First, I'm not sure there's a strong case that our lifestyles today are any more sedentary than in, say, the 1970s (when obesity rates were around 12% rather than 30%). We had cars, transit, elevators, escalators, school buses, television, keyboards, etc. in the 1970s, while at the same time "going to the gym" was just not something that average people did on a regular basis. Even going jogging was mildly eccentric.
Second, this is looking at resting metabolic rates, not overall calorie expenditure, although there is probably some association between RMR and physical activity.
Which brings me to the third point, which is that you're just shifting the burden of answering question of "why are we fat?" to "why are we sedentary?". If we are in fact increasingly sedentary, it could be that an outside factor is causing both low RMR and sedentary behavior. Anecdotally, I (as a comparatively skinny person) have a lot harder time sitting still than some of my friends and acquaintances that struggle with their weight. They might consider spending a day in bed as a great way to recharge, whereas it is something I would only do if I were pretty miserably ill.
I don't think any significant portion of the population is going to the gym regularly these days. There is definitely a fitness community, but most people just sit around and eat.
They will be in the coming decades as the population ages. The direct and indirect effects of sitting all day long are going to be incredibly costly to the society, and the only reasonable policy would be to combat our car addiction by any means necessary – and this is even distegarding all the other disastrous externalities of widespread personal car use!
I kind of wonder how much of a role climate control has to play as well. Surely must have a role alongside straightforward inactivity.. until pretty recently, people would burn a lot of calories just regulating body temperature indoors. People with outdoor jobs/lifestyles obviously still do.
My understanding from one of the articles was that McDonalds wanted them to make a special model that did away with some portion of the manual process in favor of press-button maintenance, and they did.
Unfortunately, it turns out that it's hard to replicate the reliability and adaptability of human manual labor mechanically sometimes.
The point is that McD-corp gets IceC-corp big money by mandating a single machine from them. IceM(achine)-corp do this through broken maintenance process. Hence IceM-corp see machines very often and ensures as a third party that food-safety of ice-cream produced by these machines is satisfied. This is what McD-corp is getting back from it. They don't trust die Franchises and let them pay money for their own inspection.
I don’t know about your reduced capacity argument. The reason Buffett sold his airline shares so low is he foresees supply outstripping demand for quite some time in the industry. Presumably that would apply to other travel/experience stuff as well. And for gasoline I think the Saudis et al can ramp up preeetttyyy quickly.
I think the airline industry is sort of uniquely vulnerable vs other travel/experience related industries: in the short term, supply may outstrip demand for some time against a relatively fixed cost base; and in the medium term, there may be limited ability to scale back up rapidly if airlines are unable to re-recruit pilots and crews they had to let go to deal with the short term.
Care to elaborate on some of your points/concerns here? I’m not an expert, but it sounds like short interest is still so high that if a coordinated group can hold the line they’ll squeeze the shorts. But you and other posters make it sound like that isn’t possible. Can you or anyone else explain why not?
It's possible in theory, but very unlikely in practice.
A short squeeze is a very temporary event. Once it's over, the share price will begin to decline quickly. Anyone left holding shares on the way down will lose their money. Moreover, if they only joined to squeeze the shorts, they'll lose their purpose. Despite what the memes say, they'll absolutely start selling when it looks like there isn't any more money to be made.
WSB presents an extremely over-simplified version of the stock market. They look at graphs of short interest and assume that no new short positions have been opened since this started. In reality, hedge funds are likely closing and opening short positions all day, every day. They're trying to push the idea that total short interest is a valid indicator of when the squeeze has started, but it's not valid at all.
Frankly, the level of misinformation coming out of WSB can no longer be attributed to Redditors having fun making memes. They deliberately remove comments and accounts that don't toe the line or pump the stock. They deliberately push flawed ideas to convince newcomers to buy more shares. They're pumping the stock, and the early GME buyers will take advantage of the pump by dumping their shares. It's basically a pump-and-dump at this point.
What you've said is great. I'd just like to add that the idea that Reddit is holding strong is actually wrong already. Although all over the net you only see people posting about HODL and [rocket emoji] [rocket emoji] GME to infinity!!!!!, in reality many retail investors have been exiting positions and quietly taking their profits. I suspect that many are early investors who run with their money and then just don't post about it to avoid being ostracized for "squeezebreaking."
Matt Levine saw the Citadel order flow (so Robinhood investors' orders) over the past week[1] and, contrary to what you'd expect, there were only more net buy orders than sell orders on Monday. Every other day, there were more sells than buys, to end the week overall at about a 1:1 ratio.
What to make of this? I think that this is pretty clear indication that early WSBers (who got in at sub-100) are smartly taking their profits and running. What we're going to see at the end of the day is a pretty significant wealth transfer, but unlike what the news is parroting, it is going to be a wealth transfer from the starry-eyed lowest rungs of society to the upper-middle class and large institutions who have gone long on GME. When those driving the narrative on WSB and the Wall Street trading desks exit, the mom and pops who heard about this on the morning news and got in at 200+ are going to be left holding the bag.
Big banks own upwards of twice as much as retail. What is the big banks target price and what is retails target price?
Over on WSB they're going nuts claiming that 5k isn't a meme.
The banks aren't holding until then. If they decide to offload at, say, 600, then retail will be left with the bag since the bank selloff will drop the price down dramatically.
That's the claim as I've seen it made on the /r/stocks subreddit.
I have a lot of shares. In at $17. I'm not sure what to think. I've already taken out 5x my initial investment. I've been doing as much research as I can to determine how high this could go, partially for my own benefit, but I also want to "hold the line."
Who knows what would have happened had RobinHood and others not shut down buying. I'm pretty sure I would have retired.
> Who knows what would have happened had RobinHood and others not shut down buying. I'm pretty sure I would have retired.
This is another misconception: Robinhood didn't exactly choose to shut down buying. The extreme volatility required significant extra collateral to be posted, which Robinhood probably didn't have the money for. This is why they had to do an emergency raise of a billion dollars and draw down their credit lines.
Robinhood also makes all accounts margin accounts by default. They try to hide the fact that trades don't settle until T+2 days by making the margin invisible to the end-user, but it still draws down their credit. Robinhood Instant [transfers] also consume margin while they wait for incoming bank transfers. Without an infinite supply of credit, it just wasn't possible to allow unlimited buying (margin buying in most cases, due to T+2 settling or bank transfer delays) of GME stock.
Congrats on the value of your shares, but I would implore you to come up with an exit strategy. Even /u/DFV has been slowly taking money off the table during this entire run-up. Don't let yourself be one of those people talking about how you had a paper gain of a million dollars for a brief moment in 2021 before you lost it all.
Simplifying things to PGE’s current plight I do agree with you.
The larger problem is as the GP mentions the misaligned incentives. Here in Sacramento we have SMUD, which is a publicly owned utility. No shut offs here. I have a friend who’s an arborist for SMUD. Before that he was an arborist for PGE.
For years at PGE he was trying to jump to SMUD. Why? Because they place a higher value on his services. PGE, being beholden to shareholders, treated him as 1099 and paid significantly less.
PGE shuts off power in part because they don’t keep their lines clear. Because they didn’t employ enough people like my friend. And those they do employ don’t stay longer than they need to.
Short-term shareholder incentives don’t align with long-term incentives of the public in this case. It’s a problem. Pointing out that California’s government has flaws doesn’t negate that point.
The wage PG&E pays doesn't tell us anything about whether they have enough arborists though. All that anecdote tells us is that SMUD is willing to pay arborists a high wage.
I have a public electric company in upstate new york. They have more reliable service and cheaper prices. They come through every year and butcher all the trees to prevent ice storms from knocking the power out. Highly recommended 5/5.
If it's an interest-only mortgage, and you are sure the value isn't going to go down, then fine.
But if you're putting in capital, you have to factor in the cost of money. There are far better things to do with $500k than to park it in an asset that doesn't appreciate.
And of course, you have to factor in the risk that the price will actually drop. Risk isn't free either: it doesn't make sense to take a risk that you may lose money, unless there's a counter probability that you will actually gain money instead.
Even if your monthly payment was less than your rent, you still might be better off doing something else. To get a good interest rate you need 75% LTV; which means on a $500k house you need to put up $125k up front. You might be better taking that $125k and investing it in an S&P500 index fund, and then paying rent, than taking that $125k and putting it into a house and making a mortgage payment. (Obviously you need to do the actual math here to see if it makes sense or not.)
<EDIT>And of course there's the diversification aspect too. If your net worth is $300k ($500k house + $50k other investments - $250k mortgage), it would normally be a really poor decision to have 166% of that ($300k / $500k) in a single asset, whose value could drop drastically for any number of reasons.
All that to say -- if your house isn't an investment, it had better be significantly cheaper than renting before it makes financial sense.</EDIT>
From a societal flexibility perspective, it's much better if most people rent; particularly poorer people who can't as easily from the economic shock of having their house lose all its value. If the bottom fell out of the economy in the city I'm in, and my house's price dropped by half, I could afford to cut my losses and start over. A lot of people are stuck.
I'm told that Germany is very different. It's not at all expected that people strive to own their own home; people rent the same place for decades and are perfectly happy. Because they've never had out-of-control housing prices (at least, not in the last few decades), they can keep things rational.
If the UK's policies suddenly looked like Germany's I'd probably take a massive haircut on the house I own. Personally, I'd be willing to do that if I knew it would make things better for other people; I'd be OK financially. But a lot of people wouldn't, so I understand why it's difficult to change.
ROI on paying rent vs mortgage is negative due to no equity building and the opportunity cost of that money disappearing vs paying yourself with each principle portion of your mortgage payment.
We all need a place to live so a house serves a physical utility as well that other investments do not, in addition to being able to collect unlimited rent when the mortgage is eventually paid off eventually. I think there is a lot of upside to home ownership if it is financially feasible.
You say “to get a good interest rate, you need 75% LTV.” Not true. I have a 30 year 3.25% fixed and that was at 95% LTV. Rates are damn good right now.
