mos1

This is often because he has to grossly simplify what his actual research has said in order for it to be consumable by a mass audience.

The papers may spell out certain prerequisites and gotchas quite explicitly, but in a TV interview, that turns into a vague-sounding "it depends".

1 - Why do they keep interviewing him about the future but never talk about how accurate he was in the past.

I've often wished that people who made predictions for a living were forced to assign probabilities to their statements, and give some clear definition, so we could keep score.

That said, two points:

1) doing so is not just immoral, it's against Scribd's TOS.

2) your claim that re-hosting content without permission is indistinguishable from transport makes clear that your beliefs are so different than mine that I cannot possibly find a way to communicate with you.

That said, it's irrelevant because they don't crawl for content. The HN admins are way out of line with their practices on this one. They're making illegal copies to help their friends at Scribd, and doing so without the requisite consent.

One is simply using a service, the other involves rehosting content without the request or permission of the author or content owner.

It kind of makes sense if you think about it, since achievement typically has a log-normal distribution with a long right-hand tail, which implies that it's based on multiple normally distributed underlying factors.

Take away any one of the factors, and you rapidly approach more "normal" levels of achievement.

If you have an MBA from HBS and an MS from MIT, there will be a lot of doors open to you that simply won't be available without those sorts of connections. This is not to say that they are requirements for achievement. They simply improve your odds of getting "lucky" at some future point in time.

That said, I shouldn't downplay the importance of the education aspect. The number of case studies I read and thought about during grad school did wonders for sharpening the way I think about my own business.

That bit of snark ignores the reality that a developer has resource constraints, and they constantly have to decide how best to deploy their time, money and energy.

Failing to address some platforms might well be a big win. Claiming it's a definite loss is absurd.

As an example, I am a CFA Charterholder, and off the top of my head, I cannot give you advice for the following reasons:

1) I'm not familiar with your investment experience.

2) Your return objectives are unclear. Do you really just want a 4-5% return (and perhaps a 1-2% draw?) or are you looking to withdraw 4-5%?

3) Your risk tolerance and your understanding of various risks is unclear.

4) I have no understanding of any other financial goals you may have, such as intent to protect wealth in case of divorce, or intent to transfer wealth to children, etc.

5) I have no understanding of what your full financial situation is, and what your current portfolio looks like. Is this $5m all you have, or do you already have a variety of assets?

6) I have no understanding of what level of liquidity is required of your investments.

7) I do not know if you have any specific objectives, mandates or constraints. These could range from a desire to move to a particular country, to engage in a particular business, or to weight a particular sector more heavily when possible.

8) I do not have the ability to accurately and clearly communicate investment information via an internet forum comment. Doing so requires presenting you with the information in a manner that is clear, easy to understand, and where you have the opportunity to ask questions and allow both of us to be sure that you understand what is being said as well as what is not being said.

9) Any over-simplified recommendation I made for you would fail a test for diligence and adequate basis.

To be frank, I can see NUMEROUS problems with much of the advice given here (in particular, a lot of people are advocating strategies that carry serious risk, but are NOT disclosing that risk, nor accurately explaining how to hedge against it. there is also a lot of misrepresentation about the performance of various investment vehicles on this page), but I cannot be more specific without breaking my professional code of ethics.

I hope you take my warning seriously, that the advice in this forum comes, almost necessarily, from people who are not qualified or experienced with these matters. I do not want your business, and I am not soliciting it. I just don't want you ending up in a bad situation because you mistook a well-composed and well-intentioned internet comment for advice that is right for you.

I've seen way too many people lose way too much money because they didn't fully understand the ramifications of an idea.

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edit: I want to give you some advice, so let it be this: educate yourself. Treat it as a serious, full-time job. Don't think that reading a few books (or a few blogs) aimed at a lay audience is adequate. You might consider taking the CFA examinations, just so you can competently audit any advisors or managers that you hire to assist you.

You are in a situation that can make not only your life better, but to also improve the lives of your loved ones. Real education will help you determine if your advisors are doing what's best for you, and long-term, will make it easier to confident that you have outsourced the handling of your investments wisely... or if you decide to do it yourself, that you are doing so with a reasonable understanding of investment.

Please be careful.

I vomited a little in my mouth though, as I despise invented marketspeak words.

Also, I'm not on a particularly fast connection at the moment, but your graphical widget (I assume it was flash) took a few seconds to show up for me. I had probably 2-3 seconds where I was being told to Prauxmote myself, by PC... and that was it.

I definitely would've hit the back button in any other circumstance.

I doubt anybody would claim my entertainment budget is "austere", but it is substantially reduced from what it was when we lived in a smaller place. We almost completely stopped ordering out on weekdays, and we eat out about half as much as we used to on weekends.

We went from buying everything, to buying only things we don't know how to cook, or that are a pain to cook.

A fancy kitchen might correlate to fewer restaurant meals and less prepared food purchases.

A media room might correlate to less money spent on theater or movie tickets.

Sure, there needs to be a budget, but your post denies that household spending can be reallocated from one column to another.

This isn't a cut and dry argument either. That said, it's the reason that some unemployment compensation packages include or are dependent on job placement services and/or retraining efforts.

If you simply provide people with moderate passive income, the likelihood that they'll use it to update their skill set and change the direction of their career depends on a whole host of variables (satisfaction at previous jobs, age, industry, amount and type of education, union membership, other cultural factors.)

As such, I'd agree that for some people, income without retraining or mandatory placement services has a deleterious effect, but this is in no way a universal phenomena.

The detroit auto worker is pretty much the poster child for the problem you cite. This is because they tend to be on the wrong side of every variable I mentioned (low satisfaction, high age, salaried employment, a contract industry, relatively low formal education, higher vocational education, union members, and likely to be part of a generation that feels they are "owed" jobs.)

That said, their existence doesn't demonstrate that the programs are an overall drain, because they aren't representative of the average unemployed worker. They're skewed negatively in every dimension that matters.

Their existence does, however, reinforce the value of retraining services and mandatory placement efforts as part of a maximally effective unemployment compensation program.

It exacerbates the business cycle for very obvious reasons, and it also slows economic growth as it results in more conservative investment, and lower spending on the parts of both businesses and consumers alike.

The real world numbers seem to bear out that unemployment compensation of some sort is a good thing.

The real world numbers also seem to bear out that if an undue portion of that compensation must come from the former employer specifically, that it creates some unfortunate disincentives towards hiring in the first place, which reduce (or in extreme cases eliminate) the benefits.

In short, Patio1 is right in thinking that the French system has some drawbacks... but his claim that the French system is some sort of inevitable end result of worker rights is utter and complete rubbish. The problem is nothing to do with workers rights, and everything to do with the specific implementation.

When I've done tiered pricing, that was my logic.

It's clear that if the sunnis and the shiites can't share power politically, that the levels of violence are likely to escalate. If they can, they'll likely stay level or trend downward.

That said, if you're seriously considering it, I'd read some of the numerous accounts from journalists and other non-combat professionals who have spent time over there.

If after recognizing the possibility of changes in the security situation, the dangers associated with working in Iraq (both physical and mental) you still want to go.... go ahead.

But personally, I wouldn't even consider it. Making money isn't really that hard, and there are countless interesting experiences I can have that don't involve substantial risk of trauma.

That said, everybody's money threshold is different, and it's a lot easier to say no to $200k as somebody who already lives comfortably and has a family to take care of, than it would be to say it as somebody who isn't yet financially comfortable, and whose passing would affect only parents, not wives/children.

Sad that the courts appear to not be going his way. That said, I'd love to see what the planning commissions specific complaints are, to see if we're dealing with some sort of legitimate concern, or if it's just general abuse of power.

Sure, it doesn't have a box... but it has a lot of rights granted to it, and it has some cachet.

Because the fact that your skill set has grown doesn't mean that your employer's needs have grown identically.

As a very public counter example, Fred Wilson has stated that his lifetime failure rate is 20%. To get it that low, he most definitely had to pass a lot of profitable but high volatility opportunities.

Highway 12 Ventures has 20 companies listed in it's portfolio, and 5 of them are already successful exits. Their portfolio is not large enough to allow for very low success rates, and their past experience seems to re-confirm that they do not generally invest in super-high-risk activities.

Further, VCs are not interchangeable. They have different areas of expertise. This will lead to them investing in markets they understand, and often passing on opportunities in markets where they're less familiar, even if everything seems perfectly reasonable.

Accusing them of being dishonest for noting that they routinely pass on good investments is absurd. I'm certain that they do so on a very regular basis.

If you are presented with 500 investment opportunities a year, and only have enough capital to fund 5 of them, you are going to pass on a lot of +PV opportunities.

Maybe they appear positive to you, but don't cross your hurdle rate. Maybe they're overly correlated with other existing investments, so despite being positive, they're not ideal for your portfolio. Maybe you want to avoid certain risks because you already have that risk in your portfolio. Maybe you're running a double or triple bottom line company, and it works financially, but is inferior to another investment in another way. Maybe it has more vol than you can fade. Maybe it's fantastic, but you have another investment that's really fantastic.

There are almost countless reasons that a company could be great and a worthy investment, without being right for a particular investor at that moment.

Posted from Chrome on Mac.

Simply put, the economic effects of modest increases in the minimum wage floor are sufficiently complex that it is difficult to conclusively prove that there is a negative aggregate effect on unemployment.

Further, a useful analysis of the matter would also consider effects on labor force participation, distribution of wages, the poverty rate, entitlement expenses, the cost of living, incentives to attain education, incentives to work, consumer expenditures, prices, etc, in addition to unemployment.

Minimum wage laws cannot be usefully discussed by saying "increasing the minimum wage increase unemployment, it's that simple." Because it's not that simple. And even if that one variable did change that simply, it still would not be a useful policy analysis.

That said, I no longer get paid for presenting or analyzing policy, and your personal opinions have no effect on me, so I'm going to go spend my time doing something more useful and profitable.

Not terribly impressive, but $150 worth of my own work wouldn't have been able to drop the power usage to those levels.

In a single afternoon, I was able to hook some one-wire sensors into the loops, attach them to a widget that made the sensor data available via IP, write a daemon that monitors the temperature, and then automatically notifies the IP-enabled thermostat to flip over to secondary heat if the loops go below effective temperatures, and to flip back when they recover.

The next day, I made it so the loop temperatures were recorded and graphed, and that I receive an SMS alert if there's a complete HVAC failure (loops too cold + secondary heat failure).

That was some awesome tinkering.

None of that demonstrates that reasonable minimum wage laws, in the aggregate, cost jobs.

Econ 100 -- Keeping all other variables the same, if the cost of wages goes up, demand for workers goes down.

Econ 600 -- When wages go up, the other variables do not remain the same, so a useful comparison must analyze the second-order effects to determine the change in aggregate demand for workers.