igor67

Back when I would go fishing growing up, I could fish, listen to Ueck on the radio and read a book. Multitasking and doing nothing all at the same time it was great.

There are any number of examples for the link between numbers of investors and risk and efficiency (which are 2 somewhat distinct things). One of the more defining monopoly behaviors is to suppress competition by buying out the competitors and just letting their idea die. The entire math behind free markets assumes infinite individuals (large numbers generally behave similar enough to infinite for this to work). What's true for supply and demand is also true for investing the wisdom of the crowd works better in the long run than any individual. So the smaller number of people you have making the decisions the more the individuals deviations from the best choice will accumulate as inefficiencies. Scientists have expressed concern about analogous behavior with grant agencies for years with them often favoring funding safer experiments and not risky ones. DARPA is rather famous for running counter to this trend. On the private side the tendency for various investment firms or management styles to favor sales departments (and the shiny immediate returns) vs. long term R&D is another one.

I certainly understand how an individual level investing makes sense, but when one looks at wealth accumulation as a pure Darwinian steel cage match the game seems rather less impressive. Let's take my current yearly pension contribution of $4200. Now let's assume for the moment that I'm a crazy active investor who researches everything and manages to get a 10% return and no fees. I've made for the year an impressive $420 dollars. On the other hand I could make more than that with a 1% raise on my actual salary. When the question comes what is the best thing to do with that extra income specifically of course the answer is to invest it (hence the individual benefit), but when you start applying that same analysis on the high side of the equation you also realize that the working class, I saved my way to 1-2 million net worth, individual is still losing ground over time to someone sitting on a few billion. This also leads to significant inefficiency over time in the usefulness of investment capital. Instead of lots of investors placing bets on which ideas are good ones it becomes more and more concentrated with fewer people making meaningful decisions on which business ideas to invest in, which to anyone familiar with the math understands leads to more missed opportunities, aka less innovation.

I'm trying something different in the new year, I'm pretty much giving up all paid services. Had been doing Sling for awhile, and its a solid value but I mostly watch network. I basically get Netflix for free via my phone, and For that extra bit of cable like indulgence I'm trying Pluto TV. Sure it means commercials again, but my TV watching has actually gone down this last year. With everybody doing their own little channel we plan to sign-up here and there for a month or two and binge things.

I would argue BTN would be a good match for something different.

Sling is completely portable. You do need to have decent internet to stream. Netflix is also completely portable and lets you stream a little better with slower connections (since it buffers unlike Sling).

Its because Christopher Heyerdahl is really quite something. He played a number of aliens on Stargate Atlantis and Sanctuary so he isn't always recognizable except for the voice. I liked his work on Van Helsing as well.

I honestly find it more than a little disturbing that the stock market is basically right back where it was

Thanks for the correction on the percentage.

I used to rant about Boomers and Social Security, complaining that all their money was parked on the shores of Vietnam. It's kind of true afterall. But I changed my mind for a few different reasons. 1) as mentioned above the drumbeat of empirical data that most people don't save enough. Second though was the realization though that most of the cost increases were driven by life span increases and demographic transition. Life span increases may continue incrementally, but the demographic transition is nearing maturity (aka the percentage of the population in different age categories is closer to stabilizing). Three no one complains when private companies fail to meet 10, 15 or 30 year projections. With my school budgeting experience I came to viscerally appreciate the importance of modest year to year corrections. Without that level of adjusting any 30 year projection for any company or government is going to end up either controlling the world because they have made so much money or be bankrupt many times over. Also remember our SSI is 13%, 6.5 from you and 6.5 from your employer. Very small changes in the program now would have a very large impact on how long there continues to be a SSI 'surplus' The surplus is actually one of the last things I realized is problematic. What would happen to the stock market if a mythical investor let's call him Warren Gates, suddenly bought 3 trillion dollars in stocks(AKA the value in the trust fund)? Of course it would over inflate prices on tons of stocks, Buffet has made a lot of comments during the last Bull market for not having enough places to park merely Billions in cash because the value isn't there. So there is reason to be concerned about over supplying the stock market with capital, when there are plenty of very useful investments like roads, bridges and public health that generate huge economic benefits.

We didn't have any problems lowering the benefit growth rate along with increasing contributions to improve the fund ratio. Calling it a ponzi scheme doesn't make any sense since it does not rely on ever increasing numbers of participants. It invests in the market just like individual. The reason it became easy to sell people against the idea is the dark side of compound interest. When you build your various budget forecasts extending 5,10 or 20+ years into the future any small amount of mismatch be revenue and costs will get magnified like it is compound interest, which turns into huge numbers pretty quickly. But forecasts are not destiny in the public sector anymore than they are in the private sector. You just have to manage the projection/ budget every year. I've sat through board meetings for well over a decade, and most of those years some new board member becomes convinced healthcare expenses are going to sink everything. At the end of the day though, with competitive bids and some other things we kept the impact close enough to inflation so that we've only had to increase employee contributions $25/ per check in that span.

Workforce age is not really relevant as pensions give you credit based on years worked, so swooping in at the end doesn't get you much. As I mentioned above a shrinking pool of workers does cause problems. Pension funds have an FDIC type insurance program, but solutions aren't hard to imagine since we have more workers than we did years ago, namely instead of tying pensions to jobs you could group pensions across worker classes and make sure things are staying stable. We know 401ks don't work as policy. They benefit some individuals, but after decades of telling people to save more it's clear that ain't working. If there wasn't so much money to be made in fees investment banks wouldn't try so hard to get a hold of the pensions. Aside from the rise of the 401k coinciding with rapid Wall Street growth my coworker who lived in NYC can vouch how eager they are to get their hands on the money. So I play the game a little bit to spread and hedge against what is really just a political risk. MN most recent actuarial study had to increase funding just a bit because people are living longer, I would guess that is the biggest driver of increases in most states.

Trying to extract maximum individual benefit is a short term gain though at best. If there is some sneaky hidden inefficiency, eventually it will show up in the actuarial studies and then you have to make adjustments to payouts and/ or contributions. I'm getting close enough that the various calculators give close enough results without having to completely sweat about how sensitive they are to assumptions. Between SSI and our pensions we are on pace for our retirement income to at worst match our working income. We effectively contribute 13% of our income to pensions. Once you account for not having to make SSI or Pension contributions in retirement we come out ahead. People work hard enough by and large they all deserve that.

401Ks do substantially worse. I'm not aware of any pension that isn't invested so it is earning a return. So I mentioned 1 huge advantage above, but there are 2 others that do it yourself will never top in a systematic way (so yes lucky individuals will occasionally out perform but not most). Reason number 2 is lower fees, than an individual can get. Reason 3 is that a pension never has to adopt the more conservative approach needed when you get older to manage risk. They can always participate in the market in a similar way. There are some cautions. 1) Rapidly changing the number of workers especially downward in a pension plan is problematic, this was a big one a few decades ago for the autoworkers. 2) Apparently in some states rules made it easy for lawmakers to raid the public pension fund. To my understanding this is not possible in MN or WI 3) I don't know how often private pensions are required to do the actuarial studies to adjust as people live longer or the inevitable variations in market returns.

The amount of money that wouldn't have to go to retirement under the 401K model if people didn't have to self insure against living too long is pretty staggering. It's one of the big reasons pensions are so much more efficient/ cheaper as an investment they can just assume the actuarial average. On the teaching side, the most recent data is that wealth is the biggest environmental variable on student performance yet most people need to start their families years before they hit peak earning, so it is a pretty common phenomena. The 2008 recession doubled our free/ reduced lunch population over night, including myself back then.

On the other hand getting backed into a corner policy wise might give Modern Monetary Theory a boost and give use some tools to get things moving faster going forward.

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense Everyone gets that this is a huge drag and lots of people are getting hit hard, superfly. But your comments indicate you don't actually understand the scale of potential carnage. Particularly your earlier flippant 'a real threat would be 50% mortality' comment. Only the Black death has ever come somewhat close to that level of mortality and been widespread. On most historical population graphs it's also the only population decline recorded for humans. Think about that no wars ever managed to kill enough people to produce a net population decline. To try and put some perspective rather than pretending 90+% survival is good let's look at the American Civil War about 620,000 dead Americans out of 31 million. As stated before the natural R0 rate puts herd immunity at 2/3 of the population. The exact death rate remains to be seen, but if we go on the very low side at 1% that still gets us to 2.2 million after accounting for the disease sputtering out. If you scale up the Civil War present size that would be 6.2 million. A 2% death rates produces 4.4 million, and 3% surpasses in everyway. Undoubtedly you can come up clever sounding comebacks, but that completely misses the point. The fact that a reasonable estimate of not using our 1 tool that works right now to slow the spread gives final death tolls even remotely comparable to the war that killed more Americans by far than any other is horrific.

I have no relevant insight into how long for the market, but I did see a prominent Libertarian oriented blogger suggest that he was significantly rethinking the benefits of globalization as the hyper market specialization has left everyone vulnerable to huge disruptions in supply chains. It's undoubtedly influenced by his deep reading of history and understanding that prior plagues have wreaked havoc on many an empire and helped to stimulate significant upheaval.

I did some preliminary calcs and Yelich's lead in the batting title is pretty secure. Someone in the .310 area or so would need a 4-4 or 5-5 day and Yelich would need to go 0 for Sunday and the potential Game 163 for it to be maybe possible. Oddly enough Can might have the best shot because he might get the extra game. He's got the HR as long as Carpenter doesn't hit one today though the possibility that the Rockies have to play 2 games with Story and Arenado sitting at 35 each gives them a chance to take that portion of the crown. The 2 RBIs to catch Baez are certainly possible even without some HRs.

I've come around to actually liking both, though I do think we really to add a big addition to the rotation to maximize the value of the moves. Yelich is basically everything we hope Brinson might become and there were already cautionary signs that he might fall well short of that. My only negativity was really emotional attachment. Harrison was the big tool guy we drafted to get impact players and it looked like that was starting to pay-off. But Yelich is like the best of getting a free agent and the best of having a great prospect. Now it is certainly fair to think that we can't do too many more deals like that or the team will have a very short shelf life as it ages quickly without enough young talent to cycle in. Things potentially look even better anticipating some kind of return for someone out of the Aguilar/Thames/Santana group. Cain put me down in the camp that 5 years is not too long as long as your expectation is not that he'll give more value then he is being paid every year. With his profile it is easy to imagine him being a solid or better 4th outfielder in that 5th year. If you've gotten good value the other years that is not a disastrous hit by any means.