savanaly

49 ms·

571.
by savanaly 8y ago
It's the same for personal debt, right? I would never take out a loan unless I expected the present value of the thing I'm buying with that money to be greater than the discounted cost of the loan. It might be awfully hard to quan
572.
by savanaly 8y ago
Isn't that a bit like asking why the Christians are still talking about Jesus every Sunday instead of looking to the future?
573.
by savanaly 8y ago
>In 2017 AMC made 5 billion in revenue and took home 500M in cash. I would say they are doing just fine. That's why I was careful to say "economic profit". On the books numbers are all well and good. But the only indicator
574.
by savanaly 8y ago
We could study this, right? Simply ask soldiers what the their combat experience was like and also what they think about nations starting wars, and see if there's a relationship between how much they've been exposed to the "h
575.
by savanaly 8y ago
But cinemas are hardly a monopoly-- so there really is no room for the price to go down. They are presumably already operating at long run minimum average cost, which is equal to price, and there's zero economic profit being made. I wo
576.
by savanaly 8y ago
There's definitely the need for this in JS. It would be extremely difficult to do, though.
577.
by savanaly 8y ago
It's not that I'm not worried in the sense that if I had infinite resources I wouldn't allocate any to improving this particular situation. It's just that previous news coverage made it out like this was a huge crisis wh
578.
by savanaly 8y ago
I guess so. My impression from reading media reportage of the incident was always that due to problems in the water supply the residents of Flint had lead in their water such that they were even more in danger than Americans generally were
579.
by savanaly 8y ago
Surely you just believe that the fine is not high enough, not that it is ineffective in principle? There exists a number X which is the amount that google could be fined where they are ambivalent between that fine and a ban from the market
580.
by savanaly 8y ago
Minecraft with mods? I'm sure there's more than one that does exactly that.
581.
by savanaly 8y ago
I don't think that 1/300 million part was about the likelihood of influencing the election, but rather about what percentage of the gains go to the person (not more than the percentage that that person represents of the population
582.
by savanaly 8y ago
That's the web developer equivalent of being able to use a hammer as a carpenter, though. That's a bit of an exaggeration but only a bit. Would you hire a carpenter if he couldn't use a hammer effectively? Sure, you could spe
583.
by savanaly 8y ago
That's not how science works.
584.
by savanaly 8y ago
Corporations can take on a role as a monopolist but it's not inherent to their nature. I would hazard to say that most corporations are in a market where they can't affect the equilibrium market price of the good they're se
585.
by savanaly 8y ago
I guess I interpreted the argument as being about workers and employers, with healthcare cost as a given, with the debate mainly being about how much the employer should subsidize healthcare. Which basically amounts to how high should the w
586.
by savanaly 8y ago
I support free markets because they tend to distribute scarce resources efficiently, and monopoly disrupts that. A union is, roughly, an attempt to form a monopoly and charge a price above the market price, which our first expectation shoul
587.
by savanaly 8y ago
To a large degree, the responsibility is also on Smyte, right? Selling to a big corp is one thing, and once you are no longer owner of a company you've washed your hands of future decisions. But at the time when they agreed to the sale
588.
by savanaly 8y ago
I read the tone of your post as angry disagreement, you seem to be agreeing with me? My point was >I think what we're really upset about when it comes to rich people making a lot of money through investments is not that interest isn
589.
by savanaly 8y ago
I think what we're really upset about when it comes to rich people making a lot of money through investments is not that interest isn't taxed more, but rather that they had such a high (non-investment) income in the first place. I
590.
by savanaly 8y ago
Couldn't disagree more. What's wrong with a prisoner in the prisoner's dilemma playing the game rationally while also wishing he wasn't in a prisoner's dilemma?
591.
by savanaly 8y ago
It's like calling someone morally repugnant because they agreed to give you money equal to the sum of two and two and then gave you three dollars, insisting that the math actually does come out that way. If they honestly do believe tha
592.
by savanaly 8y ago
I mean there's lots of things we could do to people and usually we don't. What makes you think we would do it to chrononauts more than, say, people in comas they're expected to wake up from?
593.
by savanaly 8y ago
The problem then is that those people don't have enough income, not that the price of buses to them is too high. If it's hard to provide the service to them, the price should be correspondingly higher to discourage use of the bus
594.
by savanaly 8y ago
I also think it was appropriate that in that thread they changed the inaccurate title to "Google de-emphasizes 'Don't Be Evil' motto in its code of conduct "
595.
by savanaly 8y ago
Agreed. In computer science the smallest lever can move the largest mass and smaller levers are not inherently less sophisticated.
596.
by savanaly 8y ago
Advertisement and info gathering beyond a certain point (which we probably passed long ago) is simply an arms race/prisoners dilemma. All the companies would be better off or at least no worse off if they all mutually scaled down their
597.
by savanaly 8y ago
If we want to give charity to a class of people via subsidizing credit to them, we should be explicit about it rather than putting moral pressure on banks to make sub-optimal loans alongside honestly offered loans. The idea that the bank is
598.
by savanaly 8y ago
Guess I was more responding to the speculation of a Skynet scenario than of a company screwing over a "small subset" of customers which plainly does routinely happen.
599.
by savanaly 8y ago
If a company routinely closes its customers' accounts when there's no good reason to won't it open a space for a competitor who is known for not doing that? Seems like it's hard to have an equilibrium where one can'
600.
by savanaly 8y ago
My informed but non-professional understanding is that: the good news is if your kids are biologically your own and you are naturally curious, they are predisposed to be as well. The bad news is that studies show that if you want to steer t

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