Experimentalist

9 ms·

1.
by Experimentalist 16y ago
> That ideal doesn't exist, and probably can't, in the real world. Yes it does, and it's a reality throughout the economy not just an ideal. > Hospitals are often losing money because they're covering the cost of procedures for peop
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
Investors/entrepreneurs are attracted to businesses that show promise to be profitable, and turn away from making investment in unprofitable businesses. This is a basic economics principle - I'm not assuming anything. I cited hospitals as a
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
> Defendants of the current system argue free market but the result is the most expensive health care I've ever seen. Interesting, but the current system in the US isn't "free market". It's communistic. - 80%+ of health care expenditure
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
1. Health care does follow the rules of supply and demand. It's erroneous to claim otherwise. 2. Many if not most health care costs are not emergency services, and they include many elective non-emergency procedures, diagnostics, mental h
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
That's one example. There are 5,500+ hospitals in the US, so one example is hardly representative. There would be many more investments if it was more profitable. As the link I posted states - many are not profitable and many have a very lo
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
What wrong with a for-profit system? There should be MORE profit, not less. High profits attract entrepreneurs to compete for customers by offering lower prices and innovating - consumers benefit. The current system is the exact opposite -
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
The costs incurred by people not paying for their medical services are relatively small, less than 5% of all health care costs. A much bigger issue is higher insurance premiums due to unhealthy lifestyles. Preventable poor health due to obe
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
That's a lot of assumptions for 2 sentences.
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
I think "Ludic fallacy" might be a more accurate fallacy to cite. The Ludic fallacy refers to making predictions based on past events, even though the probability of future outcomes includes variables not contained in the past dataset.
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
No, inflation is not only in people's minds, it's a real measurable monetary phenomenon. Sellers can raise prices but if there is not enough money to pay the price then no transactions occur, The sellers would then have to lower their price
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
Also I believe a balanced budget amendment was enacted in Brazil around that time.
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
Demand should be depressed because it was artificially stimulated before. ie. if demand for homes was normal and not stimulated by easy money then there would not have been a housing bubble. a dotcom bubble. etc. Government stimulated dem
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
We already had way too much government investment encouragement with artificially low interest rates for years. People do not need more incentives to spend. btw, we still have rockbottom low interest rates. What happened in this crisis is o
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
How about this: When a blind fat man gets depressed, you console him first. You don't immediately put him in a go-kart with a fistful of antidepressants,a bottle of gin and a sword in order to combat the lack of euphoria that caused the dep
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
Taleb's criticism of methodology in economics echoes Austrian criticism of economic engineering and the various mainstream economic models. For example, in the Black Swan, Taleb mentions Hayek, the Nobel Prize winning Austrian school econom
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
I have to disagree. The "micro-sites" you are talking about, and the long-tail SEO people are complaining about, are nothing new at all. It's been common for SEOs to build and rank sites like that for at least 5+ years. The difference is Go
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
Capitalism doesn't work because of accumulation of capital - in fact it might be argued that the more capital is transferred around the better in capitalism, which is why free markets and trade are advocated. Capitalism works because of inc
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
"I just think that purely mathematical errors are relatively rare" It's more common than you would think. Math error equals loss of Mars orbiter NASA reported Sept. 30 that it had lost the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter because the force
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
And my point, which you get to at the end of your msg, is that a mathematical or logical error can invalidate a hypothesis regardless of the subject matter of the datapoints being measured. If you say 10 nuclear reactors + 10 nuclear react
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
I agree with most of what you said. However, you don't need to be knowledgeable of a particular field to find faults in a scientific study. Logic, reasoning and mathematics can be used to identify methodological errors regardless of the sub
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
Technology isn't the only comparative advantage. Nor, is it necessarily the best option when maximizing comparative advantage over another firm. Nor, is implementing new technology necessarily a comparative advantage, it could be a disadvan
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
I'm glad to see a post highlighted here which shows the limits of bright engineers and hacking in a business. Google Wave is just one high profile example.. Being full of engineering-minded people, Hacker News has a strong bias favoring the
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
(edit: reply to _delirium, not sure this might be out of order, oops) As you mention, those stats are only for the UC system (no source), but leave out a whole chunk of other relevant data. The author is addressing what he believes is the d
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
"Forum traffic, unless it's very targeted to a specific niche, does NOT convert well. You won't get a good CPM no matter what." No, I'm talking about informational and news/blog sites that have hundreds or thousands of subtopics. They can g
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
"Typically, AdSense pays much, much more poorly than individually negotiated advertising buys" What you are saying is true in some but not all cases... It's a bit more complicated than that and depends on how targeted your app/site is, as w
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
This article is a misguided gross oversimplificaton of the issue. I agree that you shouldn't only rely on adsense the rest of your life. But if you are starting with either solid CPM targeted traffic or a lot of traffic or both, then it's
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
Also maybe look to see if you can write it somehow to interface with Google Analytics api -- a lot of sites use that for their own backend stats.
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
As I understand it, you're basically talking about stats for the creator of the content who is creating it on another site, I think there might be potential for something like that. However, you would just have to nail down your market bett
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by Experimentalist 16y ago
The extra $5k people have to spend would increase the price people are willing/able to pay for a car - and increase demand-- which would lead the car sellers to raise their prices.