tway_GdBRwW

because we are not seeing a high level of hospitalization or deaths.

Michael, I disagree with your point but I recognize your integrity. You just posted your name and city, and your HN profile shares more personal information.

I respect that you are willing to stand behind your claim. Best of success with your current venture.

> nothing bad has happened

ummm, WTF?

10x increase in teen suicide doesn't qualify as "bad"?

or repeated DOJ lawsuits against Facebook because their advertising practices result in highly effective racial discrimination?

Oh, man, you had great parents. Hopefully in other aspects as well.

Used to work at a payments company. Yes, you need to be *very* explicit in how you model currency amounts and precision. See also earlier post about Canadian rounding rules. Some of the "logic" is regulatory/compliance driven.

ref child post about stocks trading for 0.0001. Yes, those are real trades and (probably) fully legal etc, but I'm not sure the Fed recognizes currency amounts less than 1 US cent ($0.01), so the accounting rules and tax rules might not match expectations based on generalized floating point math.

I guess that might depend on how much you trust Musk.

Yes, because tidyverse should be called tidycurse. It's designed to be easy to teach, under the assumption that ALL you learn is tidycurse. Just don't use it!

Use datatable instead.

US citizen and long-time expat calling bullshit on this. That's not the purpose of taxes and that's not how citizenship works in any other country except North Korea.

Looking at the list of "benefits" another person posted:

> The rights your passport gives you Are no different than the rights an EU passport gives you, except when entering the US-- but then again, an EU passport gives you better rights when entering the EU, so this is not an exclusive.

> + the legal and embassy protections given to American citizens. Like the American civilians held in Russia that Biden recently traded Russian spies for.

Note that the US doesn't have jurisdiction outside of US territory, so it cannot give legal protection and explicitly embassies do not give legal advice. Yes, there may sometimes be trades like above, but on the other hand, if the US prisoners were not US people, they probably would not have been jailed by the Russians in the first place.

> You still have access to vote absentee, Voting is a responsibility, not a benefit.

>as well as collect social security benefits.

Wrong-o! You only get social security benefits you have paid for. If you are living outside of the US, you are not contributing to soc. security.

> You can use US bank accounts and other institutions.

So can non-citizens. US bank accounts do not require citizenship. Nor does owning real estate. Nor forming companies.

You and your children have the right to return if you ever desire it.

I love this unique insight:

"Fire control computers ... solve ... fire control problems."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwf5mAlI7Ug

U.S. NAVY BASIC MECHANISMS OF FIRE CONTROL COMPUTERS MECHANICAL COMPUTER INSTRUCTIONAL FILM 27794

Clever! with the challenge being getting a 100K credit limit and assuming your student debt is < 100K.

> But why don’t market forces correct these issues?

Another theory: The value creation is not linked to the value capture. So market forces make a bad feedback loop.

Look, I'm totally pro business, but business is only "good" at allocating capital when value capture and creation are linked. Education isn't like that. The closest we have are the bootcamp schools, where they take a cut out of your first 2 year's salary if you find a job or nothing if you don't.

When capture/creation are not linked, you need a different social organization method. "Government" or "Religion/non-profit" come to mind. Perhaps others have additional suggestions.

> Universities will have to start focusing on ROI.

In Europe, they have a simpler system. Education is paid for from taxes. If a student does well, they pay for it via taxes. If they don't, then they aren't crippled by debt.

The problem with the ROI approach is it still places too much burden on the student, and, well, life happens. Say you major in comp sci (or some other high-paying field) but shortly after graduation something happens which prevents you from working in the field. Sucks to be you.

And likewise it sets up universities to, as you say, "cut courses with poor returns." Like for example "teaching", because school teacher pay is crap, so it has a poor ROI.

I don't see why it wouldn't be. Conscious thought is only the tip of the iceberg; even Western thought has a long tradition of noting that Eureka moments come during periods when you are not rationally engaging with the topic. See for example

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_(word)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_effect

Maybe it was a joint project?

I think the full acronym would be

Keep It Simple Stupid, Active Sanity Saver

Hmm, lots to dig into here.

The expectation that government provides certain services...

The nature of fiat currencies and what actually makes the USD worth anything or even usable as a medium of exchange...

Basic economics. Government spending == business revenue; the money doesn't just vanish.

Why do you assume that well being is the same as economic progress? Look, I like indoor plumbing as much as the next guy, but it isn't the only contributor to my well-being.

A great deal of the innovation I've seen or read about has been pushing costs onto the public or other thefts of the commons. I see how this is a necessary feature of innovation (by definition "innovation" implies a new social contract over how a resource is used). But it is not clear this is a universal good, and the new contract often enriches a few at the expense of the many.

Good regulation defends the commons/the rights of the many.

Good innovation creates a better standard of living for the many.

The team and/or org may have more impact than you think. I've seen people who were stars in one company totally bomb in another.

I have failed simple coding interviews because of stress. Been coding for 2 decades or more, know I'm good at it, and have had multiple other people confirm this. But sometimes under interview stress, I can lock up. Especially if something goes fubar like their on-line editor.

If I was at work, that wouldn't be a problem, take 3 minutes and come back to it. You don't have that in an interview.

I'm thinking of the observation from the speed climbing event at the Olympics. They had set up the course wrong, and one of the holds in one of the lanes was like 2cm out of position-- and it wasn't even a hold that was used by the climbers. But that was enough that people in that lane consistently lost.

As you point out, the problem is that the rate of change is crazy higher than what almost all multi-celled life is used to.

I'm on board with your view that we are a part of nature, not separate, but when I think of previous speed-ups in rate of change (i.e. sexual selection to allow more rapid gene reshuffling, or epigenetic modification which allows more flexibility from the same genes) these have been spread across multiple species.

The acceleration we are currently seeing is basically due to the industrial revolution, which is due to people finding an net energy positive fuel source and leveraging this.

Nature is a chaotic system, yes, but chaotic systems have balance and tend to have semi-regular orbits.

By so drastically changing the rate of change past what any other living thing can match, we are on course to push the system into a new regime. Which is unlikely to be as pleasant as the one we currently enjoy.

And in further support of what you are saying, when I'm in the flow state, either for programming or for workout or for other hobbies, I am not conscious. That's kind-of the definition of flow.

or people who describe an expert as someone who is unconsciously competent, they no longer have to think about what they are doing they just "know".

And as yallpendantools is saying, operating at that level of expertise is much much more than sheer muscle memory, though the muscle memory is critical. My typing skill certainly helps me find flow in my programming work, I don't have to think about how to type each letter, when I'm in flow the ideas "just appear" on the screen.

So rather than saying the competitors turn off their conscious brain, maybe it is better to say that they transcend it?

> starships to mars for colonization in mid to late stages

?? Did I miss a news article?? I know we've successfully landed on the moon, but we don't have reliable ways of commuting there let alone setting up a colony.

I even hear about astronauts stuck in orbit for months at a time.

mars is just a little bit further away and has similar atmosphere problems as the moon.

I agree that boycotting Amazon is not the answer, but government action might be. And government action only happens if the politicians think enough of their constituency thinks something is a problem.

You're making a lot of assumptions about the availability of other work. I'm glad you've been able move between jobs, but it isn't always easy or available.

You are probably also taking for granted a lot of the labor rights which were won over the last 100 years. For example, blacklisting used to be a thing, and it certainly did prevent job mobility, that was the whole point.

You are also right that you as a CONSUMER should not have to check every company's credentials before doing business with them. But you as a CITIZEN might want to have your government do this through things such as minimum wage laws and overtime laws.

You are correct that even if the US stock market flatlines for the next 20 years, there will be individual companies which do extremely well, and others which die.

That's not what this article is about. The article is about average corporate profits in the current-to-the-point-in-time largest US companies. And using the SP500 allows the analysis to be consistent even as the mix of the SP500 changes.

And no, changing the mix does not guarantee that the index increases in value over time. Plenty of periods of 10 years or more where the SP500 flatlined. Also, economies in other countries have extended periods where the index of their top companies flatlined.

Further, the explosive growth which you hope to find is generally not in the SP500 companies. The explosive growth is what puts a company INTO the SP500.

The exclusion of financial firms is standard in economics literature. The usual reason is that their financials are inverted. The money YOU hold in a bank is an asset to you, the money the BANK holds in the bank is a debt to you.

Passing peak globalization might contribute to declining corporate profits from say 2020 onward; not sure that 2020 is peak globalization, but it is in the ballpark.

Under standard assumptions of a capitalist economy, a new factor such as "technology" should not drive aggregate higher profits. Because companies don't exist in a vaccuum. Technology may allow a company to produce a good for lower cost, but it also allows that company's competitors to produce the similar good for a similarly lower cost.

So of course the article ignored it, it is a non-factor in aggregate corporate profits.

So "technology" can increase aggregate wealth of society (I'm a big fan of indoor plumbing) but it is not going to increase AGGREGATE corporate profits.

Also, it isn't clear how the specific technology you point towards, "automation", is structurally different from earlier technologies such as i.e. railroads or containerized shipping or telephones or ...

Look, obviously only aggregate corporate profits. Some companies made tremendous money off of the "railroad" technology, others went out of business because of it. Likewise, some companies made enormous profits off of computer chips, office software, etc, but the article is about aggregate profits, the economy as a whole, not individual companies.

Heinlien, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, 1966

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress

The moon colony uses this to win its freedom.

However, The Expanse is also a great book

I've heard even some programmers like 0-based indexing. Crazy!