anthony_r

The market value of stocks and corporate bonds is pretty much always larger than the book value of the underlying companies. If this is not the case you've found yourself in a 1931-type of a bargain.

The delta between the book value and the securities pricing is the estimated future profits. Now how exactly did you arrive at the conclusion that the future profits estimation is too high?

> "As the total value of the global financial market outgrew the value of the real economy" - the first sentence

What the hell is this supposed to mean? What is "value" here, can financial markets conjure more houses, crops or datacenter capacity? Or does it mean that "market prices of securities" have outpaced the "market prices of" .. "the real thing"? Like, seriously, what?

Let's end, indeed :)

> you're not making a great case for why people don't need to know what a sigma algebra is

I can assure you most people that do stats / data mining / big data / machine learning do not know or do not remember any more what a sigma algebra is.

> wouldn't it be swell if this is how we practiced medicine too? patient has early stages of atherosclerosis just do a triple-bypass or something, it just works.

C'mon writing websites is not surgery. There are some people with deep knowledge required in the industry as a whole, but you really don't know to know much to write an app or a website, especially an internal corporate tool. And this is where most working hours are spent.

It's the reality of things. I mean just look at the OP link. Do you think this is targeted at people that already know what a sigma algebra is?

This is a super common issue that people are raising over and over again, but there's already a solution for this: split teaching into technical and non-technical. In some countries universities are split along this axis.

Take statistics for example - most people that know something about statistics don't exactly know what a statistical space is (and it is a very precisely defined concept, embedded in the set theory). And that's fine, that's for the "pure" nerds. How to use it can be taught without defining the roots and proving theorems from the ground up. It is also how most of software development is done, few people out there that write code understand how CPUs fetch and execute instructions, talk to other perhipherials, how does malloc()_or sin() work, what is a page fault, or how to balance a red-black tree. Just use std::map or dict() or something, it just works :)

This is not directly about 51% attacks.

This is about chain splits.

No, that's only one example. Or rather a simple pattern for how to spot some antifragility in the wild (has it been around for a long time? well then it's likely antifragile).

Consider a portfolio of out of the money options, with some short closer to the money options to "collect premium". This is how Taleb made good amount of his money while trading options back in the day (I personally call such setups "a Taleb trade"). He himself describes it as "trades that make little money on small moves, lose medium amounts on medium moves, win a lot on big moves". But this has absolutely nothing to do with Lindy.

A Lindy "trade" would be something like hoarding gold. It's been around for sooooooo long.

> Antifragile: what doesn't kill you makes you stronger

No, you've missed the point of the book (or haven't read it). It's about that some things become better in the presence of error/noise/damage/volatility. But not all things, some other, fragile things, become worse and worse as damage accumulates. And that there's no word for such a property, so he calls it "Antifragile". And then the book goes in great detail about lots and lots of examples (with the usual rambling).

Shocking.

(sorry for a dumb comment but I tried to match the surprise value and the significance of this finding; you will not believe what comes next!)

Yes there are commonly clever people that know how to play organizational ladders with minimum amount of work in every sufficiently large organization. Also a fair amount of "morons".

Or maybe finally learn mechanics 101 - what the conservation of momentum is. The kind of stuff we expect to understand from smart 16 year olds.

This is the physics equivalent of someone writing a brute-force recursive SAT solver and wondering why it takes so long. Perhaps we don't measure time correctly? What if mirrors are an illusion? We mustn't stop advancing the field!

Well people that buy cars actually like the VW's more, look up sales/registration data in Europe.

Such office hours could have a price. Given how much consultants charge it wouldn't be unreasonable to charge $500/hour (being a maintainer comes with deep knowledge).

Yes, it did in fact cost 500x more to buy, temporarily. Price is not determined by the cost of production but by supply and demand. Haven't you seen the extent of damage in Texas? What do you think people were willing to pay for electricity to not have this damage?

Otherwise you can have a command-and-control economy, like the Soviet Union had (I'm not being sarcastic). Then a person/group in charge would decide who gets the remaining supply, rather than the price-driven market.

Energy has always been a very delicate piece of engineering, sensitive to short term disruptions. Whether or not that energy is distributed via capitalist markets or not, whether it's electrical energy, gas or oil or whatever else.

It's not the infrastructure that (temporarily) costs this much. It's the power that runs through it. There was simply no power.

> Unusually frigid temperatures knocked out nearly half of the state’s power plants in mid-February

They were short on the futures/forward contracts, i.e. they had to provide electricity, but there was none. When shit hits the fan someone has to foot the bill, and here it is them (among other such players).

What exactly is a startup here?

(serious question)

The "mania" is in the public perception & pricing of securities. Many "mania" companies were legitimate, or at least had legitimate parts in it (look at the example of GameStop, there's nothing wrong with the company, but it was hilariously overpriced).

VA Linux is one of those prime examples of stock market mania. Close behind in terms of scale and similar in terms of philosophy/narrative (of the good small man sticking it to the evil big machine) to what we saw recently with GameStop. It is even a featured example in recent editions of The Intelligent Investor.

The more things change the more they stay the same.

I tried doing that sometime in mid or maybe late 2000's. The manufacturer said I'd have to return the hard disk (on which the system was technically installed, on some shadow partition) and pay for the replacement cost of the disk with an amount that's surprisingly close to the cost of the license that would be returned to me (netting me ~0). Being a teenager I just stopped there.

You're not seeing the other side of the coin - the huge amount of spam and abuse that such systems correctly identify and remove. If every abuser requests those explanations (which they will) there will be far more spam going around the Internet.

Just think about the army of "Facebook content moderators" who were a popular topic on HN recently due to the concerns over their mental health.

(I am offering no solutions here, for I know none)

Lol no, that would be a very serious accounting fraud. That is exactly what Enron did - they used to sign a contract and immediately book all the projected profits.

Here's how it works:

1) If the goods weren't delivered and the customer hasn't paid then they're in the inventory on the balance sheet (assuming the goods were already produced) and nothing is in the income statement.

2) If the goods were delivered but the customer hasn't paid then this is in accounts receivable on the assets in the balance sheet and in the revenue in the income statement.

3) If the goods were delivered and the customer has paid then this is in cash on the balance sheet and in the revenue in the income statement.

4) If the goods weren't delivered but the customer has already (pre)paid then this is in cash on the balance sheet, but also in deferred revenue in liabilities, and not in the revenue in the income statement.

TL;DR: you can only recognize revenue if you deliver the product/service, until that time it's either just inventory (asset) or inventory(asset)+cash(asset)+deferred revenue(liability). AMD revenue = chips delivered to customers in the quarter.

Exactly. Only one of these paths does not have a hidden/probabilistic cost. Hard to say what's the market rate for exposing yourself to criminal prosecution, it's not like there's a hedging market for such things.

Though if as a corp you cover the black market rate fully then there's really no reason for a researcher to ever sell on the black market.

I did not distinguish between large and small investors, but pretty sure there are enough institutions on board.

To be honest most of the "credit" comes from Wall Street. Yes, Tesla wouldn't have been profitable if you subtracted the credits but it is absolutely not worth as much as the market says with the credits or even with 3x the credits it got.

And the $TSLA price it's not just some random number mostly irrelevant to daily operations of the company, they sold/issued many shares at such valuations.

Not my website, also I don't vouch for the accuracy :). Though I do use it myself.

BTW, as of late Tesla isn't at all the big leader over there:

https://eu-evs.com/marketShare

All developed countries "emit" a lot of CO2 by importing goods manufactured overseas in countries that are heavily reliant on fossil fuels including coal. There's just no going around the fact that this is a global problem.

It is 1% of all US federal tax revenue. It is not insignificant.

Also, insane that your health plan costs as much as the average citizen's share in all federal taxes (which also include corporate taxes, tariffs and whatnot).

Mortgages are so f* insane when you do the basic maths, such as 1/downpayment to get the leverage. If you just presented the numbers differently nobody would have ever signed up for one except people like Victor Niederhoffer.

And on top of that most of the underwriting is on central government balance sheet via frankenstein constructs like fnma.

Sheesh..

> People do not lose their shirts when leveraged real estate purchases go wrong, because it's the bank holding the bag

That is not true, both parties suffer. Imagine paying 10 years worth of mortgage in a place turned bad (NY in 80s, Detroit recently, Greece even more recently) and finding out that you're still in very negative equity. All your payments have been for nothing, and the most reasonable course of action is to go bankrupt and have the house foreclosed.

Also, US mortgages are on central government balance sheet, not bank balance sheet, so it's the taxpayer that suffers.