james22

Hey, I love the idea of autonomous ride-sharing getting those who don't like driving (and aren't good at it) from behind the wheel. Makes the roads safer for the rest of us. I just don't see adoption rates above ~50%. Too many like driving or have requirements that won't be accommodated. The world doesn't work like urban sophisticates think it does.

Sorry, didn't provide a link: https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/how-we-stopped-inflation-without? No idea why any discrepancy.

Setting aside things that are truly life and death, proponents dismiss as tail events things that are not (simply because they are unfamiliar with them): - RVing. - Overlanding/off-roading. - Trailering your boat/PWC to the lake. - Trailering your ATV/snowmobile/motorcycle to the trail. - Trailering your competition car to the track.

Are you very, very young?

. . . when you feed synthetic content back to a generative AI model, strange things start to happen. Think of it like data inbreeding, leading to increasingly mangled, bland, and all-around bad outputs. (Back in February, Monash University data researcher Jathan Sadowski described it as “Habsburg AI,” or “a system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AI’s that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features.”) It’s a problem that looms large. AI builders are continuously hungry to feed their models more data, which is generally being scraped from an internet that’s increasingly laden with synthetic content. If there’s too much destructive inbreeding, could everything just… fall apart? https://futurism.com/ai-trained-ai-generated-data-interview

Printing money will always be politically easier than cutting benefits or raising taxes.

This is a projection made by scolds living in large urban centers who seem to have little understanding of driving for pleasure. One in Three Americans Enjoy Driving a Great Deal (2018) https://news.gallup.com/poll/236813/adults-drive-frequently-fewer-enjoy-lot.aspx#:~:text=Although most Americans are spending,and 8% not at all. https://www.automoblog.net/people-still-love-driving/

On December 5, 2022, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) achieved something truly remarkable. After firing 192 lasers at a small pellet filled with deuterium-tritium fuel, the resulting reaction essentially created a tiny star for a few nanoseconds. Crucially, the energy created by this reaction was more than the energy put into the reaction. In other words, science had finally achieved nuclear fusion ignition. Until that point, humans had never been able to recreate the life-giving power generated in the center of our Sun on Earth. But for the first time, the clean energy promise of nuclear fusion—arguably the greatest energy source imaginable—suddenly seemed possible. Now, fast forward only eight months, and LLNL has achieved ignition again. But this time, they had even greater results. LLNL spokesperson Paul Rhien spoke with The Financial Times on Sunday, and said that “in an experiment conducted on July 30, we repeated ignition at NIF. Analysis of those results is underway, but we can confirm the experiment produced a higher yield than the December test.” https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a44754208/scientists-achieve-second-fusion-ignition/

Sure, but we're comparing the average growth rates/performance differential between small-mid caps and the large caps. I'm hoping for a SV (and International) comeback, but who knows? Maybe it's different this time?

Unlike equity investments, I assume investment properties are somewhat anchored to home value? Maybe not.

Is that a single investment property at 2.4X the value of your home? That's pretty unusual, I'd think? How'd that come about? Commercial, maybe?

? The Size and Value premiums disfavor Large Growth.

"Who asked you to do that?" is the "Show your work!" of the working world.

I'd Like this if I could.

How'd Luca manage to tag your post with Haha, Parsad? There's many a post I'd like to Like.

In a paper published in the arXiv preprint server July 18, researchers said "performance and behavior of both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 vary significantly" and that responses on some tasks "have gotten substantially worse over time." https://techxplore.com/news/2023-07-pains-chatgpt-dumber.html

I'm a little surprised the analytical types frequenting this board wouldn't like lifting for the numbers. After running, boxing, and/or crossfit for 35 years, I first found lifting itself not very fun. But measuring progress against standards now makes it pretty entertaining. https://legionathletics.com/strength-standards/ https://outlift.com/how-much-can-the-average-man-lift/

https://www.runnersworld.com/health-injuries/a20790871/running-preserves-motor-units/

My Planning & Analytics Department used to spend ~80% of our time gathering, cleaning and organizing data. The thought of AI freeing that time for analysis makes me a little giddy.

SPR Has a Refill Problem The problem with refilling the SPR to the tune of nearly 300 million barrels is multifaceted. First, oil prices are still a bit above the level that the Biden Administration said would trigger purchasing action. Most short term forecasts are calling for price hikes instead, so the likelihood of prices falling to those levels soon is not estimated to be a sure thing. Second, 300 million barrels at a cost of even $70 per barrel would cost $21 billion for the oil alone. Now, the Administration would argue that since it canceled congressionally mandated sales that had called for another 147 million barrels of crude oil to be sold from the SPR, it should be counted that it has already replaced 147 million barrels, leaving only 144 million left to purchase at a minimum cost of $10.8B with $70 oil. What’s more, that cancellation resulted in Congress taking $12.5 billion away from the DoE that was to be used to repurchase crude oil, leaving it with just $4.3 billion of available cash to buy. Nevertheless, the Administration is confident that it will refill the SPR, although the anticipated timing of the repurchases depend entirely on who in the Administration is doing the talking. Next up is the issue of infrastructure and feasibility of filling, withdrawing, refilling, etc. of the SPR. Those salt caverns are made of… well, salt, and according to SPR former project manager William Gibson, who spoke to Bloomberg, they were built—in the ‘70s—with the idea that they would last 25 years. They were also designed to be withdrawn and refilled just five times, lest the salt caverns simply dissolve. As one former official put it, the caverns were “not really intended for daily ATM-type operations.” Any buyback program would have to be slow-rolled in order to prevent price spikes—the very thing that triggered SPR sales in the first place. In March, even Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said that any repurchase scheme would take years. https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/The-SPR-Could-Stay-Half-Empty-Forever.html

https://www.runnersworld.com/health-injuries/a20790871/running-preserves-motor-units/

Thanks, Saluki. I must have a copy lying around. Investing: The Last Liberal Art is another great read: Hagstrom explores basic and fundamental investing concepts in a range of fields outside of economics, including physics, biology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and literature. He discusses, for instance, how the theory of evolution disrupts the notion of the efficient market and how reading strategies for literature can be gainfully applied to investing research. Building on Charlie Munger's famous "latticework of mental models" concept, Hagstrom argues that it is impossible to make good investment decisions based solely on a strong knowledge of finance theory alone. https://www.amazon.com/Investing-Liberal-Columbia-Business-Publishing/dp/0231160100