burroisolator

I thought 18 carat just means 75% pure gold. If something has 10x less actual gold does that mean it is 1.8 carats?

I guess I'm searching for a graph that has time on the x-axis and (real gdp * % of income that went to the bottom z%) on the y-axis for 5 ~ 10 different values of z. And hopefully it trends upwards for all values. I'm just surprised this isn't something that economists have already thought of as it feels like it would be the most important GDP-derived metric. Or at least "GDP per capita on median" if that makes sense.

Perhaps my argument can be simplified as follows. If everyone had the same models, they would pick the investment with the highest ROI adjusted for risk (ignoring externalities). That same investment is now not available for someone else: they now have to take the second best.

> Real GDP per capita grows.

Do you know if the share of real GDP for the bottom 10% (or in general, bottom x%) of consumers grown? And is there a well-known term/metric for this?

There is a zero-sum game in the some sense if you focus on potential buyers. If you buy out all the onions in a grocery store (and continue to do so once they restock), eventually the grocery store is going to start raising onion prices. Thus anyone purchasing onions after you will suffer a slightly higher price. In theory, the long term price of a stock should be the sum of its discounted future cash flows. If you bid up a stock through purchases, anyone who wanted to purchase the stock after you (assuming your decision to purchase did not affect their decision) will suffer a slightly higher purchase price, most likely leading to reduced future gains. Liquidity is gained for any sellers.

Economies of scale and knowledge spillovers cause large labor markets to be more productive than smaller ones, and thus not trying to concentrate jobs will be an uphill battle. Increasing mobility in areas with more unemployment will probably be more effective.

I think it helps to understand that only 0.37% of the world's land mass is artificial covering [0]. It makes sense that counteracting the loss of albedo from the melting icecap would be difficult as that would imply drastically increasing the artificial covering while making up for the loss of albedo from what is removed during the process.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_cover

> You generally need borders if you want some from of universal heath coverage for example, that's not disputed.

Do you mean that the US can't afford to give universal heath coverage to everyone if the entire world migrated in or is there another reason?

I'm not sure about major complaint(s) of people, but I can see why city planners would be upset. City planners use height restrictions or FARs (floor area ratio) as a bargaining chip to get what they want: usually things like more affordable housing or plazas the public can use. Real estate developers going after bonus height or FARs is evidence that there is more demand to build upward than what zoning laws allow. Loopholes such as large vacant mechanical spaces, make bonus height restrictions or FARs less valuable, and hence city planners are less likely to get the things they want out of real estate developers.

That the city is willing to provide bonus height or FARs is also showing how these height restrictions aren't based on any pressing concrete objective; the only one I know of is by the FAA: "the Federal Aviation Administration sets a building height of 2,000 feet in most U.S. cities to make commercial flights safer"[0]. In addition, while extracting more affordable housing out of "greedy" real estate developers is politically popular, it is questionable whether this is the most cost effective way to provide more affordable housing.

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2019/04/08/worlds-tal...

Source for 1. above

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-...

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19529624

> When someone has money and spends it, other people benefit. Buying that jet employs how many people? Keeping that jet running employs how many people?

It is true that one person's spending is another person's income but that doesn't capture the waste. While wealth isn't a zero sum game, the time of the population as a whole and the low entropy (resources) of this planet is. If you employ someone to pilot your private jet, that person isn't able to do more productive things such as pilot a plane with more people on it. In capitalism, your wallet is like a vote: you get to influence how other people spend their time and how resources are allocated.

> Why judge what people buy with their own money? Isn't hard enough to judge what you buy with your own money?

I'll give the benefit of the doubt for most things. I'm sure people will judge some of my consumption as wasteful. I do think there is a threshold in which we can tell the consumer, "I think you can do better": imagine if you hired a person to burn trees all day - and I'm not talking about slash and burn agriculture or generating power using the resulting steam/heat - just literally burning trees. I'm open to be convinced that private jets are within the threshold but as of now I don't agree.

I apologize for inferring more than you said, but I do think that the average case of Betty finding a gold nugget or more commonly winning a lottery ticket leads to wasteful consumption. And so it spurred me to give the answer I gave.

> If one person controls all the money in the world, would you consider that to be harmful to society?

Probably not since the money would be worthless: why would anyone want to use this money?

> This suggests that if I find a gold nugget while hiking, somehow that hurts society?

Yes, if they sell the gold nugget and purchase wasteful goods and services, assuming they would not have purchased those goods and services otherwise.

If you use the money to purchase a tractor so that you can grow more food, then yes, you probably are increasing global productivity. At best, it is unclear whether private jets make you a more productive human and thus increase global productivity given their enormous costs - even if you include the motivational boost that it provides to non-private jet owners who look at the private jet and work harder as a result.

Wow!

This is a long article but I believe it is worth a read to the end: in short, don't dismiss this as yet another "top N evil things that Google has done" article. It is a narrative about anti-trust regulation that happens to pick on Google. In fact, given the paragraphs at the end, I wouldn't even classify this as anti-Google.

The paragraphs detailing the fears of Microsoft in 2000 when they were under public scrutiny were especially insightful - they touch upon aspects that the Wikipedia summary of the Microsoft anti-trust cases [1] do not really highlight.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

I get

"There was an error opening this document. The file is damaged and could not be repaired."

when trying to open with Adobe Reader.

"Amazon has definitely pioneered online commerce and has excelled at providing a very engaging customer experience and executing the complex supply-chain steps of delivery purchases to consumers. But its success is not the result of that alone. Amazon has also greatly benefited from many years of resolute avoidance of sales tax collection on purchases, giving it an inequitable and potent strategic pricing advantage over bricks-and-mortar retailers that have complied with sales tax requirements. A recent study found that households in states where Amazon collects sales tax reduced their Amazon purchases by eight percent after sales taxes collection was implemented. The effect is more pronounced for large purchases, where the decline was 11 percent. This advantage is slowly coming to an end, but, over the years, it has cost states and cities billions of dollars in lost revenue, while forcing local retailers to compete with one hand tied behind their backs." - https://www.indiebound.org/spotlightamazon

While I believe that Amazon probably would have won regardless of sales taxes, emphasizing "fairly" seems a bit strong.

Don't forget DoubleClick in addition to Trendalyzer for Google Analytics.

I would be interested to know myself. My guess is that the cost of upgrading libraries isn't that expensive. Library maintainers probably have to change things every couple of years anyways when new countries get added or a country changes timezones. Removing DST would just be yet another change but slightly larger in scale. I would assume most of the cost would be from people assuming that DST was in effect, and as a result being late to something important.

We basically do that every year, and the results don't look so promising...

"Exploiting the discrete nature of DST transitions and a 2007 policy change, I estimate the impact of DST on fatal automobile crashes. My results imply that from 2002–2011 the transition into DST caused over 30 deaths at a social cost of $275 million annually."

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/app.20140100

For starters, your time value cannot be 0. At minimum, your time value is equal to your living expenses.