cepelling
Typo here too, perhaps?
jimv
Karma: 378
Upvoted because I really appreciated the intro test at the start that let me know that this wasn’t the post for me. Thanks!
My suggestion isn’t really aligned with your initial hypothesis, about the potential for LW to be more efficient than the efficient market because of comparative advantages at spotting niche things. I don’t know much about cars, about car manufacturers, or about investment. So I’m not using some expert niche knowledge that I would realistically expect to be more efficient than the market.
Really, my reasoning is just that it doesn’t seem that feasible that Tesla is worth more than car companies that are selling many, many times more vehicles than it.
From first principles, it seems high probability that most vehicles in the future are going to be electric vehicles. I suspect that incumbent car manufacturers forecast this too, and therefore expect that they are investing heavily in developing electric vehicles. These are large companies with very well-established dealership networks, large cashflows from sales of internal combustion engine vehicles, etc., so should have substantial capacity to pursue that development. I don’t know whether Tesla claims a technical advantage in electric vehicles, but if they do, I don’t see it as being likely to persist.
For the autonomous-driving parts of the technology, I could envisage there being more secret sauce than the electric vehicle parts. But for similar reasons I would expect the other vehicle companies to be investing heavily in it. And — this is really anecdote time now — I’ve seen some videos online that are suggestive of Tesla’s self-driving abilities seeming outright dangerous.
Suggestion: a short position on Tesla (TSLA)
Reason: Tesla sold about 900k cars in 2021. This is about 1-2% of the global car market. Even in electric vehicle sales, Tesla only represents about 1⁄7 of global sales. [1] And yet TSLA is valued at as much as the combined value of the next 5 car companies combined. [2] Musk has been claiming since 2015 that self-driving Teslas are a year or two away [3] so it’s hard to believe that they are particularly close now. It seems that Tesla’s current self-driving features are not particularly more advanced than those of competitors. [4]
Personal thoughts: I have low confidence that this would be a good trade over a 12 month timescale. Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent and all that. And TSLA trades high based on Musk’s personal appeal, which might have years left to run (see Matt Levine’s Money Stuff newsletters on the Elon Market Hypothesis). But longer-term, some trade structured to represent the relative values of TSLA vs. the next, say, 5-10 largest car makers, seems like it should pay off. Either TSLA is currently over-valued or the other car makers are currently under-valued. Unless Tesla can capture, say, 50%+ of car sales globally, either its value will have to fall substantially or other makers’ value will have to rise substantially, if investors realise that they have the same benefits as Tesla represents.
[3] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/14/cars/tesla-cruise-control/index.html
[4] https://www.cars.com/articles/which-cars-have-autopilot-430356/
Are the time limits enforced via parental settings for different apps? If so, I’d be interested in hearing what technical solution you use and how well they work out. Do you have to have them working across different machines / operating systems, for example?
On the question of finance, there was historically a prohibition on usury in Christianity. This was worked around by the triple contract / Contractum trinius.
I have been told that something comparable happens in currently existing Islamic finance: people devise clever schemes that are technically acceptable, though not really in the spirit of what was intended, so they replicate lending-at-interest without technically doing so. (I believe there may also be some regulatory flexibility in choosing which religious scholar you submit your scheme to, being able to select one that is known for looking favourably on such proposals.)
I believe that there are circumstances in which financial services that are in tune with the spirit of some of these rules (rather than just within the letter of them) could be desirable. But people do seem to have a habit of finding ways around them.
Re your question about whether the Zoe or official numbers are likely to be correct in the UK.
It seems likely that it’s Zoe, based on other data and on the physical situation.
The other data source is the Office for National Statistics. They’ve been running a sampling study, going out and testing the population. They are finding very high levels of infection. It’s about 1 in 16, or 3.4 million people in England who would have tested positive a week or two back. (Plus some more for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.) That seems very compatible with Zoe saying 340k cases per day across the whole UK.
The relevant information about how things are going is that there has been a massive change in testing. People in the UK used to be able to request a free pack of 7 lateral flow tests to be delivered by post every day. As of today, those are no longer available. Officially, over the last few weeks you could still order them every 3 days, but in practice they have been almost completely out of stock.
The guidance and general tone has also changed, with much less attention to COVID in general and on testing in particular.
Given that tests are so much less available, it’s almost surprising that as many cases are being detected as are.
Likely typos: “debiasing” became “debaising” twice, once in the title and once in the body text.
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Are these slips or am I misunderstanding the notation?
I don’t think the statement implies that Russian POWs would be treated inhumanely.
I think it implies that if Russian POWs are saying things like “we didn’t know we were aggressors”, you cannot distinguish between whether they are saying that because it is true or the fact that they are saying it because they fear inhumane treatment.
And even in the second case, you may not be able to distinguish between Russian POWs who have correct fears of possible inhumane treatment if they are non-compliant and Russian POWs who have unfounded fears (i.e., the situation where their Ukrainian captors have no intention of mistreating them, but the captives comply out of fear of mistreatment nonetheless).
As an external viewer, the implication is that you should presumably place less weight on the probability that such videos are providing robust evidence of what they purport on their face to present, unless you have other reasons to believe both that the Ukrainians would not mistreat Russians who don’t comply with requests to phone their mothers saying what the Ukrainians want them to say, and that the Russians know that they would not be mistreated.
So it’s not making an assertion of mistreatment if non-compliant, but rather making an assertion that you the viewer might not be able to distinguish between the different reasons that this particular conversation might have occurred, with only some of the possible reasons being “it’s approximately the truth”.
“Expelliarmus!*”
Is there a rogue asterisk there?
“All our secrets will be yours. You will know all that is known about the Mind and Body, Time and Space, Prophecy and History, Love and the Divine,” said Memnuela.
“That’s ten divisions, plus the entrance door. The Entrance Chamber has twelve doors. What did you leave out?” said Luna.
Did you miss a pair of divisions out?
Nit-pick: if Luna is supposed to be linguistically similar to real British people (or British people in canon Harry Potter), she’s unlikely to say “Mom”. It would be “Mum”.
I disagree with the assertion that this is obvious nonsense. There’s an empirical question about the likely incidence of food poisoning from different cooking methods… so I have dug for a little evidence on the matter. I found a modelling study [1].
Short version: their model predicts well done burgers causing food poisoning around 8 in 100,000 servings compared to rare burgers causing food poisoning around 19 times in 100,000 servings. Those numbers do seem low.
NB: Your mileage may vary, especially from country to country. The Berriman et al report is UK-focused, and food poisoning incidences vary between countries. Naïve numbers say the USA has ~10× the incidence of the UK, though fact checkers caution heavily against making international comparisons on that basis [2].
This story [3] pulls together UK modelling showing ~180 deaths per year from food poisoning vs. CDC data showing ~2600 deaths per year in the USA, around 14× more deaths for a population that’s only ~5× the size. So maybe the USA has a food poisoning burden something like 3× that of the UK?
Oh, and that Full Fact story [2] mentions an estimate of 1 million people in the UK getting food poisoning each year. Combined with the estimate in [3] of 180 deaths p.a., that seems like a case fatality rate of the order 18⁄100,000. So (making a huge assumption about whether burger poisoning is approximately as deadly as other types of food poisoning), if we multiply the 11 extra cases per 100,000 (from switching from well done to rare) by 18⁄100,000, we get 0.00198 additional deaths per 100,000 servings, or ~1 additional per 50 million servings.
[1] Berriman, A.D.C., Kosmider, R.D. and Snary, E.L. (2014) Risk to human health from consumption of VTEC O157 in beef burgers.
[2] https://fullfact.org/health/food-poisoning-US-UK/
“[the] rule that all burgers must be served well-done … [is] obvious nonsense”
The UK’s Food Standards Agency outlines what seems to be at least a plausible explanation for the difference between burger and steak, and why that means that burgers should not be served rare:
https://www.food.gov.uk/safety-hygiene/burgers
The gist is that meat tends to get pathogens on its surface; if you get a steak and cook it rare, the outside surface gets cooked and that kills the pathogens; but if you mince it to make it into a burger, some of the bit that was the outside of the source meat is now on the inside, so you need to cook it all the way through to be sure the pathogens are all killed.
I am not a food scientist, so do not know whether this accurately reflects a real world risk. But I would say it’s plausible enough to say that the rule is not obvious nonsense.
You have 2021 dates listed a few times in the first paragraph. I think you probably meant 2022.
> No, really, asking for a booster every six months that knocks a lot of people on their ass for a day or two? Yeah, that’s kind of a huge ask. The short term side effects are sufficiently costly that most people will correctly decide that it’s not worth it even if there’s lots of Covid out there.
I am not convinced that this assessment is necessarily correct. It seems to be ignoring the possibility of being ‘knocked on your ass’ for maybe several days with COVID.
If the issue is that immunity is waning, then you might effectively be left with a choice of a certain exposure to vaccine with a possible (or even probable, depending on prevalence) exposure to the virus. Hand-waving away the risks of any more serious outcomes from infection, a calculation of the trade-off would want to include the probability of side effects of each (vaccine vs. virus) and duration of each.
My prior is that if you let your immunity wane for, say, 12 months, and then catch COVID, but are otherwise relatively young and healthy, there’s a pretty high chance that you’d have symptoms in the region of ‘knocked on your ass for several days’.
It would also be good to think about what changes we expect to see over time. Immunity might fade more slowly (or fade to a higher remaining level) as your total number of doses (or virus exposures) increases, which might mean that boosters could be every 12 months rather than every 5-6 months. (The seasonality stuff that ACX has touched upon has left me feeling that annual seems more like a longer-run default than 6-monthly.) I guess there might also be a change in likelihood and duration of vaccine side effects with increasing numbers of boosters, though I don’t have much of an intuition of what that might look like.
Possible argument in favour of having an omicron-tailored booster in a couple of months’ time: given COVID is now mostly omicron, the next variant might be more likely to be descended from omicron. An omicron booster might be more protective against that next variant too, then.
More generally, it seems pretty clear that immunity fades over time. Therefore, having boosters or top-ups seems like a helpful thing. If they’re going to be helpful anyway, why not have a version that’s more specific to the variant that’s most prevalent?
That’s not too far from the situation with flu vaccines. They are updated every year, and my understanding is that they are designed to be protective against the strains that are most likely to be prevalent in the coming flu season.
I think this is probably not a good idea. You are proposing to expose your body to a certain (modulo your success in freezing etc.) exposure of a virus to avoid the risks of possible exposure of that virus in the future. That doesn’t seem like a great trade in most circumstances. It’s not impossible that it’s OK, but probably very sensitive to a particular set of assumptions about likelihood of and expected severity of reinfection at various points (itself dependent on how much and what variant of the virus is circulating then) and also on how future vaccination waves are / aren’t handled or permitted.
Any reason why sass would need a double c at the end, but the ck in kick just becomes one x?