ksdale

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331.
by ksdale 6y ago
I've always felt the same way about crowded sporting events. Intellectually, I understand that sports are rather... shallow?, but there's something that just seems magical about tens of thousands of people gathered in one place fo
332.
by ksdale 6y ago
I grew up watching Disney-type stuff, and as I got older, it was off-putting to encounter stories that didn't seem to have a "point." A bunch of stuff happens and then you're required to just accept the utter lack of res
333.
by ksdale 7y ago
I disagree, I think regardless of the implementation, there are so many businesses that didn't get money, that banks are getting sued anyway. I also agree that a lot of banks probably aren't losing much sleep, but that's di
334.
by ksdale 7y ago
Everyone said they weren't taking any risk, but all the money was distributed and now they're getting sued by people who didn't get some.
335.
by ksdale 7y ago
This just doesn't feel like robustness to me, I guess. It feels precarious, and as far as I know, we haven't yet had time to feel the ripples from electronics supply chain disruptions in China, or the pharmaceutical supply chain d
336.
by ksdale 7y ago
I live in western Washington, where the stores have been more or less out of toilet paper for weeks, and as far as I can tell, this thing is months from being over in the US. The supply chains haven't broken entirely yet, which is exce
337.
by ksdale 7y ago
I didn't say you should become a subsistence farmer. Mine is more of a general argument about the costs of specialization. And do you think the Native Americans were more or less specialized than the Europeans?
338.
by ksdale 7y ago
I agree with you in principle, but I would point out that our long, precarious supply chains are the exact result of most professionals earning money to outsource things. I'm sure it's still a good deal, but it's less of a go
339.
by ksdale 7y ago
Is this not basically what Amazon did? Massive capital expenditures with cascading depreciation that wiped out profits while increasing cash flow until they got to a certain size and decreased CAPEX and recognized profits?
340.
by ksdale 7y ago
If the profits from the CAPEX just get plowed into more CAPEX, though, you could end up looking like you don't have profits for decades, and it isn't necessarily a problem as long as you're growing. Edit: What I'm saying
341.
by ksdale 7y ago
Heavy CAPEX doesn't require no profits, but it can easily result in that.
342.
by ksdale 7y ago
Just as a hypothetical to illustrate my point, it's really common for small business owners in low margin businesses (like retail and restaurants) to have take-home pay of about $50,000 on $1,000,000 of revenue, which means they have $
343.
by ksdale 7y ago
I understand that’s how it is meant to work, but I think small businesses are, on average, a lot closer to insolvency than people think. This is like offering low interest loans to... anyone to get through the crisis. It’s definitely better
344.
by ksdale 7y ago
I think you may be underestimating the extent to which a “small business owner loses a year of income” and “entire small business capsizes” are the same thing.
345.
by ksdale 7y ago
I've always gotten the impression that under the jokes and sarcasm, Matt Levine loves finance, though I agree that he focuses on the interesting in a way that might skew a layman's perception of the likelihood of various things
346.
by ksdale 7y ago
Just FYI, I live near Seattle, and the grocery stores around here have been out of many things for a week. I'm sure they've been restocking in the meanwhile, but we haven't been able to get a few things.
347.
by ksdale 7y ago
I interpreted the parent's comment to mean that it could just be an artifact of the small size of the country. After all, there are almost certainly cities in the US where hundreds of teenagers have recently decided not to do drugs, bu
348.
by ksdale 7y ago
If you had a random six months of your education removed from your memory, how long would it take you to relearn it? If it was prior to high school, would you even bother relearning it? How important is any particular six months of your edu
349.
by ksdale 7y ago
I've seen that same thing! But I live about an hour away from Seattle, and I'm generally seeing way fewer people shake hands and several people I know (my family included) are avoiding unnecessary trips into public. I mostly just
350.
by ksdale 7y ago
I don't think it's obvious at all that everyone will get it, especially now that so many people are practicing social distancing and handwashing and avoiding gatherings. Yes, there are still a lot of people going about their lives
351.
by ksdale 7y ago
I remember reading about some sort of project that was analogizing the economy to nature and talking about balance and I nearly blurted out that there is balance in nature because so much stuff dies all the time . People who want to make t
352.
by ksdale 7y ago
I was recently reading a book about Thomas Edison and it mentioned how he sent people all around the world searching for plant fibers that they could use as the filament in light bulbs. IIRC, they settled on a type of bamboo because the str
353.
by ksdale 7y ago
I think there’s a distinction to be made between a tu quoque fallacy and something like an economists “revealed preferences,” the way people act gives you information about How they feel about the truth of an assertion. In the article he sa
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by ksdale 7y ago
If someone says, “Here is a wrong thing,” that’s just an acknowledgement that the thing is wrong, but there is no hypocrisy. If they say “Here is a wrong thing and anyone who does it sucks,” then it is the definition of hypocrisy if they do
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by ksdale 7y ago
Whether it’s hypocritical depends on the judgment attached to the acknowledgement. I agree that it’s not necessarily hypocritical, but I find most articles that mention the apocalypse have something of a judgmental angle to them.
356.
by ksdale 7y ago
Though I agree in general, I think acknowledging it kind of smugly changes the calculus a bit.
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by ksdale 7y ago
I love William Gibson but it rubs me the wrong way a bit that he (or the author) so casually attributes the apocalypse to flying (among other things) and then, without irony goes on to say that he’s been visiting London for several decades.
358.
by ksdale 7y ago
I’ve read that while inequality within countries increased, inequality between countries has decreased dramatically (and is arguably much more important as it records the huge reduction in poverty in Asia in the past 50 years). And I’m not
359.
by ksdale 7y ago
I think in the 90’s, people were just a single digit number of years removed from the end of the Cold War, just a few decades removed from the Great Leap Forward, another few decades from the holocaust and gulags, not to mention WW2, which
360.
by ksdale 7y ago
I think these are great counterpoints, and important to consider. I would offer that I think we are more worried about dystopia because we are so much more aware of all of the ways the world can turn into a dystopia, but I don't think

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