FastMonkey

A payoff has to happen over years too. Sure you optimally ignore sunk costs when looking at a given project, but if you keep ditching solutions 2 years into a 3-year payoff you're going to lose a bunch of money.

If you ever visited the killing fields in Cambodia, you'd never make a statement like that. A sub-optimal economic policy isn't even on the same measurement scale as the raw, senseless, brutal cruelty and violence of that regime.

I don't know how to break it to you, but the system you're looking for that does all the things you're saying is capitalism.

Have the talent and desire to be a heart surgeon? Go for it, and you'll be rewarded. Want to make life sized statues of the Beatles out of used printer cartridges? Eh, fine but maybe also get a day job.

I suppose in the absence of cash we would just force some people to do the necessary tasks that aren't anyone's favourite hobbies?

There's a lot of power in stories. Even today, on social media someone can make or break your reputation with a single post. A difference today is that you can fact check things much more easily. Historically, it's not hard to believe that professional story tellers had tremendous power. They could make or break the validity of a ruler's claim to his rule, they could "explain" natural phenomena, and essentially create an world beyond they knowledge of the audience where they had done fantastical things.

A lot of the posts and comments I see on here are made by people in the dangerous phase between becoming interesting in markets and actually having experience.

I've been around, and there very few 9-to-5 places that mind if people work 10-to-6 or 8-to-4 instead.

I had the same questions myself. I tried to follow the citation on wikipedia, but that links to a newspaper article that doesn't seem to mention it at all.

Edit: on the other hand, the claim "meta-analysis by Rutgers researchers found that Permanent DST would eliminate 171 pedestrian fatalities (a 13% reduction) per year.", does actually link to a paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014...

Gold isn't confusing, it just doesn't work so great for the economy as money. Money is more complicated than just being a token that you can own.

People like this don't realize that it's their own epitaph they're writing. They're creating a community that disdains the fairly recent past, with the result that they'll be disdained in the fairly near future.

I understand. On the team I'm on right now, we're trying to make some large changes, and some of that has to do with challenging assumptions. I'm just primed to see things like "10 weeks is a reasonable amount of time for Y" as a check point to ask whether it's actually reasonable, or whether we've fallen into a pattern that we've stopped questioning.

I'd argue it's ordinary rather than reasonable. It seems like the tax is fair, you can import a 1000hp beast for personal use and get taxed heavily, or you can import it for whatever sort of haulage you need a 1000hp pickup truck for and you're limited by the rules of other haulage trucks.

A half a kilo of CO2 per km is pretty hefty...

Edit: 1.8lbs/mile of you prefer.

This makes sense if you're talking to business people. They don't know or care about the details, they're looking for something with basic graphics, a few big numbers, and some soundbites. I'd feel ripped off I spent my time at a tech talk in my area that did that.

Agreed, and how many stay on the same or a similar subject for decades? It seems like the great artists he mentioned jumped from one thing to the next, whereas academia seems to incentivize patient deepening of a single furrow.

That sounds about right. A search engine has to try and intuit what users are going to want. Decisions have to be made to show one thing above another. In order for us to trust the engine though, we should have a way of knowing what values are referred to when making these decisions.

Maybe people are so used to living in such a safe country that they can't even conceive of a real threat to its existence. Countries only exist because they're willed into existence. Sure, Ukraine isn't perfect, but it's the Ukrainians' and they have every right in the world to defend it. That said, the way the conversation is going on here in the last day or two, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of these comments were direct propaganda, or people have been soaking it up from somewhere else.

Doesn't that get you back to the problem of click bait? If newspapers are only paid for articles with headlines that grab your attention, then that's where their incentives will drive them. Part of the attraction for newspapers for me is that you're sort of forced to read the other articles as well.

I think "sensible" is highly context dependent.

It's easy to spend your entire life running from one thing to the next. Meditation can just be a 10 minute break where you give yourself permission to take a mental break. Like almost everything, there is an unhealthy extreme. As an analogue, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that fitness is generally good for you, but trying to do ultra ironmans is probably not going to be good for many people, and if you attempt it you have to prepare in a way that's suited to your own body.

I got a proposal last year from a vendor where I wasn't allowed to copy or download the text. They were one of a handful of proposals I got, so since I wasn't able to share they're stuff with other decision makers they put themselves out of the running. We do take steps ourselves ourselves for communicating sensitive data, but my point is that there can be costs to overusing systems like this.

It's almost like they're sanctioning themselves!

It's like a loss you would make if you bought a stock for $20 and sold it for $18. Someone else buys it for $18 and it might go up or down from there. Rosneft got their money back when they initially sold the stock to the market.

I think BP is a UK company and I'm not that familiar with the specifics of their accounting system. In the disclosure they say they considered that they had "significant influence" which is an IFRS accounting term. That would mean (as simply as I can explain it) that the initial purchase is recorded at cost with their share of Rosnefts profits and dividends recorded against that holding (along with a large bundle of other accounting details).

They've made the accounting changes that show they may sell. Instead of telling investors "we are holding a significant portion of rosneft and intend to hold it for the foreseeable future", they will now be saying "we hold shares of Rosneft that are worth $X on the market, and we will sell them if we think we will get a reasonable price".

Rosneft is a publicly traded company. When you "exit" a position, that usually means you sell the shares onto the market. Public shares are traded on a secondary market, so if they do that some other investors would be buying them. I haven't looked into this story that deeply, but I think it's unlikely that they would be striking a good deal with Rosneft to sell them directly back to the company. Rosneft may decide to buy the shares back from the market itself.

Edit: looking at the BP disclosure, they've decided to make the accounting changes that show they're going to sell the stake, they'll likely be looking for a smart way to offload the shares, probably to some large buyer (not just pressing sell on some brokerage account).

Edit 2: the $25B figure isn't really that accurate. Before this all kicked off, Rosneft had a market cap of around $70B,and BP held about 20%, or $14B. The article sums BP's carrying value for the company ($14B, coincidentally I think), and an accumulated foreign exchange loss of $11B, which had already been charged to equity. The current market cap of Rosneft is about $30B,so the actual hit to BP sharebolders will be something like $8B if they could sell at current prices.

I've worked in a couple of different industries, and from what I've seen an associate is generally a title for junior staff. After a few years, most graduate some type of specialist or project management job title.

Depression might lead people to eat differently. I know when my diet suffers when I'm down, there's definitely more pizza and less fruit and veg.