mdnahas

17 ms·

151.
by mdnahas 3y ago
High-end coffee shops. I’ve been lucky that two of them that I’ve gone to had a bunch of interesting regulars. They were usually foodies (and I’m not), but they have other interests (travel, data, politics, woodworking, etc.). And, if
152.
by mdnahas 4y ago
I played a lot of Civ as a kid and it got me into Economics. I’ve been trying to understand the housing market, especially why rents and home prices have jumped dramatically in my home of Austin, TX. I’m putting together a website (below
153.
by mdnahas 4y ago
Textbooks on rhetoric. Aristotle’s book is okay. I also had a book from the 1950s. They didn’t teach me logic, but taught me how other people think. Or, at least how they act after you communicate to them.
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by mdnahas 4y ago
I’m working on combining economics and information theory. Econ talks a lot about “informed markets”, but doesn’t measure that in Shannon’s bits.
155.
by mdnahas 4y ago
My father worked at Bell Labs, with Thompson, Ritchie, Aho, etc.. My dad says Bell Labs was the result of the monopoly laws restricting AT&T. The government forced AT&T's prices to be based on its costs from 2 years previousl
156.
by mdnahas 4y ago
I did some thinking about this months ago and I think the origin of the problem is how groups make decisions. I think it is similar to a Flocking algorithm. In the algorithm, each bird starts in a random direction but then keeps adjusting
157.
by mdnahas 4y ago
Too true. I’d prefer a game where you see every action by the agents, not differential equations.
158.
by mdnahas 4y ago
A website with classic games (tic tac toe, crossword puzzles, minesweeper, soduko, etc.) that collected all (and I mean all) the data from every game and showed insane statistics about how well you did, relative to all the other players. I
159.
by mdnahas 4y ago
Agreed. Also, the US was one of a handful of countries not bombed during WWII and had to be very profitable from 1945 to 1960s. We were shipping cars and factory parts everywhere. By the 1970s, that advantage was disappearing.
160.
by mdnahas 4y ago
What I believe your saying is the price of bread in terms of gold was standard for centuries. Does that relationship still hold? The thing is that money doesn’t matter. It’s just a unit for the transactions does in the short term. The r
161.
by mdnahas 4y ago
I’m an economist and have noticed a lot of the trends identified by WTF 1971. But the thing is the date “1971” is not specific in any of the trends. They start somewhere between 1970 and 1990 or so. Also, the gold standard had been aba
162.
by mdnahas 5y ago
I did many things, but the best two were to make an effort to try more and to take an acting class. Psychology is the study of interacting with people - in theatre, you actually practice interacting. The class’s games were fun. People w
163.
by mdnahas 5y ago
Yes, it is backwards. But most economists agree that companies should not be taxed. Well, they should be taxed for things like carbon emitted, waste, resources used, value-added, etc.., but their income and profits shouldn’t be taxed. Econ
164.
by mdnahas 5y ago
I'm the designer of Par2, employee #7 of a successful startup (Broadway Technology LLC), a former Wall Street quant, and winner of two research grants. I'm looking at starting a company/public-benefit-corporation/non-pro
165.
by mdnahas 5y ago
No. When you rent, you usually are paying (1) the owner's mortgage, (2) taxes, (3) maintenance and (4) profit. So renting the same place is almost always much more expensive than the mortgage payment. Rents do not have to rise. They
166.
by mdnahas 5y ago
I've pursued personally-funded research for more than a year. Some thoughts: Think about your competitive advantages. What makes working at your place different from a university and why would a researcher choose yours? It could be
167.
by mdnahas 6y ago
I strongly disagree. Snapshots are a useful concept for programming. Each snapshot represent a compilable program with a certain set of features. So snapshot A has a certain set of features and B has another. Diffs are not a useful concep
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by mdnahas 6y ago
Sadly, the bad part is git's user interface. It hides the pretty parts underneath. There is a concept of "the next commit" or, equivalently, "the pending commit". In the documentation, this gets called "index
169.
by mdnahas 6y ago
Options are valuable because they are how Wall St. deals with probabilities. We don't actually know what a company is worth. You can imagine estimating the worth (a.k.a., "net present value") of a company based on its future
170.
by mdnahas 6y ago
I'm a computer scientists who went back for an econ degree. The answer is two parts: salary has not increased and we get less for our money. The salary stagnation is pretty well known, but I've been looking into the other side:
171.
by mdnahas 6y ago
Ideally, global savings would go to help industrialize poor countries. However, investors are usually scared that they will not get their money back. Either because of corruption or "nationalization". Thus, investors are likely
172.
by mdnahas 6y ago
I think I had this conversation word-for-word with one company. I told the CEO my salary demand and he could pay me in cash or in stock at the previous valuation (which had happened a week earlier, so I knew the price and that they had cas
173.
by mdnahas 7y ago
https://medium.com/numbers-that-matter I try to find important issues and simplify them to one good number. E.g., America's healthcare system costs us $4,000 more per person that other developed countries and we live