podcast.
> “But then I think around year five or seven, you’re going to start seeing a lot of … all new-build kitchens being completely reinvented, fully autonomous, no humans in the back of house, 25% the square footage, probably fits in a shipping container, completely changing the entire industry and potentially disrupting the franchise model.”
> “The future’s already here,” he says. “We have standalone machines that can cook a pizza in less than three minutes from scratch. We have automated Boba tea bars hitting the scene. And all these things just make it easier for customers to get low-touch food options faster and close to home.”
White Castle has been experimenting with this tech and in October 2020, announced that they would roll out the robotic fry cook to 10 new locations. [2] See [3] for a short video, showing the robot in action. There is also the Creator restaurant in San Francisco, which has a fully automated burger chef. [4,5]
Amazon Go has already solved the problem of automating retail. [6] As a customer, you don't interact with any employees. You scan in with your app as you enter, cameras automatically detect the items you select, and it charges your account when you exit. Go stores still have employees, including people stocking the shelves and someone available to help people as needed. Nonetheless, they still require fewer employees and can therefore offer lower costs.
I used to frequent two of the Go stores when I lived in San Francisco. They are incredibly convenient and offer the highest value in terms of value for cost. Quite hopeful that they'll expand out to my current city soon.
Getting people out of this menial work will drop costs to consumers, while improving consistency, quality, and cleanliness. I can hardly wait for what this sector will look like in just a decade.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/12/11/the-rob...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/27/white-castle-rolls-out-mor...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vjf13h2f6o
The messaging seemed to be generic arguments in favor of unions combined with some general Amazon and Bezos criticisms. Even reading through the linked reports, didn't seem to provide a particularly convincing argument. E.g., they begin their concerns about workplace safety with
> The report notes that between 2013 and the time of publication earlier this year, seven workers had died at Amazon facilities. According to the report, two were crushed by forklifts in the warehouses, one was run over by a truck, one was killed by a driver in its parking lot, one suffered a fatal heart-related event during an overnight shift, one was dragged and crushed by a conveyor belt, and one was killed and crushed by a pallet loader. Two more Amazon workers were killed just weeks ago when a warehouse in Maryland partially collapsed during a storm.
While workplace deaths are certainly concerning, nine deaths in eight years for a workforce that is now up to 876,000 workers [0] suggests these deaths are exceedingly rare and may not be something most workers are thinking about. Further, there’s already OSHA requirements for workplace safety and I’d imagine all firms, including Amazon, want to avoid worker deaths and will make the necessary changes.
I think a union will need to address the specific demands of the workers they will be representing rather than generic arguments for unionization. Further, Amazon may be a particularly challenging workplace to organize since they already pay exceedingly well for unskilled labor, with a starting minimum rate of $15/hour and surprisingly good health benefits. [1] For many workers, Amazon may be the best job they’ve ever had and these workers may be concerned about risking the situation.
This includes risks like Amazon shutting down a unionized warehouse, which should be illegal, but there are workarounds. More likely, Amazon would just not grow a unionized warehouse and instead grow nearby ones to control labor costs. This would include building new warehouses if necessary.
Amazon may also be particularly aggressive in automation investments for a unionized warehouse, which would allow them to justify layoffs for redundant workers. Some analysts have even proposed that Amazon may be able to have “dark warehouses” (i.e., warehouses that keep the lights off) with full automation within 10 years. [2] Union concerns may lead them to invest even more aggressively in automation tech.
In general, I want to see workers' concerns addressed at all firms, and unionizing may be the best approach for this Amazon warehouse, but I think this will be challenging and will require organizers to put a lot of thought into the specific demands that the majority of workers want.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-number-of-employees-w...
[1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/workplace/employee-benefits
[2] https://futurism.com/the-byte/amazon-automated-warehouses-10...
Students and their parents would need to plan out a career path assuming they don't get into the best schools. They could still spend time and money on education and personal development, but it wouldn't be singularly directed at test prep. Instead, there'd be more focus on developing the foundational knowledge, critical thinking, and diligent habits that promote career success.
I asked a friend who has a CPA, but doesn't work in tax law. Their first comment after briefly scanning the legal code is that "disqualified person" is only used within the context of "prohibited transaction". The definition of "prohibited transaction" concerning "disqualified person" doesn't seem to address this case. Instead, it seems to focus on dealing with the Roth IRA assets in a manner to benefits ones accounts outside of the Roth.
Further, there are disadvantages to having this portion of his wealth in a Roth IRA. For one, you cannot borrow against equity in a Roth. So while he can sell and buy something else tax free, none of these assets are available to him until retirement age. Whereas his PayPal shares outside of retirement accounts can serve as collateral for loans, which would allow him to access a portion of these assets tax free , while allowing the equity to continually appreciate.
If Thiel made this contribution for tax year 1998, then this would be before they even took any external funding. It's quite conceivable that he received an exceptionally low salary that year and relied on savings.
Anyone can found a company with a $1 market cap and have full ownership from their one dollar investment. But it's meaningless unless they turn that into an actually valuable company with a market cap in the billions. Thiel just got exceptionally lucky, in addition to a bunch of hard and smart work.
I think this is a concept a lot of us struggle with when imagining the extreme wealth of the most elite tech entrepreneurs. Bezos, Gate, Zuck, and the rest all started with worthless companies and had substantial ownership as founders. Their wealth came from turning those large stakes in worthless companies into slightly smaller stakes into companies worth hundreds of billions.
Here's a 2015 Kaggle competition that they hosted, which provides sample data that they use in modeling, https://www.kaggle.com/c/icdm-2015-drawbridge-cross-device-c...
And here's a technical writeup of one of the well-performing solutions from that competition, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.01175.pdf
In my program, many of us would strategize for the 30-60 minutes of the closed door grilling. We sought to give our committee members obvious things to criticize with the PhD student having prepared arguments to defend against these criticisms. E.g., I ashamedly included quite a few spelling and grammar errors in the first few pages of the summary section of the thesis (the only part anyone would actually read) and we spent at least 15 minutes on my horrible writing ability.
In general, the main outcome of the closed door portion of the defense was requests for additional work. It was common for committee members to suggest additional things that could “improve” the thesis work. Not surprisingly, many of these suggestions involved applying a committee member's methods, even if not plausibly applicable, so that one would publish another paper citing the committee member’s work. Some students, including myself, would have a job lined up before the defense to timebox the amount of additional work that could be requested.
Category Net sales Operating expenses Operating income Margin
North America 236.3 227.6 8.7 3.7%
International 104.4 103.7 0.7 0.7%
AWS 45.4 31.8 13.5 29.7%
I added profit margins to show just how little profit they're making in the retail business, particularly in the international market. AWS is the profit machine.
I couldn't find a further breakdown of different markets in their 10-K. That might be because its difficult to assign expenses to the market for a single country.