If you don't like $TSLA being in your various index funds, isn't it relatively trivial to concoct a short position that offsets your net shares owned?
All the indexes publish what the index is comprised of, I bet if you told ${AI} all your positions it would go figure out what your net $TSLA position is.
I think $TSLA valuation is insane, but I've seen what happens to people who short it...
It’s not trivial to concoct a short position in TSLA to offset your index holdings.
For one, it has large borrowing costs. You already admit that short sellers haven’t fared well, and shorting over a long time period can be very costly. Concocting a short position to offset one’s long-term index holdings requires being fairly accurate with timing and is very different than just wishing it wasn’t in there because you imagine that eventually the bill on that will come due, even if it’s years down the line.
If I’m wrong, I’d love to see a cheap way to do it over a 5-10 year period.
Direct indexing will soon be able to provide that functionality of giving you S&P 500 stocks minus A, B and C companies you don't want to hold. However, cheap and reliable direct indexing brokerages aren't out there yet. Hopefully more competitors show up and help lower the prices for everyone.
Note that if you ever want to be a pilot, THINK VERY HARD BEFORE GETTING DIAGNOSED OR MEDICATED. This doesn't apply to most people, but it is the major gotcha on an otherwise straightforward decision.
/r/flying is full of people who wish they didn't have this in their medical record. The FAA is totally backwards about medical stuff and has a very dim view towards ADHD & associated meds.
I'm disappointed to acknowledge you have a point. Shame on the FAA for pushing people into the closet with this.
If one did want to become a pilot, I do think it would be critical to determine whether or not they were prone to manic episodes. That really could be very dangerous to a pilot and their crew, passengers, etc.
Also, from my 15 minutes of preliminary research, I don't think that applies to pilots of ultralights. So if your dream is simply to fly, it's still achievable.
Yes, you are correct. My point is that a lot of people who self diagnose as ADHD have a different disorder that causes executive function issues, and it's important to rule out bipolar because it has very different consequences. I don't care if someone with untreated ADHD or ASD flies a plane, but untreated bipolar disorder could actually be dangerous. (Not a doctor.)
> now you could just run all of that student's activity in class through that AI. In the real world you don't know if someone is competent because you run an exam, you know if he is competent because he consistently shows competency.
But isn’t the whole point of a class to move from incompetent to competent?
Sure, and the exam is to test that happened. There is no need to perform that test at one point in time if you continuously check the student's performance.
Ah, now I’m getting it. You’re basically measuring the derivative of competency and getting a decent idea of where they are at the end of the course without needing to do a big-bang final exam.
My gut feel has always been that removing the electoral college would hurt the blue team and help the red team. Logic:
The popular vote is basically split evenly today (the usual talking point, 2016, was 62,984,828 Trump, 65,853,514 Clinton). 2020 and 2024 had similarly small-ish margins.
So take 2016: if we’d had a normal election cycle, and then the day after voting said “hey guys let’s do this based on the popular vote!”, Clinton would have won. But that’s not how it would be; both sides would know of this change for at least the full election cycle.
So now you start with a roughly 50/50 split voting base, with many Democrat votes coming from big cities and many Republican votes from Middle Of Nowhere, Kansas.
You win the upcoming election by gaining votes.
Republicans go energize the voters in New York, LA, SF, Seattle, Austin, etc, who are not voting today because they (correctly) know their vote doesn’t matter. They maybe change some bit of their platform to appeal more the big city voters. They can pick up millions of votes in relatively few places.
Democrats have to go win votes from Middle Of Nowhere, Kansas. Or more accurately, 500 small towns in Kansas, to pick up a few hundred thousand votes. There isn’t nearly as much of a depressed Dem vote in red states, simply because red states have small populations (see “land doesn’t vote!”). It’s an exponentially harder problem. While Democrats are trying to convince Uncle Rupert that FOX is lying to him, Republicans are filling Madison Square Garden in NYC with closeted Republicans and telling them their vote will count for the first time ever.
I just don’t see how abolishing the electoral college doesn’t backfire on Democrats. How wrong am I?
Today, people probably stay home in safe states - if you vote Democrat or Republican in California - you already know how the state is going to be called. Same can be said for Alabama. Why waste your time for a sure thing?
Some 65% of the population voted last time. Last cycle, there were some jokes about how only votes in the handful of battleground states mattered. A popular vote policy could activate a lot of non-voters who suddenly felt like their voice could have an impact on the result. How that would shake up, I am not sure. I have heard that most republican voters are already participating, there are significantly more democrats who stay home.
The Electoral College strengthens democracy by enabling local-election-observation to be a highly effective safeguard against fraud and voter demoralization.
At my neighborhood polling place, poll watchers (including local professors, blue collar neighbors, and even occasional UN election observers) volunteer to quietly monitor the election process, verifying that no registered voter is rejected or harassed. With a day off work, any citizen can audit their precinct to verify that end-of-day machine totals match the state's certified results, and could alert the news of any discrepancy. Any motivated citizen can trace their vote's impact up to the state level.
This matters because the Electoral College locks in your vote at the state level by using it to secure electoral college votes. Should fraud occur in some far away state, the Electoral College prevents it from numerically overturning the electoral college votes your state has secured. This federated system is more resilient against local failures.
By contrast, adopting a nationwide popular vote means that votes don't count until they're tallied at the national level. At the national level, a firmware flaw in a poll machine in Hawaii, or a lazy Secretary of State in Arkansas can cause the system to accept fraudulent votes that numerically overwhelm the national tally without ever presenting itself in a way I could observe or report. Without the Electoral College, Democracy loses a lot of its "go see for yourself" and becomes too much "just trust us."
> The Electoral College strengthens democracy by enabling local-election-observation to be a highly effective safeguard against fraud and voter demoralization.
The Electoral College is a bigger source of voter demoralization than anything that exists in any modern representative democracy which doesn't have the Electoral College. (FPTP by itself is bad, but even other systems have FPTP, don't have nearly the degree and persistence of voter demoralization seen in the US.)
Like, I can see how one might utter this sentence in an alternate universe where the US was the only approximation of representative democracy that ever existed and where every commentary was purely theoretical with no concrete comparisons to make, but in the actual world we live in, where there are plenty of concrete alternatives and whole bodies of comparative study, it is beyond ridiculous.
You are correct, because the current implementation of the electoral college is currently synonymous with "winner takes all" in all but two states - ensuring no opposing party turnout in states that are a foregone conclusion. If the winner-takes-all system were removed but the electoral college were still intact, Democrats would never win another election.
I don't think that can be right. The Democrats have recently won both the House and the Senate. In such an election, if "winner take all" is abolished, how would they not win the presidency?
Because in states like California, Colorado, etc., vast swathes of Republicans do not bother to vote because their vote is overridden. The numbers don't work in reverse.
Just look at the county maps within blue states: these elections you speak of relied on those folks being entirely disenfranchised.
Of course it works in reverse. Plenty of Democrats are not going to bother to waste their time in California when the current electoral outcome is a foregone conclusion. Similar with Republicans in Mississippi.
If the rules changed to a popular vote where even "safe" states were up for grabs, I think there would be lots of previously uncounted "dark matter" voters who would activate and would significantly impact the outcome.
This math doesn't work in reverse because there aren't as many applicable people or relevant districts in the rest of the states.
Mississippi has far fewer total disenfranchised Democrats (in both absolute number, district count, etc.) than California has disenfranchised Republicans.
Without extreme gerrymandering, there simply aren't enough eligible-to-be-swung electoral votes to meaningfully benefit Democrats in rural states.
You do not need disenfranchisement, just apathetic voters who do not currently contribute. Right now there are ~23 million voters registered in California. 45% registered D, 25 %R, giving absolute numbers of 10 million D, and ~6 million R. Which you can handwave is 4 million Ds who know they do not need to contribute - their neighbor has their back to secure the state electoral votes.
Looking at the US as a whole, there are 44 million registered D with 37 million R. If you could round up all affiliated voters, Dems win the presidency every election if going by popular vote[0].
My IDE provides 98% of the pixels on my screen and provides 90% of the overall experience. That’s why it gets all the attention. If the OS is able to show my IDE on one screen and a web browser and UNIXy terminal on the other, it’s working.
So you don't use the built-in Terminal? What about Finder, Safari, Mail, Spotlight, System Settings, etc? If someone doesn't care about how they look, they should use all the built-in stuff right?
> After that you're allowed to buy the most expensive aqua because now you're in the middle of the water monopol
Never understood why people are buying bottled water at airports. I always bring a large empty water bottle, and fill it up at the drinking fountains that are invariably on the other side of security, or near my gate. They pretty much always have those touchless bottle filler things on them now. Seems pretty painless.
Not the best tasting water, but in the states I'm reasonably confident airport tap water probably isn't dangerous.
A MacBook Air is just a Mac mini with a keyboard, screen, and battery. You can choose to attach the same peripherals to your MacBook, and have the flexibility of a laptop when you need it. Paying a couple hundred dollar premium for this is a good deal.
Of course you can. And you don't need any consent from the user for doing so.
The only thing you need to do is to have some document where you list all the personal information you process and store, for how long and what you do with the said data.
What you cannot do is store data that you don't have a legitimate interest in storing. And this is why you have to document what you do with the data, because if you're not doing anything with it (“I want to store 10 years worth of IP address logs just in case”) then you aren't allowed to (on the opposite “I want to store IP addresses for a month for DDoS protection purpose ” is allowed).
That’s not how the law is structured. You CAN do that no problem but it’s then WHAT you do WITH that which is where the law comes into play. If it’s just for security purposes then there’s no problem I believe.
Can’t say “the field” in the general case; there are many places in the NAS where the same frequency is used by a few uncontrolled airports that are close together.
All the indexes publish what the index is comprised of, I bet if you told ${AI} all your positions it would go figure out what your net $TSLA position is.
I think $TSLA valuation is insane, but I've seen what happens to people who short it...
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