wgerard

> Except that the aspiring pro athlete is doing esports now. They are trying to get World of Warcraft or Fortnite pros.

First and foremost, I doubt many children who aspire to be Fortnite pros would have ever considered being a professional athlete in a past life. Aside from some very notable exceptions (e.g. Tyler1), those don't seem to be intersecting circles very often.

Secondly, they're just lofty aspirations. Most children have no more chance of being Fortnite pros than they do of being professional athletes. Does it really matter what childhood fantasy they choose to chase, outside of obvious exceptions (e.g. serial killer)?

I assume your counterpoint here will be about physical fitness, so I'll just say: It's obviously possible to be a healthy and fit professional gamer (see: well, I already said, Tyler1). It's also obviously possible to be a pretty unhealthy professional athlete (see: The numerous ex-pros past and present suffering from CTE).

> Before it was: principled, ethical, decent, proper, just, honorable, honest, good.

I don't know where this is coming from. Professional sports has always been full of people like Mike Tyson and the Boz. Hollywood obviously has/had people like Harvey Weinstein. Do I really need to name any "unprincipled" rock stars?

> Now the main goals seem to be exploitation

The entertainment industry is just so incredibly rife with this since basically inception that I don't really think I need to even list an example here.

> spammy link building

Hollywood, of course, has been infamous for the IRL equivalent of this for quite some time.

> dishonest marketing

Milli Vanilli, or any number of artists that don't actually write their songs

> the me-first principle.

Eli Manning famously said he would go to law school before playing for the Chargers, the team that drafted him, because he didn't think it would be good for his career.

> It honestly scares me to hear my nieces and nephews, all around the 10 year old mark, talking about aspiring for internet fame more (and in some cases exclusively) than any other actual profession or healthy aspiration.

Er, isn't this a common childhood cliche? Aspiring to be a pop/rock star, pro athlete, famous actor/actress, etc.?

I guess I fail to see how this is meaningfully different from any of those things.

Ahh, gotcha. Cheers then!

> My personal performance of investing in all three categories (total market index, S&P 500 index, NASDAQ-100 index) matches every chart you can find online over last 5 years; the total index funds are carrying the baggage of all that "not S&P" weight and are worse returns than the 500, with the 100 achieving almost twice the performance as the 500 (near 24% returns over 5y).

I think you're perhaps inadvertently proving my point: If S&P funds are performing significantly better than total market funds, either there's something particularly special about S&P companies (very valid reasoning, it's not a random assortment) or S&P companies are overvalued simply because they're part of the S&P and investors value that more than perhaps the fundamentals would support (not a completely asinine thought).

> You're not wrong, but for most people, most of the time, this quibble is not worth getting into.

Sure. I assumed we were talking about whether passive investing could potentially cause negative effects at scale, not whether your average person should invest or not. I don't think the latter is much of a discussion (i.e. yes, they should).

When people criticize passive investing, they're largely criticizing increased institutional passive investment, not retail investors--retail investors don't generally affect the market much one way or the other. And yes, even many institutional funds invest in indices that aren't just total market indices.

If the concern about said passive investing is valid, this of course may end up affecting many average americans down the line, eg. CalSTRS is one of the largest funds in the world.

> Going with index funds is no more and no less than investing in the entire market

I don't think that's entirely true. When most people talk about investing in index funds they're largely talking about funds like eg. $SPY, not total market funds like $VTI.

There's certainly a case to be made that increasing passive investing in certain indices (like $SPY) causes companies within the index to be overvalued simply because of the nature of passive investing. You often see companies getting a big boost in their share price simply for joining the S&P, even though reason would dictate that there's nothing fundamentally different about the company.

The usual counterargument to this is that we should reach an equilibrium where active managers will then be free to invest in companies that are undervalued simply because they're not a part of an index, but of course that also is making a number of assumptions.

Without reading the article too deeply I'm not sure if that's Burry's specific criticism, but it's one that's not uncommon and certainly isn't completely outlandish.

To be fair, I think WSB bucks this trend a little. People report the huge losses there, and it's part of what makes it so interesting.

In fact, I would argue that the most well-known posts are often from people losing huge amounts of money, eg. "Guh".

The article touches on this:

> The latter method [encouraging recreational hunting] has sometimes backfired dramatically when surviving animals spread across the state. In some places, for-profit hunting outfits have worsened the problem by importing feral pigs

Basically, it doesn’t seem to work for pigs (thus why Montana banned hunting them).

Actually IIRC last time I looked it was more like city researchers usually subtract depreciation on the vehicle from the earnings, which can be quite substantial (IRS rates are roughly a quarter per mile). Uber doesn't subtract that, so the rate per hour varies wildly.

> Taxis existed before Uber and others.

To be fair, taxi service in seattle was quite awful during the pre-uber times. It was usually best to pretend they didn't exist unless you were at a location they congregated frequently (the airport, for example).

Hopefully, the prompt and transparent service that came with Uber is here to stay even if the company itself isn't.

I said this in a sibling comment, but I think the confusion is:

> I think what's confusing is there's two different wages being thrown around here: Are drivers guaranteed at least $16.39/hr, in addition to $0.56/minute and $1.33/mile driven while transporting?

> The questions I think are mostly about the former, not the latter.

I think what's confusing is there's two different wages being thrown around here: Are drivers guaranteed $16.39/hr, in addition to $0.56/minute and $1.33/mile driven while transporting?

The questions I think are mostly about the former, not the latter.

I think it's quite common for drivers to have both the Lyft and Uber app open, and to take the first/best available ride that pops up from either app.

The question is whether you'll be paid by Uber while completing a ride from Lyft, and if the answer is "no" how that'll happen technically. Or perhaps you don't get paid for idle time - I'm not quite clear on that point.

I'm also curious about this. I wonder if they'll start requiring drivers to "clock on" and "clock off", and you won't be able to accept rides outside of that dynamic. I know it already kinda works like that, but something more formal since now they're paying you while you're "clocked on".

I also assume this means they'll be more strict about turning down/canceling rides when you're "clocked on", and they'll assume you're available to accept rides when you're "clocked on" and don't currently have a passenger.

Which of course makes them much more analogous to a traditional livery cab.

EDIT: But then also kinda not I guess? Because a livery cab driver can decline a ride before it starts obviously.

I wonder if it'll work more like food service, where Uber covers the "difference" if you make less than the minimum wage (and for better or for worse, much like food service I assume if they have to make up the difference too frequently you'll be booted off the platform).

I said this in the thread when the arrests were announced (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23529035) but I had a similar thought again reading this. Just a little funny and bizarre to see people react extremely differently to the same situation.

> Wild. I'm like 99% positive I know the couple and the newsletter they targeted, because I used to work for an ecommerce company that also came under fire from said couple semi-frequently. Of course, like adults, we just rolled our eyes a little bit when it was particularly over-the-top and tried to use our rational heads to determine whether the criticism was warranted or not. Truthfully, I think they kept us in check and I'm glad they exist.

> If we had done anything even close to this, we would've been fired immediately. To be even more blunt, I think I would've been fired for interacting with them AT ALL, even just a strongly-worded email.

Yikes, I haven’t kept up with it much clearly.

But yeah, there’s a valid non-malicious reason to believe Tesla is overvalued.

I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what short sellers do (which is where most of the "fraud" accusation comes from). Some short sellers DO claim fraudulent behavior, e.g. Enron was famously predicted to be fraudulent by Jim Chanos.

However short selling at its core just involves the belief that a company is overvalued. In the case of extreme fraud, the "correct value" is $0. In most cases, the short seller just believes it's some amount less than the current share price (but above $0).

Tesla falls into the latter category. I'm sure some do claim fraudulent behavior, but Tesla is an interesting case because Tesla's PE is ~200 IIRC, compared to the 20 average for the automotive industry. For comparison, Amazon's PE is 120.

So if you think Tesla is ultimately a car company, or even just a "regular" tech company, it's not insane to think that it's incredibly overvalued. That doesn't mean you think it's a fraud, of course, but the subtlety obviously gets lost by many (and short sellers often make grandiose edicts that don't help their case).

Pump-and-dumps are an entire class of fraud that fundamentally relies on you being long.

We're probably unlikely to come to an agreement here, I think because we have fundamentally different opinions on what constitutes a hobbyist (and, I think, also a video game). I really fail to see the difference between someone playing Mario Odyssey on a Switch on the train every day vs. someone playing Candy Crush every day on the train.

If you chose to bike to work every day, I would call you a biker. If you watched a movie every single day, I would say watching movies is a hobby of yours. If you went to a rock climbing gym every day, I would call you a climber.

Driving, and some other fields like cooking, are quite different. You're not choosing to engage in that behavior - it's a requirement for your life. Same with cooking food. You need to get to work, you need to eat. You don't need to play Candy Crush on the train - and obviously, many people don't.

> And my general opinion: don't worry about identifying yourself as a gamer because of some stigma.

I don't mean to be a negative ned, but I'm not talking about the "neckbeard loser" stigma. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, that's probably for the best.

> It may have to do with the difference in "I will play this game instead of staring into the void" vs "I will buy that game and set aside time to play it". Would people on the subway play candy crush if they didn't have to commute? There's a fine line, I believe.

That seems like a weird distinction to draw, given the numerous other activities you could be doing with that time (reading a book, for example). Clearly, they downloaded candy crush with the intention of playing it. The time they set aside is their commute.

If I purchase a Switch solely to play e.g. Octopath on the subway, am I no longer a "gamer" simply because I'm just using it as an alternative to staring out into the void?

FWIW: IIRC Candy Crush's most popular "day of the week" is Sunday, meaning people ARE setting aside time to play.

> And then there's another fine line with regards to what counts as "video game". Is computer chess a video game because it's played on a computer, or is it simply chess?

Yes, that's true. I think that leads to interesting questions about what qualifies as a video game. Do all the e.g. sim games (bus sim, flight sim, etc.) count as video games? What about Madden/etc?

However, I don't think any of that's relevant here: There's no real-world counterpart to Candy Crush.

> "Video games" aren't the same as "mobile games" in my opinion, though there are video games on mobile devices, but e.g. Solitaire isn't a video game.

I think that's a pretty reductionist view of mobile games, especially given the roots of video games. Candy Crush isn't any more simplistic than say, Ice Climber or Tetris (or substitute that with most other early NES-era games).

I don't think you want to put arbitrary complexity requirements on games to be considered "true games", otherwise we'll have to re-evaluate a lot of titles: E.g. are Telltale games "video games", or are they just choose-your-own-adventures on a computer? What about Tetris?

And that's to say nothing of the other point you mentioned, which is that increasingly "modern" games are available on mobile devices. One of the top sellers on the iOS app store is Minecraft, which I think everyone would consider qualifies as a video game. Epic is currently going through a massive battle with Apple over them kicking Fortnite off the app store.

> And last but not least: I'm pretty sure most people who play Minesweeper on their commute but aren't otherwise into computer games would self-identify as "gamers".

I will posit that is largely because of the stigma around being a "gamer", partially warranted (gaming communities can be notoriously toxic) and partially not.

This is somewhat self-reinforcing because many adults who should identify as "gamers" don't want to be associated with that term (I count myself in that group, which is partially why I'm so passionate about this topic). Viewpoints like "mobile games don't count as real games" don't help either, by excluding everyone but the most diehard.

Again, I think with any other hobby it would be hard for you not to qualify as at least an enthusiast if you spent an appreciable amount of time engaging in it. If I read novels for 2 hours a day, it would be quite appropriate for someone to label me as a "reader".

I'm confused why there's some implication of diminished frequency with "casual" gamers.

On the subway, it's not uncommon to see people playing games like candy crush on their commute to and from work. The average subway commute is an hour long each way. Playing two hours a day is a decent chunk of time. Engaging in any other hobby for even 30 minutes a day would put you squarely in at least the "enthusiast" category by most definitions.

Even excluding commutes, it's quite common for me to see people playing mobile games during e.g. their lunch break.

So, I think a better analogy would be more like:

"Over three billion people are now drinkers"

> "If you count drinking a budweiser every day then sure"

Which, yeah, I would.

> then you should also use major media organizations' 2016 predictions as evidence of greater delusion

Why? They responded to evolving evidence and sentiment (specifically, the FBI announcement on the 28th). 538 gave Trump a 30% chance to win on election day. 30% isn't a super unlikely event. People regularly take a chance on events with much less likely outcomes.

Here's an analogy: Harvard has a 4.5% acceptance rate. If a mediocre student tells me in June that they're going to apply in September, my prediction is going to be that they will not be accepted. If in August they tell me they've randomly received a letter of recommendation from a US senator after saving them in a car accident, I'm going to change my opinion from "very unlikely to be accepted" to "moderately unlikely to be accepted."

That doesn't mean I was stupid or delusional to think in June that they were very unlikely to be accepted, and that still doesn't mean I'm delusional to think they will still likely be rejected (the mainstream media polls). That also doesn't mean that the person who told the mediocre student in June that they were a shoe-in for Harvard was prophetic by any means (Scott Adams).

> The dude is batty in some ways, but he clearly saw something that most of us didn't.

Ehh, or he just got a lucky guess? A broken clock, etc. etc.?

For an analogous situation, this happens in sports media all the time: Some sports entertainment personality will make a "hot take" that's really just a contrarian opinion based on little evidence. If they're wrong, no one cares. If they're right, they look like a prophetic genius. Either way, they win because they get attention for making a bold prediction.

Whether you want to call it confirmation bias/selection bias/whatever, I implore you to think about all the times Scott Adams has been incredibly wrong and whether you think he actually has some unusual insight or whether he just made a lucky guess based on his personal biases.

It's extremely likely that if the election had been held October 27th, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Think about that for a second.

> Weren't everyone's predictions wrong in 2016?

Actually if you go look at the NYT polls, Trump had a monumental surge in the later half of October that caused the result to look much closer. Probably no small part of this was the additional FBI investigation into Clinton's emails, which was announced Oct 28 (10 days after the NYT article you posted).

If you go look at the polls from right before the actual election it looks significantly closer:

NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/polls....

538: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/

It's not completely unthinkable for a 20-30% probability event to occur. Further, it is quite a rare occurrence for a candidate to win the election without winning the popular vote: This was only the fifth time in American history it's happened.

I think you're incorrect about the perceived power of a former US president, but regardless I don't think perceived power has any impact on whether the FBI chooses to investigate or not.

That might be a fairy tale some black hats tell themselves, but it seems clear to me that compromising a former president's accounts has serious security implications for the US govt. Obama's access to information (both past and present) is such an overriding concern that his level of perceived power is basically an after-thought.

The FBI often helps out with major breaches of all varieties, let alone ones that involve former heads of state. It's extremely unlikely they're not already involved in this one.

Former presidents are still privy to a lot of information (e.g. they receive national security briefings still). Hacking their technology accounts is absolutely a threat to the security of the US govt, and is one reason the Secret Service specifically monitors their technology usage.

I'd bet a lot of money the inclusion of people like Obama and Biden all but guaranteed the FBI/NSA get involved now, or at the very least the Secret Service.

Wild. I'm like 99% positive I know the couple and the newsletter they targeted, because I used to work for an ecommerce company that also came under fire from said couple semi-frequently.

Of course, like adults, we just rolled our eyes a little bit when it was particularly over-the-top and tried to use our rational heads to determine whether the criticism was warranted or not. Truthfully, I think they kept us in check and I'm glad they exist.

If we had done anything even close to this, we would've been fired immediately. To be even more blunt, I think I would've been fired for interacting with them AT ALL, even just a strongly-worded email.

Just a little wild to see how differently people react to the same exact situation.

Caveat: I'm fine with this decision from GH, just clarifying.

I believe it's the same usage as used in music recording, e.g.

> an original movie, recording, or document from which copies can be made.

This is incredible!

While we were trying to build up a corpus of transcription data for our company, I often thought we should build something like this an open-source it. We ended up building a one-off hacked-up thing to do it instead, but I'm really glad this exists for any future people in our shoes.

Annotating speech data is super tedious and anything that improves the process even 10% is a huge, huge win.

To be fair, I remember this being a problem even when I participated in middle school debate ~20 years ago.

If you make a bunch of points that the other team doesn't refute directly, you get to nail them on it later.

Short of you speaking so quickly that even the judge didn't understand you, it was heavily encouraged to speak extremely quickly even back then.

Just to play devil's advocate a little:

You should look up some of the ethical issues around cobalt mining [1], which Apple is at least indirectly complicit in.

Netflix famously made their culture documents transparent to much derision about their workplace being an unhealthy competitive environment. Relatedly, they're also arguably the most famous progenitor of the "unlimited-vacation-but-don't-actually-take-it-or-else" workplace cliche.

1: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/dec/16/a...