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My intuition is that if market participants go too many levels deep in terms of mind games that you’re exactly correct. It just kinda ends up in the right place when you average it all out, maybe there’s a slight risk premium but that’s usually it
I think the value was in the interesting idea rather than being particularly rigorous
Glad to see more discussion of food here. Whatever the cause / best way to eat is, I maintain that fixing whatever is wrong is one of, if not the freest lunch we have
In America we still have this odd puritan streak in us. People often seem as though they think things must be hard to be worthwhile. I find that if you work deliberately you can achieve great results without a ton of effort. For example, to get in shape I lift a few times a week, but most of it is simply getting enough sleep and not eating a few things that are really bad. 4am runs and cold showers are not my thing, but I’m also aware that I’m not trying to punish myself for my sins, I’m trying to achieve a goal in the easiest way possible. Even that last sentence still registers as lazy! Since you’re smart and curious, you’ll naturally want to optimize and get into the weeds. You can spend years obsessing about investing like I do, or you can beat me by buying an index and moving on. The difference for me is I love investing, and working out is a means to an end. Best of luck to you op
If you’re not already aware, you would like Henry George’s Progress and Poverty in how it deals with a framework for thinking about Labor and Capital.
Way above my paygrade, but can you just respond to some inputs randomly?
Somewhat easier, why take a loan against a 401k? Well, you have some value and some exposure to an asset, and you would like to use that value without facing the consequences of selling. In this case, the penalties to an early withdrawal are far higher than any normal interest rate, especially over a short time.
Yeah it seems like everything stagnates/goes down all at that same time other than college with a very small gain. Maybe stigma was causing underreporting of online? It used to be a way bigger deal
I don’t think anyone does! Now nature isn’t always right, but I tend to think you need a good reason to deviate from it. Something about the primarily processed foods is killing us en masse. I tend to think it’s acting mainly along some satiety axis, as otherwise your body should adjust towards a healthy homeostasis, but in many it isn’t. People are being given a signal to eat in excess of what’s healthy—quite literally killing them, and they seem unable to do anything about it in the long run of their own accord. Does that point to damage in the hypothalamus, a change in hormones, or are some highly processed foods simply sneaking through the gates? I don’t know. As for your theory, I find it interesting—people really seem to agree that processed foods are bad, and some are only processed to the extent that a few components are consumed separately. If two components are inextricably tied for all of human history, the body would only need to measure one to get a good idea of where it stands. Certainly something to think about. What would have to be true for that theory to be true? Well, it should be really hard to overconsume protein to gain weight, but quite possible to become overweight primarily with fat. Easy to get fat on white bread, hard to get fat on vegetables high in fiber. Easy on cheese, hard on eggs. But why does our brain love this energy injection when we are positing that it can’t measure it? Perhaps it can’t measure it well, all you need is for it to be a little off to the tune of about 3600 calories a year. But why wouldn’t it be able to just measure the amount of fat and downgrade appetite? Well, we’ve already established that we’re talking about only a pound a year in the average American, that could be kept up as a continuous process—you could do that in two days relatively easily. That simple mental experiment definitely sets off some bells though
The answer, of course, is that there are transaction costs to using the market. There's a cost to searching for and finding a trustworthy contractor, which is avoided by keeping me around.
With the internet and fully online on boarding, could be a good way to explain the rise of contracting gig jobs in recent years
Soybean oil grew the most in the USA, and some studies in mice make it look quite bad. I’m not positive, but my takeaway is that it is very low downside and quite easy to cut it out of my diet. On the one hand it is new, and our ancestors were fine without it, whether it is bad or not. And two, it’s highly concentrated in processed junk that everyone agrees to avoid anyways. As for general soy products, not my area of expertise but I’m not going out of my way to avoid them if they’re not highly processed
I'll throw in with you here, I think calories fundamentally is missing something. Not sure what it is yet, but I argued for suspecting vegetable oils. For anyone who naturally keeps a healthy weight, my intuition is: how hard would it be to lose 10 lbs from here? That would be hard as hell for me, and I have no reason to disbelieve people who have trouble getting to a healthy weight--especially in light of the contents of this post--it would only take a slight surplus to start getting really bad.
My question for you--could you elaborate just how useful avoiding vegetable oils is for you? And you wouldn't have happened to have run an experiment where you just avoided them but nothing else? A man can hope!
https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=cn&commodity=soybean-oil&graph=domestic-consumption
These guys say yes
https://www.statista.com/statistics/946501/china-soybean-oil-consumption-volume/
These guys say not really
Haven't started playing with time series data yet, you may be interested to know that there is something fundamentally different about the patterns of consumption between Asian countries and GDP--that is to say there is no correlation in my data, but a very strong for Ex-Asia and GDP
Ah interesting, nice catch there. Wonder what's going on with 3rd gen Chinese, given that the equivalent all Asian is .86 whites vs their 1.08.
though 2nd and 3rd generations of Asians were also associated with reduced obesity prevalence as compared to other races, the magnitude of the association decreased compared to the 1st generation of Asians.
So in aggregate, it would lend itself a bit to our theory here
Also, you may be interested to know that there is no correlation between consumption and GDP in Asian countries, while Ex-Asia GDP is very highly correlated. I noticed the difference just eyeballing the chart in the OP--at the very least the linkage between GDP and consumption is fundamentally different between Asia and Ex-Asia. When you separate the data you start getting other really interesting stuff too, I'll definitely be putting that on my substack soon.
Either way, I don't put an absolutely massive amount of stock in this, but it is certainly plausible, I was reading this article:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24977108/
So we would be getting closer to a mechanism--there is a genetic difference between African Americans and
(FADS) cluster are determinants of long chain polyunsaturated fatty acid (LC-PUFA) levels in circulation, cells and tissues.
Can't find a lot of stuff on Asians or Asian Americans.
Re: Japan
Yeah, I haven't had time to really dig into how intake differs between countries; one of many reasons why I didn't put much stock in the data I gathered. The best numbers are consumption, but it is really hard to figure out what exactly that entails when it comes down to calories in bodies.
That's certainly fair enough! I really don't think that I have any qualms with your logic, my reason for posting and exploring this is partially that maintaining a calorie surplus didn't seem to be a very satisfactory answer, analogous in your argument to saying we know the proximate cause of climate change because more energy is coming in than out--and that opinion was shared by a lot of other people here. In particular, the mysteries of the Peery paper were definitely getting some discussion going.
I'd refer you to the comments on this post--I think a lot of others said it better than I why we at least think this merits more discussion.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fD8jXHvLJrEdSLQrE/obesity-epidemic-explained-in-0-9-subway-cookies
I think that analogy maps quite well. In both cases we have a net retention of energy--measured in temperature on earth and in weight in humans. I believe there's the possibility that I'm writing about the metabolic equivalent of CO2 in humans here (both graphs go up and to the right with industrialization). See, we know that the net balance of calories in humans or joules retained on earth is going up. The question is why. I think the answer to "why" is CO2/possibly vegetable oils. As for "how," from what I understand that is the source of your exasperation--in climate change the answer to "how" is the greenhouse effect--the mechanism. What is it about these substances that cause the energy to be retained? As for this theory, there are a many reasons that I don't fully and completely understand, so I didn't want to muse on about them in the OP. I am certainly at fault for your exasperation here.
The following are studies (not an exhaustive list) followed by what I would consider the statements that most closely map to "mechanism"
Here is perhaps the most direct answer for weight gain
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22334255/
Here we posited that excessive dietary intake of linoleic acid (LA), the precursor of AA, would induce endocannabinoid hyperactivity and promote obesity.
Here's one for inflammation, which from what I know is quite correlated with weight gain:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22570770/
Omega-6 (n-6) polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) (e.g., arachidonic acid (AA)) and omega-3 (n-3) PUFA (e.g., eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA)) are precursors to potent lipid mediator signalling molecules, termed "eicosanoids," which have important roles in the regulation of inflammation.
Here's the really crazy study in mice:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31912136/
To test the hypothesis that soybean oil diet alters hypothalamic gene expression in conjunction with metabolic phenotype
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26200659/
Metabolomics analysis of the liver showed an increased accumulation of PUFAs and their metabolites as well as γ-tocopherol, but a decrease in cholesterol in SO-HFD. Liver transcriptomics analysis revealed a global dysregulation of cytochrome P450 (Cyp) genes in SO-HFD versus HFD livers, most notably in the Cyp3a and Cyp2c families. Other genes involved in obesity (e.g., Cidec, Cd36), diabetes (Igfbp1), inflammation (Cd63), mitochondrial function (Pdk4) and cancer (H19) were also upregulated by the soybean oil diet. Taken together, our results indicate that in mice a diet high in soybean oil is more detrimental to metabolic health than a diet high in fructose or coconut oil.
And finally in terms I can really understand intuitively:
https://www.jeffnobbs.com/posts/why-is-vegetable-oil-unhealthy
The primary fatty acid in most vegetable oils is linoleic acid, a type of omega-6 fat. The omega-6 content of vegetable oils is what makes them so problematic.
Omega-6 fats, while necessary in extremely small amounts, contribute to general inflammation when eaten in excess. While chronic inflammation is cited as a source of many of the diseases we face today [1], it’s just the tip of the iceberg. The unstable, reactive properties of dietary omega-6 create a host of other downstream effects that have been causally linked to poor health and chronic disease, including heart disease, the leading cause of death in the world [2].
Now that seems like a wall of proof, and if it were in defense of greenhouse gases, you would probably have good cause to be mostly convinced. From what I can tell in nutrition, that is probably not the takeaway that you should have, necessarily. You could probably make just as convincing a case against saturated fats or fructose or something. I am partial to a somewhat "zoomed out" approach, I'd love to just see more studies of humans over long periods of time eating vegetable oil in good experimental conditions. As I said, there's a disproportionate lack of them, especially given how prominent they now are in our diet. Those sources were strong for this theory too. Here's one, PDF warning.
https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i1246.full.pdf+html
Only a handful of randomized controlled trials have ever causally tested the traditional diet-heart hypothesis. The results for two of these trials were not fully reported. Our recovery and 2013 publication of previously unpublished data from the Sydney Diet Heart Study (SDHS, 1966-73) belatedly showed that replacement of saturated fat with vegetable oil rich in linoleic acid significantly increased the risks of death from coronary heart disease and all causes, despite lowering serum cholesterol.14 Our recovery of unpublished documents and raw data from another diet-heart trial, the Minnesota Coronary Experiment, provided us with an opportunity to further evaluate this issue.
I do think I was mistaken to not have included this stuff, I kind of assumed people would read the sources but that probably didn't happen lol
No clue, that would be a tough data point, taken as given that they got skinnier while also using more vegetable oil. I don’t know much about vegans so I’ll look into it, if you had to steelman it what would you say?
Perhaps they switch to oils relatively better for our health such as olive oil. My cursory googling points to this as a possibility.
Fighting the strongest version of this argument: let’s say someone does lose weight replacing meat with lots of soybean oil. If soybean oil primarily induces us to eat more, then veganism counteracts it by vastly reducing the choice set of palatable food, coming out slightly net positive for losing weight. In this scenario you’d expect veganism to be very, very hard to stick to assuming you add a lot of vegetable oil to your diet. In this scenario, veganism would have no special sauce vis a vis other diets, and would actually be a pretty uphill battle to lose weight.
Overall, my arguments would still leave a lot to be desired, the existence of healthy vegans chowing down on vegetable oils would certainly be a net negative for the plausibility of this theory
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0212740
Very interesting, that could give us a pretty good test case. At first blush, it rings as consistent with this theory. However, it seems the Chinese in the USA are more obese than in China, but not as obese as white or black or Latino Americans (they still have plenty of time to catch up). That would imply:
- This theory is wrong: the simplest explanation. At the very least, it doesn’t fully explain what’s going on. Something else is causing obesity here.
- Soybean oil does cause obesity, but they have partial adaptation to 0 adaptation physically, rather the consumption of soybean oil there is essentially different in some way culturally, such as combinations or preparation.
- Soybean oil does cause obesity, they have some adaptation, but they consume soybean oil more here or the nature of the use here produces oil or effects that are physically different. Thats why they aren’t on the same as other recent immigrants who are quite obese.
Or something else, but that evidence is somewhat hard to rectify with soybean oil completely causing all this. On that macro level, just comparing USA obesity to China obesity, that could explain a lot. When I think about Chinese in the USA, it comes a little undone. There is plenty of precedent in racial differences in reaction to foods, such as dairy and alcohol.
Japan is interesting:
https://www.indexmundi.com/agriculture/?country=jp&commodity=soybean-oil&graph=domestic-consumption
Consumption falls between 06 and now, as does obesity in boys
And this is quite interesting too, but doesn’t entirely support our theory, it’s hard to tell what the trend is there. If it’s trending up, you’d have to posit that the oil only modulates obesity in young people, which isn’t the most ridiculous idea ever, however it would be another hurdle.
https://twitter.com/kevinnbass/status/943719131181920256?s=20
Overall, Japan seems to somewhat vindicate our idea here, that is really quite striking that obesity and soybean oil decline at the same time in boys, and I think overall obesity looks to have flatlined in adults in that timeframe. Also, they mostly missed the obesity train despite being industrialized relatively early on; due to their adaptation.
Any other thoughts? I definitely feel like I haven’t quite thought this through quite right logically, or I’m missing something. Thanks for the new info.
Whatever the cause is, I’d bet it’s probably modulated by genetics as well. The Peery paper goes into it too. I have most of those factors other than maybe the virus and I pretty effortlessly maintain a 22 BMI unless I’m drinking 5+ beers a day for months. Obviously anecdote but I know I couldn’t get down to 18 BMI without a ton of effort, just as an obese person can’t get down to 23 without a ton of effort too. Or perhaps the damage is done as a child or in the womb, hard to say.
Hey guys I’m Sam. You may have read my post on the obesity epidemic. I studied econ, although I’d say I’m really only qualified to assert any expertise at all when it comes to financial markets. I’ve been on reddit for what, 10 years and have thus stumbled on here from time to time.
From me, you’ll probably see a lot of trying to figure out just what in the world is going on in a complex system, and then throwing my hands in the air. Also, you may see me going to logical extremes (“how about we model the universe as one atom going in a straight line the void”) both of these are habits from econ that die hard.
I have a particular focus on insightful and novel ideas (sometimes, i even have them), and I have a strong tendency to prefer what is simple and elegant as an explanation for nearly anything. You’ll probably find that i have a very detached style; this gets me in trouble in real life but this is the only place where it seems to go over well.
Good stuff, I'm still digesting it all! This adds to my idea that different types of oils/fats and different types of w3 and w6's act quite differently in studies. I see very little bad about olive oil, and virtually nothing about soybean oil in particular even though it's used most intensively in the US. People tend to talk of them in monolithic ways, but when you get down to it something like olive oil almost always stacks up well. As for the intuition, same here, not sure what to really make of this stuff other than it I don't see a downside to excluding seed oils from my diet--our ancestors were certainly fine without them, and they're found mainly in processed foods. The other low downside takeaway I have is that this should be studied more. When zoomed out, it definitely looks like a preponderance of the evidence is against seed oils, but when you get lost in the really specific studies you always come away thinking that whatever pathway they chose wasn't quite proven.
Interesting, that would definitely jive with processed foods being bad. I think you could make a great argument that it’s more primarily processed foods too, vegetable oils included. Now in these findings, are they under isocaloric conditions? I ask because you could certainly posit that processed foods are bad because they avoid satiating us somehow, but that wouldn’t necessarily hold in situations where we get the same number of calories from them. I think that’s an easier hurdle to start with, it’s very easy to imagine structures in food that our body measures satiety with getting broken down under any type of processing, but your idea of reduced efficiency or side effects would be next on my list after that.
EDIT: My complete thoughts are here: https://goodtosell.substack.com/p/a-response-to-a-contamination-theory
https://www.jeffnobbs.com/posts/what-causes-chronic-disease
I’ll add more and fix this up tomorrow at my pc. Sorry bout the sloppiness and the formatting, you’ll see why I was so excited. I really can’t stress just how much this adds up. It’s really quite uncanny. I encourage anyone to just read that instead of me, but I gave this a shot for when you’re done with that.
Just found this, it reminded me of your post, as I’d been thinking about it a ton.
Looks to me like it’s vegetable oils. Practically fits everything perfectly. The new addition to our diet. They were only invented about a hundred years ago. They’re in nearly everything packaged in the supermarket—hence why it looks environmental, why the rats got fat, why the processed food looks bad, even why the Cubans got skinnier, since these oils are highly implicated in global trade.
If you look at what soybean oil does in mice studies it’s kind of ridiculous. Not a medical professional, so who knows. Especially how it solves most of the points addressed in that paper.
- Changed over the last hundred years
Yep
- With a major shift around 1980
For the 1980 thing, I think the author focuses on that date a little too much anyways, it’s a monotonic increase in both oils and obesity all the way up.
-It could be a threshold that got passed around that time—it looks like that’s about when the average man went from just under to just about overweight BMI
-Perhaps a large cohort was hitting a certain age around that time
-Global trade really starts kicking off
- And whatever it is, there is more of it every year
Yep. See source.
- It doesn’t affect people living nonindustrialized lives, regardless of diet
Global trade, new invention from USA, ticks this box for me.
- But it does affect lab animals, wild animals, and animals living in zoos
Lab animals fed store bought food, yep. Wild animals, no source from what I can tell, surely raccoons are eating plenty of cheetos nowadays.
- It has something to do with palatable human snackfoods, unrelated to nutritional value
Yep. Unrelated to carb or fat content.
- It differs in its intensity by altitude for some reason
Also think they’re a bit too focused on this one, maybe there’s a mechanism, maybe Colorado is an outlier. There’s a lot of talk of lipids, and oxidization in papers about veggie oils, perhaps that’s something—less oxygen, less oxidization, less CVD? I don’t have the expertise. Maybe it’s something else for that.
- And it appears to have nothing to do with our diets Not so sure about that one
Some quotes and my rebuttals:
But again, it’s not just the contents. For some reason, eating more fat or sugar by itself isn’t as fattening as the cafeteria diet
Well, not the macronutrient contents. I think we have plenty of studies that show low fat vs low carb etc is kinda a wash. But surely there’s plenty of vegetable oil in all those processed foods.
For an abrupt shift, 1980 is when the USA started guidance going against saturated fats….and we replaced lard and butter with veggie (soybean) oil.
When humans switch from an ancient to a Western lifestyle,” he says, “they experience increased waistlines, reduced insulin sensitivity, higher blood pressure and a host of related disorders and diseases.“
Same location, new lifestyle? If they didn’t also move, I don’t see why you should say it’s in the water, vs a complete diet makeover. Note that these oils do all these things to rats. The oils also seem to act on their brains, messing with the hypothalamus which from what I could tell seems somewhat implicated in set point type stuff.
Diet won’t work—only potatoes did. Whole foods does. Those get rid of veggie oils for sure. Switching from fats to carbs won’t get rid of the veggy oils that are in near all processed foods though.
“palatable supermarket food”; not only Froot Loops, but foods like Doritos, pork rinds, and wedding cake.
Oils are in doritos (ingredient 2), in froot loops even, presumably in ‘fried pork skins’. As for wedding cake, couldn’t find a good label on the internet, if it’s store bought it’s probably there though.
I actually doubt it’s chemical contaminants—you’d think China with the factories and air pollution, or the Congo with mines and terrible water would be worse than us. The USA really cleaned up its air in the past 60 years or so, no dice on that in my book.
Finally, I don’t have a horse in this race, i posted some thoughts a few weeks ago here too with an entirely different explanation. I don’t usually get emotional about science, and try to kill my bias. But something smells here. This works way too well, it’s new, it’s simple, why is this not one of the first things anyone thinks of? The people who wrote the paper in the OP didn’t address this at all, when veggie oils are in nearly everything and absolutely exploded from nothing about a hundred years ago. I’ve done a fair bit more digging, there are allegations of corruption—especially of Proctor and Gamble (crisco) buying out the American Heart Association essentially. I’m skeptical, but it does seem like they were throwing some money around in support of Crisco.
Per the source:
Throughout our decades-long battle with chronic disease, Americans have closely followed everything the CDC, AHA, and USDA have told us to do. We're smoking less, drinking less, exercising more, eating less saturated fat and sodium, and eating more fruits and vegetables. Still, chronic disease and obesity rates continue to rise. All the while, vegetable oil has steadily and stealthily made its way into our pantries, restaurants, and packaged foods, now contributing 699 calories per day to our diets, or about 20% of everything we eat.
Tldr, vegetable oils were invented about 100 years ago, highly promoted around when they started to turn on saturated fats, and line up with close to every mystery the authors assert. It’s also a way simpler explanation.
I’ve never been a strict EMH believer. My definition is that you can’t find any free money anywhere. The market does obviously stupid things sometimes—see gamestop or amc recently. You can say what you want, but in my mind at least one of the meme stocks was for all intents and purposes objectively overvalued. But my definition is revealed by the state of the world currently—I am not rich because I saw something that was, in my mind, clearly wrong. See, even when GME was at it’s highs, the cost to borrow was over 100%, with the possibility of a squeeze going even higher and thus a margin call. Buying puts at 600 IV, yeah sure. The thing was, everyone recognized that it was too high, but the cost to realize that made it such that you were essentially indifferent. And that’s what markets being efficient means to me. It’s not that it’s always right, it’s often wrong. But it’s really hard to be lesswrong than the market.
No doubt environmental factors should be considered. Assuming for a moment it’s plastics in the water, say, I’m curious what mechanisms would explain why we don’t see really obvious trends by geographic area (independent of other factors). For example, it’s of course not all environmental because people in the same neighborhood/family have different outcomes.
To throw my hat in the ring: all things metabolic seem highly intertwined. I faced an interesting trillemma once upon a time—I had high blood sugar, high cholesterol, and low testosterone(alcoholism). I initially cut calories: that was tough because my testosterone declined even more, and burning fat also “releases” (not a technical term) cholesterol from the fat back to the bloodstream. But I improved blood sugar. After that miserable time, I messed around with a lot of different things, but ultimately settled on a general healthy whole-foods based diet, lifting weights, and hiit. Worked like a charm. What was interesting to me was how everything failed at once, and in roughly the same proportion: my cholesterol and blood sugar were just hitting the danger zone, and my testosterone was just about hypogonadal. Interesting, because you would think one acute stressor would affect, say, only blood sugar. But that’s not the case, it seemed as if the system was highly interconnected, and “slack” could be taken from one parameter to improve another. Along the same line, it seemed as if the whole system could be tightened up all at once as well, by a holistic approach. But focusing on blood sugar came to the detriment of cholesterol and testosterone. So one bad input could turn all the outputs, even the non-direct relationships, bad all at once. But the opposite was not true.
Another thing, anecdotally I’ve observed that generally people either stay at a good weight, or pretty much always decline monotonically, once they hit some sort of inflection, i.e. insulin resistance, past a threshold. Rarely do you see that their tendency goes from effortlessly maintaining 150lbs>effortlessly maintaining 155lbs. It seems more that they effortlessly maintain 150lbs, then something breaks, and they add weight until they are old enough to have even bigger problems. This may be why the acceleration at once, perhaps the average level of some cumulative damage /other measure went from just under to just over said threshold around 1980.
What am I saying? It’s probably fundamentally super complicated. I almost don’t even think we’re lacking in data or really in understanding of the basics—it seems we need a statistical revolution to really get to the bottom of this. My intuition tells me that the answer is there, it’s just not going to be a simple linear correlation. Same goes for most complex systems too, by the way. Or, equally likely, God just starts fucking with us when we try to figure out things that he simply wills, so he fudges the data
I completely lost my sense and smell and it did return over the next few months, for the record. Therefore, I wouldn’t consider that damage final in all cases.
Cool stuff, like always a bit over my head. I’d be very interested to hear strategies about either getting “not okay” mode to “okay” mode, or for more accurately assessing when things are truly not okay (more more rarely than our brain states would suggest). It is my experience that in our modern world, and especially in the world of white collar work, this switch is flipped much much more than is necessary. When you get the email that you need to file some form that you probably should have known about, but in reality is no big deal, you definitely get sent into “not okay” mode both in the sense that there is a problem and you are technically at fault. On the micro level it is correct, but disproportionate in the reaction, and lacking context in that you’ll never be able to tie up the loose end hydra that afflicts us all. But that doesn’t stop the acute cortisol injection or the chronic stress! In my experience, the people who are most successful in these jobs ironically have the largest response to a stressor like that, and are obsessive about rectifying it. But one has to wonder the long term effects of that!
I know it’s a complete meme but have you given CBD a try? Also, I imagine the swipe feature on keyboards on phones/tablets would be a fair bit less irritating
I think you’re right that it’s an overall loss. If they’re going to be sold at above msrp, it might as well go to the manufacturer to incentivize more supply. Otherwise, that delta goes to scalpers, and the scalpers have to spend their time. I think the reason Sony doesn’t raise prices is because it is sensitive to perception of users. The console itself is really just a portal to the Sony ecosystem, which is where the money is made anyways. They don’t want to be seen as charging you for the privilege of paying them for subscriptions and $80 games, especially since their model vis-a-vis PC gaming is lower upfront cost, higher ongoing costs. I think they’re playing the long game here, content to let the scalpers take the heat, while they wait out supply shocks that everyone sees as transient anyways.
Underproducing seems very silly, at least for Sony and Microsoft. A lot of the value is in the network—playing with friends. Nintendo may well be a different story, especially since their model is more single player focused and their profit (i think) is relatively more concentrated in hardware sales.
In the past, there was always talk of the consoles being sold at a loss. I’m sure that is very near the case still, especially now that they have people paying yearly subscriptions for online play. There is no reason to be hemorrhaging users when the $ is in the ecosystem
If by “negate” you mean render irrelevant, very very low chance in my opinion. There will still be business, even if it’s just maintaining robots or peddling luxury goods. And you’ll have years of earnings compounding. And there’s REITs in indexes, they’re not making any more land anytime soon. Financial obligations are surprisingly sticky across regimes, Germany is still paying pensions for soldiers from world wars, and national debt from before the wars, too. What you’d really want to worry about with bonds is inflation. If we are talking pure finances, I’d buy VT with like 90% of the money, and put roughly 10% in crypto, especially crypto that you can stake and earn an income on
Yeah I know absolutely nothing about cigars! You may well be right about horses, I’m just trying to think about rich-guy leisure activities. In a world of no work and a perfectly engineered environment, I imagine we’ll be doing a lot of sitting around, and God knows we’ll still care about status. Even if new printed wine or whisky is better, you’ll get a ton of credit for busting the old bottle out—it was never really about taste anyways.
If I can’t do something lame like a stock, probably a basket of art, precious metals, and liquor/wine or cuban cigars. I think the alcohol bit is probably my best idea, as it actually improves in quality across time, not just in perceived scarcity. Even in post-scarcity, I find it hard to believe that people will flex with printed/conjured wine, we’ll all jockey for French 2020 wine or real old Kentucky bourbon while we sit around and smoke cigars all day. Of course it’ll actually be top tier racing horse jizz and we’ll all be kicking ourselves because it should have been so obvious.
I think the essence of the future pose scarcity value proposition is the signaling, especially of taste and status.
Assuming it has to actually be “physical”, I’d probaby buy some berkshire hathaway stock and pay to get the actual certificates sent. I’m not sure you could do the same for an etf or a mutual fund. Berkshire because 1: it is diversified, and 2: it doesn’t pay a dividend, which would be tricky if one has to have something physical.
Well, I’d probably start with some expected value stuff. What's the probability of a scenario, multiplied by the payoff. For housing specifically, I know the govt does a weird calculation for inflation in housing where they ask honeowners what they think they could rent their house for, something like that may help you make a framework for directly comparing
From the perspective of a store of value, I’m starting to think the costs are a feature, not a bug. Bitcoin is the most popular>huge fees to transact>more miners for bitcoin>bitcoin is more popular. Requiring more energy in some way means firms that mine have higher costs, there was an according use of resources on one side of the ledger from the value of the bitcoin it created. In 101 talk, it’s worth what people will buy it for, but I can’t help but think that those costs to mine find their way into the prices somehow—not just energy, but entrepreneurship and fixed costs. That is to say, congestion begets high price for mining, which begets higher prices in bitcoin, which is the main idea for like 99% of bitcoin users
I just assumed everyone knew this
Rant on the way, not an exhaustive list by any means! I kinda extrapolated ‘short-termism’ to mean lack of investment and more so a lack of results in technological progress—as I see the critique or ‘short-termism’ to really hit hard in the idea that companies aren’t investing when they should to make technological progress.
Perhaps it’s the market working as intended, value outperforms growth in the long term, and growth necessitates higher investment to expand. Doubtful, as no one outside of hardcore finance guys know about this anyways.
Perhaps it’s companies becoming more beholden to financial interests in Wall Street—increasing financialization. One of the simpler explanations, but I’d argue that not much has formally changed on this front, and convention is going in the opposite direction. Additionally, if we’re talking about long term technological progress—government, private, and academic progress hasn’t been obviously faster than ‘short term’ public companies, in my opinion at least, I could easily be corrected here.
Paradoxically, as markets get more competitive, economic profits decrease and investment capital dries up. This would necessitate a shorter term outlook to simply survive or profit at all. I don’t favor this one either, if anything natural monopolies are more common when complexity and scale really start ramping up—see Apple or Google.
When interest rates go up, future earnings are more heavily discounted (aka: money now>>>money later, as opposed to money now>money later). Probably the easiest one to strike off, unless you’re an inflation truther, lol.
My pet theory is as follows: we have orders of magnitude more scientists and researchers, rGDP is much higher than in the past as well. Yet, outside of IT, earth shattering innovation that reaches the market has been lacking in recent decades (debateable, surely, again my theory here). This leads me to believe that we are simply running out of “low hanging fruit,” or we are looking in the wrong places. Or it’s so complex, that scientists are forced to specialize to such a degree as to render their findings realistically irrelevant. I think this is among the simplest explanations for the apparent stagnation in technological progress.
Allow me to pick a bone here though, as I (largely) take issue with the premise to begin with. A company has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders. As the other commentator touches on, there’s pressures on CEO’s and corporations to show results. None of this has changed significantly in recent years, in fact I’d argue pushes towards ESG and ‘stakeholder capitalism’ are now working in the opposite direction of pure shareholder value. I don’t put the blame entirely on companies, because if they legitimately saw value in long term high R&D spending, their shareholders should be convinced to see that, and failing that, they could carry out said duty and stick to their guns. Not an easy thing do, however. Tesla’s shareholders seem to see it, likewise investors saw the value in the tech bubble, EV’s, green energy, crypto, biotech etc (ARKK anyone?). Capital is pouring into smaller, nimbler, forward thinking (perhaps to a fault?) companies, elevating multiples to bubble territory in some cases. The companies are there, the (investment) money is there, where I see the problem is largely either the execution or the feasibility of many of these ideas. Or maybe somewhere else, I won’t pretend to be more than an amateur in anywhere but Economics. That’s not to say that every company is doing it perfectly, but in the long run those that have a vision and an execution will win out. Disclaimer: I’m a finance guy, not an inventor or scientist, and probably quite obviously not a competent rationalist either.