superqd
The VAST majority of what is wrong with our society (political and obviously economic) can be traced to this. It's the expectation that every economic endeavor must show a return on investment - forever. That every entity must strive to optimize the bottom line every day of its existence. Optimizing for growth above all else crushes and consumes everything.
Increasing local manufacturing will only create more opportunities for people to be indentured to a company that literally hates their existence.
A company is forced to build here in the U.S. and people are supposed to rejoice they now have another option for their lives to simply be tolerated and disposable?
It has democratized what is possible with technology, when that technology was programmable with natural language, i.e., by just asking questions, or asking it to do things, in every day language. It meant people who didn't know how to build software could get software to do their bidding regardless.
Some online Masters degree programs are just scams preying on people's desire to improve their careers. They are successful because so many employer's won't pay or promote to certain positions without advanced degrees. So there is a real demand for degrees like MBAs.
For some degrees, the real value is the additional education you receive because of the increased complexity of the subject. Not everyone goes after these degrees for the same reason. For me, I went to grad school in physics not because I thought it would help my career, but because I wanted to learn more physics. I don't think this is the typical reason for which advanced degrees are sought anymore, but at least in some cases, like mine, master's degrees aren't scams, but a necessary part of deeper education into a specific area.
The problem is the humans. We are not reliable witnesses, even of our own pasts, and unless we are following very strict diets, most of us essentially follow a mostly random walk with our food intake across a narrow range of food groups (even caloric intake can be wildly inconsistent over time). I've met enough people who completely underestimate their consumption of desserts, e.g., that they mentally reduce the occurrence of such events in their personal historical narratives. That alone could put many from both low-carb vegans and low-carb meat eaters into the high-carb category.
Which is the point, the worst failure of this methodology is that there is no evidence that human memory, regarding food consumption, provides an accurate measure over long periods of time. If you cannot establish the trustworthiness of the most basic tool of your methodology, then almost by definition it's meaningless. The error in self reporting could be high enough such that the true classification of 80% of the low carb group is actually high carb. Or the vegan group could be nearly half high-carb, etc.
Without a thorough vetting of the accuracy of the instrumentation used in the research (FFQ in this case), we cannot know the margins of error. But we have apriori reasons for believing the accuracy to be significantly high. Adding more people to the group doesn't increase the accuracy in this case, it only increases the volume of the noise. Is the True Low Carb ratio of each group 10% or 90%? Who knows.
If we can't validate the accuracy of the tools, it makes the results essentially a random choice between the possible conclusions. It means they haven't disproven the null hypothesis.
Which is why I favor some form of sequestration of smaller populations of similar genetic makeup (multiple groups for each type of diet), etc. But that is mostly impractical.
Asking people to quantify their eating habits over the previous several years and expect to have meaningful quantitative results is impossible. I can barely quantify my eating habits over the last few months. There are just far too many variables that cannot be controlled for in such research as to render any conclusion impossible.
We need meaningful nutritional research, desperately, and this just isn't it. It angers me deeply that this passes as science that will get reported on, used as "proof" in justifying recommendations, etc.
The research in general on nutrition and hearth health is still mostly correlation. Definitely someone with a specific disorder could have a more obvious causal link with cholesterol and cardiac events, but I've read a bunch of different papers, many from respected institutions, and the conclusions usually are, IMHO (I studied physics), garbage.
"There is little doubt that people with high cholesterol have an increased risk of disease."
It's just as valid to say that people with heart disease are more likely to have high cholesterol. When all you have is correlation, there is a heart disease group, and a high cholesterol group, and all you shown with correlation is that there is a third overlapping group of people with both. With only correlation, you don't know how/why, or even if, members of one group transform into the other. Which is partly the underpinning of the article.
It's possible that high cholesterol is a result of underlying heart disease (which the article says is possible), rather than a cause. But what shocks me is that people, even researchers, seem surprised to realize such possibilities.
The rules I suggested aren't necessarily good rules, just random examples. That is, to me the most powerful driver for short term thinking isn't managerial in nature, it's investor in nature. That is, it's the short term fluctuations in market value as investor reactions to events or goals that have nothing to do with the company's bottom line or long term goals, etc. But if essentially random forces are affecting the value of your company, there will exist pressure on management to respond to that pressure. So to me the real fix is some set of rules constraining investor behavior with regards to how the stock is traded, not some nebulous honor-code among CEOs. I am not sure what the rules should be, I just picked random rules out of my butt. But I think there should be some trading constraints: if you truly want to incentivize long term vision, you have to remove the short term pressures.
Like your suggestion for a trading window every 5 years. I have no idea how well that would work, but it seems reasonable, and is the sort of thing I expected for the site, but they seem not to have anything like that in mind. Which to me means that have entirely missed the mark.
I fail to see how this will have any meaningful effect on "long term vision", if they still allow your stock price to be dumped at the first sign of trouble, or allow people to bet against your company when some irrelevant bad news hits, or no one else sees value when you decide to deepen your spend on R&D for some long term plan. If people freak out, or think they can profit off of your lack of current obvious value, the you are still going to have short term fluctuations that you will feel pressured to address.
The problem with short term thinking isn't from companies or company leadership, they are reacting to the natural short term fluctuations in their value because of the short term thinking of investors. Shareholders are not gonna understand your vision every time you decide to engage in a long term strategic shift in priorities, so they will react when they find out, and that reaction can swiftly damage a company's value. If shareholders can still trade over short-terms, then you will still have large scale short-term fluctuations that CEOs will be forced to address, as more and more potential buyers will be influenced by the low price of a stock caused by other skittish short-term thinking investors.
The problem is with investors in stocks, not with the companies unwillingness to think long term. To make such an exchange work, you have to have clever trading rules in place to force longer term thinking.
https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/formal-methods-amazon....