To be pedantic, the S&P 500 is a large portion of the stock market, not the economy. Its value is about 75% of the value in stocks. But stocks are only 25% of all stores value. Real estate is twice the size of the stock market. The rest is mostly corporate and govt bonds.

This is why the real estate crash of 2008 caused the Great Recession, while the Internet Bubble bursting was a small recession.

Vanguard’s VTI uses an index designed by CRSP. I read the rules and, best I can tell, CRSP indices will add the stocks at the next rebalancing in September.

(FWIW, CRSP was run by U of Chicago, but they recently sold it to Morningstar.)

Vanguard doesn’t use S&P, because they wanted low fees and the license was expensive. They use CRSP’s index rules.

I checked and it looks like new stocks get added to the CRSP index at the next rebalancing, which is September. So, even the knockoff S&P adds it quickly.

BTW, CRSP was run by University of Chicago, but got sold recently to Morningstar, a mutual fund company.

I tried to send an SD card loaded with free data (Wikipedia, dictionaries, books, etc.) to a refugee camp in Bangladesh that had no good internet connection. Tried twice with USPS. Neither letter was received.

Legal Eagle does legal analysis on YouTube. They looked at the recent “settlement” between Trump and the IRS. They determined that it is not legal, is not limited to $1.776 (as a press release stated), and does not require disclosure of who got paid and how much.

Right, you should use Lean or Coq. They are cleaner mathematically, which means AI has a better chance with them. And you can have the AI write proofs about their correctness. The proof-checker can verify the proofs and give you more trust in the AI’s work.

This isn’t foolproof - you still have to understand what was proved. And it may take some work to understand the unproven parts of the code. But I believe this is the path forward.

We created databases to keep track of reality. It fascinates me when the database is taken for reality.

Should YC HackerNews put together an offer to buy GitHub from Microsoft?

One throughline of history is database-ization. Some of our older writings are records of ownership and tax liabilities. We keep moving information from the real world into a database. We have done it so much that the database is sometimes more important than the real world. Someone marked “dead” in a database can have a hard time living!

Economist here. The more likely short-term replacement is gold. Not as the reserve currency, but as the currency for denominating trade.

The US has raised tariffs erraticly. Traders seek out a good that can be traded anywhere with predictable low costs and that is gold. So, demand is rising and, if it continues, trades may be denominated in gold.