To start out free, google app engine is a good way to go. It is a little quirky and different from most solutions, but it's great to start paying nothing.
348 karma · joined February 9, 2009
>Sociology, Psychology, and women studies do matter, but the way they are currently taught is nothing but intellectual fraud.
At some places but not in general. If you had started reading when you were two you wouldn't be able to categorically make this statement. Chill out on proclamations about things that you couldn't possibly know.
I really hope you learn that saying things like this points out to people that you are willing to stereotype a huge number of people of whom you are completely ignorant. Also, there wasn't really an issue here. It was a human interest/science story about a scientist learning he is similar to the people that he has studied. Interesting story without an issue being focused on.
I'd love to read it, but the easiest way to answer your second question is to point you to 'A non random walk down wall street.'
One huge assumption that Black-Scholes makes is that returns are normal distributed. This is not done for empirical reasons rather mathematical ones, namely it is so convenient.
Edit: Pdf http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/conference/2007/liquidity...
Some meta data and such if you don't feel like going with a pdf:
I think your remark on finance professors is quite wrong. It takes quite a lot of dedication to do a Phd. I'm not great respecter of academic prestige, but its a bit insulting to imply that people fail their way into a professorship.
I'd be more than happy to share some pointers on financial papers I've read and such. Just talk about your background and what you know. If you think 'a random walk down Wall Street' is correct, it isn't. Have you seen the derivation of Black-Scholes? Do you know what most high frequency trading is based on?
I'd also be interested to see what type of stuff you like to read.
The median real income has been hardly been growing at a fast rate. You'd need it to get growing at an incredible 10% a year for your explanation to be at all credible.
This is very far from the truth. Worry not, rich people can spend to their hearts content in single payer countries. They still spend less and have better outcomes.
In the abstract maybe we do want to spend a lot of money for health care. However, medical costs have been growing at double digit rates. Hopefully that pattern does not continue for too much longer.
These things are complicated. Wealth can be generated in a variety to ways. The Phoenicians were quite wealthy for their time for establishing a trade network in the Mediterranean.
Apple produces virtually nothing (okay they make software but lets pretend for a minute that we are talking about the hardware. People do rave about the aesthetics of the devices). However, they have plenty of 'wealth' to capture than the manufacturers do for their charging price. They having marketing savvy and they are able to get large numbers of people excited about what they think of.
Facilitating transactions and applying knowledge are not exactly producing but doing these tasks can provide a decent living. If you want to extend 'producing' to mean anything that makes people money, your statement could be a truism but it seems you are using produce in a more traditional sense.
We spend more on health care in large part because we have way too much surgery going on. There's other stuff going on too, but there's a lot of waste to go with us 'valu[ing] it so much'.
Keynesians are capitalists and I've never heard of them being opposed to efficient trade.
One thing that inspires people to spend money is feeling that they won't be laid off. People do not have that feeling right now. Should we just wait for that to happen? Producing while people aren't buying leads to inventory gluts which leads to deflation.
>Milton Friedman played three roles in the intellectual life of the twentieth century. There was Friedman the economist’s economist, who wrote technical, more or less apolitical analyses of consumer behavior and inflation. There was Friedman the policy entrepreneur, who spent decades campaigning on behalf of the policy known as monetarism—finally seeing the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England adopt his doctrine at the end of the 1970s, only to abandon it as unworkable a few years later. Finally, there was Friedman the ideologue, the great popularizer of free-market doctrine.
I'd have to suggest that this statement came from the 3rd Friedman. There is sort of an irony here. Friedman saw monetary policy as a zero sum game. I think that was a fallacy.
This is a straw man. I cannot think of anyone (and I'd love to see you find a progressive or anyone) that would say that economics is a zero sum game.
A lot of this community did form around pg's essays. However, it's a little sickening to think that anyone would take them as gospel. Since the early days of reddit and hn these things have been vigorously debated. pg is at his best when talking about start ups and I think the way he conveys how founders should think is good stuff. However, please do not expect, or treat his writing, like he will win a nobel prize in economics.
>This is also why the Internet creates economic value, because it's able to more efficiently pair producers and consumers.
I would say that is one reason why but I whole heartily agree.
Classic. Moral claims don't get you too far. I could start going on about gentiles eating shellfish, but I'm one of those gentiles.
>They do by producing
Sometimes. These things are complicated. But if you've already got it figured out, no need to discuss it I guess.
Libertarians are here, sure. However, I'd love to see how many people would really march in lockstep with doctrinaire libertarianism.
I'm not ignorant of libertarian views. Nor, am I unused to tantrums such as your own. I'll leave the vocabulary boot camps to you and Richard Stallman. I have that freedom.
How are people to work more when there's not money to pay them?
In this economy we need more money being spent. When things are doing well again, you could try to make a case for the rich being richer, but it's a strange cause to take up.