evanpw

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391.
The False Prophets of Efficiency Wages(marginalrevolution.com)
2 points by evanpw 11y ago|0 comments
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by evanpw 12y ago
A lot of students are there to get a degree, not to learn something. Employers don't know or care how much freshman chemistry you remember (unless you're a chemist), but they do care if you didn't finish your degree because y
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by evanpw 12y ago
Patents of processes are actually explicitly allowed: 35 U.S.C. 101: "Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful _process_, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a pa
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by evanpw 12y ago
Relevant SMBC: http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2253
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by evanpw 12y ago
The vast majority of the time, this is true. Notice that after the Flash Crash, most prices came back to basically where they started within a few minutes. At the micro level, the problem is uncertainty. The "true" or "fair&q
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by evanpw 12y ago
You could say the same thing about almost any law. The difference between an accidental fire and arson is criminal intent. While in theory it's not possible to observe someone's inner mental state, in practice their outward action
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by evanpw 12y ago
I've been paying $80 + 2 x $10 for 3GB of high-speed data each. After reading this comment, I switched over to unlimited for the same price. Thanks!
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by evanpw 12y ago
If you're actually willing to trade at that above-market price if the market moves suddenly, then that's a legitimate strategy and not manipulation. You're playing the role of a shock-absorber. If your plan is to cancel as qu
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by evanpw 12y ago
It is legal to change your mind quickly. It is illegal to place an order with the intention to cancel it before it executes.
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by evanpw 12y ago
At first, I thought trying to sample "uniformly" from a discrete non-homogeneous set of real numbers was just mathematically nonsense, but there's actually a pretty elegant generalization: Basically, the probability of pickin
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by evanpw 12y ago
This article is pretty garbled. Matt Levine is, as usual, excellent: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-04-09/new-york-di...
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by evanpw 12y ago
By inverse, I mean reversing states of the world. If Alice and Bob have exactly equal wealth, then transferring $50 from Alice and giving it to Bob decreases total utility, because of the decreasing marginal utility of money. If Bob now has
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by evanpw 12y ago
Here's an interesting heuristic: if an action is morally bad, then its inverse is morally good. Does that seem plausible? If blinding a child is bad, then curing their blindness is good, etc. Applied to this situation: if it's mor
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by evanpw 12y ago
The paradox doesn't go away if you assume that the Predictor is occasionally wrong. In real life, the people who know you best could probably predict your answer to the question with some accuracy better than chance. (For example, mayb
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by evanpw 12y ago
1. Even Apple borrows money for buybacks rather than spending their giant cash hoard. The reason is taxes. Companies have a lot of cash generated overseas, and if they brought that cash back into the US in order to buy back stock, they woul
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by evanpw 12y ago
Last year, S&P 500 companies sent 95% of profits back to shareholders, through dividends and buybacks: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-03-24/private-com... .
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by evanpw 12y ago
"the evidence indicates that HNC led to an increase in the total number of vehicles in circulation as well as a change in the composition of vehicles toward high-emissions vehicles"
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by evanpw 12y ago
Google found this: http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/ldavis/df.pdf . But those high-order polynomial fits (see Figures 9 and 10) seem a little shady to me.
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by evanpw 12y ago
I don't get it. Congestion pricing is bad, because it gouges the poor. But if we make the price much higher and call it a fine, then everything's okay.
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by evanpw 12y ago
A direct quote from Rognlie's article: "Land does not depreciate; all its income is net." This is the worst kind of internet debate: a group of people who haven't read Piketty's book arguing with a group of people w
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by evanpw 12y ago
If you relax the constraint a bit and replace top 1% with top 5%, then almost 40% of Americans will make it at some point. And 12% of them will hit the top 1%. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/opinion
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by evanpw 12y ago
I think you're confusing two different issues. If a retail customer's order is actually sent to an internalizing firm, then trading ahead of it would be _actual_ front-running, is already illegal [1], and is taken very seriously b
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by evanpw 12y ago
You have to get the information in breach of a duty of confidentiality (and in exchange for some personal benefit) in order for it to be illegal, at least in the US. If you discover something on your own, you're free to trade on it.
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by evanpw 12y ago
I thought Atwood's Law [1] was a joke, but this is seriously interesting. I remember when Java was just a fun little toy language for making web pages, and I'm still surprised every time someone mentions it as a serious number-cru
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by evanpw 12y ago
> Because I believe morally the correct thing to do is not the thing that reduces poverty quickest in the short term, but reduces it the most in the long term. I completely agree with this. It's my take on the evidence that immigran
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by evanpw 12y ago
Absolutely. I don't mean that it's true on a case-by-case basis, only on average. If you force a large number of Indians who want to move to the US to stay in India, then you will keep a large-but-not-quite-as-large number of peop
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by evanpw 12y ago
> That's a bit of a leap. If someone lives in India, they are likely to have a standard of living below what would be considered poverty level in the United States. If you actively prevent them from taking a job that would take them
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by evanpw 12y ago
Let's say for the sake of argument that every Indian immigrant displaces one American from their job. Under what moral calculus is that a bad trade? The per-capita income in India is almost exactly 10 times less than in the US. By Amer
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by evanpw 12y ago
Here is the opposing view: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/07/17/t... .
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by evanpw 12y ago
It's possible for a sentence to be understandable, but still be jarring to read. His user page gives another example: "could of". If you see that phrase, you know what the author meant, but it interrupts the flow of reading.

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