I think you are right. The fact is, social democratic societies deeply need children. Who will take care of you and run businesses when we are old? Tech cannot solve everything ; we need actual humans deal with the future! No, the Ipad IOS.32 with AI will not do that.
I live in an aging society with 'free' healthcare, where most of the resources are consumed by unhealthy people with chronic conditions (read : boomers with diabetes). A lot of large scale social programs (which I like) are built on the assumption that most of the people inside it are healthy and will not need serious care for a long time (read: full of young people).
I think that raising children produces a lot of social benefits, that unfair social expectations puts a lot of pressure on women, and we should put a LOT of value on the labor required to raise healthy and stable children.
I know a lot of front end developer who tell me that Next.js is the way to go! In your opinion, which framework will outlive the other ; django or next.js?
Very interesting. I know my opinion on this topic is not normal, but I believe that some kind of 'party' which gives a sense of 'accomplishment' is a missing ritual for scrum-agile. We deeply need some kind of religious celebration to give meaning to our work! Few individual are going to be able to cope in a purely cyclical view of their work, where the pain and sacrifices start over and over again without a sense of accomplishment. Why are programmers expected to behave like Nietzsche's superman?
Principles of congestion pricing were applied rather successfully in electricity markets.
Having public congestion prices for electricity makes it easier for investor to understand what needs funding ; do we need more power plants, or more electric lines?
I whish these principles could be applied elsewhere, since ''congestion pricing'' often reflect the need for better systemic public infrastructure (aka a network or a market maintenance cost), while ''regular prices'' are often tied to private business (aka a node, or an entrepreneur).
*wouldn't the most accurate advice be to ignore all the marketing*
Your point is right, but I'm afraid that the underlying advice is not applicable. First of all few people are truly in control of their attention span, and we are all exposed to marketing wether we like it or not. You might as well ask a dog to ignore the smell of food.
*If people are inundated with marketing telling them to be active investors, telling them to be a more informed active investor is not the solution*
The problem with some popular financial apps is that the marketing is 'built in as a feature'. My banking app allows me to create a 'saving account', which sounds like a good think to do right? However if I click, I will have ''investing options'' to choose, which are all financial product sold by the institution. These types of 'financial dark patterns' are all over the industry. In Canada, I consider those to be built in by law, and are not likely to change any time soon.
Managing investor bias is not something you can achieve with a mathematical argument; it requires patience, trial and error. People who are bombarded with marketing about stock trading will avoid ETF and trade stocks. I think that a lot of them would benefit a learning environment which was not created by financial institution to sell them products in the first place. You could then introduce a feature, where the apps suggest some ETF information if the portfolio is hyper concentrated in a few stock, etc.
Hi! I have a Msc in finance and a CFA. I've worked as a professional quantitative investor, and I've never purchased a single stock for myself!
I had a view similar to yours regarding ETF and average investors until 3 months ago. For many reasons, I decided to become more active on social media in order to increase financial literacy. I was shocked by the amount of marketing the 'middle class' are exposed to. Competition is intense, and giving good financial advice is actually an uphill battle. I consider this environment to be toxic for the average individual.
Is this app perfect? probably not. However, I view this type of initiative as an improvment!
I'm not a 'pure tech guy', but I know enough to do project management and challenge devs of tech choices given a business objective.
I work at a startup for 50% of my normal wage. If the project fail, I simply go back to BigBankInc, work there 1 year or 2, and start again. Easy!
Of course my personal budget and lifestyle are very minimalist, I basically sacrificed my hobbies for my busines project. However I am totally happy with this decision, it improved my mental health a lot. I attribute this kind of 'needs arbitrage' as an outcome of my meditation practice.
Do note however that I do not have a family (yet)...
I want to help people aged 18-34 get better with their finances and economic thinking. By doing so, they can emancipate themselves and stop giving their soul to the boomercracy in exchange for financial security they don't need. I started a newsletter, I use twitter for R&D, and I expect to start an instagram with videos and infographics soon.
Eventually I could develop a neat budgeting app which help people realize that the point of money is to finance their needs, from physiological to spiritual.
In my experience, the public VS private debate is a false dichotomy. Here is why :
- What influences your day to day experience is the size of the firm for which you work. Big gov and big corp have much more in common than a startup and a small charity group. Think about how the abundance of ressources, staff, speed of change, stability and reputation management will affect your job. Big firms often have two employees for the same role (in case one of them goes away), while small firm often have two roles for the same employee.
- For most people, ''vision'' is a buzzword. By construction, it should come out of your imagination ; it is a desired change on actual reality. This is why vision jobs are less secure than 'pragmatic' jobs. Sense of purpose is an experience where your action are aligned with your vision ; you understand how your work builds the vision. It gives fire in the belly!
- Money being a lag indicator of the state of affairs, profit or security seeking people (which are the same thing with a different name) often end up in big organizations. People with a strong sense of purpose would rather want to join a small group with an non-established business model which aims to change the world.
In other words :
Profit & Security => Established & working business model => big organization => hierarchy with redundance => low sense of purpose
Financial risk => Unproven business model => small firm => too much jobs for few people => high sense of purpose.
As an ex-power trader active in the californian market, his analysis is incomplete.
The pricing of wholesale market depends on many factors, including
1) the amount of electricity consumed at time T (quantity)
2) the variation on that amount at time T (delta of your quantity)
3) the location (delivery fee for your quantity)
The problem with solar in californa is that electricity is produced when the market does not need it, and that it stops production when the demand increases. The current reality is that 'green' power generation increases the dependance on 'brown' power source for reliability reasons. Your can read more about this here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
That ''net metering'' thing is to electricity prices what Santa Claus is to christmas presents.
In my view, 'experiences' (time) are alway related to 'things' (assets) :
- The experience of sleep requires a bed
- The experience of cooking requires groceries and kitchen tools
- The experience of being an elite requires a fancy diploma
And if the experience does not requires an asset, it is usually because you are borrowing (lending) the asset of another party
- The experience of consulting a psyghologist requires him to have a diploma
- The experience of traveling requires the airline business to maintain a fleet
- The experience of creating a startup to change the world requires borrowed equity at a given rate
I plan to discuss this stuff in my upcoming newsletter about personal finance. People who are all about 'buying experiences not things' are usually priviledged hot heads whose social and professional situation allow them pay high borrowing fees in order to not deal with the logistic of managing their own assets.
The labor theory of value is an old marxist economic theory which is not used by serious social scientists in their field.
The modern approach is called the opportunity cost, and by definition is a counterfactual scenario. It is triggered by a choice you actually have. Otherwise it's called science fiction.
This article does a very average job at explaining the whole thing... Even the Elon Musk example is not accurate. The value of Tesla in the ''without Elon'' scenario is wrong, because in that case Elon would be *replaced* by another overconfident nerd. Just think of Apple without Steve Jobs ; he got replaced by something different, and the firm is still standing strong today...
Good counterfactual thinking is super important, but I do not feel that the author is a master of the art.
By trying to bond with people on an emotional level rather than an intellectual one.
After all, do you want to *be right*, or do you want to connect? At some point I realized that it made no sense to complain about loneliness because I am a brainy type AND simultaneously refuse to engage with other's emotions because they are not brainy as I am.
The book which helped me the most is *non violent communication*. Its like an universal protocol, but still filter the bullshit.
edit: Of course, as other said, growing out of your mental tendency takes years and is still a work in progress. But with this type of thing the way is the destination.
Zen buddhism. I started going to a local zendo about 7-8 years ago to do a weekly 1h30 hour meditation (in fact, 3 short bursts of 25min). This also became a (much shorter) daily habit, and over the year I attend various retreats (from 1 to 5 days). The zendo itself is 'managed' by a monastic.
I started because I wanted to have a crazy experience that would modify my epistemiological understanding of the world. Over the years, I discovered how past emotional events subcounsciously influenced my decision making, how much parental roles shaped my romantic views and how much of my personality was invested in my mind and not my body. I could go on and on.
I cannot prove this scientifically, but somehow I think that my effort toward zen practice made all of this possible, and the only thing I know is that the next change will be weirder than the last one.
I would also like to mention that, even if meditation is ''not christian'', I now feel that my understanding of it is better now than 8 years ago.
I've actually had the opportunity to practice a bit of zen meditation within a traditional framework (Rinzai Zen) which is very close to what Leonard Cohen experienced.
In my humble opinion, spirituality is to religion what 'passion for fitness' is to a gym. A gym is an organisation with rules, employees, a boss, location, history, etc. Some people go there in order to get a 'healthy person' identity, meet friends, and to make sure that their body image fits the attractivness metrics of the society in which they live. The actual experience of pushing iron and sweating is an inconvenient.
I live in an aging society with 'free' healthcare, where most of the resources are consumed by unhealthy people with chronic conditions (read : boomers with diabetes). A lot of large scale social programs (which I like) are built on the assumption that most of the people inside it are healthy and will not need serious care for a long time (read: full of young people).
I think that raising children produces a lot of social benefits, that unfair social expectations puts a lot of pressure on women, and we should put a LOT of value on the labor required to raise healthy and stable children.