yellowstuff

35 ms·

1. 331.▲
   by yellowstuff 12y ago

   This is badly misguided. It is true that design is a series of trade offs. At a certain point adding an extra safety check will not be worth the cost, whether that cost is in terms of dollars, complexity of the system, or something else und
2. 332.▲
   by yellowstuff 12y ago

   Valuing anything illiquid will involve a mix of rational analysis of inherent value and speculation, they can't really be separated. Pre-IPO companies are very illiquid and so could be prone to bubbles, and many knowledgeable people cl
3. 333.▲
   by yellowstuff 12y ago

   I recently had a rental company tow a new car to me and tow away the old one because the key they gave me was slightly broken and stopped working when it got wet. They had a spare key, and they believed me that the wet key was the obvious p
4. 334.▲
   by yellowstuff 12y ago

   This is pretty much what happened to LTCM ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management ) in 1998. They owed so much money that the Fed had to help organize a bailout from their creditors (although no gover
5. 335.▲
   by yellowstuff 12y ago

   Sorry, I don't really understand your comment. Assuming that people maximize utility is a useful model for certain tasks. Kahneman's work shows that people's decisions differ systematically from any kind of rational maximizat
6. 336.▲
   by yellowstuff 12y ago

   This is interesting, but this seems like a pretty minor thread in Kahneman and Tversky's body of research. The review highlights a number of experiments that show how actual human reasoning differs from maximizing utility. The critique
7. 337.▲
   by yellowstuff 12y ago

   FB stock falling was actually a big embarrassment for both the company and the banks that ran the IPO. At best Zuckerberg had mixed feelings about selling at the (temporary) top of the market. But my point was more that the institutional in
8. 338.▲
   by yellowstuff 12y ago

   Google tried exactly that, letting people bid for as few as 5 shares. It didn't work. A company like GrubHub, with much less name recognition than Google, is much more reliant on a bank helping to market their IPO, and in a worse posit
9. 339.▲
   by yellowstuff 12y ago

   I don't know about GrubHub in particular, but it is normal to see first day IPO returns of 20% or more. The main reason is monopsony- there are a limited number of institutions that can make significant investments in new IPOs, and the
10. 340.▲
    by yellowstuff 12y ago

    I poked around in the neighborhood of "Tremulous" and saw a lot of obvious data errors: "ladiesand","manklnd", "confldentlal", "howdare", "monment". Other words don't seem par
11. 341.▲
    by yellowstuff 12y ago

    You missed customer service, a huge one for me. I actively try to avoid brick and mortar shopping ever since a hardware store owner refused to take back a defective stud finder. Amazon will bend over backwards to make things right for a cus
12. 342.▲
    by yellowstuff 12y ago

    > We see big companies frequently taking part in tax avoidance by going overseas. Should we also blame the US government for having taxes that are too high? This is a common argument in finance and economics articles.
13. 343.▲
    by yellowstuff 12y ago

    Feynman discussed this: “Consider a Mayan astronomer, he suggested… the Maya had a theory of astronomy that enabled them to explain their observations and to make predictions long into the future. It was a theory in the utilitarian modern s