A way to enable a reader mode has come and gone over the years, always "in testing." That's not the same as a first class feature, and it's clear they have no intention of making it available by default. Defaults matter.
Yes, that was the most glaring mistake in the article, in my eyes. The runner up strange argument was the one about multiplication and addition having different identities and inverses. But why would the operations "Addition" and "Repeated Addition" have exactly the same properties? The operations are not the same.
I think the real issue is about how to interpret the adjective "Repeated" when we turn to more general domains than the natural numbers. But that's not a huge issue, it's mostly a matter of terminology.
Am I missing something here? To me, Buffett's argument sounds like a reformulation of Sharpe's Theorem[0] from 1991, which states that active investors cannot in aggregate outperform passive investors. This is an easily proved theorem, so what's the catch here? Why would anyone bet against a theorem?
There's lots of active traders that aren't hedge funds (day traders, prop shops, bored retirees, bored reddit users), so it's reasonable to test/bet/show if the hedge funds confidently putting themselves out as deserving 2 and 20 are worth it, or if it's predictable which specific funds, rather than the aggregate, are worth it.
what is being tested is not that the _average_ active investor won't beat the market, but that it's impossible (or very hard) to pick a set of active investors that would beat the market.
No, because Buffett is an individual. The theorem is a statement of aggregate performance.
It's not surprising there exist individual people who are capable of beating the market, just like it's not surprising there exist people who can play sports at an elite level. You likewise wouldn't expect every human to be able to play at the elite level.
Aggregate performance should cluster around a point of central tendency.
And as Buffet himself has said: as Berkshire grows in size they will have a harder time beating the market simply because they are becoming a bigger part of it.
Warren Buffet also does a lot of deals not on the public market. If I'm not mistaken, a minority of Berkshire's money/value is invested in public stock.
This changes the equation somewhat since he can swoop in (dangling a billion dollar check) and do all sorts of research and investments that are unavailable on the open market.
He also (through Geico and other insurance holdings) gets to invest a ton of borrowed money at what amounts to a negative interest rate. (insurance premiums are, in aggregate, a loan to the insurance company until the customers need that money back. With the added benefit that you can repay less than you were given if your business ops are lean enough. That's why Geico pushes to do sales over the phone or internet, much cheaper than agents).
I am, of course, butchering this explanation. If you want an inside look at what he's doing, his letter to shareholders lays it ALL out.
50% of Berkshire's value / market-cap is in public stock. Everything else they own: Geico, BNSF rail, Berkshire energy, etc. each are the actual minorities.
He's not really an "active" investor in the sense he uses the term, I think - his ethos is to buy and hold for a long time - almost the polar opposite of the "managed funds", isn't it?
It's valid for any time period. The crucial point is that the theorem talks about the aggregate returns. It's like if you have 10 cars in a race, and 3 of them run at exactly the same speed which is the average of all ten (i.e. they follow the index), then the average speed of the remaining 7 (the actively managed) must also match that speed, even if their individual speeds can vary a lot.
Because the real world very rarely matches the precise conditions to which a theorem applies.
Not saying it would be a good bet, and not the theorem isn't a good heuristic, but it's not as clear-cut as you're saying.
Edit: I also clicked on the link and it doesn't claim to be a theorem or have a formal proof, it just gives heuristic arguments against using active management, which, again, good rules of thumb, but not ironclad proof in the sense you meant.
For a start, war crimes should be prosecuted much more comprehensively than today. I think most criminals do make some kind of risk/reward calculation. Even the nazis did that when they dug up mass graves and tried to hide the evidence.
Cool, so what are you going to do about a China, and what it's doing to its minorities? It is so big, powerful, and vital to global trade. Are you only going to enforce these things on weak countries? Or are you willing to go to war against China?
Just like nothing really happened to Russia for invading and still supporting Ukrainian border conflict. Israel's atrocities vs gaza strip and pushing out their border. US committed war crimes, white phosphorous drone strikes in random countries.
As you said only weak countries are targeted by the justice.
Very much worth reading overall, and this especially caught my eye:
You can still be noticing new things after days of trying to paint something people usually take for granted, just as you can still be noticing new things after days of trying to write an essay about something people usually take for granted.
I don't paint, but I did a lot of drawing in my younger days, and I noticed the same thing. And I do understand how this type of insight can be abstracted and be transferred to different circumstances. So I think art is very important, for reasons that are not always obviously apparent or easy to articulate.
One of my favorite things, perhaps the favorite thing I got out of landscape photography was that while I was doing it, I was dialed into the seasons, weather, sunrise and sunset times, and light like never before. Everyone sees the sky all the time, but I really saw it.
According to the only option I have for a "Broadband" (FCC 25mbit down 3mbit up) ISP... No, they're still happily giving me only a /64 IPv6 address.
IPv6 wants to reserve the lower 64 bits for RNG addresses (sure, fine), and the upper 32 bits for classification and global routing (also fine?); leaving 32 bits for inner-ISP subnet needs. In practice the ISPs seem intent on at _best_, for an actual business class connection (which I've seen) providing a /56 to that, but forcing stupid router firmware to eat /4 of that, leaving in practice a /60 on the business link.
"Stateless address autoconfiguration (SLAAC) requires a /64 address block, as defined in RFC 4291. Local Internet registries are assigned at least /32 blocks, which they divide among subordinate networks.[42] The initial recommendation stated assignment of a /48 subnet to end-consumer sites (RFC 3177). This was replaced by RFC 6177, which "recommends giving home sites significantly more than a single /64, but does not recommend that every home site be given a /48 either". /56s are specifically considered. It remains to be seen whether ISPs will honor this recommendation. For example, during initial trials, Comcast customers were given a single /64 network.[43]"
I've been sort of fortunate given how terrible American Internet is to be on Charter (legacy Time Warner). Due to their agreement with the FCC they can't (yet) put any cap on data use, and they've always given me a /56 when I request one. [1]
Really not looking forward to having to move or Charter finally implementing caps. With a lot of luck I'll be somewhere with municipal fiber, but I'm not hopeful.
[1] If you don't send an IPv6 prefix hint, you get a /64. I can get a /56 reliably by requesting it. Behavior with /48s is a bit buggy. Last time I tested it I could get a /48 some of the time, but sometimes the request would fail and I'd end up with a /64, so I went with the stable option instead.
> 128 bits ought to be enough for any IP address, right?
Here's something I find really amusing. In the late 90s, when IPv6 was being introduced, the joke was that 128 bits would suffice until we all had massively parallel wrist watches. Which would never happen, certainly not in our lifetimes.
Well, maybe. If you're trying to use the IP address to include routing information, maybe it's not enough. It's only 16 groups of 8 bits, or 8 groups of 16.
We wouldn't use them up in the same way we used up IPv4, there really can be 4 billion devices to address. But I could see some important spaces becoming very crowded when you try to cram multiple levels of routing information into that small a space, resulting in exploding complexity of routing tables as you try to garbage collect from sparse areas.
I've seen some people express reservation by how greedily they're allocating IPv6 blocks. Will home network /64 prefixes one day be like how Ford Motor Company owns all of 19.0.0.0 in IPv4? Well, probably not. But there's already a lot fewer than 128 bits of real addresses to hand out.
/64 is the smallest available subnet by design and many things will break the moment you try to subdivide further. The idea was that the lower 64 bits would identify a particular NIC by it's MAC address; this was later changed to be a randomized suffix. This is why most machines typically have hundreds of v6 addresses - they generate a new one every few hours.
62 is the number of letters and digits in ASCII, so it's the most compact encoding that doesn't need special punctuation characters (which aren't always safe to use).
Agreed, the XOR trick is just a clever trick that might be useful in some esoteric niche cases, but otherwise don't bother. GCC will even optimize away the XOR operations when this is used for simple things like ints on amd64. I did a simple compile test, and with -O1 and higher I got identical machine code for the XOR algorithm and the naive swapping version. Without optimization I did get the XOR instructions, but the number of machine instructions was longer than for the naive case, and the number of CPU registers used was the same.
And in the old days people were accustomed to be able to resolve local hostnames, without having to supply any domain part. The "search" keyword in resolv.conf is a remnant of this. By adding a final dot, you ensured that the domain part you wrote referred to the global DNS root, not any local one. Unless of course someone had changed "ndots" which controls how many dots are needed to disable the search feature.
https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/john-coster-mullen