That's been my conclusion recently. While I'm sure it's true that people aren't getting enough vitamin D because they are indoors a lot, I'm not convinced you can't easily get enough of it in supplement form. If UV is only needed for vitamin D then you might as well avoid the aging effects of UV exposure and pop a pill.
I don't think we know the entirety of what happens in the skin with UV exposure. We are pretty sure that vitamin D is good, and that cancer is bad, and that seems to be all that people talk about, but there are a lot more things happening that we don't fully understand.
I suspect when we know more, the best answer is going to be moderation. But it's really anybody's guess right now.
There are even things that we do know about but generally aren't talked about such as UV-triggered nitric oxide release[1] which moderates blood pressure among other positive effects.
I want to be clear that there being pros and cons whose relative proportions change is very different than what some other commenters seem to be implying which is closer to a threshold model of UV safety which clearly doesn't exist and is non-scientific.
I wonder how this will affect BRK-B, given that so many investors (or at least the "retail " ones) buy its shares with the assumption that they provide exposure to Buffett's strategy.
In any case, I hope Warren can experience not working at all in the few years he likely has left after being alive for over 1/3 of his country's existence!
I don't know the guy, but by all indications he is even-keeled, low-stress, conscientious but come what may. Given his nationality and net-worth, I'd wager that Warren is a centenarian in waiting, unless and until he chooses to invest in the afterlife. Whichever comes first.
BRK is now (since the last 10-20 years) large and diversified enough that it more or less tracks the S&P 500 and the overall stock market. There isn't some genius trading strategy in there. Buffett himself tells everyone who will listen to buy and hold a diversified index fund for a long period of time.
BRK and VOO have a correlation of 0.7 over the past 5 years. That's high enough that they have been relatively similar, but not so high that I would really say it "tracks" it.
Of course, no one knows the future so who knows if this will continue.
BRK is like a conservative S&P500. It offers enough diversification off the "total market" funds for me that I invest a small but material portion of my "safe money" with them.
Sort of like holding boring dividend stocks without the dividend.
BRK has a beta of 0.7 (meaning it's less volatile than the market) because a third of it is just cash (probably because they want to buy the blood in the next crash like they did in 2000) so I'm curious why you wouldn't just keep that part of your portfolio in cash like he does? Now me personally I think that strategy is kind of dated because the dollar has lost 39% of its value over the last twelve months because it's only as good as the blood sweat and tears of the people who mint it. Dividend stocks like Heinz aren't good investments these days either, since as far as I can tell, those dividends have been coming straight out of the stock's value. Even Buffett turned his back on them. A tidal wave has been rolling through this country sweeping away everyone who follows the safe socially sanctioned wisdom about investing.
Mostly because I don't trust myself to push cash into the market when there is blood on the streets. Or really ever, for that matter. Both due to thinking "everything is still overvalued" as well as decision paralysis even when/if I do feel the time is generally right.
I'm generally overly conservative, so this is somewhat of a middle ground. Along the lines of the best diet is the one you can consistently stick with, not necessarily the most theoretically optimal one. Same goes with investing for me.
I intellectually understand it's likely a worse bet than just dumping 100% into VTI or whatnot, but investing isn't simply a mathematical game - at least in my case.
> A tidal wave has been rolling through this country sweeping away everyone who follows the safe socially sanctioned wisdom about investing.
Agreed. I'd be retired now if I would have been able to shake the conventional wisdom in this area and just YOLO'ed it.
Math is only useful when you apply it to something that has value, like knowledge. Warren Buffett got it by reading balance sheets all day. He'd see through all the smooth talking and marketing because of it. One of the things that makes the system broken these days is no one has time to do what he did. People just park their money in passive funds like VTI. I'd be surprised if even Vanguard read these companies balance sheets. Although I know the fund managers care a lot about environment social governance.
What are you going off? CPI? For thousands of years gold has been the benchmark of currencies. For example you can read the Code of Hammurabi from Ancient Babylon where they used gold and silver as their currency, and then convert the figures mentioned in their laws. You'd be surprised by how invariant everything seems. https://justine.lol/inflation/ CPI isn't a trustworthy indicator. The government can't tell the truth about inflation because retirees all own TIPS so the government would have to pay them obscene amounts of money if the official numbers went up, which it can't afford, because the whole reason the government is debasing the currency in the first place is to pay for all the other benefits it gives to retirees.
39% just doesn't pass basic muster. in the past year, my rent hasn't near-doubled. it doesn't cost anywhere near twice as much as last year to buy food or clothing or transportation. 39% inflation over the past year would mean the economy is rapidly shrinking in real terms.
Inflation benefits people like your landlord, because his property value increases while his mortgage fees go negative. The bank is basically paying him to lord over you. So maybe he's a nice guy and doesn't make life harder for you when he's doing so well. Equities have concomitantly appreciated in value, keeping the overall economy worth about the same, but the gains get redistributed to more modern companies while everyone else gets washed away in the rising tide. Everything else it needs some time to trickle down and cause some pain before vendors wise up. That arbitrage opportunity is what incentivizes the folks who get the printed money to do it in the first place.
> In any case, I hope Warren can experience not working at all in the few years he likely has left after being alive for over 1/3 of his country's existence!
Honestly I struggle to understand the desire of folks earning an income to wish the best for folks who have literally never struggled in their lives. This hero worship of billionaires is bizarre in the extreme. Warren Buffet earned his billions on investments from friends and family that the vast, vast majority of people have zero access to. But people keep acting as if he is some sort of genius because he was able to grow an equivalent of $1MM in investments from friends and family at a time when basically every single fucking industry in the country was growing at crazy rates. Capital begets capital. Wake me up when someone actually comes from rags and doesn't just try to weave that into their propaganda.
There's no Buffett's strategy. Market buys whatever Buffett's company bought. That's how he got unusual gains.
Moment of fame stretched over 60 year of clipping coupons off of that initial fame.
The thing that made it possible was that he was content with his performance and never tried to one up himself. He kept his fame and market interest in him simmering over six decades inatead burning out in one bright flash.
I know one anecdote is not data, but his investment in BYD all the way back in 2008 does counter that viewpoint somewhat - his investment success in the BYD case isn’t from other investors following him in, it’s from him identifying BYD as a successful company far before any other major investors did.
> That sure does trivialize him. If that was your goal, you nailed it.
Pretty much. I'm always interested what's left once I reject te ususal narratives that people keep repeating to each other. I find this kind of excercise insightful and satisfying.
While in every working thing there's myriad of significant details, the main engine of operation is usually just one usually quite straightforward thing. I like making attempts at recognizing those main things. I'm sometimes wrong but even when I am I find satisfaction that I tried instead just repeating some selection of what other people said.
Yes its the typical attitude than gives HN users a bad name. And this particular comment doesn't seem to have done beyond surface level research either on his investment works. Maybe not even surface level. Too much confidence too little works just empty words.
I've begun to call it (in my own head) "pessimissivism", a fatal combination of being pessimistic and dismissive. It can't be unique to HN, but I find it particularly jarring that it has taken root here, given the optimistic and open-minded origins of this forum.
We are talking about about billionaires gambling with company issued casino chips while messing up the actual brick and mortar economy. Being open-minded and optimistic about this activity brought us such wonderful events as 2008.
Value investing a la Buffett and Munger is certainly not how we got 2008. Quite the opposite. In fact they were some of the most prominent individuals before 2008 outspoken about the risks of the derivatives that led to 2008, calling them "financial weapons of mass destruction".
There is and it’s found in float, leverage and low-volatility assets [1].
If you look at what he does, that becomes clear. If you only pay attention to how people talk about him on the internet, you’ll be misled into seeing trend following.
You can invent any strategy and you will be consistently successful if you get the flock to follow you. And if you don't, your strategy will crash and burn eventually, whatever it might be. The prolonged success of Buffet's strategy doesn't lie in the strategy. It lies solely in his fame and market followers.
He has plausible narratives for his success and that was enough to manufacture fame out of his initial random success. And the fame carried him for decades.
Cars have the benefit of transporting humans and goods around.
It's more like saying a hypothetical car which moves itself by using gasoline as a propellant rather than fuel for its combustion engine would have negative value.
Sure, using fuel (of all things) for propulsion would be one way to move a vehicle, but it would be inefficient by design.
Bitcoin, at least, was created during a time where there was no alternative to security-by-inefficency, but PoS and other consensus mechanisms are pretty battle-tested now
Bitcoin has the benefit of being the first way in human history of being able to transfer value between two countries in a way that a corrupt bureaucrat, judge, or customs official can't freeze, reverse, or steal it. That's the benefit Bitcoin brings humanity, and to me, I prefer it to having a car.
Proof of Stake is an absurd security proposition. Stakeholders are immediately centralized. In every single PoS coin, the governance immediately becomes the exchanges because they always hold the most coins. They can and have used this to guide PoS coins towards governance unfavorable to the users, like as happened with Steem.
Bitcoin consumes 20 to 40GW to process 7 transactions per second. Using 30GW means about 4 billion joules per transaction. And transactions per second don't scale with more electricity. It is the least efficient technology ever created.
Yeah, it makes me wonder whether I should start learning to be a carpenter or something. Those who either support AI or thinks "it's all bullshit" cite a lack of evidence for humans truly being replaced in the engineering process, but that's just the thing; the unprecedented levels of uncertainty make it very difficult to invest one's self in the present, intellectually and emotionally. With the current state of things, I don't think it's silly to wonder "what's the point" if another 5 years of this trajectory is going to mean not getting hired as a software dev again unless you have a PhD and want to work for an AI company.
What doesn't help is that the current state of AI adoption is heavily top-down. What I mean is the buy-in is coming from the leadership class and the shareholder class, both of whom have the incentive to remove the necessary evil of human beings from their processes. Ironically, these classes are perhaps the least qualified to decide whether generative AI can replace swathes of their workforce without serious unforeseen consequences. To make matters worse, those consequences might be as distal as too many NEETs in the system such that no one can afford to buy their crap anymore; good luck getting anyone focused on making it to the next financial quarter to give a shit about that. And that's really all that matters at the end of the day; what leadership believes, whether or not they are in touch with reality.
It's been some years since I've had to put ads on the web, but I found Reddit ads insanely effective. Really, Google ads have been dead for a long time. I found them hardly effective at all since maybe 2011.
A surgeon in our family got basically all his (private) clients from Google. Spend was multiple k per month. If you consider that one surgery brings in 7k in revenue, then those numbers actually make sense. He's retired now but did this up to 2y ago.
> Really, Google ads have been dead for a long time.
For you perhaps. I work with a huge amount of businesses whose profits are still driven almost entirely by them, who have seen not even a blip and make money hand over fist.
I wish I knew the difference. I’ve ran or been close to tens of businesses over the last 20 years and we’ve always paid the Google tax, but I’m not sure it’s ever had a positive ROI.
I'm not sure I'm having more fun, at least not yet, since for me the availability of LLMs takes away some of the pleasure of needing to use only my intellect to get something working. On the other hand, yes, it is nice to be able to have Copilot work away on a thing for my side project while I'm still focused on my day job. The tradeoff is definitely worth it, though I'm undecided on whether I am legitimately enjoying the entire process more than I used to.
You don't have to use LLMs the whole time. For example, I've gotten a lot done with AI and had the time to spend over the holidays on a long time side project... organically coding the big fun thing
Replacing Dockerfiles and Compose with CUE and Dagger
Is that really how most people would define optimism these days? I know that's what it meant in Voltaire's time, but something tells me that if you asked modern optimist whether they thought we lived in the best of all possible worlds, a majority of them would either say no or that they don't know.
It would seem if we think Voltaire was wrong, then the difference between pessimists and “modern” optimists is not fundamental but merely a matter of degree.
I've also had a ton of luck growing corn in 5 gallon buckets with holes drilled in the side to allow air into the soil which keeps the roots from balling up (wasting energy that should go into growing ears). Used potting mix with a handful of lime and a handful of epsom salt, and topped the buckets with mulch to retain moisture.
If you're willing to try that approach, this was very similar to my system:
Can anyone really blame the students? If I were in their shoes, I probably wouldn't bother studying CS right now. From their perspective, it doesn't really matter whether AI is bullshit in any capacity; it matters whether businesses who are buying the AI hype are going to hire you or not.
Hell, I should probably be studying how to be a carpenter given the level at which companies are pushing vibe coding on their engineers.
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