Frank
1d ago
4, 10
Yes.
20, 30
Probably. What's even the difference between fake and wrong?
It's really hard to measure things or make conclusions from them. E.g. if this recent paper is true, modern neoclassical economics and DSGE models etc. are wrong (because tariffs have the opposite impact). I don't think we can really know. But we've had unmeasured endogenous money creation for a long time. Asset prices and credit cycles seem to drive the economy lately, but IDK how to incorporate those into some metric doing what inflation measurements should do.
No, you just wildly misunderstood[1] my point and think I (or rather my company) am too lazy to understand basic metrics. I am saying that OER is bad and not correlated to actual housing costs. Neither mortgage and insurance payments nor differences in total purchasing vs. rental costs are captured (depending on the geography, renting can be twice or half as much as buying). BLS lags and assumes price increases are gradual such that the sampled month only shows 1/6 of the change but rental prices do not go up a few dollars per month but have big, occasional changes based on new tenants etc. (Yes, this should be smoothed and averaged out but... I am arguing that's not what's done here.) To be clear, I don't think housing is currently a big inflation driver e.g. the New Tenant index showed a much faster decline.
[1] fair, not like I effort post or think about word choice. I e.g. don't know why I focused on CPI vs. the others which I also have problems with. CPE's the only one with fed targets...
Of course! I've lazy posted about this for years. Obviously, the basket of goods a person uses has gone up wildly more than the official numbers suggest - just compare the prices of food now and in your childhood. When you normalize different categories or baskets with wage increases, hours worked and labor productivity, it gets especially bad. We have also had wildly inflationary policy for decades now, which must increase to service debt while we're in a commodity supercycle where molecules matter again.
Frank
1d ago
Big topic, little time:
- cost increases are the main driver; there are less goods and things being done in America, they're just expensive
- at work we remove whole categories like government spending, legal, advertising and medicine (this is debatable, but important to normalize things later) which has long precedent in different systems of national accounting and, both from Socialist countries and libertarian analysts like Gavekal
You could have a society with lower GDP but higher real-world prosperity
We have plenty such examples today!
Frank
5d ago
I've been trying to find a nice take down of "out of Africa" I placed into my notes. It was basically just an argument that Africans and everyone else are quite divergent evolutionarily.
Frank
5d ago
Not much to say. I can't effort post but here's some rambling:
I don't know much math (and learned most in the last couple years) but architecting nice trade execution lets you do a lot of things; a good trade or correct insider knowledge is meaningless if you don't know how to isolate the opportunity from risks unrelated to what you want exposure to.
The systems themselves had a lot of inline assembly. Lisps all have some disasm function giving a function's assembly, which you can improve and inline for easy high performance (or e.g. dynamically change). The architecture's were all OOP (i.e. moving hashmaps of data and assembly functions). In the same way a class can remove a level of if nesting, looking up particular fields in the object/map like "exit-inventory-below-optimal" or "exit-inventory-above-optimal" saves time, and those are all precalculated. They all used event sampling instead of time sampling. There were different models according to situation e.g. news can push the market to bimodal distributions around a new level, which governed particular data representation - laid out to encode decisions. Linear trend channels, vol compression breakout, support/resistance breakouts and trend change when linear trend channels break were insightful. I learned to write trading agents for each strategy (with an agent for each slight change e.g. for every .1% difference in stop loss) and all agents issuing internal orders, combined (e.g. some agents sell and others buy, canceling out) and then executed (Alan Dunne talks about "ensembles"). (I now only make a few trades a year with 2-5 year time horizons, so the agents' "votes" are weighted by success in the current and various other regimes, and they're working on various valuation schemes. Also log scale helps, because markets move return space.)
Sampling is hard and important, since you need to choose data representations/current distributions/regimes etc. I like additive swarm systems. There was cool signal processing stuff for feedback control which I didn't understand, but which govern when to turn off (groups of) agents according to market stress and risk exposure. If you structure everything right, you'd have most computational power constantly rebuilding 100gb of hash maps and while the main loop does 2-3 look ups per agent on an event, everything on some group of correlated assets (like 5 gold mining companies in the same geography). (N.b. ensembles decorrelate things, different agents just with different stop losses have distinct return profiles even if only trading Brent.) Event sampling means if 20 things happen in an hour, but then 40 happen in 5 mins, and you're sampling every 10th thing... You'll have a lot going on during a little clock time on the spikes, hence precomputing things. Systemic indicators are driven by moving "windows" of data, whose updates are all recursively adjusted in the agent swarm. Remember, missing trades is fine but making bad ones is bad - so you'd have a more dedicated update loop for positions you're holding.
But everyone improved order execution, some HFT firms like Virtu shifted to providing order execution as a service. This is why IEX remains a small player.
Nowadays, off exchange trading/dark pools have similar volume to exchanges and while they're actually valuing assets, most can't see those transactions, which reduces overall price discovery. Far worse, passive inflows into indexes make up most exchange volume, which kills price discovery. You can do really nice things looking at the many thousands of stocks which have literally no analysts looking. (The investable world has really shrunk since the 70s, less quality markets (e.g. African and South American governments undertook awful policy so everyone left) and less publicly traded companies) but even the S&P 600 barely gets attention.)
Munger: "Investing is the only profession where inactivity is a competitive advantage."
Frank
6d ago
For the past decade, everyone I know (e.g. my grandma) only gets recommended videos of guys in trucks talking about race realism etc. even though they're generic liberals and just try to watch craft videos. I was annoyed by it until I "converted". Overall quality's pretty low, but it's often fairly solid. Lately my grandpa was directed to this gem.
Frank
6d ago
I've seen him mentioned a few times (including here iirc) but his work seemed to disjointed and slop-y, so I stopped quickly.
algorithms have a left wing bias and that dissident voices are difficult to find
They've been boosting dissident voices for a decade bar the topic of covid, in my experience.
Frank
6d ago
At least today, LLMs can't produce anything which runs in any of the languages I use at work or leisure. An AI should be able to reason from a spec etc. but they're currently slaves to training data alone.
viable option for anything that even vaguely cares about performance
There have been plenty of hard real time systems and operating systems using GC.
Common Lisp can dominate benchmarks (over C and Fortran) but often gets kicked out, because they say e.g. in-lining assembly doesn't count even though the CL programmer generates and optimizes that assembly from the REPL (emitting it via compile time macros or such). I've worked on CL HFT systems (n.b. since ~2017 the field's not looked anything like the popular world things, because of regulatory and policy changes.)
APL or BQN are also great and can write compilers at competitive performance.
Various Forths offer different memory management paradigms to C with more safety and reliability (e.g. the ALOT word). Indeed, the preferred way is for everything to run on the stack alone.
There has been better than C for longer than we've lived. That e.g. Lisp required a dozen mb of ram caused cost issues some decades ago, but now that it's cheap...
Anyway, modern C++ memory management's closer to Rust than C, Swift has some nice innovations too. Many things can be done - the OS could even manage it for the program. Research has shown how GC can theoretically surpass manual memory management - and today GCs are faster already, just look at runtime and wall clock time. The developer today chooses when to trade latency for throughput and wall clock speed.
Frank
6d ago
Most mines are deployed by gun, rocket or helicopter e.g. FASCAM or butterfly mines.
there is not a need to transfer large sums of money to the elderly
Pensions are old men cutting trees down.
In general, the social state is fundamentally corrupt, divorcing people from their action's consequences. (Alas, we don't have to imagine the block voting to increase their privileges... We're already stuck in a doom loop.)
Frank
6d ago
To state it more clearly, man cannot build and maintain civilization leaching from others - civilization must prosper and multiply.
Frank
14d ago
I didn't praise state capacity once but argued the opposite: China is not state directed like you describe.
GDP blabla
My recent post history is full of criticisms of such metrics! You literally have no idea what I'm talking about and recycle the same copes.
Muslim subcontinentals
Although I inadvertently started this, I don't want to engage much. But... I have long been fascinated by Persian(ate) culture and learned Persian (and Arabic). Shia Islam has some weird things, but remains in conversation with philosophy, logic etc. while Sunni Islam literally rejects philosophy, science (a fire burns because God wills it, there are no "chemical laws") and... asking questions. Subcontinental Muslims are Sunni - and they mix it with ugly tribal practices (nominally banned by Islam itself). The upper class Pakistanis I discuss Persian poetry with and dated in the past, are quite nice, insightful etc. but some habits and beliefs really shock me.
edit: I didn't state the core conceit: The Islamic subcontinent was heavily Persianized, the court language was (Afghan) Persian until the 1830s when the East India company changed local governance and administration (until then their agents learned Persian and kept records in it) although the population overall never spoke it much.
Frank
14d ago
If you oppose China, you should be scared and try to actually learn about it instead of repeating comfortable copes. Chinese capacity and progress is truly impressive - reassuring for human industrial civilization, but horrifying for me as a Christian who wants true freedom.
People have been repeating these same copes for hundreds of years, about the US then Germany then Japan and... 40 years already about China. The Chinese market is freer than the US and US government spending is a higher percentage of GDP than China's. Even with rather high (new) environmental regulations, Chinese companies can just do things, build factories quickly etc. which take 5+ years to receive planning permission in most of the US.
China has much more competition than in the West. Even when the government directly orders something, it's just broadcasting goals which many smaller governments try to reach in many different ways. Once an effective method is found, the people behind the effective method are promoted to try to implement it elsewhere while new competitions are started. In the US the 50 states have long since stopped experimenting with weird policies and the federal government offers many carrots and some sticks to standardize everyone on mediocre stagnation.
You repeat copes like "China just steals" but China has been inventing leading technology for at least a decade. Materials science, engineering, chemistry, mathematics etc. high impact papers have 60-80% Chinese authors.
demographics suck ... China ... does not have nearly the same social security safety net
Chinese demographics don't matter, because those old people don't have much wealth and won't bend half the economy to care for them. Those old people were also poorly educated. They are being replaced more educated people, who grew up with better nutrition. 1.4 million engineers graduate per year vs 200k in the US. Their factories are also heavily automated. Their elites have no need to replace the people - indeed, they even emphasize traditional culture and architecture in a way we can only envy.
Frank
14d ago
But what is a thene? (Being countable implies discrete things/examples, perhaps it shouldn't be countable.) Mild inspiration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emic_and_etic_units
Frank
15d ago
New Chinese cars are about 1/4 of US prices and significantly nicer. Reliability seems roughly equal (newer cars in the US seem to break way more than 2 decades ago), but we'll need some years to tell. Either way, these $8000 Chinese electric cars are quite nice for many purposes. This is all 2nd hand though - I don't like cars much. But for heavy vehicles, you can get a Chinese fire truck for $100k instead of 1.5 million in the US. In Mexico, Chinese semis like Shacman seem to already have 1/3 market share. A mine I work with is considering buying 200 (originally 40 but they can get this many more and hire drivers for the same price as they expected for 40).
I don't see how Western industry can compete without actively improving infrastructure to drive cost reductions. At the moment, it's more expensive by pure energy expenditure to move parts around the US etc. than in China, besides higher technical competency, faster turn around times etc. For a while, I was curious whether the Great Lakes could compete with the Yellow River Delta but without immediate ocean access, barges down the rivers or canals are 1/3 as efficient as cargo ships in the sea.
US economic complexity has been decreasing and the largest Western nations aren't doing much better. I'm partly to blame, provisioning tools for extractive industries - but in the short-medium term I don't know what else small Christian societies can out compete on. @Shrike N.b. I am not a China booster (what freedom does the Gospel have there?) but coherent economic planing, growth and improved standards of living are good and emulatable. Western stagnation is recent, but deep - and in these conversations, we tend to embrace the worse possible choices; for less short term pain guaranteeing great pain later.
Frank
15d ago
better to submit to Xi Jinping than suffer Houellebecq’s Submission
Particularly as Putin welcomes millions of Indians to Russia too. Scary is the future ahead.
Frank
16d ago
A man who was convicted and fined for setting a Koran on fire, while the man who attacked him with a knife while he was doing so only received a suspended sentence
A German girl was jailed for ...defaming (cyberbulling?) a gang rapist whose sentence was entirely suspended. Similarly, in Oragen a stabber was acquitted because the victim said a racial slur.
- The EU Omnibus I proposes to deregulate a bit, let's see where it goes.
- The Western European elite hasn't changed in ages, the same families control London, Milan etc. as 800 years ago. European class structure is roughly: super elites with assets, wealthy politicians gaining from their place in the apparatus, middle class bureaucrats (earning less than a McDonald's employee in the US), poor working class, lumpenproles (indigenous and foreign) including retirees which consume 1/3-1/2 of GDP (bribes to keep riots down). Politicians (in nearly all parties) don't understand how to drive economic growth besides by hiring more bureaucrats (but there's no tax base left for this.) In the US, it's been possible to work hard, even at McDonald's and invest everything and build enough wealth to retire early (although consumerist culture infects people away from this). In Europe, most remuneration comes in the form of mandatory expenses (like bureaucracy controlled retirement funds with below market returns or high taxes for social services). Everything functions better than the US, with less waste for transportation, healthcare, school etc. (similar to better results for far less GDP expenditure) places you can physically socialize in (because you don't have a long commute far from work and friends) etc. but it's rarely possible to do better or excel. Class mobility is almost impossible - certainly not creating generational wealth. The middle class is tiny, because big business is structurally encouraged and even amassing capital to start or receive a loan is difficult. (Hell, after 20 years the EU still lacks a common capital market..) And well, I made a few million working in Eastern Europe which would have been impossible in the West. All this is to say: The West European elites truly hate you and me and structurally tries to keep everyone down (high income and capital gains taxes retard capital accumulation, so generational wealth in Europe remains the only wealth around.) The US at least has competing elites, rising through entrepreneurship (vs. the bureaucrat happy establishment side).
Frank
17d ago
current estimated lithium reserves are not sufficient
"reserves" are economically recoverable resources. As the price changes, reserves increase. There was a brief lithium bubble where ignorant players thought lithium worked like copper with multi-year lead times etc. but there is more lithium than we should ever need. Bubble -> overcapacity -> price collapse -> reserve decrease. Everyone in commodities knows how this works. But lithium doesn't give you long periods of profit because it's a salt and production ramps up in weeks. You can fill a bore with water then pump the brine out, let the water evaporate and boom lithium. There are plenty of easily accessible molecules, refining is more difficult but you weren't worried about that.
Base metals are in a far worse situation with all recent copper exploration presenting dreadful grades (significantly worse than the gold mining ventures I'm involved with). Grades are half of what they were in the 90s and brownfield expansion costs have ballooned to rival greenfield. Only 14 deposits have been discovered in the past decade! Marimaca and Glencore are still interesting here.
Now, I believe the peak oil narrative was 100% correct and fracking only caused a 10 year delay as incinerated a trillion in capital (because of short well lives and gassing out) although there are still great conventional opportunities e.g. Prio in the Brazilian presalt layer. But even without nuclear, China's found a way forward with much to most of its heavy vehicles already running on LNG instead of diesel and build outs of synthetic gas, which I suspect will build a price ceiling around $80 BOE by the end of the decade, powered by cheap solar (which certainly has a positive EROI in their deserts.) I suspect there will only be one more oil bull market. I am rather pessimistic about the West (baring Chinese largesse) here. In the US, Trump finally cut the Gordian knot and freed mines from (in some cases) 30 year permitting hell - his talk of price floors and raw material tariffs makes me suspect auto-genocide from the right too. Financing is still hard abroad (ESG inertia still keeps US funds away and EU banks still have such laws, royalty companies have also seen massive consolidation with all 14 I'm involved with going through M&A this year)...
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