animefan

In contrast, the courts find "an offer of continued at-will employment is, by itself, sufficient consideration for a non-competition agreement." To me this is completely reasonable.

You are right that there is no reason to single out tech. However my claim is that this is because other professions have been successful in implementing the harmful protectionism I and the article were referring to. There is not a critical shortage of tech workers in particular, but high wages indicate a shortage in general. There are also valid reasons to focus on tech, e.g. tech skills are more transferable internationally than, for example, law.

If you are considering economics, one thing you have to understand is that econometrics is very oriented towards economics, and if you are more interested in statistics per se, you would probably be better off in a stats program. There is very little machine learning in econometrics even today.

If you are a Christian, then you most likely believe in a single objective universe, which is the one we live in (I'm not a Christian so I won't go as far as saying that a Christian must believe this, although many theologians do).

If you are not a Christian, you might have more flexible beliefs that allow for the anthropic principal.

As for imperfect competition (which I'm also familiar with, I have a PhD in economics), I see you mentioned it above but I still don't know why. Even if not sellers were a monopoly or oligopoly, everything I said above would apply, at least in very broad terms. You could probably come up with some demand function such that increasing input costs of a monopolistic producer resulted in an increase in production, but I don't see why you would think that actually applied here.

I think the article has direct relevance to HN, where many people would like to protect the high wages of the tech industry, by opposing H-1B visas, offshoring (not such a big issue now) and campaigns to teach tech more broadly. People often conveniently forget or ignore market logic, which states that for the greater good, people should be given every opportunity to move into higher wage jobs, even though this will lower the wages of people in those jobs. These people often seek refuge in the thoroughly refuted logic of the far left, which states that even very well paid workers are still being "exploited" and that competition between workers of any kind is bad, and instead we should somehow seek to re-arrange the economy so everyone has access to the bountiful "surplus" that is somehow out of our reach. In contrast, the author rightly puts people on a spectrum of wealth, and points out that people far enough along this spectrum need to being arguing that they should have less not more.

One reason I find it hard to reject Platonism entirely is that the main alternative in the philosophy of mathematics, Formalism, looks to me like a kind of Platonism. This is because formalism replaces belief in the independent existence of mathematical objects (real numbers, integers) with belief in the independent existence of meta-mathematical objects (theorems, proofs) which most formalists conceive of in mathematical terms.

Ultimately I think that there is no a priori limit that we can place on how science is going to pan out, and how this will affect our philosophy. E.g. I find the idea of multiple universes distasteful and nonsensical (e.g. If everything possible happens, then how can we interpret probabilities? Why do we live in a universe where macro observations are consistent with applying the law of large numbers to quantum randomness? I can't think of any anthropic/observer based principle that would enforce this) but I can't yet rule out that that's really how things are.

For any policy change, you can find some case where it negatively affects someone. Churches, schools and nonprofit theaters might tug on the heartstrings but if as a society we really thought these things are incredibly underfunded (I don't) then we could just give them money directly through government grants.

Government policy must be able to change, and there is no guarantee of compensation when it does. To do so would be prohibitively expensive, since the government never receives any money when people indirectly benefit from its policies.

Even if it is for the greater good, please understand who you're fucking over here before you cheer it on.

I think it is for the greater good, and I accept the negative consequences while I cheer it on. Are you saying this is a bad policy, or do you just want people to feel bad anyway?

CA farmers are increasing nut trees acreage because nut trees require a lot of water, and thus nut prices are going up in the current drought, and thus the farmers are rushing to increase the production of such profitable product. (Heard on NPR)

Taken by itself, this contradicts neoclassical economics, no matter how charitably you read it. If it were implied there were more complex mechanisms whereby acreage increased even while total production decreased (as neoclassical economics implies it must), then the statement could not use the words "because" and "thus" in the way it did.

You and others have implied that I was wrong because the conclusion that nut tree acreage increased is still possible, but I never said it wasn't. I think it's perfectly fine, and important, to critique an argument as opposed to a conclusion. If I let this slide, then should I also nod and smile when someone argues that people should buy local since it makes everyone richer?

None of this explains how knowledge of supply shocks would change a consumer's intrinsic demand for nuts.

>In other words, consumer preferences can result in inelasticity of demand.

Earlier you said As long as nut prices are going up faster than nut costs, so will nut acreage

No matter how inelastic demand is, it is impossible for prices to increase faster than costs. In the limit of infinitely inelastic demand, prices increase at the same rate as costs (all costs are passed on to the consumer).

Consider the limit as demand becomes (locally) infinitely inelastic. Then a shift of input costs of X will cause the price to change by X. Total volume (call it Y) of goods sold stays the same and total revenue increases by YX. Total revenues net of costs remain the same since total costs increased by YX.

The main point here is that markets don't do weird counterintuitive things, at least in a partial equilibrium analysis. Shocks to the costs of inputs always result in less production and less profit.

[Reply to edit] No offense taken, I shouldn't have said "econ 101" in the first place since it could be interpreted as disparaging. What I meant is that once we accept the assumptions of partial equilibrium analysis, it really constrains what can happen, and it can be shown by simple well known theory. And you were right, I wrote "revenue" when I should have written "profit".

I'm sure that what you are saying about water rights is true, but I'm simply arguing that the increased "cost" of water must move the supply curve of nuts up (at every point) not down. This shift of the supply curve might cause some people to stop growing and others to start, there is nothing in the theory that contradicts that. But everything in this thread still fits into partial equilibrium analysis.

>Even if we assume that the price increase must be supply driven...

That doesn't matter to me, I was arguing against a specific mechanism. I never said there was no reason that more acreage might be used. I said that the reasoning of the poster was wrong.

depending on elasticity, this could conceivably even increase the total revenue of almonds sold

It really couldn't. If you are, as you say, assuming prices are driven by supply and demand, and there are no demand shocks, then total revenue must go down. That is econ 101.

That doesn't make sense. Consumers have no reason to care why prices change. Do you really think that when there is a drought, consumers increase the amount of nuts that they consume at a given price, because they find the price reasonable due to the drought?

It's a mistake to rely on simple supply-and-demand to analyse this situation because laws of supply and demand are generally considered in an atmosphere of perfect competition, and ceteris parabus - all other factors being held equal other than the water cost, in this case.

It's a bigger mistake to assume consumers behave in ways that make no sense, in order to justify someone else's verbal argument (which made no reference to why consumers would act a certain way, and probably didn't even consider the issue).

It simply isn't possible for things to happen the way you describe them.

Prices are a function of supply and demand. When you say "nut trees require a lot of water, and thus nut prices are going up in the current drought" this implies that supply of nuts went down during the drought. Otherwise, consumers would have no reason to care about the amount of water required to produce nuts.

Given this, "CA farmers are increasing nut trees acreage" must be an incomplete picture. Even if some farmers are increasing acreage, there must be others who are decreasing by even more, otherwise prices would be going down, not up.

In theory, continuous trading should be the simplest game, and let people focus on their individual information and liquidity needs. In practice it certainly induces strategic behavior, but it might still be the simplest system.

The real problem in my opinion is the active human trading that drives these markets. The only reason there is so much is that people irrationally invest with actively traded funds. In fact if people were perfectly rational there would probably be too little price discovery, as people world but market portfolios and any other trade would stand out as information based. But in practice we are way on the other side of the spectrum, with way more active trading than is socially optimal.

This touches me because I've often been in the situation where my explanation was inadequate, and I was accused of trying to sound smart. We shouldn't be too eager to take people down a notch.

If you think you can disprove x > y, (where x and y are parameters like the mean of some quantity for two different populations) then it follows that you can prove x <= y.

On the other hand you cannot ever prove x = y since there will always be values of x and y that are so close that your test has no power. but you can still put bounds on how close x and y must be in this case

This makes perfect sense. IPhones are already a status signal, while sub $1000 watches are a pretty ambiguous status signal. If you knew enough about watches to tell a $100 watch from a $500 watch, you probably wouldn't be impressed by either.