ucaetano

90 ms·

871.
by ucaetano 9y ago
> Economic rents benefit owners of entrenched corporations, but they don't make them more efficient. Efficient at extracting rents and higher profits, yes. > And you haven't addressed the difference in public service effici
872.
by ucaetano 9y ago
Oh, it is, it extracts profits like nobody else. I'm not talking about efficiency as in providing the best bang for the buck to consumers, companies and investors don't care about that. I'm talking about returns. Cold, hard c
873.
by ucaetano 9y ago
The US spends 80%-90% of what Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland spend per capita PPP, yet the public services and social welfare in the US are abysmally bad. Here's one issue with your source: > The United States is one of the mo
874.
by ucaetano 9y ago
The US spends 80%-90% of what Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland spend per capita PPP, yet the public services and social welfare in the US are abysmally bad. > Well, maybe not the Swiss. Yep, reasonably true.
875.
by ucaetano 9y ago
It isn't about "enfficiency innovations". You always have to make tradeoffs between the collective and the individual, the private and the public. Allowing private companies to extract economic rents from the public is good f
876.
by ucaetano 9y ago
> All you have to do is look at healthcare to realize this is (at least a) questionable assertion. Healthcare companies are more profitable in the US than anywhere else in the world. Yep, "most efficient private sector" still a
877.
by ucaetano 9y ago
The US probably has the best, most efficient private sector of any developed country. And the worst, most inefficient public sector of any developed country. It chooses to prioritize the private sector over the public sector. Other countrie
878.
by ucaetano 9y ago
Hopefully it will help drive discovery (and ad funding) of local news, an extremely important part of democracy that has been neglected by users.
879.
by ucaetano 9y ago
Exactly. Let's say cops stop 10% of blacks for "looking suspicious" (aka, being black), but only 1% of whites. Now say that 10% of both whites and blacks are criminals. And they always get identified if stopped, and eventuall
880.
by ucaetano 9y ago
> The data[0] shows that the race distribution of the assailant in crime reports is about the same as the race distribution of arrestees. There's no support for the differential enforcement hypothesis. Unless the reports are also in
881.
by ucaetano 9y ago
> "It seems like you have some security issues, it's great that I have this friend who can fix them for you before you get hacked" Isn't that some sort of conflict of interest for any other industry? Quite the opposit
882.
by ucaetano 9y ago
I applaud that. Medium makes it far harder to get a glimpse of the actual source of the article. Take this post, for example, HN lists (baremetrics.com) as the source. If it had been published on Medium it would have listed (medium.com) whi
883.
by ucaetano 9y ago
When I read the title I thought the piece was on neighborhoods controlled by NIMBY associations.
884.
by ucaetano 9y ago
Indeed, but not that more expensive. Despite costing in the same range (€6,875/month vs. €6,000/month), the Swiss employee is probably making about €4,500 to €5,000 net, while the French one is making €2,300 net. Cost of living in
885.
by ucaetano 9y ago
> Pilots are never expected to get their eyes off the controls. Pilots do so all the time, because airplanes aren't flying in a congested 2D space. Airspace is mostly empty, with very large distances between planes and features, all
886.
by ucaetano 9y ago
I once did a quick "anthropological" study with In-N-Out employees (read: fancyspeak for sitting down and talking to them about their job), I was quite surprised. Most of them were very happy with their jobs, not just happy with p
887.
by ucaetano 9y ago
> Well, I'm saying that most every improvement to labor laws that benefit employees make it more difficult and/or more expensive to hire. Yes, and it protects those with a job and more qualified, and who pays for it is those un
888.
by ucaetano 9y ago
> Average income in Switzerland is over 5500 € gross / month. I won't even bother to calculate the employer's cost to give an employee such income, because the figure is already way higher than the French one. Oh, no. You
889.
by ucaetano 9y ago
> Well making regular contracts cheaper means lower wages and/or lower fees/taxes on labor. Making full time contracts cheaper means more security and possibly lower unemployment, at the cost of wages (and/or tax income de
890.
by ucaetano 9y ago
Nobody is claiming that they are. But if you could hire an equally-qualified employee in two countries for the same cost, and in one country the employee will take home 70% more for roughly the same work, where would you hire?
891.
by ucaetano 9y ago
> But they hire 40h weeks not because hiring 50h wasn't want they wanted but because it's illegal. 40h? France has a 35-hour work week. > I'm not saying it's easy to outlaw temporary contracts but it's worth a
892.
by ucaetano 9y ago
> A sign that the use of temporary contracts should also be a focus, just like wages and work hours. This is harder though. They use temporary contracts because permanent contracts are too expensive. Making temporary contracts (which wer
893.
by ucaetano 9y ago
> Nice! That's the future. I've seen the "future" in France, nothing "nice" about it. Permanently hiring someone (and emphasis on the permanent, firing someone on a CDI contract is extremely costly, far easi
894.
by ucaetano 9y ago
> The executive branch has chosen to exercise its anti-trust powers against monopoly (which is often reduced to consumer harm) Those two aren't necessarily related. From an economic (and therefore a regulator's) perspective, a
895.
by ucaetano 9y ago
So that, unlike what OP mentioned, independent sources aren't being "punished", heavily biased sources are. Which is fine, IMHO. Notice that Mother Jones (independent, leftist) and Fox News (non-independent, large) have not b
896.
by ucaetano 9y ago
> I am surprised there has not been an antitrust case against Google and Facebook. Google is definitely abusing the monopoly position it has in search. The claim that any user can switch to Bing by just typing in a different URL is ridic
897.
by ucaetano 9y ago
From the article, it weren't independent sources which were punished, but far-left and far-right sources. > However, in addition to AlterNet and other left-wing news sites, Rosenfeld said right-wing, alternative media outlets have a
898.
by ucaetano 9y ago
> I thought this was interesting because if knowledge workers like journalists can do so, why not programmers, or what ever term you'd prefer to be called? Because unions have no standing across international borders.
899.
by ucaetano 9y ago
> How fast can you get lending users to put $100 million to a billion into your non-blockchain platform? Do you mean a stock sale? Once it's passed all SEC certifications and so on for going public and done your IPO, a company can d
900.
by ucaetano 9y ago
Larger size, larger engine, more natural resources required (and more pollution). Also, not only you need to account for the negative externalities, but you also need to provide a disincentive for purchase, which then needs to be progressiv

More ›