nsx5200

After diving in on the CCP political system a bit, I think there's a reasonable chance that the controlling political faction will change in the upcoming plenum meeting, with the control going back to the faction that promotes a more market-based China as opposed to the more closed-system that is under Xi. Instead of stepping into potential conspiracy theories, what companies do you envision would benefit from such a move? Also, for those that likes to role-play as an oracle or soothsayer for Halloween, do you have a prediction for the immediate to short-term market reaction to such an event, and why?

So what's the logical/smart move, if you were a holder of that asset, and you know an asset is being manipulated?

Incentives for big corporations, if practiced by all the states, is a freebie for big corporations. This is similar to how low corporate tax, practice by countries like Ireland, is(?)/was a freebie for big 'multinational' corporations. Here's a podcast from 2016 that details two states, Kansas and Missouri, offering incentives for Applebee to 'build' in their state. The result is not totally unforeseen, if some people with a little bit of knowledge on game theory, sit down and think about it. IMHO, it was a wise move for NY.

I bolded the most relevant word in your statement, and agree with you. When the younger generation becomes old, they'll be saying the same thing. More or less the same crap was said about Gen X, Millennials, and I'm sure the same thing was said about the boomers. The older generation always complains that the younger generation is not like them enough, and the younger generation always complains that the older generation is out of date. The truth is that every generation has their own challenges that they will eventually overcome that the previous generation hasn't met before. C'est la vie. I disagree w/ that older generations have failed our failed generations. Living standard continue to improve, even though it might not seem so 'in-the-moment'. Were there stuff that could've been done better? "Of course", in hindsight. A lot of stuff was advanced organically, messily, 'in-the-moment', and in hindsight, could've been done better. Internet was one of those things 'back-in-the-day', and I'm fairly confident that AI will be one of the things that 'could be done better' 10-20 years from now. Every advancement will incur some amount of slop that the future generation will need to go back and fix, but that leads to more opportunities(jobs) for people to work on in the future. Every problem is an opportunity waiting for somebody to solve, many times with a huge bounty at the end. We really should be looking at all the issues that Gen-Z is facing, and try to figure out who's solving it, if not solving it ourselves.

Something smells fishy. The underlying BoA report switches back-and-forth the use of data from global to US without clear demarcation. I couldn't really find more raw data from BoA's claim "Gen Z will have globally amassed $36 trillion in income and that figure is expected to surge to $74 trillion by around 2040.(2)", where (2) is noted "BofA Global Research, Euromonitor" The BoA's narrative seems to indicate that Gen Z's 8% salary growth from a single month in Feb. 2025 will carry all the way out to 2040, which I find questionable. I'm not quite sure why the BoA report's trying so hard to construct such a narrative given how poor the implied data really is. The biggest takeaway I got from the report is that a great wealth transfer is coming as the baby boomer dies off, and pass their wealth. That I can agree with. The questionable narrative in the BoA report that NYPost based off to construct their own biased sensational reporting makes me distrust the the NYPost narrative even more. Not saying that the NY Post article is wrong, but I'd be wary to take their narrative at face value without questioning their motive. Addendum: I can't locate the exact quote from Charlie Munger, but I do agree that the young need to stop whining and just work hard. Good stuff tends to follow good practices.

Wasn't going to post this, but seeing the discussion on AI and its impact here, I think these are relevant: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/29/if-ai-can-diagnose-patients-what-are-doctors-for A more in-depth article on how AI might be used in medical diagnoses situations. "they asked some doctors to read the A.I.’s opinion before they analyzed cases, and told others to give A.I. their working diagnosis and ask for a second opinion. This time, both groups diagnosed patients more accurately than humans alone did. The first group proved faster and more effective at proposing next steps. When the chatbot went second, however, it frequently “disobeyed” an instruction to ignore what the doctors had concluded" "Bresnahan eventually caught the chatbot mixing up dates and hallucinating blood-pressure readings" If we were to apply these findings to the prediction of demise in values investing or in coding (like for CSU), it seems like those predictions are greatly exaggerated. On the other hand, looking at the experiences of gaming (ex: DoTA, Go), where AI can accumulate multiple lifetimes of learning in simulated environments on models that are more simplistic, AI can easily out-perform humans. So currently, it seems like there are two major classes of problems: one where there aren't a lot of data, relative to the underlying model for AI to latch on, and the other where either there are a lot of data, or can at least can be generated synthetically, such that the underlying model can be emulated correctly. By classifying problems in those two major categories, I think it would be easier to forecast whether it would be easily disrupted by AI or not. Like I can see low-value coding that a lot of off-shore companies provides being disrupted by AI, or low-value script-based customer service being disrupted by AI. Whereas higher-level software architecting, or more critical or complex software component remain in the hands of capable engineers. As to the future impact, I can see people that knows how to use AI as a tool will gain a productivity edge over the ones that don't, similar to how Google-fu is a productivity multiplier. The ones that can maximize new tool can potentially replace/displace many ones that don't. That's just how it is. Just like how corporations that used to look for people with skills working with office productivity tools. Nowadays, it's assumed they can. If not, Youtube/Google should easily solve that, at least for basic tasks. As new tools adds more capabilities, everybody have to adapt, or be left behind. This has deeper implications on society for the ones that aren't willing, or can't adapt, and that contributes to the great political divergence that we see everywhere.

[s] Yes, society in the long term will definitely be better if everybody hoard something desirable and rare instead of figuring out how to to add more capabilities. I heard that dinosaur bones are in that category, we should go get the engineers to quit their jobs and start digging. [/s] Yes, by changing "we should all have been making and hoarding violins to beat inflation" to "we should all have hoarding violins to beat inflation" makes more sense, but it still means you're still missing the bigger picture.

I ran across Die With Zero that talks about the trade off between life experience with accumulation of wealth, and agree with @SharperDingaan that money/wealth is there to serve you and not the other way around. A lot of us are conditioned to think the other way, and that's wrong. Something that really helps is to really deliberately consider all the impulse/unnecessary spending that, most of the time, doesn't really improve our long-term happiness but instead increase the chance of an unhappy experience in old age. You'll make mistakes with those decisions and trade-offs, as we can not fully predict the future, but with any skill, I believe as you make more deliberate choices and reflect on past choices, you'll make better choices. Now that it's spent, it's already done. You've already paid it, so why 'cry over spilt milk' by aggravating yourself. That's unnecessarily mentally paying for it again. The best thing you can do now is to try to maximize it by enjoying it. Try to find ways to increase the usage in order to minimize your per usage cost. That's how a logical business would think about some capital asset. Be a decisive business leader: make a decision, wrong or right, and make the best of it. p.s. not saying your decision is wrong. That's for you to decide in a few years as you reflect, but IMHO, it's a bit irrational to mentally pay for for it again, so you should really enjoy it, worry free. HTH.

Shifting the arguments a bit from Gold to rare violin: https://www.beares.com/the-beares-stradivari-price-index/ "Stradivari violins have consistently proven to be safe, stable and excellent investments combining the high returns achievable in equity markets with the stability and low risk offered by long-dated US Government debt." https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/investment-ideas/when-a-violin-will-net-you-millions-of-dollars/article16798490/ "A 2013 study by Brandeis University economists Kathryn Graddy and Philip Margolis found that from 2007 through 2012, rare violins outperformed fine art and the S&P 500 index." No real numbers provided by the links but I suspect somebody will go off and claim that the hundreds of years of advancement is for naught, and we should all have been making and hoarding violins to beat inflation. I think it becomes, rather quickly, the absurdities of some arguments.

DLTH - Duluth Trading w/ their famous underwear. Has a loyal following. Essentially single owner company. Another fallen angel due to poor leadership transition for several years. They've rehired the previous CEO recently. For disclosure, a small position for me RN. I'm already beyond my comfort sizing in the retail space, so it's possible that it remains small. If anybody would like to discuss, there's already a pretty stale topic here.

That's a bit disingenuous to pick a particular time range that just happens to favor gold. Why not let people decide for themselves: https://www.macrotrends.net/2608/gold-price-vs-stock-market-100-year-chart Play around with the time range, and see the two horses take turn in the lead.

https://vegoutmag.com/lifestyle/d-i-nannied-for-the-ultra-rich-these-discreet-habits-set-the-truly-wealthy-apart-from-everyone-else/ "Automation quietly removes friction This family treated systems like oxygen—unseen but everywhere" Seems like a well-oiled operation, not unlike a well run corporation. Good policies, like good architecture, only need to be changed infrequently. Minor adjustments are made as needed. The overall goal is to reduce the mental load so it can be spent where it is actually needed. I find it interesting that this popped up in my feed, and this type of content showed up on a Vegan website.

There are a decent chunk of evidence that AI+human performs better than either one alone. Reading, pre Google, pre AI may be how the bulk of these knowledge get accumulated in the past, but I think even WB has adopted Google in his flow, as technology continue to decrease the cost of acquiring knowledge. We should try to use every tool available to us, whether it's meditation, learning to speed read (when appropriate), workout, AI/search, in order to maximize our learning. I, personally, wouldn't mind some NotebookLM/summarizer to at least quickly search/narrow down certain questions I have for topics on this website (I recall seeing a couple of in-house experts on LLM/AI, but can't recall who they are rn, which a LLM would be real useful for). I see that there are APIs from the platform that powers this websites, but have not looked into whether it's accessible or not for this website. Maybe somebody with experience with LLM interfacing can provide some feedback on the LOE needed for that.

Just nitpicking: there are some issues with what you stated above that are most likely not true. The European/US safety net difference yielded results opposite of what you've stated. The second, based on Google, yielded results opposite of what you've stated as well. In general, I can see the desire not to have hard-earned labor (as measured by currency) eroded due to currency inflation, and should be a noble goal for any currency to have. I guess those are the main two driving levers for setting the inflation target rate of a currency, with the primary goal of maintaining its value while minimizing the frictional cost of transactions. Seeing how much trouble the Fed in determining a target inflation rate, I think, as a thought experiment, it might be interesting to design a perfect currency, and see what that currency would look like. If we're omniscient and able to perfectly distinguish the price impact of permanent supply changes(i.e. increase in productivity) from temporary changes(i.e. supply imbalance), we should be able to set that currency's inflation rate perfectly. If some advancement cause the supply of a good to increase leading to a price decrease, we should inflate that currency to match that price decrease, thus maintaining the value of that currency to that good. Temporary issues leading to price increase or decrease should be passed through, with no changes on the currency. This would need to be repeated for all the goods and services, each with its own inflation rate for that good/service. The idea being that even if productivity gains increases the supply, ceteris paribus, the same currency still buys that same good at the same quantity. No more, no less. Of course this is totally undoable, as omniscient is impossible due to research cost, and multiple inflation rates are impossible to be compacted into a single inflation rate without assumptions. But I think it lays out the template for how the central banker can approach the target inflation rate more methodically, and any numerical adjustments/assumptions used made public for more transparency. As technologies make these capabilities possible, the central banker should yield more of these manual adjustments to the market. I imagine a future where goods/services-specific currencies exist, and the exchange of those currencies happen with market forces with the end results compacted and delivered at the time of purchase so an individual can go to some market, and see how much the goods/services 'cost' in real time. I imagine the final currency would be converted/denominated/summarized in that purchaser's "time", which is the ultimate personal limited resource.

I agree that the advancement started happened before the US got off the gold standard, but the statement "Meanwhile the economy is basically flat while measured gold, all that growth is an illusion, it just masks monetary decay." implies that the economy and living standards stood still after the the US got off the gold standard. That, I have serious issues with. If you truly believe that the national capabilities, as whole, has stood still since we got off the gold standard, well... Whether the advancement would've happened quicker or slower if the US stayed with the gold standard is debatable. For that, we would need to look at the historical evidence, which I'm not an expert in. Crashes tend to slow and pause progress a bit, although it's sometimes necessary to prune out the bad ideas (ex. 2000, 2008). So a quick Google AI search on crash yielded "Crashes and major financial crises happened with greater frequency and severity before the U.S. fully abandoned the gold standard, with the consensus among economists and historians being that economic volatility was higher in the 19th century and during the gold standard era compared to the post-WWII period.", with citations. If you have evidence that Google's AI's hallucinating on this, you're free to share. If you disagree with those historians, well.. I guess some people can favor more frequent crashes the same way some people are masochist. In that case, I'll have to file these data points in my own collection of patterns of... interesting behaviors.

You're saying the economy with all the advancement in medicine, computing, whatever... essentially massive increase in living standard after the US got off the Gold Standard is all for naught. I would, very compassionately say, that you're picking one very specific way to measure the economy and not looking at the bigger picture. I can only imagine what Munger would say to that, given his propensity not to suffer fools gladly.

So @theperksofbeinganINTJ from Askeladden Capital's been integrating AI into his investment and non-investment productivity workflow, and has shared his experience in his newsletters, which I find interesting. Based on his experience, it seems like the task of digesting information on smaller companies are becoming easier. I suspect this will start to eat away at the mismatch between the fundamental and the price for these small/microcaps. AI is changing the way we communicate and think, based on articles like ChatGPT Is Changing the Words We Use in Conversation and How algorithms are changing the way we speak. The implication of this, coupled with increasing adoption of people digesting information using AI-first is: this can lead to corporate(or worse, state agents) to 'hack'/influence AI systems by using certain languages to get AI to spit out more favorable or unfavorable summaries. Super interesting times as AI is disrupting 'investing' in more meaningful ways.

Those results smell funny as they are derived from respondents with unspecified method for selection, so there's already some self selecting bias. Due to that, I'm not sure if those are really worthwhile 'insights'. I don't see how stablecoin supply is tied to the price of another coin. I guess I need to dig around to see how these stablecoins maintain their stability/supply through smart contracts. Previous attempts at stable cryptocurrencies tied to other cryptocurrencies all failed in spectacular fashions. No deep insight IMHO, but by latching stable coin supply to government debt/currency is that it'll add one more variable to whatever its attached to. Depending on the size of that lever, it can change the price of the debt/currency. We may see wild swings in government debt/currency, which has the more meaningful deeper implications. If I were the fed, I would keep a real close eye on it, and really grok the smart contract mechanisms. There may be some weird mechanism for somebody to exploit and lead to a systemic crash.

TSM. In a sick way, Chinese factories have a lot of the Scale Economies Shared characteristics as well. A lot of products are just rebranded goods with the same underlying factory. I'm thinking of Midea, but just recently ran across Techtronic Industries (TTI), which owns Milwaukee, Ryobi, Dirt Devil, etc. I also find Fidelity to have a lot of the Scaled Economies Shared characteristics as well with their zero funds, no PFOF, as well as execution enhancements that executed at much better price than I put in. Unfortunately, they're not on the public market.

Thank you for the articles and your contributions. I find that media outside of the US have different viewpoint on the same topic and are worth paying attention to, especially if the topics are political only within the US. This forum has a lot of members that are outside of the US, and that really adds a lot of value.

Really insightful article with a very high signal to noise ratio, and if the results are accurate, provides another highly predictive tool in the mental toolbox. Just curious how you came across this article. Natural articles tends to be fairly technical and only intersect with mass media occasionally. Unless you are/were a researcher, it's not something that a typical layperson would pick up and read for fun. I probably should add it to a weekly skim list, but would appreciate if you can share other venues that provide similarly high quality summaries/results.

Deflation over the last 30 years was due to China's factories spinning up. It's possible that all these efforts to bring manufacturing back to the States will bring another set of factories online to compete with China's factories on price. I don't see it happening unless the US invest heavily in robotics and automation to compete against China's supply of still-cheaper labor. IMHO, the race to the bottom really sucks, and I prefer the US not go that route.

You need more in-depth longer-form of journalism: Here's a podcast episode on how BLS collect their actual data: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1256727558 and some potential side-effect from the firing, based on stories from other countries: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1256971798 Note that NPR and the whole economic profession tends to lean left if you want to try to bias it. Additional thoughts for biasing: "Never ask a barber if you need a haircut" also applies to the economic profession.

A bit late with this, but TY for the link. Some random thoughts regards to AI and truths... I would think that some AI system, after ingesting centuries of text, human knowledge, and in the near future, lots of data points on human behaviors and correlated outcomes, that it would be able to derive an optimal way to live life. If I had to guess, gun to the head, it would look very close to the teaching of Buddhism, or at least contain a lot of elements of Buddhism.

The Toyoda are true principals of these companies, and not just a hired agent. That and their name is attached to these companies. Makes a world of difference.