One way the world has been getting better
November 2024 Magazine
1st issue!
Miscellaneous
On bumps in the road
The location of all earthquakes overs the last ~half century
Incredible sculpture art
Great player great ad
Exercise is good:
"You name the system in your body, and exercise improves it and makes your chance of disease in that system less: 60 percent less likely to have [atrial fibrillation|, 50 percent less likely to have diabetes, 70 percent less likely to fracture your hip, 50 percent less likely to have colon cancer, 25 percent less likely to have breast cancer, I think 25 percent less likely to get depression; 70 percent of people who are active in their daily lives report better sleep. And over many years, you're much less likely to die. So, I mean, you pick your system. Exercise, it really is the magic pill…One minute of exercise buys you five minutes of extra life."
Transportation innovation is accelerating at the macro level.
Self driving car progress has jumped an order of magnitude in the last year or two.
- Self driving cars are now in commercial use in SF, LA, & Phoenix (“the future is here but not evenly distributed”).
- Waymo is now doing 100,000 paid rides per week, up 20x from last year.
- Tesla has logged over 1.5 billion miles, up about 10x since last year.
- Amazon is about to launch a robotaxi pilot.
This is a titanic change in transportation and the second order effects are hard to predict (will this change where people choose to live? where work is done? how many jobs will be impacted? which companies survive and thrive and which don’t? in what ways and to what degree does urban design eventually change?…)
Air travel adoption has been increasing hugely. About 20 million Americans had a passport in 1993, now about 160 million Americans do. Global travel has become mainstream. It’s expected that $1 out of every $10 spent globally in 2024 will be on travel, according to a new report from the World Travel and Tourism Council.
On why you should invest in S&P 500 index funds rather than trying to beat the market
A study looked at ~29000 public stocks over the last 100 years. The majority (51.6%) of these stocks had negative cumulative returns. However, the investment performance of some stocks was remarkable. Seventeen stocks delivered cumulative returns greater than five million percent (or $50,000 per dollar initially invested), with the highest cumulative return of 265 million percent (or $2.65 million per dollar initially invested) accruing to long-term investors in Altria Group. Annualized compound returns to these top performers relatively were modest, averaging 13.47% across the top seventeen stocks, thereby affirming the importance of "time in the market.".
Industry growth does not always = company in industry stock price growth
You’re extremely unlikely to beat the market consistently over time (and trying to costs money in helper fees and trading fees and taxes, compounding the negative effect of missed returns from simply investing in an S&P 500 index fund)
We are living through arguably the biggest transition in human history with AI. The impact of AI is extraordinary, from already making web development or artistic creations much more accessible (see from me this website! and below digital paintings I used AI to make), to starting to turn the search engine (Google’s 10 blue links) into an answer engine (ChatGPT), to soon enough even more impressive AI models (that may in some cases spend hours or days or weeks for more complex queries). We’re in the last year or two where AI is not by far the most discussed topic in the world (as the writer Tim Urban recently said).
AI digital painting by Henri #1
AI digital painting by Henri #2
AI digital painting by Henri #3
AI digital painting by Henri #4
