Very few places use electricity for heat. It’s super inefficient unless you use a heat pump, and residential heat pumps typically don’t work too far below freezing.
Very few? Maybe for single family homes, but electric heat is very common in apartments - Every apartment I've ever lived in had electric baseboard heaters.
37% makes sense. When you live in a moderate climate and minimally need heating, low capex and high opex makes sense.
Too bad so many air conditioners don’t have reversing valves. One day I want to install a window-shaker “the wrong way” and see how well it works as a heater.
As an alternative, one could put water containers in their freezer and throw the ice outside as it freezes as a rudimentary sneakernet liquid<-> solid phase change heat pump.
That's only because the state and local tax deduction was limited at the same time as the mortgage interest deduction was (further) limited. The standard deduction also increased.
Prior to that, it wasn't uncommon for people in higher income tax states to exceed the standard deduction with SALT and mortgage interest.
Warren Buffet is not betting on index funds. If he was, Berkshire Hathaway would not exist. Buffet uses index funds to manage some of Berkshire’s money, and he famously bet a meager sum (for him) that actively managed funds wouldn’t beat the S&P, but if you look at what Berkshire does, then you would see they are still very much into active management. The success of Berkshire should really prove to everyone that it’s possible to beat the market. Will most beat the market? No. But it’s obviously possible if you have the talent.
> should really prove to everyone that it’s possible to beat the market
none of the bogglehead investment advice claim that it's not possible to beat the market - the claim is that it's hard, and if you're average person (and face it, most people are average people), the best advice is to do what is more likely to succeed, rather than the small chance thing that might succeed beyond your wildest dreams.
Therefore, the best advice for the average person is to buy index funds, rather than follow the path of Buffet.
> The success of Berkshire should really prove to everyone that it’s possible to beat the market.
Since 2008, BRK is just keeping up with SP500, and even that seems to be due to outsized bets on Apple, which offset earlier mistakes of not investing in Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon…and instead going with IBM/Heinz.
That is a lot of risk for no gain over 15 years. Obviously, Buffett is playing with money he can afford to lose, but he is smart enough to advise others who cannot afford to lose to invest differently.
Are you sure? Just some back of the napkin math: S&P 500 is 5.17 times higher since the bottom of 08. BRKB is 6 times higher. And performance this year is even more dramatic. S&P is down 20%. BRKB is up 3%. In 08, too, the decline in Berkshire was much less than the S&P. Clearly Berkshire has been a better bet at most points in time.
Of course, I should not debate that it is possible to beat the market, but the question for an individual is, is the potential return over the relatively risk-less SP500 worth the risk? And the data for the past 14 years or so indicates that BRK’s edge may have decreased.
I write “relatively risk-less SP500” because on a sufficiently long timeline, I assume US federal government is bailing out SP500, or the US federal government has big problems (such as does not exist in the form it is in now).
Last time I checked, the “mutual funds don’t beat the market” is kind of a myth perpetuated by S&P Dow Jones Indices to hype their own index products. First of all, what is the S&P 500 if not a handpicked collection of stocks? To say mutual funds don’t beat the S&P 500 is to say that S&P is the best stock picker out there. I find that unlikely. Second, something like 10% of mutual funds do beat the S&P 500 on long time horizons.
Where did you find that 10% beat S&P? First of all, that's low %, but I don't think even that is accurate. So you have 1 in 10 chance of identifying who might beat the S&P. Congrats.
Can you share a source for that? As far as I remember, the odds are around 1 in 300 (this is from memory, but that information is from Bogle's books directly). I think that research was done since 1970, but I am not sure.
> And over a full 20-year period ending last December, fewer than 10 percent of active U.S. stock funds managed to beat their benchmarks.
Still, if it was 1 in 300 I think they would say “fewer than 1% or fewer than 0.5%”. So I’m assume between 9 and 10 percent beat the S&P.
I suggest reading the linked article with the mindset that nearly all of the content comes from S&P directly. It’s basically a market piece. For instance, when they say the mutual funds don’t perform consistently, they use a crazy metric of picking the top 25% performers from one year and seeing how many are in the top 25% next year. Basically their point is that mutual funds won’t beat the S&P every single year, and therefore the S&P is better. But if course, unless you’re only investing for a single year, you should care more about the expected total return. Just my two cents.
They are talking about 2000-2021; what I mentioned is from 1970 (again, that is from memory, I don't have the book in front of me, at the moment). But almost surely that number is nowhere near 10% that can beat S&P in the last 50 years.
Not a lot of funds even continuously exist for 50 years - most of them closed.
It is true that about 10% of large cap mutual funds beat the S&P 500 over a 10 year period (see the latest SPIVA study). At 20 years it goes down to about 5% that will beat the S&P 500.
You missed the point. maria2 is talking about whitebox crypto. The "whitebox" part means that the decryption process happens on your machine incuding the secrets, which are present in some obfuscated scrambled form in memory. Getting the secret key is a matter of debugging and understanding the obfuscation scheme. A prime example of this is DRM like Widevine (L3) in the chrome browser.
I am really failing to understand the distinction here. Encryption with say, AES has very different properties and use cases compared to an obfuscation scheme. You can use encryption as a part of an obfuscation scheme, but obfuscation is a shell game, all the way down. Crypto is not, mathematically. They are categorically different things, right?
Obfuscation with encryption can be done with good ciphers, like AES, but the key is still shipped with the code, so it's still just cat and mouse.
It's a little different if the key is hardware specific, so each binary only runs on one system and it's hard to extract the keys, but that's not a typical setup. Usually it's this code needs to run on the general public's computers or phones, and that's too general a target to rely on hardware crypto.
> Nvidia primarily makes add on GPU's, if I understand their business correctly. Apple integrated a GPU onto its m2 (or whichever chip is used in their studio) that performs comparably to the 3060, and even beat the the 3090 in some benchmarks/workloads. I think that's pretty impressive.
You don't necessarily need to make that comparison: If you make the trains too slow many people will drive instead which is radically more likely to kill them than the train.
So you can still find that there is a speed risk tradeoff the minimizes death which is not the same as minimizing the train risk.
Worse for NY's problems is that in that decision people are probably using something like the 95-percentile trip time as the criteria: It doesn't help them if the train is fast on average since they need to schedule for the worst-likely case. The fact that the crews are playing roulette with an kafkaesque speed limiter system and risking disciplinary action should they anger it essentially guarantees that the times will be both slow and highly inconsistent.
Why do you find it sad? Everything has a cost. There are plenty of things that harm people every single day that we tolerate readily. For example, 91 lumberjacks died last year. There are way fewer employed lumberjacks than there are subway riders.
You’re right, it’s even worse than that. When public transit is constantly decelerating, crawling, and hesitating it (correctly) communicates to the riders society’s judgment that they and their destinations don’t matter. That if your trip mattered you would have your own car. It sets a waiting room atmosphere. Public transit is a purgatory for those with nowhere else to be to while away the hours. And pretty soon that’s who your ridership is and what they’re doing there.
