a008t's comments

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.