All of skot523's Comments + Replies

My intuition is that if market participants go too many levels deep in terms of mind games that you’re exactly correct. It just kinda ends up in the right place when you average it all out, maybe there’s a slight risk premium but that’s usually it

I think the value was in the interesting idea rather than being particularly rigorous

Glad to see more discussion of food here. Whatever the cause / best way to eat is, I maintain that fixing whatever is wrong is one of, if not the freest lunch we have

In America we still have this odd puritan streak in us. People often seem as though they think things must be hard to be worthwhile. I find that if you work deliberately you can achieve great results without a ton of effort. For example, to get in shape I lift a few times a week, but most of it is simply getting enough sleep and not eating a few things that are really bad. 4am runs and cold showers are not my thing, but I’m also aware that I’m not trying to punish myself for my sins, I’m trying to achieve a goal in the easiest way possible. Even that last ... (read more)

If you’re not already aware, you would like Henry George’s Progress and Poverty in how it deals with a framework for thinking about Labor and Capital.

Way above my paygrade, but can you just respond to some inputs randomly?

Somewhat easier, why take a loan against a 401k? Well, you have some value and some exposure to an asset, and you would like to use that value without facing the consequences of selling. In this case, the penalties to an early withdrawal are far higher than any normal interest rate, especially over a short time.

Yeah it seems like everything stagnates/goes down all at that same time other than college with a very small gain. Maybe stigma was causing underreporting of online? It used to be a way bigger deal

I don’t think anyone does! Now nature isn’t always right, but I tend to think you need a good reason to deviate from it. Something about the primarily processed foods is killing us en masse. I tend to think it’s acting mainly along some satiety axis, as otherwise your body should adjust towards a healthy homeostasis, but in many it isn’t. People are being given a signal to eat in excess of what’s healthy—quite literally killing them, and they seem unable to do anything about it in the long run of their own accord. Does that point to damage in the hypothala... (read more)

The answer, of course, is that there are transaction costs to using the market. There's a cost to searching for and finding a trustworthy contractor, which is avoided by keeping me around.

With the internet and fully online on boarding, could be a good way to explain the rise of contracting gig jobs in recent years

Soybean oil grew the most in the USA, and some studies in mice make it look quite bad. I’m not positive, but my takeaway is that it is very low downside and quite easy to cut it out of my diet. On the one hand it is new, and our ancestors were fine without it, whether it is bad or not. And two, it’s highly concentrated in processed junk that everyone agrees to avoid anyways. As for general soy products, not my area of expertise but I’m not going out of my way to avoid them if they’re not highly processed

I'll throw in with you here, I think calories fundamentally is missing something. Not sure what it is yet, but I argued for suspecting vegetable oils. For anyone who naturally keeps a healthy weight, my intuition is: how hard would it be to lose 10 lbs from here? That would be hard as hell for me, and I have no reason to disbelieve people who have trouble getting to a healthy weight--especially in light of the contents of this post--it would only take a slight surplus to start getting really bad. 

My question for you--could you elaborate just how useful avoiding vegetable oils is for you? And you wouldn't have happened to have run an experiment where you just avoided them but nothing else? A man can hope!

https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=cn&commodity=soybean-oil&graph=domestic-consumption

These guys say yes

https://www.statista.com/statistics/946501/china-soybean-oil-consumption-volume/

These guys say not really

Haven't started playing with time series data yet, you may be interested to know that there is something fundamentally different about the patterns of consumption between Asian countries and GDP--that is to say there is no correlation in my data, but a very strong for Ex-Asia and GDP

Ah interesting, nice catch there. Wonder what's going on with 3rd gen Chinese, given that the equivalent all Asian is .86 whites vs their 1.08.

though 2^nd and 3^rd generations of Asians were also associated with reduced obesity prevalence as compared to other races, the magnitude of the association decreased compared to the 1^st generation of Asians.

So in aggregate, it would lend itself a bit to our theory here

 Also, you may be interested to know that there is no correlation between consumption and GDP in Asian countries, while Ex-Asia GDP is very highly... (read more)

That's certainly fair enough! I really don't think that I have any qualms with your logic, my reason for posting and exploring this is partially that maintaining a calorie surplus didn't seem to be a very satisfactory answer, analogous in your argument to saying we know the proximate cause of climate change because more energy is coming in than out--and that opinion was shared by a lot of other people here. In particular, the mysteries of the Peery paper were definitely getting some discussion going. 

I'd refer you to the comments on this post--I think... (read more)

I think that analogy maps quite well. In both cases we have a net retention of energy--measured in temperature on earth and in weight in humans. I believe there's the possibility that I'm writing about the metabolic equivalent of CO2 in humans here (both graphs go up and to the right with industrialization). See, we know that the net balance of calories in humans or joules retained on earth is going up. The question is why. I think the answer to "why" is CO2/possibly vegetable oils. As for "how," from what I understand that is the source of your exasperati... (read more)

No clue, that would be a tough data point, taken as given that they got skinnier while also using more vegetable oil. I don’t know much about vegans so I’ll look into it, if you had to steelman it what would you say?

Perhaps they switch to oils relatively better for our health such as olive oil. My cursory googling points to this as a possibility.

Fighting the strongest version of this argument: let’s say someone does lose weight replacing meat with lots of soybean oil. If soybean oil primarily induces us to eat more, then veganism counteracts it by vastly r... (read more)

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0212740

Very interesting, that could give us a pretty good test case. At first blush, it rings as consistent with this theory. However, it seems the Chinese in the USA are more obese than in China, but not as obese as white or black or Latino Americans (they still have plenty of time to catch up). That would imply:

1. This theory is wrong: the simplest explanation. At the very least, it doesn’t fully explain what’s going on. Something else is causing obesity here.
2. Soybean oil does cause obesity

Whatever the cause is, I’d bet it’s probably modulated by genetics as well. The Peery paper goes into it too. I have most of those factors other than maybe the virus and I pretty effortlessly maintain a 22 BMI unless I’m drinking 5+ beers a day for months. Obviously anecdote but I know I couldn’t get down to 18 BMI without a ton of effort, just as an obese person can’t get down to 23 without a ton of effort too. Or perhaps the damage is done as a child or in the womb, hard to say.

Hey guys I’m Sam. You may have read my post on the obesity epidemic. I studied econ, although I’d say I’m really only qualified to assert any expertise at all when it comes to financial markets. I’ve been on reddit for what, 10 years and have thus stumbled on here from time to time.

From me, you’ll probably see a lot of trying to figure out just what in the world is going on in a complex system, and then throwing my hands in the air. Also, you may see me going to logical extremes (“how about we model the universe as one atom going in a straight line the voi... (read more)

Good stuff, I'm still digesting it all! This adds to my idea that different types of oils/fats and different types of w3 and w6's act quite differently in studies. I see very little bad about olive oil, and virtually nothing about soybean oil in particular even though it's used most intensively in the US. People tend to talk of them in monolithic ways, but when you get down to it something like olive oil almost always stacks up well. As for the intuition, same here, not sure what to really make of this stuff other than it I don't see a downside to excludin... (read more)

Interesting, that would definitely jive with processed foods being bad. I think you could make a great argument that it’s more primarily processed foods too, vegetable oils included. Now in these findings, are they under isocaloric conditions? I ask because you could certainly posit that processed foods are bad because they avoid satiating us somehow, but that wouldn’t necessarily hold in situations where we get the same number of calories from them. I think that’s an easier hurdle to start with, it’s very easy to imagine structures in food that our body measures satiety with getting broken down under any type of processing, but your idea of reduced efficiency or side effects would be next on my list after that.

EDIT: My complete thoughts are here: https://goodtosell.substack.com/p/a-response-to-a-contamination-theory

https://www.jeffnobbs.com/posts/what-causes-chronic-disease

I’ll add more and fix this up tomorrow at my pc. Sorry bout the sloppiness and the formatting, you’ll see why I was so excited. I really can’t stress just how much this adds up. It’s really quite uncanny. I encourage anyone to just read that instead of me, but I gave this a shot for when you’re done with that.

Just found this, it reminded me of your post, as I’d been thinking about it a ton.

Loo... (read more)

I’ve never been a strict EMH believer. My definition is that you can’t find any free money anywhere. The market does obviously stupid things sometimes—see gamestop or amc recently. You can say what you want, but in my mind at least one of the meme stocks was for all intents and purposes objectively overvalued. But my definition is revealed by the state of the world currently—I am not rich because I saw something that was, in my mind, clearly wrong. See, even when GME was at it’s highs, the cost to borrow was over 100%, with the possibility of a squeeze goi... (read more)

No doubt environmental factors should be considered. Assuming for a moment it’s plastics in the water, say, I’m curious what mechanisms would explain why we don’t see really obvious trends by geographic area (independent of other factors). For example, it’s of course not all environmental because people in the same neighborhood/family have different outcomes.

To throw my hat in the ring: all things metabolic seem highly intertwined. I faced an interesting trillemma once upon a time—I had high blood sugar, high cholesterol, and low testosterone(alcoholism). ... (read more)

I completely lost my sense and smell and it did return over the next few months, for the record. Therefore, I wouldn’t consider that damage final in all cases.

Cool stuff, like always a bit over my head. I’d be very interested to hear strategies about either getting “not okay” mode to “okay” mode, or for more accurately assessing when things are truly not okay (more more rarely than our brain states would suggest). It is my experience that in our modern world, and especially in the world of white collar work, this switch is flipped much much more than is necessary. When you get the email that you need to file some form that you probably should have known about, but in reality is no big deal, you definitely get se... (read more)

I know it’s a complete meme but have you given CBD a try? Also, I imagine the swipe feature on keyboards on phones/tablets would be a fair bit less irritating

I think you’re right that it’s an overall loss. If they’re going to be sold at above msrp, it might as well go to the manufacturer to incentivize more supply. Otherwise, that delta goes to scalpers, and the scalpers have to spend their time. I think the reason Sony doesn’t raise prices is because it is sensitive to perception of users. The console itself is really just a portal to the Sony ecosystem, which is where the money is made anyways. They don’t want to be seen as charging you for the privilege of paying them for subscriptions and $80 games, especia... (read more)

Underproducing seems very silly, at least for Sony and Microsoft. A lot of the value is in the network—playing with friends. Nintendo may well be a different story, especially since their model is more single player focused and their profit (i think) is relatively more concentrated in hardware sales.

In the past, there was always talk of the consoles being sold at a loss. I’m sure that is very near the case still, especially now that they have people paying yearly subscriptions for online play. There is no reason to be hemorrhaging users when the $ is in the ecosystem

If by “negate” you mean render irrelevant, very very low chance in my opinion. There will still be business, even if it’s just maintaining robots or peddling luxury goods. And you’ll have years of earnings compounding. And there’s REITs in indexes, they’re not making any more land anytime soon. Financial obligations are surprisingly sticky across regimes, Germany is still paying pensions for soldiers from world wars, and national debt from before the wars, too. What you’d really want to worry about with bonds is inflation. If we are talking pure finances, I’d buy VT with like 90% of the money, and put roughly 10% in crypto, especially crypto that you can stake and earn an income on

Yeah I know absolutely nothing about cigars! You may well be right about horses, I’m just trying to think about rich-guy leisure activities. In a world of no work and a perfectly engineered environment, I imagine we’ll be doing a lot of sitting around, and God knows we’ll still care about status. Even if new printed wine or whisky is better, you’ll get a ton of credit for busting the old bottle out—it was never really about taste anyways.

If I can’t do something lame like a stock, probably a basket of art, precious metals, and liquor/wine or cuban cigars. I think the alcohol bit is probably my best idea, as it actually improves in quality across time, not just in perceived scarcity. Even in post-scarcity, I find it hard to believe that people will flex with printed/conjured wine, we’ll all jockey for French 2020 wine or real old Kentucky bourbon while we sit around and smoke cigars all day. Of course it’ll actually be top tier racing horse jizz and we’ll all be kicking ourselves because it should have been so obvious.

I think the essence of the future pose scarcity value proposition is the signaling, especially of taste and status.

Assuming it has to actually be “physical”, I’d probaby buy some berkshire hathaway stock and pay to get the actual certificates sent. I’m not sure you could do the same for an etf or a mutual fund. Berkshire because 1: it is diversified, and 2: it doesn’t pay a dividend, which would be tricky if one has to have something physical.

I just assumed everyone knew this

Rant on the way, not an exhaustive list by any means! I kinda extrapolated ‘short-termism’ to mean lack of investment and more so a lack of results in technological progress—as I see the critique or ‘short-termism’ to really hit hard in the idea that companies aren’t investing when they should to make technological progress.

Perhaps it’s the market working as intended, value outperforms growth in the long term, and growth necessitates higher investment to expand. Doubtful, as no one outside of hardcore finance guys know about this anyways.

Perhaps it’s compa... (read more)