>We live very well in the EU. We don’t have to have millions in savings in order to retire. Strong worker protection. Plenty of time off. Low crime rates.
We'll see how that pans out when the baby boomers finish retiring. Europe ate it's children to feed the retirees.
Or is the active money also in the big companies, because even though there are good opportunities elsewhere, the steady ETF flows just keep pumping the big companies even faster?
The way I've been looking at this is that when The Big One happens and the average American loses their shirt via the crash of the giant ETFs, the naysayers who managed to have been invested in the things that don't crash will zig when everyone else is zagging.
However: between now and then they're likely underperforming as you point out. And when it happens most people who believe themselves to be ziggers will have chosen the wrong zig candidate.
I really really worry about the ETF world, but to do anything else puts me at even higher risk.
Also the longer you're in an underperforming hedge, the worse the crash has to be and the better your hedge has to perform to be worth it. You could be completely right about a recession/crash, but if you miss it by 5 years, your net outcome could still be worse than if you just sat and rode it out start to finish.
No? ETF inflows from passive, market-index funds are evenly distributed across the market, weighted by market cap. They don't concentrate to only the big companies.
The S&P500 represents 87% of the US market (~$54 of 63T). Inflows to S&P500 funds are evenly distributed among that 87% (by market cap).
I think concerns about market concentration are usually expressed about, e.g., the Mag 7 being 31% of the US market (~$19 / 63T) moreso than the next biggest 493 stocks. S&P 500 inflows don't overweight the Mag 7 relative to any other S&P 500 component.
The UK has insane prices because of their refusal to do regional pricing to accommodate grid constraints. They'd rather pay wind farms to park their turbines, than to segment their grid pricing (i.e. make energy prices cheaper where there is a surplus of wind generation).
The UK's prices are a political choice due to the mapping of voters over the energy generation distribution.
We also have this rather unusual energy market where the price for energy is set by the supplier with the highest price necessary to meet demand at any particular time, and all the suppliers get paid that price. Most countries use a system where the suppliers get paid how much it costs for them to generate individually, and the users pay an average of that all.
No, most countries use the same merit order mechanism like UK.
The difference is that in those countries gas peakers are competing with cheaper hydro (nordics), coal(Germany) or nuclear (france). UK nuclear is pretty small, so gas competes only with itself for setting the price.
Curtailing renewbles due to grid constraints is usually a perfectly rational decision. New generation, new storage, new demand and new grid connections don't always happen on the same schedule.
Now, banning onshore wind in England for a decade when it was the cheapest source of energy available. That's just plain stupid (or a corrupt gift to your mates in gas companies).
But it followed economics. What you are saying is that now you want to screw it, because moving industry/trained labor to other areas isn't a plug and play option- it's a huge investment which could lead to closures
The government, by saying that there was a single zone, despite the electricity not actually working that way (because interconnectors don't have infinite capacity), were defying economics.
By breaking the country in to zones, where the electricity that's bought can actually reach the users they then apply the actual economics of the system properly, and encourage suppliers to build where the demand can be satisfied by them.
But in the past it made sense to have a single zone- prices were similar. So industry developed where possible. Now what you ask is that due to the ren generation, the pricing should change, so that industry that was formed long before current ren push needs to restructure/move to more advantageous locations because otherwise it'll use competitiveness. If you are fine with such development and it's consequences, you could ask for such reforms.
Situation is very similar in Germany - most industry is concentrated in the south while most productive wind in the north. In the past it didn't matter since prices were similar with coal. But now, since you can't magically create wind in low wind/unproductive areas, the options are either split zones and kill part of industry, which Germany doesn't want, or to keep a single zone and build expensive transmission like sudlink.
The recent full blackout in Iberia was caused by renewables destabilizing the grid, and the fossil plants were cold so couldn't save the day. Having fossil plants is of no use if they were mandated by the government to turn themselves off.
The grid operator did release a report, and it stated that the problem was desynchronization of a solar farm, followed by more frequency destabilization as they tried to combat the first problem, followed by a panicked attempt to bring gas plants back online but they weren't available. They'd been switched off to make way for solar and would have taken hours to warm up.
The only sense in which there are conflicting arguments, is that the leftist Spanish government read the above report and concluded that it was the fault of the gas plants for not being available when they were needed. Because they were switched off. Because of their own policies. This is not an argument that deserves genuine consideration.
It's been 20+ years since I worked in a state power control facility, it seems from your comment that you've never done such a thing; they're more complex than your comment suggests.
The preliminary report was exactly that, preliminary off the cuff listing of things that might cause issues with no definitive conclusion .. hence the need for longer consideration and a final report.
> the leftist Spanish government
Drop the politics and act like an Engineer (civil, electrical)
> the fault of the gas plants for not being available when they were needed. Because they were switched off.
It's routine across the globe to bring power generation facilities on and off, and spin them up in anticipation of need - this incident is a failure of a control algorithm regardless of politics.
This is a one time gain. Think of it like instead of doing the work yourself you are just pair programming with a junior developer whom you cannot trust to write secure and bug free code. You can probably optimize your interactions such that this “intern” does work while you do other work. But if it’s work blocks what you are doing, it’s just that now you work differently.
I toyed with it and found it to be less frustrating to set up the latest layout for a VueJS project, but having it actually write code was… well I had to manually rewrite large chunks of it after it was done. I am sure it will improve but how long until you can tell it the specs, have it work for a few minutes or hours or days, and come back to an actual finished project? My bet is decades to never.
CC just feeds the whole codebase and entire files into the model, no RAG, nothing in the way. It works substantially better because of that, but it's $expensive$.
I'd say edited, I did wonder if they used AI to find the issues in the first place but they would brag about that front and center and pivot to an AI-first security company within seconds. Then again, maybe they used AI to help them map out what happens in the code, even though it's Go code and should be pretty readable / obvious what happens.
That said, I think it's weird; the vulnerabilities seem to have been found by doing a thorough code review and comprehension, why then cut corners by passing the writeup through AI?
I don't think they would brag about it if they were found by AI, but based on their description I suspect most of this work was definitely done by LLMs, and then checked by humans.
Why do you have that belief? If some researcher used AI, they'd be singing the praises of AI from the rooftops. There'd be Show HN on how cool AI is that it can find CVEs. VCs would be flooding the dev with offers, for what reason who knows, but that's VCs.
Why would you think someone would hide the use of AI? I'm not familiar with a timeline with that behavior.
Infosec is a bit different - this industry is all about (1) expert knowledge and (2) secret sauce. You disclose a part of your secrets, like the security findings, and in exchange your reputation for expert knowledge increases. Telling the world "I automated the boring parts with LLMs" will not only get you "duh, everybody does it now" but will cast doubt on your expertise. That's why these repeated disclaimers at the beginning "we didn't use fuzzers etc., it was all manual process because we knew what to look for" etc.
We'll see how that pans out when the baby boomers finish retiring. Europe ate it's children to feed the retirees.
https://www.politico.eu/article/france-francois-bayrou-wakin...
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