1,766 karma · joined May 30, 2009
Co-founder Paradigm
Watching this is a bit weird, it's reminiscent of a deli meat slicer.
"It also reported instances of wealthy people from cities rushing to rural areas on Monday in hopes of buying commodities with the old currency before people in those areas heard about the exchange process."
Your bachelors degree institution also isn't just a pedigree. You can't perpetually argue that 'everyone is equal'. People aren't equal, and where you went to school is a useful signal.
Beyond all this, the Dropbox guys are predominantly MIT, and expecting applicants to be from a similar environment should be seen not as insulting, but natural.
Their average rental period is ~4 days for approximately 10% of retail price, and they send 2 sizes to you (which somewhat resolves the fit issue).
Small technical gripe: The images on their website are ~300kb and take way too long to load. They don't seem to have a technical person on the founding team, but I'm sure they will work such issues out as they get more popular.
Players who rely on winnings for their livelihood do meet the author's description. In particular, for online poker players, the # of hands per year can total in the millions, and you can get pretty specific about the types of strategies/decisions that will alter your bottom line. I played poker online pretty seriously (and profitably) for about 2 years, logging over a million hands, and I definitely did no self-promotion.
Check http://www.pokertableratings.com/, a site that logs all hands played at the major poker websites. A major statistic is BB/100 (big blinds won per 100 hands), which is an oft used metric for profitability. The online poker community has a very good idea of the expected BB/100 at various skill levels/stakes, and the associated variance - it's very much a 'science'. The impression of self-promotion that you have is an unfortunate result of commercialized poker TV.
This seems to be an optimization for their average user, but is really inconvenient for people searching for system errors, mathematical/cs theory terms, or other queries where acronyms are common.
Engineering breakthroughs tend to take a bit longer to be recognized because determining whether they are significant takes much longer. There is a necessary grace period to see whether the breakthrough actually has impact.
There seems to be reasonable evidence that at least some quantity of 'welfare' is beneficial. If that's the case, then the negative income tax can provide that without all the bad distortions that traditional welfare/re-distributions (SS, unemployment insurance, etc) produce. (Alas, we can never escape the DWL of taxation, though).
What the author is describing is a 'Martingale' strategy, and it is indeed a surefire way of making a profit (with one critical caveat: you need an unlimited bankroll).
After each win, you always earn a profit of X (where X is your base bet), regardless of how many rounds you have lost before.
Without a sufficiently large bankroll relative to X, however, probability of bankruptcy is high.
That breaking up a monopoly (and how do you define one, anyway?) is good is not obvious (economies of scale, etc). But even taking this as given, that sometimes monopolies are bad, it is far from clear whether allowing government to intervene will be better.
You have to weigh the costs and benefits. Anti-trust law is extremely subjective. It's existence incentivizes companies to use it against each other to gain a competitive edge rather than real value-added approaches. Anti-trust law creates uncertainty that can deter innovation (should we develop this technology if we can't fully profit off of it?)
Government institutions are like all other institutions - they want to survive. And to survive, they need to grow. Mission creep is inevitable. So even if you have identified a narrow area in which government intervention can help, it is not obvious that we should allow government to intervene.
From the GSE's (Fannie and Freddie), the SEC, the mere existence of a central bank, to scores and scores of other existing government interventions in the economy, what we've seen in the past few decades cannot really be called free-market capitalism.
The current crisis clearly indicates that something is broken. That we have too much regulation is as plausible an explanation as that we have too little. And yet, very few people seem to even acknowledge this fact.