https://old.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1uufkpe/windo...

Still a simplification, but doesn't horribly mislead you into thinking it's a reckless policy.

(With that said, I agree that 30 years is excessive, even under the heuristic that it should be a greater penalty than the crime it supported.)

Also:

>Stacking a weight on top of a table holds it at a fixed height and requires zero mechanical work.

I was referring to a human holding it. What would have been a better way to keep you from missing that?

1) You have to declare all income, even from illegal activities.

2) The declarations can be used against you in court (IIUIC with the caveat that they need an independent reason to get a warrant for those tax records).

>The Fund employs an indexing investment approach designed to track the performance of the S&P 500 Index (the “Target Index”), a widely recognized benchmark of U.S. stock market performance that is dominated by the stocks of large U.S. companies. Under normal circumstances, the Fund invests at least 80% of its net assets, plus the amount of any borrowings for investment purposes, in the stocks that make up the Target Index. The Fund attempts to replicate the Target Index by investing all, or substantially all, of its assets in the stocks that make up the Target Index, holding each stock in approximately the same proportion as its weighting in the Target Index.

That doesn't sound like a lot of leeway to arbitrarily ignore major new additions that make up a few percent of the index. They'd have to say "no, we're not holding each stock anymore".

It would be more informative to see SEC or court rulings on a mutual fund that tried something like this.

Or, we could just go the way HN normally works, and settle it by who can write the most confidently.

Right, if they've advertised as an S&P 500 index fund, they have to robotically follow the S&P 500, stupid inclusions and all. Changing that strategy would require ... a lengthy process involving input from shareholders.

However, someone can still start e.g. a "classic S&P 500" fund that follows the old rules for inclusion, and I suspect we'll see that in response to these recent decision.

If you wanted to correct a misconception, you should provide a better, more complete understanding, not just express frustration about a misconception that doesn't even exist outside of an uncharitable reading.

In this case, that means refining the point to the more accurate model, that you need an insurable interest -- i.e. reason you don't want the event to happen, even knowing you'd get a payout[1]. Your counterexamples only work as such because that exists![2] If you want to fix all the people who don't have your superior understanding, that would have been a great way to help them out.

>I'm not sure where this false premise started but alot of people believe it.

It exists because it's approximately true: you can't get insurance on 99.99999% of buildings in the world because you have no insurable interest in them. And any time someone could correct that false premise, they probably just complain rather than providing the complete understanding -- exactly the choice you just made here.

[1] IMO, this is the natural dividing line between gambling and insurance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13916088

[2] Edit: And in your building collateral example, the policy would prevent you from double dipping -- getting both the building and the full payout.

Related: In most of the world, carmakers separate out a luxury brand from their other products: Honda with Acura, Toyota with Lexus, etc. In Japan, they don't. The explanation I usually get is that the culture primarily associates luxury with "being attached to the big-name corporation". So you don't really improve on that by introducing another smaller brand, even one you build up as luxury.

See also the patio11 comment:

>>My salary was $30k, but there is some tangible value in having a pocket full of business cards which practically read "Attention, person who has just been handed this card: give the bearer whatever he wants. We're good for it. If you don't, we will remember." That status is very much not the same as the one you get if you combine two part-time jobs into the same level of income.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8576008

That said, it has definitely pulled some real humans out of the woodwork to give their real opinion that "yes, I'm influenced/duped by context and that's a good thing". And that's an accomplishment.

[1] By which I mean predicting the behavior of error-prone code that requires good knowledge of all the quirks of the language to correctly answer.