gridlockd
It is unlikely that you will beat the market in the long run and if you do, it may well be down to chance, but it is possible, because the market is not perfect.
Furthermore, you can not "buy the market" in the first place. You can buy ETFs replicating stock indices, but that is not the same. If you bought the S&P you will have performed differently than if you had bought MSCI world. Ultimately, stock picking is just a less diversified version of buying an index.
I don't like that. I'll give you a downvote, that will set things right!
Also, you can make money betting on the outcome itself. If the odds you get are underpriced relative to an accurate forecast, that's a great bet to take.
Furthermore, these forecasts influence where politicians put their focus. Let's say you're Hillary in '16 and you think Wisconsin is yours despite the forecast showing a narrow lead, maybe you should reconsider.
Why do they have so many more PhDs now? Because PhDs are a now a dime a dozen, not because a PhD itself is valuable. The opportunity cost of a PhD is four years of lost income during prime employment age, plus extra student loan debt.
Even with a higher salary (and higher tax burden), it's not clear that you come out on top during your lifetime. If you don't come out on top, it's a waste, unless maybe these years you spent doing your PhD were the best years of your life (probably not).
A lot of people were pissed off about Adobe stopping perpetual licenses, but that didn't hurt their bottom line. In fact, they increased revenue because a subscription is a low upfront cost.
Most of the people complaining about this are non-customers whose strong-held beliefs on how to license software have been offended. These people don't matter to Adobe's business.
> What about different strains and variability in how deadly they are?
Is there any evidence that the variations spreading now are different from those spreading earlier this year?
> What about the difference that the size of the initial dose of the virus makes to the end outcome?
There was a study done on hamsters that only showed a minimal impact of initial dose on disease severity.
On the other hand, you have increased mortality among healthcare worker, which could be caused by higher exposure. However, there's also the impact of such a stressful situation on the immune system.
The highest-quality software can not win in the software market. This is evident from the software that is out there owning the market.
Quality is a trade-off, if you spend too many resources on it, you can not compete. Catching those last few bugs takes exponentially more effort.
Moreover, there are snake oil salesmen at every corner, telling you that if only you adopted some methodology, your defect rate would plummet. It's easy to get lost in that, not actually delivering a product.
Correct.
> Why would the customer report a bug instead of switching to a less buggy product?
All products are buggy to varying degrees. As a user, you can't easily tell if another product is "less buggy". Would you risk investing time into figuring out another program that may turn out just as buggy? No. You most likely move on with your life.
Once users are invested into your product, it takes a lot to make them switch. Every single piece of software that I use regularly is either extremely simple or somewhat buggy. I haven't switched once because of it. It's a nuisance, but not a dealbreaker.
That's not to say that I like this situation, of course I would prefer software that doesn't have bugs and glitches, but I also prefer software that exists today, not tomorrow. The market has spoken: worse is better.
> Why do you think the customers are going to report bugs?
If it's an important bug, somebody will most likely report it. If it's not an important bug, not having it reported is most likely not important either.
> I can't say that I've ever attempted to report a bug on an iPhone app, Windows, etc. It's like yelling at the wind.
So, did you switch to Android or Linux/MacOS then? Is the grass really greener on the other side?
If there's a bug slipping through, someone will run into it, report it, and it'll get fixed. If nobody runs into it, the bug doesn't cost anything.
This is the most economic way to go about it, which is the reason why pretty much all successful software is kind of buggy. We all like to complain about it, but then we don't want to wait an extra year for the next version either.
At the other end of the spectrum, if you need really reliable software, the solution is not to eliminate all the bugs, that's impossible. Even with perfect software, hardware can fail, bits can flip the wrong way. The solution is to make sure that errors can't bring down the airplane.
Good! Maybe you can actually get something done using it then, instead of getting lost in mastering lots of concepts just for the sake of it.
What is unique to Zig is that it has these features without bringing together "the best of Forth and Lisp". Sometimes, just being pedestrian is a virtue.
The difference is only about 5% to the "no news" crowd. Also, people that are better-educated tend to lean liberal and therefore might prefer to consume liberal outlets, but that doesn't mean liberal outlets are better at informing people. Looking at the frontpage of MSNBC, it's almost exclusively political opinion pieces centered around the US.
Moreover, the key question is not whether you're being informed better by consuming this media, but whether it is worth risking some of your well-being by consuming it. Research has found that media that is upsetting is the most addictive. People with addictions make up all kinds of rationalizations on how their addiction has upsides. The idea that you've been wasting time consuming ultimately useless information that irritates you - it's not very attractive.
I can't, please elaborate.
Usage and production are two different things. You can produce more energy than you need and have a stable grid by just throwing money at the problem. In 2016, you had EEX spot prices around 2-3 ct/kWh, below the production cost of any technology. This signals waste and it's also a major reason why renewables rollouts stalled in Europe.
To store just a fraction of the needed power would require millions of large expensive batteries, whereas pumped hydro storage requires geological features that are in limited supply.
Once you factor in all these costs, suddenly the "cheapest electricity in history" becomes really expensive.
These renewables produce a lot of power that isn't needed during their peaks, which gets sold at low or negative prices on the market, yet is compensated for with the full subsidy.
During their troughs, you need another source of power, usually natural gas, which is expensive, or coal, which raises the baseline production and therefore exacerbates the peak production problem. The result on CO2 emissions is pretty damning.
This is the danger of picking "winning technologies", you are telling the market to waste resources. Instead, you need to incentivize the market for your actual goal and then let it do its thing. Putting a price on CO2 would've incentivized all sorts of technologies that reduce net CO2 emissions.
Sure, you may have very high excess death in a few areas, but unless you think people from New York are somehow more important than everyone else, all excess deaths must be weighted equally. Remember, we're trying to optimize for all-cause mortality across the entire country.
> Sweden could be a special case, but Brazil literally had 0.1% of its population wiped out.
Every year, Brazil loses 0.65% of its population to all-cause mortality. COVID-Mortality in Brazil may be high, but it is pretty much on par with Chile, which has had a severe lockdown.
> In Manaus there were five time as many excess deaths as confirmed COVID deaths. If that's not healthcare collapsing I don't know what it is.
Yes, for a brief period, hospitals in certain cities did indeed get overwhelmed. That's very visible.
What isn't visible is people that would suffer and die in the next years because their livelihoods were destroyed because of a lockdown of questionable efficacy.
In Chile, you have starving protestors clashing with the police. In Brazil, approval for Bolsonaro is at the highest since his presidency started. Put two and two together.
Of course, but you need a significant amount of hospitals to be overwhelmed to cause significant excess death. Remember, we're trying to minimize excess death of all causes, not just COVID-19.
> Second, every successful preemptive measure is by definition an overreaction. Perhaps you don't see more overwhelmed hospitals precisely because lockdowns are effectively preventing that.
Sure, but that insight doesn't really help. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. Given that neither Brazil nor Sweden had a lockdown and given that neither of their healthcare systems collapsed as some models predicted, my guess would be that a lockdown isn't necessary to prevent such a collapse.