> You are copying what active investors (in aggregate) are doing so if they’re fueling a bubble so are you.
The "in aggregate" is doing some heavy lifting here. Active management holds concentrated positions in certain investments because they think they will outperform. Active folks believe they have found market inefficiencies, whereas passive folks lean towards the market being (relatively) efficient (enough) and chasing returns won't work (at least for most people):
To be a little more precise, the version of active investing available to retail investors rarely outperforms. Some shops are very good, but they aren't taking retail money.
> People passively invest because active investing rarely outperforms passive.
Active rarely outperforms… after fees:
> […] We're a hundred students into class, 99 people make a left shoe, one person makes a right shoe. One of the students in the class made a right shoe." And then I say, "A pair of shoes goes for $100." I also made a left shoe. And so I approached the only person with the right shoe and they said, "Karl Marx said that how much time you spent making something determines its value. We both spent the whole day making it. I propose that we both get 50 bucks and then we sell the one pair of shoes."
> And then regardless of who the student is or what their political beliefs are, by the way, they always turn down that offer. They immediately say, "No way, you're not getting $50 for this." And I say, "Well, explain to me why you feel that that's the case." And then they say, "Well, I have all negotiation power because they're 98 other people in the class that I could go to for a left shoe. I have the thing in short supply, you have the thing in large supply. So who gets all the rents?" Then I say, "Well, how much do you think the person with the right shoe gets?" And invariably the class comes to the conclusion that it's somewhere between 99 and a hundred dollars, so that almost everything goes to the person who has the one right shoe.
> And so after saying that, I say to them, "Well, to do investment management, I need two inputs. Instead of the left and the right shoe. I need investible money and I need mutual fund managers skill. Now tell me which one of the two is in short supply." And so very quickly they come to the conclusion that having investible money makes you in no way special, because everybody has investible money. And so it's very difficult to call that a skill in short supply. The skill of the manager is something that is in short supply. Who is going to go home with the rents from this process? Just like the right shoe owner, they go home with everything, the manager goes home with everything. And so the value added is entirely absorbed by the manager in terms of fees. Which by the way is exactly the same reason for why the net alpha is zero. Because in this left and right shoe example, the net alpha is the amount of money the left shoe owner goes home with.
oh great..I'd almost forgotten about that... what I found really funny was they just infected every USB key that vending machine had until a worker bought one...No fancey targeting, just cheap usb keys and patience.
> The car just thinks it can't get a signal, instead of missing one of its radios if you unplugged the cellular module.
I read comments that this may still not be ideal, as when you take it a dealer service (especially during the warranty period), all the collected data is cached locally and may eventually get uploaded to the proverbial mothership at that time. If you can/could tell it to stop collecting generally, then there's nothing to upload, antenna or not.
Not sure how valid this thinking is, but it is worth considering as a 'threat model'.
The seems to be recent proof that smart TVs actually do this caching. If a shitty TV from walmart does it you can safely bet it is implemented in your 50K car.
> There are plenty of AWDs that operate as FWD 90% of the time, only engaging the rear as needed. (I am told this is for fuel efficiency but the logic escapes me.)
AIUI, you lose energy because the power/torque has to go through an extra differential, transfer case, etc, before reaching the rear wheels.
Going from the engine through the transmission to the front wheels is already a 'fixed cost', but the extra mechanics (and their friction loses) to the rear wheels an 'OpEx' that you don't necessarily have to pay if you don't need to.
>> the extra mechanics (and their friction loses) to the rear wheels an 'OpEx' that you don't necessarily have to pay
True for a FWD v RWD car decisions, but in an AWD are not the rear differential and driveshaft still turning whenever the rear wheels are turning? Even the clutch packs should still be rotating even if disengaged. The fact that there is no power through them doesn't mean they aren't generating losses.
It depends. With conventional AWD (like all Subarus), you are correct that there is significant energy loss due to the AWD because there is a drivetrain to the rear wheels, even if it is not delivering power.
Many hybrids, however, have AWD and they work by having a second, small electric motor that powers the rear wheels only when needed. That means no physical drivetrain to the rear wheels, so no energy loss. That's why a hybrid Toyota RAV4 AWD gets about 15% better gas mileage than the smaller and lighter hybrid Subaru Crosstrek AWD.
The disadvantage of the electric motor approach is that it cannot deliver as much power to the rear wheels as a conventional physical AWD drivetrain can. That said, probably only an issue in deep mud or snow.
Well, no physical drivetrain to the front half of the car would make a difference. But even with electric motors in the rear there is a drivetrain between the wheel and the motor. If the idle rear electric motors are is still spinning then the total mass of spinning parts might well approach the mass of a Subaru drivetrain. Driveshafts are very light.
It sounds like the savings are more in construction costs than fuel savings.
> If the opportunity ever arrived and we entered some kind of Mad Max lawlessness, they would instantly start to murder and plunder just like barbarians out of fiction.
In the aftermath of various disasters, history has shown that people tend to help each other out:
> I think the seductive appeal of Gordon Gekko is meant to illustrate something fundamental about the human condition. We are all susceptible to temptation, whether it involves pleasure, money, status, or power.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago:
> The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.
> Well, it doesn't just look that way they really did have a lot of fun. In fact that's really all they could do is have fun and more fun and more on top of that, until it wasn't so much fun anymore. But what they couldn't do was just be. They just couldn't face that.
Blaise Pascal in his Pensées (Thoughts):
> When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves at court or in war, whence arise so many quarrels, passions, bold and often bad ventures, etc., I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. A man who has enough to live on, if he knew how to stay with pleasure at home, would not leave it to go to sea or to besiege a town. A commission in the army would not be bought so dearly, but that it is found insufferable not to budge from the town; and men only seek conversation and entering games, because they cannot remain with pleasure at home. […]
> Whatever condition we picture to ourselves, if we muster all the good things which it is possible to possess, royalty is the finest position in the world. Yet, when we imagine a king attended with every pleasure he can feel, if he be without diversion, and be left to consider and reflect on what he is, this feeble happiness will not sustain him; he will necessarily fall into forebodings of dangers, of revolutions which may happen, and, finally, of death and inevitable disease; so that if he be without what is called diversion, he is unhappy, and more unhappy than the least of his subjects who plays and diverts himself. […]
> To endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe. You cannot hire a wise man or any other intellect to solve it for you. There's no writ of inquest or calling of witness to provide answers. No servant or disciple can dress the wound. You dress it yourself or continue bleeding for all to see.
> "The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good."
The whole paragraph from where that line is extracted:
> Teldar Paper, Mr. Cromwell, Teldar Paper has 33 different vice presidents each earning over 200 thousand dollars a year. Now, I have spent the last two months analyzing what all these guys do, and I still can't figure it out. One thing I do know is that our paper company lost 110 million dollars last year, and I'll bet that half of that was spent in all the paperwork going back and forth between all these vice presidents. [some chuckles from audience] The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated. In the last seven deals that I've been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pretax profit of 12 billion dollars. [applause] Thank you. I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much.
Honestly has a lot of parallels to the maxim "the best programmers are the laziest". They liberate their time by automating and clever and thoughtful abstractions and by building tools so they don't need to work hard in the future. Greed and laziness both have negative connotations, but in these more nuanced contexts they aren't wholly unreasonable.
Greed and laziness are both motivating forces for humans. Sometimes they motivate people to productive ends, but not always; eg. all too often the "greater efficiency" of the lazy is achieved through cutting corners rather than optimizing processes. It seems to me that the character and principles of the actor matter a lot more in determining whether any action taken will be positive than their motivations.
> > ...you think there are the good people and the bad people,” said the man. “You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”
A little more highfalutin with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago:
> The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.
The "in aggregate" is doing some heavy lifting here. Active management holds concentrated positions in certain investments because they think they will outperform. Active folks believe they have found market inefficiencies, whereas passive folks lean towards the market being (relatively) efficient (enough) and chasing returns won't work (at least for most people):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street
"Active" and "passive" exist on a spectrum and are not binary:
* https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/133
reply