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At least with the CIA, arguably, the intentions were good. There are success stories, too - Japan, West Germany, South Korea.

As far as I am aware, the Saudi establishment is only out for themselves.

Have you been taking it? What has been your experience?

Do you take L-threonate or other versions? Have you tried stopping it - did things get worse than before you started?

I am 6’4 and thought it was impossible for me to gain muscle weight. Turns out I just wasn’t eating enough. Starting Strength + gallon of milk a day, and I have been making really good progress. Eating and sleeping are parts of the difficulty when training.

Same. I wonder if there is any way to recreate that in normal life?

I find that when travelling, I find myself excited to get up in the morning and I am quickly full of energy after waking up, motivated to do things. Not so in everyday life, even if I don't have to go to work / do anything during the day. Is it due to more sunlight? Better scenery?

It would be nice to increase the baseline to that state you experience when travelling. I definitely remember feeling similar / more powerful excitement and the feeling of being full of energy as a kid.

So what's the eli5 on how this works? How does predictit make a profit?

If helmets are in fact necessary, they should not be exempt. If they are not necessary, everyone should be exempt.

If nobody is actually analyzing the companies to discover their intrinsic value, stock prices will detach from fundamentals and we will see much bigger crashes than we ever saw before.

Five days a week sounds like too much - if you are not able to recover between sessions, you will get symptoms of overtraining which include poor sleep and poor appetite.

And the beauty of being a trader/quant is that once you come up with such an automation, you will capture a lot of the upside as the company will not want to have you leave for a competitor and implement a similar strategy there.

An important thing to realize is that you are not paid based on the value you added during the year. You are paid to make sure you do not leave (for a competitor).

I think in the long run, acting in the best interest of the business when you are employed for that business would result in superior income/career than doing otherwise.

Another option is finding possibilities for automation that could apply to other companies with similar problems, and starting a separate company selling such automation services. A consultancy could work, too.

One can get a 30-year fixed rate mortgage?

But that does not change the fact that his primary role at the moment is selling his research institute to potential funders.

But the Fed cannot just arbitrarily set rates, presumably? There is some "real" rate in the economy, which is determined by supply/demand of capital at different maturities. If the Fed goes significantly below or above that, you should get price inflation or deflation.

Some people argue that interest rates are objectively low because we are in secular stagnation - there are loads of savings, but real economy growth is sluggish which means there are few investment opportunities, leading to low interest rates (e.g. https://www.morganstanley.com/pub/content/dam/msdotcom/ideas... - may not be the best link, I have seen the ideas elsewhere).

Houses have intrinsic value, which comes from future rental cashflows. Let's ignore the premium that some people would pay over that just because they want to be owners of a house.

Then, it seems to me that house prices can be approximated as a function of rents, interest rates (determining required return on owning a house), and anticipated growth in house prices (which again can be decomposed into growth in rents, reduction in interest rates and 'irrational' growth). Using London as an example. Rental yields appear to be around 3.5% in London at the moment, which suggests to me that a good deal of anticipated growth is priced in. But where can that growth come from? Rents are a function of incomes and are unlikely to outpace inflation. Interest rates seem to be more likely to go up than down. So it seems that house prices are unlikely to rise, and once that is realized by the market, prices may even come down as participants stop anticipating growth just because "London house prices always go up".

So a bubble means that house prices are disconnected from fundamentals, that some irrational assumptions are built into the price. I am not entirely sure that there is a bubble - it seems to assume that you need to assume that there is also a sovereign debt bubble, i.e. the "risk-free rate" or the treasury yields are irrationally low. I am not sure if that is the case or not, but that is the subject for a different discussion.

Why would interest rates "normalize" though?

Why is gold doing so poorly then?

Are you saying that each individual person cannot decide to and then become more conscientious?

My main concern is that the big government will be used by big corporations with massive compliance and legal departments to shut down any emerging competition that refuses to be bought out.

So then, one can advocate against the use of social media in general or Facebook in particular, (ironically) run targeted ads on these platforms to educate the users, etc.

In truth, I think social media as we know it is on the way out anyway. The new generation will rebel against it, and might go back to writing hand-written letters to each other for all I know. I feel like giving these companies all this attention and treating them as "the new utilities" that are forever to stay here and must be regulated also psychologically cements their position as such.

He is primarily a salesman, is he not?

Distribution of assets or distribution of consumption? I would argue the former is a complete red herring and if one is to be concerned about any inequality, it's inequality of consumption.

Somehow, I feel like the old, unregulated internet was better. I wonder if that is just nostalgia or there is something to it.

With an unregulated internet, any internet user has to take care of their own privacy and anonymity. Barriers for entry for new websites and services are very low. Data breaches and abuses of data can lead to users being concerned about giving their data to tech monopolies, which can enable competition.

Regulations like GDPR arguably make users complacent and lowers their guard, as well as strengthens the tech monopolies by adding to their moats. Would Facebook have been able to displace Myspace in the current environment? Or Google displace Yahoo?

The internet was doing fine for decades with minimal involvement from governments - why change things?

People become jaded?

I remember often stumbling on online communities and message boards on Google when looking for something ~15 years ago. Most people in those communities also stumbled on them through Google. I cannot remember a single time I saw one in search results recently.

So either Google is deliberately excluding them, or they actually ceased to exist for the most part, or it has been a self-perpetuating cycle and one cannot pinpoint what came first - exodus to 'social media' or disappearance from Google search results.

I think the way the internet has changed in the last decade has contributed to loneliness significantly.

10-15 years ago, the internet was full of small independent communities: message boards, IRC channels, chat rooms of all kinds, etc. You could really "hang out" with the same people and get to know them.

But something killed pretty much all of them. Instead we have centralized "social media" that is at best all about narcissism and self-promotion. Sites like Reddit where there is too many people and everyone converges to a single "hive-mind", you cannot have someone reply to an interesting post you made years ago, and that really take the humanity out of the whole thing (like Facebook or Tinder or what not). Even HN is problematic in this regard - it is good for the purpose it exists for, but you cannot have any sort of casual threads or discussions just to get any sort of rapport within the community.

Even messengers have somehow become worse in this regard. Yahoo/MSN messengers, ICQ etc. were somehow all about having connections with online friends. Maybe it is just me, but there just doesn't seem to be an option that works for this as well nowadays. Or at least people do not seem to use the existing options in the same way.

When you are in full-time education (school, university) friendships come naturally from the people you share the experience with. Work doesn't have the same effect because being professional usually implies not combining work with fun and not getting personally close to people.

So when you are in your 30s, you have limited time and limited opportunities to make friends. If you don't spend a lot of time hanging out with someone it is tough to make really good connections. Other factors come into play as well - comparing yourself to others, more niche interests, lack of desire to invest time, having a partner, etc.

You have to agree, though, that it depends on the value that the minimum wage is set at? If you set the minimum wage at a senior developer level, anyone at the junior level will be unemployable.

So if we agree that at some level of the minimum wage, businesses would not be hiring someone because they cannot pay them below minimum wage - then why do you think this is not happening to some people at the current level of minimum wage?

Low salaries should help the startup scene, not hurt it. Where would you rather create your startup - somewhere where it would cost more to hire or less?