byrneseyeview

9 ms·

31.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Offensive comments are morally relative, though. Someone has to be offended, right? In your examples, the victim certainly notices and cares; if they get a vote, they're going to vote "immoral." But if you did something "murderous" in absol
32.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Paul Graham has a nice essay on this topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html Things that are "offensive" tend to change a lot, compared to e.g. things that are "incorrect." I've found that the best mental model is that they're intellect
33.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
A general question: when someone says something offensive, the apology is often "We're sorry: we thought this was funny, but obviously it wasn't, so we've changed it." This seems to get universally condemned, and lots of people argue that i
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
The only thing worse that having cofounders who big companies are trying to hire is having cofounders who big companies aren't trying to hire.
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
What was Blodget accused of fabricating? My understanding is that he settled when he was accused of touting stocks he didn't like. But I also understand that he actually lost a lot of money on such stocks. He paid $4m in restitution to inve
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
The article is all about the hominem . He says he left because of how he felt. It's entirely appropriate to ask if there might be other feelings involved. As another reply points out, he didn't manage that much money. Goldman had clients w
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
I don't really know what he's thinking. But it is interesting that he was fine with the culture during most of his career, then not-fine with the culture after he found out how much money he'd be making in the future. There are many boutiqu
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Mirabile Dictu! http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230469280457728... When Goldman doled out annual bonuses earlier this year, Mr. Smith's small payment became a point of friction, according to people familiar with the matter
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Goldman has a kind of hilarious understated response, in which they note that this guy was a VP (there are thousands of VPs at Goldman) and that the group he managed consisted of him and him alone. Plus, this was a bad year for bonuses. Not
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
To be fair, I think many of the people who were employed at Goldman Sachs three generations ago are no longer with the firm, so it's hard to judge GS based on that.
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
"When you said X, you probably meant Y. But I bet you don't believe Y, thus you were lying about X." How many pointless arguments take this form? He should articulate why he considers the situations comparable, so the Pando people have some
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How the iPhone is changing the way Washington thinks(news.yahoo.com)
5 points by byrneseyeview 15y ago|0 comments
43.
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Pay is not the independent variable here. I'm not arguing that if you double someone's pay, you'll double their performance. I'm saying that if there's zero correlation between pay and performance, and that pay to some extent predicts pre
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
I'm not sure if this is deliberately obtuse, but: all else being equal, the smarter and harder-working person will win, right? The existence of some randomness doesn't mean that skill and judgement are immaterial--if you disagree with that,
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
I would find it unpleasant to be called "C-class talent," but I'd also find it unpleasant to get a C. In both cases, that would prompt me to either step up my game or reconsider my priorities. People are unequal, and in a business context,
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
I can't address the part about my assertions being unfounded, but you can replace "high marginal tax rates" with "lower levels of executive compensation" without affecting the argument. So, what false assertion did I make? It's interesting
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
I'm presenting two possibilities: 1. There's an efficient market, and CEO pay reflects the extra value they create. In other words, a $100 million CEO is worth $50 million more than a $50 million CEO, so your economic outcome is the same re
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Past a few million, wealth has basically no correlation with consumption. So to the extent that economic inequality is about unequal access to consumer goods (vs unequal numbers in a brokerage account), those high incomes are not a factor.
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Zero correlation is a surprising number. That seems to imply that CEOs are paid fairly; I had thought they were overpaid. If they're underpaid, there should be a positive correlation between CEO pay and corporate performance (i.e. the compa
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Dropbox's last valuation was about $4bn, so if a "handful" of startups have talent acquisitions, which tend to be in the $5 to $50m range, that would confirm his argument.
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Extracurriculars are another dog-whistle for that sort of thing. A heuristic like "Deduct 150 SAT points for violin or piano" would be pretty predictive.
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Elite colleges are far more diverse than elite employers. Google, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, and McKinsey are dominated by whites and Asians, especially outside of entry-level jobs. I also don't buy the idea that college is a way to teach peo
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Well, yes. Facebook's IPO is unlikely to perform like one of the best-performing IPOs ever, especially since we can look back at why investors underestimated Google after that IPO. The bull case on Facebook doesn't rely on a linear increase
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
Google was underpriced at the IPO; there's no indication that stocks should be systematically underpriced to the same extent. Since Google went public, investors have learned a lot more about how these business models work, and how quickly
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
GRPN: 9.5X sales ZNGA: 6.5X sales LNKD: 16.2X sales P: 8.7X sales S&P 500: 1.3X sales. It appears that valuations are very high right now. The stocks are down from their peaks—-in other words, investors are not at a record level of opti
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
First sentence: "The magazine I also work for, is rebuilding our website in WordPress." I couldn't find anything valuable in the first few paragraphs. Can anyone post a quick summary of any specific facts from the article that were surprisi
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Man with two hearts survives double heart attack(news.yahoo.com)
2 points by byrneseyeview 15y ago|0 comments
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
This is meta, but as of right now every single comment on this article is about why the WSJ would claim to believe SOPA is a good idea, not what their actual argument is. A decent fraction of these comments cite Rupert Murdoch and/or phone
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
In value-at-risk terms, Starbucks' hedging requires a negative amount of capital: they need more cash on hand if they refuse to hedge. With a given capital structure and no coffee hedging, there's a possible coffee price X that would wipe
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by byrneseyeview 15y ago
This article is completely wrong. If Starbucks has hedged, they aren't "losing" money on the price of coffee going up or down; their hedge pays out inversely with the change in operating costs due to coffee price fluctuations. Another way t

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