evanpw

27 ms·

241.
by evanpw 11y ago
Here's a post with some actual charts and numbers: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleaebeling/2013/03/15/gen-x-a... . The conclusions looks like: 1) People in the age range 29-37 (cherry-picked?)
242.
by evanpw 11y ago
Population growth is slowing, and previous generations in developed countries have been richer than their parents, so the evidence seems to point in the opposite direction.
243.
by evanpw 11y ago
If you take your gold bars down to the bank or to a warehouse, they will absolutely charge you to store them (from what I can Google, on the order of 1% per year).
244.
by evanpw 11y ago
Maybe I'm just misunderstanding, but you're talking as if the current system was consciously selected because of some inherent advantages it has over the alternatives. I don't think that's really true, and I would argue
245.
by evanpw 11y ago
You'd obviously have to cut a lot more than just SS in order to pay for a reasonably-sized UBI (that's why I said "pay part of"). But in any case, SS is probably a bad example, since it's already just a cash transfe
246.
by evanpw 11y ago
I think you're overthinking this. If you want to give a benefit to low-income people, then either you phase out slowly and it costs a lot, or you phase out quickly and you have high effective tax rates. And the people passing the laws
247.
by evanpw 11y ago
This is exactly the issue of decreasing marginal utility of money. If your income is $0, then the utility you get from an extra $1 is huge, because it keeps you from starving. If you have a $10k / year basic income, then the utility yo
248.
by evanpw 11y ago
Yes, but expanding Social Security to cover everyone (huge budget increase) is very different from shutting down Social Security and using the savings to pay part of a basic income (budget neutral). Even if the liberals and the libertarians
249.
by evanpw 11y ago
There absolutely no hope right now . The idea (for better or worse) is that there will be some scientific breakthrough in the future (e.g., nano-scale medical robots) that will make it possible to repair the damage done by the current, ver
250.
by evanpw 11y ago
Well, the libertarians wouldn't support it as an addition to the current welfare state, and the liberals wouldn't support it if it was conditional on dismantling Social Security, Medicare, etc. If we were building something from
251.
by evanpw 11y ago
This is the reason a lot of economists think it would be better to implement the earned income tax credit as a wage subsidy rather than a tax credit. Instead of a getting a big lump sum at tax time, you'd get a bigger paycheck: kind of
252.
by evanpw 11y ago
The thing that discourages work is (mostly) not the cash grant itself, but the high effective marginal tax rate you get from phasing it out as the recipient earns more. The negative income tax and the earned income tax credit (which is almo
253.
by evanpw 11y ago
This argument proves too much. A minimum-wage US worker in 2015 has a higher standard of living than the vast majority of all human parents who have ever lived, or even the majority of parents currently living on Earth. Are you saying that
254.
The World Isn't Ready for Gross National Happiness(bloombergview.com)
1 points by evanpw 11y ago|0 comments
255.
by evanpw 11y ago
Relevant slatestarcodex: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/30/prescriptions-paradoxes... TL/DR: Doctors like to prescribe new flashy drugs, and patient vs. doctor's ratings of various drugs are nega
256.
by evanpw 11y ago
> Don't forget that the investment bank buys a portion of the IPO for themselves that they sell off later. I think you may be misunderstanding the "green shoe option": http://www.investopedia.com/articles&#
257.
by evanpw 11y ago
The investment bank's fee is a percentage of the proceeds (typically around 7%), so you're saying that they gave up millions of dollars as a favor to their "friends". I think it's more likely some combination of: a)
258.
by evanpw 11y ago
Part of the service the banks are supposed to provide is to help with timing the IPO. (I have no idea how good they are at doing that, though).
259.
by evanpw 11y ago
This is a totally plausible theory, but I'd also point out that all dark pool trades get reported through the TRF; it's not just retail internalizers. The spread on SQ is also 1 cent, which tends to lead to more dark trading.
260.
by evanpw 11y ago
And Google still had a 15% first-day pop, which is just about the normal size for a traditional bank-run IPO.
261.
by evanpw 11y ago
This is exactly right. The lazy version seems like magic, but it's really just exploiting the fact that if computing p(a) never evaluates a(n) for n >= m, then p(b) = p(a) whenever the first m elements of a and b agree, so you can c
262.
by evanpw 11y ago
There's some discussion here: https://docs.python.org/3.1/tutorial/floatingpoint.html . Basically: eval(repr(x)) == x is guaranteed, and some attempt is made to give the shortest such string representation for
263.
by evanpw 11y ago
There's a whole thread of speculation about the rules on the xkcd forum [1]. It looks like the conclusion is that derived words are allowed, and the base word list comes from here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wi
264.
by evanpw 11y ago
But is this a representation of a mold or span? It seems to describe a set rather than define a function, so the latter seems more likely, but the section header implies otherwise.
265.
by evanpw 11y ago
> A mold is a function whose range is some useful span. A mold is always idempotent (for any noun x, f(x) equals f(f(x))), and its domain is any noun. I think using the magic word "projection" would make this clearer. Basically
266.
by evanpw 11y ago
At least the big two (Wealthfront and Betterment) aren't trying to beat the market. They're basically just keeping your portfolio balanced between low-cost ETFs (like Vanguard's) representing different asset classes, and harv
267.
by evanpw 11y ago
In the US system, the IRS still has all of that third-party data. If it's a significant amount of money, you'll just find out that something was wrong after you submit your tax return (when you get audited) rather than before.
268.
by evanpw 11y ago
For a regular guy, investing in the stock market is a great idea, but trading stocks is a terrible one. (In other words, index and forget it). If you don't trade much, then insider trading is probably more likely to benefit you than ha
269.
by evanpw 11y ago
> Anyone can try to become as smart as Buffett, hire away his analysts, and so on. Anyone can try to schmooze corporate insiders so that they tell you some juicy information. And that seems a lot easier (theoretically and empirically)
270.
by evanpw 11y ago
I agree that there are legitimate reasons to restrict insider trading, but I think that the "fairness" angle distorts more than it illuminates. Warren Buffet's trading plans for next year are not available to me at any price,

More ›