evanpw

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331.
by evanpw 11y ago
SEC employees also do pretty well for themselves: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-02-27/the-sec-sho...
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by evanpw 11y ago
This blog is the best public description I've seen: https://mechanicalmarkets.wordpress.com/2015/01/13/trader-ty...
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by evanpw 11y ago
This is scientific evidence, not mathematical proof. One way to frame the concept of free will is that some subjective experiences cause rather than are caused by or are identical with, physical changes in the brain. One way to test for c
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by evanpw 11y ago
I actually agree with you; I was just poking fun at the "high price good, low price bad" tone of the article. Notice the author's apparent relief that a few commodities have "managed to stay out of the bear market"
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by evanpw 11y ago
Main Street headline: "Raw materials are getting cheaper" Wall Street headline: "Market crash: next global catastrophe?"
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by evanpw 11y ago
Some interesting demographic data here: http://www1.nyc.gov/html/nycha/downloads/pdf/CAFR_2013.pdf (page 136). A few things that stand out: * About 175k families in public housing, with 400k people total
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by evanpw 11y ago
I'm not sure what part of my comment you're disagreeing with; I agree that bond prices can fall significantly in a short period of time. I was mostly disagreeing with the statement that such a drop doesn't matter if you don&#
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by evanpw 11y ago
This is both true and false: a fall in the price of a bond reflects opportunity costs. An example: you buy a brand-new MacBook Pro (bond) today for $1800. The next day, Apple cuts the price of the exact same model by 30% to $1260 (interest
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by evanpw 11y ago
If a company and its potential customers are prevented from making a mutually beneficial exchange because of some rule, that's a cost. You can argue that the cost is outweighed by the benefits of the rule, but you can't just claim
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by evanpw 11y ago
The arguments against artificial sweeteners seem a little like the arguments against e-cigarettes. Yes, there are plausible mechanisms by which the substitutes may cause harm. Yes, further research is needed. Yes, cutting out both the origi
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by evanpw 11y ago
The link between real sugar and diabetes is very strong and well-studied, so any effect of artificial sweeteners on the incidence of diabetes would have to be a lot more definite before "replace sugar with artificial substitutes"
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by evanpw 11y ago
No one is suggesting that all grants be replaced by prizes. Even research projects which are ultimately unsuccessful are valuable and need to be paid for. But does it really seem like a bad idea to pay the research team a bonus at the end i
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by evanpw 11y ago
I am not a biologist, but I think of the ecological risk of GMO as something akin to AI risk: Not a serious risk at the current level of technology or in the near future, not sufficiently dangerous to stop research or forego the benefits of
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by evanpw 11y ago
I like the term "mathiness" for this, because it seems like exactly the same kind of thing that's complained about in economics under that name. Namely, you claim (necessarily without proof) that a real-world phenomenon is an
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by evanpw 11y ago
1. You have to be careful how you define "luxury". The average house in 1950 was less than half the size of today's average house (even though the average household was larger), and not air-conditioned. 2. Since 1950, food pr
346.
Patent Theory versus Patent Law (2002) [pdf](mason.gmu.edu)
2 points by evanpw 11y ago|0 comments
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by evanpw 11y ago
> An expert would be able to skim it, recognize the path of reasoning as something he's seen a before, and narrow down on the error quickly. This is almost exactly equivalent to saying that an expert programmer should be able to det
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by evanpw 11y ago
Seconded. This is called the "Grossman-Stiglitz paradox". There's also a kind of second-order version of market efficiency that says that active fund managers that can actually beat the market will increase their fees until t
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by evanpw 11y ago
Here is a different perspective from Matt Levine: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-07-07/can-you-rea...
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by evanpw 11y ago
This is a much better summary of the evidence, in my opinion: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/30/wheat-much-more-than-yo...
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Planetary Defense Is a Public Good(marginalrevolution.com)
4 points by evanpw 11y ago|0 comments
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by evanpw 11y ago
I agree with a lot of what you're saying here. Greece should never have joined the Euro. There needs to be a procedure for an orderly default within the Euro. A lot of the bailout conditions were counterproductive. But I disagree with
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by evanpw 11y ago
Something to note: Argentina issued those bonds under New York law because they could get better terms on debt enforced by the US judicial system than on debt enforced by Argentinian courts. Also "used the US government" makes thi
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by evanpw 11y ago
1. He's talking about default within the Euro, which doesn't seem to be in the cards any more. As he notes (in a linked article), their ability to stay would depend on the ECB continuing to support the Greek banks. In reality, the
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by evanpw 11y ago
My disagreement with the second-to-top-level comment is that they consider "default would be bad" to be unjustified FUD. Krugman is on my side: "force Greece into a presumably disastrous default". He's just faulting
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by evanpw 11y ago
1. I'm not sure what you mean by "near-3rd world". Their economy has fallen to about the pre-Euro trend-line ( http://www.vox.com/2015/6/28/8858727/greece-gdp-chart ). There's still ple
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by evanpw 11y ago
> Translation: FUD The Greeks have always been perfectly free to stop paying their existing debts, at the cost of not being able to borrow any more money. The only reason they've been negotiating with the Troika and agreeing to the
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by evanpw 11y ago
There is no moral dimension to this situation: Greece is not morally obligated to pay back its existing debts, and the rest of Europe is not morally obligated to loan more money to people they don't believe will pay them back. (If you
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by evanpw 11y ago
I was wondering the same thing. The linked article ( http://dslab.epfl.ch/pubs/cpi.pdf ) says that they don't use a dedicated register. The unsafe stack pointer is saved in the thread control block, accessible throu
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by evanpw 11y ago
The Medallion fund is a bizarre outlier. For the most part, high expected return => high risk, which is not what you want for a middle-class wealth-generating engine. It would be much better to tax the hedge-fund winners (at the end-poin

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