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Stock markets. I am using them continuously (if passively).
In response to
Why people want to die
As usual, Nietzsche got there first:
The heaviest burden: What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine!’ If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “do you want this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
In response to
Vegetarian/Omnivore Ideological Turing Test Judging Round!
I am a big fan of the Ideological Turing Test, and applying it to different domains, and I was happy to participate in this one. However, I wonder whether this is an appropriate domain.
I think the ITT works best when there are coherent and well-defined opposing positions, of roughly equal size and intensity. The abortion debate is a good example - while there are differences in emphasis and gradations of support, it is clear what the two sides are. Other good examples are the minimum wage debate, the global warming debate, and the debate. The ITT works worst when the positions are incoherent and ill-defined, or of grossly unequal size and intensity. "Was Tony Blair a good Prime Minister?" is a good example - it's not clear what it means to be a good Prime Minister, there are people who (dis)approve of him for diametrically opposite reasons, and his detractors are much more invested in the question than are his defenders.
Sadly, vegetarianism is much more like the latter than the former. Some people are vegetarians for health reasons, others for animal welfare reasons. Vegetarians typically feel strongly about the issue; non-vegetarians simply don't care about it, and have typically not considered the issue nearly as strongly. There is no "opposing side" to vegetarianism that would drive the ITT; all that links non-vegetarians is that they don't find vegetarian arguments compelling.
The U.S. prohibition was very successful at its goals (whether those goals were correct depends on your values). The minimum drinking age is also quite effective at its goals.
US prohibition was very successful at its goal of reducing alchohol consumption, and you are right that this is insufficiently appreciated. But it also resulted in massive organised crime. Your linked article is extremely unpersuasive on this point.
Although organized crime flourished under its sway, Prohibition was not responsible for its appearance, as organized crime’s post-Repeal persistence has demonstrated.
Ha! And lest anyone thinks I'm being unfair, that is literally its only discussion of the massive increase in organized crime caused by Prohibition. In an article that repeatedly discusses the possibility of people being socialised into different modes of behaviour, too!
Now, "don't cause a massive increase in organised crime" wasn't exactly a goal of the WCTU et al when they were campaigning for Prohibition. It was simply not on their radar, so you're kinda right that Prohibition succeeded in its goals. But looking at the implicit goals more broadly, Prohibition was a disaster, despite its success at its ostensible primary goal, in exactly the way that Lumifer's "blinking ad" example demonstrates.
Uhm, I wonder if they are aware that prisoner's dilemma is defeated through pre-commitment. They are weeding out small dealers strengthening the big ones.
Pre-commitment needs to be credible, verifiable and enforceable. If you're playing chicken, pre-commitment means throwing the steering-wheel out of the window, not just saying "I will never ever swerve, pinky-swear."
What is the relevant pre-commitment mechanism here, and how does it operate?
If anything, I would say large dealers are more vulnerable.
Regarding factory farming - what alternative am I comparing it to? It's worse than happy animals frolicking in the fields, it's better than those animals not existing.
This is such a weird argument to me. It seems to me self-evident that happy animals > animals not existing > suffering animals. Or don't you think that factory animals are suffering?
With my omnivore hat on:
I don't know what you mean by "suffering." Google defines it as "the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship." But just because you're going through pain and hardship, doesn't mean you'd rather be dead. You can be suffering in some ways, and still have a net-positive life - indeed, this is the normal meaning of suffering. Do you deny that the inhabitants of the Syrian refugee camps are suffering? Do you think they'd be better off not to have been born?
Do factory farmed animals sometimes suffer? Surely. Is their life such a constant torment that non-existence would be preferable? Surely not.
toy model
Oh, I thought we were talking about reality. EMH claims to describe reality, doesn't it?
As to toy models, if I get to define what classes of investors exist and what do they do, I can demonstrate pretty much anything. Of course it's possible to set up a world where "a suitably defined investor cannot make money but can lose money".
And deep OOM options are diversifiable -- there is a great deal of different markets in the world.
Oh, I thought we were talking about reality. EMH claims to describe reality, doesn't it?
Yeah, but you wanted "a scenario where everything is happening pre-tax, there are no transaction costs, we're operating in risk-adjusted terms and, to make things simple, the risk-free rate is zero. Moreover, the markets are orderly and liquid." That doesn't describe reality, so describing events in your scenario necessitates a toy model.
In the real world, it is trivial to show how you can lose money even if the EMH is true: you have to pay tax, transaction costs are non-zero, the ex post risk is not known, etc.
deep OOM options are diversifiable -- there is a great deal of different markets in the world.
There's still a lot of correlation. Selling deep OOM options and then running into unexpected correlation is exactly how LTCM went bust. It's called "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller" for a reason.
However, there is a lot of downside risk here, and normals do not want to take it on.
By itself, no. But this is diversifiable risk and so if you short enough penny stocks, the risk becomes acceptable. To use a historical example, realizing this (in the context of junk bonds) is what made Michael Milken rich. For a while, at least.
market segmentation caused by the different risk profiles
This certainly exists, though it's more complicated than just unwillingness to touch skewed and heavy-tailed securities.
Penny stocks (and high-beta instruments generally, such as deep out-of-the-money options) display this behaviour in real life.
In real life shorting penny stocks will run into some transaction-costs and availability-to-borrow difficulties, but options are contracts and you can write whatever options you want. So are you saying that selling deep OOM options is a free lunch?
As for the rest, you are effectively arguing that EMH is wrong :-)
Full disclosure: I am not a fan of EMH.
- Who says this risk is diversifiable? Nothing in the toy model I gave you said the risk was diversifiable. Maybe all the X-like instruments are correlated.
- No, I'm not saying that selling deep OOM options is a free lunch, because of the risk profile. And these are definitely not diversifiable.
- I am not arguing that EMH is wrong. I have given you a toy model, where a suitably defined investor cannot make money but can lose money. The model is entirely consistent with the EMH, because all prices reflect and incorporate all relevant information.
Except for all the people on this site, who talk nonstop about deliberately setting off such a thing?
"Why, so can I, and so can any man
but will they foom when you do conjure them?"
The annotated RichardKennaway:
This is a quote from Henry IV part I, when Glendower is showing off to the other rebels, claiming to be a sorceror, and Hotspur is having none of it.
Glendower:
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur:
Why, so can I, or so can any man
But will they come when you do call for them?
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What other way is there? Building a time machine?
How else can you estimate the suitability of models in making predictions than testing their past predictions on current data?
One possible answer is to look at how the then-state-of-the-art models in (say) 1990, 1995, 2000, etc, predicted temperature changes going forwards.
The answer, in point-of-fact, is that they consistently predicted a considerably greater temperature rise than actually took place, although the actual temperature rise is just about within the error bars of most models.
Now, there are two plausible conclusions to this: