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Also, it might explain why youth unemployment is so high in Europe.

Really, you think this would have cost $33M if a Fortune 500 firm was paying? Enterprises overpay a little because managers are spending shareholders money. Governments overpay a lot because bureaucrats are spending tax payers money. There is a lot less accountability in the latter.

So only people who have been wildly successful have the right to share their thoughts? This guy failed and writes a blog post about what he may have done wrong and includes the advice he got from his mentor. Agree, disagree or ignore, but I don't see how your comment adds any value.

BTW - There are plenty of successful people offering awful advice. Can't we just try to evaluate ideas on their merits?

By looking at Google Adwords. In senior care, there are a bunch of referral companies that get big commissions when they place a senior in a private facility. They bid up the price of advertising.

The article isn't saying you shouldn't be passionate about your work, rather that you shouldn't restrict yourself to selling in markets where you have a personal interest.

I have mixed feelings about this. I started a website about senior care giving because I thought there was a market need and advertising rates were/are incredibly high. However, writing about senior care as a 27 year-old male is mind numbing. The site failed because I had no motivation to create content for it. So, the lack of passion can definitely result in failure.

It seems to me that the key to success (as noted by the article) is finding where you can add the most value. I'd say that:

Value Added = Function(Knowledge, Work, Market Need)

If you work on something you are passionate you have a head start on the first two. But, this doesn't matter if the market isn't there. The trick is finding market needs where you are uniquely suited to add value. In a soundbite, you shouldn't follow your passion, but you shouldn't ignore it either.

I was just responding to his "it's a public good so it should be provided by the government". In economics, public goods are automatic things that should be done by the government because the market would fail miserably. I wasn't using jargon for jargon's sake.

Your advocacy for universal health seems to have two parts:

1. It would be nice for someone else to pay for my health care.

2. Universal health care in other countries is better than what we have in the U.S.

My responses would be:

1. Everyone would like this, but it doesn't make us any better off in aggregate. (If you want to redistribute income, it doesn't have to be done via healthcare).

2. Is debatable. There are trade-offs. Look at wait times in Canada. What about innovation over time. Maybe other countries are free riding off of our innovation. Just because costs aren't as visible don't mean they don't exist.

I'm not against all government intervention into healthcare. But, we should understand why the market is failing and how the government is correcting those failures. That is the only way to make good choices about the trade-offs involved. Otherwise, we are just setting ourselves up for failure in the long run.

Health care is not a public good (in the economic sense of the word). To be a public good it has to be non-rival and non-excludable. It is definitely rival (the surgeon can't operate on two people at once). And, it is only non-excudable to the extent that society won't let people die just because they aren't able to pay.

There are plenty of reasons to think health care will not be efficiently produced by the market (adverse selection in health insurance is one). But, the reason the government will do such a bad job isn't that we have "stupid partisan assholes". It's that the incentives for government bureaucratic are all screwed up (see public choice theory). The problem is deeper than politics.

I used to feel that way. But, after some contemplation, I realized how conceited that is. People are so multidimensional and have such varying experiences that it is arrogant to think that there is nothing interesting about someone you have just met. They may not be good at communicating and they may seem to be boring or shallow. But, they almost certainly have knowledge and experiences that are foreign to you. The trick is finding what they are. If someone can't find anything interesting about another human being, it probably says more about their lack of wonder than about the target's "interestingness" (although sometimes communication is the problem too). I really like watching Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe to see him converse with the people he is working with. If you were small talking with these people in the dentist office they might seem boring. But, Rowe is able to bring out their interestingness.

The socks look like they are very nice quality, but given the bright designs, you had expect some comments. The negative comments are probably a plus on net as they drive more people to look at the ad. How did the advertising work out for you? Any sales? I advertised on Reddit and lots of traffic but no sales.

"Each win reassures me that as long as I refuse to give up, I can never lose."

I can totally identify with this. Nothing is sweeter than the taste of victory after slaving away on a problem for hours. In fact, minutes ago, I just had one!

You shouldn't compare the benefits of getting exercise from rock climbing to the chances of dying from it. The choice isn't rock climb or be totally sedentary. You can get exercise in ways where you can't fall and die. What you should compare is the marginal benefit of the additional exercise you end up doing because you enjoy rock climbing more than the next best activity. And, then compare that to the death rate.

My favorite part is the kid using what he learns:

For school, the kid goes on the streets of Toronto to raise money for cancer research. He notes that a homeless man has likely already found the most attractive location to raise money (near the subway). Then, he uses backwards induction to infer that the homeless man will leave if he begins collecting for a more worthy charitable cause in the same location.

What keeps the magnets from falling out? Are they connected to bone?

I agree this is the problem. In economics it is called "adverse selection" and is particularly problematic for insurance.

Yeah, I did that in the 90's too. Got kicked out of a Rite-Aid for being a little too obvious about it.

Pretty cool. Example: "2 inground pools, one for people and one for dogs" -$15 night

Credit cards are the #2 source of funding for young companies. I think the availability of this form of credit (compared to other parts of the world) is part of what makes the United States so entrepreneurial.

Discussion on the original claim: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3732385

Catch: You have to buy their $50 USB modem and the free service is limited to 1 year.

Still, a nice way to check/send email in a pinch for those without smart phones.

There are some bugs. I looked up some mouth symptoms I had and the entry on Tooth Abscess talks only about depression: http://symcat.com/conditions/tooth-abscess

I think you misunderstand the economic meaning of "rival good": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics)

But gold isn't the only store of value. You could have used silver or copper. And, the value of gold fluctuates wildly in response to fears of future inflation. This creates a lot of noise. Finally, you should know that most economists consider the CPI to overstate inflation due to substitution bias: http://www.frbsf.org/econrsrch/wklyltr/el97-16.html

I thought this article made a lot of really good points (especially about wasting time tracking commissions).

However, the OP seemed to miss why we pay sales people with commissions but programmers with salaries: it is easy to objectively measure the output of sales people and it is not easy to objectively measure the value of code.

If you asked the question, "Why do we pay most people in salaries?" the answer is because there is no easy way to pay-by-performance for most creative, subjective, or service oriented tasks.

How is the state linking health care to employment?

My understanding is that health care is linked to employment because of the adverse selection problem that occurs in a free market of individual health insurance. Can you elaborate on why you consider this to be the government's fault?

I always think of this when I have my laptop with me in the car. I worry that if I leave it in the car, a would be thief will walk by and see it. But, if I take my backpack out and put it in the drunk it is a huge signal that "my backpack has something very valuable in it!" to anyone who might be watching. Since you can get into the trunk by breaking a window and pushing a button, I think on net, it is safer to leave my backpack in the car.

Closer to 1/10. The 1/4 figure comes from a study where only 1/14 women self-identified as being raped.

Regardless, too many, and the reference to rape in the original article was unnecessary. But, repeating nice round inaccurate statistics to exaggerate a problem is also dangerous.

I agree with you that the cost of education is very high, but you need to look at the marginal cost. A person has to eat and pay rent regardless of whether they are in school. You can't count that 25K as the marginal cost of school.

I think it is really funny that you consider cleaning to be an unskilled job and cooking to be skilled job. They are both low skilled job that are a lot of work. Your anecdotal "they like being a cook" misses the point. On the margin, some people will choose cleaning over cooking.

Society agreeing on a minimum wage does not make it efficient by definition. First of all, "society" is only the majority of voters. Voters pass things that are inefficient all the time. Secondly, efficient has a specific meaning in economics. It means that goods are allocated to where they are most highly valued and produced where they are can be most cheaply made. Given the definition, the minimum wage clearly does distort people incentives to work and leads to economic inefficiency.

Awful article. Others have discredited it well, but I wanted to comment on this plausible assertion that it makes:

"The market cannot accomodate everyone to be the best at something; in fact it is impossible by definition."

Actually, this isn't impossible by definition (think of an island with 100 people), but practically some people aren't the best at anything. That doesn't matter. Everyone has a comparative advantage in something (see Wikipedia for definition). This is because even superstars only have 24 hours in a day. The person who mows our lawns or picks up the trash doesn't do it because they are "best at it" they do it because they have the lowest opportunity cost.

I debated the WMD topic in high school pre-Iraq war and the expert consensus was that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. Arguing otherwise was a losing debate. It may have been obvious that invading Iraq would be disastrous, but it wasn't obvious that they didn't have WMD. The experts had little information and were misinformed.

The tone of your response to the OP is belittling and adds little to discussion of what experts knew or thought they knew. You think the Economist relied solely on Fox News and Bush intelligence when believing that Iraq had WMDs?