h4nkoslo

27 ms·

241.
by h4nkoslo 10y ago
The Saudi royal family derives significant prestige from being seen as successfully managing the Hajj. However, they're not particularly competent at anything approaching governance or management, since being competent isn't a go
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by h4nkoslo 10y ago
Between the lines, hierarchy was necessary in order to impose HR-compliant politically-vetted governance. "the Preston-Warner episode helped demonstrate that some problems couldn’t be solved by the masses. While the old times created a
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by h4nkoslo 10y ago
You maintain favorable access to that information, and your people get to see different scenery instead of being stuck in one particular, usually crappy, locale. "Hey Bill, back when you worked that field off of Malaysia - was the mini
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by h4nkoslo 10y ago
Oil companies in particular have enormous fixed investments in particular bits of infrastructure with their own particular nuances, long-running relations with particular governments, etc. It actually makes sense to invest heavily in peopl
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by h4nkoslo 10y ago
When the size of the discrepancy exceeds the risk-adjusted cost of arbitrage.
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by h4nkoslo 10y ago
It's not even that "irrationality persists indefinitely", it's that it increases towards infinity. Equity > GDP as a return to risk would require you to be able to "invest in GDP" in a relatively variance-fr
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by h4nkoslo 10y ago
I am talking about a long run relation between two long run quantities, which either fluctuates in a certain band around equilibrium, or allows the economic equivalent of perpetual motion. You seem to be predicting a diverging trend in that
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by h4nkoslo 10y ago
"Maybe the future will be perpetually irrational about asset prices" is not really a compelling economic story. There is indeed a mathematical relation between long run asset prices and the income generated by those assets. In t
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by h4nkoslo 10y ago
"as if the fundamentals of asset classes change radically depending on how they are marketed" More like the fundamentals of asset classes change radically depending on how they're regulated & taxed, who is willing /
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by h4nkoslo 10y ago
Planning financial investments for a 50 year time horizon when mass-market finance has really only been around since ~the 1970s is crazy. An entire retirement system predicated on long term financial returns > GDP growth, likewise insan
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by h4nkoslo 10y ago
Hence "ilk".
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by h4nkoslo 10y ago
It's hardly a secret that student loans, intentionally, cover living expenses, and that enrolment rises when the economy sucks. Students aren't embezzling the money; living expenses are bundled with the (crappy) package. http:&#
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by h4nkoslo 10y ago
One aspect of ITT and its ilk is that the students often only sign up so they can take out "education" loans for living expenses, with the class work as a very secondary concern.
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by h4nkoslo 10y ago
Counterpoint: warehouse operations.
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by h4nkoslo 10y ago
Not trying to pick over semantics, but in both of those cases, payroll was in fact met almost immediately, just via "extraordinary measures". Going a full pay period without a paycheck should be the signal to stop showing up and
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by h4nkoslo 10y ago
Has there ever been an instance of late payroll (as opposed to eg sales commission checks being calculated wrong) where the company actually pulled out of the nosedive? It seems like it's almost always the death knell.
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by h4nkoslo 10y ago
Any business that has a long delay between collecting revenue and delivering product is vulnerable to this - it's one of the reasons, for instance, that life insurance is so highly regulated. Grey-market auto sales (eg of high-end spo