> billionaires running biologic research companies
D. E. Shaw Research is exactly this. Haven't heard of others, though.
2,256 karma · joined January 13, 2015
D. E. Shaw Research is exactly this. Haven't heard of others, though.
[1] https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...
[2] http://www.freetheslaves.net/why-i-chose-to-research-what-sl...
See my reply to vkou. This is exactly how scalpers make the situation better, by creating the availability of the choice to make a trade-off, where before there was no choice but to compete on latency or luck (which is fine for many consumers, but consumers vary in their ability to compete on latency and in their valuation of the trade-off).
A reasonable dollar price, but an unreasonable requirement of speed and/or luck.
The original distribution was hardly a lottery, it was a competition on latency (i.e. competition to be first in line). They change the distribution of some of the supply from a competition on latency to a competition on price. Consumers vary in their ability and preference to compete on latency, and in their valuation of the time/pleasure trade-off. Assuming a fixed supply of switches (in the short term), scalpers add value for those consumers whose preferences are such that they would in this instance prefer to compete on price rather than latency, and are willing to pay the going premium for not having to compete on latency. Without the scalpers, these consumers would have no option but to wait for new supply. There's really nothing unfair going on.
Side note, high frequency trading is kind of an interesting example of the converse situation, where inability to compete on price forces everyone to compete on latency. Because the exchange has a minimum "tick size" for changes in price (a penny or tenth of a penny, or whatever, depending on the exchange), there comes a point where it is no longer possible for buyers and sellers to compete with each other further on price, and so the only thing left to compete on is latency.
If the two alternatives are a world where no new Switches are available for anyone to buy, and a world where some new Switches are available for a high price, then surely the latter is strictly better than the former. Your sentiment places the scalpers in an unfair position of "ethical entanglement": if you try to make a problem slightly better, then by not fixing it entirely you are now to blame. Other examples at http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethi...
It's a critically vital function in preserving the rule of law.
Not necessarily -- life on Earth may have arisen a remarkably short time after accretion, perhaps even in the first few hundred million years. See this old HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10415212
Given that these planets are so close to each other, and interacting with each other gravitationally, how likely is it that their orbital arrangement is stable over geological time?
* Shop around
* Plan your cashflow around the healthcare expense
That chart (and subsequent text) quite clearly says "current US dollars," which is presumably 2012 dollars given the date of publication. So yes, it is inflation adjusted.
I suppose the US's experience is not typical of the world's... after ww2, the US alone was something greater than 50% of global gdp, and its manufacturing base equally huge in comparison. Life is good when you are so far on top, even for the common worker, who with minimal education and no experience could find a job that supported an owned home, a homemaking wife, kids, a car, and two vacations a year. A couple of decades of that, and it starts to seem normal. But it was always abnormal, a result of fortunate post-war circumstances, and now that the rest of the world is catching up, perhaps we are returning to normality.
However, I do generally agree with your diagnosis that the anger isn't so much about automation per se, as about changes in post-war economic structures finally starting to reach some tipping point, whether perceived rightly or not.
"Based on all of these measures, we find that children entering the labor market today have the same chances of moving up in the income distribution (relative to their parents) as children born in the 1970s.
"Although these rank-based measures of mobility have remained stable, income inequality increased over time in our sample, consistent with prior work. Hence, the consequences of the "birth lottery"---the parents to whom a child is born---are larger today than in the past. A useful visual analogy is to envision the income distribution as a ladder, with each percentile representing a different rung. The rungs of the ladder have grown further apart (inequality has increased), but children’s chances of climbing from lower to higher rungs have not changed (rank-based mobility has remained stable).
...
"Together, these two facts can be used to construct various measures of mobility. For example, if one defines mobility based on relative positions in the income distribution---e.g., a child’s prospects of rising from the bottom to the top quintile---then intergenerational mobility has remained unchanged in recent decades. If instead one defines mobility based on the probability that a child from a low-income family (e.g., the bottom 20 percent) reaches a fixed upper-income threshold (e.g., $100,000), then mobility has increased because of the increase in inequality. However, the increase in inequality has also magnified the difference in expected incomes between children born to low- (e.g., bottom-quintile) versus high- (top-quintile) income families. In this sense, mobility has fallen because a child’s income depends more heavily on her parents’ position in the income distribution today than in the past."
maiar is the plural of maia (in Quenya, anyway, but conventionally in English, too). At least get the facts right.