jshaqaw

One thing I notice about the people who seem to achieve the most in this world - few of them seem to have intricate PKM/organizational systems.

I say this as someone as guilty of productivity app porn as anyone.

I think these systems appeal very much to certain kinds of people with adhd/adhdish issues looking to maximize their potential. And yeah a good system can really help with that when you don’t let obsessing over it get out of control.

We’ve long moved past the zero rate bound being a hard constraint on monetary policy. Whether they should or not is a valid question, but money can always be created and injected into the system.

This. I’ve been investing professionally for almost 20 years. You know those internet memes with the bell curve iqs…. For much of my career I was contrarian to this view but after watching the government responses to repeated financial asset crises, you don’t want to be positioned too far from what the voting masses will demand if they see their home prices or 401ks sharply decline. Can governments keep this up forever? Logic would say no but then again doomsayers have been arguing about the unsustainability of trends for all five decades of my life. The “smartest” investors I know always see a climax around the corner when finally all the accumulated problems come to roost. Guess what. Last fifty years you didn’t want to be sitting out of assets holding cash. This stuff is hard.

It’s really really hard as you get older and your hopefully accumulated savings are high relative to your current income and your expected remaining working life earnings.

In your 20s you can ride up a bubble, lose it all, and chalk it up to a cruddy learning experience. Later in life it gets exponentially harder because mistakes are permanent and irrecoverable. You can play the game and risk it in what seem like expensive assets. Or you can sit it out and fall behind without any compounding to create wealth and offset inflation. The latter option isn’t really an option unless you start with so much wealth that you can just spend down principal being eroded by inflation year after year and still have enough.

Good luck!

The great resignation is fascinating. Some people are trapped in jobs with toxic cultures because they really have obligations to meet and a lack of good alternatives. Lots of other people just think this is the case. A toxic manager with a certain kind of charisma (as many high level toxic managers ten to have)can project this fear into the susceptible and they use that power shamelessly. But this kind of fear projection seems to rely on actual physical proximity or at least spending lots of time in an environment that they not you control. It’s amazing how much less scary a jackass manager seems when you are working home in your sweatpants with some Louis Armstrong playing. Can only be good to defang these soul parasites a bit.

I live in NYC. I love NYC. Anyone who starts a business in NYC is insane unless and until the political climate changes. Other cities seem to value and nurture the economic foundation their tax base is built on. Since Bloomberg the entire NYC political class seems to consist of people who have no clue private sector works, are often outright hostile, and are willfully blind to the fact that the entire tax base that funds the city could click over to another jurisdiction over a weekend.

This isn’t fair. By 2021 we have learned that the way to judge the merits of a scientific proposal is not testability or provability but the ability to exchange Joe Rogan anecdotes on the Lex podcast.

Perfect, thanks

KDB is trying to expand out of the finance niche into other applications no? Is that a viable path? Is KDB competitive in other sectors?

I’m not sayin this is impossible but… if it emerged that big tech was secretly spying on every citizen the political backlash would end these companies as we know them and every CEO would end up in jail. Or there is at least a 50 percent probability of that outcome. It’s hard to see these companies engaging in such practices out of self interested rationality.

Let's be clear about what G&T programs mean in NYC. There is a heavier workload and more intensive academic focus but not really so much in terms of constructivist learning, child autonomy etc... That why we skipped it. To be blunt, I wanted my kids to have a more interesting classroom experience and not waste evenings stuck doing homework when they were little. My bet/assessment was that they would be smart enough to more than catch up later on when the workload ramps in a challenging middle school. So far it looks like I was right.

BTW - not all public school in NYC is tough. You have to remember the scale of NYC. Within it are insanely great schools, a lot of mediocre schools, and too many horror shows - much like the public school system in any US state.

I am all for supportive programs for really smart kids. FWIW my kids go to NYC public schools. We did not go with gifted and talented because we didn't really like the structure of the program. If the city ends up providing REAL enrichment for gifted kids past 3rd grade it will be a net gain for everyone.

It is pretty ridiculous how pervasive test prep is for pre-school age kids to get them into the G&T program.

This looks fantastic. This generation needs a Robot Odyssey.

Some of the mathematical equivalences worked out on the underlying article are quite interesting. The broader implications part is fairly hand-wavy vague but you can skip it. Part of me wonders if Smolin is trolling the string theorists with “well this idea is mathematically consistent if untestable too…”

What is also dangerous are zombie corporations stuffed with excess capital forced to reinvest it at subpar rates of return or go on wasteful m&a sprees because they can’t return capital to where it can be most efficiently redeployed into other investments. I’m not saying buybacks can’t be abused but if you want to see a corporate environment where capital can’t be recirculated look to Japan. I don’t think many people would say the last few decades of Japan are a great example of economic dynamism.

The common refrain among many critics is that “Wall Street” is short sighted and can’t make long term investments. Really? At this point you have 10b public valuations based on revenues which won’t appear for a decade at best (flying taxi companies anyone) while value stocks paying high free cash flow today languish at single digit earnings multiples. Any company which has a viable growth strategy for invested capital gets a ton of credit from the market, making capital return a last resort. So the idea that buybacks are somehow starving growth investment seems strained.

Must be nice to be a tenured professor teaching a few hours a week with plenty of time to homeschool his kids.

The NY DOB is a textbook case of regulatory capture by the construction and real estate industries. I

I’m a renter. I like being a renter. If nobody owned properties to rent who would I rent from?

As a renter in NYC I expect to pay for this for years to come as landlords have to price in periodic expropriation risk.

Society absolutely had the right (and perhaps moral obligation) to prevent harms like evictions of the vulnerable in a crisis. There is always a tension in law drafting between maximum protection (in which case yes you will have more edge cases abuses by grifters) and maximum targeting which will bury everyone in legal/bureaucratic process and probably harm some of the deserving.

What is almost always bad policy is to place all the expenses of a societal goal randomly on one class like landlords which is the easy way for society to get something without paying for it.

Mypillow ads?

This is an ever recurring critique of McKinsey and as a long-ago (and very jaded) McKinsey associate this isn’t quite right. The on ground teams do valuable analytical and data sourcing work but the clients are really paying for the counsel of the partners/directors. The 22 year old grad is providing the necessary information inputs and implementation details for the partners/directors to make effective recommendations.

Because it's so easy to play asset stripping games, personal guarantees are very common in the commercial real estate world.

It is irrational behavior for these landlords to evict or pileup unrealistic future obligations. On the other side of covid it will be far better to have an existing in place restaurant or bar tenant than to try and lease space in a glut market and take on lots of tenant onboarding costs.

I'm not a boomer. I am a market professional for whatever that's worth. Yes with age there does often come less risk tolerance. Money is a more serious thing when one is older with responsibilities, bigger dollars involved, and generally higher stakes for mistakes. But there is also some element of experience. I've worked as an investor since 2003. This year is the first time in my entire career you have really seen significant popular retail interest in individual stocks. The 2000 crash just wiped out that sentiment for 20 years. There are many things this time which are different. There are also many parts of the market which are eerily similar. If you are 32 today then you were 12 playing video games the last time a market reckoned with sentiments like "valuation doesn't matter." Ancient history for the textbooks. Every generation needs to learn this lesson anew for itself by losing money. Someday then you can be the old fart telling youngsters that these speculative frenzies rarely end well.

An index fund ETF is just a basket of stocks packaged together under a single stock ticker with hopefully low fees. It's the simplest way to just buy an index but yes its value will reflect the value of the underlying stocks so there is nothing magical which will insulate you from market swings.

Maybe he should run for mayor.

Our family takes vitamin d supplements. I’m not sure what the ultimate efficacy is but the low risk-high potential reward seems compelling. My kids think the yummy gummy versions are a treat anyway. Just be aware that like most things you can take too much vitamin d. By all means take some supplement but don’t overdo it or the low risk part of the equation changes.

It’s really hard for me to get in the headspace to understand this. Maybe one way to think about it is if you were ever playing a Civ game where you were in that “just one more turn” mode. You know you have just lost 8 hours of your life to something with no real world payoff. You know you lost a day of productivity at work/school/life with real quantifiable impact and need to get back to real life. But ... “one more turn”

As a non-Californian I marvel at the constant stream of articles about what a hostile Soviet environment California is for private enterprise and yet over the past few decades it has been one of the greatest centers of innovation and wealth creation in global history. The rebuttable presumption when you here about some emerging world conquering company is that it is coming out of CA. Something right must be happening there!

I am a tv producer. Stealing is if I invest years of blood, sweat, and capital into a project with the paradigm that in a free market exchange you can pay in some form to view it or not and happily find some alternative way to enjoy your time. Nobody is forcing you to watch what I make and you won’t die if you don’t watch it.

The creators like myself you valorize don’t exist in a vacuum. If distributors who finance the projects upfront with risk capital don’t get paid then there is nobody to pay me for making content and thus content does not get made. Financing the speculative production of a movie or tv series is inherently high risk.

Let me flip the script a little michaelmrose. What do you do for your money and why should you not have to do it for me for free?

Nothing is perfect. Certainly in the US our two party system is creaking. But multiparty parliamentary systems have their own issues where small outlier parties can often extract disproportionate power because they are necessary to build a majority coalition.