mos1

That's pretty clearly malicious, and it most definitely breaks the "would you say this at a dinner party if you wanted to be invited back?" rule.

That said, american style bank accounts are obscenely silly legacy products. I keep hoping the US will boldly jump into the 1990s and implement a saner system.

The problem is that with the USAA app, I've had two instances where something was wrong with the picture and I was directed to deposit via mail instead.

Please don't use the terms interchangeably.

In areas that don't have bottled water from a brand I recognize, I drink nothing but fermented beverages (I've brushed my teeth with beer).

I'd use brand-name ice cubes, if they were packaged in a known, trustworthy manner.

I don't know if I happened to stumble upon an actual ebay item that was somehow using female full frontal nudity, or what... but between that and pedobear, I ain't goin' back.

Besides, I've seen this exact mashup before in a number of forms (hooking to ebay, googlemaps, and sometimes to other third party retail APIs) so I'm not sure what the point is. It's an undifferentiated product entering an existing market... and frankly, it seems less useful than the standard ebay API, where I can switch to distance specific search if there are too many results overall.

Meh.

I've listened to the full 911 tape recording, and none of it adds up... he doesn't sound scared, he doesn't try to put it into neutral, he doesn't try to turn it off (he claims he was afraid the car might flip), but he does claim he tried to pry up the gas pedal (which is an essentially impossible physical move, to do with your hand while driving).

Not to mention that he has a ridiculously shady past (bankruptcy, $700k of debt, runs an adult website, entire kitchen of his house was stolen during foreclosure, former business partner accuses him of theft)

Honestly... if you're going to cite him as an example of anything, he seems like proof that a lot of these incidents are pretty obviously frauds.

I picked up the utility concept from my financial background.

On this point I disagree. I think that much of the value of college comes from things that don't really seem valuable at the time: sports, clubs, experiences with friends, or even study groups. As such, I'd really recommend limiting the programming a bit, and forcing himself to engage with other students first, and program second.

And as a corollary to that, I'd recommend trying to find ways to get to know students who aren't other people with identical interests and socioeconomic backgrounds. The more one stays in one's bubble, the less one is going to get out of school.

"I am insufficiently motivated to do clearly beneficial things when they require non-trivial amounts of actual work.

This is huge. Absolutely huge.

I have very little interest in hiring somebody who thought, at age 18, that he knew everything college could teach him; nor one who could not spare the time to give himself such a clear advantage.

It in no way suggests this.

As for more specific discussion, I'm not motivated to spend weeks putting together semi-legitimate models of various stimulus efforts, and doing less than that would be pointless. That said, when you talking about crowding out effects and such, you should be aware that economists are aware of these effects, and they are part of the math that sits behind a stimulus model.

The only thing I'll address in passing about the roosevelt recession is that it emphatically did not occur during a period of government stimulus, rather it came at a time when the government was adopting austerity measures and increasing taxes, which is pretty much the opposite of the situation today.

That said, I stand by my original point that proper analysis is complex, and that there really isn't any substitute for it. Anything less is just noise... so let's leave it to the technocrats.

Only if you ask the question as poorly as you did. Taking two arbitrary values out of a complex multi-variate equation, and dividing them generates nothing but noise.

If you're legitimately interested in quantitative public policy analysis, there are excellent graduate and doctoral programs that deal both in general policy analysis, as well as more specialized studies dealing specifically with labor and unemployment.

If that sounds ridiculous to you, perhaps it'd be wise to recognize that the analysis is highly skilled technical work, and if you haven't devoted considerable energy towards gaining those abilities, you're just a noisemaker. You might as well be a donut-baker who holds strong opinions about graph theory despite having never programmed nor studied CS.

* My claim is still that if comparable amounts of money were put in my own pocket,*

Even if your claim is true, governmental solutions need not only to be good, they need to be replicable and scalable.

If step one is "identify a million individual families who are able to use money more efficiently than established market-proven businesses", then it's going to take a very, very long time to reach step two.

Joe works at WidgetCo and makes $60,000/yr. His loaded costs are a little over $100,00/yr.

WidgetCo pays this because his skills are worth about $125,000/yr to them, so it's a great deal.

At this point, if you are a well-meaning, but rational cherub, what is the highest rational price to pay to get Joe working again? I'm guessing anything up to $125,000.

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But that's not the end of our grossly simplified model. We also have the fact that Joe spends his paycheck on niggles. He fucking loves the shit out of niggles. As he consumes $60,000/yr of niggles, he personally pays for 1/2 of an employee at the niggle factory (and that guy spends his money on something too...)

So now we have to recognize that if Joe loses his job, there's going to be a negative ripple effect, and if Joe gets a job, there's a positive ripple effect.

So now, as a well-meaning, but rational cherub, what's my highest rational price? Well.. at this point I'd probably call in an economist to help me figure it out, but it's clearly more than $125,000/yr... it's likely close to $200,000/yr.

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And now somebody hands me a "stimulus" proposal, and it turns out that I could create a job for Joe for about $150,000/yr. So let's see... $200,000/yr of value for $150,000/yr... sounds like a great investment to me! Very good value for money, even if it does lead to an annoying headline indicating "$60,000/yr jobs cost silly cherub $150,000!"

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Obviously this is grossly glossed over (I didn't even mention the obvious fact that if people are buying widgets, they must provide value), and actual models of costs and benefits of various scenarios are quite complex, but I simply meant to demonstrate that simply dividing the total cost of a package by the number of jobs is silly, and misses the point widely.

I knew he was off the rails as soon as he indicated that my claims were based on an assumption of duration of employment. That statement only makes sense if you use the same model that the parent used, in which the only value captured is the worker's salary.

I do not, because that is a fool's calculation.

The value created is not one year's salary, it's the difference in the present value of an individual without a job and the present value of an individual with a job, including all estimable secondary effects (both positive and negative.) If you simply divide it and compare it to a year's salary, you'll sit there and go 'HURRR THAT IS DUMB', but in reality, you're proving only that you don't really understand policy analysis.

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I'm reminded of a situation that occurred many years ago in my career, when I was still working in a corporate setting. My team hit a seemingly intractable combinatorial explosion problem while trying to create a tool for the sales force. It was incredibly difficult, and quickly blew through the allocated budget (which we'd told them right from the gate, was inadequate).

The management just assumed we were lying... that we weren't up to this task, or we were just lobbying for more money and man-power for our group (I was trying to make a very specific high-end hire to help, and I had already purchased some serious iron). In fact, they were so convinced that this couldn't be this difficult to accurately analyze that they started shopping consultancies, and most agreed with us, that this would be difficult and expensive... but one did not. One said "yes, we can build it, no problem."

A year later, the consultancy had burned through a pile of money, and had nothing to show for it.

Only then did management recognize that maybe this seemingly simple configuration problem was not, in fact, as simple as they imagined. And perhaps we weren't just lying or waving our hands when we said "this shit is not as simple as you think it is." (and even then, they didn't admit it outright. I had an all-day meeting which consisted solely of them asking me stupid question after stupid question, as to why various simple approaches wouldn't work... and me having to draw out specific examples on a whiteboard, indicating the business and technical problems with these simple approaches.)

It's sad, but common, for people to assume that other people's jobs are easier than they really are. Even very smart people fall into that trap... but generally speaking if intelligent, hard-working people are advocating something that seems stupid to you, it's probably because you don't understand the problem or the solution.

Because it really sounds like you're gearing up to find a reason to dismiss his message if it doesn't mesh with your preconceived ideas.

Frankly, I'd prefer if our comments stood on their own merits (or lack thereof), but perhaps you've hit upon the next social media craze. Instead of simply using karma scores, we could multiply one's karma by the amount of currency tracked in their covestor account.