pw0ncakes

12 ms·

61.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
It's something I realized after I started working in finance-- the young are very "short housing", and most people are neutral at best. In New York, housing is a source of widespread and ongoing misery. If you lose your job, you're truly
62.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
Right. Inflation is far less vicious than house-price inflation for most people. It's bizarre that so many people have adopted the "rising house prices = good" mentality, since housing is something on which people naturally have a short pos
63.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
100 years ago, the practice of bathing once or twice per day would seem luxurious if not wasteful.
64.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
Interest rates were high because there was an inflation problem in the 1970s. Also, house prices then would be considered a bargain by today's standards-- you could buy a middle-class house in Seattle or San Francisco for what would be abou
65.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
Torturing monkeys to prove points about depression? Depression sucks, and the worst versions of it could certainly be compared to torture in terms of the misery inflicted on the suffer, but I find it questionable that one could link externa
66.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
When older people complain about supposedly whiny, entitled, self-centered and disloyal young people, exactly one work comes to mind: Projection. We came of age while society fell apart. We're in our 20s and won't be able to own a house or
67.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
I'm not familiar with the environment, but I generally agree. I'd much rather a VC express that he thinks I'm wasting my time than give a noncommital non-answer. There's a more nefarious reason for the so-called "political correctness", alt
68.
Stuart Ellman: Not Everyone Gets a Trophy(businessinsider.com)
2 points by pw0ncakes 16y ago|2 comments
69.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
There's a difference between buying futures (which may or may not pay off) and reliably predicting the price of oil. Also: Southwest buys fuel futures to hedge its exposure, which is different from speculation. People hedge because they do
70.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
What are the inputs into this manufacturing process? The $100/bbl figure is meaningless, unless we know what the specific inputs are and how stable their prices and availability are. Energy of some sort is obviously a major input, and it's
71.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
Some public schools (those in rich suburbs) actually provide a good education (chances are someone who attended one of those schools will object to this comment). Those are an exception and exist in areas where residents could afford to se
72.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
So it's easy for us to laugh from the sidelines... knowing that we would never make those mistakes ourselves... (oh, the naivete) but we're all making critical mistakes, and only very few of us are introspective enough to realize what our
73.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
It could certainly get to $500/bbl, but it's unlikely that it would. Before reaching this point, it would have wrought misery on the world economy, as you've described (and "recession" is an understatement).
74.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
No one with any credibility actually believes he can forecast the price of oil. Oil is very inelastic in the short term, which is why small drops in supply lead to massive price increases. The long-term effect of unavailable or expensive oi
75.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
I thought this was a linkbait title, but it actually is the title of the original article. One of many thoughts appropriate to this dubious claim: often, questions like, "Do you smoke pot?" or "Do you drink?" have more to do with identity t
76.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
Lisp is cool in many ways, but a lot of those features result in code that is hard to read and painful to debug. I can tell nightmare stories about even benign-seeming features like multiple-value returns. Of course, I'm sure a lot of progr
77.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
I've only been in a psych ER once, thank God, and the experience was a lot more traumatizing than the panic attack (worst in my life) itself. To compound the badness of the situation, I went to the nearest ER, and I was living in Brooklyn a
78.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
American society has a high rate of mental illness because, due to some horrible choices in how to build our society and economy, our society is literally breaking down, and because our lifestyles are very unhealthy. In that regard, I'm not
79.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
Panic attacks can be reliably produced in normal people with certain drugs, leading to the implication of biological causes. Anxious people tend to be more prone to panic attacks. A panic attack usually begins with a benign biological malfu
80.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
It sounds like the problem here has more to do with irresponsible diagnosis (which most of us would agree is a serious problem regarding mental illness) than the drugs themselves. If someone has a manic reaction to antidepressants, the resp
81.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
This may not be what you're looking for, but I can vouch for Lexapro on personal experience. I had a bout of crippling panic attacks in the spring of 2008. I lost my job because of this (I was a trader at a hedge fund). I had about 30 attac
82.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
Also, anxiety and depression are often comorbid, so a person who is depressed may come out of the depression but still have anxieties about doing the things necessary to recover. An extreme example of this is agoraphobia, where a person's a
83.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
I'm sorry to hear about this. I have had real panic attacks, and they're pretty awful. The worst part was the month during which I thought it was a physical medical condition, and the absolutely rotten quality of treatment I got in many cas
84.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
Depression and anxiety are biological problems, at least to some extent, and people who have serious biological problems can't just "get out, get some sun and exercise". The drugs work for a lot of people, although it's essential to make li
85.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
And lawyers were the most dishonest. Given the culture of New York biglaw, I'm not surprised. It's an awful work environment-- the ills of banking, without the upside-- and pretty much everyone is miserable.
86.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
The cards have a ranking that is on the card (Judgment is 21, World is 20, Fool can be 0 or 22) if you need a quantitative result, but it would be a mostly qualitative system. How it would work would be based largely on the GM, since you ca
87.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
It's interesting that the OP says this: I know many of the GPs and they are all great people and great investors, but this situation reminded me of one of my critical fundraising rules for entreprenuers ... then tells stories that prove a
88.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
The fact that you won't be joining us will not have a negative affect on the summit - we will sell out and have a waiting list....it's completely your lose!
89.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
It's a good game mechanic for RPGs. In high school when all the cool kids were writing their own role-playing systems, I wrote one based on m5d10. I feel like the computational (and, worse, legalistic) overhead for RPGs can detract from the
90.
by pw0ncakes 16y ago
^ I wish I could delete this. I realize the comment sounds very tasteless out of context. I was ripping on the sterility and general uselessness of corporate so-called "humor" by describing a behavior that would be offensive and bizarre in

More ›