bokonist

79 ms·

601.
by bokonist 17y ago
Lack of government involvement is not the problem with U.S. healthcare. There is government intervention everywhere. My rule of thumb for determining whether an industry is a free market or not, is that I ask the question, "Can I start a
602.
by bokonist 17y ago
The simplest thing to do is pick out the best healthcare system in the world, and then replicate it exactly. So bring in the top officials from Singapore, put them on an independent commission to redesign the healthcare system, and force C
603.
by bokonist 17y ago
one worker as "something frightful and infernal", and although the rooms were hot, windows were often kept closed during the summer so that conditions for thread work remained optimal. The air, meanwhile, was filled with particles of threa
604.
by bokonist 17y ago
Limited liability is simply a matter of contract between the lender and the owners of the corporate structure. When a bank lends money to an LLC, the contract is that the bank can only seize the assets of the corporate structure, not of th
605.
by bokonist 17y ago
A corporation is simply a contractual agreement between people. If a husband and wife share ownership of a house, the government cannot search or seize the house. If a hundred shareholders share ownership of a factory, they are still prot
606.
by bokonist 17y ago
So, you go back to the mid-nineteenth century and these so-called "factory girls," young girls working in the Lowell [Massachusetts] mills, were reading serious contemporary literature. They recognized that the point of the system was to
607.
by bokonist 17y ago
Film seems to be about the same. Literature probably about the same, not really sure. TV has been much better over the past decade. Art has been pretty subpar for a long time. There is good modern art, but it's usually not called "art
608.
by bokonist 17y ago
Even when I scour the net for "best of" lists or ask friends for recommendations, I almost never like the new music. I've tried sites like "The Sixty One", but most of the stuff there I find to be pretty bad too. And the Indie stuff I hea
609.
by bokonist 17y ago
How is the Nash equilibrium for stock prices infinity when inflation is greater than the interest rate on bonds? The Nash equilibrium is for the market to select some good other than Federal Reserve Notes to use as a store of value. Pe
610.
by bokonist 17y ago
I've been increasingly coming to the belief that Napster killed rock and roll. Maybe I'm just an old fogy at the early age of 25, but I think the music of the last decade has been considerably worse than the music that came out from 1960 t
611.
by bokonist 17y ago
Cuban leaves out the role of monetary inflation. From 2003-2007, MZM was growing at ~8% a year, corporate revenues at around ~10% a year, bank credit expanding at ~11% a year, gold at 23% a year. Meanwhile corporate bonds were only paying
612.
by bokonist 17y ago
If you like sports, join a Boston Ski & Sports Club league. You can also join a gym such as Cambridge Athletic Club. It has basketball and squash leagues. Meetup.com has dozens of different groups of all sorts of interests. Also chec
613.
by bokonist 18y ago
Don't most dynamic languages already allow this? I know in python you can reload code.
614.
by bokonist 18y ago
The $100bn number was an empirical observation. There is a limit on the dollar price of wealth created - the supply of dollars. More precisely, the total returns to VC investment from a given cohort is equal to nominal GDP times the po
615.
by bokonist 18y ago
I used to believe this but now I think the opposite. Technology obviates the needs to learn many skills. Some 18th century skills I no longer need to know: sewing, soap making, farming, canning, penmanship, spelling, using a slide rule, l
616.
by bokonist 18y ago
if you offer the freedom of not going to school that you seem to advocate, and if the parents don't care about their kids' education, you have a major problem. If parents cannot raise their kids properly, well, you have a major problem.
617.
by bokonist 18y ago
Before anyone gets too excited over this proposal, you might want to consider how government funding for science in the year 2009 works in practice. Here is an except from a blog post that describes how the Energy department works from the
618.
by bokonist 18y ago
Do you really think that everyone has the natural talent to be able to do well at calculus? but rather because he is "learning to play them for fun" But what is fun? A person experiences fun when they have a feedback loop of effort, acco
619.
by bokonist 18y ago
The system is all they know, so that's the terms in which people think. The school system is like any product, you cannot design a great product by giving people exactly what they say they want. I'm pretty confident that if I was the CEO
620.
by bokonist 18y ago
Well, personally, I'm an abolitionist. But even if I believed in public schools, there are many aspects of our school system that do not even make sense on their own terms: 1) Kids are mandated by law to attend school, but then when in sc
621.
by bokonist 18y ago
I think almost everyone wants the system changed, but they just disagree with how to do it. A lot of people make money from our current system and will not support anything that threatens their income. Even so, I still think it might be po
622.
by bokonist 18y ago
Even someone with average natural talent in everything, can become above average by picking a less competitive niche and learning to excel. For example, there are a lot of average athletes who are good at ultimate Frisbee. Also, it's not j
623.
by bokonist 18y ago
I tend to think everyone loves learning stuff that's within their ability range. If you put a kid who simply is not naturally talented in math in a calculus class with a bunch of kids much smarter than him, then he will be miserable. But
624.
by bokonist 18y ago
The education system at this point is not a designed entity. It has evolved through the interplay of various political forces. It has no purpose. No one would design anything like our system if they were doing it from scratch. It's just
625.
by bokonist 18y ago
People left the cities because of the rise in crime. Crime can always be prevented by a reasonably effective government. Read this book to get a sense of what happened in Brooklyn: http://www.amazon.com/Canarsie-Italians-Brooklyn-Against
626.
by bokonist 18y ago
If all of our elections were decided by black people voting for bad candidates because they were black then you'd probably hear a lot more about it. That's exactly what happened in a bunch of major cities ( Detroit, Newark, Baltimore, Was
627.
by bokonist 18y ago
Yes, I know what Churchill said about democracy. Funny enough, Churchill did not say what people think he said about democracy. He said, "it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that h
628.
by bokonist 18y ago
Not just the Asian tigers - pretty much every country in the world established rule of law, property rights, contract law, and the other foundations of economic growth under authoritarian governments.
629.
by bokonist 18y ago
Is democracy a means or an end? To me, it is a means - a way to achieve better government by making government more accountable. But you are basically saying, in order to have democracy, you already need to have good government. Well, if
630.
by bokonist 18y ago
This is really interesting. Perhaps the success of the hedge funds was precisely because of the new money entering the industry. New money enters, that money pushes up the prices of the assets the hedge fund already owns, making their r

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