NickM

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391.
by NickM 8y ago
I mostly agree with you, but I wouldn't entirely blame nonprofits. There's a lot of public pressure on nonprofits to reduce costs as much as possible because everyone is obsessed with "overhead". This TED talk explains t
392.
by NickM 8y ago
Your answer is correct too, but the question originally asked was "what would he have gained from destroying the shorts? I understand that shorts are effectively a bet that the stock will go down but do they actually damage the compan
393.
by NickM 8y ago
I don't know why I'm getting downvoted. The parent post asked why short sellers harm companies, and I gave a legitimate answer, and that answer is also exactly one of the reasons Musk cited for wanting to take Tesla private. Maybe
394.
by NickM 8y ago
If you short a stock, you profit when that company does poorly; since Tesla is one of the most shorted stocks out there, we have many people trying to spread FUD via blog posts/tweets/etc in hopes that they can drive the stock pri
395.
by NickM 8y ago
My example is a bit contrived, but it's a well-studied phenomenon that natural disasters tend to cause a net boost to GDP because of all the extra work needed to repair/rebuild/replace stuff. We can write this kind of thing o
396.
by NickM 8y ago
GDP is a pretty terrible measure of the economy, even if you're trying to look at the big picture and ignore the day-to-day impact on individuals, because it only measures creation of value and not consumption/destruction of i
397.
by NickM 8y ago
Yeah but this argument I always hear that "our economy needs the military to survive" is utterly ridiculous; if you take it down to the simplest possible alternative, we could just keep paying all the same military employees and c
398.
by NickM 8y ago
Oh I don't think we need to wait, pretty sure it's already sunk in, and the effects are measurable: https://electrek.co/2018/05/21/electric-car-adoption-decepti...
399.
by NickM 8y ago
I think you're both right and wrong. In our current system, yes, a lot of success comes down to luck. However, that doesn't mean that it's impossible to remove a lot of the luck from the equation. For just one example, if you
400.
by NickM 8y ago
They could do public offerings, but that comes with a lot of legal and regulatory requirements and expenses, accounting rules, disclosure rules, etc. etc. Not all of those things are necessarily bad; ostensibly they are there to protect pub
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by NickM 8y ago
Isn't this kind of thing the whole reason we have accredited investor laws? This might be an unpopular opinion, but if we want to protect people from themselves, maybe we should stop banning people from investing in private equity and
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by NickM 8y ago
Vermont recently legalized it via the legislature, though I think your main point still stands.
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by NickM 8y ago
Great points. I think it's also important to consider the statistics when you combine multiple approaches to contraception. It may not be a good idea to solely rely on natural methods, but natural methods can be combined with other con
404.
by NickM 8y ago
The electoral college and equal Senate representation acts as a tempering force on said mob. So rather than tyranny of the majority, now we have tyranny of an arbitrary minority. I fail to see how that improves things. As others have poin
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by NickM 8y ago
This is back of the napkin stuff, it doesnt need to be perfect. It doesn't need to be perfect, but if the result is off by an order of magnitude or more than it's pretty useless. If you have a better method, I'd love to se
406.
by NickM 8y ago
The Reddit analysis is pretty suspect - you can't assume that power usage scales anywhere close to linearly with data usage. If you look at all the devices connected to the Internet, I would bet that a huge majority of the power consum
407.
by NickM 8y ago
Air conditioners actually create value though, in the form of making people comfortable. Most people do not see Bitcoin mining as something that creates real value in the world, so it's a bit more understandable that people might be up
408.
by NickM 8y ago
That may not be nuanced enough for the desired results. Sounds like a lot of these places would like to still provide plentiful cheap power to industrial companies that actually create jobs and generate useful output that stimulates the loc
409.
by NickM 8y ago
I’d start with studying more math. So many other interesting doors open up as a result of better math skills. Plus it’s just gratifying for its own sake; feels like getting a deeper glimpse into the structure of the universe....
410.
by NickM 8y ago
"Subjective experience exists" doesn't imply there's a single, uniform fabric of experience, nor does it imply anything about how subjective experience relates to an accurate perception of the world. Even if I hallucinat
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by NickM 8y ago
I wouldn't be so sure about that. The phrase "too big to fail" referred to the idea that certain banks are so big that their failure would severely damage the economy, to the point that it was worth propping them up at all co
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by NickM 8y ago
I've been waiting to see programs like this pop up for a while. Remote workers are an economic dream for whatever region they end up in. They bring in large amounts of money from outside the area, spend it locally, pay local taxes, lea
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by NickM 8y ago
It's interesting to think what might happen if something like this became really popular. I'd imagine many novels might start adding super oddball stuff in the first page, just to stand out from the crowd and pique peoples' c
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by NickM 8y ago
If the cost of the PV is now baked into the mortgage, then depending on payback periods, interest rates, etc., the reductions in utility costs may meet or exceed the increase in your typical monthly home payment. This could effectively make
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by NickM 8y ago
Come on, I'm trying to be scientific about this and you're just going to swing in with a rude, ad hominem argument about "Tesla fanboys"? Claiming that Tesla having bad QC is "common knowledge" doesn't som
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by NickM 8y ago
I didn't say it was safer than humans. I said that the study results suggest that either humans are fine with taking over and driving manually when required or if humans are not taking over when they should then autosteer might j
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by NickM 8y ago
Well of course you're going to see people post about issues they're having if you look on forums. Nobody goes out of their way to look on forums and make posts sharing their frustration over the lack of problems they have with the
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by NickM 8y ago
As these accidents demonstrate drivers can’t be relied upon to ‘monitor’ the autopilot and react if something goes wrong. We don't know how many other accidents have been prevented by autopilot. A safety system should not be judged b
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by NickM 8y ago
This "kind of autonomous driving" is absolutely deadly, by definition. It's never going to work well. Instead of just speculating, the NHTSA did an actual study on this, and they reached the opposite conclusion. They invest
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by NickM 8y ago
Sorry, which Coursera intro course?

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