JackPoach

The points are valid. But it's entirely possible to replace 'Bad Economics' with even 'Worse Economics'

It's not just density, many books are pure nonsense. So 200 books of pure nonsense a year won't teach you much. They'll just introduce you to a ton of terrible ideas.

This is nothing new. Molten salt ideas have been around 30+ years and there are projects in Spain and other countries that tested them on small scale. The economics is still poor.

Real wages have been stagnant since 1970s in the US. Median household incomes have only gone up because some people work in highly paid industries, like IT, plus household incomes include income from stocks and real estate AND most households now are two working adults.

Clearly the Fed mostly. We'll see it once the supply chain issues go away, but high prices stay high.

And it's probably going to only get worse looking at Fed

It's not an indicator problem, it's a problem of people trying to time markets. Also, there are two ways to use the Buffet Indicator - right and wrong. The wrong way is to say 'it's overvalued, I should do something - short the market'. The right way is 'it's overvalues, I should avoid doing something - buying overvalued stocks'.

Buffett has been sitting on piles of cash in the past for years and years, avoiding buying securities when they are overvalued. He never tried timing the market, simply waiting for the right moment. Nor did he sell stocks when they were overvalued in order to try to buy them back at a lower cost at least AFAIK from reading his biographies. So, for a value investor, it's a useful tool.

Did you study the work of Ralph Nader and the auto industry? Or the history of tobacco industry? There are multiple examples when it worked in the past. I am quite confident that when abuse goes too far, the pushback is even bigger. I just don't want to oversimplify the issue and say that any big corporation or any IT giant is bad by nature. It's growing pains in my book.

Well, when each country does that it becomes economically unfeasible. Such fines work and work very well, once FB realizes that they lose more money from unethical behavior than they make, they'll stop it. I don't believe that any corporation is evil. I do believe that there are temptations to do bad things in order to make money, even if short term. This corrects such behavior. Hopefully.

It's kind of strange to compare companies strictly based on their valuation. Saudi Aramco valuation today is higher than that of Apple but these are very different companies and I wouldn't claim that one is better than the other.

Though coronavirus is very different in many respects, it's worthwhile (especially if you are older like me) to remember the history of AIDS. We've learned to live with it and limit its spread very effectively in the western world.

There's huge inflation in many things related to making cars (chips, steel, shipping costs as many cars are still being shipped across the ocean, labor costs, etc.). We are likely to be in the very beginning of significant inflation cycle, with probably double digit inflation which will eventually drop to 4-4.5%. I wouldn't expect to prices to drop any time soon, nor have 2% inflation. My bet is that fewer and fewer new cars will be sold in the next few years (3-5) with prices rising 4-10% each year.

Maybe, maybe not - you'd have to define which complex set of chemical combination is happiness and which isn't. But why? We know a lot about neurochemistry. We know a lot about receptors, neuromodulators and their interactions (serotonin, addiction). As a biologist I don't understand - why would you want even study something that doesn't exist (happiness), when you can study specific parts of neurochemistry that are more practical and may have actual benefits (like reduction of addiction or help with schizophrenia)

No, it's not my logic and your conclusion is incorrect. Measurement units don't actually exist (meters, seconds, inches, pounds, liters) - yet that's how we measure things and very successfully.

Abstractions are critical to human thinking in science. But not only reification is very different, you can't measure happiness even if you want to. You'll always have to go 'happiness as defined ...' or resort to people self reporting their feelings. Which is fine - I always ask my kids how they feel. I just understand that not only kids and adults may change how they feel next hour but that those feelings are unreliable. If you have kids of your own, you know how many 'tragedies' they lived through by the age of 6.