zarro

"Machines are taking control of investing..... Funds run by computers that follow rules set by humans"

If the rules/algorithms are set and monitored by humans, the humans are the ones ultimately responsible. Computers are just tools which provide greater utility and control for investors than ever before.

That comes with its benefits and also with its potential downsides, but does not lessen from the fact humans are ultimate responsible.

Mass murder DUE to incompetence - trying to justify the output is like putting makeup on a pig. Its thinking like this that led to the US golden age to be referred to as "Gilded Age" because it was felt that incompetence was marginalized and considered as viable to instead marginalize competence.

Those Soviet Khrushchyovkas are the most depressing, abysmal buildings built in the history of mankind and I for one cannot wait until the day they demolish the last one of those despicable creations.

I think its more about "We wont be able to collect data en masse as efficiently anymore" than it is about "National Security or prevention of sex trafficking".

Its because it doesn't make sense to move out, the real estate markets stagnation makes taking out a huge loan almost feel like indentured servitude.

why? Because it feels like your always working to pay off the landlord or the bank just so you can have somewhere to sleep. Even if you own it outright, property and taxes are 10k/y, now your paying $1k/m just to have a place to sleep before you can even spend money and work for the things that you want. The worst of it, is as prices go up there should be a huge push to build more to balance the market, but than you have all these huge artificial barriers to entry to build preventing that from happening.

So it makes sense to try to live with parents, make enough money to buy your house outright so at least than you have a chance to get out from indentured servitude.

To be honest most of us are just hoping the real estate market collapses, or these barriers to entry are overcome so that prices can drop because we are not willing to pay these prices which amount to servitude. Our refusal for this type of "life" is what causes a decreased in birth rates and growth in general in the economy.

I do get that dealing with the main argument and providing a counter argument is hard, but I don't think you can actually win an argument by attacking the credibility of deliverer rather than the argument they propose.

The short term "necessities" for tariffs aside, I don't see why in the long run we shouldn't be working toward eliminating all tariffs to begin with.

The argument: -The US consumer buys $100B in Japanese products. -Japan consumers buys $50B in US products.

US cries: We spent $50B more on your products, you MUST buy ours or we will raise tariffs.

How is that fair? I provide you with a product you wanted, and now instead of being allowed the same courtesy I have to chose between accepting a product back I don't want, or being hurt on my ability to reach my customer base?

It just seems like a mechanism for less productive producers to cheat by using the government to show arbitrary favoritism instead of actually working on improving their product(s) to service ALL their customers better.

The problem with the teacher pay to me is obvious, market forces aren't allowed to play themselves out.

Think about it: A teacher should be paid according to their skill, supply, and demand. A great teachers time is highly valuable and there should never be a cap on how much they make or considerations on such an important task to hinder on concepts such as tenure.

If I hire a private teacher for my kids to teach them programming, I know that a great teacher has options to go work anywhere and I need to pay enough to afford a good one. I might get a couple friends kids to join to afford his time. Put together a few different subjects and all of the sudden you have a school.

So the question is why is this simple concept not being followed? The answer is lack of accountability, artificial barriers to entry, limitations on control to pick your instructors, standardized testing requirements, checkbox mentality, teachers unions, etc.

Steve Jobs was right, if were going to continue taking money from peoples paychecks to fund a dilapidated educational system, we are much better off giving the money we spend on a kids education directly to the parents (with the obligation to spend it only on education), and letting them select the course of education for their own kids themselves.

Notice the keen implication in the title that testosterone causes reduction in cognitive empathy - making the reader now brainstorm ways to prove the hypothesis instead of considering if its the correct question to be asking in the first place.

To illustrate my point, consider if this was the title: There is no evidence that being female reduces cognitive function.

I think you calling our current system "capitalist" is giving it more credit than its due.

Part of the problem is too much centralization of the control of $. This arrangement could be fine if people (and companies) where held accountable for their mistakes (No bailouts).

What I mean: Normally, you wouldn't trust all your money to one bank or financial adviser, because if they make bad bets you could lose your money. But because of the bailouts, it puts an hedge on your downside risk, so you feel more comfortable with outsourcing the responsibility to a small number of parties to manage your money, because if they fail, you in part (mostly them), will be bailed out.

This ignores the fact that there were individuals that were more responsible with their money that ended up being the losers in this arrangement and were extorted of their money.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't have bailouts, but what I am saying is that if we are forced to do it, we should do it to such an extent that it addresses the root cause and provides economic incentive to be more accountable for ones actions.

The problem of the countries in eastern Europe is primarily political corruption, rooted from the old soviet system and slowing dying off.

But, this is being resolved by: People moving to other countries resulting in a decrease in government tax revenue, giving less incentive to extort money through corruption and forces efficiency on government services (out of necessity), and in the end, it makes it a competitive market again.

People like my parents who left will never go back. But for people like me, if the conditions in those countries improve and become attractive again (and they seem to be improving), I have no problem with going back.

I don’t see how that has anything to do with forcing a private institution into serving customers it doesn’t want to.

The argument is: Imagine you and a friend have a private tutoring business. You should be able to have the freedom to pick whatever customers you want, your not a slave, your not obligated to provide a service for someone if you don't want to. Over time if there is demand for private tutoring that you and your friend aren't willing to meet, there will be others who will provide that service because there is profit in it.

I don't get why a private University can't decide who it wants or doesn't want to attend its school regardless of the metrics it chooses.

For instance, I don't think that matching a Universities demographics to the "national" or "global" demographics is likely to produce highest caliber candidates. What if Jewish and Asian candidates consistently outperform other candidates, why shouldn't a private school be allowed to accept more of the candidates it thinks "deserve" it more?

If people don't like the policies of institutions that do this, or think they are ineffective, over time other institutions will outcompete/outperform them.

I don't see how it is possible for someone to argue that discrimination based on race isn't racist and prejudiced.

I also think the presupposition that an increase in "diversity" is always "good" isn't necessarily always "true".

I agree that's the argument used, but you have to weigh that against the possibility that it also incentivises malicious actor(s) to subversive behavior because they will not be held accountable for their actions.

In the grand scheme of things it comes to a subjective decision point, and I would tend to argue that an increase in accountability toward the customers (us), wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.

They didn't get your next level satire of straw-manning a straw-man argument.

"There isn't a free market economist that wouldn't agree that the state has a role to play in ameliorating [negative third party externalities]"

Actually there are plenty of free market economists that would argue that negative externalities are the result of poorly defined property rights.

I always found it annoying how things get "declassified" only after anyone that could have provided context and good points of objection, in order to develop a better system of rules, is dead.

How can you expect to perfect a system by making the negative feedback loop ineffective.

No doubt today we have more tools at our disposal to distract ourselves but regardless reading is still the highest bandwidth method of transmitting and retaining information and its not going away until a better method is found.

The proposition I disagree with is the idea that people don't read as much or to the same extent as the "good ol days", which I think is false. There are a lot more people now, maybe the frequency as a percent of the total population is lower, but in aggregate numbers there are more people reading to a greater extent than ever before living right now and the demand for books/reading material has never been higher in the history of mankind.

Oh you think this is bad, just imagine all the guys at the NSA

Facebooks innocent mistake was the presupposition that its capable of defining truth.

You misunderstood the meaning of my post. Whats funny is the idea that you could somehow "create" money out of nothing by simply printing it, then attempt to balance its value by creating incentives for people to use. The part I think is funny, is that the people that have the prerogative to lend out the recently printed money, don't have to take the same risk as the people who have borrow it to create value. The "unfair" part is the part where money is printed, and given away for "free" to "investors" who don't "deserve" it, but make the argument that without them, the system will collapse because market valuations have been distorted for so long that only prolonged distortion can stabilize it.

Its not some nefarious scheme, its just the best way that has arisen to do things thus far. It wasn't "designed" or "planned" and in order to make the system more efficient, a new method of transactions needs to be established, and many groups are working hard to come up with a cryptocurrency to solve this problem.

Regarding interest and "usury" there is no difference, because there is no definition for "unreasonable" interest. I have an irresponsible friend, that I know if I give $100 to, there's a 1% chance that I will get my money back. So than why would I give him money at a rate that would be unprofitable for me when I can do other more useful things with it? Say I have another friend who I have good reason to believe will give me back my money 99% within our agreement. Obviously the second would get a better interest rate because there is less risk and he might be more useful with the money than I could be.

How do you calculate risk? Well let 10,000 other people with money offer him better terms (driving down the interest rate) if they think my judgement is wrong, and if it turns out to be the case they make money, if not they lose money.

Its not for you to say, ALL Investors you have to get involved with the business, for one, the person receiving the money might not want to give up control, nor the investor give it, because that might not be his area of expertise. Then again, maybe it is, and you have specific investors called VC's that do get involved.

Its actually ridiculous that people in the 21st century could consider the usury argument valid and actually praise Dogmatism. The greater concern is actually about creating and maintaining a competitive marketplace of creators and investors, then about the rates they charge -which is determined by simple supply and demand.

Try limiting the rates to your definition of "Fair", see what happens. Hint: Google "the cobra effect".

Brilliant reply, in this case if his kid isn't able to get in on merit alone, paying a premium for the "privilege" to be surrounded by a mix of wealthy and/or incredibly intelligent people is entirely reasonable.

They could price discriminate if they wanted to, the fact that they wouldn't (In ways they already do) I think illustrates that they intuitively understand that in the long run doing so wouldn't be a profit maximizing strategy.

What you can do is try to prevent legislation that puts arbitrary barriers to entry for competition. If privacy is as big a concern as we think it is, over the long term products which offer privacy built in will outperform in the market. Meaning Apple and google will build in privacy into its products or risk losing market share.

The only way that will be prevented is if a law(s) are passed which prohibit google from making changes that would make it harder for telecoms and government(s) to spy on you.

No doubt, but I think the point is to ask the right questions. Its not so much about preventing the inept institutions from maintaining their influence so much its about making sure that competing institutions don't have arbitrary barriers to entry that prevent them from competing in the market, even if initially, people are skeptical of them in comparison to "established" players.

I think the argument is funny:

We will continue to arbitrarily create money, and create incentives which force us into subpar investments in order to motivate people to take out loans they otherwise wouldn't have, in order to work to create products there wasn't otherwise enough demand for, and in the meantime the middleman will collect the fees for their "work" in managing these "investments".

Really kind of reminds me of Rick and Mortys microverse episode.

If rich people want to buy their way into university, why not? I think the argument is really:

1. Arbitrarily small class sizes - the degree is not so much about the education as it is about the prestige of being in small class size. But long term, who cares? There are obviously candidates that have equal or higher capability if the universities can limit the class size. Besides those that don't go have cheaper market rates and are more attractive investments since the universities strategy is pretty much increase the demand by lowering supply arbitrarily.

2. The idea that you buy merit that is undeserved. To be honest, I am not sure why this is a big deal. Its not in the universities long term best interest to give its clients undeserved merit, because the market decides their merit, and if they pump out people that don't have skills over time their "Prestige" doesn't amount to much, and their customers will go elsewhere. To be honest, I think this is already starting to be the case.

Really I think this argument boils down to distasteful envy and jealousy of the things rich people can "buy", which if you examine it carefully isn't the case anyway.

The sooner we can separate sports and education and allow the market play itself out, the better.