kesselvon

The US had a whole host of laws that made pulling out cash from businesses very expensive, but investing in them very easy.

So you had a strong incentive to increase salaries, hire more workers, invest in more machinery, diversify, etc. simply because getting more cash out of a business wasn't worth it

This isn't really true, because up until relatively recently most university funding came from the state and not tuition. The decline in state support led to higher tuition costs; federal student loans turned it into a bonanza, but the steep price tags are more because tuition was never the main revenue driver for universities.

Vibe of the story is middle class retirees moving to Vietnam to have an upper middle class retirement; nobody on the median income line in the US can afford to have in-home staff to help them, or afford care outside of what Medicare offers.

Titles are important for pay reasons, as they correspond to pay bands. People that say titles don't matter are probably already making outsized compensation and don't find it important because their resume speaks for itself.

A manager and director can be doing the same job, but the title matters in terms of their compensation and potential title at their next job.

The point made is that boards bend to founders, and many founders control the boards anyways, so the board is a big rubber stamp rather than any kind of control mechanism.

I feel it has to be. Who is tipping their movers only $5?

Poor people don't buy lotteries because they're a good investment, they buy them because its fleeting hope that they'll escape their circumstances.

Probability is like...a Grade 5-6 concept.

This is pretty historically documented, and kind of something that still exists as a holdover in ex-Soviet countries. The lying became so pervasive that it was impossible to tell what the actual output of industry was

The idea that the Great Lakes are going to be tapped to solve water problems outside the watershed is fall flat when they realize those Great Lakes states aren't going to sell off access like that.

I remember some moonshot proposal to pipe the water to the Southwest, which is wild.

Consolidation is not a function of technology, but a function of unregulated capitalist economics.

There's way too many competitors, and it probably pushed margins way down. B2B competitors like Drift charged insane amounts for their chatbot.

Yeah, thats exactly what net income means. Its an accounting of the actual profits your company generates after all expenses. Its a standardized measure, which means you are able to compare apples to apples.

Both are oligopolistic market players that can command price, and then generate outsized profits from their large market share. Both have fat margins, that has nothing to do with how easy that margin is to take away. Average corporate profits (net income) run 10-15%, so any outsized margin beyond that is a good indication that the company is able to generate excess profits through whatever means.

Base inflation is never zero. In the article he mentions the 1.8% average inflation rate, plus 2% attributed to gov't stimulus, and 3% towards corporate profits. That adds up to a 6.8% inflation rate.

It's hard to blame this purely on ZIRP or QE because we've had both for the last ten years, all without any meaningful spike in inflation.

Visa has a net income of 50% its revenues. There's a loot of margin for the taking.

Best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, second best time is now. Summers is not the best guy for policy advice, as he's been very lax on the wall street crowd for a long time. This goes back to his time in the Clinton admin where they chose to not regulate OTC derivatives and passage for Gramm-Leach-Bliley.

I think what they're saying is fraud isn't murder. The median murder sentence in the US is like 15 years.

You don't even have to influence. DoJ is naturally going to take interest when a huge startup that has the Secretary of Defense on the board goes belly up.

a P/E ratio of 4.4 is nuts. The fact that we normalized that is wild. Same for committing 30% of net income to housing.

Enterprise businesses are a majority of the workforce and drive trends that are followed by small businesses.

Employer underhanded tactics are so common it's an SOP.

It's not a lot of money in San Francisco, where you're fighting with every tech company employee for housing

Flooding your public website form isn't a crime in the same way prank calling a customer service line isn't a crime.

Land isn't scarce, but economically viable and productive land is scarce. Economic viability is a moving target, but for the most part pretty steady.

There are a lot of places that offer an education budget of a few hundred dollars. This kind of thing would fit perfectly into that.

Yes. The vast majority of the population has no idea how excel works, or have ever had any kind of training in it. I've personally worked with people that would do the formulas by a hand calculator and type the results into the cell.

She makes her classes very accessible and the videos just make it easy to engage with; Excel courses usually don't try to do this.

It's not? Influenza is a virus, not a detox. Which is why it can kill you if you're not careful.

We're not even talking about semiconductors. All of the basic goods you'd need to supply an army, or the industrial capacity for consumer goods that could be shifted to wartime production no longer exists. It's a problem the DoD has been talking about for years, but little action has happened.

Hollowing out the industrial base leaves us even worse off.

The U.S. supply chains would be completely wrecked. We're probably close to a point where in the event of a global war with China, we wouldn't be able to mobilize industry in the same way we did during WW2 simply because the industrial output fo yesteryear no longer exists in the U.S.

It's realistic. Russia needs to sell natural gas to finance state activities, Europe needs natural gas to not freeze in the winter.

Russia can only play with natural gas diplomacy to Europe to a limited extent, because Europe is their main market and they don't move much into China (the PRC gets gas for cheaper out of the Stans, so not a great market for Russia). That's why Russia uses it pretty selectively against countries that are weaker (Poland, Ukraine, the Baltics). EU could counteract this by forcing a union-wide buying cartel, rather than letting countries negotiate working with Russia individually.

EU countries have been trying to get alternate routes up and running, but Russia has been pre-empting this with some maneuvering (any plausible route would go through Turkey, Syria, or Iraq)