chooky
17hr ago
I think Exhibit A is the $6k Social Security tax break in the BBB, which is the Covid stimulus in perpetuity. The Covid payments were universal, so much less of a stealing from one's grandchildren dynamic.
chooky
17hr ago
But there are only about 600 ascents of Annapurna ever - this is not even a fringe hobby like BASE jumping. It cannot be that Anthropic and frontier developers are just chock full of these incredibly rare people and that this level of risk tolerance is also well-correlated with AI coding ability.
On war, the calculus on risk has drastically changed over time, at least for people in wealthy, developed countries. The US fatality rate for Vietnam, for example, was less than 3% - and this is the war that completely destroyed the political plausibility of a draft for anything except defending an invasion of American soil, and AI developers have very high opportunity costs for death since they would otherwise be well-compensated programmers.
chooky
1d ago
1 out of 10 is incredibly high, though. Are there ANY activities you can think of with a 10% death rate? The death rate for heroin is 1-2% of users per year. The death rate for hang gliders is 1/1000 per year. BASE jumping is 1/2300 jumps; for this to be a lifetime rate would require an average jumper to do 230, which sounds pretty high. These are the absolute riskiest activities I can think of. Death is much higher stakes than a 10% chance of portfolio wipeout - no one takes 10% death chances, and apocalypse is even worse.
chooky
1d ago
The biggest problem for high-abikity fertility is the financial opportunity cost of children. They are expensive, and having kids means significant lifestyle cutbacks, even for relatively upper middle class working pairs. Do you realize how many fancy vacations you could take for a daycare budget and the amount of money parents have to sock away for college? Just give it to all married parents and means test at an aggressively high level (like 300k or something).
chooky
1d ago
The Zoomer/Trump conservatism seems to just be blatant self-dealing. The "Boomer" version was a lot better, but the reality is that Boomers are in fact the most guilty of anyone in voting themselves budget-busting entitlement expansions.
chooky
1d ago
Greater than 10% of apocalypse over the next decade? That is such spectacular risk tolerance that I have a hard time believing this 10% number is genuinely held, which could just be that the people who believe in the "10%" chance do not really know what it means to take a 10% risk.
chooky
2d ago
Isn't the accusation that all the frontier model did was train on the draft proof by Buckmaster, and then OpenAI published the model's work as original, in which case the frontier model is not really outcompeting mathematicians?
Or is my summary of the controversy incorrect? I agree with your post's conclusions about what it would mean for Buckmaster's accusations to be unfounded, but it is not clear to me either way.
chooky
2d ago
Sort of. Audience acquisition is very expensive, and kid magazines, by definition, constantly have acquisition costs. The Cricket model where kids graduate to new levels of content is not bad, but the market can only get so saturated. I doubt that even Cricket has yet reached a point of stable subscriptions.
chooky
3d ago
Yes, but is the novel written by Severian as the events are happening in his clueless state? The narrator makes many choices about what and how to relate.
chooky
4d ago
I would not want to bet against near-term healthcare spending simply because of demographics, which is to say healthcare spending is driven by old people who either get it for free from the government, are getting extra free money from the government or are benefiting from equities.
chooky
6d ago
Even the more limited version is kind of surprising. I would have thought that as N goes to infinity, it becomes impossible to find pairs of primes within a fixed distance. I'll have to go read what's so special about 186.
chooky
6d ago
It's suprising to me that the distance between primes would not expand as numbers go up. It really caps at 186, huh?
chooky
19d ago
But this would cost data center owners money. Are they actually going to do this?
chooky
20d ago
This is a neat scenario, but recall that the current reality is that data centers create a great deal of additional demand for electricity, which raises prices. I agree that an easy solution would be for data centers to loudly and publicly pay well above-market rates that subsidize other businesses/residents, but it does not seem to be the case. In the data center heavy Mid-Atlantic PMJ, for example, approximately half of the large increase in rates is from data center demand.
chooky
22d ago
That Trump quote makes Amadan's attempted paraphrase of saying zero terrorism, etc, sound pretty accurate. Also, seemingly Trump did not discuss the Strait of Hormuz, etc, largely because Trump failed to understand what Iran's strategy would be.
chooky
22d ago
Or, shit, just a person from a population with lower IQ than yours that nonetheless is clearly smarter than you. OP needs to go live some real life.
chooky
22d ago
You would be inclined to bet on long term rates falling right now? I mean, zig when others zag, but Trump/Iran aside, hard to see how that happens in context of US debt levels.
chooky
26d ago
Isn't that indeed how it works? If you need a rock moved, you hire a rock-moving business and pay them, I don't know, $500. The worker probably gets around $100 in wages. The other $400 goes to the business whose main function is to invest in earth-moving equipment.
chooky
26d ago
Can we ever have a climbing adjacent movie that does not start with a fatal accident caused by the characters' idiocy?
Because of the lack of an idiotic accident, Mission Impossible 2 remains the best climbing movie. (Actually the best one is Eiger Sanction.)
chooky
30d ago
I claim in casual interactions all the time that we clearly left schools, etc, closed for way too long in 2020-21 and, depending where you live, 2022. Generally, everyone agrees that stuff was way too strict, especially for kids - certainly, I am not ostracized for this. Although lockdowns were not necessarily a clear "woke" position, they were very much the prevailing dogma.
It is also now very possible to criticize Black Lives Matter with the benefit of hindsight; it accomplished nothing, and the leaders of the movement seem to have predictably used it to enrich themselves. You could probably even critique the movement on its merits (e.g., it is probably true that American police resort to lethal force too quickly, but it is much less clear that they are particularly racist about it).
chooky
30d ago
The Christian monoculture was very much still in effect back then. Growing up in the 90s, belonging to a church was very much the default. This was no longer true by, I don't know, 2005?
chooky
1mo ago
You get 75% stronger BoA credit card rewards if you have 100k combined assets at BoA/Merrill.
chooky
1mo ago
I have a portion of my portfolio that I would like to be highly liquid and effectively zero risk. Currently, my approach is to buy Blackrock money market ETFs, but these present a problem in that a) my broker does not have good tools for daily cash sweeps, so getting compounding interest requires too much micro-managing and b) the gains are subject to income tax.
Do you guys have approaches to the risk-free parts of your portfolios that are brainless and optimized? I'd strongly, strongly prefer for it to be accessible through Merrill so I can keep high status.
Getting rid of all BBBA tax changes gets you halfway there. All of the personal income changes (SALT deductibility, SS, tips, and overtime) were obviously bad policy.
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