zippy5

But what if the DJ convinces his audience to invest in a much larger and more expensive night club at an extraordinary premium. Then it might make sense to buy the original night club just to protect the DJ’s scheme.

My math is that Musk’s twitter activity very reasonably increased Tesla’s market cap by more than 5% which is what he is offering to pay.

I think you can decompose a calculus course into three key components; principle/concepts, proofs, and procedurally solvable math problems.

All three have value but clearly the math problem aspect of it has depreciated in value due to calculators, wolfram alpha, etc yet it tends to remain the focus of many math curriculums. Calculus by its nature is more computationally intensive, meaning that it has experienced the greatest decline. If you really think about it, that curriculum was designed for an era when we called human "computers". There is probably opportunity to make calculus a more broadly valuable class by deemphasizing the mechanics and focusing on the principles and proofs.

This is wonderful. I’m going to see if there is anything I can build for this.

I think it could be Nobel Prize worthy. Protein’s structure often determines its effect as a catalyst. So to map the DNA to the 2nd order outcomes seems like it could be the missing ingredient to controlling the properties of cells.

Personally I’m hoping that someone smarter than me figures out how to displace existing catalysts like platinum and palladium. Seems like it could be a pretty penny and some positive environmental impact to boot.

It seems to me that there are two ways to learn well. One is to have a carefully curated curriculum and the other is to have enough experience to parse the world by yourself. In humans we might describe these as knowledge/education and wisdom. I see data preparation as improved knowledge transfer and more training data as the path to wisdom.

Wisdom is usually heavily discounted by smart young people so I expect engineers will double down on better data prep than better data acquisition. Also which looks better on a resume?

I’d say that the first premise is objectively false. I think it’s much simpler. The volatility of asset has correlated narratives of hope and fear in the mind of the asset holder. These in turn produce a dopamine response, akin to mechanisms of a gambling addiction

He replaced his marketing department with a R&D department. It really doesn’t have to work, just keep the believers believing.

I want to apologize, I definitely don’t intend to fear monger and most definitely not want to imply that I have expertise. Roughly my level of understanding is mostly that of a low level undergrad and you should treat my naiveness as such.

I recognize that what I’m engaging in is entirely wild speculation based on limited experience and data, likely very error prone and that really I’m just having fun without considering how it may impact other readers.

I understand that for many this an important issue of health and research. I did not intend to detract from these more legitimate forms of discussion.

It’s not really a comprehensive interpretation of intercalation but I think a geometric interpretation can help some non-chemists understand how intercalating molecules bind to dna.

From the purely geometric model, some of the molecules you proposed have pretty large functional groups adjacent to rings which I think may make the intercalation process less efficient. That being said, if you took those molecules and gave massive doses to rats, some may comeback as carcinogenic.

I think that your multi-ring point is fair. The multi ring structure to me suggests that the more the pi orbitals are able to delocalize their electrons the higher the binding efficiency. I have tested 1-2 molecules where non-fused rings showed some affinity but not near the potency of fused ring structures. I would also say two rings with a carbon-carbon link seem to be potent binding as well. I presume that it’s also related to delocalizing pi orbitals and extra degrees of freedom in the intercalation process but I suppose that’s just speculative.

My interpretation is that is why it’s so brilliant.

It’s incredibly simple for the end user conceptually but encapsulates optimizing processing across a distributed file system, fault tolerance, shuffling key value pairs, job stage planning, handling intermediates ect.

Hadoop a big data framework that reduces the level of competence required to write data pipelines because it was able to hide a massive amount of complexity behind the map reduce abstraction.

Id even argue that hive, snowflake, and other sql data warehouses have taken this idea further, where most sql primitives can be implemented as map reduce derivatives. With this next level of abstraction, dbas and non-engineers are witting map reduce computations.

I think my point is that abstractions like map reduce have had a democratizing effect on who can implement high scale data processing and their value is that they took something incredibly complex and made it simple.

I think the example of the railroad is biased by the exact same phenomenon. From 1900, In the next 10 years you would see the mass production of automobiles and the invention of the airplane. Basically it’s the story of disruption told from the perspective of the disrupted technology.

In the 1920’s standard oil subsidiaries were still an effective monopoly for petroleum in the us market. Therefore a reasonable proxy for the future profitability of the entire industry in that market assuming that their ruthless anticompetitive behavior allowed them retain their market dominance. Additionally they were profiting off the same disruption in transportation that you are citing, which as we are both acknowledging was massive.

The book Titan is awesome context for this. Wonderful read.

Unlike the technology such as railroads, natural resource commodities and vertically integrated supply chains tend to not be disrupted as easily (very unfortunate for us).

I’m not saying that it couldn’t have gone wrong, but clearly an asymmetrical risk reward at 3-5 PE. So in general you are right, but I think if you find a company that has a great business model, is a monopoly, and is disrupting a massive market, at reasonable price, you have a recipe for outlier returns.

I do think there is some real signal in this article in addition to the survivorship bias.

1) Noting that the stock market was boring I think is real indicator of the mass psychology of that time. There is definitely a inverse correlation between enthusiasm for markets and future returns.

2) Noting the returns of standard Oil is a reasonable take. There was a massive expansion of combustion engine production in the preceding two decades and inferring that this would be correlated with increased demand for oil based products is not hot take. Also it doesn’t take a genius to understand a oil is better business that automobiles, recurring revenue and all.

3) Tax rates have historically influenced valuations.

4) I’m not sure how to extrapolate the the German currency situation but I think looking at the relative attractiveness global markets makes sense.