I liked Matt Levine's take in his latest podcast. You buy an index because you want to own the market. If you want to own the market in 2026 you want to own SpaceX and Anthropic, and probably OpenAI too.
That said, if you think this is as bad as the article claims you'll obviously buy SpaceX at IPO, then sell it when Index funds are obligated to buy.
> That said, if you think this is as bad as the article claims you'll obviously buy SpaceX at IPO, then sell it when Index funds are obligated to buy.
The price at IPO will obviously be influenced by expectations of a future purchase by index funds... as an analogy, if it became public knowledge that next week, 1,000,000 people would all be required to buy gold, the price of gold would go up today, not next week
By making inclusion near-certain and fast, the rule changes may actually reduce the post-IPO inclusion pop (it gets priced in at IPO) while increasing the IPO price itself and the volatility on rebalance day due to the float constraint.
This IPO marks and inflection point where a fund that tracks whole market value shifts in definition, because of the forced rush value nature of the rule changes.
If the fast entry rule changes hadn’t happened I would agree with you entirely.
The rule change where nasdaq adds a weighting factor to spacex's float is what causes distortions - it artificially increases the size of spacex's cap weight without actually having more shares.
Fortunately, this only affects indices that follow nasdaq, and from what i know, no other index is following this. That means it's "safe" to purchase a globally diversified, cap weighted index fund (safe as in the float isn't manipulated).
People talk of the demise of passive investing due to this, but most of the commentary fail to mention it's a specific, nasdaq thing and not a general change.
I want to buy an index with generally fixed rules. I don't know enough of the topic to know how bad it is but if Nasdaq is literally manually tweaking SpaceX's weight, just because? Then it's not buying the market.
If this is expected to be bad for ETF investors, what's stopping let's say Vanguard or Blackrock from creating their own index that tracks the NASDAQ but without the new inclusion rules, and then changing their ETFs' target indexes to that one. Vanguard is investor-owned so it would be in their best interest wouldn't it?
High Scale is so subjective here, I'd hazard a guess that 99% of businesses are not at the scale where they need to worry about scaling larger than a single Postgres or MySQL instance can handle.
In the case of one project I've been in, the issue was the ORM creating queries, which Postgres deemed too large to do in-memory, so it fell back to performing them on-disk.
Interestingly it didn't even use JOIN everywhere it could because, according to the documentation, not all databases had the necessary features.
A hard lesson in the caveats of outsourcing work to ORMs.
I've worked both with ORMs and without. As a general rule, if the ORM is telling you there is something wrong with your query / tables it is probably right.
The only time I've seen this is my career was a project that was an absolute pile of waste. The "CTO" was self taught, all the tables were far too wide with a ton of null values. The company did very well financially, but the tech was so damn terrible. It was such a liability.
One of the last companies I worked at had very fast queries and response times doing all the joins in-memory in the database. And that was only on a database on a small machine with 8GB RAM. That leaves a vast amount of room for vertical scaling before we started hitting limits.
> So it is in a bad state because it does not receive enough money, that's it
In real terms the budget is the largest it's ever been, it's a relic of the time when people worked and died shortly (a decade) after retiring, not when they live for 30+ years longer.
> In real terms the budget is the largest it's ever been
Which it needs to be given the demographic changes you note. It's about 15% smaller per capita than comparable countries spend. That would suggest that we need to increase the budget if we want comparable service.
That has changed in recent years. Now greater than in France in absolute spend per capita, would need a 7.5% increase to match in terms of GDP. It would still require a 15% increase to match Germany in absolute per capita, but only 8.5% in percentage of GDP.
It's much easier to maintain, as headsets have become integrated it's become harder and harder to work with anything that runs from the brake levers through the frame.
In terms of maintenance, most cyclists would benefit more from internal gear hubs and carbon belts. From a product development POV, seems better to make auto shifting IGHs. Indeed this is how share bikes are designed.
Yes, but for racing bikes, which are the target market for wireless shifting in 2025, the efficiency losses of an internal hub are a non-starter.
The casuals whose bikes haven't seen a wrench since they were assembled aren't buying wireless groupsets. For them: we're in agreement about belts and internally geared hubs.
Automatic shifting has yet to prove itself to be more than a curiosity. A 20-something year old Autobike came into the shop I was wrenching in. It still worked shockingly well for being covered in rust. In good shape it would be an entirely adequate solution, if only it solved a problem anyone had.
My money is on e-bikes entirely supplanting any demand there may have ever been for automatic shifting on a bicycle. The motors have enough oomph that they make a lot of shifts unnecessary if you're not looking to maximize speed/battery life/whatever.
The complete market failure of the Autobike suggests that the demographic of people not on bikes who would ride if they didn't have to shift is either not that large or wasn't reached by their marketing.
This was literally the only one I've ever seen. And I volunteered for a year and a half at a community bike shop that was infamous for attracting oddities and evolutionary dead-ends. For instance: a side-by-side bicycle built for two. If there were a gazillion Autobikes out there, we'd have seen a couple. People simply didn't buy them.
1x setups have negated a lot of this. My wife does not enjoy bicycling and we got her a cruiser, it is very simple for her to understand "click up for harder, click down for easier".
That's long-term maintenance for commuters and casual riders. This product is for competitive and serious riders, and it reduces another type of maintenance (setting up and maintaining their bike for high performance).
And yet, this entire class of abuse is only possible because Microsoft refuse to implement any kind of permission management or sandboxing for extensions.
If the team put those filters in place, then it was the team. Anyone implementing automation gets to be held responsible for its failure, but also its successes.
Unfortunately the marketplace ecosystem is why I went back to VSCode from Cursor. I'm a bit upset by this because I don't quite appreciate that Microsoft has a closed ecosystem for the marketplace and does not open it to Cursor but the reality is, that Open VSX does not have all extensions and little vetting.
Well this was an extremely unsophisticated attack. The malware wasn't hidden and they didn't even bother to actually copy the real extension.
If I were doing this I would copy the real extension, give it a name that made it sound official but in the README say it is a tweaked version with some improvements or whatever. Also actually add some improvements, but hide the malware in those changes.
Which doesn't seem to be wrong? At least from the linked document, he went to prison for non-violent drug crimes, unless I misunderstand what the document says?
Him claiming he's in prison for non-violent crimes (like he's your local herb dealer) takes gumption...Authorities linked his Carfentanil escapades to several deaths.
Something really similar happened to me, I broke my radial head cycling last year.
2 days later I got a call from the doctor telling me to start moving it as much as I could, I asked when I should stop with the sling and he told me yesterday.
Maybe, but I think part of the fear behind the IPO is that some bully type investor like Icahn will do a takeover/weigh-in and mess it up, towards a profit driven enterprise.
With major ownership held by someone else, this becomes less likely.
That said, if you think this is as bad as the article claims you'll obviously buy SpaceX at IPO, then sell it when Index funds are obligated to buy.