bdcs

Courtesy of the Chicken Tax, yes you read that correctly.

"The chicken tax is a 25% tariff on potato starch, dextrin, brandy, and light trucks imposed in 1963 by the United States under President Lyndon B. Johnson in response to tariffs placed by France and West Germany on importation of U.S. chicken."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/06/12/414029929/episo...

Wireless charging was a great feature for in the car. I would set my phone down and it would play music over BT while charging. C'est la vie.

Yes the 5X and 6P work with Project Fi, according to CNET.

http://www.cnet.com/news/googles-new-nexus-phones-to-work-on...

>An extremely progressive tax policy

Except for the fact that effective tax rates on "money received" (income + cap gains + net carried interest) is extraordinarily regressive, with people paying <10% on tens of millions earned per year (cf., most famously, Warren Buffet).

It's about $4 per charge, at 7cents per kWh... Comes out to $250/yr. I guess they should include it if you live in HI or somewhere else with high-priced electricity, but realistically it is much, much less than, say, sales tax, which they also don't include.

I think Patrick sums it up quite well. Perhaps the interesting thing is imagining how this would go down 15 years later in 2015: Patrick asks if the bet is available; it is. They enter into a 2-of-3 bitcoin transaction with 3rd-party escrow. Patrick and Mike sign the terms (probably written in pseudocode or python) using their sending bitcoin addresses (or GPG keys). Filesharing is an order-of-magnitude easier than setting up FTPs with personal IP addresses. The bet is promptly won by Patrick.

Ah, how things have changed in 14 years

FYI, the S&P500 is weighted by float (market cap available for public trading) and not market cap, per se.

Usually S&P500

I believe the latter. FWIW, Qualcomm's marketing demo/presentation was very impressive.

There are three things for me (this is just my subjective account):

1) Ease of receiving texts. Reading a text went from 7 seconds to 1.7 seconds for me. Really nice while driving (I can keep my eyes near the road and not be mentally distracted) or when I'm in lab with latex gloves on ("Oh yes, I do want to get lunch in 5 mins, good thing I saw this"). BTW, if my time is worth $50/hr and I get 100 texts a day, saving 5.3 seconds per text, the $250 watch pays for it self in 33 days.

2) Social implications of checking your phone vs checking your watch. The latter is impatient, but the former is outright rude in many contexts.

3) By filtering the important things through my watch rather than my phone, if my phone buzzes but my watch doesn't, I can safely ignore it, because it is of lower-tier importance. This benefit surprised me, but it is actually rather nice to have an automatic hierarchy of notification importance.

>Of the things you mention, my _guess_ would be that only energy prices are a significant factor stopping AWS pricing from following Moore's law.

Ah, but this is subject to Moore's Law too: As transistor density increases, performance per watt goes up (well, this requires Dennard Scaling also). Hence, as Moore's Law advances, the power costs go down (at constant performance).

Your guess about network costs are correct, their prices have a half-life of 9 months: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#Other_formulatio...

Good to hear they're working hard in the Department of Redundancy Department.

Supposedly you can go to Walgreens and get a test from Theranos.

>Has anyone else ran into this problem?

So many people did that this very practice is now banned in the state of California.

Steel is 36 cents per pound. Assume you can move it up and down 300ft (30 story building). This will get you 1pound * g * 300ft of energy storage. This comes out to 300,000 USD/kWh, about a 1000 times more expensive than Li-ion batteries, per kilowatt-hour.

Your point is correct, but the details are wrong: coal (and nuclear) provide so-called "baseload" power, while natgas and hydro provide "peak" power (this is why natgas plants are called peakers). Coal has a very long spin-up (and spin-down) time. If you've studied process control, the first-order time delay is on the order of hours to days. Natural gas and hydro have time constants of ca. minutes. Moreover to your point, batteries have very short time constants (but a plethora of of other problems).

I understand that products and services sold by US companies boost USD (vis-a-vis buying iPhones in your example), but why would, say, a Brit buying a Xiaomi phone using USD boost the USD? The USD holding time would be rather short, I would imagine.

> People generally have to buy energy (oil) in our currency, which adds a great deal of support (though we’ve already seen the very beginnings of the PetroYuan).

Can someone explain why using USD as a medium of exchange supports the USD? I can see this effect insofar as central banks will hold a trade-weighted basket of currencies and having more trade in USD will increase that share of the basket. Other than this effect, is there (an) other(s)?

IME, youtube ads seem to come on dynamically, with dynamic amount of "forcible viewing" time, eg 5sec, 30sec, 60sec, etc. It does a pretty damn good job of showing me the most ad without my walking away in disgust. For example, I was on a binge of science videos and the ads went from 0 sec, to 15, to 30, in lock-step with my curiosity.

As far as I know, TaxACT[0] is the only tax software whose parent company doesn't actively lobby against tax filing simplification. I haven't used them nor do I have any stake in them, but I figure it is good for people to know of this TurboTax alternative.

[0] http://www.taxact.com/

Thank you for review. I had traditional braces for 8 years and I cannot convey much it would have meant to me to brush my bare teeth or eat some, say, corn on the cob, if only for a brief (albeit painful) moment.

All the same, good luck with your braces. I cannot recommend a "gum stimulator" enough!! http://smile.amazon.com/Gum-Butler-G-U-M-Stimulator-Pack/dp/...

Just for context, solar provides <1% of world electricity and nuclear provides >10%, both of which produce very little CO2

This number is useless without the context of GDP, which is growing exponentially. Even if debt grows at 1.5%/yr, debt-to-GDP ratio can go to zero if GDP grows >1.5%/yr. This has the funny effect of people seeing exponentially larger debt numbers and freaking... due to lack of context.

Here's some more historical context, England's interest rates and debt over the last 300 years. About 100 of those years had debt-to-GDP of over 1.0.... And no problems with interest rates. http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/10/28/opinion/10281...

Finally, the article's closing scare tactics of coming up with a high interest rate doomsday scenario is a red herring. In such an example, the article fails to mention the USD would depreciate and GDP would skyrocket(denominated in the dollars would go up, because about half of S&P500 revenues are foreign). The net effect would be a drastic lowering of debt and increase in GDP, thus somewhat fixing the debt-to-GDP ratio and largely fixing the high interest rates.

Of course we should pay down our debt when(or if) it makes sense to do so: when unemployment is low and inflation is close to target (or above target). Now is not the time. Additionally, structural government reform is sorely needed, although it should target more outstanding issues, rather than an out-of-context debt number.

If secular stagnation holds true, we may not have "normal" interest rates again.

Which is weird because A16Z invested in AirWare (and they, as all VCs, love to talk to their book!)

It implicitly is if their customers use USD / EUR. Maybe they buy something en masse at, e.g., $99 but not $119

Look back to Sept 2011 to see the Franc do similar price swings without a cap in place... In fact, that's WHY the cap was put into place (also to prevent deflation, recession, and a huge slump in exports).

Thank you for the well-thought-out reply. On the other hand, I don't know whom I should cite to convince you if I can't cite generally well-respected academic articles and periodicals. If you want me to make a strong, free-standing argument, I believe it would take many more words than would be warranted in small comment section of a news site.

>Are there any studies that show [immigration] would help growth?

Immigration increases wages for domestic workers in the long-run[1-3].

"None of these studies is decisive, but taken together they suggest that immigration, in the long run, has had only a small negative effect on the pay of America's least skilled and even that is arguable. If Congress wants to reduce wage inequality, building border walls is a bad way of going about it." http://www.economist.com/node/6771382 and here http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/immigrat....

[1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w12497 [2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w14188 [3] http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/what_immigration_means

> just as it took time for the Irish or Italians to assimilate ... For a variety of reasons, assimilation across racial lines is much more difficult

In early America, the Irish and Italians immigrants were not considered white, like the British and Germans were. They assimilated across racial lines and joined the "white race". And, indeed, many more races will in time. Incidentally, Mexicans were considered white for about 70 years until 1920.

"Among those not considered white were the Slavs, Greeks, Italians and other Mediterranean peoples." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_th...

>Did you actually read these papers?

The abstracts and figures, yes.

>Did you understand the models and the math? Do you agree with the models? Why?

No I didn't read them fully.

>Do you agree with the assumptions behind the model? Why?

Yes! Because they are the most cited papers on the topic of wages and immigration (I believe citations to be the best metric we got for quantifying consensus amongst experts). I also learned about them from sources I trust (e.g., The Economist, econ blogs). I'm sure we both agree immigration and wages are very complex issues and I believe we should consult the academic consensus before deviating from it. I'm not saying they're right, but we better have a good argument if we say otherwise.

>the papers you site are the farthest things from "facts" that are imaginable

Please realize you're calling me out for citing the-most-highly-cited peer-reviewed economic articles. In your other comments in this thread (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, disagree with my argument) you cite nothing, but rather present your personal views and, perhaps, a false dichotomy. Although my argument may be wrong, at least they're cited (by me and over 2000 other peer-reviewed articles, for what its worth).

EDIT: Here's the The Economist on wages and immigration written for the lay person, lest I may Euler you.

"None of these studies is decisive, but taken together they suggest that immigration, in the long run, has had only a small negative effect on the pay of America's least skilled and even that is arguable. If Congress wants to reduce wage inequality, building border walls is a bad way of going about it." http://www.economist.com/node/6771382 and here http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/immigrat...