yetanotherphd

>we bullied them in school with no come back and they are crap a lobbying as a group so lets go to town on techies.

This motivation is not sufficiently acknowledged on HN. I think people are afraid to face up to this fact. A lot of what feminists say about rape culture is true, and similar observations apply to nerds. Our culture trivializes physical and sexual (wedgies) assault on nerds. It is only natural that this same culture put on a front of false outrage when some nerds earn a good living.

The main point of the article: that all stock prices are artificial, and so there is no such thing as market manipulation, is wrong.

Stock prices reflect the expected future dividends of a stock given current information. If a person intentionally gives wrong or misleading information to the public, and this results in shift in the stock price, then this could be market manipulation.

The author is correct in stating that it is hard to distinguish a person giving their honest opinion about a stock they own, and market manipulation. However, that doesn't mean that the concept of market manipulation is ill-defined.

"Don't want to deal with breaking up with your emotional boyfriend?"

Quick someone submit a pull request to fix their gendered language.

Correlation studies are fine, but I do worry about national GDP as a confounding factor.

Maybe poorer countries have lower life expectancies, (or whatever PYLL measures is higher), and work longer hours.

I would like to see this graph broken down by quantiles of national GDP.

I have a PhD in economics, and I was initially convinced by these arguments, but the are actually misleading.

If I have inside information, and there is a market with 1000 people, and I make $100 by doing insider trading, that money must come from the pockets of those 1000 people. This follows from the fact that the stock market is (for these purposes) a zero sum game.

The error in your argument is that (1) is false. You say "you just call your broker and ask to buy at the market price". But if every market participant was like that, then the order books wouldn't match and the market would break down. There must be some participants who are price elastic. And these are precisely the people whose decisions are effected on the margin, that is, the people who you cause to buy/sell when you engage in insider trading.

So when I buy shares with inside information (say I know the price will rise), I cause the price to rise by a tiny amount, and induce some people to sell who wouldn't have. Since these people wouldn't otherwise have sold, they lose money from my actions.

It is true that insider trading provides information to the market place, and so it is beneficial in that sense. However, it also creates asymmetric information and so harms liquidity. While there is always asymmetric information (I own stocks through my 401k, but I have no idea what MSFT should be worth), insider information is an especially extreme kind, and therefore especially harmful to liquidity.

Your are exhibiting precisely the privileged attitude I referred to earlier. You believe that merely being a protestor entitles you to more rights than a mere squatter. In fact, both have equal rights under the law. Both a squatter and a protestor have a right to carry a sign or chant slogans. Neither have a right to camp in a park.

You are the one being disingenuous. An ordinary person would be kicked out of the park before a single night had elapsed. The fact that the police eventually to some action doesn't mean they didn't also turn a blind eye for a long time.

People are good at different things.

Some people are good at creating and utilizing social networks.

Other people are good at finding high paying jobs.

How is that relevant?

My point is that the police turning a blind eye to the occupy protests using public space in an illegal way, and effectively claiming that land for themselves, is evidence of the privilege of these protestors. If the poster had pitched his tent in other circumstances, the police would have made him take it down.

>would have deserved what you get

What do you imagine this would have been? What would a "fair" reaction of the protestors have been?

The poster wasn't 'using' the protests, they were using a public park. It is hypocrisy of this movement to take over a public space and claim it for their own exclusive use, while not acknowledging that the fact that the police let them get away with this is a sign of their own privilege.

good for you! I always found it unfair that left wing protestors are allowed to do illegal things, like camp in parks. They complain about privilege, while they themselves are afforded privileges that ordinary people (like you) don't have.

The theoretical and empirical relationship between changes in the money base (M0) and inflation are well established, and based on very simple intuition: changing the amount of hard money by a factor of 3, results in a change in the value of money by a factor of 1/3. I can't educate you on macroeconomics in this thread, please refer to any macro textbook.

I chose M0 because you are talking about creating hard money, which is what M0 measures. When you create 7.5 Trillion in hard money, you increase M0 by 200%. My very rough estimate is that this will create 200% inflation, because M0 is the base through which all other kinds of currency derive their value (hence the name "monetary base").

Reserve banking doesn't cause inflation in itself as long as the reserve ratio is fixed, because a given percentage increase in M0 will result in a similar percentage increase in bank reserves (M1). So it is really down to M0, which is also the quantity that the reserve bank manipulates through its open market operations in order to execute monetary policy.

>I'll also point out that M2, not M0, is traditionally what is used to forecast inflation.

That is not relevant. Forecasting inflation under the current policy regime is a completely different matter from forecasting the inflation that your proposal would cause.

that sounds terrible. Why not just use taxes?

Since M0 is about 3.7 trillion, printing 7.5 trillion in cash would cause inflation of about 200% per year.

This would have obviously bad effects, causing people to great lengths to avoid holding cash. I think income or sales tax is the only way to distribute large amounts of money from the rich to the poor.

I don't get the philosophy behind the "dignity of work". People primarily work in order to get paid, money they then spend on themselves or their families. Work is no more altruistic than going to clubs and having casual sex.

Society functions not because people feel compelled to work out of principal, but because if no one worked, the price of labor would go up until people were enticed to do it.

And it's also very strange that eroding the labor supply is painted as a "loss of jobs", when lowering the labor supply means more and better jobs for those who do want them.

Finally, the idea that making poor people better off is bad because they might work less, is ridiculous. What is society striving for in the first place, if not the benefit of its members? Sure, the disincentive to work creates real deadweight economic loss. But this loss has to be weighed against the gain to the people receiving the handouts. It seems pretty clear that the wrong balance between work incentive and reducing inequality was struck in the US, and Obamacare is helping to fix this.

Perhaps, but in most cases the person simply cannot follow your reasoning. That might not be your fault. The interviewer might not be as smart as you, or might not have a very theoretical background. I've never heard of the Boyer-Moore string algorithm, so when presented with it for the first time I might not understand it.

So stupid.

What has the salary of the president got to do with the salary of the cleaners? It is only coincidence that the cleaners are employees on the books. What about the people who make the textbooks they read, or the iPhones they use?

Inequality is important, but it is a society-wide issue. Reducing inequality within a company is a meaningless goal.

There is already a very effective way of reducing inequality, which has the advantage of being completely even handed. It's called income tax.

Controlling costs is also good in itself, but that is a separate issue. Running an entire university is a position of great importance, and the salaries mentioned seem in line with this level of responsibility. (Not that people deserve more money because they have more responsibility. The point is that these position require the best people, who will demand higher salaries).

You could also raise that much money by raising income taxes.

There are good reasons to legalize pot, but the ability to raise tax revenue isn't one of them.

Working in a big company is inherently "high stress". Dealing with an interviewer isn't scarier than dealing with someone way higher than you in the reporting chain.

You can tell some of these things from an interview. For example, when I interview, I never pretend to agree with something the interviewer says. If the interviewer doesn't agree that my algorithm is O(N), I will keep arguing that it is, unless we decide to move on. I can be quite convincing, so I have even convinced interviewers of things that are wrong during interviews.

This approach demonstrates an ability to collaborate. If a person can't debate a straightforward problem without either backing down immediately, or getting angry or defensive, how will they be able to deal with protracted disputes about the design of complex projects?

IQ is a dirty word now. But even apart from it's "racist" connotations, it is still bad PR to use that term. Compare "I got to where I am because I am really smart" with "I got to where I am because I was able to develop good learning skills".

The stats at http://transferweb.com/stats/transfer-acceptance-rates suggest that top schools accept very few transfer students, and so I don't think it is an important part of the issue.

Tuition isn't really the issue. Most top schools have needs-blind admissions, so conditional on getting in, you will get funding if you need it.

Inequality stems from the fact that by the time they reach college admissions, students from richer families are already more qualified (at least in the eyes of admissions committees). Addressing this would require either changing the admissions process, or helping students from poorer families to become better qualified prior to the admissions process.

Just because money benefits the rich disproportionately, it does not mean this money is not well spent. This is because the students at fancy colleges are not only richer, but also smarter, more ambitious, and harder working, on average. Furthermore, donations don't only benefit students, but researchers working at those universities.

So while giving to fancy colleges is not necessarily the best use of money, it is not enough to show that the students there are privileged. If the students at those colleges were only there because of their privilege, then the author's point would make more sense.

Those answers are all reasonable, except for the use of "specific specification" and attributing taste differences to differences in the raw agricultural ingredients, rather than the incompleteness of the product specification.

You don't seem to notice the irony of calling his comparison to the holocaust idiotic, while the parent comment was threatening the rich with guillotines.

Just more leftist protection scams. Stay safe fellow nerds.

Not only that, but the idea that the truth is too subtle and complex for the masses, so it is better to feed them ideas known to be false by the leaders.

I always hear "educated" liberals say how crime is caused by poverty, and that race isn't a factor after poverty is accounted for. I have read plenty of academic topics on the paper, and liberal academics are very happy to acknowledge that poverty cannot account for the race difference in crime rates.

But these academics have proven their loyalty to the true faith, so they can say these things within their own circles. Ordinary people who try to make this same claim will be socially punished.

This is great, but we can take this a lot further. Submit pull requests to fix gender-binary assumptions in open source software.

If an engineer refuses to accept your PR, they are an insensitive asshole, and deserve the public criticism and dismissal from their job that will inevitably follow.