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Productivity in this case is fairly simple to calculate = Cost/Duration.

You can factor in the time (presumably that’s paid for so you should have a real number) and cost of materials (On-site use historical or replacement cost) yourself.

Your points holds more generally though, especially when there aren’t clear prices paid.

2017 story on how Intuit killed the ReadyReturn program for pre-calculated returns for California.

https://priceonomics.com/the-stanford-professor-who-fought-t...

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/epis...

Not trying to be argue for the sake of arguing, but is there some data to back this claim up? Anecdotally I'm aware of many parents who think music makes their kid well rounded, but I'm not aware of parents that specifically believe learning music makes their kid more intelligent in non-musical areas.

Is it? The parent poster was specifically trying to say there is signal -- vs just noise -- in purchases like aeron chairs.

> The computerized GRE goes even further... it's like a videogame, it feeds you harder questions the better you do, then reverts to easier ones when you mess up.

Isn't that one of the better ways to finely calibrate a score? Rough approximation of heapsort?

This might result in jammed audio for human listeners, but recovering the original audio seems like a fairly mundane signals extraction problem subject to the standard signal/noise ratio issue.

This is the right take. When you get to a certain level of income/wealth, it's all about figuring out ways to:

1. shift earned income into capital gains (e.g., private equity carry, small business earnings into equity vs salary)

2. defer taxes (401k, mortgage deductions, 1031 exchanges on real estate, etc)

3. avoid taxes (shift jurisdictions)

4. get accountants, lawyers, and lobbyists to figure out additional ways to lower tax burden

I'm not saying the government is efficient or that 100-200k incomes should be taxed more, I'm just saying that's the game as it stands. Tax expenditures are the ways the government gives (rebates?) money back, mostly to the wealthy.

What would said dumb money be holding if not index funds? Single name blue chips? What would the blue chip holders do in the counterfactual world where there is a big downturn?

Perhaps there will be greater correlation between names in a downturn, but then again, factor-based investing might offset some of that.

Is there any way to minimize exposure to plastics in modern society? Modern homes all have PVC water piping, too.

I'm guessing even the "safe" plastics will turn out to be not that good for us.

If you're trying to sell GOOG, which trades a few billion worth every day, no.

If you're trying to sell TEAM (Atlassian), which trades a few hundred million, maybe.

If you're trying to sell something less liquid (which trades a few million of notional - price x volume - then you probably want to go with some kind of algo execution.

i.e., your order size as a percentage of notional traded matters.

I agree, this is a very good article.

One consequence of increasing order internalization (because it's a good business, read the article) has been the remaining order flow on the public market is getting more toxic over time, which is part of the reason some (generally higher frequency) hedge fund strategies have done less and less well over the years.

It's been a while since I've used IB, but they are one of the few retail front ends that offer algorithmic execution.

i.e., instead of showing 1000 shares to the market, it might parcel it out in small chunks to hide your footprint.

Although this typically isn't relevant for most orders, if you are trading something thin, it could be helpful.

Some of the comments conflate retail traders with regular Joes and Janes. A lot of hedge fund investor money comes from pension funds who are placing retirees' money either directly or indirectly into hedge funds.

HF compensation is different can of worms.

This seems true, and also I think there's some nuance lost in the stats as well.

My personal experience as a parent is that my kids don't get nearly the amount of independence that I did at their age. A reasonable part of this is that I am afraid that my kids will get taken away. My preference is towards the free(r)-range style of parenting, so the ex-post stats don't convey the full effect that the small sample size of reported "big gubmint takeaways" has.