I don't think that it makes a ton of sense to draw an ideological difference between shorting and buying in the secondary market, where buying is 'Investing' and short selling isn't. Both are valid contributors to price discovery. The initial investment already happened, you're not actually adding capital to the company when buying shares on an exchange.
Investing doesn't mean you have to contribute to the thing you're investing in. Take investing in gold for example, you don't polish nor do anything else to the metal. You just buy a quantity of it and hope it goes up in value.
The problem with short selling is that you're actually borrowing.
That all said, I'm not saying I disagree with your point either. It is hard to make an ideological argument when this is really more just different shades of grey. Personally I'd say all investments are a form of gambling. Some investments are just riskier than others.
No, NW border of Excelsior is 280, so definitely not north of Monterrey Blvd. Broad strokes neighborhood is Twin Peaks area. That part of Twin Peaks is heavily influenced by historically affluent planned developments. Some of the more well known ones listed here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Residence_Parks.
Note that nonfarm payroll is still seasonally adjusted - 156105k vs. 156306k adjusted.
The FRED series for NFP with and without sesonality: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=15LPE
> The answer to that more likely has to do with some very broad phenomenon: capital has been accumulating due to increases in energy availability. Human talent (that turns capital into something actual) is plateauing due to slowing of population growth.
> As the world became more stable over time, the default risk also lessened over time
I think these are both saying the same thing from two sides - the default risk going down doesn't really mean anything in isolation. The implied context is the default risk goes down for the same rate of return (or the rate of return goes up for the same default risk).
I'm not sure if this claim really makes sense - if water districts are incentivized by income, and if high users really have such inelastic water consumption, then wouldn't the water district continue to raise the tiered rates at the highest level?
Thus, under these assumptions, the current tiered rates should accurately reflect the marginal price that the wasteful users are willing to pay, and any rise in price would result in a decrease in consumption.
Water districts are not able to do so with their tiered rates. They aren't necessarily for profit corporations (some are), although in many ways they are managed like them. The additional revenue allows for the addition of staff, the implementation of new programs, it helps cover the cost of aging infrastructure. Its not necessarily a bad thing. Tiered rates with straight caps might make more sense, but again, districts are disinterested from this. They generally need to make 'across-the-board' reductions of some set amount (say 20%). For a long time, it has not been in their interest to reduce the usage of these highest rate paying tiers of users.
Well, then keep ramping the rates up for big users and start giving smaller users more free water. A lot of people will just use the same amount of water even if their bill is eliminated.
If the intention of this idea is to allocate reasonable consumption to each person at low prices and quickly increase prices beyond that, then I don't think this wouldn't be a bad thing.
Tradeable quotas can be an effective way to protect a common resource.
The parent comment suggests a progressively priced system that would presumably allow for cheap consumption of water at small quantities. I think the comments here discarding this idea by claiming price sensitivity doesn't exist for wealthy people are unimaginative.
I'm not totally sold on on the idea, but it is very possible to create a tiered pricing system that makes domestic water waste unsustainably expensive. The price required to deter consumption may be absurdly high, but demand elasticity will always exist at high enough prices.
> "Me" being all car drivers. I specifically might not try to squeeze past bike
> riders, and I specifically might actually be patient on the road. But the
> proverbial "me" is the worst of the car drivers for purpose of this post.
To give a brief counter to the Taleb/Spitznagel Empirica Kurtosis strategy, the pricing of deep out of the money options is systematically overvalued in relation to the Black-Scholes model, suggesting that the market correctly prices in fat tails.
The volatility smile pattern describes the 'overvalued' nature of these options, and the SKEW index tracks their pricing.
I wonder if this adjustment is enough... Spitznagel's fund did return 4,144% in Q1 2020. Maybe they found some other similar hole, but one seems to still exist.
It's certainly possible that even with the volatility smile markets still underprice unlikely events, but high returns from a tail-heding fund during a black swan event hardly provides any evidence. Regardless of pricing, the expectation of the strategy is infrequent high returns and frequent poor or negative returns. Whether the market accurately prices these events also depends on how bad returns are during years without anomalous market conditions, and the intervals between fat-tail events.
