absherwin

6 ms·

1.
by absherwin 4y ago
Increasing payouts should bring more players though it would be offset by eliminating the advertising that currently consumes some of that revenue. Flattening jackpots would have a negative effect but we just need to optimize for being abov
2.
by absherwin 4y ago
If we assume the main problem with lotteries is that they make some people poorer, we need to solve two things: The payout being less than the cost due to both high overhead and transfers and the payouts tending to concentrate wealth since
3.
by absherwin 4y ago
There's a simple answer: Offer a lottery with a high payout rate and flatten jackpots to the extent they don't cause a shift into other worse sorts of gambling. The total amount of money transferred to support government programs
4.
by absherwin 4y ago
These criteria are such a low bar that merely stating them upfront would have changed the discussion last week. I wonder if these were the original criteria or if this is a partial walk back. The SBA usually defines a small business as havi
5.
by absherwin 5y ago
That’s true for most adjustments. Buffett also suggests investors ignore income statement effects of marking securities to market. “I must first tell you about a new accounting rule – a generally accepted accounting principle (GAAP) – that
6.
by absherwin 5y ago
The most significant adjustment was excluding a $3.2B writedown of the value of their stake in Didi
7.
by absherwin 5y ago
The key challenge with this system is merchant adoption. Since merchants are forced to charge the same prices in the less valuable currency, they'll drop out if its exchange rate falls by more than their profit margin (and perhaps befo
8.
by absherwin 6y ago
You will find that management consulting firms (and the companies that hire them) have fairly clear rules about how they approach and talk about pricing and competition to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Most notably, they would never
9.
by absherwin 6y ago
Of course the customer can say that. And nowhere does Patrick suggest that taking his advice is a condition of continuing a relationship with Stripe. That's not the issue. The issue is that coordinating pricing is illegal in any form.
10.
by absherwin 6y ago
"every time I convince a Stripe customer to raise their prices ... we benefit directly" sounds like the exact words of an illegal cartel. While I doubt that that is Patrick's intent, if I were an antitrust attorney, this woul
11.
by absherwin 6y ago
This preprint explores, in part, cross-reactivity for a similar test and found it to negligible: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.17.20037713v...
12.
by absherwin 6y ago
This is an antibody test which will only be positive days after the onset of symptoms. This is principally useful for several purposes: 1. Figuring out who to isolate in hospitals if the RNA test isn't available in sufficient quantity
13.
by absherwin 7y ago
A version of what you suggest has been the law since ERISA was passed in 1974. The problem is what to do if investment performance doesn’t meet expectations, lifespan increases, or future assumed yield decreases. Generally companies had to
14.
by absherwin 7y ago
The report is misleading because AP tends to be used far more on controlled access roads which have fewer crashes per mile. There are other biases too but this alone could easily explain more than the observed 1/3 risk reduction.
15.
by absherwin 7y ago
Unbiased means that if I draw infinitely many random samples from a population and average a statistic (in this case standard deviation) across all the samples, the answer will be the statistic computed from the population itself. If one di
16.
by absherwin 7y ago
That's a zero sum game. Let's consider two possibilities that aren't zero sum. Late payments: A credit card company might make slightly more money when people pay late than it costs them in servicing and default costs whil
17.
by absherwin 7y ago
The other bit of evidence she cites but doesn't quantify is that marketing new cards causes incremental debt. That said, I largely agree with your sentiment that the article doesn't provide sufficient quantification. You also migh
18.
by absherwin 7y ago
One bit of additional intuition: Since the square of a number goes up from addition by slightly more than it goes down from subtraction, perturbations increase the average of the squares. This is why the difference between the two quantitie
19.
by absherwin 7y ago
Economic growth is the key to resolving the paradox you highlight of his seeming wealth then being inflation adjusted to only modestly high net worth today. Using Maddison's estimate for UK per capita GDP in 1820, suggests that the ave
20.
by absherwin 8y ago
I agree wholeheartedly with the larger point that we have a higher education bubble. I’m skeptical both that: Lower tuition would make taxing endowments more likely and that universities believe that that’s the case. In a world with lower t
21.
by absherwin 8y ago
The point you’re raising is that an endowment could simply exist to make money for its own sake. The IRS combats this by requiring a minimum distribution of 2/3 of the endowment’s minimum return (which tends to be lower than actual). S
22.
by absherwin 8y ago
Two thoughts: Funds are explicitly mentioned as acceptable entities in 501(c)(3). For what non-educational purpose are endowments used? While some uses may seem tenuously connected to a given observer, all are determined to further the univ
23.
by absherwin 8y ago
The underlying assertion is that universities must provide financial assistance to the majority of their students to be considered tax exempt. No citation is provided. 26 USC 501(c)(3) explicitly lists an organization operated exclusively f
24.
by absherwin 10y ago
Unsupervised refers to whether or not the dataset is being trained against anything. Think about the difference between: How many people will view this webpage? Divide these pages into 20 clusters? The first is supervised. The second isn&#x
25.
by absherwin 10y ago
Given that the company had been incorporated prior to the YC application, there are two possibilities: The original incorporation paperwork shows a 50:50 split or it contradicts the YC application. In the latter case, assuming that one part
26.
by absherwin 11y ago
Minor crashes are even more frequent than the article estimates. Thus, the real human accident rate is even higher. Probably between 1 in every 24000 and 87000 miles. The VTI driving study[1] equipped 100 cars with sensors and was therefore
27.
by absherwin 11y ago
This completely ignores the perspective of those who bailed-out AIG. Whether their ultimate assessment of the ramifications of AIG's bankruptcy was correct (Which is important to understand for future crises) they feared the collapse o
28.
by absherwin 11y ago
The data has been available; acquiring it would have cost six figures until recently. Details: The loan-servicers have the same data and many have provided it to Black-Knight (LPS/McDash) for years. http://www.bkfs.com/
29.
by absherwin 11y ago
Areas where children are disproportionately less likely to be married than their same-income peers at age 26 will be reported as having lower income mobility in this analysis since it uses household income.
30.
by absherwin 12y ago
Average starting salaries: Stanford engineering: $74,467[1] Olin: $78,074[2] The first is from (2010-2013) while the second is (2011-2014) which explains why Olin reports slightly higher numbers. [1] http://www.nerdwall

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