This is backwards.

Heavy traffic causes depressions in the road. Water collects there and seeps into tiny cracks. Then it freezes, expands and makes the cracks bigger with every cycle.

It's also possible for potholes to form if the roads are continuously covered in snow that is compacted into ice. There is no direct damage from traffic. The expansion of ice creates tiny holes throughout the road.

There is this thing called a zero lower bound. Then there is this thing called liquidity preference, which is basically the minimum fee someone accepts to part with liquidity.

Add those two together and you will get a minimum positive return constraint on capital.

Capital can only pay a return if it is fully utilized. This means there needs to be enough demand to saturate the machine.

You can never have any form of excess capacity, because excess physical capital does not generate any returns. It actually loses you money, which is incompatible with the positive return constraint.

Since the expected return is positive, the lender has to pay back more than he borrowed, meaning that he has to have more revenue and more revenue is earned by selling more products.

Now, this alone doesn't explain the reason why you have to keep going though.

The question is, when someone demands positive returns and those returns are artificially anchored against zero thanks to the ZLB, why is this bad.

Well, think about what happens if nobody borrows the money. That means the money is still waiting for a borrower and it is not turning into demand. Now there is money missing in the economy. The rest of the money has to circulate faster to compensate the loss of money but it doesn't, because everyone is thinking the same thing.

The problem here isn't on the business side. The problem is that someone decided to use an unsigned integer for something that can be negative.

You need money for daily transactions. You don't care about the nominal value of the money as a "store of value", you care about it as a way to turn your illiquid work output into a liquid voucher you can redeem at any store.

Since modern society depends on money, having the money system degrade is similar to an internet or electricity outage.

So what happens instead is that the government takes on more debt because that is the logic of a zero lower bound.

It also forces the central banks to do QE, because there is nothing you can do at zero.

In both cases, the system is being flooded with the same defective money. Someone will hold onto it, due to their liquidity preference and the lack of negative interest rates.

Is the zero lower bound still true? You have effectively negative returns on cash due to inflation (and infinitely negative returns if the economy breaks so hard we have to switch to a new currency) and physical capital depreciates too. There may be a zero nominal lower bound on cash but that doesn't mean anything due to inflation.

That's disproving foobiekr's point though.

>Until you get cancer. >Survivalist fantasies aren’t realistic.

"I have a survival plan"

"if you get a terminal illness, you will die anyway, checkmate"

"Ok fine I will go somewhere with medical infrastructure"

"Idiot, there is no medical infrastructure"

At this point the whole discussion is illogical. If there are no doctors, then the survivalist strategy gives up nothing.

The initial strategy obviously works. If you get ill, you just need to make sure you've had children and that your children are healthy.

Uh no?

The fertility crisis is an entirely individual crisis. You are a parent and you raise children

Your children's pension contributions are paid out to someone else, leaving less for you.

Having your own children no longer ensures your retirement, so you don't have them in the first place.

The problem couldn't be more individual than that.

You're describing a systemic problem. An individual problem is: my paycheque is next week but I need to pay rent this week. That's a problem specific to me. A systemic problem is: paycheques aren't big enough to cover rent any more. It's a problem that affects a large number of people. Systems are comprised of individuals but describing a systemic problem from the perspective of one individual doesn't change the nature of the problem.

This is almost correct.

The way the pension systems are set up, you're donating your children's labor to the pension system as a whole. This means any investment into your children is purely an expense. Meanwhile if you don't have children, you can save money for retirement and let other people's children work for you.

This means children are a net positive to society as a whole, but a net negative to the parents raising them.

I'm sorry your kids hate you so much they wouldn't support you if you needed it?

Kids are definitely a net positive for society. They're future taxpayers.

But that's not relevant to couples choice to get pregnant. I've never heard a parent say they had kids so they can pay into Social Security.

>Vertical indoor farming is far more sustainable than outdoors farming.

It's not. "Vertical indoor farming" is heavily biomass constrained and this won't change even with infinite energy.

Have you ever paid attention to the types of crops grown in vertical farms? "Leafy greens" is a phrase that is used almost exclusively in the context of vertical farms and nowhere else. Most people talk about the specific vegetables they've had in their salad, not a broad category of vegetables that can be used for salads.

"Leafy greens" are "interesting", because they have an incredibly high water content, meaning less biomass is needed to produce the same volume of produce and they tend to have small root networks, which means that most of the biomass is edible and can be sold. They also tend to be small in the vertical direction, which allows more vertical stacking.

All of those seem like barriers that make C++ unappealing in general, but you're deciding to overcome the barriers using an LLM and seeing that as a strength somehow?

That's like every application of LLM-coding I have ever seen people talking about.

Those asserts probably saved a lot of development costs and increased the robustness of the software, which is worth a lot more than a few percent on a benchmark.

I personally am more conservative on those things. I'll pick the fastest thing that is reliable.

Are we talking about games or medical devices here? I expect different things from them. If a medical device needs to turn off bounds checking to get results I'm concerned enough to not want to let anyone use it. If a game can get a slight performance improvement I'm all for it, who cares if it crashes, it is just a game.

Who cares if it crashes? The users.

We can all agree it's not medical systems, but audio DSP and game dev both end up rewriting a lot of STL stuff to suit their needs, and often using a restricted subset of modern C++ features for similar reasons.

That isn't some arbitrary choice, but pretty much where everyone continually ends up when solving real-time problems using C++. Whether those be games or not.

You can prevent more than enough crashes with enough testing to make gamers happy. Even if you prove there is not out of bounds error I still want a medical device to check

Even with an extreme high level of inhouse testing (which is needed anyway) you'll never find the bugs that are discovered when a hundred-thousand gamers try to exploit every little feature of your game.

The reason to keep asserts in release mode is so that when one of those asserts is triggered "out in the wild" the bug investigation is dramatically simplified. The assert message and callstack is usually enough to figure out what went wrong. With a regular crash that happens without asserts the actual reason of the crash may already be obfuscated enough that a useful bug diagnosis is no longer possible. E.g. an assert is usually triggered very close to the bug, while crashes are usually only the end result of a whole cascade of events triggered by an initial bug.

Fair, but the counter is eventually you have enough real world testing to have confidence and so you no longer need the assert. If 1 in 10 user's have a crash that is unacceptable. However, what if it's only one in a million, or one in ten billion? At what point can you say, 'it's no longer worth worrying about that rare case.'

And this is why games are different from medical devices. In medical devices, I would worry anyway. In games, especially in a tight loop, it may be that extra CPU instruction is an important difference in performance.

Screw this game! I lost all of my progress because it crashed and the last auto-save is 10 minutes old. Uninstalled. 0 stars. Getting a refund.

That blog post is garbage and fails to accurately convey the paper it is based on.

>I rely on the Center for Research in Securities Prices (CRSP) monthly stock return database, which contains all common stocks listed on the NYSE, Amex, and NASDAQ exchanges. Of all monthly common stock returns contained in the CRSP database from 1926 to 2016, only 47.8% are larger than the one-month Treasury rate in the same month. In fact, less than half of monthly CRSP common stock returns are positive. When focusing on stocks’ full lifetimes (from the beginning of the sample in 1926 or first appearance in CRSP through the 2016 end of the sample or delisting from CRSP), just 42.6% of common stocks, slightly less than three out of seven, have a buy-and-hold return (inclusive of reinvested dividends) that exceeds the return to holding one-month Treasury Bills over the matched horizon. More than half of CRSP common stocks deliver negative lifetime returns. The single most frequent outcome (when returns are rounded to the nearest 5%) observed for individual common stocks over their full lifetimes is a loss of 100%.

>Individual common stocks tend to have rather short lives. The median time that a stock is listed on the CRSP database between 1926 and 2016 is seven and a half years. To assess whether individual stocks generate positive returns over the full ninety years of available CRSP data, I conduct bootstrap simulations. In particular, I assess the likelihood that a strategy that holds one stock selected at random during each month from 1926 to 2016 would have generated an accumulated 90-year return (ignoring any transaction costs) that exceeds various benchmarks. In light of the well-documented small-firm effect (whereby smaller firms earn higher average returns than large, as originally documented by Banz, 1980) it might have been anticipated that individual stocks would tend to outperform the value-weighted market. In fact, repeating the random selection process many times, I find that the single stock strategy underperformed the value-weighted market over the full ninety years in ninety six percent of the simulations. The single-stock strategy underperformed the one-month Treasury bill over the 1926 to 2016 period in seventy three percent of the simulations.

>The fact that the overall stock market generates long term returns sufficiently large to be referred to as a puzzle, while the majority of individual stocks fail to even match Treasury bills, can be attributed to the fact that the distribution of stock returns is positively skewed. Simply put, large positive returns to a few stocks offset the modest or negative returns to more typical stocks.

https://obj.portfolioconstructionforum.edu.au/articles_persp...

Compare this to the blog post:

>The implication is devastating for index fund orthodoxy: When you own a broad market index, you’re mathematically forcing yourself to hold the 96.6% of stocks that create no value while simultaneously diluting your exposure to the 3.4% that generate all returns.

The professor just told you that investing in any individual stock is a terrible decision and that investing in more stocks means having greater exposure to the stocks that do net a return, creating a puzzle, where diversification doesn't reduce yields, in fact it did the opposite: it increases the yields.

There's also a general fallacy that any index (directly referred to as index orthodoxy) has to be a "broad market index", when in reality there are many competing indices. If someone came up with an index that would follow any investment strategy the blog post suggests and it turns out to work reliably, then people would switch part of their portfolio to that index. "Index othrodoxy" would prevail, because people just need a better index rather than abandoning the idea of an index altogether.

It's also difficult to reconcile with the fact that after fees, most active funds have failed to net higher returns to their investors. This random blog post is basically delivering an active investment strategy on a silver platter that will make fund managers and the people investing into it rich, is this believable? Consider that it's written in a "shocking" AI style, trying to sell you something.

Funnily enough, the ad in the middle of the blog post "The U.S. Treasury collapse is HERE!" is incompatible with the premise of the article, that 96% of stocks are worse than treasuries.

>But even if we use the more moderate 80/20 framing, the strategic implication is identical: If 80% of market returns come from 20% of stocks, why would you construct a portfolio that treats all five hundred stocks in the S&P 500 equally?

The thing is, you don't have to do that, like at all. There are indices like the S&P 500 Pure Value and S&P 500 Enhanced Value that are known to outperform the regular S&P 500. The problem is that they have done so over the long term and long term really means long term. There have been decades where they underperform.

Also, the article is three times as long as it needs to be, it's clearly AI generated.

Edit: Invesco renamed their ETF to S&P 500 Concentrated QVM.

>This all costs the index funds, because every dollar of profit for the other firms is a dollar out of the pocket of the end investor.

This is so wrong I'm not sure you understand common sense economics and by economics I don't mean anything you can find in a text book. If I invest nothing, the other investors or traders can still make a profit without costing me anything.

Opportunity costs are never real costs. If I have $10, and the traders do weird things with the prices and I don't spend the $10 on anything, I still have $10. The traders failed to cost me.

You're also ignoring the underlying issue which is that the valuation of SpaceX on the open market is different than the valuation it could get from forcing index funds to buy in early. If the stock is worthless then short sellers will make money, but short selling only works if the short sellers don't get squeezed. If the passive funds buy two weeks in, then early traders know that they can sell to a greater fool at inflated prices. Any short seller who is trying to discover the true price will stay back and short directly after the indexes have bought. That's the perfect moment for them. They want the post IPO hype and bull market, only for the stock to collapse within a year.

'their customers, in aggregate, want that' citation needed