Also would like clarification here: "have it go back to the previous price level without us needing to collectively find a replacement quantity of cash to put back in the bucket."
You don't need a replacement quantity of cash, but you do need a (replacement?) quantity of eager buyers. Value does in fact need to be replaced.
Otherwise, neither Facebook nor GameStop's stocks will ever go back to the previous price level (and we can be nitpicky and say well, if it's part of a larger broad-market fund and everyone's buying the fund but you still need an everyone...
That's an excellent point -- I knew that every buyer required a seller, and that there are (rare) situations in which you could try to sell your investments only to have the brokerage firm say "sorry, no buyers available right now."
But even though there's the same amount of cash going to/from buyer/seller in all unique transactions, future transactions either decline or increase in value based on whether more people are trying to buy or sell (as you noted).
So if you want your future transactions to increase in value, you want more people to want to b...
It's both a CYA and a joke. Anyone who says anything about the stock market online begins with the statement that "this should not be constituted as investment advice," e.g. here and here (two examples pulled from top of google search).
There is assumedly a legal reason that this disclaimer came into practice, e.g. if I wrote something and you did it and you lost money you might sue me, so I am obliged to tell you that A) I am not giving you advice and B) you should not take it!
That paragraph was meant to be less intuitive and more "wait if you really follow this line of thought it takes you to some nonsensical arenas..."
But we don't get to say "I'd like to exchange a fractional share of Microsoft for a widget." You can only exchange a fractional share of Microsoft for A) cash or B) shares in something else, and you can only do so if someone else is willing to make the trade. There are situations in which you could have an asset you want to sell and nobody wants to buy it, which is also true for other assets like houses (and, if ...
One note that I wanted to add as we begin the discussion: in the hour it took me to write this post yesterday afternoon, Facebook stock had the largest one-day value drop in the market's history.
This is what appears to have happened:
All of the money-making value was redeemed before people like you and me even had a chance to trade. Right?
I agree with you on ALL OF THIS. Make your evaluation as similar to what you're actually aiming for as possible, make sure you don't neglect any sections of music and/or allow previously learned material to degrade, spread effort over time aka spaced repetition.
BTW, in our house we're building a "piano performance ladder" (house concert, smaller venue, bigger venue, duets with other musicians, etc.). My mom used to teach this kind of thing to kids -- play for parents first, then grandparents, then church or nursing home, etc. It holds up for adults too...
What I'm seeing in the comments, btw, is something I've been curious about testing next -- whether the ideal scenario is something like "identify single problem, solve single problem, repeat solution five times perfectly consecutively (if you can't do that, you haven't solved the problem yet)" and then move on to the next problem.
At the end of your practice session you can test your work by playing all of the measures you've solved in current or previous sessions (the whole piece, if possible, or just the parts you've been able to address so far). If you win that attempt, STOP. If not, add failed measures to the next session's problem-work-set...
But the probability of success increases as you accumulate previous successes, right?
And there's a difference between "play 5 times perfectly" and "play 5 times perfectly consecutively." Much more randomness (and potential regression to the mean) if you are allowed to have imperfect runs between your perfect ones.
The flip-a-coin experiment is a very good idea. Are you predicting that the result will look something like this:
vs.
That's worth testing, and I can start tomorrow.
Will be interesting to see if it devolves to this:
Or resolves to this:
Spaced repetition (stopping af...
BTW I could learn something even more useful than "stop after win" with another month of metrics; maybe "immediately redefine more sophisticated win condition and work towards that" is the real key. But the data I've got now suggests that just repeating something you've already practiced to a defined win condition is counterproductive.
If you define your win condition and achieve it, your next step is to define a new win condition and achieve it as well. That means you could go from "play passage all notes accurate from memory" to "play passage all notes accurate from memory without curling 5th finger."
I'm going to write a post on Tuesday about reps reps reps vs. mindful repetition, and why a rep where you pay attention to why you're failing is just as valuable as a win.
I think the real question is whether the traditional approach to shooting a 3-pointer works. Do people who shoot shoot ...
That's how I've done it, too. Once you know what pitch your favorite song starts on, for example, or what key it's in, learning pitches becomes much easier.
This assumes that you can recall music from memory in its original key, of course. If you can't, your first step might involve strengthening that kind of recall.
I think the question of whether there is a Faustian effect is the wrong one to ask, and it may in fact be a substitution for the real question (as Kahneman would say).
Your actual question is "should I get the Pfizer booster in the first half of February?"
I would answer that question (and in fact have answered it for myself) by asking questions like "what do I observe happening to people I know personally who already got boosted?" and "what do I observe happening to people I know personally who did not get boosted?"
If you subdivide the people you know...
You can compare both ingredient lists and serving sizes if you look at cookbooks from the 1950s-1960s and recipe sites today. My Betty Crocker cookbook from 1969 (where I get most of my dessert recipes) has a brownie recipe that calls for 2 cups sugar, 4 oz chocolate, 2/3 cup butter; it's meant to bake in a 13x9 pan and yield 32 brownies.
The brownie recipe on Betty Crocker's website (that is, "today's brownie recipe") calls for 1 3/4 cups sugar, 5 oz chocolate, 2/3 cup butter, but is meant to bake in a 9x9 pan and yield 16 brownies.
hmmmmmmmm...
The obvious question is "what were you eating in 2014 and how was it different," and the answer is "I was still doing most of my own cooking because I wanted to save money, but I was terrible at it (one of the reasons I switched to Huel was because I didn't have the skills to make food taste good) and most of my meals would have been embarrassing to serve to anybody else."
Then, when I felt badly about not having anything good to eat in the house, I would order takeout or walk to the local Walgreens and buy candy and cookies. (Huel effectively stopped...
I eat honey every day, probably a tablespoon's worth on my morning oatmeal.
We don't avoid sugar but we don't go out of our way to add it. None of the food we ate today had sugar in it, for example.
Breakfast: steel-cut oats, fruit, nuts, honey, butter, egg, milk, coffee
Lunch: Rice, homemade mango slaw, homemade guacamole, smoked sausage (we didn't make that, but it has no sugar, no HFCS, no nitrates/nitrites, no MSG), grapes, cheese
Dinner: Rice, homemade naan, homemade dal, vegetables cooked in butter and various Indian-influenced spices, red wine
Dessert: 100% dark chocolate square (Ghirardelli), segmented orange
Oh, very true. The point of my narrative was to make an argument against "bland food being the solution," while acknowledging that hyperpalatable food could still be part of the problem.
When I ate bland food nearly exclusively, I was focusing on metrics that allowed me first to lose and then to maintain weight, even though those metrics were high effort (not overwhelmingly high effort, but still), encouraged binge-restrict cycles (if I eat 3600 cals today and 1400 cals tomorrow, I'll still be on target) and added anxiety to food-related cultural ritu...
This is what I thought when I read the SMTM papers too. "People are eating more calories but that's not why they weigh more" okay hmmmm...
Not that I think CICO is the only factor, and that's important! The leptin resistance and the insulin resistance hypotheses both make sense, for example.
Here's another compounding factor (pun intended):
We know that it takes more energy to sustain greater mass, which is part of why people get really excited about CICO ("if I just consume less energy, my body will naturally resolve to a smaller mass") and then disapp...
It's also helpful to put less food on your plate to begin with, as a tool to recalibrate how much is "enough" for you. It is always possible to take food off your plate and put it back into a Tupperware and then into the refrigerator, but the easy, default choice is to convince yourself to clean your plate -- especially when the alternative is putting a spoonful of whatever into either a shared leftovers container (which could be an issue depending on the hygiene standards of the people you're living with) or in a separate bin to be consumed on the day you...
I can actually speak to a variation of this theory, since I used Huel (a nutritionally complete powder) as my primary food source for, like, two years.
I can also speak to the "losing weight and keeping it off for 5+ years" thing, because in 2014 I hit my all-time weight high of 138 lbs (at 5'3", this is the point at which the scale tips to overweight). I started calorie counting with a food scale and lost 15 lbs in a little over a year, which tracks with what the research claims will happen if you try to lose weight at a consistent small caloric defi...
The most important thing I discovered in regards to my current partnership is that the relationship is the thing that exists between the partners. The relationship is the choices that are made by both people.
In every previous situation, the relationship was dysfunctional because there was an unwillingness to acknowledge "what I want it to be," "what the other person wants it to be," and "what actually exists between us".
(Think 500 Days of Summer, when Tom says "you can't say we're not a couple, we do all of the things couples do" and Summer say...
Specific, replicable actions that lead to predictable, desired results > specific, replicable actions that lead to unpredictable, desired results
(with the understanding that you may need to grind unpredictability for a while until you get what you need to consistently achieve predictability)
(example being "building freelance career" vs. "maintaining freelance career")
(actions that lead to undesired results aren't even on the table for consideration, of course)
See, that's what I thought -- any hashtag I tweet or editorial letter I write is going to be way less effective than the movement leader telling a journalist that "Stark Doobin" (no, seriously, that's how he announced it) was going to be the person who could push the plan into completion.
That makes me wonder whether any of the volunteer tasks are useful at all (share a tweet, share a meme, make a blog post, etc.), or whether they exist primarily to keep volunteers engaged. Which is in itself useful, keep the biggest fans on board so they don't get distracted by other shinies, but still.
Got it. So the proposed solution on the table is:
If 1 and 2, then we don't need 3, right?
If 2 and 3 but not 1, then we have something that resembles our current situation, with a lot of people arguing contentiously (rather than productively) over whether 3 is necessary (or helpful) and whether 2 is even necessary (or helpful) given that 1 is absent.
The other question that could provoke argument/contention is "whe...
We need different words to describe what the polio and measles shots do vs. what the flu and COVID shots do. One of these tools effectively stops [disease/death] and the other may reduce [symptoms/severity/transmission].
That is the only way to let the statement that "vaccines stop the virus dead in its tracks" remain true.
I'm trying to remember if there was an outbreak in a vaccine-mandated zone with Delta. We know that vaccinated people could both contract and spread Delta, and that it can transmit within a "fully-immunized household" (Bloomberg, October '21).
Searching "college campuses Delta outbreak" doesn't get me any stories like Cornell's, at least not on the first page of Google; there are stories of Delta spreading through a relatively isolated facility (nursing homes, prisons, etc.) with caveats that not everyone in that facility is vaccinated.
The lack of new...
We have existing examples of vaccine-only zones; here's how they're going so far:
Cornell University Shuts Down Campus Due to COVID Outbreak, Despite Vaccine Mandate—Here's How That Can Happen (Health.com, Dec '21, this story was reported in many major outlets)
48 test positive for Covid on world's biggest cruise ship (CNN, Dec '21,"95% on board were fully vaccinated. Of the people who've since tested positive, 98% were fully vaccinated. The total number of cases amounted to 0.78% of the on board population.")
Points worth noting:
Agreed (which is why I noted that county data could be more valuable than aggregated CDC data, and that nuance has the potential to be lost with every aggregation), and I spent a good 30 minutes after writing this comment asking myself if there is a better term than "primary source," which I probably used incorrectly above.
That said, it's fair to note that I didn't actually answer the question asked, because I don't know how to determine the reliability of any given number (or any given source providing any given number). How are other people doing this?
Hooooo boy.
Here is how I have been evaluating data, curious to know if other people are making judgments based on similar inputs:
There's at least some possibility that it's less of a Pfizer bias than it is an "unnecessary medical intervention" bias (my family of origin made sure we all got our 1980s-recommended vaccines, but they also said "taking Tylenol for a headache doesn't solve the underlying problem, drink a glass of water instead"). You may believe that Paxlovid could be helpful in some situations but you'd rather not take it unless you absolutely have to.
That said, we've also been exposed to two years of "this will work!" followed by does not work, does not work as promised...
the person must have been very crucial
Having spent the past week (technically, the past month) being the House Hero in all matters related to holiday prep, well — I mean, I can't say this is the case in the commenter's situation, but in my household the amount of holiday planning knowledge (where the special dishes were located, where the special recipes were located, which family members have which dietary restrictions and preferences, etc.) that I was carrying, organizing, and delegating was in fact crucial.
I am confused about why it's better to get Omicron later rather than sooner. I understand that avoiding overloaded hospitals is a good idea, but the reports from people who have Omicron (understanding that first-hand reports are created by people well enough to report and/or by bad actors) suggest that getting Omicron right now is equivalent to a nasty cold.
Even the data suggests that getting Omicron right now is much less likely to lead to hospitalization, regardless of whether you feel chipper enough to tweet about it.
So... why do you assume...
I agree, with a caveat. There's overeating in terms of food volume (bigger portions, eating past fullness, however you'd like to look at it), and there's "eating the same volume as you did before, except much of the food is more calorically dense."
As I commented on the Hyperpalatable Food Hypothesis post, you can actually compare recipes from then and now to see what's going on:
... (read more)