socksset's comments

It was also always "not cool" to say the label actually helped you. I remember a piece on NPR that talked about this.

Many bands use to love their labels privately but in the press blast the labels as evil corporate empty suits to fit that typical narrative and image.

Of course streaming strengthens the power law distribution of the payouts in this space.

Podcast, youtube channel, music, it is all the same process and payout structure.

Since there is too much choice you just have to sample what is popular and so what is popular gets more popular at the expense of the less popular. Repeat.

It reminds me of non-developers with ideas for apps/software.

As if the idea of getting all our energy from the Sun is an original thought.

How do we accomplish this?

"I don't know, I am just the idea man. You do all the engineering for my idea and we will split the profit 50/50!"

Even worse to me is so many orchestras have to pay the bills with performances of Christmas music or orchestral versions of Motley Crue.

Imagine putting in that many hours of practice on the classical masters to end up with a low paying job playing Frosty the Snowman and Def Leppard "Pour Some Sugar On Me".

I don't think this is rocket science.

"The latest statistics show that 18.4% of women and 7.8% of men on the continent live with obesity "

Couple low BMI with a much lower life expectancy so less people over 65 and I think the main variables are covered.

I don't think this is rocket science.

"The latest statistics show that 18.4% of women and 7.8% of men on the continent live with obesity "

In the abstract, centralization bad, decentralization good.

There is no deeper thought going on here than the above. These are barely thought out, quasi religious beliefs as moral justifications for get rich quick schemes and frauds.

The same conversation about nothing, ad nauseam.

IMO after Greenspan, the Fed was basically captured by Wall Street.

I just don't know how anyone at this point can not say the Fed's job is to write puts under the equity markets when that is exactly what they have done for 13 years.

Not moving 50 bps this last meeting says it all.

It is hysterical Greenspan gets blamed for this when we have barely been able to keep rates off the floor the past 13 years since he left.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS

If 2002-2004 was keeping rates too low then what do you call the past 14 years?

"Cigarette smoking: an underused tool in high-performance endurance training" is pretty classic

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3001541/

That sounds crazy to me. In the US, an ambulance with its siren and lights flashing has the right-of-way. The driver that hit the ambulance would be charged.

Do they not want ambulance drivers in Denmark? That is mind blowing to me.

We need to just all stay inside forever. Be safe my friend.

I mean you could have hired a hyperrealist oil painter to paint porn characters 30 years ago but it is so much more work and expense compared to people.

I don't see how a game engine is much different for the foreseeable future. It is so far away from under cutting humans in this domain in terms of time and expense.

What makes R interesting is the amazing libraries for statistical ideas that are not completely run of the mill.

You almost literally can't come up empty on CRAN.

Dalio said without reservation or probability that at the start of COVID we were in a global depression. Oops, 100% wrong but no one cares.

IMO the entire narrative that Americans are so divided is largely an illusion. People are highly divided over wedge issues in online arguments.

If you turn off the internet, the phone and FOX/CNN/MSNBC people are pretty much the same.

Sporting events are a good example of reality. If the media narratives were true getting a 100k people in a sports stadium would result in utter chaos.

We are certainly not as divided as in the 60s. That is so apparent if you read any history from that time.

Actually, if we suffer from anything it is exactly represented by Dalio. Conflating extreme wealth accumulation with extreme intelligence and wisdom. The ideas of billionaires are given far too much weight. Not based on the ideas themselves but on the size of their net worth.

IMO if Feynman or Einstein were alive today no one would listen to them, "If you are so smart why don't you have a billion dollars???"

Phlogiston theory always comes to mind for me.

I think we will see these fields as attempts at science while completely lacking the instruments to properly study the field so all kinds of nonsense conclusions were drawn.

Economics though is so especially perverted because of monetary incentives for economists. A somewhat correct prediction is worth so much but terrible predictions don't really harm much at all. "It is economics!?! It is stochastic, the coin came up heads, not my fault. The theory is still correct".

Or maybe in 50 years we will just have an honest econ textbook that is just a 1 page pamphlet that says "When the stock market goes down, print money. Make up everything else as you go along to justify this".

I doubt anyone is as worried about the 4th Reich as much Germans.

I am pretty sure anyone expressing these worries outside of Germany is either a troll, completely ignorant or a combination of the two.

This is a mistake we make over and over and over.

It practically seems like a type of cognitive bias based around technology.

We use some similar technology from the past to model the implications of the new technology and then willfully ignore the fundamental change brought about by digitization and network connectivity. The strangest thing is everyone understands how powerful network connectivity and digitization are in the abstract but when it comes to the concrete we brush it off like it is not.

This is just like renting The Terminator from the video store in 1989. What could possibly go wrong?

I know people at family events who will complain about Facebook spying on them and then almost immediately after the event post pictures of the family event on Facebook.

It is even more than not caring. People are willful accomplices in spying on themselves and do so compulsively. That to me is so fascinating.

Yea because there is such correlation between being an expert in a field and being a great teacher.

Come on. Most professors are not Feynman. This is exactly the problem if anything.