Growing up in the EU, living in North America now, it's mind blowing to me how much credit these companies are making available to me. Not that I ever would outside of an actual emergency but I can see how it's tempting to someone who didn't grow up in a financial risk averse society.
It is not risk taking, it is a system that not just normalized the debt, but punishes people for not taking it. When you are recommended to use credit card, so you can function on debt, so that you can get better mortgage later on, then the thing in play is not just "risk aversion".
> Monetary pursuit has become a guiding principle for alot of people
People need money to survive. The wealthy class have made it such that it's harder and harder to earn enough money the normal way. Often it doesn't even pay enough to survive. This is what creative people come up with in order to make a living. And it's obviously not in the wealthy class' interest to make any changes to that.
Doesn't make it excusable. I get it's hard to uphold principles when the stomach is empty. But it's clear the person in the piece wasn't thinking about much else, though he was also clearly not in the streets and starving.
When we worked at a p2p car sharing company it was well understood what a treasure trove that past accelerometer data was as good input to frequency prediction of a claim resulting from a particular rental.
It’s less about denying coverage and more about accurate risk pooling. If an insurer knows a specific marker leads to a 90% chance of a million-dollar claim, they have to price for that. If they don't, the 'healthy' people in the pool end up subsidizing the high-risk ones until the premium becomes too expensive for everyone and the pool collapses (adverse selection). The real challenge is that regulators often won't let insurers price high enough for those risks, which is why many companies just stop offering LTC (Long-Term Care) altogether.
that's the fundamental paradox of modern underwriting.
insurance relies on what philosophers call a veil of ignorance. it only works if we're spreading stochastic risk things that might happen to anyone.
once data gives us perfect foresight into a 90% chance of a million-dollar claim, it’s no longer insurance; it’s just a pre-funded bill. at that point, the pool isn't spreading risk, it's just facilitating a direct wealth transfer. the 'good' risks realize they're just subsidizing a known event for others and they flee the pool, which is exactly how the market for things like LTC collapses.
we're basically at a crossroads where better data is actually making 'insurance' as a concept mathematically impossible for certain risks.
why would I agree to that when I'm not at risk of that? (Assume for discussion I have had this tested - whatever it is). I have my own life and like everyone more things (including vacation...) I want to spend it money on than I have money.
Some of us think that a key aspect of society is that we take care of each other. If something terrible happens to you before you manage to amass a fortune, it’s nice to live in a society that won’t leave your family destitute.
Some of us don't like paying for other people who make objectively bad decisions that cause them to need to be bailed out in some way.
There's nothing wrong with taking care of others, but there has to be limits. Hopefully the limits are designed in ways that encourage objectively good choices and discourage objectively bad ones.
True, but reductio ad absurdum is a good way to make any argument look silly without actually considering nuance. Of course, there's some limit to what society will do to save an individual. If someone is lost at sea, we'll try to save them, but we won't spend $1T rerouting all of our available naval capabilities to do it. How much should we spend? The math isn't clear, and thus the economics aren't clear. But, where we should fall is somewhere on a gradient between "Every man for himself" and "Save every individual at all costs."
The question is, where do we fall on that gradient?
Things are not that simple. Spending money on the toys/experiences I want also increases my community. As does investing in the future. Helping the poor does increase society as well, but it isn't clear which investment helps society the most (there is no one correct answer).
YEsh, they'll both raise your rates for not submitting this data and raise your rates for being in the cohert that's susceptible; they'll also raise everyone elses rates for having to recalculate the tables!
GINA prohibits genetic discrimination in pricing common health care insurance, but not for products like life insurance, disability insurance, or even long-term care insurance. Some states have statutes that address the latter types of insurance, though.
Life insurance is mostly a useless financial product, and obviously the law wouldn't mandate selling life insurance to people who are likely to die early. That would create such a crazy perverse incentive.
And now go do that in another region. Bam, savings gone. /s
What I mean is that I'm assuming the math here works because the primary purpose of the hardware is training models. You don't need 6 or 7 nines for that is what I'm imagining. But when you have customers across geography that use your app hosted on those servers pretty much 24/7 then you can't afford much downtime.
I'll bite. Isn't as obvious to me as it is to you, I'm just a programmer, I don't know how the economy works. This is literally the first time in my life I heard anything about governments borrowing Yen like this and that this would become an issue.
I'm aware of an "AI bubble" and the over-concentration on the "Magnificent 7".
What else is obvious to people and why is the timeframe (next 4 years) so obvious?
Well, investment markets all over the world are not reflecting the real economy right now. You can see that on how stock prices don't reflect how wealthy you feel and maybe more clearly in how house prices are completely unrelated to the amounts people can pay.
That's the obvious part. The consequences of that are anyone's guess, as is the timeframe. But it's not a sustainable situation, so something is bound to happen to change it eventually.
It’s not as obvious as they claim. If it was, if the future was somehow predictable, there would be software that did it; there isn’t.
People have been claiming the end is near since forever; economists have been saying for months now that stocks should already be falling, but they are going up. And also, it feels good to be part of the in-group that just knows more than everyone else. Just ask a prepper: they will be equally convinced.
So in summary, even if we’re headed for another crisis, unless you’re only a few years from pension, you’ll just sit this one out calmly, just like all crises before. Unless the global economy breaks down for good (in which case you’ve got other things to worry about), your ETF will recover. Don’t let the fear mongers get into your head.
The entire stock market basically functions as a funnel of wealth from the middle class to the rich right now. When OpenAI and Anthropic IPO, they'll be megacap stocks and 401ks and pension funds the world over will invest in them. Then insiders will cash out, and the AI bubble will collapse. USD will have transferred from the retirement accounts of middle-class people to the rich. This is how all stock market crashes work. This one is especially interesting because the middle class is already so squeezed - how many more times can they pull this trick off? Seems like it can't go on many more times.
That's not how the Google IPO worked. If you bought that at IPO and held it this whole time, you'd be very rich by now. Which is why the financial system will never let that happen again. These days many of the companies that go public will be nefarious financial schemes in Florida that hired and fired a guy in a San Jose at one point (thus transforming the scheme into a Silicon Valley startup) and anything good like Anthropic you need permission to invest in them, or you invest in them by proxy. If you want to long OpenAI you then you long Microsoft. If you want to long Anthropic then you long Google. Guess which one the carry traders liked more these past few days?
Israel and Gaza are a key litmus test or third rail in American left/center-left politics right now. I am sure there is literally nothing else he'd rather not discuss right now.
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