evanpw

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271.
by evanpw 11y ago
For siblings and downstream, here is some more discussion about this fact: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-04-01/another-pol...
272.
by evanpw 11y ago
> with inside information, you're incentivized to keep others in the dark so that you can maximize the impact of your trades This is true of all professional trading. > borrowing money to short stocks in a company likely to go ba
273.
by evanpw 11y ago
I am not a lawyer nor a German, but Wikipedia says that German law has no strictly liability [1], which would seem to imply that knowledge (or at least belief or a willful lack of knowledge) that the goods were stolen would be necessary to
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by evanpw 11y ago
I basically agree with this, but I don't think it helps that much to answer the question of which trading activities should be allowed, and which should send you to prison. Almost all of what you've said applies equally well if yo
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by evanpw 11y ago
I often prefer to use lambdas as (named) inline function definitions: auto lessGold = [](const Hero& h1, const Hero& h2) { return h1.inventory().gold() < h2.inventory().gold(); }; std::sort(heroes.begin(), heroes
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by evanpw 11y ago
Excellent point. In other words, if you can earn a 5% (real) risk-free return by stuffing $100 bills under your mattress, you're much less likely to make a risky investment expected to make a 6% (real) return, and definitely won't
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by evanpw 11y ago
That doesn't make very much sense to me. It's not as if the "new dollars" are worth $1.02, while the "old dollars" are worth $1.00. Some people talk about "Cantillon Effects" in the context of QE, but
278.
by evanpw 11y ago
I think you're mixing up real (inflation/deflation-adjusted) and nominal (not inflation-adjusted). - nerfhammer probably meant a nominal return of 5%, which when combined with 5% deflation is 0. But it seems more likely to me that
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by evanpw 11y ago
> Looks to me like the powerful are doing a good job at keeping inflation above 0% I've seen the opposite argument much more often: the rich and powerful are pressuring central banks to keep inflation too low to help with unemployme
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by evanpw 11y ago
Absolutely, but to know how much more skeptical to be, you have to know likely this outcome was, given your prior hypothesis. And for that purpose, knowing ways in which this situation differs from textbook, across-the-board deflation is
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by evanpw 11y ago
> Although wage growth has slowed in Switzerland, it was 0.6% on an annual basis in the second quarter A big part of the reason that economists think that deflation is bad is that people are very resistant to cuts in their nominal wages
282.
by evanpw 11y ago
Here is another quote from Hayek: "I agree with Milton Friedman that once the Crash had occurred, the Federal Reserve System pursued a silly deflationary policy. I am not only against inflation but I am also against deflation. So, once
283.
by evanpw 11y ago
It seems really strange to argue that wages are too low because business owners aren't greedy enough (to raise wages to profit-maximizing levels). It actually appears more likely that employers have on average already set wages sligh
284.
by evanpw 11y ago
This is a valid point, I think the effect will usually be small. 1. If a company is paying above-market wages, then by definition there are more people who want to work there than there are available spots, so the second company will get so
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by evanpw 11y ago
In an economically idealized world, if someone pays above-market wages then you would expect a competitor to appear that will charge less to their customers while making the same profits, destroying the first business. Of course, in that id
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by evanpw 11y ago
If the Fed prints money and buys bonds, then in the future when they need to take that money back out of circulation in order to control inflation, then they just sell the bonds. If the Fed prints money and gives it to people, getting nothi
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by evanpw 11y ago
> In recent decades, the majority of new drugs brought to market have been of little real therapeutic benefit. If drug companies are trying to charge ridiculous high prices for drugs with "little therapeutic benefit", wouldn&#x
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by evanpw 11y ago
If you only have time to learn one language, learn Python, because it's better for non-statistical purposes (I don't think that's very controversial). If you need cutting-edge or esoteric statistics, use R. If it exists, ther
289.
by evanpw 11y ago
So...the employees likely pay a larger amount in income taxes than Facebook would have paid in corporate taxes, and the remainder goes to the actual UK employees rather than shareholders in the US. Isn't this the best possible outcome
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Income: A meaningless, misleading, and pernicious concept(themoneyillusion.com)
1 points by evanpw 11y ago|0 comments
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by evanpw 11y ago
"Scare quotes ... may be used to imply that a particular expression is not necessarily how the author would have worded a concept." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes
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by evanpw 11y ago
> AWS Import/Export Snowball is a petabyte-scale data transport solution that uses secure appliances to transfer large amounts of data into and out of AWS.
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by evanpw 11y ago
Housing is definitely taken into account: it has a weight of 40% in the CPI[1]. [1] http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpiri_2013.pdf
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by evanpw 11y ago
The threshold is inflation-adjusted: http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/index.htm?0,6
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by evanpw 11y ago
If you like this kind of thing, you might take a look at Robot Odyssey[1], from around the same time. You solve puzzles by wiring up digital circuits inside of your 3 robots. Playing it in elementary school is what got me interested in elec
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by evanpw 11y ago
There are a lot of old, prestigious private non-profit colleges (Princeton, Harvard, MIT) who can charge a lot because of their reputation. For-profit colleges are mostly very new and tend to have bad reputations.
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by evanpw 11y ago
It's my impression that there isn't much private student-loan industry left, having been driven out by federal loans. What's left probably targets a different demographic from the usual one, like borrowers who have already ma
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by evanpw 11y ago
If it's a federal loan, the government will garnish your wages [1] and eventually your social security payments [2], and will withold any tax refunds. And since student loans usually can't be discharged in bankruptcy, you'll
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by evanpw 11y ago
If the current interest rate is high compared to default risk, why hasn't some private company come in to undercut the government and make a killing? I don't think it's because the banks aren't greedy enough. My guess wo
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by evanpw 11y ago
Education is never free; it always consumes some resources. The question is who should pay the cost: the student or everyone else? In cases where basically everyone needs the education to succeed in society and the positive externalities ar

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