maehwasu

Yeah, if you’re bragging about Nobel prizes in economics, you’re doing it wrong. They make the Peace Prize seem rigorous.

I think he means more that you can make it an operating expenditure and not a capital one, for accounting.

Of course, once you start selling the item and build a business around it, retailers are less likely to randomly yank you with no recourse or real feedback.

It’s almost like physical retail and software are different. Crazy!

I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and the claim simply isn't true. My family mail-ordered all the time, and it was nearly always delivered to the house.

I get that it feels neat and tidy to say that Amazon and Uber had the same growth model of skirting regulations, but the facts don't match that.

This doesn't mean that Amazon is good--I think that what the effect of what they've done to retail is awful. But using Uber as the key piece of a kind of Godwin's Law doesn't really help matters.

The government is elected by about a quarter of the populace, and even the winning quarter is often dissatisfied at the lack of control it exerts over its representatives.

Democratic representation is one of the leakiest abstractions ever devised.

You can, quite literally, find someone from a university in the social sciences who say anything that you want.

The practice of inserting quotes from random "experts" in news stories is one of the worst journalistic practices out there. It's fundamentally dishonest in very obvious ways, and forms the basis of many articles.

Pell grants force the spending to be allocated to universities.

Leaving aside how laughably wastefully the universities spend that money, disconnecting the borrower from the spender of funds is a massive anti-pattern.

Awareness of and discretion over spending is an extraordinary effective forcing function.

Most countries do the far more reasonable procedure of having you give up ties and get another residency, rather than fully renounce.

Getting a second passport is extremely costly in terms of time or money, and your “free to pay an administrative fee and renounce” comment indicates that you don’t understand this at all.

Source: went through the process of acquiring a second passport for the purpose of renouncing.

Airbnb + Uber = All Startups

You'd also often be forcing people to leave their communities and families, because the right job for them was somewhere else.

It feels weird to unthinkingly sacrifice valuable life preferences at the altar of Economic Efficiency Uber Alles.

Russia already exerts a lot of economic influence over Kazakhstan, so this example actually goes the other way.

There are MANY ways to derive benefit from a relationship between countries: it’s not binary annex/not-annexed.

Ethnic, linguistic, and cultural ties tend to have great staying power (see US-Britain, the unification of Germany and Italy, Balkan conflicts, and on and on). This is all even more true when the countries are close geographically.

Counting the power of Taiwan for China and Ukraine for Russia is likely more predictive of the future than not counting them. Lines on a map and citizenship papers are easier to redo than centuries (millenia for China/Taiwan) of culture/language.

This is NOT an endorsement of China taking over Taiwan, which I do NOT want and think would be a bad thing.

The parent comment made a relative statement (comparison of US to Europe). You responded with an absolute statement (US tax code is not progressive). That’s completely irrelevant to his/her point.

It's bits vs atoms. Anyone who has run a company of both types feels the difference instantly and intuitively.

“In his new book, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us, Paul Tough explores this divide, and interrogates whether going to college has become a privilege of wealth and whether it can still lift people out of economic insecurity.”

How the hell do you “interrogate” an abstract proposition? We may as well not even have words if we’re going to use them this thoughtlessly.

"Corporations oppressing workers", while being a very bad thing that I am very against, has almost nothing to do with feudalism, even by structural analogy.

As an example of something that would be apropos, Industrial Revolution working conditions and employer/employee dynamics would be far better analogies, although obviously imperfect themselves.

You're inadvertently making precisely my original point: "exploitation" and "bad thing" are incredibly general properties that exist in many systems, and it's not useful or insightful to compare them to feudalism.

So "feudalism" = "things I think are bad?"

The gig economy has many, many downsides, but those downsides don't share much at all in common with feudalism, even by analogy.

If we let all words deteriorate to mean simply "good" or "bad" (with gradations of good or badness), we're barely communicating.

Given what we see in non-human nature, the tendency of visitees to get rekt by visitors is much, much more likely due to the dynamics of competition for life than to some human-specific variable.

This doesn't seem correct. The author specifically says that Haskell is important because it is used in industry.

There's a lot to be said for a language that is a) important as an idea and b) gets used enough to test out those ideas in practice.

I'd agree with the author that Haskell occupies something of a sweet spot in that regard.

Even if there were not already ample evidence that phones do listen to us, the very publishing of this article would basically be a blaring confirmation.

This feels like it was dictated to the writer directly by a not-super-competent intern at an intelligence agency.

VCs who think they can then flip the whole mess onto the public markets.

This is why the author of the article wrote the article: it turns out that there’s a real and useful distinction that takes more than 30 words to suss out.

This is an insanely overconfident article, given that the field in question has dozens of confounding variables that likely can't be reduced to a pat conclusion+prescription.

I guess that makes it par for the course for Tabarrok. He reminds me of all my econ friends at unnamed Ivy League school who learned linear regressions freshman year and then started applying them to everything.

Yup. I find it's awesome to experience the rich emotional things, and then write the boring dry things so that you can recall the former easily.

Nothing will change wrt usage of Google products unless/until Google starts deplatforming users from Gmail-type services on the basis of their Google searches or email content.

This is not currently happening, but a) it wouldn't be super out-of-character for what Google has become b) it's likely a necessary condition for non-technical users to start caring about Google's threats to privacy.

I noticed that a lot of days/weeks/months started to blur together as I got older (and I’m not that old).

I started keeping a very factual journal each day.

Every hour or so, I write down where I was and what I did—subjective impressions are optional.

It’s been really helpful in jogging my memory and seeing where my mind was at a few months prior.

I just do it in a note program on my phone, so I can fill it in while walking, in the bathroom, etc.

This sounds like exactly what you'd expect from a company that is bleeding talent and morale.

Note: I do not have any information that that is what is happening in Google; I'm just saying what my guess would be if I were presented the situation as "these are the symptoms at Company X. What is the problem?"

Yes, because Russia = Bad, and so Bad for Russia = Good

/s

American provinciality is really bizarre and offputting.

Yup. It’s a metonym that’s getting at the idea of “bits, not atoms.”

Plenty of companies use extremely impressive tech to manipulate atoms, but, by convention, we call the ones that manipulate bits “tech companies.”