I don't think that's fair. He asked about statistical defensibility (implies an entire dataset) and was handed something that definitely does not qualify. What was provided certainly makes it clear that it's a reasonable thing to wonder about but it doesn't (at least I don't think) rise to the level of actually supporting the claim in question.
There's no obligation in either direction in this context (idle chitchat) unless of course you care to convince someone of something.
He objected to what was provided and you accused him of ignoring evidence. I'm voicing agreement with his objection. The original claim was one of a statistical nature. Thus any purported evidence should be expected to match.
> of a statistical nature. (True) … should be expected to match. (False)
If a group is more likely to be X than the average population then being a member of that group is statistical evidence you are X. Really when referring to statistical evidence here it’s an indication the evidence is of a very low standard not a high one.
He provided evidence that cops are more likely to be white supremacists which doesn’t actually mean much which is kind of a point on its own. That being it’s the same low standard as used by actual racists, but as you said there’s no actual obligation to go beyond such wordplay. Personally I was very amused by the whole thing but obviously it’s quite offensive to some people.
Taking the other side of this one, you could say something like “sure the odds at least one of them are white supremacists is non trivial, but suggesting all seven are is unlikely.” Again not a strong argument, but it’s at minimum an actual argument.
> He provided evidence that cops are more likely to be white supremacists
This is the crux of the matter. I don't agree with that statement. I believe the provided evidence does not support that claim in any meaningful sense.
I would at least agree that it suggests to seriously entertain the possibility though.
I'm not sure what to make of your true/false response. Suppose I claim that apples have a higher chance of poisoning you than oranges. Evidence that someone at some point made an effort to put poison into the apple supply does not directly support that claim. However if credible it is certainly cause to entertain the possibility.
More generally a claim about a possibility (discreet) can be supported by an event but a claim about averages (statistical) requires population data. Further, a claim that X is more likely than Y is a claim involving multiple populations.
> Evidence that someone at some point made an effort to put poison into the apple supply does not directly support that claim. However if credible it is certainly cause to entertain the possibility.
Go from the other direction suppose you had millions of cases. By your logic 1 cases is not evidence. Two cases is therefore 0 + 0 = 0 no evidence. Thus by induction 1 million cases is still not evidence. Instead 1 case is weak evidence because each individual cases adds up.
For more rigorous analysis see bayesian statistics.
Further the article isn’t referring to a single solidity case but instead multiple independent events.
Sorry, that's not how this works. Claims must be supported by evidence. I didn't ignore it, I reviewed it and explained how it doesn't support the claim.
I have no obligation to provide evidence to the contrary. Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Court cases look at things like when someone arrives in a city as evidence, that alone doesn’t make someone more likely to have done whatever than a million other people, but it’s still evidence. So you dismissed it, but it is in fact evidence that there were white supremests just as your post is evidence you are a serial killer.
It’s not poof after all you could be a bot. But out off all humans who ever lived 95% of them can’t be a serial killer because they are dead, that post is evidence you where alive recently therefore it is evidence that you are vastly more likely than the average person who have ever lived to be a serial killer. Again as apposed to a dead person who at most could be a former serial killer.
Thus demonstrating that evidence isn’t the same thing as strong evidence just something that increases the likelihood of something being true.
And to expand on that, this isn’t even a debate. It’s a casual chat about an actual courtroom debate. Here, no one is judging our presentation. We don’t have to meet a high standard of evidence to speak our opinions, lest they be judged invalid.
However, in the actual courtroom where very similar arguments played out with real consequences, Afroman was found not liable for saying more inflammatory versions of the same things. That is, he was judged, for worse, and he won.
Which isn’t quite accurate as for example people prefer to move out of their parent’s homes while young adults but aren’t necessarily homeless if they don’t.
Basic housing is a necessity, but people also huge homes and 2nd homes etc. So housing policy should therefore be more complicated than simply subsidizing anything you can call housing. Capping the home mortgage tax deduction at ~median home prices for example is probably a better use of government funds.
They are 0.8 ton each and last ~5 years. 10,000 / 5 * 0.8 = 1,600 tons per year at 10k satellites, and their goal of 40k satellites would put it well above the amount of asteroid debris impacting each year. Further asteroids contain very different materials and don’t all impact at the very low angles you see from de-orbiting in satellites. Thus, I don’t think you can presume this is meaningless without actually modeling it.
Space dust on the other hand behaves very differently on reentry because of the high surface area to volume ratio.
They last 5 years if they're dead in orbit. These satellites have electric thrusters and boost themselves regularly to maintain orbit, so your estimate is wildly off.
As for presuming them to be safe, there's fuck all evidence to the contrary. Whining with baseless speculations about the effect of satellites burning up is motivated by the base reflex to shit on any technological progress as an environmental disaster in the making, but nobody can come up with a story about how dolphins might choke on satellites so instead we get this "muh aluminum" narrative.
A 5 years useful lifespan sets the replacement rate and thus the average number burning up each year. In steady state the delta between end of life and reentry is irrelevant, instead the average number of satellites launched each year = average number that burn up each year.
As to harm. Aluminum is mildly toxic, you don’t eat your bike but vaporized aluminum from a satellite is way more likely to cause harm than if the things were made of steel. The plastic bits are likely fine though.
Saying let’s study something ahead of time rather than contaminating all the world’s farmland with and then seeing what happens seems like a perfectly reasonable standard. Technology has generally been wonderful, but that doesn’t mean everything is equivalent. We want to phase out leaded aviation fuel in the US even though it’s ‘only’ 2,000 tons of lead per year, that’s still enough to be problematic. Perhaps ramping up to ~5k tons/y of vaporized aluminum worldwide is a complete non issue, but if it’s not insisting on some other material isn’t the same as a ban.
> part of the healthcare system that is moderately competitive.
That’s only half the story though insurance companies also try and reject way more claims, cover fewer people, and are just harder to get money from than Medicare.
This means hospitals can’t afford to give them cheaper rates as they just require vastly more work from staff for the same procedure.
The industry isn’t blind to this effect, but has little reason to change.
Hospitals and clinics can only take so many Medicare patients as a ratio to private pay because it’s very well known that Medicare and Medicaid is often provided at below cost. It’s of course area and demographic dependent but as a rule any private clinic has a cap on these patients they will accept overall. Hospitals cannot cap it realistically speaking, so looking at clinics is a good proxy.
Private insurance subsidizes Medicare and Medicaid even after you add in admin overhead.
The MLR incentive question is one I'm digging into for a future issue. The short version: the ACA's 80/85% MLR floor was supposed to constrain overhead, but vertical integration changed the math. When UnitedHealth's Optum division provides services to UnitedHealthcare's members, those internal payments count as "medical expenses" for MLR purposes. The money stays in-house but reports as care delivery.
On the denial rate point: 15-17% initial denial rate, 80%+ overturned on appeal, but less than 1% of patients actually appeal. That gap between the overturn rate and the appeal rate is where the profit lives. If you deny 100 claims and only 1 patient appeals, you've effectively reduced payouts on 99 claims at the cost of processing 1 appeal. I'll have the numbers on this in a later issue.
All the other managed care organizations have similar 2% profit margins.
It is funny seeing complaints of excess profit margins from businesses earning 2%, that compete against non profits, from people on a forum composed of employees of tech businesses earning 20%+ profit margins. I wonder how much Epics’s profit margin is?
And then there is also pharmaceuticals, also earning double digit profit margins. And then the law firms in medical malpractice suits, who I imagine are not working for 2% profit margins either.
Profit margins are difficult to compare across industries, game developers on average have great profit margins in part because all the studios that fail quickly stop counting.
Grocery stores on the other hand are a known as a low margin business, but as people constantly need more food every month it can be really stable. Further as most stock turns over multiple times a month your return on capital can be extremely high. Even better during a downturn when people buy 20% less food you also need to buy 20% less stock and employ fewer people to stock shelves etc, which makes your profits far more resilient.
Suddenly grocery stores are looking like a much better investment than making games.
The point of a profit margin is to be able to compare a seller's pricing power across industries. It invalidates attempts to claim the seller is able unilaterally act in their interests without the customer having recourse. For insurers, not only do customers have a choice to switch to a different insurer, but insurance prices have to be approved by government employees.
And total returns are the end all, be all for measuring investment performance. Just because some volatile video game businesses go bust does not make the grocery business or insurance business attractive. I could just as easily put my money into SP500 and earn far more with far less (almost zero) risk.
> It invalidates attempts to claim the seller is able unilaterally act in their interests without the customer having recourse.
By that logic the cap’s on annual profits by insurance companies suggest significant pricing power by insurers.
As to S&P vs a grocery store, there are grocery chains in the S&P there’s nothing wrong with the business model. As always the arguments for starting a business are more complicated than the alternatives due to the amount of leverage you can get etc. Further a weekly turnover at 2% is a rather insane annual ROI, we’re talking 100% return on investment though obviously actual business don’t just concern themselves with groceries, labor, and rent.
>By that logic the cap’s on annual profits by insurance companies suggest significant pricing power by insurers.
I disagree. If I was a seller, and if I had pricing power, then I would not settle for a 2% profit margin when the cap is 15% or more. The only reason I would settle for 2% is because I cannot sell for my product or service at higher prices or in higher volumes to get more than 2%.
>Further a weekly turnover at 2% is a rather insane annual ROI, we’re talking 100% return on investment
I don't know what definition of return on investment you are using, but it does not match any that I am familiar with based on share price and dividend history of any publicly listed grocer (kroger/albertsons/walmart/target). Obviously, Costco has done well, and Amazon, but those are not strictly due to selling groceries, or retail in general.
A 10% or 20% cap is only relevant if the company is hitting the cap. Operating a subdivision with a lower profit margin is a different matter, that’s no longer an insurance company hell they could be selling porn and it would be equally irrelevant.
Instead what matters here is that insurance companies by your own admission clearly have pricing power and that’s a problem.
> does not match any that I am familiar with based on share price and dividend history of any publicly listed grocer
Return on capital when starting a company is different than return on investment when buying a public company. If a company is kicking off 1 Billion dollars a year it doesn’t matter if it cost 10 million or 10 billion dollars building the company, you pay for the share based on future revenue. When starting a company however it very much matters if it takes 10 million or 10 billion to get off the ground.
Yes but the Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates are below breakeven so cash and insurance rates have to be above provider breakeven. The main cost frictions are administrative costs for billing on both the insurance and provider sides.
That's true to an extent, but some provider organizations manage to survive with patient populations that are almost entirely Medicare / Medicaid. Many provider organizations are just badly managed and haven't taken steps to optimize their finances through automation or participation in value-based care programs.
I'm working on a project in an area of healthcare where there was massive Medicare fraud decades ago. Medicare now requires extensive documentation for each claim and the paperwork is so onerous that providers have exited the market and it's very, very difficult to access care.
Right, CMS plays whack-a-mole with Medicare claim fraud. When they catch on to a systemic pattern they clamp down in a way that creates extra burdens for everyone, and then the fraudsters move on to something else.
They waste billions on fraudulent claims because they don't fund the program well enough to have compliance enforcement or auditing.
Also, I'm not going to trust a podcast owned and operated by Stacey Richter, who also just so happens to be the co-president of Aventria Health Group and QC-Health.
> They waste billions on fraudulent claims because they don't fund the program well enough to have compliance enforcement or auditing.
These are synonyms for having higher overhead, right? If you pay a billion dollars in claims with ten million dollars in administrative costs then your "administrative overhead" is 1%, even if half the claims are fraud. If you increase "administrative costs" to a hundred million to get rid of the fraud, in practice you just saved 410 million dollars but now your "administrative overhead" is up to 20%.
There's another reason. The harder you make it for a provider to get reimbursed for a service (in order to cut down on fraud), the more difficult it is for legitimate patients to access that service. Medicare patients are elderly. Many of them aren't able to chase after doctors to get the services they need.
This isn't even close to true. Keep in mind that Medicare, together with Medicaid (which operates under much of the same administrative rules), account for nearly half of medical spending. So basically, if a provider doesn't want to play by their rules, they MUST deal with Medicare. That is, the government is nearly a monopsony in this industry.
There's a common, misleading, claim that Medicare is more efficient because they spend far less than commercial insurance on overhead like claims processing. This claim is true. But the impression that it gives is absolutely the opposite of reality. The reason that Medicare doesn't spend as much on admin is that they offload all of this work onto the providers. Every hospital in America has a "Medicare Reimbursement" team. A moderate-sized hospital is going to have something like 2 FTEs focusing just on the reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid. And that's a lot more work than just filing the right forms for each case. There's a ton of additional work. Each spring they have to file a HUGE "Medicare Cost Report", requiring a couple of months of work to get all the data in place for it. (Source: my wife was "Director of Reimbursement" at various hospitals for quite a few years, before going into consulting.)
That Medicare Cost Report that I mentioned is, beyond a huge effort sink, the source of many other evils. Because of the amount of work that's needed to gather and collate all this data, hospitals naturally structure their Accounting around the way Medicare wants them to report. The thing is, that's largely orthogonal to the way a rational person would do cost accounting. The result is the common criticism about how widely varying the cost of a given specific line-item is between hospitals: they don't really know how much a given procedure costs because that's not how they track their expenses, so they apply some allocation heuristics, and every hospital does that a bit differently.
There are also various perverse incentives in the system. For example, Medicare is smart enough to know that it costs more to deliver care in NYC or SF and so forth. Every locale has a Cost Index that scales how much they expect to need to pay. This leads to hospitals needing to show that their expenses are higher so they should be classified into locale X rather than neighboring locale Y.
Another one my wife told me about her hospital: Medicare realized that a lot of UTIs were hospital-acquired, and they rationally said that they would no longer pay for UTI treatments unless the hospital could prove that they were not hospital acquired. Well, maybe that wasn't rational, because with Medicare/caid being such a huge portion of their business, they changed their policy to test for UTI for everyone at admission, so that they could furnish the proof demanded. Think of all that wasted lab work...
So no, Medicare is NOT more streamlined and efficient. It's absolutely, 180-degrees, the opposite of that.
> something like 2 FTEs focusing just on the reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid
2FTE’s vs what?
The question isn’t is this free, the question is how large is the total staff including price negotiations, doctors, and IT time spent handling billing issues, and is Medicare more or less than 50% of the total.
I am ware of one hospital and 2 medical clinics where the difference is very much in favor of Medicare.
2 FTEs vs a department. Most hospitals have entire departments to handle insurer coding and some even have departments just to handle insurer disputes.
I think maybe I did a bad job of explaining. Of course providers have teams to deal with getting approvals from, submitting to, and disputing with, all the various Payers. At this level, we can consider all the Payers roughly equivalent.
But for Medicare/caid, there's an ADDITIONAL layer of work that CMS requires Providers to perform. The Providers need to ensure they're compliant with all kinds of standards, and jump through hoops to document and prove to CMS that they're compliant. These standards aren't limited to the specific care - procedures, meds, etc. - being expended on a particular patient. They encompass the entirety of the Provider's operations. For example CMS makes Providers provide documentation about their average pay rates, stuff that's not related to the care of any given patient.
The existence of that additional layer of reporting and compliance is the work that they're offloading onto the Providers, and thus increasing costs of providing care without it being legible if you were to audit CMS's own expenses.
> At this level, we can consider all the Payers roughly equivalent.
No we really can’t, economies of scale means when Medicare changes something you’re spreading costs across a lodge number of visits. When an insurance company changes something that same cost is spread among a vastly smaller pool.
Coding is a different layer. Everything needs coding, whether for gov't or commercial payers. So the folks doing this coding can't be separated out for commercial. In fact, it's kind of the opposite:
CPT codes (for procedures) - these are defined by AMA, but mandated by CMS (i.e., Medicare/caid). Because the gov't mandated them, the commercial payers adopted them too.
HCPCS codes (equipment and supplies) - defined by CMS.
ICD-10-PCS codes (hospital inpatient stuff) - defined by CMS.
versus nothing. Hospitals don't have to maintain a whole team for UnitedHealth, or for Anthem, etc.
This is my point. Medicare cooks the books to look more efficient by offloading their administrative costs onto providers. Other payers can't do that because, even if huge, they don't operate at the same scale.
Think about it: we often hear on the news about disputes about contracts when a local hospital's agreement with some insurance company comes up for renewal. They play hardball, getting local news to run stories on how many people will be affected if they can't come to terms. But you'll never hear this in the context of Medicare/caid. Hospitals have leverage to negotiate with commercial payers, but not with the government.
Depending on the size of the health system it may not be a team of multiple FTEs but they absolutely do expend significant resources on managing differences between commercial payers. They all have different rules about covered services, step therapy, prior authorization, hospital admission, etc. Sometimes those differ significantly even between health plans offered by a single carrier.
This isn't really true anymore (if it was ever true). Providers are spending a huge amount of time dealing with prior authorizations and appeals for private insurance.
I work in this area and you're right that Medicare can require a huge amount of paperwork from providers. And a hospital will have far more than 2 FTEs for this (it's called Revenue Cycle Management).
Medicare has overhead, but you’re not saying whether it is more than commercial insurance. The admin expense/profit portion of commercial insurers also don’t take into account provider admin costs (not to mention the huge amount of time patients can deal with denials, appeals, etc.)
It's further the case, regarding Medicare expense ratios, that their admin costs are low relative to private insurance because the median private insurance customer incurs far lower medical costs, leaving admin as a higher fraction.
It can't be both: either insurers are incentivized to authorize as much care as possible so as to fit more money through the 20% opening, or they're incentivized to deny care to minimize their expenses. Which is it?
What do you mean elevators go up and down clearly someone only wants to go in one direction. If they are below 80% they want costs to increase, over 80% costs better decrease.
The ideal long term strategy is to drive everyone’s costs to go up slowly over time slightly faster than inflation. Adding administrative burden to medical institutions is a perfect way to achieve that, but clearly that never happens…
Regardless of their motives they're all subject to the same regulatory system so they can only stray so far for so long from the net effect of the incentives and remain not bankrupt and being auctioned to pay back creditors.
It seems to me that the leading vaccine manufacturers, who spend billions of dollars yearly in order to lobby US lawmakers that establish the bureaucracy the article is complaining about, are interested in just that (maximizing profits).
It doesn't really matter much if there are individuals or other organizations interested in curing disease, when we have a system that allows for legal bribery of lawmakers, and other individuals / organizations with more money that value profits over anything else.
A large portion of the US healthcare is through nonprofits who are more interested in continuing to exist than in maximizing profits.
Vaccine companies are very interested in preventing disease not the kind of extended treatment people so often expect the healthcare industry to be looking for. They have an endless stream of new people being born every year so have no interest in people getting sick.
If people aren't getting sick, they have no revenue stream. Those non-profits you mentioned obviously aren't as capable of lobbying congress to influence industry regulation / bureaucracy as for-profit organizations are.
Nonprofits constantly lobby congress for a huge range of reasons, but they also get results with a surprising amount of federal money going directly to such organizations independent of Medicare, Medicaid, etc.
> If people aren't getting sick
People also get sick outside the US.
People still get vaccinated in the US for diseases with effectively zero new US cases because they haven’t been eradicated worldwide and would come back as soon as we stop vaccinating people.
Odds of winning are rather meaningless for negative sum games, you’re going to lose anyway. While I find most forms of gambling rather boring, if you like the experience it’s little different than spending 50$ at an arcade.
My game of choice is the big state lottery and it’s simply for the fun mental space of the possibility of winning, actually checking your ticket is kind of depressing because the odds are so low. But look at it as paying for the experience of the possibility of a jackpot and realize when you buy one ticket or multiple so just buy one and it becomes a cheap thrill.
I have one friend who likes to gamble. I've tried the old math argument with him and he dismisses it out-of-hand. He says that, yes, he knows it's a negative sum game but sometimes he wins and that makes it worth it. Then he says, "You spend money on a symphony or an art museum or an expensive restaurant, right? Those are guaranteed to leave you a little bit poorer at the end of the night. Same thing as gambling, but with a bigger guarantee."
Hear me out: Whenever people try the "math argument" on a gambler they are basically wrong and are misunderstanding how recreational gamblers actually think, which is not irrational (for the most part) or at least not irrational in the way people think on the surface.
Take the lottery: The classic "math objection" is to explain to the person that the expectation[1] of buying tickets in a lottery is negative so over time they will (on average) lose money.
Most people who gamble know this. The thing is they are not trying to maximise expectation. They are trying to maximise "expected marginal utility"[2]. They know that the dollar they spend on the ticket affects their life far less than the payoff would in the unlikely event they get it. Because the marginal utility of -$1 is basically nothing (it wouldn't change their life much at all to lose a dollar) versus winning say $10mil would completely change the life of most people and therefore the marginal utility of +10mil is much more than 10mil times greater than the marginal utility lost by spending a dollar on the ticket.
It is fundamentally this difference that the gambling companies are arbitraging. And for people who become addicted to gambling it is like any other addiction. The companies are just exploiting people who have a disease and are ruining their lives for profit. There are studies which show that addicted gamblers don't actually get the dopamine hit from winning, they get it from anticipating the win (ie the spin). So actually winning or losing just keeps them wanting to come back for another hit.
[1] Ie the average payoff weighted by probability
[2] Ie the average difference in utility weighted by probability. This could be seen as how much of a difference the payoff would make to their life.
All people who go to casinos are not pathological gamblers.
They have some disposable income, and spend it at the casino for a bit of fun. Sometimes, they come out richer, and they are happy, sometimes, they lose, they come out a bit disappointed, but that's the cost of of entertainment.
Gambling can be entertainment, and as long as it's viewed as consumption it's fine IMO. I enjoy playing craps whenever I'm in a casino, and have great memories with friends playing the ups and downs of the table.
The response is probably that gambling is designed to be as addictive as possible, and while your friend might think they will not get addicted, is it really a good risk to take?
Go to a movie and you are going to be put the ticket prices, it’s a money losing proposition clearly there’s no reason to do so. Obviously, people place value on some experiences so any argument which fails to consider that is flawed.
If you happen to be at a casino, make exactly one bet in your lifetime and there’s a significant chance you’ll end up ahead. On average you’ll be out money but we don’t live out every possibility and average them. It’s just one event and you could easily end up ahead, it’s only as you repeat it with minimal gains and negative returns that things quickly become a near certainty.
With Powerball the odds are low but not astronomical that you buy 1 or 1000 tickets and end up ahead. It’s the most likely outcome by a massive margin but due to non jackpot prizes a long way from zero.
However again the odds of breakeven just reduce the cost of play they aren’t the only thing people get for their money.
If they're actual flips, you don't know you're going to lose? You know your EV is 0. As others have noted, in the hierarchy of gambling a truly 0 EV game is fairly high up in the rankings if you're looking for less harm.
I don’t play the lottery but I’ve never really understood the math against it. It’s a negative expected value, sure, but it also produces a (small) probability of a high return. The math against it seems to hinge on the idea that people should maximize the expected value of their wealth.
But, an alternative goal is to maximize your probability of qualitative changes up, and minimize the probability of qualitative changes down, for your living conditions. If somebody is in a situation where they can spend a qualitatively inconsequential amount of money on lotteries, then playing the lottery is a rational way of maximizing this metric, right?
Of course, it does add the hard-to-quantify risk that they’ll become addicted to gambling and start spending a qualitatively meaningful amount of money gambling!
OTOH if we as a society all started putting a small percentage of our wealth toward the lottery we’re essentially misallocating whatever that percentage was. So it produces a somehow less efficient economy I guess. So maybe there’s a social bias against it.
> if you like the experience it’s little different than spending 50$ at an arcade.
If you spend $50 at the arcade you usually develop a little more skill at the game. Depending on the game and player.
$50 at a slot machine develops no skill. At best you’ve broke even or made a little money. At worst, it just feeds an addiction. But there’s no skill here; the odds of any outcome are fixed regardless of what the player does.
Two or more tickets in the same draw have a lower expected value. Yes it is a very small change to your payout while having an extra chance. In some way you're betting against your self with a second bet in the game relative to the jackpot .
> especially the ones being taken advantage of here.
This is a great argument why buying an index is a poor choice for a long term investor. You can avoid a great deal of shenanigans by randomly purchasing stocks and holding them for 50 years. Even a 0.02% annual fee costs you 1% of your long term returns over that timescale.
Index investing is a great choice for a long term investor who cares about simplicity, which should be the vast majority of them. Actually the best thing about holding individual stocks is probably the increased opportunities for TLH, but the nightmare of holding and managing hundreds of securities in your account is very seldom worth what you save on fees or deferred taxes.
You still owe the taxes on dividends generated by an index fund that automatically reinvests dividends. There’s ways around this like a 401k, but you can also own individual stocks inside a 401k or rollover to an account that lets you do so.
I don't know how that's a response to what I wrote. I'm not saying that an ETF is more tax efficient, although it is more tax efficient than a mutual fund. If you are worried about the tax drag of dividends then there are ETFs that seek to track spx, but without receiving dividends, by selling and rebuying around ex div dates. They're not established enough to trust with a lot of money, imo, but maybe it will become more normal one day.
Grocery stores have slim margins, but if you make 10k after selling 1M worth of stock buy turn over that stock 12 times a year that’s ~12% annual ROI not 1%.
Again you assume a year delay on a workers full salary before the company gets compensated. Cash flow rarely works like that.
Uber driver does what 2 weeks of work before getting paid, they also front the cost of their car and gas etc. Meanwhile users are paying as soon as the ride occurs, so uber doesn’t need an account with a full years salary for every driver somewhere at the start of the year. Get paid before the worker and the worker is in effect giving you a zero interest loan.
Now for a consultant the company may get paid after the worker but the company is rarely waiting a more than a few weeks.
+/- 0.1% over a year isn’t meaningful here. I understand that you’re unwilling to reconsider your beliefs when they are based on faulty math and thus don’t reflect the underlying reality here.
A plumber, doctor, teacher, cook, etc does work before getting paid and the company rarely needs to wait 365 days for someone to pay them for that work. This means your idea is inherently flawed, there’s no broader point when you’re making a mistake.
Further future revenue is generally inflation adjusted. If you borrow 1B to build a power plant you sell electricity at future prices not what electricity was worth when you started building. When the reverse happens say at collages when they get paid months before professors get paid, the school isn’t increasing salaries every month to keep up with inflation.
You can use a lot of those authentication / bank apps on a tablet without issue. Obviously it’s worth verifying before making the swap to a flip phone, but I like having minimal apps on my smartphone so I still have a backup if needed.
Evidence has no minimum standard in debate, you can only provide more compelling evidence to the contrary.