Being large is not illegal. Having a monopoly in a specific product is not illegal. The standard by which the antitrust officials judge companies is whether the company controls a sufficient part of the market such that the consumer is harmed. The problem with the current regulations with respect to Google/Facebook is that their products are "free" to the "consumer," and free can't be harmful (harm is higher prices). The state attorney generals complaint against Google tries to recast the "consumer" as advertisers. The reason Apple and Amazon get a pass is that within their "markets" they are still relatively small. For Apple, their market would be all cell phones (or in the Epic case the Apple lawyers define the market as all game platforms). Since they don't have a majority of these markets and consumers are free to switch within the market they can't be forced to change behavior. "iPhone" is not a market by antitrust definition. Amazon places itself in the total retail market where they are still less that 10%. As the law is currently written and interpreted most of what big tech does is not a violation of antitrust laws -- the laws do need to be changed for everyone.
Advertising companies have a natural size limit since they generally can't work for competing companies. Agencies reach about $500M in revenue and then get sold off to a holding company. It's almost inevitable there are a whole bunch of deals.
This is likely one of the most cost effective methods for increasing vaccination rates. VAT receipt lotteries are becoming a common tool to help increase VAT compliance among merchants. Consumers ask the merchant for a receipt so that they can enter the lottery, thereby forcing the merchant to pay VAT. The allure of a big payoff can motivate people to change behavior.
A good friend of mine works for a large construction firm that has bid on some of the California high speed rail jobs. He said that for much of the work (particularly moving existing utility infrastructure) there are no firms bidding, or at most one firm. They therefore know they can jack up the price to 2-3X normal costs. The work needs to happen in places where there are literally no construction workers, and crews don't want to go to where the work needs to be done since there is other work close to their house.
I saw Kurt Vonnegut speak in the 1990's and I remember his saying something along the lines of "I am one of the 100 people that are able to make a decent living writing fiction"
I wonder how much we are seeing general problems with adenovirus vector vaccines (e.g. blood clotting and this manufacturing issue) only because we've never rolled a vaccine out to a large population so quickly. Regulatory agencies are likely afraid to approve any at this point, which does not bode well for other vaccines using the same technology.
I'd be really curious to know how San Francisco rental prices are diverging between newer (not rent controlled) buildings and older (rent controlled) buildings. There is historically not as much turnover in the rent controlled buildings, and people pay a premium price at the time of move in because they get protection from rent increases. I would guess that rent controlled unit prices did not slip that much because people realize that San Francisco will be a great place to live at some point in the future. These rental surveys are heavily biased towards larger, newer apartment buildings.
Real estate (built a few spec houses and then small scale landlord). His last client, BTW, was George Lucas' personal secretary. When she retired that was the end.
My single parent father was a typewriter repairman. He visited offices to repair them, so I spent some of my early childhood in the car outside of various office buildings (highly illegal now, of course). The exact moment it ended was when we were watching the 1984 Super Bowl together (this was in January 1985). He saw the Apple Macintosh commercial and said "uh oh" (paraphrasing NSFW language). He went out and bought the Macintosh on the very first day it was available. I set it up and made a document on MacWrite. Another round of "uh oh." I hit print and the printer spewed garbage -- all of the first cables were defective so the printers didn't work. After he went back to the store and got the working printer cable he decided to find a new line of work.
Most mortgages are made by mortgage originators who resell them. If I remember how it worked before the crash, the agent, mortgage originator, and title agent would work together to make the deal happen. There were some kickbacks. The mortgage originator would hire the appraiser directly. Now the appraiser is assigned by a 3rd party, with one consequence being that appraisers generally don't know the nuances of local markets and are unable to properly price in a hot market.
It's not just convenience and speed. In hot markets, the appraised values can't keep up with market prices (since the comps are a half year old). If the buyer doesn't have resources well above the minimum to make up for the difference between the appraised value and the sales price, it's likely a loan cannot be approved. Before 2009, appraisers would just appraise at the sale price because the real estate agent that hired them wouldn't hire them again if they didn't.
>90% of Americans prefer their primary residence as an investment over the stock market. People are likely to move funds from savings and the stock market into their homes, as they believe this to be the best strategy.
The way the housing market is structured, it is a vastly superior investment for most Americans. Housing is the only asset where every American can be highly leveraged with a fixed downside. As a house buyer you need only 10-20% down and can mortgage the rest. So if the house price goes up 10%, your return on principle is more than 50%. In California and some other states, first mortgages are non-recourse -- if there is a short sale the homeowner is not personally liable for the difference between the sale price and what is owed on the loan -- this is not true if you buy equities on margin. For these reasons, historically the returns for Americans of modest means has been astronomically larger than the returns on equities. The "all cash" phenomenon is partly investors realizing there are excess returns in this market.
There was a similar story about the ascendancy of Japan over the west in the 1980's, but demographics eventually slowed Japan's growth. There were simply not enough young people to keep the economy growing and take care of the growing elderly population. A similar thing is happening with China as many young people chose to not have children or only have a single child. So far in human history this trend towards fewer children in advanced societies is irreversible. The successful parts of the "west" have counterbalanced this trend by attracting and integrating young immigrants (both educated and working class). Unless China becomes a more attractive place for immigrants it is probably nearing its peak potential.
When I was in physics, I always read "a typical example of the data from an experimental run is shown in figure 1" as "we have carefully selected the best data, shown in figure 1." It sounds like that is the case here.
When I was in McMurdo station in Antarctica on the way to the South Pole I happened to be there at the same time as the Navy cargo unloading crew. McMurdo banned all alcohol sales while the Navy was in town.
Some of the people who are least likely to have insurance are those who "retire early" aka lose their job in their 50s or early 60s and are unable to find a replacement job with similar benefits and pay. Other people in blu collar jobs can no longer keep up with the physical demands of their profession once they hit mid 50s. Sometimes they have enough saved to scrape by until they can collect social security, which they unfortunately often do at 62 and forgo 30% of their monthly income permanently. Medical coverage is a huge problem for these people. Fortunately Obamacare makes it so they can now buy coverage at this age (before they would be rejected for likely pre-existing conditions), but any plan with reasonable premiums has a huge deductible (up to $10,000) that needs to be exceeded before insurance kicks in. For many people they would rather do without insurance that doesn't cover anything that is not catastrophic and save on the premiums.
There is not so much a shortage but instead the empty containers are in the wrong place. With the US stimulus coupled with the lack of ability of American consumers to consume services like travel, imports to the US have surged. They've started adding an extra layer of containers on ships coming from China and a bunch of them have fallen off. In the past we would fill some of the containers going back to China with agricultural goods, but now empty containers are essentially more valuable than filled containers. Here's a marketplace article on the situation: https://www.marketplace.org/2021/03/17/inflation-shipping-co...
My mentor once said "3 sigma effects happen in physics a lot more often than they should." I've since come to realize that we should do a multiple-hypothesis testing correction on all such results, where the number of hypotheses tested is approximately equal to the number of Ph.D.s granted in particle physics.
The Whatsapp route is to get purchased by and subsidized by Facebook. There is no chance the antitrust authorities in the US and Europe will allow something like that to happen again.
I agree that a world of 100% fully self driving cars that talk to each other makes the road capacity and travel speeds much greater. I don't see any way, however, to get from here to there (at least in the US). Are we going to give cars to people that currently rely on beat up used cars to get to their jobs? It's the same reason we can't have single payer healthcare -- the chasm is too far for us to cross politically and economically even if the destination would be superior.
I suspect the adoption process will be slow because consumers really don't want this product. Self driving cars will drive the speed limit and infuriate both other motorists and their owners who are getting passed by speeding human driven cars. There will also be well publicized stories of the few times that self driving cars perform worse than humans. All drivers think they are above average and therefore the statistical comparison to the average driver does not apply to them.
This change will have zero practical effect. The economics of fourplexes and smaller multifamily units do not work. After purchasing the lot and tearing down or modifying an existing building, the costs are upwards of $750K per unit, well above the market value of the units. The only hope is that some of the new factory fabricated housing can reduce the costs to make these sorts of buildings feasible. Construction is the one industry where we've seen literally zero productive gains in the last 50 years, and that has become the limiting factor on affordability.
> Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero?
Maybe I am deluding myself because my daughter has decided to get an expensive classics degree, but the most valuable skill one can acquire in college is how to communicate, particularly how to write well. The second most valuable skill is learning how to master complicated material. Each major teaches these skills in a different way, but the value of learning these skills is basically the same however you accomplish it. It might be easier to get a high paying job right out of school with a CS degree, but the ability to communicate and the ability to learn will still pay dividends long after your technical knowledge is obsolete.
It seems to me that as interest rates go down people take on more debt because their interest payment is the same. This is true of households, companies, and governments. At the same time, the price of assets goes up. As long as interest rates are going down it all works. At some point, however, you reach an interest rate of zero and a zombie economy (insolvent companies, governments and households refinancing to repay debt) or interest rates go up and everything collapses.
It's really hard to see how BTC does not get outlawed by most governments. Since financial transactions are zero sum and provide no economic value, it's the equivalent of a giant methane leak.
Whatever you decide to do professionally, focus on craftsmanship, particularly when no one is looking. The people that focus on craftsmanship enjoy their work more and get better results.
> The most valuable people in the data chain will be those that can take idea to near-production.
Having hired many data scientists/ML engineers over the years, people that build robust automated intelligence directly into products are extremely rare. I've estimated a maximum of 10K people in the entire world. They also command the highest salaries, not coincidentally. Very few people have both the statistics and engineering backgrounds as well as temperament to be successful, particularly when the problem requires new data sources or new types of models. There are some real simple practical hurdles such as the need to implement robust tracking that allows data snapshotting at the time when a decision needs to be made without affecting product performance, as well as figuring out how to gather data on users/situations that are actually important for moving the needle (first time users, casual users, etc.) There is also a mismatch between the best frameworks for prototyping/research and implementation which (at least at the companies I've worked for) can be summarized as "Java is good for application development, not ML. Python is good for ML, not application development."
One thing that surprisingly hasn't happened in the 30 years since the Human Genome Project is a Nobel Prize for the work. There are examples from large physics projects where the leaders were awarded the prize. Surely Francis Collins and perhaps Craig Venter are deserving.