There's a difference between sensitive, private and public. If public (i.e. NEXT_PUBLIC_) then yeah likely not a reason to roll. Private keys that aren't explicitly sensitive probably are still sensitive. It doesn't seem to be the default to have things "sensitive" and I can't tell if that's a new classification or has always been there.
I can imagine the reason why an env variable would be sensitive, but need to be re-read at some point. But overwhelmingly it makes sense for the default to be set, and never access again (i.e. Fly env values, GCP secret manager etc)
> Can you hike in the Grand Canyon? Yes, technically. You can walk along the rim, but the view won’t change; same damn canyon on one side, same damn parking lot on the other. There are trails that go down into the canyon, but they’re a trap. They are featureless steep inclines formed into endless switchbacks, and when they finally end, there’s nothing to do except go back up, which will be just as boring but three times as hard and might kill you.
I’ve seen enough. From the Midwest so was looking forward to a takedown of the dunes (or something witty craptowns esq). but dunking on the GC for being a canyon?
We went a lot to the US in my teenage years. I have been to the Grand Canyon two or three times (you start losing counts at some point).
One time we were there with our family and my aunt/uncle + kids. We hiked down the canyon because my dad was sort of the group leader and he goes on such adventures without necessarily thinking it through.
So we went down with a small amount of water and food. I heard sometime years after that you have to pay to go down the Grand Canyon, but this was in the nineties and it was a quiet part of the Grand Canyon, not much to do. We hiked down, stayed inside the canyon for a bit to eat and drink and then we went up again.
And that's where the differences started. My dad was still undeterred and went up in high speed like it was nothing. We were young, fit teenagers and for us the climb was more than usual, but pretty doable. The rest of the adults... not so much. At least one family member was crying, others were swearing (without swearing, polite people) about the predicament my dad put us in.
I am not sure why I am telling this, I guess... go in prepared?
The Grand Canyon was nice, but I never loved it. I think my expectations were pretty big because it's so well-known, so it was a bit anti-climatic. I really liked Monument Valley, there was virtually no other tourist when we were there and it was stunning, even better than in the Lucky Luke comics [1] that we read as a kid. As I teenager I also loved White Sands. In contrast to the author I did really like Petrified Forest.
The NPS has large signs posted at the Bright Angel and Kaibab trailheads on the south rim warning visitors about the dangers of the trail, the heat, the steepness, the lack of shade. It is made abundantly clear that even a modest hike requires conditioning, water, appropriate shoes, and protection from the sun. They even have rangers patrolling the trails assessing hikers they pass and questioning those they believe are going to have trouble. Unfortunately, they can only recommend, not enforce. With all that, people run into difficultly and have to be hauled out. Sometimes, they die. As Ron White has said, you can't fix stupid.
The only time I saw the Grand Canyon was when we briefly stopped while I was helping a friend get her car across the country. It was January, no one was around, and patches of snow dotted the rim. Quite a beautiful sight. But we noticed a poster on a bulletin board detailing how a medical student who had run the Boston marathon had somehow gotten lost on a hike and died after running out of water. It was particularly shocking because my friend had known the woman who died since high school in New England, but had not heard the story until we were reading it on that poster.
I also did one of the hikes to the CO river in the 90s with 3 friends when we were in college. We got off to a late start so jogged down a good deal of the way (dumb). We carried a 1 gallon water jug each (not even close to enough). We had no extra clothing (dumb). Two of us (me being one) made it out that day. The other two didn't. A group of smart hikers with water filters and iodine tablets found them belly up on the path in the direct sunlight. I'm certain they would have died if the hikers didn't give them tablets, water and emergency blankets. Man we were dumb.
If you are fit, you can absolutely do this. In fact, you can go all the way to the other rim and back (rim-to-rim-to-rim). The current record is sub 6 hrs by Ultrarunner Jim Walmsley. [0]
I read all the chapters on the hiking and falling deaths before I hiked rim-to-rim. So many of them are "Family hikes down to the canyon, young child complains of heat. Sits down and dies." Or "Someone takes a shortcut, walks down an un-climbable hill. Dies of exposure."
There were a lot of completely unprepared tourists on the way up to the South Rim. They had walked down a little bit and couldn't walk back up. We weren't in great condition ourselves but we had been hiking for the past 12 hours.
Canyons can be a challenge. To maybe paraphrase some signage along the way. Down is optional. Up is not.
Going down to the river makes for a very long day. I've boated (part raft, part other) down the canyon but I've only hiked down to a spot part of the way and then back.
Agreed. I've been to many canyons, and the Grand Canyon is truly a marvel - it's stunning, it took my breath away and still does. Just go and look at it for 15 minutes? That's all you can muster? "Featureless" steep inclines? No mention of the biodiversity? What?!
The Grand Canyon is in the rare club of places I've been that surpassed my high expectations.
I say to anyone who asks me about the GC "it will completely surpass any expectations you have of it, even if you take this into account". Nothing can prepare you for the scale of it, even if you've been there before and/or been in the Utah canyon parks. No photo, no video can capture the experience of being on the edge of it nor being down in it.
Back when I was younger and challenges were mostly mental, I did participate in a group hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon (via the Hermit trail). Yes, the hike back up was tough, but we had two nights' camp out at the bottom, right by the river, in what for us Canadians was pleasant August type climate, while we had started in a bit of snow at the top (late October) and the rest day was beautiful.
During the hike and stay at the bottom we encountered about half a dozen other people. It really was grand.
In Yosemite, all you have to do is outhike the "Reebok hikers" as we called them back then. An hour's serious walk gives you relative solitude.
And in Zion, last time we were there, a couple of us did not do Angels Landing. Instead we went to another spot equally high up where it was peaceful and quiet, and took telephoto pictures of the others on Angels Landing (note: I've been up there and it's awesome, but in that terrain a crowd sounds scary).
You may be referring to the Observation Point hike at Zion. It starts off with a 2k ft high switchback route. But at the end it will put you smack dab in the middle of the canyon higher than Angeles Landing (and a bit safer, less crowded hike). And you still have a stunning view of the canyon and far beyond.
I did Angel's Landing at one point and I'm glad I did but wouldn't do again. Observation point is my favorite but I don't think my old route is open any longer though you can still apparently get up there by another trail.
> In Yosemite, all you have to do is outhike the "Reebok hikers" as we called them back then. An hour's serious walk gives you relative solitude.
You actually don't even need to do this if you park somewhere other than Yosemite Valley. For example, Tenaya Lake is nice and not that far in on Tioga Road.
There's a statistic that floats around which may be apocryphal - something like 90% of visitors to national parks don't get more than a 5-15 minute walk from the parking lot (and some literally never leave the car).
National parks are huge and you can quickly literally get lost forever in them (which is an actual danger, stay on the trails!) if you're willing to walk.
Some of them have very obvious "goals" to see (the geyser, the half-dome) which of course are high traffic, but others are beautiful "all over" and taking the treks is worth it.
His experiences mirrors most people's I know. They all told me - go to it if you have the extra time, otherwise The southern Utah parks are much better.
When H Melville stuffed the middle of Moby Dick with a "cetology" -- BEFORE The Origin of Species, famously saying "a whale is a fish" -- he didn't forget the Greenland Shark. I think all the time about how many of those sharks swimming around in 1851 are still swimming around today.
Note that Melville was well aware of the reasons that "whales aren't fish", and went over those in detail, then said he was going to call them fish anyway.
The whale=fish thing is also an old joke about catholics. Back when one could not eat meat on fridays, all sorts of water-living mamals were declared to be "fish" for purposes of eating. So a new world protestant author in the 1800s is pointing a critical finger at oldworld religion and science.
We have lost knowledge of such nuance, like rewatching MASH or Trek and missing the religious and racial messages that made them so controversial then but banal today.
In 1760, The Natural and Civil History of the French Dominions in North and South America did absolutely claim that there was some papal decree that otter tail was fish, and beaver was fish, and so on.
But... There's no actual Papal decree, bull, or otherwise in canon law that anyone can find. It's just a good story, not a true one.
Which doesnt matter. What maters is whether melville thought it to be true when he wrote the line. The joke/reference would have been understood by readers at the time regardless of whether it was factually true.
2010. Archibishop of New Orleans. Alligator is "fish". Whether or not the pope has an opinion, such things are not fiction.
Yes I agree. All the moreso because the word fish is very ancient and was used to mean any aquatic animal long before Linnaeus came along and decided to "well ackshully" the word.
This is a reach, but do you know where to find the essay I read about someone explaining to King David that a whale isn't a fish and the King laughs at him because his modern mammal explanations are useless and impractical compared to the ones he uses?
Point taken but I think it's a bit of a fallacy to frame this way. The market can go up and down as can individual stocks; "85% of the decline" doesn't make sense because some stocks are going up.
A book I read a few years ago put this more eloquently. Some governor said that 20,000 jobs were created last month and his state contributed half of them. Well, many states lost jobs and the state next door actually gained MORE jobs, so the "more than half" framing makes no sense
I wouldn't say it's a fallacy. It's just an interesting way to look at the data.
I think more people need to be talking about the fact that the S&P 500 has extreme concentration risks that didn't exist 15+ years ago (and the Chart of the Day demonstrates that). We're in uncharted territories re: market cap concentration.
It becomes less interesting the more the “overweight” stocks correct.
The extreme concentration risk lessens as these 8 stocks fall in value compared to the rest.
I also don’t personally see the risk in the concentration. Risk of what? These companies are legitimately larger and doing more business than other firms.
Pick a median consumer. Which company are they sending more profit to than companies like Apple or Amazon?
10 years ago the average consumer maybe bought an iPhone from Apple every 3 years, so they gave Apple less than $100 of pure profit dollars per year.
Now that same consumer is giving Apple money for the iPhone, but also spending on services that they weren’t buying 10 years ago. If they’ve got an Apple One subscription they’re now sending Apple double or triple the profit they used to get.
These companies are big because they sell more things and are more diversified than they were in the past.
There’s no concentration risk. I’d actually argue that the concentration risk can be resolved overnight through antitrust regulation (e.g., force Apple and Amazon to split into multiple companies, as they already have obvious verticals that could stand alone).
The concentration risk relates to diversification in investing. Index funds are generally thought of as a way to diversify a portfolio. Cap weighted index funds are generally preferred because they are cheaper for the provider to maintain. Compare VOO with RSV for example. VOO is cap weighted. RSV is equal weighted - which means investors in RSV bear the cost of periodically readjusting all holdings so they are once again equally weighted - something no necessary with VOO.
I am not the only investor who has taken steps to offset the overly high concentration in the SP500 that raises the riskiness of an investment portfolio. I've done so by splitting my VOO holdings in half, split 50/50 VOO/VTV that strategically diminishes the impact of the high top 10 stocks in the SP500.
I certainly think it's a good thing to diversify investing, while recognizing that there is value in putting a lot of your bets into heavyweights that are very likely to do very well in the long term.
One of my main points here is that dumping a lot of money into one company isn't always something that represents lack of diversity in your investment dollars.
A company like Microsoft has its hands in so many business verticals that its stock by itself is a highly diverse asset.
I also think it's important to realize that massive companies like these have inherent advantages over smaller ones. A company like Framework literally cannot make a better laptop than Apple even if an angel investor dropped billions of dollars into their laps. Even if they pulled it off, it wouldn't come with a free trial for Apple's content subscriptions and other revenue-maximizing features, and the wholesale price they get from the factory can't match Apple's margins on the device until they convince a large enough mass of people to buy them.
That's the kind of stuff that big companies can do, and that's why they are worth more putting more bets into than smaller ones.
Obviously, companies like Tesla and Nvidia are far bigger risks in the S&P 500, but they represent a small minority of those giants.
There is nothing wrong with your desire to 'dump[ing] a lot of money into one company'. That is easy to do without an index fund. And it is not the investing theory behind the creation of index funds and their investing purpose. When 8 companies dominate an index fund, that means the index is not performing the intended function for which it was created.
But the index fund is doing what it was designed for, which is to index on the companies based on their relative importance in the marketplace.
And that’s really my whole point. Someone who is buying an S&P Index fund wants to own more Apple than GoDaddy, because Apple represents much more economic activity than GoDaddy.
I have read John Bogle extensively. I believe he would disagree with you about the purpose behind why Bogle invented the index fund. Index funds are cap based primarily because that saves on costs (there is no need to rebalance the index). But the philosophical framework is diversification. When 10 companies make the other 490 irrelevant in producing the annual return of the index, the index itself is no longer serving the diversification purpose.
Nobody is going to deny enjoying the monetary gains produced by the index becoming concentrated. But it comes at the cost of the portfolio risk that diversification (i.e. absence of concentration) is intended to eliminate.
I’ll make an analogy to maybe help explain what I mean further:
I own a somewhat diverse set of 50 company stocks, at least for the purposes of this exercise.
Let’s say a bunch of those companies merge, now there’s only 20 companies.
No product lines have been discontinued. The companies make all the same things with the same client lists.
Did my investments become less diverse when these companies merged? Perhaps in some ways yes, in many other ways no.
Is my investment portfolio more diverse if I own one stock, Apple, or if I own three stocks, Time Warner, Paramount, and Comcast? All these companies make media content, but Apple is in more industry verticals overall in addition to being a media company (or at least, we can say they are for the purposes of this analogy). If the content industry collapses, Apple is fine, the rest not so much.
Size and success is not a diversification factor. Investment history is scattered with the bones of 'golden child' companies that never saw the death train coming at them through the tunnel. Intel. Nokia. Blockbuster. Yahoo.
Moreover, your examples are crossing over into active investing versus indexing. Indexing theory submits active investors cannot beat indexing over time (Buffet's purchasing/controlling whole companies notwithstanding).
I'm not talking about size and success, I'm talking about participation in a diverse array of industry verticals.
My example is not meant to specifically talk about active investing, I'm just picking out companies to discuss within a hypothetical index holding.
> Intel. Nokia. Blockbuster. Yahoo.
Interesting, 3/4 of these still exist and are doing reasonably well. If you bought their stocks 30 years ago you'd be up on your investment on all of them except for Blockbuster. Obviously, they're not top performers in that timespan (although Nokia ADR pays dividends like other telecoms so maybe it is a good investment in the right index).
You have inadvertently demonstrated some of my point here: companies that serve diverse verticals stick around for decades. For example, Nokia’s consumer business evaporated but their telecom business is still here. See also: BlackBerry.
I wonder what a solution could look like. Perhaps keep the market cap weighting, but cap the weighting at a max $500b (or some sliding scale to prevent the top X stocks from composing more than Y% of the portfolio)
That would certainly be a way to control escalating concentration but at the expense of keeping index fund costs low. The Vanguard Total Stock Index (VTI) has an expense ratio of 0.03 - almost zero. Low expenses is a critical factor behind why index funds outperform active investing. So, yes, your proposal would work, but the expense ratio would up to implement the cap.
I think the point was that those stocks are causing the S&P to be overweight towards those firms that are highly invested in AI. It's like comparing personal wealth when Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are included in the list - the average ends up far above the median.
> The 10 biggest companies in the S&P 500 make up almost 40% of the index, and if Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX are added later this year, the concentration could approach 50%, see chart below. The bottom line is that the S&P 500 basically doesn’t offer much diversification anymore.
A similar explanatory mirage happens in elections: when a candidate loses by (say) 1% of the vote, people go looking for factors that produced a 1% swing and declare, “it’s because of inflation! it’s because they took position X! it’s because the other team focused harder on turnout!”. You can find several such explanations and no single one is the causal one.
I don’t think it’s misleading (at all) when you take into account that the index is volume weighted. If you held two different stocks: 1 from megacorp worth 90; 1 from smallcorp worth 10; if megacorp is down 10% while smallcorp is up 10%. Your portfolio would still be worth less even though 50% of your portfolio positions are up.
Very interesting. Would love to see comparisons with LV where sports gambling has always been legal (relative delinquency rates to other states before the ‘18 ruling, especially in the u40 group). Also change in delinquencies in LV as a control (presumably flat)
That feels like it wouldn't provide a useful comparison, because the people who were going to bet on sports when LV was the legal place to do it, would go to LV to do it. Their delinquency rates wouldn't necessarily be reflected in LV, though, since they've come from elsewhere to do it.
As alluded, the walls stood the test of time (1,000 years) until the final siege in 1453. The Ottomans fired thousands of cannon shots (weighing 1k lbs) into the walls and ultimately broke through.
I'm struck by the significance. The walls allowed the Byzantine Empire to outlive the Roman Empire by ten centuries. Their undoing marked the end of medieval times (the collapse of the Western Roman Empire marked the start).
Fun fact about that cannon: it took so long for the cannon to cool off between shots that the Byzantines were able to patch each hole it caused before the next shot.
The repairs to the walls under the Ottoman cannon fire made use of the rubble, they made a wooden "basket" to hold the rubble; this ended up being very effective, as just like sand, the slight "give" to the rubble swallowed up much of the force of the cannonball.
Fun fact, the conquer of Constantinople was prophesized in the sahih hadith (authentic saying of the Prophet) [1].
Another fun fact, it took about 800 years, or four Islamic caliphates before the event happened in the Ottoman Caliphate era, after Rashidun, Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates [2].
And another fun fact, one of the prophet trusted sahabat namely Abu Ayyub al-Ansari was involved in the very first campaign of the First Arab Siege of Constantinople during the Rashidun Caliphate [3]. He died during the event in his old age of over 90 and become the patron saint for Istanbul, Turkey. His tomb/mosque was the official inauguration place for almost all of the Ottoman Caliphs [4]. He also famously hosted Muhammad in his house for several months during the migration or Hijrah to Yathrib (modern Madinah), where Hijrah date is the start of Islamic calender.
[1] Muhammad Al Fatih – The Sultan who did the impossible:
The reading ease algorithm we use is the Flesh-Kincaid algorithm, which works pretty well for regular prose books but clearly fails very badly on avant-garde prose like Ulysses or As I Lay Dying.
Using your mind to "untangle" is the whole point and pleasure of reading. Using llms to expand your understanding of it makes sense, but "Outsourcing" the reading not so much.
Came here to post this. Dam good book on the shifty maneuvering that resulted in the Owens Valley Diversion and ultimately the population center that is LA.
> No print publication on the planet does this. The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this.
In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville noted that American publications (unlike those from Europe) packed their pages with ads
This is a fact, America is absolutely leading with this kind of capitalism but Europe is following closely, just like the rest of the world. It’s just matter of time, US just happens to be ahead of everyone else.
I can imagine the reason why an env variable would be sensitive, but need to be re-read at some point. But overwhelmingly it makes sense for the default to be set, and never access again (i.e. Fly env values, GCP secret manager etc)
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