defertoreptar

The military is paid by taxes. In general, no single citizen has much control over how much it costs. The USPS is different because if we eliminated stamps and paid it all out of taxes, individuals would abuse the system.

Because we pay out of pocket for postage, we expect the USPS to place no further burden on taxpayers. However, it keeps going going into debt. This signals that there is something wrong at an operational level, since its competitors don't go bankrupt despite not having the huge subsidies and advantages in the law that the USPS has.

The "why" and "why now" is that the USPS's debt has been growing and isn't sustainable in the long run. Unless structural changes are made, tax payers will ultimately be left paying the bills. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/15/postal-se...

Looks like it had a recent jump, but is still below the trend line. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPILFESL (You can zoom in on the recent year by using the slider at the bottom.)

It relates the overall principle to a concrete example. The particular example isn't important. As you said, we can tweak the numbers to go either way. What's useful about it is showing an example of how the numbers could work to logically explaining Epic's decision. I find concrete examples like this really helpful for comprehension.

It looks like Trump was attempting to do with the order that came along with this news.

> The executive order, Hira said, appears to provide “a way to ensure that ‘secondary employers’ — outsourcers — adhere to the H-1B attestations as though they are direct employers of the client.”

> Such a change, if enforced, should prevent abuses such as those reported at Southern California Edison and Disney, where workers allegedly had to train their own H-1B replacements, Hira said.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/08/03/h-1b-visa-president-t...

Hard to judge without knowing how much more Koda wants compared to other content providers. Anyone know this?

Going to be the devil's advocate on this one. The current policy creates an incentive for unnecessary overtime. That can distort the real demand for labor. Eliminating the incentive could allow the USPS to find out the actual demand, and hire the right number of workers to get the mail out on time.

Was the author blatantly lying in the introduction paragraph?

> In the years following the financial crisis, numerous economists and market observers warned of rising inflation in the face of the unorthodox monetary p0licy by central banks. They were wrong time and again.

> Russell Napier was never one of them.

Edit: maybe they were referring to the pandemic when they say "financial crisis"?

Maybe someone who plays the game could clear it up. I did some searching, and it appears as though the ordinal ranks on the x axis are just buckets of players in ranges of 25 points in each bucket. The underlying rating system for these rating points is apparently something like Elo or Glicko, but I couldn't find a source that explicitly says what.

> Is the point really predicting outcomes?

Others have pointed out how there is a psychological aspect of rating systems, and no developer wants to constantly field complaints. That said, I believe the answer is yes. A rating system derives meaningfulness from its predictive power. In other words, people want to know how good they actually are compared to one another.

The author didn't benchmark to see if this system is actually any better at predicting outcomes than vanilla Elo. That's how you determine if your implied win probabilities are accurately being derived from rating differences. The author seems to be under the impression that there's something fixed and concrete about an 1800 rating, but when you change the system, you also change what an 1800 rating means in the first place.

Some of these complaints are solved by existing systems, namely Glicko. For example, rating deviation helps with experienced players (low RD) losing points to newer players (high RD). It also has a built-in way to discourage inactivity. Players' RD increase over periods of inactivity, so they can be excluded from the leaderboard after reaching a certain point. That allows us to maintain their rating without decreasing it. After all, that's our best guess of the player's skill. It's just a less reliable guess over time.

The author is looking at consumption, not income. It's been shown that when you look at consumption, inequality isn't nearly what people think. https://economics21.org/html/when-it-comes-inequality-consum...

Not exactly. We know the broad strokes. He figures a price for a company by estimating their lifetime earnings and then factoring in the time value of money. He's talked about a mental checklist he goes through when looking at quarterly reports, but he never talks about the exact details of this process. Whether he's lost his edge, that's debatable too. The time since he's beaten the S&P is now entering into the long-term.

Now repeat the same procedure on randomized data and see how often you can match or surpass this accuracy.

Whether they intended it this way or not, users will now be worried they're upvoting the "wrong" thing and will be less likely to vote unpopular opinions and political views, just in case.

Just a suggestion, instead of using the average upvotes per visitor, how about something objective and not directly tied into the model itself? For example, we could look at the average Pearson correlation of the rankings over all individual trials.

That still wouldn't factor in freshness, though.

> A large fraction of the things he says in public are either factually false or total nonsense. To say anything else would be incomprehensibly biased in the other direction.

The point is that it's not for Wikipedia to say that a person lies. Instead, it needs to point to specific factual instances and quote experts when bringing the idea together.

> Because, yes, we should definitely give as much space to viewpoints that the earth is flat as to those that say the earth is round.

As long as scientific sources are referenced and the criticisms are acknowledged, what's the problem with having a flat earth Wikipedia article?

A recession causes deflation, which costs people jobs and quality of life. When the Fed prints money, it's counteracting the deflation. When the balance sheet is trillions or dollars, there is no worry of inflation. The Fed can easily vanish that money supply by selling assets and unwinding bonds.

As you've pointed out, savers lose. In a recession without money-printing, their savings would've been worth much more. As it turns out, preventing job loss and lower quality of life is more politically appealing to decision makers than helping responsible savers.

> I obviously was talking about "thought-ending" in context of the conversation on what boundaries should be set on speech in which situation. What point are you trying to make?

You were saying how free speech absolutism is a "dogshit principle" because it is thought-ending. My point is that we could use the same argument against speech suppression, which is even more thought-ending. It's almost literally thought-ending, since people also think with their speech.

>> What's an example of hate speech that's infinite and permanent?

>Inciting a pogrom.

Talking about a murder can result in a murder. They're two different things. Both ought to be taken seriously, but one results in the permanent end of life. The other in and of itself does not.

> If speech can cause harm then it is justifiable to redress that harm. If someone wants to argue for free speech absolutism while acknowledging that they are justifying without limit harm and damage to others, by all means they can do so. I think most reasonable people would see how stupid that position is.

Doesn't insulting someone who is sensitive cause harm to them? There're countless ways to cause psychological harm through language, and most don't have anything to do with "hate speech." For example, you said any reasonable person would see how "stupid" it is to believe free speech absolutism outweighs harm given through speaking. I'm taking that position. Should you be arrested for making that remark if it results in my feeling hurt?

> Free speech absolutism is obviously on its face a dogshit principle because it is unlimited and thought-ending.

Not as thought-ending as silencing a voice with the threat of legal action.

> Yes, the suppression of speech can cause harm, but this harm is not infinite and permanent.

What's an example of hate speech that's infinite and permanent?

> If speech is powerful, then its power can cause damage and harm. Deal with it.

Who said otherwise?

I go on business trips to Vegas along with a friend. My friend has been playing blackjack for decades. I'm not a gambler, but counting allows me to join in while mitigating risk (in the long run). We have a really good time.

Initially, I spent about 40 hours training on blackjack counting software. Nowadays, I'll practice for one day before the trip, and I'm sharp again. My "lifetime earnings" are very good, but I'm not trying to make money so much as not lose money.

Counting is only a small part of the game. You need to memorize basic strategy for the different types of tables, as there are subtle differences in rules. You have to know how many decks are left on the shoe. You have to divide the count by the decks remaining and calculate how much to bet based off of this information. Lastly, you have to execute all of this nearly perfectly all while in a loud environment while people are talking to you. Even a small percentage of mistakes can mean negative expected value.

Immunity isn't well understood, or at least it wasn't well understood when government guidelines came down.

Also if the government risks hospital overcapacity by not imposing restrictions, and high deaths per capita resulted, then that would look very bad politically.

He had nothing but positive things to say about the American economy. He spent a large amount of time at the beginning putting things in prospective, to show the amazing growth we've had since the nation's beginnings.

He was careful to always talk about "the next 20 to 30 years." That's something he always does, saying he can't predict what happens over the next year. However, between the lines, it seems like he was not optimistic about the short run. I think you could see it on his face.

Maybe it was just not having Charlie Munger around to throw out quips between questions.

If there were no worry of a recession, then land and other asset values would increase. The $6 trillion is meant to offset possible deflation and keep inflation on course for 2%.

> if those loans are paid back, they will cause net zero inflation.

Assuming you can get the fed to make that money disappear, which it doesn't have a good track record of doing so far.

Your three examples run in a similar vein: individual rights vs the role of government. I think many of those you would see as holding contradictory views would say that government intervention in these areas actually fall under the domain of something they believe is one of the few justifiable functions of government: defense. Only, it's not a war this time.

The problem is with CEO compensation incentives, not buybacks. Buybacks do not increase a company's market cap, just ownership per share.

If a company compensated management based on future market cap and did not compensate with a fixed number of shares, then this would not be an issue.

Covid-19 and flu do have similar symptoms: https://i.insider.com/5e6a58fee4f9fe5dad7d0932 , so if you have one and are symptomatic, it wouldn't be hard to confuse it with the other.

Where they're wrong is:

1) The death rate. Seasonal flu is around 0.1%, while covid-19 is likely between 0.5% to 1% (many figures in the news are inflated by selection bias due to testing being a limited resource).

2) Contagion. We have vaccines for seasonal flu. Covid-19 spreads much faster and stays alive in the air and on surfaces for much longer.

3) Hospital capacity due to the fast spread.

The trouble with this is that it fails above first order thinking. For example, I remember asking a photographer, "what's the value of 20 megapixel cameras"? His answer was something like, "the more the the MP, the better the detail."

I knew that already, but he didn't know I knew that. I was wondering because most mediums with which I view these photos don't support that high a resolution.

As a result, I've tried to do what the above author prescribed, but add an "I understand how x..." to avoid wasting time with the obvious answer.

There's even an issue when doing that, though. The question becomes too complex (as the author was getting at). I see this mostly when I'm troubleshooting something on the phone, and the tech is used to giving the "on script" answer.