Hacker News Reader

mohawkon How alcohol industry organisations mislead the public about alcohol and cancer

http://www.lunaliving.org/pdf/global-burden-of-disease-and-i...

The link is on the right next to the google scholar search results.

mohawkon How alcohol industry organisations mislead the public about alcohol and cancer

Go to Google Scholar and type in the paper's title - often there will be a link to a publically available copy of the pdf, such as is the case for reference 1.

And you sound like you made up your mind before even really digging into the literature. Your first job as a scientist is to not fool yourself.

mohawkon Aspirin May Prevent Cancer from Spreading, New Research Shows

Sorry haven't got much time at the moment, here's the paper that got me interested

Anti-tumoral action of cannabinoids: Involvement of sustained ceramide accumulation and extracellular signal-regulated kinase activation

http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v6/n3/abs/nm0300_313.html

Put that into Google Scholar (the paper title or just "guzman thc"), then click on the Cited by xxx below in the search results to find newer papers.

GW Pharma is a company doing clinical trials, and i think Canadian licenced producers of cannabis are doing trials as well (though i don't know how many are about cancer/anti-tumoral activity).

Here's a long list of research papers on cannabinoids:

http://www.cannabis-med.org/studies/study.php

mohawkon Japan's nuclear technology faces extinction

I'm happy to hear uranium will last for a long time, gives us a good alternative if the sun ever stopped shining (e.g. massive volcano or asteroid). But it doesn't really change the economics.

China's newly installed solar capacity in 2016 was 34 GW and growing fast, they currently have 20 nuclear reactors under construction with a capacity of 20GW. So solar is quickly outpacing nuclear even in China, and the trend is in solar's favor.

The only saving grace that nuclear has at the moment is the lack of massive battery capacity. Electric cars are quickly changing that, and then it will be game over for nuclear.

I think that potential investors of nuclear reactors see this trend now as well, which is why interest in building new nuclear reactors in market-based economies is quickly fading (of course it depends on latitude at which point in time solar/wind dominance is reached). Quite substantial cost overruns are also typical for nuclear power plants, but rare for solar/wind.

mohawkon Japan's nuclear technology faces extinction

So may the best one of us win. My most profitable investments have been based on other people's myopia, and it is a far sweeter victory than scoring points in an online discussion forum.

mohawkon Japan's nuclear technology faces extinction

Ok, let's find some common ground: we agree current nuclear reactors "could be a lot better". With very finite uranium, coal, and oil deposits on earth these forms of energy generation are only a short-term solution. As an aside, it would also be great to save those energy supplies for a dark and rainy day.

My prediction is based on Econ 101: the cheapest solution will win.

Nuclear reactors (and coal plants) are long-term investment projects with payback over decades. If you're close to the equator, it doesn't even make sense today. And the increasing cost differential between solar and nuclear/coal will mean that zone is expanding towards the poles.

I'm sorry if you're financially or intellectually invested in nuclear, but that's what i think will happen.

mohawkon Japan's nuclear technology faces extinction

They will. I'm an investor, i like to make money, and i hate losing it. So i'm happy there's still someone else on the other side of the trade :-)

mohawkon Japan's nuclear technology faces extinction

Solar, wind & batteries will power the future. It is a question of when not if. All others will fade into oblivion. So long, and thanks for all the Joules.

mohawkon Chernobyl Hints Radiation May Be Less Dangerous than Thought

Recent large-scale research suggests dose-risk relationship holds at small doses for leukemia:

http://www.nature.com/news/researchers-pin-down-risks-of-low...

mohawkon Ask HN: How did you learn about stocks and the market?

Short advice: get a low-cost physically-replicating ETF covering a large part of the market (e.g. Vanguard) and dollar-cost average. This is the ultra-low-effort average returns approach.

Stock picking advice and understanding the economy:

I really recommend reading all of Warren Buffett's letters to shareholders which can be found on the Berkshire Hathaway website. They are written in a down-to-earth style and offer a panoramic view of investing, from accounting issues to competitive advantages to macroeconomics. You can also see Warren's investing style evolve and him deal with various issues throughout history, from high inflation to the dot-com boom. Warren boils down many issues into easily remembered sayings ("Be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy", though the sayings themselves are probably as old as the stock market itself).

Find investments that have moats is one of Warren's guiding rules, i.e. business advantages that are hard to replicate.

Learn about accounting. You don't have to learn everything, but you should know about the things that will affect your valuation of an investment. Pension contributions, stock-option accounting, etc. Come up with your own metrics to compare companies in a sector to find out who is the most efficient etc.

You will have to find an edge, something that most other people don't know, otherwise you'll just follow the crowd. Things that aren't in fashion are great places to find bargains.

Understand how a discounted cash flow (DCF) calculation works. The important part in a DCF from the point of an investor is to look at how sensitive the results are with regard to changes in the input variables (because the risk-free interest rate and size/timing of future cash flows isn't known in advance).

Understand the effect of interest rates on asset prices (see DCF calculation).

Understand the debt cycle. We are at an interesting point in time, coming ever closer to our debt-carrying capacity.

Here is a nice video by Ray Dalio on this topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0

Some economists probably disagree with some things said there, but i think the gist of it is spot on.

mohawkon It's time to dispel the myths about nuclear power

It would be great if externalities were insured by everybody, yes. But externalities are real, why would you ignore them "out of fairness"? The sane thing to do is to consider them for all kinds of power generation, and then make the best choice. Nuclear just has huge unconsidered negative externalities, we haven't even yet talked about cost of storing and guarding waste for centuries.

Thankfully there are only a few more years until wind & solar will have solved this once and for all by being cheaper, externalities considered or not.

mohawkon Goats on Acid (2002)

Alcohol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50tlF3kGbT4

mohawkon It's time to dispel the myths about nuclear power

What exactly do you mean? It's too expensive? Legally impossible? No insurer would insure this?

It's a thought experiment to show what replacing wishful thinking with a tiny amount of objectivity would look like. OP was talking about expectation value of damages etc. Insurers are companies that deal with these sorts of things professionally.

The economic damages of Fukushima and Chernobyl are real and gigantic. It would be foolish to ignore them.

mohawkon It's time to dispel the myths about nuclear power

It would be good if these risks were objectively valued, for example by insuring the plant against meltdown costs.

Total economic loss estimates for the Fukushima meltdown are 250-500 bn USD[1]. And if the wind had been slightly different those numbers would be a lot higher, as Tokyo real estate would be affected.

And that insurance should also cover human error, terrorism, natural disasters. Won't be cheap is my guess.

Which brings us to the biggest myth of all, that nuclear power is cheap when you don't externalise so many costs.

[1] http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/environmental-heal...

mohawkon Deutsche Bank: Germany's Financial Colossus Stumbles

I would state it differently. Derivatives can be quite useful for the economy, because they allow people to offload risk, e.g. companies can hedge their commodity or exchange rate risks.

They become a problem in banks that have a lot of them ("weapons of financial mass destruction") because of their opacity on the balance sheet (DB has one line in their balance sheet for derivatives, ~ 500 billion Euros) and because banks offload their long-tail risks to their depositors and ultimately the taxpayer. The new bail-in rules mean that depositors in banks are essentially guaranteeing the bank's balance sheet. Think about that the next time you look at your bank account.

mohawkon Deutsche Bank: Germany's Financial Colossus Stumbles

You've hit the nail on the head, the derivatives they have on their books are massive compared to shareholder equity. "Counterparty risk" are the words nobody analysing bank's derivatives positions wants to hear.

It's a terrible mistake there has never been a separation of investment banking from commercial banking in Germany (i realise the line is hard to draw), because the German taxpayer is essentially guaranteeing this shoddily run bank.

Unfortunately German politicians seem to be quite oblivious to this problem. Joe Ackermann (then CEO of DB) was giving Merkel advice on the financial crisis of 2008, so there seems to be some asymmetry of information there...

mohawkon Overdoses Propel Rise in Mortality Rates of Young Whites

A lot of these people got hooked on opiates through a prescription from their doctor. These doctors prescribing opiates before trying medical marijuana for pain management are endangering the wellbeing and lives of their patients.

mohawkon Overdoses Propel Rise in Mortality Rates of Young Whites

That's a lot of lives that medical marijuana might have saved.

mohawkon Germany May Offer Model for Reining in Fossil Fuel Use

Could nuclear advocates please include cost of insurance in their calculations? Because insurers seem to know a bit more about extreme value statistics and long-tail risk, unlike governments or nuclear power advocates. And then please include the cost of storing nuclear waste...

mohawkon Germany May Offer Model for Reining in Fossil Fuel Use

According to that paper (table 3), the UK is number one per capita, and Germany is rank 5.

mohawkon The New Atomic Age We Need

Most new panels announced these days top 20% efficiency[1]. Output is guaranteed to 90% after 10 years, 80% after 20, real world often better[2].

[1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Is-SolarCitys-N...

[2] http://sroeco.com/solar/solar-efficiency-losses-over-time/

mohawkon The New Atomic Age We Need

That analysis uses solar panels with 10% efficiency in its calculations...

mohawkon How I missed an engineering interview after getting singled out by Münchner cops

I agree 100%.

I didn't mean to attack you personally, it's just very easy to become blind to things that don't affect you personally. The last paragraph of the blog post touches on this as well. I still think it would be an interesting experiment, because of course my opinions on Bavarian police are also based on extrapolation from anecdotes that i have heard.

mohawkon How I missed an engineering interview after getting singled out by Münchner cops

I am from Germany. Bavarian police is famous here. They do profiling based on your looks, it is called "Verdachtsunabhängige Personenkontrolle". I have heard plenty of complaints from people living in Bavaria, e.g. wearing dreadlocks means you are virtually guaranteed a number of searches and stops by police per year, without any probable cause or even a crime having happened.

If they did this to the majority of Bavarians, things would change quickly. So therefore my guess...

mohawkon How I missed an engineering interview after getting singled out by Münchner cops

Perhaps you think that police are friendly and helpful because of your experiences. So here is a guess: you are white, you have a standard hairstyle, you wear standard clothes.

Perhaps we could experimentally test your hypothesis of friendly police behaviour. Start wearing dreadlocks, put on baggy pants and some other more 'hip-hop' looking clothes. Put some colour on your face and make it look darker.

Do this for a year, and _then_ tell us what you think.

mohawkon Origin of the name “Google”

That seems to be wrong, look here for the details:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol

The terms googol and googolplex were first published in 1940.

mohawkon Parkinsons-Like Neurodegenerative Disease Linked to Prion

> I find it mainly amusing because the previous battle similar to this was from people who thought nucleic acids couldn't be coding molecules while proteins could!

Did you mean s/be coding molecules/have catalytic function/ ?

mohawkon Where Are Chernobyl’s Children?

Please update your beliefs with this new data

http://www.nature.com/news/researchers-pin-down-risks-of-low...

mohawkon U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high

Well-documented neurotoxicity and bioaccumulation seem good reasons to me. Of course there will always be colony collapses without neonicotinoids too. How about we stop using them until we fully understand their effects?

EU has banned their use for two years:

http://ec.europa.eu/food/archive/animal/liveanimals/bees/neo...

http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/beehealth.htm?wtrl...

mohawkon U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high

There's quite a few papers referenced on wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid#Decline_in_bee_p...