nopie
1yr ago
Just an interesting observation from my pharmacist class in the UK. The biggest earners now are those who did average or even were on the verge of failing. It is just my anecdote. Obviously you need to be smart enough to pass the exam to get a licence. But once you pass this bar, in real life to be on top of academic knowledge is less important than perseverance and drive to succeed and social skills. IQ tests do not measure these things.
I have reason to doubt that the studies showing IQ correlation with success are true. It is very difficult to get clean data and eliminate bias. Just see how hard it was to prove that masks are/are not effective in containing covid. Scott deeply delved into this issue but got it wrong – final Chinese experience shows that masks are useless for all practical purposes (outside some very strictly controlled environments, like hospitals) and we were fooling ourselves with mask mandates (still current in some places in Europe). Probably studies with IQ are similarly unreliable. My trust in them is very low.
nopie
1yr ago
Very doubtful. The bus rides didn't increase when petrol prices increased considerably. Just because grain is more expensive now, doesn't mean that pizza prices should increase by 50% or so.
nopie
1yr ago
You have a specific job but I don't. Although you could say that by posting here and on reddit I am probably using code that runs on some Amazon cloud services or whatever but that is too indirect.
I just wanted to see if I could be a part of bitcoin network without any extra expense by using my own laptop. It wasn't really possible.
nopie
1yr ago
I think that modern finance is complicated and may not be optimal but overall it is working fine. It could be improved but only by people who really understand how it works and what are the actual problems. The crypto essentially proposed to restore the gold standard in a digital format. It completely ignores all the reasons why the gold standard was rejected and tries to solve non-existant problems.
The second aspect that worries me is that most crypto supporters are so much against the government that it could be called anarchist movement. I agree that any government can become dictatorship. But the solution is to make sure it doesn't instead of creating society or any aspect (like finance) that doesn't need government at all.
nopie
1yr ago
What purpose a wallet will have if I cannot mine or otherwise participate in decentralized network with validations? No, I didn't make a mistake. I just decided that I don't have enough available resources for this.
nopie
1yr ago
Sure. I am not particularly interested in FTX blow-up. I am saying that whole crypto is misuse of talents and waste of energy, time and money(!). Sometimes we criticise that the smartest minds in Silicon Valley instead of searching for a cure of cancer and other good things, work hard on how to make people to click on ads. But crypto is much worse. Ads at least can help to connect sellers and buyers and improve economy and ultimately our standard of living. But what can crypto give us?
In comparison, Theranos failed and was fraudulent and many hundreds if not thousands of biopharma startups fail. But one of those gave us mRNA vaccine and another Harvoni (highly effective HepC treatment).
nopie
45m ago
“up to” could mean less than 10%. Could be 1% or whatever. Even if we accept 10% figure, we also expect the GDP to grow more than 10% during this period.
Many suggested measures talk about degrowth. That could have severe impact on our growth, even more than 10%.
That's why I want more detail analysis and our confidence levels about this analysis. Obviously we will need to stop using oil sooner or later but it is not about that. It's about the politics that surround all these decisions.
nopie
10mo ago
I don't think that the government knows what caused the brain damage. Was it even “caused” apart from natural progression of certain disorders?
Here is very important thing – people hate uncertainty. That's why they are more likely to believe far-fetched theory about sonic weapons than reject this theory and be left with no explanation.
nopie
10mo ago
Ukraine is different. It is a European country that is being fast-tracked into the EU. Those who try to attack my friends, will get harshly punished.
The rules are clear. Just because someone somewhere broke them and didn't get punished is not an excuse.
nopie
10mo ago
On 4) I haven't delved deeper into this but the claim that medical mistakes is one of the leading causes of death requires proper context. My intuitive understanding is that technically it could be true. And yet it is only because people live much longer with the help of the modern medical system. Everyone should read Scott's article “By very slow decay...”. People who are barely alive survive only because of constant medical care, requiring 10 or more concomitant medications, constant care and procedures etc. The likelihood that overworked staff makes a fatal mistake increases exponentially and then that mistake kills the patient who was already literary on the death-bed.
Without that medical care and 10 different medications he would be already dead from natural causes but now he is dead because a nurse overdosed his insulin or pushed too much morphine into his vein or whatever. This doesn't mean much, only that medicines helps to live longer albeit with a poor quality of life and with a better care that minimises medical errors we could extend their lives even more while seriously questioning whether such efforts are worth it.
nopie
1yr ago
It always should be. But the idea is that almost always the decision is made to terminate the pregnancy. That's the point of making the test. Maybe in some countries that percentage is still not sufficiently high due to poorly understood information and we should think how to improve that.
nopie
1yr ago
It's part of the risk.
The point is that he was right that things are going to get ugly and was not just lucky. Whether he succeeded to make money on that or not, is immaterial.
The whole discussion I started is also not about how one can become rich. It is about the maximum benefit for the society. I believe stock market is very beneficial for all of us but sometimes it fails and we should make a system that reduces failures.
nopie
1yr ago
That still is not utilization. My sources are the BMJ. I am too lazy now to search for the article I had read before but the quick search sent me an article that it had decreased by a third, so I am not sure which data is more trustable.
The rebounding after 1-2 months of depression is simply not believable. We had unexplained excess mortality of 10-15% in December 2022 which was neither due to vaccines, nor covid (despite panicking voices on both sides). In medicine we don't just look at test results to make diagnosis. We have to corelate to what we observe in patient, all manifestations and functions. And we have to admit what we don't know.
It may be fully possible that the measures introduced to limit covid exposure increased actual spending while utilization remained below the normal.
I can now better understand why 2008 crisis caught so many unprepared. That was the belief in reported numbers that everything is fine. It took a doctor to actually look behind those numbers and see what is going on in the field.
nopie
1yr ago
I was in Spain and it definitely hadn't recovered in 2021. The amount of people on streets were visually lower.
Healthcare utilization in the UK during covid was 80% of normal. That is one of the most contra-intuitive things because most people believe that healthcare was totally overwhelmed during pandemic. Well, some places were but in general the income of healthcare workers took a hit.
However, the amount of money we spent on vaccines that later were thrown out were unusually high. That means that other needs did not get financed sufficiently. The distortions are quite clear and apparent in every sector where I look.
nopie
1yr ago
This data does not show this. Even if the expenditure increased but it could be the case that it went to wrong sectors of the economy.
nopie
1yr ago
No, the overreaction to the pandemic was a terrible risk management, instead of understanding it and acting contrary to the government's recommendations during this time. The same probably applies to the activities in the market during times when you clearly see the world being collectively afflicted by wrong decisions.
nopie
1yr ago
You are missing the main reason why the stimulus was too much this time. It was simply because the government acted in contradictory ways and prevented people spending money. The fact that different restrictions continued after most elderly had received vaccine was the biggest unforced error.
nopie
1yr ago
Should you yolo your life savings in the next time there’s an event like COVID where you think the market is wrong?
It is impossible to tell. The next time when we get a pandemic, it will not be the same as COVID. We don't know if it will be the case when people get overreact or the case when the risk ir real and measures like lockdowns and travel restrictions are effective and need to be implemented. We don't even know whether markets will be so wrong then.
But the idea is that everybody knows something that other people don't. Sometimes it gives you opportunity to make better bets on the stock market. Should you use this opportunity? EMH says that we shouldn't because the current price already includes the publicly available information that you have but other people don't.
nopie
1yr ago
Well, I had read Krugman's “End This Depression Now” explaining why stimulus in certain conditions is needed. I read the book because I was going through personally depressive period in my life but the book had some insights anyway. Krugman was proven right with sufficient evidence that I was surprised that so many experts still disagreed with him and demanded austerity policies instead. Nevertheless, even the staunchest critics have to admit that stimulus worked better during economic contraction, so it was no-brainer that the governments faced with economic contraction during covid pandemic would try to use stimulus too. I didn't believe that it will be very effective because unlike normal conditions people were prevented from spending money. The government had little choice though because they had to make sure that people who were forced out of work by their policies can still pay rent, buy food etc.
Incidentally, the lack of spending opportunities also gave me chance to invest some money. I expected that other people would do the same and it seems that eventually they did. But when I saw stock market taking a dive, it made no sense. I didn't expect to make a quick profit, I thought that recovery would take longer time. I believed that eventually everybody would get covid and then all the restrictions will be shown useless. Even the most totalitarian governments would have to admit that their policies are futile. Once restrictions are gone, people would quickly restart economic activities and stock market would rise.
Scott wrote that the stock market dive actually happened due to automatic selling. Many funds set automatic scripts to sell when the price reaches certain low threshold to prevent from further losses. Selling moved the price even lower with more and more funds initiating automatic selling.
Comparison with gas in a chamber is really strange. Avogadro number (the number of molecules in 1 mole) is 6×10^23 and that amount of gas will occupy about 22 Liters. The number of humans is no more than 10^10. We definitely cannot use gas example to provide intuitive understanding about markets.
nopie
1yr ago
That precisely is my understanding too. But why not play the market with the same attitude in every case? I saw a big issue of market going into the wrong direction without being an expert in this because it was so obvious. But many people are experts and they know about about multiple smaller cases where it makes sense to invest with smaller but sufficiently good returns. The fact that they help to correct the market and bring it back to equilibrium just means that you need to be an expert. Why make a theory that basically says – if you are not an expert, don't pay in the market and simply invest in index funds?
Just a thought: maybe investing has attracted too many non-experts that it becomes like a mass delusion that they all believe that they know how to beat a market and we need some warning for those people?
Latvia didn't grant automatically citizenship to Soviet immigrants who arrived during occupation. To get a Latvian passport they were required to pass a language and history test. But many immigrants decided to acquire Russian citizenship instead because the retirement age for Russian citizens was lower.
Now some of those people are in trouble because Latvia requires language test for permanent residents and if they fail to pass it, they can be deported to the country of their citizenship – Russia. In fact, it is very hard to learn a language once you have reached retirement age. But they made their choice where their loyalties are. Those who remain non-citizens of Latvia (a special status) are safe as they have practically the same rights as citizens and cannot be deported.
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