Tyrek

There are productivity decisions at the micro-level that actively hurt scaling. The easy business example here is the choice to manage data in Excel as opposed to a formal database. (Very common in financial orgs). Excel gives the team today much more flexibility, at the trade-off of risk (anyone can edit numbers) and scaling (other teams probably can't find your excel file).

Increased prices (and sufficient demand to justify the price increase - e.g, overall profit increase) is part of the interaction between demand and supply. Sure, demand for food is inelastic, but there are plenty of different suppliers at each level of the supply chain (different food brands, different grocery stores, etc.) who are individually acting to support the price search function (via individual profit maximization).

Price is a signal of scarcity. Food is more scarce due to supply chain issues, therefore food is more expensive. Is that bad? Sure, let's address the supply chain issues, overall macroeconomic inflation and, uh, other disruptions (incl. the UA war).

Unless you are specifically alleging direct conspiracy between food producers to raise prices (e.g., monopolistic action), (also already an illegal thing), there doesn't seem to be a clear call to action here.

gouging is an incredibly unhelpful context in a macroeconomic sense. In cases of shorter term scarcity (e.g. toilet paper during early covid), you can have instances of gouging. But over a longer-term period where prices are calibrating to demand/supply dynamics, price increases simply reflect the shifting balance between supply and demand.

Should we be concerned about why there are shifts in demand/supply? Sure.(In the case of food, part of this is driven by the UA war and likely other trends in food productive)?

But it is eminently unhelpful to simply attribute increases to 'gouging' and expect that to be the final say.

"hollering", as outlined in the Dean's memo, is fine. Attempting to execute a 'heckler's veto', however, is not.

I suspect your conceptualization of 'dangerous and violent' as a single axis may be the main weakness here. We've struggled with 'dangerous and violent' for a long time (e.g., incorporating 'friendly' Gallic tribes in the late Roman era as a defensive buffer) - but over the long term there's been a clear transition away from the 'friendly barbarian' model towards the modern professional military?

I don't have a clear conclusion here to wrap it up, but the multiple dimensions at play here intuitively reject the assumption that you have to embrace the same characteristics that you are trying to protect against.

What the business truly requires is an abstract question. What the business expects of him, however, has been answered in this thread. The purpose of a system is what it does, etc.

The difficulty here, as in many cases, comes down to uneven enforcement and unclear lines. Consider the typical example of a consistently noisy neighbor and filing a noise complaint - in many/most cases, often nothing gets done.

I suspect there's a simpler takeaway than what most comments are suggesting: Don't spend substantial amounts of money (based on nominally promised funding) before the checks have cleared.

If we "actually work" 32 hours out of 40 (80%), what is the likelihood that if we shift to a 32 hour max week, that the average person will only "actually work" ~26 hours (80% of 32) in this hypothetical future?

What if at least part of the 20% is spent doing social activities, water cooler conversations, etc. that enable the remaining 80% to flow more efficiently?

> insufficiently compensated for their time

You've just described the job market. If this employee cannot find better paying employment (assuming that the job market is operating efficiently) then it is either a skill issue (This hypothetical employee is not sufficiently skilled to demand a higher salary) or a demand issue (There is insufficient demand for your skills in the market).

We can have a fruitful discussion around job market efficiency (e.g. is Amazon a monopsony employer in some local markets), but objecting to the tone of the comment feels very out of place when this is the language that we use to describe the economy.

Are you implying that the Napoleonic wars, all of the resulting politics, etc. are the natural result of revolution? That the revolutionary ideal requires military defeat in order to reach a positive end state?

You're not being serious if you end there.

I'm not sure I understand your point. Time is just a statistical construct, but it's also a useful one. Similarly, base load is a concept to determine how power generation should be distributed between high reliability/consistent sources, vs less consistent sources.

I agree for the most part - I don't think that there's any strong conclusions w.r.t. spending here, but an interesting direction for future research.

What I'm struggling with, however, given the assumption above (spending is decoupled from tax revenues), is that while the paper suggests a lack of incentive to cut taxes, it equally suggests a lack of disincentive to cut taxes.

Could you point to the part of the paper that you're drawing these conclusions? It's been a while since I've done serious econ work, but I'm not seeing a spending variable when I scan through the paper.

I'm still working through the paper, but this is actually an interesting one to me - The common response to this paper will likely fall along the lines of 'Tax cuts bad because it clearly doesn't stimulate growth'.

However, the counterfactual is more interesting here - it suggests that, from a purely macro perspective, that the spending enabled by higher taxes...does nothing for economic growth. (Note: this does not detract from the humane/ethical argument of redistribution, which I leave for others to cover)

I'm not sure I agree that this is /wrong/ per se - the issue arises from the city council's disinterest / lack of expertise (which itself comes from disinterest) in these systems. If the issues are disclosed clearly, and the city council continues to sign off on the implementation (due to disinterest, cost pressure, whatever) without consulting knowledgeable third parties, then it's only realistic that the blame falls on the ultimate decision-maker (in this case, the city council).

I appreciate the intention, but this is the sort of approach that leads to a long-term distrust of what 'the scientists' say - if we let politicians dictate the scientific message and consensus, then there's no room to criticize when the scientific message gets politicized and ignored.

The argument here is that it's all shell games otherwise if the money isn't set aside - e.g. look at the broader trend with social security's solvency. With the way public funding has trended, it would not surprise me if any unfunded programs simply ran out of cash at some point.

There isn't an easy answer to balance the needs of existing liabilities (pension commitments) with financial operations - the problem with the USPS was (I believe) the catch-up funding required to meet funding requirements, and not the actual funding itself.

but if, as the OP article suggests, there is no lost value, then there is no incremental value to pay existing NIMBYs. Otherwise you're just paying people off based on some subjective measure, which does not seem eminently sustainable.

Obviously, there are plenty of potential issues, such as sampling bias that may confound the article's conclusions, but it's not something to outright ignore, either.

Why not enforce regulations that prevent bad actors from pursing anti-competitive behavior? It's harder, and much less flashier than mandating a cap, but it retains much more of the free market integrity. Pricing is a genuinely hard problem, and mandating it from above is an exercise in pure folly.

absolutely not. If shareholders were risk neutral, they'd be buying bonds, or holding cash. "passive" investment is wholly built upon the concept that "passive" investment outpaces active investment - the very fact that you're in the equity markets suggests you are chasing the 6-8%+ annualized returns (and associated risks) from equity investments. Passive is a replacement for stock picking, and while more conservative in nature, isn't really so in a relative sense.

It's both. Sovereignty should not be taken lightly, nor do we really need yet another avenue for the big fish (read: US/China/Russia) to start throwing their weight around - whether it be through ""democracy"", troll farms, agitprop, etc. This may only start to become a better idea once we've proven we have an effective arsenal against these ideas.

As a direct response, this is not strictly true. The SEC and IRS require financials prepared under different accounting standards, due to a different focus of each group (SEC - focused on overall profitability and activities of the Company; IRS - focused on cash flow and triggers of taxable events) I'm not familiar with the FINRA standards, but companies maintain their books and files to translate between SEC numbers ('book basis') and IRS basis ('tax basis')

The general line of argument here is that the managers have spent time and effort as part of their professional development in order to understand the business, whereas the engineers have dedicated their time towards a more technical focus. This is reflected in how they spend their days - the manager spends time in meetings, whereas the engineer is spending time coding (very broad generalization)

Assuming that neither side is doing significant amounts of extracurricular work to bridge the gap, it therefore follows that management understands the business better, because that is explicitly the purpose of their job.

In a best case scenario, it makes sense to provide engineers etc. with the context to understand the decisions. On the flip side, business decisions are often made upon a huge heap of context that is generally invisible to the engineer (unless they spend an equal amount of time in building up their business knowledge, spending time in meetings, etc. - but at that point, they're basically a manager?)

It's not to say that engineers can't develop the background, etc. to make the decisions, but that it's not exactly part of the expected job functions, and not something that's explicitly looked for as part of the recruitment process. In a sense, this is a bit of a tautological issue.

Can't publish employee quality/motivation. By nature of the game, the Federal level generally has more quality expertise available to it,(larger talent pool, more prestige) more funding to explore different issues, and the ability to focus that funding on limited areas of focus.

These are levers generally unavailable at the lower levels of govt, especially not for the smaller states.

this is both a pro and a con. If companies could hold on indefinitely without running a sustainable model, then old companies would never die and disruption would be much harder. To analogize it to a HN audience, this would likely mean that Yahoo/AOL would still be the dominant search engines.

Structural changes aren't that easy to make, and often have unintended consequences. Glibly advocating for some immense change in the system can bring about severe ripples that are not so easily undone.

and what if it died down due factors other than social distancing? You're positing an irrefutable claim which is sloppy logic.

it's kinda not fair to say that a large org should have enough internal coordination to align incentives and coordinate between different teams? It sounds reasonable to start with, but really gets to the whole making-excuses-for-them kind of thing if you think harder, no?

The easy solution to this idea is to have the guy inside the car (you know, the passenger) pick up in this case. He's right there - no latency problems. The difficulty is in correctly identifying an unresolved edge case with enough margin to brake safely and draw the attention of a distracted passenger.

Local maxima is explicitly not the greatest good for the greatest number. In many ways, it's the greatest good for the greatest visible number, and only for a relatively short period of time. I'm not the biggest fan of raw unbridled capitalism, but there are aspects to innovation and competition that you're absolutely passing on if you default to local maxima solutions. Long term, you're going to get outcompeted/outteched if you remain in the status quo.