Could you give an example of something that is a market, unlike housing? And why?
Is a super market a market? Or a stock market ?
1,281 karma · joined January 12, 2022
Is a super market a market? Or a stock market ?
Although I saw a product in a grocery store labeled "pro-biotic" cleaner.
Maybe it's a generational gap.
This is always a scam. Madoff died in prison, you know.
Wow.
I'm wondering, is COVID currently more of a threat to vulnerable people than the flu?
I found something describing a JAMA study that said for people hospitalized lately with either flu or COVID-19, but not both, mortality was 5.97% for COVID-19 and 3.75% for flu. 3-4x as many people were hospitalized in the first place for COVID-19.
However, I think that included the unvaccinated, so I'm curious what the rate for only those vaccinated for COVID-19 might be.
I read somewhere (but didn't do my own research) Schwab's business model these days, maybe others, is making money off idle customer cash, now that they don't charge trading commissions. They may not want customers to buy anything.
With interest rates up so much, I would guess it is even more lucrative?
This is just me, but if I had legal work and deep pockets, I'd hire a lawyer.
>a majority of people think that when it comes to finance they can compete on an equal level with experts who do this every day
>But if your skilled you surely save a ton of fees.
If you are "focused on wealth preservation" rather than "generating high returns", what is the need for skill?
If I won the lottery, and I just sent, say, a $500M check to a regular discount broker and bought an index fund, is someone going to take it away from me? Are the wealth management divisions of every podunk bank and credit union there for a reason? Would I need to hire "protection"?
Warren Buffett famously said he "upon his passing, has directed the trustee for his wife’s benefit to “put 10% of the cash in short-term government bonds and 90% in a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund.”
And Barack Obama reportedly put all his assets in government bonds when he became President to avoid conflicts of interest.
Obviously not everyone takes this sort of simple approach, but some famous examples seem to prove it's possible.
It appears (I didn't previously know this) that iron, while less than 8 g/cm3 at our "normal" environment conditions, is thought to be closer to 13 g/cm3 (or more) at Earth's core.
So while 9.6 g/cm3 is dense, it's probably not dense enough that it implies a significant percentage of elements heavier than iron.
And I think that it's elements heavier than iron that would be truly shocking because I was taught that stellar fusion stops at iron, apart from supernovas.
"For iron, and for all of the heavier elements, nuclear fusion consumes energy"
Well yeah? From what I read, this is a larger star than average, as well as a really close orbit.
I am failing to understand why this is surprising to the experts because the description sounds to me like the sort of exoplanet that there is/was a heavy bias towards from the beginning.
Cool, I live 62 meters above sea level.
It says something that the first three or so sea level rise visualizers I found don't go as high as 60 meters.
But it is not so unbelievable that he never betrayed Putin and his expectations were irrelevant, because he was following a path with no forks or alternatives.
Getting up in the morning and following dictatorship 101 rules like the day before is not being a "master planner".
Authoritarian rulers fear coups. They use paramilitary entities to keep the regular military under control. When they fear an imminent coup, they continue to use such entities, because it is the real military which could have enough popular support to succeed.
The simplest possible explanation for the publicized events is that Prigozhin never stopped doing his job, never changed his role, nor failed to follow orders. A not-so-public, but not completely hidden purge occurred. And when Prigozhin was done, he exited stage left.
That seems to me the correct application of Occam's razor in this case. Everything else, in my opinion, is the wild speculation without evidence.
The Model Y is said to go 3.8-3.9 miles / kWh and would've cost something like $22,000 more (both new, mine was discounted in late 2020).
Sources for Model Y efficiency:
https://insideevs.com/reviews/443791/ev-range-test-results/ https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/electric-car-range-and-cons...
Gas is near $4 where I live, so a mile is about 7.3 cents.
A kWh for me costs 19.6 cents - off my most recent electric bill, not including the price of basic service to be a fair comparison. 19.6 cents/kWh divided by 3.85 mi/kWh is 5.1 cents per mile.
So the obvious savings is around 2.2 cents a mile. $22,000 divided by 2.2 cents is a nice round million miles.
I swear I didn't rig this to come out to exactly 1 million...
But the other thing is that I only drive my hybrid about 8,000 miles a year. That's why I'm a good candidate for an EV in theory, since I wouldn't be relying on public chargers.
A million miles divided by 8,000, though, is 125 years.
Another perspective is that an EV that gets < 2.7 miles per kWh would likely be more expensive to "fill up" than my gas-powered car. There are EVs like that on the market! Apparently they are mainly BMW, Mercedes, or Audi models, so admittedly Teslas (and the Nissan Leaf) seem to be better.
You could argue TCO, but how much do you think maintenance on a new Honda or Toyota hybrid costs? A Tesla could need a million times less, but a million times less than an insignificant amount still only saves an insignificant amount. And you start tens of thousands in the hole.
But oddly that doesn't change my opinion of ChatGPT.
The only reason I know that ChatGPT was right is because I blindly followed the first Googled suggestion.
If I started with ChatGPT, then I would have to verify the answer somehow. If I use Google, I should verify the answer. But ChatGPT cannot do that job.
Wikipedia is starting to feel as useless to me as ChatGPT. I don't know if anyone is actually replacing the articles with AI generated fiction at scale yet, or whether it's still an artisan, human-centered craft but the more I click on references, the more I find they are uncheckable, even if it's ambiguous whether they are fraudulent. People write rants on a topic and cite a single book without page numbers five times. Or, of course, dead links to websites without archive.org.
It outputs some boilerplate code, and inserts a method with comments saying "insert logic here" - entirely sidestepping the request.
You can say that's remarkably human-like, but if it was a human cow-orker, you would not keep them on the payroll. It is a cheat, like ELIZA, like SHRDLU, like a useless employee.
I asked ChatGPT-3.5 for the usual rejoinder to complainers:
"If you're looking for an enhanced experience, you might want to consider trying out the paid version called ChatGPT-4. It offers even more capabilities and improvements. Feel free to explore the options available to find the best fit for your needs!""
It turned out that there was a trailing space.
The moral I took away from that was that if that is representative of a professional's grasp of their own vocation and tools in this day and age, (and I think it is) then how well do you expect think tank experts and economics professors to understand the requirements of all the jobs in the economy in order to estimate AI's impact?
I'd love to see a poll on how many economists at the University of Chicago have heard of trim().
Any time someone suggests a tax that kind of, sort of, might be, correlated with energy efficiency, it is violating what should be the prime directive of climate change - every gram of CO2 emitted should be treated equally.
Doing studies on the environmental impact of Hummer EVs is missing the forest for the trees.
The minute you establish any category of energy usage that is more pure, more sanctified per unit mass of CO2 output, the invisible hand of the market will shift as much as possible into that loophole, until it is so obscene it can't be ignored. Hummer EVs are just one example.
Focusing on weight is just starting a new cycle of missing the point. My motorcycle is really light, so does that mean it's the most efficient method of transport? Are semi-trailers used because truckers like wasting money?
The counter argument remains: "we must do something...and this is something". I don't need to see that again, but if you have the urge - do you really believe it? Can we achieve any goal through lying about the fundamental criterion of success, by micromanaging out of ignorance?
Everything done to fight climate change is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic to avoid thinking about the insurmountable political task of raising fuel taxes enough to make a difference.
If you have given up, then there is nothing left but social justice and mitigation for poor countries affected by climate change. So own it. Be clear about it.
The actual Silent Generation members who lived through the Great Depression, many of them, eventually got credit cards, and cell phones, and now they're mostly gone, but their caricatures live on.
Being able to borrow money in a crisis, or being able to get disability benefits from the government in a non-temporary bad situation are both good and reasons why people don't live the same today as a century ago.
You must have an emergency fund, like the person who got a scholarship and a high paying job that took them out of poverty circa 1955. But is cash safe? Are banks safe? Maybe it's a crisis that people don't own enough gold bars. Maybe you need to be able to live off the land. Be prepared!
You can raise rabbits for food to avoid starvation. Is the number of Americans who instead buy hamburger at the supermarket cause for alarm? Or is it a good thing that the US isn't North Korea (yet)?
Because that was the precision used by the particular author I got it from. It's not that the fourth s.f. really matters. I think the 7 actually helps my memory by making the number distinctive and not just 8 1/3.
It's like remembering that body temperature is 98.6 F. It's obviously false precision and it's not even an accurate average, but it's the way it's traditionally recalled - plus it works out to exactly 37 C.
>8 dry ounces is approximately 8 fluid ounces
I did write "cooking" originally and it is a valid point that when cooking as opposed to baking usually a little more or less liquid is immaterial.
But I meant to include baking and, say, mixing drinks.
A 4-5% difference isn't always important, but it's often noticeable. I've been using a digital kitchen scale for >20 years, and I just find volumetric measuring cups annoying compared to going by weight. I don't want to go back and forth filling a container and checking it on a level surface, to eyeball a meniscus, to wait for every drop of a viscous liquid to fall, or to sift flour.
I don't cook or bake with liquid mercury, but I use sugar, which is ~7 ounces per cup, and flour, which is (according to me) 4.25 to 4.5 ounces per cup. That's considerably different from 8 = 8.
English is funny. Both "strained" and "tenuous" work here, so why not "strenuous"?
A dictionary definition says something like "characterized by great effort" so yeah. I wouldn't win that argument. But it sounds wrong to my ear.
Maybe, but it would be the spread out grid that reflects what people do with fewer constraints, wouldn't it? The downtown center didn't have anything of interest to me that I can recall. Lot of construction going on.
I think I spent most of my time there in the ~20 x 10 mile rectangle west of downtown. Like Westheimer and the Katy freeway sound familiar.
I didn't have a car, at least the first time I went there. I don't follow you about it being too far to walk or bike or how it didn't intermingle housing with businesses enough. I found a place to stay, and I walked to work, and everywhere else, except if I took the bus.
If living by freeway overpasses, and pawn shops, and check cashing storefronts is not your idea of utopia, fine. But then was the ability to walk places ever the issue?
I can't identify any differences between your description of Japan and anywhere I've been in the US. I haven't ever been to CA though.
I agree that $44B is an unlikely amount to spend on simply destroying it. But (a) he didn't put up nearly that much cash himself, and (b) what if the net cost was much less?
The whole farce of trying to get out of the contract depressed the stock, because everyone was thinking "he doesn't seem to have a legal leg to stand on, but does he know something we don't". It was intimidating to people who should've known better. And then he just folded and onlookers were confused.
If he had bought stock options on TWTR, it's allegedly not insider trading to trade on your own intentions, so people say. Or, buddies of his who are outside SEC jurisdiction could've done it.
How many times has he said he hates and disrespects the SEC? It all seems eminently in character to me.
But as I wrote in my first comment, I'm feeling now more like it's a 50-50 coin flip between having a master plan to destroy Twitter and really being the feckless, manic owner he appears to be.
>we are still lagging on the expected heating due to occur due to increased thermal insulation from CO2 released into the troposhere five years ago
I thought it's being widely reported - this year - that we seem ahead of the warming trend, breaking all sorts of records, etc.
As is mentioned in almost every article about climate change ad nauseum, global temperature increases measured in degrees are small but involve huge amounts of energy, and typically there is said to be a linkage to massive disruptions and suffering.
So saying this temporary source of warming is very small and unnoticeable seems rather equivocal. You can say it, but what is it meant to communicate?
Small and unnoticeable on your thermometer is literally true of the primary trend from CO2, but if you go around belaboring that, you sound like a denier.
This seemed especially plausible considering his Saudi government co-investors, and thinking back to the destruction of Gawker as a precedent.
The alternative that he really is trying to make it succeed and is hopelessly incompetent seemed untenable, but I also couldn't believe that his actions would make it succeed.
$44 billion was an unreasonable amount to spend on the face of it, but ever since he capitulated in his court fight, I've been thinking what if it was a charade to manipulate the stock, and he or his associates defrayed a lot of the sticker price by trading on the knowledge that he would go through with the purchase?
But now I admit I am starting to wonder if my theory was incorrect - maybe he really did want to do something with it that isn't working out. Or maybe he's just committed to the bit.
But there's more than one kind of ounce in the US. Fluid ounces are volume whereas dry ounces are weight/mass. From memory - and I memorized this from cooking - 8 fluid ounces (one cup or a half pint) is 8.337 dry ounces (assuming the approximate density of water).
Then there's metric horsepower vs. other types. It's clearly so much more natural for a horsepower to have a German name (pferdestärke!) and mean 735.5 watts instead of 745.7 watts (numbers copied and pasted, not checked).
I think that the linked Research Letter is what I was referring to in my previous comment. I do not see anything implying I misinterpreted.
Are you suggesting that the quoted comment by the JPL author refutes or weakens my takeaway - that (1) this volcano unlike others should warm the planet, (2) it probably is having an effect already, and (3) it will probably last for several years?
Notice this, a little higher on the page:
"The excess water vapor injected by the Tonga volcano, on the other hand, could remain in the stratosphere for several years."
And of course, you can click through to the source.
"∼10% of the stratospheric burden"
That's a hell of a lot.