People who aren't self obsessed are becoming rare. It's an interesting development. I guess it must be hard to find a friend who listens and give feedback instead of talking about themselves.
That is so bizarre for me to read this:
"83% said they'd spent zero time just thinking"
I struggle to turn down my inner dialogue, because I enjoy being in my head juggling with ideas, and I thought I was the weird one for doing it. What is hiding in those people's head that they are scared of being alone in it ?
I think this is confusing efficiency with overfitting. A lot of the problems described in the article arise due to overfitting models to the historical data. We overfited supply chain management because covid doesn't happen often, we overfited credit modeling because chain reaction of default doesn't happen often... We actually weren't efficient enough, we ignored tail events.
That doesn't solve the big part of the problem which is the co-ownership of competing companies. A blackrock manager voting for you or you voting doesn't change anything. Through the fund, you co-own multiple competing companies, therefore you won't vote for policies that would increase competition between those companies.
I would say this does solve the problem. If you have enough money for your vote to matter, then you can just own all the stocks in an index yourself and get to vote. This is now even more practical as trade costs have recently been cut to zero for all major brokerages.
The average index fund owner is also not likely be spending time looking over the voting possibilities of 500 companies and aligning votes to decrease competition between them, even if that was possible. They just wouldn't vote on issues. The problem is that three funds can decided to vote on policies that reduce competition between companies and that they are big enough for the votes to matter.
Transferring votes to the underlying owners of the fund would in reality likely just cause those votes not to be cast. It is similar to just saying that the funds can't vote, but doesn't disenfranchise people who really want to vote and still gives all those shares the index funds own possible power.
I feel like the anti-competitive concerns about index funds are another example of people having concerns about everything and its opposite and not seeing that implies the problem is misidentified.
We're all worried about companies doing things to compete that are not in the interest of society, right? Less competition equals less (fewer?) externalities. Why even have companies in the first place if competition is simply always a good thing? Why was Eddie Lampert's clashing departments at Sears (supposedly) a disaster?
Ya you're right. I guess the correct solution then is to prevent index funds from voting entirely. If you own a company as a part of a passive vehicle, your vote doesn't count.
I have been working on such a system and it is NOT a huge loss of your time. I've learned so much things in the past year, in market microstructure, in networking (infrastructure, protocols), cloud computing, cloud management (docker swarm, kubernetes), linux kernel bypass, distributed systems, data base, and I've read hundreds of papers on neural networks, gaussian processes, etc... If you are wondering if you should get into this, it is one of the best learning experience you will ever have.
The only times I click on ads is to see what competing businesses are doing / offering. I am pretty sure they would actually save money by stopping showing me ads.
Is it a project that hasn't been released yet ? Or by "clearing layer that can be settled with crypto" you simply mean route ILP payments between two currencies with crypto in the middle ?
The latter. The underlying settlement is separate concern to clearing. Crypto just makes settlement easier for low-zero trust environments or situations where you want to manage liquidity better.
I am glad to read this, because it really sounds weird to me that so much people blame AI for not being able to do causal reasoning, while us human don't even do in my sense "strict" causal reasoning. I feel like we just learned a small subset of causal rules just like AI algorithms, by having experienced a lot of events that followed those rules.
The article seems to indicate that those gains are all paper money due to the huge inflation in the stock market. On paper they look richer, but they can't do much with their "money" anyway. I think a more rational measure of inequality is through the possession of "important" assets like real estate, lands, power (political influence, ...). Of course the real problem comes when the lower and middle class sells their real wealth for stocks at the top, and the 1 percenters sell them their paper gains for "important" assets.
You don't think equity in a company is an important asset?
Is wealth in a mortgage-free triplex appraised at $1MM today inequal to equities in $MSFT that is worth $1MM today? If so, in what way is the wealth of the stockholder less important or less valuable? I don't think we can be sure that the real estate is going to provide more growth over time. I'm not sure by what other means the real estate could be considered more important.
Note that a pretax income of ~$500,000 puts you in the 1 percenters league. So the type of investment value in my example is probably fairly realistic.
Yeah housing prices in a lot of areas have barely recovered to the last peak from 12 years ago (and housing equity has traditionally comprised most of the "middle class"'s wealth), while stocks are like at least double (not even including dividends).
