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I'm really not sure about why this comment has been down-voted besides that people disagree with it. This comment and the one above that was heavily down-voted both inspired some relatively interesting responses. It's a shame because the HN that I used to appreciate had more tolerance for civil disagreements. (Maybe this is just a reddit norm leaking here.) So it goes.

Awesome. Thanks for this. I really didn't like the visualization in the article since it was unclear if it was just a seasonal effect and there were no confidence intervals. The report is much, much better.

Perhaps useful to note that the results hold for minor/non-indictable offenses. However, I'm out of my depth on the more nuanced legal aspects in the report.

Until recently I would have agreed with you. It seems to me that Apple is in a luxurious decline. Cook is great at squeezing money out of their product lines but he's done it at the cost of good will.

I was in the market to upgrade, I love OS X and I was willing to pay a premium... but with crappy keyboards and systems that can't be upgraded it's just was not worth the price tag. I recently switched from my macbook pro to a thinkpad X1. I have to say the first week was hard -- especially the trackpad -- but the adjustment so far has been fine. I'm struck by how much better windows has gotten. Even more, I'm impressed by how innovative it and the eco-system has become again. I think that's the challenge for Apple. How can they stay big and remain innovative? Right now it seems they are coasting on good management and design... but they are missing that element that presumably Jobs brought to the table by directing those elements towards a new innovative vision of a product line.

Anyway, I could be wrong but it seems to me that Apple is coasting. These announcements seem more like a big company flailing around to get in on the next big thing. On the other hand, Apple is great at the self-contained devices (ipad, iphone, etc.) with no moving parts. These products seem rock-solid and I think this is where the real revenue is. My concern is that this money is going to allow everyone to hide from the fact that the company is not as innovative as it used to be.

Interested to hear from others though. My work is elsewhere so I don't track this company closely.

I think the other cause for inflation is that software patents can be rather dubious compared to other fields. It's easier to claim something is a patent when it is really quite trivial (example: one-click shopping). This is harder to in other fields.

I briefly worked in the insurance industry in Canada. FWIW in my experience the industry is incredibly backwards. I wouldn't expect their prices to reflect anything meaningful about climate risk. Quite the opposite. I rather think that the industry is jumping on the climate change band wagon precisely because their analytics are so poor. (Don't get me wrong, climate change is happening. I just think industries are going to profit from it any way that they can. In this case, this is a cover-your-ass move because the industry hasn't invested in this analytical research. Labeling bad policies that should never have been written at a certain price as climate change is a convenient excuse.)

This is anecdotal, but the one I worked at had no weather/climate modelling and was only just beginning to leverage even the most basic analytics across the company. From what I heard from people in pricing was that their pricing was also a mess for property. They basically just gave up on selling insurance to anyone within 100 meters of water. They did account for elevation to some degree so that they wouldn't insure people in a flood plain, but much of the process was kludgy and ad hoc. The company is a reasonably big player and is (laughably) considered to be very technically advanced in the broader market. Even the biggest players are just moving out of manual data entry so I am not overly hopeful about the broader industry in this country.

On the other hand, Canada has a very sheltered insurance market and it desperately needs more competition. It's very protected though so I don't expect that to happen any time soon. If there was more competition, I would expect the analytics to be better and yield a more accurate picture of the real climate change costs based on the existing science.

The point is that branding often has little relationship to quality. It does allow brands to charge higher rates for basically identical homogeneous products.

As a teenager I worked in a potato chip factory. We also made chips for competing brands. Often this amounted to changing the bags the chips were put into. These brands would then charge different prices for the identical product.

I once sat in on a lecture by a former CEO of a very successful grocery store chain. He noted that if you buy anything in a can you might as well buy the cheapest good because there were basically identical behind the label.

Choose almost any kind of product. Often times multiple brands are created by the same parent company to provide the illusion of competition. Sometimes there are differences in quality/features but sometimes not.

I think that was precisely the point of the parent comment.

Well it does a pretty remarkable job. Recall too that the stats are foreign born as a percentage of the population (Peri, 2016 that I mentioned above).

The USA is larger than all Canada, Australia, UK and NZ combined. So, let's not pretend that the US is not taking new comers at all. We're still in the ballpark of close to 50 million people. This compares to about 7 million in Canada.

I think talking about averages is somewhat misleading. There has been a steep upward trend in the US and Europe. In the 1960s we'd be talking about less than 5% for the US and Europe so that is a big change. It's fair to say that there have been major policy changes over the past 50 years but it's misleading -- I'm not accusing you, just pointing out -- to say it's an average because that implies a steady state.

I don't think USA/EU is at 15% yet. Europe trends just a little less than the USA (at least from 2016). I was just skimming this article today (below). I may have misinterpreted it so feel free to set the record straight. See Fig 1.

Peri, G. 2016. Immigrants, Productivity, and Labor Markets. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 30(4): 3–30.

Canada and Australia have had very high rates for a long time. Australia's is higher though. I'm not sure why Peri chose to combine the series because they are quite different but higher than the US.

The AU/NZ (and Canada too I suppose) cases are interesting because they all have very overheated housing markets and prices are historically high relative to average wages. The USA went through a market correction and let the housing bubble burst but these markets did not. I've heard it argued that increased immigration to major housing markets is considered to be one way to keep the construction industry and house/rent prices sustainable. I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts or insight into this.

Some people really do learn from classes. I'm not being facetious. Sometimes teaching you can actually see that students have never considered certain things and for them it is a revelation of sorts.

To understand this you have to also take on board that ethics is difficult. The media often gives us simplified versions of situations after the fact and we can't help but feel the "right" choice was always obvious. But in reality, as an ethical conflict develops those involved often feel helpless as the problem continues to grow. No one risks stopping it precisely because they don't have the intellectual framework to deal with or understand the developing complex ethical dilemma until it is too large for a single individual to take on.

I get where you are coming from though. I'm just saying that some people aren't lucky enough to have come from that place. Education does often make the difference for well meaning people not otherwise exposed to a good moral foundation.

That's the game of these companies. Scale first and figure out all of the problems. Of course, there will be waste as that gets sorted out but there is economic incentive to reduce waste (as long as it is a cost).

More broadly, this is how capitalism works. Capital is allocated relatively efficiently but there is a lot of failure and waste inherent in the competitive process.

I agree. There was a time it was normal for an organization to invest in its employees. Perhaps it's cheaper to externalize the costs of retraining for smaller firms. But perhaps for larger employers it is starting to make economic sense. I hope this becomes a real trend.

Fair enough, but not all people have that experience. Things often get harder as you age.

Sadly, some people make poor decisions when they are young and course correcting gets harder the older one gets.

You poor bastard. I worked for the federal government too.

I remember being told that working for the government for more than a few years would make me unemployable in the private sector. The idea was one's work ethic would be irremediably damaged. I thought that was foolish at the start of my time there, but a year later I had a new respect for the heuristic.

I think the supply bottle-neck is the reason. All the pot has to come from a few hand-picked suppliers. Also there are claimed Liberal ties to pot production. Some quick links (although I suggest taking this with a grain of salt given the source):

https://potfacts.ca/the-liberal-party-elite-is-heavily-inves...

https://ottawasun.com/2015/10/28/liberal-cfo-could-rake-in-m...

I haven't heard any moral outrage arguments in the press or otherwise. Remember that this isn't only a youth issue or it wouldn't be used in a federal campaign promise. It is, by definition, widely supported. Recall that people well into their 60s and 70s came of age smoking pot.

IMHO there's much more moral outrage associated with the Conservative plan to reduce drinking restrictions. Ontario remains a pretty uptight place.

Nonsense. This type of criticism is unwarranted and I suspect disingenuous.

There are lots of contexts in which we can say we would like to see more data. However, when someone is making a point which is a fairly standard one in the Brexit debates we don't need "references". Nor would referring to an article that said the same thing as OP somehow validate the point. There is a place for asking for references, but on a basic comment like this there is not.

Based on the other comments, it seems people are more upset about the perspective behind this idea rather than its truthfulness. I don't agree with the perspective that leaving the EU is a good thing but it is uncontrovertible that a significant portion of the population in the UK agrees with OP's statement.

There really is a long-term productivity problem in the USA though. Edward Luce wrote a good book on the subject a couple of years back, "Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent". He's a journalist at the FT. That and his "The Retreat of Western Liberalism" are very well researched and readable.

The book speaks to exactly these trends of decreasing productivity, loss of manufacturing and a decline in educational attainment of the US population as a whole.

The book is not anti-American but a warning by someone who is concerned about the decline of America and the social and geo-political implications that implies.

I recall reading that the biggest problem with Julia was that the language was not sufficiently well tested in an automated way. The result of which was that complex bugs kept creeping back in making the language less reliable in a production environment.

Is my memory faulty? If not, have these concerns been addressed?

Why would you complain about the author not answering a question that the article is not about?

I'd like to quibble with the term prediction in this context too. I think it's too strong to say that social scientists use historical data to make predictions. They would use historical data to make inferences about the likely causes of events and use that insight to inform policy going forward. That is not prediction but gaining insight into probable outcomes if certain things are done in certain contexts.

The closest one might come to prediction would be economic forecasting where one looks at various patterns in the data to make an, ahem, educated guesses about likely outcomes. This too is not exactly prediction because one is interested in the likelihood of a range of outcomes. Even those who do these things for a living admit that this is, at best, a guessing game. (As JK Galbraith once quipped, "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable")

I do find it interesting that when BlackBerry was known to allow foreign governments to house the servers for the Internet edition of their device it was considered a huge security breach and there was an outcry in the press. The circumstances were the same, it was necessary if the company wanted to sell devices in those markets. However, there's no significant outcry when Apple does the same thing.

Actually, the assumption that paying people will result in more blood is perhaps more problematic. The research seems to indicate that people actually like to donate. Although, work is ongoing.

http://freakonomics.com/2013/06/05/is-paying-for-blood-a-goo...

Quote:

    The position and guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO) and several national blood collection agencies for nearly 40 years have been based on the view that offering economic incentives to blood donors is detrimental to the quantity and safety of the blood supply. The guidelines suggest that blood should be obtained from unpaid volunteers only. 

    However, whether economic incentives positively or negatively affect blood donations (and other prosocial activities) has remained the subject of debate since the positions were established.

    Evidence consistent with the WHO position came originally from uncontrolled studies using nonrandom samples and, subsequently, from surveys and laboratory studies indicating that economic incentives can “crowd out” (decrease) intrinsic motivations to donate and can attract “worse” donors.

It's almost like the industry is not perfectly competitive...

Liberal does not mean "left-wing". It is a political philosophy mainly informed by the work of John Locke. It places primacy on rights of individuals to basically to do as they like to the extent that it does not infringe on the rights of others to do the same.

This is a difficult bit. There are many different ideas about conflicting rights. Without going into these ongoing debates it is enough to say that liberalism is a big tent philosophy. It encompasses "left wingers" in one end where the state has many responsibilities to uphold individual liberties. At the other end are libertarians who say there is no need for government intervention for individuals to pursue their own ends. People can argue about rights and still be correct in calling themselves liberals.

FYI - Judges aren't elected in Canada. Good point though. The real question is who continues this process now that it has clearly been exposed.

Depends what you study. If you're an economist you need access to data like compustat or other. If you're a political scientist in the US much of the data is available but you also need to spend a while cleaning it (although there are great resources now too.)

You're really talking about small scale interviews or qualitative work. That's an aspect of social science but it's not all of it.

Absolutely. Been there, done that. I worked for a guy who is top in his social science field. Total p-hacking was the norm. It was an eye-opening experience for someone new to the field expecting things to be done more honestly following something like the scientific method.

Once I found a major bug in some code that was the basis of a significant chunk of his major book and an important article. (Basically an optimization process that didn't work but gave some nice results he built a story around.) When I wrote him a report on what was wrong and why, he didn't respond. I was supposed to write a paper based on the same code and all he would say was along the lines of "it should work". Over time I realized that the implication was that I should "make" it work. Of course, he never said those words but over time the message was clear. After beating my head against a wall for a long time, I eventually walked away from the project. Technically bad for my career, but I honestly couldn't see the point in being at a top university essentially selling snake oil.

That being said, there are fields of social science that are much better: demography, political science, economics and even psychology (which is very difficult at the best of times!) are trying to clean up their act. Basically, any field of study with consistent data available openly is probably pretty decent.

There are other fields like business/management where the pay is generally good (i.e. motivation for a nice job with good perks is there), many of these journals don't require data to be released, and the samples being studied tend to be convenience samples or impossible to reproduce. I generally don't trust the work in this area.

Sadly, policy makers are often willing to take questionable academic studies that support their preconceived notions. When these things don't work out, the general public becomes jaded that their taxes were wasted... it makes all social science research look bad.

This is a great point. Having someone on your team who can act as a mentor to others is really, really important. Reading well-written code from their work/check-ins will help everyone improve over time.

I still think there are programmers more akin to artists who have a knack for solving complex problems elegantly. BUT there is a lot of craft in coding that can be learned. Even if you're not a greater programmer but you write clear, maintainable code you/someone else can improve it overt time.

Yes, monopolies do have the resources to invest in R&D. The problem is that they often lack the incentive because they have control of a market.

Government regulations that mandate some return (think telecommunications services for those in rural areas, pollution standards, etc.) can provide an incentive for monopolists/oligopolists to perform better according to some criteria. The problem is those mandates are not what we would always consider "innovative". By definition, they are often designed to incrementally improve on the status quo.

The game of politics has an important role. When there are oligopolies in many industries it is not unusual to see regulators getting jobs at the very companies they regulate. Think of the ties between the SEC and finance, CRTC in Canada and the communications sector, etc. Monopolists have a way of cementing their position in the economy and reducing the mandates that governments place on them.

This is a great point. Canada has a long history of developing branch plants to the US and selling mid-sized companies rather than growing them.

I mean, there are worse things. It took a long time before the country realized that inward flowing FDI was not a bad thing.

On the other hand, we live in complex times and Silicon Valley companies aren't making a great reputation for themselves as trustworthy partners.

Yes, it is. I have a contact that does consulting for one of the big accounting firms. SR&ED credits are their bread and butter. A large part of his job is to figure out how to get more companies to qualify as doing R&D.

Doing R&D to bake better bread? Check! Trying to make a better newsletter online? Check! (Not kidding!)

Look for your local SR&ED consultants and see if you can get a map of where they are located. Then tell me this program isn't a huge waste of money. There are a lot of people employed in the job of making companies look like they are innovative...

Don't even get me started on these tech hubs. Yes, they are important but they have a vested interest in getting companies through them. To date, there are very few statistics on dollar value invested and actual returns. i.e. there is no hard data supporting these hubs aside from anecdotal evidence. Lots of public money gets invested in them though.