ytx

The fact is it's a lot harder to create a company or build something new, than to be an employee and "work hard" all your life. There's nothing wrong with that, but to pretend that everyone rich (especially this guy!) is just luck is ludicrous.

I have fond memories of LAN parties growing up, where socializing was as big a part as the actual gaming - it's not like we were sitting there harvesting wood for hours on end!

If companies offered say a $50/month discount on car insurance premiums in exchange for gathering data, I imagine a large proportion of people would indeed opt in to that (setting aside issues of selection bias or trust in this ideal world)

Not sure how it'd compare against similar amounts of youtube/netflix though.

  > "More specifically, automakers are selling access to the data to Lexis Nexis, which is then crafting “risk scores” insurance companies then use to adjust rates. Usually upward"

Unfortunately it's instead likely to just lead to higher margins for insurance companies. And the only way to compete would be to harvest more data for better predictions.

<tinfoil hat> One could imagine a nefarious state actor offering the author of e.g. uBlock $XX million to get access to a lot of browsers. Not sure about the economics, but more niche extensions could probably be targeted for a lot cheaper.

But I guess VCs generally have the leverage and wouldn't want such terms.

I did not - adding an optimistic 2% dividend didn't change much for the S&P, but slightly reduced the underwater counts for the Nikkei (max 23, average ~7.5)

  S&P:
         once  dca_2yr  dca_5yr
  count  25.0     25.0     25.0
  mean    0.7      0.8      0.7
  std     1.8      1.5      1.1
  min     0.0      0.0      0.0
  max     8.0      6.0      3.0

  Nikkei:
         once  dca_2yr  dca_5yr
  count  25.0     25.0     25.0
  mean   11.4     11.5     11.8
  std     9.1      9.5      9.4
  min     0.0      0.0      0.0
  max    29.0     29.0     28.0

And while I think this line of thinking is still more correct than not, I wonder how much I (and a lot of other folks in the US) are discounting the possibility of a prolonged period without growth.

Despite shocks like in 2000 and 2008, the S&P has spent very little time "underwater" over the past 50 years. But that's not the case if you look at something like the Nikkei, which took until this year to get back to its 1990 peak.

Right, but in practice deterrence and incentives can be much more effective (from a cost and practical standpoint). I imagine the government would have a much harder time stopping people from randomly chaining vehicles than tracking stolen ones. There just doesn't happen to much incentive for the former.

This is antithetical to much of the internet, and anonymity is definitely a factor, but it's also just what happens when you interact with a much larger amount of people, since the chances of repeated, meaningful interactions is much lower. I would posit that road-rage would decrease if you knew that you would be driving behind/next to the same people every day - in fact, you would probably end up with some form of cooperative driving!

At the end of the day it's a simple supply-demand problem, and prices probably should have gone up anyway if lines are getting longer. It's just that businesses seem to find it more profitable to charge extra for premium tickets versus raising all ticket prices.

I think the problem is still the one I pointed out, whereby if increased efficiency halved the number of man-hours required to make an iPhone 15, instead of "being happy with the current iPhone 15 for half the cost", AAPL/the market/people's demands would result in the same number of man-hours being utilized to produce the next fancier iPhone 20 (or VR headset).

So I think a significant cultural shift would be required for increased productivity to translate into less work, rather than "more/better stuff" for the same (or an increased) amount of work.

A deeper problem is that the benefits / "slack room" provided by real growth are constantly eradicated because people's wants (and needs) keep growing along commensurately.

Some changing expectations are fairly uncontroversial, e.g. better medical technology and doctor training costs more. Others are arguably less good, e.g. private jets (or taken to the extreme, passenger planes in general!)