james22

Coup?

Last year India surpassed China as the world’s most populous nation. That might be a marginal consideration until specifics are examined. The fact is, China’s population fell for the first time in 60 years, and China is now the fastest-aging nation in human history. As most know, the population replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman. China’s 2011-2020 census (as far as CCP numbers can be trusted) shows their replacement rate is 1.3 at best. Peter Zeihan has reported the replacement rate of women in highly populated urban areas like Shanghai is 0.7! Replacement rates, and these charts, tell us that China’s demographic collapse will occur within one generation – within a human lifetime! China’s worker-age population peaked in the last decade, and by 2050 will be less than half of what it was in 2020. The population collapse of China is not just starting, it is happening right now! https://andmagazine.substack.com/p/china-is-a-dying-paper-dragon

Create a BTC ETF and the next high will be later that day.

Frailty, thy name is SEC.

I have to imagine a number of those who've held off to date might put ~5% into a BTC ETF once available. I might myself.

We have been writing a lot about forecasting failures. We came across a wonderful recent story that should have deserved more attention. Admitted, it did in the narrow world of machine learning and artificial intelligence. It is about the Makridakis forecasting model competition, named after a professor from Cyprus, the latest version of which focused on the stock market. The headline news is that a new generation of modern forecasting tools has gradually been emerging as the most successful over the years. Of the 163 entries, the winner is a model based on a very new method, called meta-learning, which one can translate as learning how to learn. They don't have a method, they pick a method. The second-placed entry follows last year's trend that showed the power of another approach, which goes by the name of gradient boosting. We would like the organisers to go for an economic forecasting competition next time, though we doubt that the central banks and other official forecasters would willingly participate in a competition that risks highlighting their failures. Our hypothesis is that modern machine learning methods would outperform them, and do so by a wide margin. This is quite astonishing because there is absolutely no economics input in those new forecasting methods. The winner of the stock market competition was totally ignorant of financial economics. The main reason for the relative success of the new generation of forecasting models is lack of bias. Forecasting is very difficult. It is hard to beat the dart-throwing monkey dumb forecast. In the machine learning competition, the dumb forecast occupied 12th place out of 163. Another old-school model, that simply used implied prices from the options market, came eighth. You can think of this as the efficient-market-hypothesis entry. That raises the question of whether the top seven are merely there because of luck. After all, more than 150 entrants were not so lucky. Another important point raised by one of the competitors who did well with a new-generation method is that the big money in stock markets is not made through forecasting, but through deep understanding: market intelligence. Those players are unlikely to take part in any competition. That would be our main conclusion too. Forecasting is, to a very large extent, a mug's game, and that applies to the new world of AI as well. For us, models have some limited value, not because they can predict the future but help us understand the past, and throw up connections that we would otherwise not have made. But if forecasting is your thing, then you are about to get a lot of competition. https://www.eurointelligence.com/

Sure. There's more than one spoke on the Wellness Wheel.

60 this Fall. At present there is absolutely no solid evidence that strength training—or any other exercise or dietary program—will substantially prolong our life spans. But the preponderance of the scientific evidence, flawed as it is, strongly indicates that we can change the trajectory of decline. We can recover functional years that would otherwise have been lost. There is much talk in the aging studies community about “compression of morbidity,” a shortening of the dysfunctional phase of the death process. Instead of slowly getting weaker and sicker and circling the drain in a protracted, painful descent that can take hellish years or even decades, we can squeeze our dying into a tiny sliver of our life cycle. Instead of slowly dwindling into an atrophic puddle of sick fat, our death can be like a failed last rep at the end of a final set of heavy squats. We can remain strong and vital well into our last years, before succumbing rapidly to whatever kills us. Strong to the end. https://startingstrength.com/article/barbell_training_is_big_medicine https://www.amazon.com/Barbell-Prescription-Strength-Training-After/dp/0982522770/

How Much Money Does it Take to Feel Wealthy? https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2023/06/how-much-money-does-it-take-to-feel-wealthy/

I've a friend who just graduated from NE who'd argue there's no better ROI than PA.

I'm only grateful I'm not a professional. It's been painful enough being a factor investor the last decade-and-a-half. Imagine being a DFA advisor. Yeesh.

But unlike sports, investing doesn't reward talent and hard work. And your competition is an index fund. Investing is like gambling - except you've the option of taking the house's side. I can't give it up myself, but I don't kid myself I'm getting paid.

1. It's very, very hard to accept you can't beat the market if you're intelligent and work hard. 2. It's fantastically entertaining.

They may not be "excellent," but a lot of lazy, know-nothing, dollar-cost-averaging, S&P500 indexing, retail investors are beating the hard-working, smart, market-timing, individual stock picking, professional money managers arguing "The market is up but if you remove the biggest winners it isn't really" this year.

As those following the burgeoning industry and its underlying research know, the data used to train the large language models (LLMs) and other transformer models underpinning products such as ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney comes initially from human sources — books, articles, photographs and so on — that were created without the help of artificial intelligence. Now, as more people use AI to produce and publish content, an obvious question arises: What happens as AI-generated content proliferates around the internet, and AI models begin to train on it, instead of on primarily human-generated content? A group of researchers from the UK and Canada have looked into this very problem and recently published a paper on their work in the open access journal arXiv. What they found is worrisome for current generative AI technology and its future: “We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models.” https://venturebeat.com/ai/the-ai-feedback-loop-researchers-warn-of-model-collapse-as-ai-trains-on-ai-generated-content/

Supreme Court turns down appeal from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac shareholders https://archive.ph/4l221#selection-745.0-745.73

I've a significant amount of MMM trapped in a Trust. Don't know what I'd do with it if I could.

Inverting: Why you believe making your research process better will improve your returns? Unknown unknowns always existing, better research will likely only make you overconfident. Reading: How many here are really familiar with the arguments for indexing? Compare their returns to the S&P500 every year?

Always inverting gets you halfway there.

Better than those who learn, once retired and spending more time together, they don't like each other that much.

To the moon!

Sure, but how many would sell their relationships? Single and wealthy, I've no problems that can't be solved with money and no stress because of it. But I've no doubt I'd be happier if I were happily married and with significantly less money. Sounds like you wouldn't trade your new relationship with your wife for whatever she might earn?

Can't buy relationships. What makes for a happy life, a fulfilling life? A good life? According to the directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest scientific study of happiness ever conducted, the surprising answer is: relationships. The stronger our relationships, the more likely we are to live happy, satisfying, and overall healthier lives. In fact, the Harvard Study of Adult Development reveals that the strength of our connections with others can predict the health of both our bodies and our brains as we go through life. https://www.amazon.com/Good-Life-Lessons-Scientific-Happiness/dp/198216669X/