Variance

7 ms·

31.
by Variance 14y ago
I definitely agree. While it may be entirely true that the Flynn effect can be explained without any difference in what is being defined here as intelligence, I don't want anyone to write with the preconceived conclusion that there must no
32.
by Variance 14y ago
This is a good point, but a contrasting point is that people who are hungry today aren't going to wait until tomorrow to get a job. It is incredibly valuable to be able to cut the benefits, so any cuts that can be made should be taken. Revo
33.
by Variance 14y ago
Definitely. It's understandable why people dislike these sterile scientific considerations of very real and human problems, but they're incredibly useful. Though romantic notions of things transcending dollar valuation are well-intentioned,
34.
by Variance 14y ago
If I may pitch in: since you're trying so hard to throw around opportunity cost, there are, believe it or not, a couple other important points to consider here. The first is that all valuable things can be measured in terms of other valuabl
35.
by Variance 14y ago
It's an excellent question to bring up, though. You note that a civilized society gives people food if they absolutely need it. Do we then want to be a civilized society? The core assumption is that it is morally correct to distribute value
36.
by Variance 14y ago
Regardless of whether you want to make the market as free as possible, or whether you want as many people to be as well-fed as possible, the long-run solution is the same for both [1]. The more the market is allowed to work, the better off
37.
by Variance 14y ago
This is a very important topic, so to answer many of these points from the canon of modern economics: 1. Price floors are net harms to economies. Overall growth and employment is reduced at the expense of artificially bolstering the farming
38.
by Variance 14y ago
Since math is just the formalization used to describe quantitative patterns observed, you're already seeing math as purely as it will ever get. Really, it's the other way around--since math is an abstraction of observation, what you observe
39.
by Variance 14y ago
Indeed, crashes happen are nothing new, and HFT algos going wrong are only one of the billions of ways that it can happen. That's what you get when the market has ways of deciding prices--through people, machines, or contracts. It's possibl
40.
by Variance 14y ago
See the excellent comments on this at [1] and [2]. The stuff that HFT currently does can't really cause anything too disingenuous. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4395986 [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4395834
41.
by Variance 14y ago
This is an excellent graphic, but the author has a strong stance against HFT (such as the pages he links to about high frequency quoting) that readers should moderate with an understanding of what HFT does in an ideal economic context--the
42.
by Variance 14y ago
And may I also add that history is just history, and things aren't automatically good or bad because we did them in the past. The country is pretty tolerant towards Wiccans given the historical context of the Salem Witch Trials, but that ha
43.
by Variance 14y ago
Romney's plan will result in far lower tax revenues, not accounting for indirect effects. It looks like the issue you're citing is a result of a lower dependent deduction allowance of some sort, and it generally means marginally higher taxe
44.
by Variance 14y ago
I agree. This isn't a [citation needed] moment, anyway, because it's mostly our subjective opinions on the structure. While the core symbolic system is effective in many ways, I hardly imagine it's ideal. It evolved over the years out of th
45.
by Variance 14y ago
That's not true, because the idea that Knight's mispurchases were zero-sum isn't correct either. All business enterprises, including stock trading, only operate when their returns can exceed the discount rate of the market [1]. This means t
46.
by Variance 14y ago
In a perfectly efficient market, YC's marginal benefit to the economy would be described by its profits, specifically cash flows to investors. If YC was publicly held, that would then translate into the share price. If YC were a monopoly an
47.
by Variance 14y ago
Excellent sources, thank you for finding and abstracting those.
48.
by Variance 14y ago
And, never, never, never, never, NEVER do a stock swap for a payout. In the finance world, holding $580 million in equity in a single position--a single company --is called flushing that cash down the toilet. The objective of anyone with a
49.
by Variance 14y ago
You're operating from a premise that misunderstands the nature of money in a market. Money is just a measure of value, a metric of human endeavor, and so it's traded on that basis. Publicly traded for-profit corporations have a fiduciary du
50.
by Variance 14y ago
The context was a publicly-traded for-profit company, like most large members of the banking system. And for those companies, you are indeed given a fiduciary duty to maximize profits (See eBay v Newmark , http://www.delawarelitigation.co
51.
by Variance 14y ago
That's your opinion of it. I can have a contrary opinion that's just as valid, and so opinions of the "ultimate" purpose of business are moot. Legally, the ultimate purpose of a business is to make money as well as legally possible; specifi
52.
by Variance 14y ago
Sounds like you're arguing for the elimination of the Federal Reserve and bailouts--which is what moving from $ to Bitcoins would essentially do. The money supply of currencies like that is fixed.
53.
by Variance 14y ago
Agreed on the poor choices of examples, though that Wikipedia article is terrible. There's absolutely nothing contrary to classical economics in "cost disease", and Baumol's stuff was more an analysis of the economics of a situation than a
54.
by Variance 14y ago
HN is also far more of a resource for tech-sector knowledge and wisdom than economic wisdom, as I've found all too often. On the other side of the LIBOR issue, reading through many of the comment pages here and seeing all the cries for disi
55.
by Variance 14y ago
Does this mean that Thinkpads are retro now? People always seem surprised that my thinkpad has a trackpoint-nub-thing and yet is less than a year old.
56.
by Variance 14y ago
I have a T420s with an SSD, and it's a charm. Light but solid. A refreshingly honest appearance, too, especially if you like the more boxy and somewhat cyber-industrial look that Thinkpads have. A little less gimmicky and passe than minimal
57.
by Variance 14y ago
More or less the happy sense of being proved right. Since the Higgs is well-modeled and well-understood in theory, other than the value of its mass, we already have a rudimentary scientific understanding of what it does and how it works. Bu
58.
by Variance 14y ago
I have to wonder where that "1 in 1.7 million" came from, then. It sounds too exact to be speculation, but I guess I did get the numbers from Physorg...
59.
by Variance 14y ago
Does anyone have the actual information of how many standard deviations the data confirms the Higgs to? Last I heard it was four, so I assume that this "update" has more, but I can't find any actual information anywhere. Edit: found it, phy
60.
by Variance 14y ago
I just had to shut down my chrome a few minutes ago and restart because I have persistent issues with tabs becoming unresponsive, where you can still scroll, but you can't click on links or highlight anything. The tabs either refuse to clos

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