cjy

The average hedge fund averages something closer to 11% (Wikipedia_. It is easy to pick the winners after the fact. And, when you have too much money it is harder to get greater returns on it. It's a lot easier to find 10 million dollar opportunities than 1 billion dollar opportunities.

I don't like Thomas Friedman either. But, that is a good quote that I think Milton would agree with. He doesn't say that invention is a necessary condition for prosperity. He said it is a necessary condition for prosperity GROWTH.

Really? I'm bet it has to do with further testing. You could give a little bit of credit to GlaxoSmithKline for working on this for 24 years. This isn't exactly a good example of "big pharma" greed.

Nowhere in that paragraph does he say or imply that grandparents where living on 7K dollars in nominal terms. He simply notes that they lived simpler lives. That is supported by the data. Our grandparents had median incomes about 40% of what we have today (in real terms) see: http://www.stanford.edu/class/polisci120a/immigration/Median...

THAT wasn't clear. Both of your examples, law and medical licenses are legally required.

Journalism schools already teach ethics and offer certificates. Reporters already are members of organizations with ethics statements: http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

All I'm saying is legally requiring some sort of enforceable code of conduct for journalists before they can work is a violation of free speech.

You can't be serious. Licenses for law and medicine impede freedom. They limit our choices of (and the cost of) legal and medical services. We are just willing to make this trade off because average people have a hard time determining the quality of these practitioners and we don't want people going to jail or dying in surgery because they aren't very smart consumers.

You can't "improve" speech without making it less free. Sometimes the loss of freedom is worth it (like yelling fire in a crowded room) but most of the time it is not worth it. Restrict our freedom of speech so that journalists can't use anonymous sources? Give me a break.

"I'll leave someone else to define [the standard]." That's convenient, since there is no standard that would be enforceable without being oppressive. I challenge you to come up with a standard that would solve the problem you state, that would be enforceable, that wouldn't be an insult to basic freedoms of speech. You also have to define what a "journalist" is. In the internet world, we are all journalists.

Too much student debt is a reoccurring theme in these stories. Part of me thinks how can someone be so foolish to incur $100,000 in student debt without getting in marketable skills? But, the other part of me blames the schools/government that provide the loans and promote the idea that education, at any cost, is worth it.

I had the same question: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=96815

If that was the case, wouldn't prisons already force inmates to sell their plasma/sperm? I'm pretty sure that would get struck down in a court.

"I have NEVER met a motivated person who has said they would not chase their goals because of tax rates" This is a common mistake that Cuban makes. The problem with taxes is that they affect marginal behavior. The doctor works a little less, and entrepreneur sells out a little earlier, the medium business hires one less worker than they otherwise would have. These decisions are invisible because they are small and we can't compare what is to what would have been. But, the costs of taxes on economic efficiency are real. We need taxes for to pay for government. And, we can debate how big magnitude of the distortionary effect of taxes. But this should be done with data not based on anecdotal feelings.

How is time spent on something in any way correlated with how much he learned?

The whole idea of failing fast is that you don't need to invest pointless time after you have learned something is not going to work.

Inequality can be a bad thing without being an externality. Externality has a precise economic meaning. Pollution is a negative externality because the byproduct of my voluntary transaction to buy gas and burn it in my car is that you have to breathe the exhaust. You are an external third party that is hurt without compensation. What external third party is being harmed when one person produces a lot and gets rich and another person doesn't?

One economic argument against inequality is that it results in people spending a lot of resources on guard labor. If I live in neighborhood with lots of inequality I have to spend lots of resources keeping the poor people from stealing my things. Therefore, reducing inequality via income distribution can create a public good in the form of less crime (and less resources wasted on protecting property). Thus, you can argue that redistributing income makes sense on the same grounds that having public police makes sense. That is an efficiency argument for reducing inequality.

Thanks for the correction. I was at the UPS store the other day and this guy wanted to insure $10,000 in cash he was mailing to his nephew. He wanted to mail the cash to keep it off the record and out of the view of the IRS. The people working there said UPS and FedEx wouldn't insure cash. But, apparently the government will.

This is a bit off topic, but the FAQs on your website recommend that people insure shipments of cash. As I understand it, UPS/USPS/Fedex will not insure cash or cash-like items. You should look into this so that you don't misguide your customers.

I think it is important to keep in mind that manufacturing output has actually been increasing over the last 50 years. It is just manufacturing employment that has fallen. That is a natural consequence of becoming more productive. See: http://mercatus.org/publication/us-manufacturing-output-vs-j

The Forbes author is arguing that it is hard to innovate when all the manufacturing expertise leaves. To support this he argues that some Kindle parts are made in China, others Taiwan, others South Korea. To me this is evidence that innovation occurs at a decentralized level. Innovation occurs when companies specialize and focus on a better battery, or screen, or lens instead of a better device. Most people on HN seem to believe that small decentralized start-ups are more innovative than bigger companies. Why is decentralization good for software innovation, but bad for hardware innovation?

When the blog author argues that "Warren Buffet should write a check" he is not oblivious to the fact that asking everyone in your tax bracket to pay more taxes generates more revenue than making a voluntary contribution. Rather, he is arguing that Warren Buffet feeling guilty about not paying enough taxes is not a good basis for rasiing taxes on everyone in that category.

Rather, taxes should be placed where they will do the least harm to the economy. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_tax. Ideally, taxes should be placed where they will not distort people's behavior. So, the relevant question is whether increasing taxes on capital gains will have a change investors behavior making the economy less efficient. Buffet says "My rich friends will invest no matter what!" But, he provides no evidence to support this. On the margin, some investments will not be worth it with a higher tax (as described by lionhearted). How big of a problem this is up for debate. But we shouldn't make tax decisions based on Buffet's anecdotal experience with rich friends.

Well said. The guy also makes a good point that Buffett isn't clear what he is advocating. Does he want to raise the capital gains tax only on the mega rich or raise capital gains taxes for everyone which would have a disproportionate impact on the mega rich who get most of their income from capital gains? The former wouldn't raise that much revenue. The latter would encourage people to consume instead of investing their money.

You don't understand comparative advantage. As long as there is scarcity, comparative advantage matters. There were 24 hours in a day when Ricardo was around and there still are today.

There are theoretical cases under which trade can make a country worse off, but they are rare situations and cannot be simplified down to "inputs flow around today but didn't during Ricardo's days". That doesn't even make sense.

But what bugs me most about your post is your belief that we should work to keep wages high for overpaid middle class American by prohibiting poor Chinese and Indians from having access to world markets where they might actually earn their marginal product. People are all for drinking fair trade coffee and supporting AID's programs in Africa. But when it comes to having to compete on a level playing field with foreign workers all that altruism goes out the window.

Good point. Even though all pieces can be almost anywhere, the algorithm could use the probability of the pieces being in certain situations to improve it's guesses dramatically. This would be especially true if you told the computer whether the board was in the beginning, middle, or end game.

I was thinking colored dots. Bar codes might look better, but wouldn't you need a pretty high resolution photo?

I found this article poorly written and defended. I didn't find it HN worthy. It is basically an investment manager complaining that the wealthiest Americans are mostly in finance and don't pay enough taxes because most of their earnings are from capital gains. He makes a lot of presuppositions in his writing that he never defends. For example:

"I asked if her colleagues talked about or understood how much damage was created in the broader economy from their activities."

How does finance destroy the broader economy in general? Liquid functional capital markets are critical for a stable economy. Finance is only bad for the economy when incentives are structures so that government limits the downside.

"America's top corporations reported 31% profit growth and a 31% reduction in taxes, the latter due to profit outsourcing to low tax rate countries."

Outsourcing is not bad. He treats it like it is a dirty world. Companies should have work done where it is most efficient. Google comparative advantage. "It wasn't the hard-working 99.5%"

Because the top .5% aren't hard working.

"In my view, the American dream of striking it rich is merely a well-marketed fantasy that keeps the bottom 99.5% hoping for better and prevents social and political instability. The odds of getting into that top 0.5% are very slim and the door is kept firmly shut by those within it."

By definition, the odds of getting into the top .5% have to be very slim because only .5% of the population can get in there.

Also, I should note that the lower 99.5% benefit from lower capital gains taxes when it comes to appreciation on their homes. Obviously, this hasn't been a benefit lately. But, this is important given that the home constitutes the biggest chunk of net worth for many families.

The NLSY doesn't include a test of IQ. It includes an AFQT test. That stands for Armed Forces Qualification Test. The NLSY tracks young people who are between 14-22 in 1979 through time. Therefore, they take the AFQT test when they are at least 14 and often older. The AFQT test isn't designed to measure intelligence per se. Your argument is pretty much that students who score well on standardized tests in high school and college are much more likely to graduate (or to have graduated) from high school. There are all sorts of correlation/causation problems there.

The first quote wasn't an ad hominem attack because it wasn't directed at the engineering deans, but rather at the author. If you're trying to determine whether people should drop out of school why would you only survey deans to make a point? Moreover, it is perfectly valid to note the conflict of interest a speaker may have. Their incentives don't make their arguments wrong, but it should give us caution before making generalization or relying on their expertise.

I think we're talking past each other to a certain extent. The deans do make some good points. 1-4 are generally true. I just don't think they are sufficient evidence to show that students shouldn't drop out. They are saying that colleges are good social networks and send important signals to employers. My argument is that something is wrong when we are spending 100K on a screening/networking mechanism. Notice that none of the deans said stay in school because of the things you'll learn in the classroom.

Of course engineering school deans are going to think dropping out is a bad idea. The guy at Best Buy will also try to convince you to buy a warranty on your flat screen T.V.

There are definitely some good reasons to stay in school, but this article rubbed me the wrong way. Take for example, a couple of the arguments presented:

Argument: You get a lot of valuable social connections from being in school. Counterargument: You will meet others and learn from your peers by surrounding yourself by smart interesting people, but this doesn't have to be at a university. Why not connect with smart ambitious people of all ages that are working in your field? If the main value of elite colleges is that they screen bright students and bring them together for 40K a year, the students are getting ripped off.

Argument: Mark Zuckerberg was successful because he was vetted and educated by Harvard. Counterargument: This seems highly unlikely. No one used Facebook because they knew the developer was Harvard educated. And, Zuckerberg was an accomplished hacker before he came to Harvard.

Argument: Most successful entrepreneurs are not drop outs. Counterargument: That is because most people who try entrepreneurship are not drop outs. A better question is whether drop outs who start businesses are more or less likely to succeed. An even better question, is whether the same person is more likely to succeed if he/she drops out. Unfortunately, the last question is impossible to answer.

Why not limited the number of searches that someone can make, or limit the resolution of the photos they can download? That will get a lot of people in the habit of using site and then they might upgrade when they get annoyed by the free limitations.

Why don't people ever recommend suing Paypal in small claims court? It takes time, but won't that force the issue?

You miss lacker's point, labor intensive goods actually become more expensive as society becomes more productive. Check out Baumol's Theorem on wikipedia.

Basically, as technology makes us more productive in a lot of industries, the opportunity cost of work that cannot be easily made more productive become very high. So, we can expect the cost of things like nursing care to get more expensive over time.

Links cannot be defamation because the content that is linked to can change at any time. Linking is more like referencing an author than referencing a book. A certain edition of a book will always say the same thing. The content on a blog or a Wikipedia article will not.

Problem: No one is hiring people with degrees Proposed Solution: Spend more money on education so that more people have degrees.

How does this make any sense? Shifting supply to the right will only reduce the equilibrium wage.

My friend is in Antarctica doing research and the pictures and video in this post blew me away.

It reminded me how important it is to do things that you are passionate about. If you're not working on important, interesting, exciting projects you need to ask yourself why not?