wegs

58 ms·

451.
by wegs 6y ago
We're in a pandemic economy. It's an economic upheaval. Many existing employees provide negative value until businesses adjust. If they want to survive, adjust they must. Whichever model we take (lockdown, soft lockdown, no lockdo
452.
by wegs 6y ago
Hey, I switched to working from home seamlessly. Many other people did too. There's plenty of at-home work. If I bought the assumption that getting COVID19 was relatively safe for me, I'd gladly swap jobs to keep someone else safe
453.
by wegs 6y ago
Well, here's the problem: The statements your making are quantifiably incorrect throughout the article, and by large amounts. The article sounds authoritative, but it's not. It's the definition of Internet misinformation. I t
454.
by wegs 6y ago
I agree that he was wrong about that :) Or to put things more accurately, he exaggerated for humor. It's a communications style. He was wrong if you read it too literally. If you read him less literally, the basic point he was making w
455.
by wegs 6y ago
Nah. You'll definitely want the new version. I'm not exactly sure what changes were made between the 1st edition and the new 2nd edition, but the 2nd edition is canonical. The text is online: https://mitpress.mit.edu&#x
456.
by wegs 6y ago
SICP is an designed as a freshman course, and it was designed at a time when many students had never programmed before. It's worth looking at and trying. It's an intense course, but it's beautiful, elegant, and you get a lot
457.
by wegs 6y ago
Dijkstra once said: "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." I find much the sa
458.
by wegs 6y ago
Which is a great reason to stay off the beaten trail.
459.
by wegs 6y ago
If you're adding everything up, please don't omit the costs of long-term disability from COVID19-related lung damage. That swings the numbers completely. If it were just 3.6% of the US population dying, I would understand the econ
460.
by wegs 6y ago
You're missing the point. If I break both of your legs, that's serious. You're not dead. If you catch AIDS, that's pretty serious. You're also not dead for a pretty long time. If I poke your eyes out, that's se
461.
by wegs 6y ago
This seems like nonsense. People in big cities rarely go less than a mile. Many are now starting to venture out into forests and similar safe areas for the first time. On the other hand, a one-mile track in Wisconsin or Montana might be an
462.
by wegs 6y ago
That's an accurate argument for why it'd be nice if COVID19 would be not serious. Wishful thinking doesn't make it not serious. Deaths are telling for who is dead, not for who is at risk of lung damage, compromised immune sys
463.
by wegs 6y ago
The major reason for suspecting long-term consequences were initially extrapolations from SARS and other related diseases. This was speculation. This was confirmed with chest x-rays in China: long-term lung scarring. People wrote this off,
464.
by wegs 6y ago
We don't know the virus is not serious for most of the population. We know most of the population won't die of it in 2-3 months. We have evidence of lung damage, increased risk of stroke, and a slew of other things which /are
465.
by wegs 6y ago
Well, it isn't proof. It is evidence, though. And in two weeks, we will have a lot more evidence. A lot of this is like Russian Roulette -- there's a huge amount about this virus which we don't know, and it could be super-ba
466.
by wegs 6y ago
Why do you say that? The US seems to have an R0 of right around 1 with lockdowns. Shopping is the major place people continue to intermingle. If we brought R0<<1, the virus would die off. If R0 > 1, we all get sick eventually. And
467.
by wegs 6y ago
That's why the fed was set up -- to make sure monetary policy is decoupled from short-term political objectives. It ain't perfect, but it's ain't bad either. We could do better than the Fed in 2020. Tech makes transparen
468.
by wegs 7y ago
The key question is what the penalty is. The penalty is different if the goal is profit-maximization than it is to promote pro-social behavior, for a few reasons: * Very few people want to lose their homes or to go bankrupt. * Investors try
469.
by wegs 7y ago
People shouldn't get paid in tips. The fees should go up to cover cost-of-living and hazard pay, or at least until there are enough shoppers to cover demand. I should be able to get reliable orders with $0 tip. I shouldn't pay les
470.
by wegs 7y ago
Those fees are for everyone's safety. If other people have deliveries, I'm less likely to get sick and die. Delivery fees should be part of the stimulus. If everyone who can afford them paid delivery fees for everyone who can&#x27
471.
by wegs 7y ago
The central friction is there are two conflicting views of banking: 1) Lending, insurance, and investment as a social service. People need homes. Businesses sometimes need to weather crises without bankruptcy. Startups need funding. People
472.
by wegs 7y ago
Hard to say. It's easy to identify safe investments, but if you look at markets, money has flooded there already. People get paid to think about this sort of thing day-in-day-out. People need food, shelter, and medicine, so those are w
473.
by wegs 7y ago
younger population with long-term lung problems = higher medical costs?
474.
by wegs 7y ago
Harvard saw free money, and they grabbed it. It went to "financial assistance to students," some of which I'm sure was what it was (e.g. they presumably helped students with housing or transportation or what-not), and some of
475.
by wegs 7y ago
Yes. It is. It's frighteningly high, but likely necessary: We have a massive crisis. It seems like the least of all evils, unless we somehow are able to act with focused intelligence. On the one hand: Look at unemployment rates, busine
476.
by wegs 7y ago
In the very short term, that's true. In the medium-to-long term, they're kind of the same thing. Fiscal and monetary policy are handled by independent bodies, but they're not entirely uncoordinated. They're both differen
477.
by wegs 7y ago
I think that's more a disadvantage. If the US starts to inflate too much, it may be dumped as the world's reserve currency. A global run on the dollar could convert modest, manageable inflation into hyperinflation. If dollars are
478.
by wegs 7y ago
It isn't free, but that isn't really true. The $1200 comes out of inflation, which decreases the value of accumulated wealth (at least to the extent it sits in cash). If you're sitting on a retirement fund, that hurts you. If
479.
by wegs 7y ago
I have a few types of data: * Most data is reasonably small, and super-critical. I might have legal documents, personal emails, source code, etc. My business might have basic employee information, or sales transactions. Most of that, effici
480.
by wegs 7y ago
Not quite. It's a circular system. Money goes places like university tuition, housing, and dining. "To the students" means "to pay the university." I've walked through the complex and bizarre accounting, but th

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