Governments pick the size of their country's financial markets when they decide what parts of society get traded in those markets.
Pension and healthcare are the two most obvious pieces governments can decide to "make it themselves" or "let companies solve it", and the later option creates the pieces of paper that get traded in financial markets and "frees" money to buy those papers.
And the article ends with the obvious notice that "large markets" is not something good by itself.
He seems to be saying that Funded Pensions like 401k can lead to asset inflation such as high housing prices. While public pensions which are pay as you such as Social Security do not lead to financialization and asset bubbles.
It was a tough read. He should tighten his word choice.
This seems like an incomplete analysis since many countries with pay-as-you-go schemes borrow money to fund them sometimes, which contributes to general inflation.
When economists were worried about "savings gluts", to decrease savings demand they advocated for things like government funded pensions.
If you read some of the literature out on China and their anomalous savings rate (household consumption is only 40% of national income) studies show that the lack of a social safety net exacerbates the problem and savings rates decline once you have the safety net.
One difference they noticed was the dramatic decline in savings rates as you go from rural to urban areas. In urban areas you have a different social safety net -- a government pension, but in rural areas the pension is optional and savings rates are dramatically higher. Because much social spending in China is handled at the provincial or city level and there are differences, it is a natural laboratory for these types of studies. It's also why you need a citizenship document when trying to "emigrate" into a city or different province, and there are internal controls that limit what city you can be registered in, which also affects things like car registration, real estate purchases, and access to local education in the city for people that are considered "migrants" - e.g. they physically live in the city but do not have enough points to be registered there.
I feel this in my own life. From well before my working years I had a message ingrained into me: “Do not count on social security to be around when you retire.”
It’s probably not all so drastic as that, but for me (and many other American millennials) my financial ethos has been squarely centered on saving and making hay while the sun shines. Compound that over 300M people and multiple generations and you do get overly deep and inflated capital markets.
As genX this was my experience too. The numbers have been clear for decades, SS is unlikely to be a great option by the time anyone working today gets it. (including people who retire in a month). Generally I think there will be SS when I'm old - but it will barely be enough to live on. I'm trying to save money so I can not only eat but also do other things I enjoy [that cost money] when I retire.
It’s not just you, I also read it and had little idea what the central thesis was. I see there are a number of points made but the author could do better job bringing it all together.
>Public pensions and family benefits may seem old-fashioned compared with asset-based solutions. But they provide security without locking households into markets, without generating trillion-dollar investment pools, and without driving asset inflation that prices younger generations out of housing and wealth. Sometimes, the non-assetising path may simply be better.
It's an obvious propaganda post intended to demonize the financial markets, and promote unsustainable social security policies.
If the options are pensions or self investment, how is one sustainable and the other isn’t? The investment dollars in scope are similar, with pensions being better managed than your average human would do.
> with pensions being better managed than your average human would do.
Only if they are. Some pensions are well managed. Some are not. Some seem well managed for years, but in fact they are not. Some have been well managed for a long time, but someone incompetent gets in power. Can you tell the difference.
Oh, and if you can tell the difference, can you convince everyone else and thus get this fixed? Or will voters be happy with the mismanagement because it is returning great results now on low investment leaving more money to spend on other things now?
In the worst case no pension (either personal/private or public) is better than a pension. At least if you have no pension you got to use/spend your money today - it didn't go to whatever the corrupt pension manager did with your money.
Before pension reform in the US I had some distant relative who was laid off 3 months before his planed retirement when the company went bankrupt - it then came out the pension he was counting on was entirely invested in the now worthless company stock. This is the real risk you need to worry about if you have any form of pension.
In principle defined contribution plans should be a good way to split the difference, although I recognize that it's a lot harder politically to make them mandatory than it is for pension contributions.
The question is who is managing the pension. Defined contributions can be a really bad deal if you can't control who is managing the money.
The other major problem with contribution is you don't know when you will die. If I'm going to die at 65 like some relatives I should retire at 50, but if I'm to live to 97 in great health like others I should wait a few more years. (family history says my expected lifespan is about 80, but it follows a statistical curve ranging between 65 and 95 - just like nearly everyone else in a "first world" country). I want a system that acounts for how long I will live and my health and ensures I have plenty of money - group pensions should be really good at that.
Most pensions are Pay as You Go systems where no investment actually occurs (or if it does it is vestigial).
Effectively no different from a regular ponzi scheme being used to purchase votes.
Self-investment has the actual investment there.
If pensions were fully-funded you'd be right, but they aren't in almost every country. Unfunded pension liabilities are well over 300% of GDP in most european countries, but since they don't show up on debt to gdp metrics, people aren't aware of it.
>The investment dollars in scope are similar, with pensions being better managed than your average human would do.
Retirement is going to be effectively pay-as-you-go no matter what you do (at least until we invent much more sophisticated robots).
You can't stockpile nurses and save them up for when you retire.
If you save money or invest in financial instruments, you're still relying on labor from subsequent generations and if there aren't enough of them, higher labor costs will eat up everything you saved.
The only way to really save up for retirement on the society-wide scale is to spend money on things that increase the productive capacity of future generations.
> The only way to really save up for retirement on the society-wide scale is to spend money on things that increase the productive capacity of future generations.
Indeed, and we didn’t do that. We invested in issuing debt and other non production capacity efforts.
Well, the current situation is equally effectively unfunded because you’ve got gains in an investment account that will be competing for a rapidly shrinking working age population in concert with large amounts of voters who don’t have investments but have a vote to vote for someone who will increase taxes to increase benefits. Pick your illusion of generational contract and financialization performance art.
Pensions are no more a Ponzi scheme than a capital market predicated on growth that will not occur due to structural global demographic dynamics. People are too bought into an abstraction while the underlying crumbles, for obvious reasons.
>Well, the current situation is equally effectively unfunded because you’ve got gains in an investment account that will be competing for a rapidly shrinking working age population in concert with large amounts of voters who don’t have investments but have a vote to vote for someone who will increase taxes to increase benefits. Pick your illusion of generational contract and financialization performance art.
You seem to have a serious misunderstanding of what the current situation is.
There is no "gains in an investment account" because social security is unfunded, and has only vestigial investments (many of which are primarily fig leaf to finance the government at lower costs/lower returns).
There won't be any "gains in an investment account that will be competing for a rapidly shrinking working age population" because there fundamentally aren't any gains.
Now, assuming that your misconception was correct, and that there was a pot of unrealized gains to be consumed when you retire... That still wouldn't cause any "competing for a rapidly shrinking working age population" because the thing about having resources is that you can spend them to get more of the things you need. Sure a large influx of capital requiring some specific goods or services would increase the price of those things... which would in turn increase the incentive to provide more of those things.
Frankly that isn't an issue if it's fully funded.
> large amounts of voters who don’t have investments but have a vote to vote for someone who will increase taxes to increase benefits.
And this is the problem.
Theft and its normalization through political power is what causes the self-funded and fully funded model to fail, not anything inherent to it.
>Pensions are no more a Ponzi scheme than a capital market predicated on growth that will not occur due to structural global demographic dynamics.
There is nothing to capital markets that requires growth. Indeed historically it is the opposite, and investors tend to overpay for growth resulting in lower returns.
I was just looking into this today but it seems pricey. $29/user/month for basic features like codeowners and defining pr approval requirements. Going with Forgejo.
Wait, what? So you're on the hook for backups, upgrades, etc. and you have to pay them for the privilege? I thought GitLab was free as in speech and beer.
Can't you see that they are using immigration questions as an excuse to consolidate power that exceeds immigration enforcement by a large margin? The ability to detain lawful workers or pull people off the street without a warrant from a judge & hold them illegally for a significant duration can become political retaliation or terror tool and a racial profiling vehicle very quickly.
And more over, they basically have proved that the law has no sufficient ability to actually enforce court orders on the ground when the administrative branch is firmly on not obeying them. Even worse, the public opinion has been just mildly annoyed by this - by mildly I mean that only some people decided to bring themselves to the streets, separately and only on the weekends or a single day in most cases.
I think you missed my point. I do not deny the existence nor validity of the immigration questions, or whether certain implemented policy is questionable or not. What I tried to argue was that the Trump administration uses those issues, and people's discontent over them, to engineer a mass power consolidation that may do so much harm in the long run (or, probably, within merely a few years) that even if in the process it helps some Americans to gain jobs or whatever it still by no means worth the price yet to be paid.
Did border crossing drop? Yes. Is economy gotta improve? It is complicated like usual. Do these worth to give up a working democracy , i.e. the ability to replace a leader other than waiting for their natural death or committing a revolution? Absolutely not. Democracy's merit isn't that it's the most fair system to pick candidates, but the power to replace leadership without bloodshed and do so within people's lifetime.
What could be the better answer to immigration policy is out of the scope, therefore I would echo the other comment that says this is not about immigration. If this wasn't clear before, it should've been after the two Minneapolis murders and the arrest of Don Lemon, etc etc.
Normalizing paramilitary forces in US cities/areas, especially Democrat-leaning ones. See also early actions of deploying National Guard units (from Southern areas into Northern ones).
It is a salve for the status wound the dimished social and economic station poor white males found themselves in after the civil rights act and the deindustrialization.
It assumes that "I deserve the benefits I or my family once had because I see someone else that now has them."
It sees the social and economic territory as fundamental limited and wants to secure a living space within them.
And it does so by binding to the state and using the state to create that void so that they can regain what they feel was lost.
It must feel amazing, like psychic fentanyl to see what's going down.
These are already arbitrary detentions, well unlawful at least (they're purposeful, just not for legal purposes).
The tens of thousands of detainees aren't being put in hotels... they're going to concentration camps; either in USA where they're forced to work (slavery you might term it, as many (most?) have not broken the law, nor been detained legally); or abroad where the regime's intention appears to be that they die.
You know the revanchist militias who would openly hate everything about our country, while claiming to be "patriots" ? You know how they've been awfully quiet lately ? It's about putting them in charge, at least as far as the bottom-up.
The top-down is something like destroying the United States and subjugating what remains, with many foreign interests aligned here - Russia, China, Big Tech eager to create their surveillance society, religious fundamentalists who just want the world to burn so their ideologies might regain relevance, etc.
I foresee something closer to a proportional increase of investment in all the remaining accessible markets, as US relative attractiveness decreases, rather than it moving to a specific other place.
So basically, everywhere else, proportionally. Even markets that have worse import/export restrictions, will still have relative changes in their attraction.
For a rough approximation non-US world index ETFs, which are available to retail investors.
You must have been a child when Michelle Obama said that children needed better food and half the country lost their collective minds. Hard to do anything when corporations control what most legislation is passed.
The way I read it, he takes issue with your assertion that "nobody bats an eye" at sugar in Coke.
This is quite the opposite of everything I've ever seen in my entire life in America.
Or perhaps since you mention sugar, not corn syrup, and list quantities in kilograms not pounds or tons, he suspects you may not actually have first-hand experience with this.
Point is that people do in fact try to change what you're complaining about, your dismissive comments are just sad. Go out and organize rather than shouting into the void if this is what you care about.
I've always wondered if her initiative, which caused some big food companies to reduce fat and salt in their products, and change their frying media, is the reason for the rise of Sriracha in America.
My theory is that the food tasted less flavorful, so people compensated by adding their own.
I don't eat a lot of junk food, but for a long time after the Obama administration, when I did partake, often my immediate reaction was "Wow. These aren't as tasty as I remember."
"No one bats an eye" is a weird take when the Federal Government, via the Department of Health and Human Services, has literally just declared war on added sugar. [1] Also, lots of people have already changed their diets [2] regarded added sugar.
Sugar has been vilified for longer and more vociferously than social media use by kids, but that may be changing now.
Well the narrative has already been promulgated that they are "anti-science" so it's being ignored. Sugar is good. Hey Mom, send down more Pixie Stix!!
You must run in different circles than I, most people I know have reduced their added sugar consumption. My point was that there has been a swelling wave of anti-sugar sentiment over the last decades and it's reach the point were even RFK loudly said sugar is bad. That's the opposite of "no one bat's an eye". Of course people will ignore all sorts of advice for all sorts of reasons, but the sentiment (as shown by the decline of added sugar consumption) is there, and growing.
The Coke Classic is still selling. Coke Zero has not replaced Classic. Both "no one bat's an eye" and your use of "most people" (even with the "I know" qualifier) are clearly extremes of both sides of the conversation being intentionally used. The fact that things like Diet, Zero, etc version of Coke and other soft drinks exist show people are paying attention to sugar. The fact that sugary products are still being purchased shows that not everyone has changed their habits.
Shouting extreme positions doesn't really move the conversation
I recall a discussion here recently whereupon the list of items eligible for nutrition assistance (food stamps) in the USA were changed to exclude unhealthy foods, especially those with added sugar. Which BTW affects poorer communities disproportionately with long-term health problems like diabetes.
Elimination of processed sugar is a good thing.
Despite this, the discussion quickly pivoted to "how dare you keep poor children from enjoying birthday cake".
In my last company, we _did_ pay for Google Cloud support and when BigQuery jobs started to fail randomly, causing huge trouble producing critical reports, the response was essentially "we are investigating", "we have identified the issue", and "please wait for it to be fixed". Hardly what I would call support. They couldn't care less.
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. This may be snark, but this is 100% needed in the world we live in today. It is a fact of today's world that individuals have no leverage over these companies. I can understand why big companies, who have leverage, buy their services. But I don't understand why individuals, who have no leverage, buy their services and build their profession and livelihood around them. Any day, they can cut you off from their services. You are being irresponsible to yourself if you put all your eggs in these big tech baskets.
We seriously do need this kind of research and compelling articles that argue why relying on these big tech cloud services is harmful for individuals.
Why would the governments invest money on such a niche language?
"Scala is widely used to build and operate essential systems across multiple industries." - very bold statement.
I don't know what it looks like on the ground now, but Scala was the defacto language of data infrastructure across the post-Twitter world of SV late stage/growth startups. In large part, this was because these companies were populated by former members of the Twitter data team so it was familiar, but also because there was so much open source tooling at that point. ML teams largely wrote/write Python, product teams in JS/whatever backend language, but data teams -- outside of Google and the pre-Twitter firms -- usually wrote Scala for Spark, Scalding etc in the 2012-2022ish era.
I worked in Scala for most of my career and it was never hard to get a job on a growth stage data team or, indeed, in finance/data-intensive industries. I'm still shocked at how the language/community managed to throw away the position they had achieved. At first I was equally shocked to see the Saudi Sovereign Wealth fund investing in the language, but then realized it was just 300k from the EU and everything made sense.
It's still my favorite language for getting things done so I wouldn't be upset with a comeback for the language, but I certainly don't expect it at this point.
Mostly the latter. Scala 3 is almost completely irrelevant to the big data space so far. Databricks took six years before upgrading their proprietary Spark runtime to Scala 2.13. Flink dropped the Scala API before even moving to 2.13. I don't know if Scio will seriously attempt the move to Scala 3. All of them suffer from Twitter libraries being abandoned, which isn't insurmountable, but an annoyance still.
And I don't think it matters anymore. I predict that the JVM will eventually be out of the equation. We're already seeing query engines being replaced by proprietary or open source equivalents in C++ or Rust. Large scale distribution is less of a selling point with modern cloud computing. Do you really need 100 executors when you can get a bare metal instance with 192, 256 or 384 cores?
People want a dataframe API in Python because that's what the the ML/DS/AI crowd knows. Queries and processing will be done in C++ or Rust, with little or even zero need for a distributed runtime. The JVM and Scala solve a problem that simply won't exist anymore.
Yeah, this is certainly the correct take. There's an alternate timeline where the Scala community focused during the peak on making it a better language for numeric computing/ML rather than the Nth category theoretic framework, but here we are. At a job almost a decade ago, we made some progress on an open source dataframes (and unfortunately proprietary data visualization) library for Scala, but we didn't get far enough before the company closed and the project died [1].
Still my favorite language I had the privilege to work with professionally for over a decade. However, in this post-JVM world, I'm actually excited to see a lot more OCaml discussion on here lately. The Jane Street work on OxCaml is terrific after a long period of stagnation with the language. I'm using it for most of my projects these days.
It wouldn't have to be used in very many places to justify a 377k investment. A few big European banks alone would be worth it. Their website says "we invest globally in the open software components that underpin Germany's and Europe's competitiveness and ability to innovate". The fact that Scala is used at a university could also be classified as innovation. This is a minor amount of money if you're going to compare it with a STEM or medical research grant.
Is it niche? Scala is arguably the single most successful functional language. It interoperates with the whole JVM ecosystem. It's probably the #3 JVM language after Java and Kotlin.
You're being downvoted but you aren't necessarily wrong. Javascript is probably one of the most approachable functional-like languages without being dogmatically functional.
Because the idea of classes is baked into JVM. So when writing inline code, with groovy, scala, kotlin, whatever else, the compiler has to basically insert fake classes into the jvm.
This may seem trivial, but because its fundamentally "hacky" its not something that is ever going to be as easy to work with and expand.
This is nonsense. And, not that there's anything wrong with classes, but compilers no longer need to 'insert fake classes' for anonymous functions since Java 8.
Yes, and? Classes are not inherently bad, hence saying that JVM should not be invested in because its bytecode requires classes is nonsense.
re: inline lambdas, they have to be _tied_ to a class, and defined as methods, indeed. But they no longer have to be standalone classes themselves since JDK8
Scala may have fallen out of favor but was quite popular few years ago. And perhaps still is the most popular EU-designed language (developed by EPFL).
For people who don't get this, EPFL is the Swiss Federal Technical Institue in Lausanne. Switzerland isn't part of the EU or EEA but has instead integrated itself with the EU very closely via a mindboggling number of bilateral agreements with the EU members and the Schengen agreement which allows for free, borderless movement. This has the effect of making it seem very much like they are part of the EU without actually being as such.
Chisel is very neat but "the number one language for building hardware"? VHDL and SV are the only things in this space that actually matter. Chisel is still a blip for now.
Hmm, I think we're talking about different kinds of "number one".
The ancestor comment called Scala "niche" and criticized the characterization of it as "widely used". So given that context, I was coming at this from a perspective of popularity; Chisel is orders of magnitude nicher than even Scala itself and orders of magnitude less widely used. Most of industry is still choosing VHDL or Verilog for most greenfield hardware projects.
I think you mean in terms of "best way to do it". Chisel can at least lay claim to that crown, sure, though I think you could say the same about Scala too.
(I might say Clash for hardware and Haskell for software, not that that does me any good.)
Canada has 14 tonnes carbon footprint per person. Canada is a cold country.
France has 8 tonnes carbon footprint per person. Climate is way warmer.
We can't continue adding population and the wondering what is going on.
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