The argument is that rate of return only regresses to the mean if you diversify. It's like saying "I hold stock in a single company, so if I hold long enough, my return will average the return of the S&P 500". Your returns will look like the mean only if you diversify across investments, not over time.
A big reason why people believe one should own their own home (or that it is prudent to do so) is due to the historical fact that land has gone up in value in many countries with strong population growth (such as the United States).
As the population of the US starts decreasing (due to lower immigration, and historically low birth rates) and the urbanization trend completes, it's unclear why the value of land should go up, and therefore why real estate should increase in value.
The rest of the debate is very dependent on things like tax treatment (e.g. SALT and property taxes), personal preference (stability of fixed rent vs right to stay forever/customize), and transaction costs.
For those not very familiar with the US immigration system: it can be very confusing and the naming of things is rarely related to their function due to a very thick layer of legal fiction in how it works.
The system sorely lacks reform to align the legal fiction with reality, which is precisely why this news release may sound entirely sensible for the uninitiated.
How is this not absurd? What is the benefit? Space is a harsh environment, with issues due to solar radiation etc, etc. And it's permanently 100ms away from any user.
I think we also have to be honest and admit that, yes, indeed, there is less novel maths for all of us to be doing. The pioneers came first and discovered a lot of low hanging fruit. There were a lot of geniuses that mined the rest and reached higher in the tree. Now even the smartest mathematicians are left solving abstract puzzles with little utility in the real world. (Don't get me wrong, it's very fun, and sometimes useful too.)
After my PhD in applied mathematics, I decided to leave the field, partly because I feel it really has advanced so far that new discoveries do little to move the needle in the real world. There's enough smart people who obsess over nothing else but maths that I can go and do more practical stuff...
Is this not just a perspective issue? The fields we learn about in school are the ones that are in some sense mature, that have been cashed.
When I was in grad school, we learned about wavelets, but we did research on convex optimization for statistics. The first was an accomplishment of the last generation of mathematicians, and it would be hard to publish something groundbreaking. But nobody had really considered sparsity inducing optimization, so that was our problem.
In many ways, the situation is somewhat better for applied mathematicians because the problem space is wider. Ingrid Daubechies was an applied mathematician, and her work on wavelets was an outgrowth of work that originated in the petroleum exploration community. Wild how these connections get made.
The title is a non sequitur from the argument. The point is not to ask for a "bring a non-local to work day" where you tag along to a rando doing their normal routine.
The thing that locals do know a lot of the time, is the spots that are actually great but not hyped up by influencers/social media, the cool spots that are often good by virtue of not being well known, etc. And no one is arguing that the locals know all the best cultural attractions, the point of asking locals for advice is to understand what they see in their own city.
This is where platforms like Couchers.org or whatever come up, where you want to actually understand the locals, more than just see the hyped up touristy stuff (which often can also be phenomenal!).
The advice isn't to literally live a life in the day of a local, it's to ask the locals what the interesting things to do are. Nobody is actually suggesting that you go hang out at an office for 8 hours, stop by an affordable grocery store and then watch Netflix.
E.G. People in Seattle will not tell you to go to the space needle or to Pike Place Market (at best you might hear that you should go at least once). They will tell you to ride a bike from Lake Union to the Locks on a sunny day, and you will have more fun and see more than fighting the crowds at Pike Place.
You say that, but I’ve more than a few times found myself scratching my head when a local person has not known basics about where they live - everything from not knowing that there’s a supermarket one block over, to having never heard of the culture whose ruins litter their city.
I think the worst local advice I ever had sent me on a 3000km detour and got me interrogated by the FSB - basically it was “oh don’t go south of the Aral Sea, the road is terrible, you will die” - turns out that the road north of the sea had already been demolished so a new one could be built, and the one south had already been completely rebuilt.
Honestly, most locals don’t know shit about where they live.
There is a reason why touristic spots are touristic spots, even before the rise of social media and influencers. The reason is that they are usually the nicest spot in that zone.
Same reason why rich people buy (and inflate its value) land for holidays homes in certain places and not others. Because those are nicer places, where the landscape is beautiful.
The reason people use "When in Rome..." or "do as the locals do" is because that's how you get an accurate taste of what life in <place> is like. If you don't want to experience a glimpse of life in Paris, then sure go eat at a tourist trap. The quote below from TFA is an inadvertent own goal, I think:
>But today I imagine you visiting my hometown and spending a day with the locals. You’d probably end up watching reality TV, ordering some ‘New American’ food on Doordash (it’s a cheeseburger with Korean Kimchi Glaze™), and sports betting from your phone.
Perhaps TFAuthor hails from a place that isn't interesting enough for tourists to visit. Lots of small towns across the USA and Canada don't offer any compelling reason to visit unless you have relatives there.
There's a reason tourists flock to New York City and not to Schenectady.
>The reason people use "When in Rome..." or "do as the locals do" is because that's how you get an accurate taste of what life in <place> is like.
>There's a reason tourists flock to New York City and not to Schenectady.
Ah, yes. The masses of tourists flocking to NYC so they can experience the grind of working your ass off, every entity you interact with trying to get one over on you hoping that you'll have a) banked enough to day cash out to <shuffles cards> Hazleton Pennsylvania b) spend so many years in one apartment you're paying far below market rate.
>Nobody goes to NYC to experience what the locals experience.
Categorically false. People absolutely do do this. I do this when I travel anywhere. You don't have to start working a retail job in Hells Kitchen to get a taste of life in New York. But if you ride the subway, visit central park, eat at restaurants frequented by locals instead of tourist traps, then you are in fact experiencing what locals experience.
The point is that the locals tend to think that spots which are actually generic and uninteresting are great because the mediocre imported cuisine they serve is different from the local food or their friend works there, and that spots full of influencers which are actually great aren't that interesting because they'd personally never consider taking a bus to the centre to queue up with tourists to enjoy a rooftop with a view when they can have coffee with their friends in their own suburb at a chain they've got a loyalty card for. Sometimes seeing what banal stuff people think is amazing and what beautiful stuff they take for granted is educational in its own right, but it's not necessarily a better way to plan a holiday than a guidebook.
One phenomenon I noticed is that unpaid things (even if they're world class museums) often get left in the shadow of others that sell tickets - these get packaged in "city pass" cards, etc. and get more exposure from their selling.
> The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with.
In the same way that it was straightforward to deal with job loss from the industrial revolution, or when the US shipped away all its manufacturing capability?
reply