To me curiosity is the most important trait. People who aren't curious seem empty, superficial and over-socialized. They lack a real identity. They seem almost unconscious to me.
I know they can grow out of it, I have seen it, but I don't have the time or energy for people at that stage of development.
Perhaps some meaning is getting lost in translation here...
If you mean curiosity as in academic achievement, then I think this is a deeply disrespectful way of thinking of other people.
If you mean curiosity as in having empathy for the people and world around you, and not being a narcissistic sociopath, then I probably agree with you.
But from what you wrote earlier, I get the impression you're talking about the former rather than the latter...
Not necessarily academic curiosity but curious to learn things and capable of critical thinking. I also think there are many 'educated idiots' so education isn't everything. There are a lot of educated people who are good at repeating complex-sounding catchphrases like parrots when promoted with the right questions; that's not intelligence.
That's not the whole story though. Often, what is more important is how stable the oil is below the smoke point. There's a pretty decent video on this by Adam Ragusea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_aFHrzSBrM
> then git gives you the tools to ensure the repos you control are not rewritten
I might betray my ignorance here, but what tools are those?
If I host a git repo, then I can obviously ensure that any branches on the origin are never rewritten. But how can I ensure that people who submit pull requests have not rewritten their history?
> I can obviously ensure that any branches on the origin are never rewritten
That is all I meant. As you say, people can still rewrite their own history on their own computer before submitting it.
We could get philosophical about what "history" is. If I press backspace am I rewriting history? What granularity are we talking here? If I make change X by frequently committing and then squash, have I rewritten history? If I make the exact same change X with one big commit at the end (no squashing), have I not rewritten history? Whether or not I rewrote history the pull request at the end is the same. Or what if I'm using jj which amends a "working commit" hundreds of times, have I rewritten history?
Ultimately the division of changes into commits is a matter of authorship, a creative endeavor. I'd prefer to do this creative work with whatever tools I choose, but if you force me to never squash, I can still achieve the same creative output using other tools or by altering how I work. At no point were commits ever an actual history, they were always a presentation of the history the author chose to present.
(I've rambled on here, most of this isn't meant as a direct reply to you.)
On my team we use pre-commit[0] a lot. I guess I would define the history to be something like "has this commit ever been run through our pre-commit hooks?". If you rewrite history, you'll (usually) produce commits that have not been through pre-commit (and they've therefore dodged a lot of static checks that might catch code that wasn't working, at that point in time). That gives some manner of objectivity to the "history", although it does depend on each user having their pre-commit hooks activated in their local workspace.
> Most people don't think critically about their money
This is a bit of a naive viewpoint. Take your example of putting money in the stock market, regardless of its health and structure:
So I'll follow your advice and I'll think critically about it. I'm not an economist, but I'm technically and mathematically quite literate. And what I see is that historically, it's generally been a good idea to put money in the stock market. But of course that doesn't mean that will apply to the future.
Except, how can I tell whether the stock market is in good health? Even as an academic researcher, that is a really hard problem. The best I can do is look at the past, and then take a risk.
It's not my lack of critical thinking that is the problem. It's that it is a genuinely very hard problem.
Thinking that critical thinking is a specific thing (what makes one thought “critical” vs any other?) shows a lack or critical thinking. Thinking critically is not.
It is equally naive to assume that a retail investor could judge which professional fund managers are scammers, which are rainmakers, and which have a real edge.
The problem is that the stock market is moving in an increasingly greater-fool direction. Companies that don't ever pay dividends, companies that don't yield control rights, companies that have extensive protections for the founders, etc.
The problem with the stock market is not that its hard to tell whether you should be in or out. Its that there's so much pressure on the general population to own stock that the stock issuers can now get away with releasing essentially worthless stock (see Snapchat for an example) and still expect it to sell anyway.
Most of my family is shocked that I haven't vested in a 401k account. The fact that I haven't decided to funnel upwards of 5% of my income straight into the big craps table elicits an almost medical concern from them. They come to me in hushed tones and ask why I'm making such an obvious mistake, so I ask them why they expect their portfolios to perform well, and of course they can't answer.
I think that's what GP is talking about. I don't think it's unreasonable to put your money into stocks, but there are a ton of people in America that put a ton of money into the stock market without even getting to the point of doing some of the reasoning you do in your post.
Even if you find a job you love it’s important to save. There is always a concern especially as one ages that they may become disabled in a way that severely impacted income
The answer is that I have not, and I probably should. But my only point is that everyone seems to think that this solution is a slam dunk, and I just don't think it is.
A 401K account is tax-advantaged and can hold everything from mutual funds to T-bills. It is absolutely a mistake to not invest in one unless you never plan to withdraw.
People put money in their 401k because it’s pretax and often has an employer match. So if you don’t, you’re basically refusing compensation that your employer is including in its pay/benefits package.
If no employer match then you are giving up just the tax benefit. If you don’t really care about that then whatever you alternatively invest in for retirement planning has to already make up for what, like 30% you save in going pretax?
>And what I see is that historically, it's generally been a good idea to put money in the stock market.
I've been following the stock market since 1995 and have come to precisely the opposite conclusion
Why?
You have zero ability to predict the state of the market at the point that you need liquidity. So it doesn't matter if your portfolio increases for 20 years, if you need your liquidity during a crash, welp you're fucked.
> if you need your liquidity during a crash, welp you're fucked.
But this simply means you didn't predict that you'd need the liquidity, which is easier than predicting the crash.
You have to know that as you get older, you will likely need that liquidity more. Thus, you should be swapping illiquid assets over time, as you get older, bit by bit.
Not doing it is equivalent to taking a bigger risk than you could afford to be taking.
> predicting exactly when you are going to need your savings - eludes millions of people
it doesn't elude millions. it "eludes" those who didn't plan their financial journey, or take more risks than they should be (for example, not liquidating a chunk when planning on having a baby).
Just because people can't do it well, doesn't mean it isn't what they should be doing. Financial planning is not "put all money into the stock market and hope for the best", as the grandparent post implies.
Sure, but crashes don't make up even 10% of the total amount of time. If you needed liquidity at any other time, having been invested would have been the right thing to do. In addition, there are many options available to make more liquidity available at all times, from literal (put) options to just simple diversification and holding a part of your wealth in cash as an emergency fund.
It's good to focus on the bad outcomes as well as the good outcomes, and most people do indeed make the mistake of only considering the good outcomes. But looking at only the comparatively rare bad outcomes and then concluding that investing in the stock market is a bad idea is just availability bias.
And as you move closer to the moment you may need your money (like retirement), you should move your investment from stock to safer investments. Ideally during a hype when everything is inflated of course, but anything other than a crash is a good time to sell.
I don't think it's that hard. Just ask - is the S&P500 lower now than it was three months ago? If the answer is "yes" then maybe stay in cash and put that money in when the answer is "no".
Alternatively, if you want to get "fancy", you can use the 50/200 SMA crossover to determine entry and exit points. It's a much safer bet than "buy and hold" since it avoids massive drawdowns.
Your first suggestion is basically momentum investing [1]. But as the wikipedia article alludes to, there are some issues with this, such as a potentially high risk, that one would need to carefully consider.
I think there is a big difference between merely applying critical thinking, versus investing the necessary time into essentially becoming a semi-professional day trader.
"Buy low and sell high", while sounding good, is generally terrible advice since you only know what was "low" and "high" in retrospect. A stock (or an index, in this case) might hit a new low only for the price to crash even further. The same thing goes for highs. A stock or index making a new high may very well continue to rise.
So, instead of "buy low and sell high" it tends to be a lot easier to "buy into strength and sell into weakness".
it is actually easy to figure "high" and "low", based on price vs value of a certain stock. Warren Buffet has been doing it for a while. most people don't have that discipline and prefer momentum.
Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't Warren Buffett an activist investor who'd find undervalued stocks from companies that had poor management and, once his partnerships gained enough control, fire the current management and replace it? Sounds like a far cry from "buy low, sell high".
But you only know the derivative in retrospect, hence, he buys when the price has gone up (over 3 months) and stops when it has gone down. To me, it seems better to buy when the market has gone down for three months.
Using your example of the stock market, thinking critically about money also entails understanding how the stock market works. Most people don't understand how it's built in the first place. When buying a "stock", one is actually buying a derivative of a derivative.
Extending the idea of thinking critically about money, it's a safe bet that a majority of the population have no idea how money itself is issued or who issues it.
"Most investors when they buy a publicly traded stock believe that they own a part of some company. They think that somewhere there is a stock certificate or some indication of ownership that has their name on it, but this is not the case. When you buy a “stock” you are actually purchasing a security that affords certain entitlement rights related to registered stock which actual owners hold. The registered shares of a private company are directly owned by shareholders. In contrast, the registered shares of nearly all publicly traded equities are owned by Cede & Co., which is the nominee of the Depository Trust Company (DTC). (A nominee is a company whose name is given as having title to a stock, but does not receive the financial benefits of ownership.) Cede is a subsidiary of the Depository Trust Company (DTC) which is a subsidiary of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) and the DTCC is a private company owned by elite Wall Street firms and money center banks. If you need background or a refresher on DTC and DTCC, click on this link. Effectively, elite Wall Street firms and money center banks, not institutions and individual investors, own almost all of the registered shares of publicly traded companies in the US... Effectively, you are buying a financial derivative from brokers of a financial derivative they hold from Cede that is just a digital entry in your DTC account." [0]
The long winded post of your simply is just spreading a form of FUD.
What does owning a stock mean, if it doesn't mean owning all entitlements, rights and obligations related to said stock?
The technical financial structure is a bit irrelevant, since this structure is created to reduce transaction costs. It made ownership of stocks much more accessible, and thus, more people could buy into it.
The idea you presented - that you don't really "own" the stock, because some other party is holding it in trust - is simply not true. After all, you do the same with the money in your bank account. Unless, of course, you're one of the few people remaining that hold out with hard cash, or even physical gold.
There's copious amounts of allegations of illegal naked short selling but zero actual evidence - not even circumstantial evidence. The article mentions coincidences that might've happened, by citing how stock prices seems to adjust to news so quickly as to being evidence of it being manipulated.
Meh, appeal to authority reinforcing a densely packed post doesn't win me over. Still appreciate they took the time, and it's helpful to know details. I'd prefer it was shorter and approachable to outsiders like myself.
Ownership requires property rights but you only get contractual rights. If you want to sell your stock and you both parties want to conduct that transaction under a different jurisdiction, perhaps for tax advantage, you can't choose to do that, because you don't own the property rights.
>> The technical financial structure is a bit irrelevant
That's a pretty controversial take because:
>> since this structure is created to reduce transaction costs
It also served to ensure a middleman was enshrined in all future transactions. What if you want to change the middleman, what if you don't want a middleman at all? Like I say, controversial.
>> you don't really "own" the stock, because some other party is holding it in trust - is simply not true.
History shouts loudly for us to be cautious here but presently we're blessed with a freedom to blissfully ignore those warnings.
>> you do the same with the money in your bank account
You don't. In one scenario you're a party to a private contract and in the other you're under-written to the tune of $250k (assuming USA)
>> hold out with hard cash
What does that mean in the context of a fiat currency?
> (ignoring the fact that t takes longer to build than the available time to transition)
My understanding is that nuclear is necessary, unless you believe in very optimistic development timelines for better batteries. Yes, batteries have come a long way, but they are still a long way off from being able to support base load -- is that not correct? It might be faster to build out nuclear, than to develop the necessary improvements in battery tech...
You're not completely off, the IEA recommends still building out nuclear and keeping existing plants alive. [0]
I've seen several analysis' such as [1] that tend point towards renewables being cheaper than nuclear power, even when taking transmission and storage into account. Better transmission cables to require less storage, plus overprovisioning and using the surplus power to create e-fuels and similar is a pretty viable alternative.
So the short answer is - is nuclear necessary? - no. Is building out new nuclear cheaper than building out new renewables + storage? Also probably no - but that might change if small scale modular reactors really take off.
However is keeping nuclear plants around a good idea? Absolutely.
Here (Australia) we've been using large battery parks to offset peak daytime solar into the evening peak demand periods.
eg. [1] ( $$ == AUD Australian )
French firm Neoen will build a mega battery in Collie after winning a two-year contract to smooth out energy supply and demand in Western Australia’s south-west grid, which is under strain from soaring midday peak supply from rooftop solar and ageing coal-fired power stations.
The battery, to be constructed from 224 Tesla “Megapacks”, can store 219 megawatts of energy for four hours during the day and discharge it back to the grid during high demand in the evening when solar generation falls.
...
UGL, a subsidiary of Spanish-owned CIMIC, has started construction on one of four grid-scale batteries in the south-west of WA. No cost was provided for the battery.
Synergy is commissioning a battery in Kwinana that can store 100 megawatts for two hours that was originally meant to be operating by the end of 2022.
In the May budget, the WA government allocated $2.3 billion for two further batteries.
Synergy will build another battery at Kwinana that can store or discharge 200 megawatts for four hours that is expected to start operating by late 2024.
The cost per megawatt isn't exactly clear in the news article - I'd have to table numbers from primary sources to declutter the journalistic filter.
South Australia is also investing in new battery parks [2] (on the back of the success of one of the earliest "city scale" battery parks globally)
> we've been using large battery parks to offset peak daytime solar
Here you're saying it's already happening. And yet your quote is: "will build, to be constructed, has started construction, will build another battery..."
1) It's already happening - South Australia had the first city scale battery park in the world (2017) [1][2]
The original installation in 2017 was the largest lithium-ion battery in the world at 129 MWh and 100 MW.
It was expanded in 2020 to 194 MWh at 150 MW.
Despite the expansion, it lost that title in August 2020 to the Gateway Energy Storage in California, USA.
The larger Victorian (another Australian state) Big Battery began operations in December 2021.
2) It's still happening, more battery parks are being planned, commissioned, and built.
Worthy of note: We've weathered a battery park fire which took out two battery packs [3]
The links above are specifically about the latest builds as they represent second generation experiences and pricing .. better locked in than the first gen ("never been done before") cases.
All up Australia has almost six years of real world city scale battery park usage - a good source of reference material for any others thinking of going a similar route.
Batteries have already solved baseload for most of the planet, we just haven't rolled out enough renewables for batteries to be needed in most places. For a few years now the actual thing people worry about, if they're not heavily influenced by concern trolls, is "seasonal storage" i.e. dunkelflauts in winter which neither batteries or nuclear particularly help with.
I had to look up what a dunkelflaute is... but the last bit you said:
> i.e. dunkelflauts in winter which neither batteries or nuclear particularly help with.
doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Wikipedia defines a dunkelflaute as "a period of time in which little or no energy can be generated with wind and solar power". Isn't that precisely where you have to fall back to nuclear, battery, or fossil fuels?
Also:
> Batteries have already solved baseload for most of the planet
this runs contrary to a lot of what I've read about the topic (which doesn't mean I lot, I know -- I'm not an expert). Do you have a source I could have a look at?
It doesn't make financial sense to build batteries or nuclear to fill in a variable gap that probably won't exceed 4 weeks, and might not even happen in any particular year (or decade if you have cross country links).
It doesn't even make environmental sense compared with fossil based methane (though greener methane sources are available).
See https://twitter.com/DavidOsmond8 for a real time simulation of how Australia would cope with 5 hours of battery storage (he has some in depth articles that go through his methodology too).
And am I correct that these dunkelflautes are becoming an increasing concern because of the increased likelihood of extreme weather events? Otherwise I don't really see why this is suddenly a bigger concern now, than it was, say, 50 years ago...?
Forgive me for being sceptical, but you did state that batteries have solved base load for most of the planet. Australia is probably the least convincing example anyone could pick, due to its extremely low population density, long coastline, and high amount of sun hours. I'd be much more interested in seeing this calculation for places like China, India, Nigeria, Brazil, Russia.
Most of the world's population lives equally or nearer to the equator than Australia.
Australia has a head start on solar mostly due to low costs of capital letting people invest long term. Same reason Northern Europe deploys more solar than you'd think is globally sensible.
In a country like Sweden, wind + hydro is all you really need. You use wind when it's available and hydro when it's not, and you produce synthetic fuels using excess power. Base load and storage are bigger issues in densely populated countries with less favorable geography.
I’m surprised this is the calculus even though it makes sense as you’ve stated it.
Sweden could do well to plan on building out wind power that’s surplus to their needs (as could many other places), solely because it can be exported if you’re long term over-capacity for what you need.
Storage is the big hurdle, but there’s a lot of novel options here. Concrete batteries are a fairly simple example of creative ways to store energy and I’m sure there’s better options than just planning on more rare Earth metals.
larger scale hydrogen extraction maybe? (I don’t know much about this just throwing it out there).
Hydrogen is planned to be used in large scale in Sweden to remove coal dependency in the heavy steel industry. https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrit (sorry Swedish article only, I am somewhat surprised)
I have also heard statements that transporting Hydrogen through pipelines is more scaleable (because of less land required) and causes less energy loss than electric cables. Much needed in a long country with energy balancing problems like Sweden.
> You don't want to end up like the french do you?
Exactly what do you mean is the problem with the French?
Assuming I've understood you correctly, I think it's worth pointing out that the French very consciously hold onto their linguistic identity. Many people would argue that is a good thing, rather than a bad thing. I don't necessarily agree with that, but I do think that your claim of "entirely a bad thing" is something that depends a lot on your perspective.
> This kind of flexibility in the labour market is clearly an advantage because the US and CH have some of the highest salaries and lowest unemployment in the world.
It really is quite a big stretch to assume that this is a causal mechanism. You only need to look to Scandinavia to find a counter-example.
I think it is more reasonable to argue that high salaries in US are fuelled by borderline slave wages for menial labour. And Switzerland's wealth comes in a historical context that is completely different from the US - it's almost impossible to blanket compare them side-by-side. The difference in population size is another huge issue with such a comparison.
In this case, it seems a perfectly valid choice of words.
"irreconcilable" basically implies that there is a binary choice -- either use a TUI or aim for accessibility, but you can't have both. The responder was saying that actually it's not a binary choice -- there are degrees of accessibility, and some accessibility can be attained within a TUI.
Disagreeing with someone, using valid arguments, is not the same as squelching discourse.
> Disagreeing with someone, using valid arguments, is not the same as squelching discourse.
I can relate with your position; I understand what you're saying. I guess my point is that some words that humans speak can strike a nerve in others. For instance, apparently I'm a huge Temple Grandin fan. I didn't know that until I mentioned the name Temple Grandin to my girlfriend of nearly five years recently and she basically snapped and told me that she never wanted me to say that name again. Apparently when I first met her I had a lot of good things to say about Temple Grandin, and I guess throughout the following five years I've mentioned Temple Grandin enough that it just raises her hackles when she hears it now. She's a good person, and absolutely does not have anything against Temple Grandin. She just doesn't like hearing that name when it's my voice speaking it.
I'm not sure if you had this in mind when you said "non-binary", but I also think along the same lines you just noted, that there is a difference between "not binary", and "non-binary". The latter could evoke connotations to the culture wars and gender identity -- though that of course has nothing to do with accessibility (of TUIs, bathrooms might be another matter).
Then again, I'm neither American nor a native English speaker, so I hardly have much authority on this point.
I'm sorry that people downvoted you (they did it to me too, so I can commiserate). Imo, your question is totally valid. It's likely that you are correct in this case, and that I am in fact subconsciously relating the aforementioned phrase that annoys me with the painful period of social upheaval that we experienced here in the US.
It's important to remember that during that time, many words were misappropriated (edit) by both sides in order to fit an agenda. Before that period of upheaval, the phrases that were misappropriated were not generally offensive, even to the people who found them confusing. Up until that point I truly believe that most people regarded such unrelatable concepts (i.e. a person identifying as something other than their physical makeup would suggest) as being simply unrelatable, but tolerable. I don't think most people had strong feelings one way or the other before the upheaval. I think when I hear those "dirty" words now though, that I experience some form of PTSD. The people with the megaphone (again, on all sides) did a damn fine job dividing all of us, imo.
Do you mean for simple command line output, or also for actual TUIs, like htop and vim? If the latter, how does that even work? Presumably you'd have to configure it on a per-TUI basis, which is exactly the point of the parent -- it's not accessible out of the box, no matter what you do...right? Or can it be more clever than that?
That is a pretty narrow-minded way of evaluating other people's worth...