ryandamm

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241.
by ryandamm 9y ago
Here, let me Google it for you: http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic... I'm glad you "guess" it's nearly 100%. This article (the top Google hit for "effects of mini
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by ryandamm 9y ago
The dynamics are considerably more complicated when you consider massive public policy decisions that affect the labor market, like changing the minimum wage. When you're pricing widgets, you can look at marginal value add and have it
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by ryandamm 9y ago
It's actually an open mystery why unemployment is so low, but we have yet to see much upward pressure on wages. Theories I've read (probably in the Economist, definitely at the NYTimes) is there is still hidden slack in the labor
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by ryandamm 9y ago
Rather than rebut this in detail, let me just suggest that you study economics before spouting off. It's fun to speculate about numbers, but there is real research and real models to describe these dynamics. I'm not an economist..
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by ryandamm 9y ago
Doesn't sound impossible to me. I was involved with a company at one point that routinely hit its customers up for small-time investment. Never saw the cap table, but I'm sure it was loooooong. (I originally wrote "doesn&#x27
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by ryandamm 9y ago
A16Z didn't invest more in Instagram because of a portfolio conflict; they had already invested in Picplz, and decided they couldn't continue to back Instagram (which was Brbn, a social check-in app, when they invested). A costly
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by ryandamm 9y ago
In this context, dealflow equates to opportunities to invest in startups. To have 'dealflow' means you've got access to a pipeline of promising, stage-appropriate startups looking for capital. I believe in other contexts it s
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by ryandamm 9y ago
It's true in practice, because of the practical ways in which large-scale capital flows are manifested. The stronger point, that it's true in all cases, is made by Pettis somewhere deep in his blog... and it boils down to the id
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by ryandamm 9y ago
Oh, I remember. I remember loading 10 of those things to run a video game, keeping your games in a big file of floppy disks....
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by ryandamm 9y ago
Four dimensions to specify a ray: two dimensions for direction, and two dimensions for where it passes through the surface (whether the surface is the display, or the viewer's eye). You could specify a ray with five dimensions (three s
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by ryandamm 9y ago
There's merely a transfer of liquidity if the two villages share a currency. But that's a delicate equilibrium; to wit, the Euro area, where capital flows can't be balanced by the exchange rate mechanism, so they're bala
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by ryandamm 9y ago
Critically, the two villages have their own currency. In order to buy Bob's store, the purchasing villager must convert some amount of his currency into Bob's. She does this by selling some of her currency on the open market, conv
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by ryandamm 9y ago
Well, I was introduced to Pettis via Paul Krugman's blog at the NYTimes... but in practice, you just gotta wade in. Be comfortable with being lost the first few tens of thousands of words on his blog, and it will add up. Pettis doesn&#
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by ryandamm 9y ago
While important, those are driven by capital flows (into the US), not the other way around. Because the US has open capital markets and a floating exchange rate, exogenous flows really dictate everything. If the exogenous capital flow is he
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by ryandamm 9y ago
Where the capital goes is distinct from the fact that it's coming in the first place. No one is choosing to misallocate capital, which then drives foreign investment. The dynamic that makes more sense to me is: foreign entities want to
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by ryandamm 9y ago
I should point out I'm conflating things a bit; there are transactions involving US dollars that never come home. For example, US dollar-denominated transactions between business entities; those dollars are simply recycled. They don&#x
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by ryandamm 9y ago
I agree! His simple-but-not-too-simple model to explain international macro economics is really great, and happens to explain a lot of the dynamics of what we see these days. It's appealing intellectually; I like small and simple model
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by ryandamm 9y ago
Well, my point (and Pettis's) is that causality runs the other way: we have debt in the US because non-US entities (individuals, businesses, and governments) continue to invest money here. That investment results in spending in excess
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by ryandamm 9y ago
At its most basic, it means money being put into US dollars from foreign entities. It could be a country's central bank buying US Treasury notes, or purchases of US companies by foreign entities, or even just investment in the public s
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by ryandamm 9y ago
An alternative view, and one I happen to subscribe to: a balance sheet analysis shows that US debt must go up over time to support exogenous capital flows. Whether US debt grows in the housing sector, student loans, revolving debt, etc is
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by ryandamm 9y ago
The image on the retina is not symmetrical, though. Try to exploit any apparent symmetries and you'll end up smearing/distorting/destroying the image you're trying to convey.
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by ryandamm 9y ago
On a side note, I'm sad that Lucky Peach is folding. I think this might be the last issue. Honestly, only found it because I was searching for Harold McGee articles (he's got a few there), but I felt it was a good mix of food scie
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by ryandamm 9y ago
Lots of fruit aren't true-breeding; the characteristics of the parent plant determine the quality of the fruit, but the seeds are genetically distinct. This is a major issue in apples, which typically have to be propagated by cloning a
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by ryandamm 9y ago
It's actually worse than that, for a near-eye display: unless you know where the person is focusing, you actually don't know where the redundancy is, so you have to draw the entire 4D raster. (If you know their focus distance, you
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by ryandamm 9y ago
Evidently my satire was too subtle -- I was referring to DVDs in the era of early Netflix (Qwikster?). I'm also confronting the possibility that I'm old, and a lot of you whippersnappers have already forgotten about DVDs, CDs, eig
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by ryandamm 9y ago
In traffic, you have to look at both throughput and carrying capacity. Traffic jams usually result when the carrying capacity gets strained, not throughput. (The throughput of stop-and-go traffic is lower than the throughput of 70 mph traff
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by ryandamm 9y ago
I think this is overstated (though without looking through the prototype, this is only speculation). During normal, outside-of-headset vision, we focus naturally and quickly on whatever we're looking at. We don't spend time with o
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by ryandamm 9y ago
Because n^4 is nasty. Full light field displays have to draw every ray, not just every location; that's two additional dimensions. Resolutions scale badly, and if you make any of the four dimensions lower resolution, you'll get ug
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by ryandamm 9y ago
Perhaps we can encode high quality video onto physical media... using microscale structures to _optically_ encode the video data? We could then use snail mail to move these optical storage devices to end viewers. Oh, wait. Darnit.
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by ryandamm 9y ago
The show is about a year, year and a half out of date. Anecdotally, the funding climate for VR was stupid in 2015, more restrained in 2016 and today. (I think AR might be frothier at this point.) That said, I haven't seen the episode y

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