[sigstoat]

> When at any point as an engineer or a scientist have you observed large exponential growth to be sustainable in any context???

what on _earth_ do you think 6-7% a year is? that's exponential growth.

> SPY is up 50% since 2019 (pre covid crash). [...] Index funds aren't supposed to be nitro, they are supposed to be slow and plodding, and 10% annual is supposed to be huge. I think major indices should be nice, slow, inertial gains from ~6-7% annual, tops.

you've confused long-term averages with short term behavior.

the market gets its 6-10% annual by going up a lot when it does, to make up for the years where it goes down, or just moves sideways.

[boringg]

Human population growths, mosquito populations growths. Sustainable for a certain amount of time. You need to time bound your question. Nothing is sustainability on an endless time scales - the stars burn out and collapse on themselves.

[allendoerfer]

The universe is pretty big. It also has 3 useful dimensions. Earth has basically only two and one very narrow one.

I think we can keep going for quite some time.

[ncallaway]

These last two comments and replies really have a strong The Last Question vibe.

https://templatetraining.princeton.edu/sites/training/files/...

Really great short story

[Grustaf]

> > When at any point as an engineer or a scientist have you observed large exponential growth to be sustainable in any context???

> what on _earth_ do you think 6-7% a year is? that's exponential growth.

It's not "large" exponential growth, it's inline with the revenue growth of many large companies, so it's sustainable for quite some time.