Yeah. It's actually the opposite: the original web considering of home pages and niche forums participated in exclusively by actual humans is very much still there, even if sometimes in different places.

It's "web 2.0" consisting of centralised networks full of your friends and friends of friends posting photos, updates and invitations that's being killed by those networks promoting "engagement bait" and generated content and bot accounts

Also, thin film solar panels that can be stuck to a flat roof likely weigh less than the small portion of the battery capacity (250 tonnes of batteries total) they could theoretically substitute for.

If you were optimising for mass rather than ease of maintenance you'd probably put them on (despite the relative lack of surface area meaning you still needed to recharge at each end)

Nobody doubts how compounding works. They doubt the logic of using that to argue that someone achieving a sustained CAGR of nearly 20% over decades and being recognised by peers as the greatest money manager of the twentieth century when he was already one of the world's richest man in his sixties actually achieved "fairly normal" performance mostly down to living a long time.

I think people who are looking at long term wealth building are better off looking at John Bogle's work. The key is this, you absolutely must stick to investing in the index as a whole, but the issue there is fees you pay is a percentage of your investment, even if small, over years compounds against you. That might look small, but its a double digit percentage if done over decades. Hence picking a fund that charges you the lowest is the key.

Buffet does this better. He basically takes the float from insurance business(Geico) and invests in the index his company manages. This basically sets you up for a long compounding cycle. Translation- You are basically investing in the US economy.

Apart from this there are some base businesses in an economy that's under long term multi year climb. Now anybody who is staring at stock charts(weekly) will tell you eventually you do learn to 'Pyramid upwards' on stocks that are clear winners. Lots of literature has been written on this.

All said and done, you can be rest assured there only at best 10 such stocks in any economy. Once you find them, you do periodic audit if the companies are holding up good and just keep putting in money as time passes.

I don't remember where- but I remember reading, Fidelity found out the most profitable accounts belonged to people who were dead. That says two things. 1) You have to hold stocks for long periods of time, like really long periods of time(Index, and some of its constituents that are carrying most of the freight) . Most people won't make it. 2) Live long enough.

Quite literally once you gain the skills to pick stock. Next single biggest skill you can master is to be healthy and live long. These things take lots of time to work.

Buffet was richer than most nonagenarians put together in his fifties, and has been consistently generating 6x the US economy's growth over long periods. Insurance float is a neat source of capital if regulators will let you put it into equities and six decades of return usually beats four, but it's bizarre to pretend that BRK's outlying returns compared with other financial institutions come from longevity and access to capital. On the contrary, others have typically started off earlier with more, and generally donated rather less than Buffet over the last couple of decades...

The "index funds and live long" advice is sensible precisely because even the average savvy investor isn't likely to time value investments as well as Warren Buffet did.

Index doesn't go up. Individual stocks do. I mean a small section of the stocks within the index contribute to most returns. This is of course different in a bull market where lots of them go up at once. But even in choppy and bear markets, its a small section of stocks that do most of the upward movement.

You need to study index carefully, like pick each stock and study it. You will see Buffet isn't exactly investing outside the index, his investments come from inside the index.

You are not looking for needle in a haystack here. More like a thick loaf from a pound of bread. If you squint enough, you find them.

Scroll down that page

Violent death rate estimates of up to 56% in selected tribal or clan societies, which is a lot more deadly than Jack's attempt to mould the choirboys into a hunting clan in the story...

it's been no more "proven" to be "significantly mistaken" because six friends from a Polynesian island nation were actually pretty good at helping each other subsist on a Polynesian island than "proven" correct because another kid shoots up a school or some kids got trained by adults to commit war crimes that make Lord of the Flies look tame.

Do central banks really asses the risk of total collapse of the Euro (only) in response to Russia's currently frazzled military launching an invasion against NATO borderlands which NATO fails to mount any effective defence as higher than than the risk the current US administration freezes assets for arbitrary and capricious[1] reasons?

In practice, of course, most countries are willing to accept both risks.

[1]a lot of states that can be reasonably confident that they won't provoke the US in the manner Saddam Hussein or Putin did whether they're friendly or not can be rather less confident the current president won't take extreme measures in response to something completely innocuous like jailing someone for domestic corruption, being a source of emigrants to the United States or maintaining a trade surplus...

Of course, it's also the opinion of someone who had expressed no interest in debate in the first place when confronted by hordes of midwits "debating" them with exaggerated civility... starting off by asking if they had a source for their claim that the pope was a Catholic and if they did have a source for the claim that the Pope was a Catholic, clearly appealing to the authority of the Vatican on the matter was simply the Argumentum ad Verecundiam logical fallacy and they've been nothing but civil in demanding a point by point refutation of a three hour YouTube video in which a raving lunatic insists that the Pope is not a Catholic, and generally "winning debates" by having more time and willingness to indulge stupidity than people who weren't even particularly interested in being opponents...

(I make no comment on the claims about Rob Pike, but look forward to people arguing I have the wrong opinion on him regardless ;)

> Tolkien was a top language scholar who spoke several even dead languages, so there’s a lot more going on than just the surface plot of Frodo “returning” Bilbo’s ring.

If you want to see it then way Tolkien saw it, probably the best way is to get through all that unimportant stuff involving rings and battles as quickly as possible to get to the appendices where Tolkein spent his time thinking about the history and etymology and even neat little details like how the calendar worked in the Shire...

(I'm only half joking)

And "don't build Skynet[1] or LLM overlords that can overpower us through the sheer power of their intellect"

[1]the UK calls its military satcomms network that, but we've always been different...

> It would be bad for certain people to get him on a stand and force him to spill the beans.

Yep. I think this sort of thing is actually their biggest concern with releasing the docs. They can redact or lose documents that say anything directly incriminating about Trump and his associates and dismiss everything Epstein and testimonies from the 2020s say about him as confabulation, but there are other people who might want to take the administration down with them if they get caught or even just get fed up of being doorstepped by the media, and some of them might have receipts.

Redactions are just hard in general. It's easy for stuff to slip through the cracks (as we've been seeing).

It's why deleting documents outright is something we aren't really seeing. Those docs can still be floating around and, worse, there can be references to missing docs within the released docs.

And with just the sheer volume of documents that are being released, it's clear to me why the Trump admin didn't release anything sooner. There's simply too much and the effort to prune it down to a specific narrative is too much of a monumental undertaking. It'd involve too many people which ultimately means it's more likely to leak out.

Gotta be honest, I think this has just been incompetence from top to bottom. But I also think this is a fracture in the trump coalition. It may be that conservative media is trying to move on from Trump which is why the "this is a nothing burger" defense hasn't been deployed as much.

It's clear from early on when they just re-released the same already public docs that the Trump admin thought "Ok, this is over, we can just move on now". But that basically backfired, especially because the expectation from conspiracy theorists was that every single democrat would be implicated. When nothing new came out it drove for more questions and kept this alive as an issue.

Now, I think they are continuing a bungled approach. These partial releases with aggressive redactions are only serving to keep the story alive. Ironically, if they'd complied with the law I could totally see the "this is a nothing burger" defense being something they'd pull off. But now with the seemingly daily revelations of "oh wow, Epstein was friends with famed abuser Nadler! And he said that Trump shared a taste in women!"

These sorts of revelations really mostly only work because they are tied to being "new information just released".

This also puts all conservative media on a backfoot. It's very hard for them to craft any sort of good narrative when every other day we are seeing wild and unexpected things like "Trump may have participated in murdering a baby".

Yeah to be clear I don’t think they deliberately screwed up, I think they just don’t care because they don’t need it to be perfect. I think you’re right that at its core this is incompetence