nsx5200

Our best bet, currently, for surviving humanity-level annihilation, or long-distance space travel is to reach the goal of in-vitro conception-to-birth, and encode our humanity in AI-like technologies that will imprint/teach those humanity back to those future generations after birth. The second part will have a side benefit of cheaper education, which would greatly benefit humanity in the near future. IMHO, any other solutions involving traversing the vast emptiness of space is just noise.

Old code is bad code This typically is true when the requirements and circumstances have changed. The problem with new code is that it is still code, and all code will have bugs. So new code will have a new set of bugs. Most coders, new or experienced, will typically come along looking at the legacy code and legacy bugs thinking they can 'fix' the issues by writing new code, only to find out their new code has new issues. Some of those new issues can not be solved because of some new flaws in the underlying models. The solution is to have a solid underlying model, document that model so future coders have a clear understanding of the limits of that model, so when situation changes that require a model change, the model is updated and relevant code re-written to fit the new model. Law and religions are just code for people with more uncertainty in execution, when compared against computers. I think all the religion have the same goal of improving society. Good ideas, for the conditions at the time, will allow followers of those religion to out perform than the followers of religions that have worse ideas. Back when there is a lot less number of people, having followers out-number the followers of a competitive religion is a huge advantage, as it provide the margin to prevent the religion from dying out. So it was important to have built-in elements that allow followers of those religion to out-grow the ones that don't have those built-in elements. So anti-abortion, and anti-suicide are some of those elements. The conditions for some of those ideas have changed, and accordingly, some of those ideas are now no longer as relevant. If viewed from this perspective, you can judge, with more ease, whether a particular practice/idea is good or bad without holding them as dogmas. Blindly following the best practices should be treated as the default mode, as there will be ones that don't have the capacity or time to actually go through the exercise of properly evaluating every ideas codified in every religion or legal system. But every code in the religion or legal system must justify its experience by explaining the 'why', so future coders can come along to properly evaluate whether those practices are now bad code, or at least identify the over-looked places where improvements can be made. Hopefully there's also some form of change log that also captures those reasoning to provide a historical solution cookbook of sorts to draw from when those type of problem arise again.

I don't know about insight, but if sh*t like that happened like that in the U.S., tons of companies would be bankrupt, and the relevant resources reallocated. Yeah, it would be a lot of short-term pain, but things typically recover quicker. The property situation in China has a lot of similarities to the Japanese Lost Decades right now. Maybe the Chinese government will eventually realize something bigger needs to be done, and it looks like it's slowly moving in that direction, but it feels like they're still sucking their thumb. I guess without fixed time-duration election cycles, they can afford to take their time waffling about. Though that seems to have some negative feedback loop through random violence: https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-races-to-squelch-unrest-as-signs-of-economic-malaise-spread-a2b10065 "China Races to Squelch Unrest as Signs of Economic Malaise Spread Knife: attacks and car rammings have officials unnerved about widespread societal discontent"

"The report estimates a cancer patient will face almost $33,000 on average in out-of-pocket cancer-related costs in their lifetime, including loss of income" Not cheap, but not bankruptcy, I want to go murder the head of the insurance entity, level, IMHO. "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" - Orwell

This showed up in one of my random searches: BLDR - Builders FirstSource They've been buying up their shares since 2022 and seems to be committing to more share buy back. They don't seem to have a long history of share buyback, and they've been making acquisitions using their shares, so all those buyback have essentially reversed the dilution from the recent acquisition(s). Their target market is the professional builders instead of the DIY crowd for home building, which HD is trying to get into by acquiring SRS earlier this year. The basic stat for that SRS acquisition is roughly EV $18b on $10b sale (so roughly 1.8). Equivalent stat for BLDR is about $24b on $17b sale (so roughly 1.4). Their numbers are down, due to a general builder industry down-cycle, as confirmed by looking at some builder ETFs. I currently have no position in it and am trying to do some DD on it. This is a fairly new industry to me, and would appreciate if people with experience in this area can weigh in on their experience or rumors about the company.

All systems have issues, that will be a given, but according to reports I've read, most of the systems in modern countries outside of the U.S. have a better outcome at a cheaper price. There are tons of material left and right, but from I've read in the past decades, they tend to say say what I stated above. Here's a center left-leaning report from the Commonwealth Fund: Their summary highlights: "- Health care spending, both per person and as a share of GDP, continues to be far higher in the United States than in other high-income countries. - The U.S. has the lowest life expectancy at birth, the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions, the highest maternal and infant mortality, and among the highest suicide rates. - The U.S. has the highest rate of people with multiple chronic conditions and an obesity rate nearly twice the OECD average. - Americans see physicians less often than people in most other countries and have among the lowest rate of practicing physicians and hospital beds per 1,000 population. - Screening rates for breast and colorectal cancer and vaccination for flu in the U.S. are among the highest, but COVID-19 vaccination trails many nations. Health care spending, both per person and as a share of GDP, continues to be far higher in the United States than in other high-income countries" That's the sad truth about cost of healthcare in the U.S. Even if you make a decent income, it still might not be enough if something catastrophic happens to you, like in Breaking Bad. For many, it is choosing to die, or most likely in the case above, choosing to let somebody close die, because you're not in the top X% in net wealth. From a personal retirement standpoint, considering getting a citizenship in another modern system is a serious consideration in order to mitigate this risk. To most in the U.S., this is simply out of reach due the lack of saving and investment.

Everybody will eventually use health care, so why not make everybody pay into the system while they are able? That means make everybody paying for health insurance, sick or not. If you know of a vampire or zombie that's been living forever and does not use health care at all, then we can probably make a special exception him/her/it. I suspect even a vampire can run into a batch of bad blood once in a century due to global pandemics and can use some healthcare as well though. I've never ran into one, so it's speculation. if you have met one, please share. When everybody pays into the system, then you might do a single-payer to gain economy of scale to negotiate the prices down. Without universal health care, in which Obamacare is a step towards, then the incentives are misaligned between health and cost. We're seeing the outcome from that misalignment. As to the effectiveness of a government program, we don't have to look far. We can look at Medicare, or NHS from UK, program in Canada, etc... almost all those programs have better alignment of incentives, and thus have better outcomes, price and health-wise.

Anybody have experience with book summarizer services like Blinkist or sumizeit? Tempted to get the service to help triage books/articles to digest. NotebookLM is my current go to, but if a paid service has better quality, or at least access to more material at the same quality, I might go for it.

So we should see shady companies start paying more for security for their senior management. It'll be interesting to see which company will self-select to be in this group, and avoid investing with them.

Thanks for the link to the video. I think win-win-win model is such a powerful moat because all the incentives are aligned. I'll have to dig up a thread in the General Discussions to see if there were past efforts to identify such business. But back to DG. Looking at DG's comments in their reddit, it does seem like there are quite a bit of losers in their model. In fact, I think their business model relies on some party losing in order for their business to do well, which in the long-run can bring about some regulatory actions to change their business model.

Classic Jared Diamond question with his theory in Germs, Guns and Steel: NotebookLM summary, "Europe's political fragmentation, while seemingly a weakness, ultimately proved to be an advantage in fostering innovation. While one ruler might reject a new idea, another might embrace it, leading to competition and progress." An monolithic autocractic style government can go down the wrong path for a long time, whereas competition amongst fragmented governments will weed out the bad ideas and the good ideas copied, rather quickly, or risk elimination. If I remember correctly, ancient Chinese rulers erroneously ended their sea exploration when they found no other civilization comparable to their, and essentially stopped the flow of new ideas and competition until the post industrial era when Europe landed in China. "The Last Emperor" captures that time period when old China and the new European-centric world met again, albeit from a limited point of view. Now, the world's gotten much smaller due to the advanced global communications we have, and competition is now on a global scale, essentially for all to see in real-time. I would claim that all the world leaders now are aware of the competitions, and are no longer so inner-looking. The true risk for U.S. and Chinese leaders is to make sure they're not selecting their advisors with yes-men, or they risk getting stuck in local minimas. It makes looking at Trump's cabinet selections a bit more interesting from that point of view.

Poor leadership since Reagan https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-cant-the-us-build-ships NotebookLM: "Main Themes: Historical decline: The U.S. shipbuilding industry has struggled to compete commercially since the Civil War, marked by a long decline punctuated by brief wartime booms. High input costs: High labor and steel costs in the U.S. make it difficult to compete with countries that leverage lower-cost labor, like China and South Korea. Cultural factors: A lack of national drive to make the U.S. shipbuilding industry internationally competitive, combined with protectionist policies and union resistance to technological advancements, have hampered progress. Innovation without commercialization: Despite pioneering key shipbuilding innovations, the U.S. has failed to translate these innovations into successful industries. National security concerns: The decline of the U.S. shipbuilding industry poses a significant national security risk, particularly in the face of growing Chinese shipbuilding capacity." The article list the miss opportunities for the US ship building industries going as far back as pre-Civil war era. The Reagan action is just one of the them. Some hopeful news along the lines of country/industry specialization shared amongst the value-aligned countries: "Now, the US is looking to Asia's[Korean] shipyards to help close that [ship building] gap as the two superpowers[U.S., China] move closer to a potential conflict." Inverting the problem, here are some reasons why China's shipbuilding got so big: https://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-shipbuilding-power-players-making-warships-at-a-rapid-pace-2024-9 "Its most significant shipyards produce both military and commercial vessels, leveraging industry for defense means" I don't have references to it, but from what I read in the past, the Chinese government's been making intentional decades-long investment in this area, similar to what they're currently doing with EV and AI.

I tried to read his 2023 letter to client: - I find it really odd that the 2023 report spent 150 pages, but pretty much didn't explain their second biggest holding (DG) except for that it was (essentially) cheap that can be fit in less than one page. I stopped digesting it around page 50, and just fed it into notebooklm. No real insight came back from notebookLM either. Not sure if informing his client of his investment holdings is the primary goal of the letter.

All those examples you gave reminded me of reading annual reports/sec filings. These days, I dump them into notebooklm and query it for summary and answers. I heard that investment houses were experimenting with AI to try to gain an edge. If they're successful, we may start to see the edge from deep diving on SEC filings shrink, forcing some of us to evolve. Or we all can just buy bitcoin and call it done.

Meditation and exercise has passed the test of time (thousands of years), unlike many modern (within last hundred years) dietary recommendations, which is where you'll see a lot of the junk sciences. We humans evolve very slowly (on the order of tens of thousands of years, if not longer) to make such practices obsolete. I would claim that science is just starting to catch up to the these ancient practices.