jgmjgm

7 ms·

1.
by jgmjgm 7y ago
I'm really not sure about why this comment has been down-voted besides that people disagree with it. This comment and the one above that was heavily down-voted both inspired some relatively interesting responses. It's a shame beca
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by jgmjgm 7y ago
Awesome. Thanks for this. I really didn't like the visualization in the article since it was unclear if it was just a seasonal effect and there were no confidence intervals. The report is much, much better. Perhaps useful to note that
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by jgmjgm 7y ago
Until recently I would have agreed with you. It seems to me that Apple is in a luxurious decline. Cook is great at squeezing money out of their product lines but he's done it at the cost of good will. I was in the market to upgrade, I
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by jgmjgm 7y ago
I think the other cause for inflation is that software patents can be rather dubious compared to other fields. It's easier to claim something is a patent when it is really quite trivial (example: one-click shopping). This is harder to
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by jgmjgm 7y ago
I briefly worked in the insurance industry in Canada. FWIW in my experience the industry is incredibly backwards. I wouldn't expect their prices to reflect anything meaningful about climate risk. Quite the opposite. I rather think that
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by jgmjgm 7y ago
The point is that branding often has little relationship to quality. It does allow brands to charge higher rates for basically identical homogeneous products. As a teenager I worked in a potato chip factory. We also made chips for competing
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by jgmjgm 7y ago
I think that was precisely the point of the parent comment.
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by jgmjgm 7y ago
Well it does a pretty remarkable job. Recall too that the stats are foreign born as a percentage of the population (Peri, 2016 that I mentioned above). The USA is larger than all Canada, Australia, UK and NZ combined. So, let's not pre
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by jgmjgm 7y ago
I think talking about averages is somewhat misleading. There has been a steep upward trend in the US and Europe. In the 1960s we'd be talking about less than 5% for the US and Europe so that is a big change. It's fair to say that
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by jgmjgm 7y ago
Some people really do learn from classes. I'm not being facetious. Sometimes teaching you can actually see that students have never considered certain things and for them it is a revelation of sorts. To understand this you have to also
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by jgmjgm 7y ago
That's the game of these companies. Scale first and figure out all of the problems. Of course, there will be waste as that gets sorted out but there is economic incentive to reduce waste (as long as it is a cost). More broadly, this is
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by jgmjgm 7y ago
I agree. There was a time it was normal for an organization to invest in its employees. Perhaps it's cheaper to externalize the costs of retraining for smaller firms. But perhaps for larger employers it is starting to make economic sen
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by jgmjgm 7y ago
Fair enough, but not all people have that experience. Things often get harder as you age. Sadly, some people make poor decisions when they are young and course correcting gets harder the older one gets.
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by jgmjgm 7y ago
You poor bastard. I worked for the federal government too. I remember being told that working for the government for more than a few years would make me unemployable in the private sector. The idea was one's work ethic would be irremed
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by jgmjgm 7y ago
I think the supply bottle-neck is the reason. All the pot has to come from a few hand-picked suppliers. Also there are claimed Liberal ties to pot production. Some quick links (although I suggest taking this with a grain of salt given the s
16.
by jgmjgm 7y ago
Nonsense. This type of criticism is unwarranted and I suspect disingenuous. There are lots of contexts in which we can say we would like to see more data. However, when someone is making a point which is a fairly standard one in the Brexit
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by jgmjgm 8y ago
Oh, lord. Please stop the assumptions and do a little digging before you post. She was on the radio today saying that she just never bothered to go through the paperwork. But if it makes you feel better, I'm sure it was a huge conspira
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by jgmjgm 8y ago
There really is a long-term productivity problem in the USA though. Edward Luce wrote a good book on the subject a couple of years back, "Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent". He's a journalist at the FT. Th
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by jgmjgm 8y ago
I recall reading that the biggest problem with Julia was that the language was not sufficiently well tested in an automated way. The result of which was that complex bugs kept creeping back in making the language less reliable in a producti
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by jgmjgm 8y ago
Why would you complain about the author not answering a question that the article is not about? I'd like to quibble with the term prediction in this context too. I think it's too strong to say that social scientists use historical
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by jgmjgm 8y ago
I do find it interesting that when BlackBerry was known to allow foreign governments to house the servers for the Internet edition of their device it was considered a huge security breach and there was an outcry in the press. The circumstan
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by jgmjgm 8y ago
Actually, the assumption that paying people will result in more blood is perhaps more problematic. The research seems to indicate that people actually like to donate. Although, work is ongoing. http://freakonomics.com/2013&#
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by jgmjgm 8y ago
It's almost like the industry is not perfectly competitive...
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by jgmjgm 8y ago
Liberal does not mean "left-wing". It is a political philosophy mainly informed by the work of John Locke. It places primacy on rights of individuals to basically to do as they like to the extent that it does not infringe on the r
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by jgmjgm 8y ago
FYI - Judges aren't elected in Canada. Good point though. The real question is who continues this process now that it has clearly been exposed.
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by jgmjgm 9y ago
Depends what you study. If you're an economist you need access to data like compustat or other. If you're a political scientist in the US much of the data is available but you also need to spend a while cleaning it (although there
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by jgmjgm 9y ago
Absolutely. Been there, done that. I worked for a guy who is top in his social science field. Total p-hacking was the norm. It was an eye-opening experience for someone new to the field expecting things to be done more honestly following so
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by jgmjgm 9y ago
This is a great point. Having someone on your team who can act as a mentor to others is really, really important. Reading well-written code from their work/check-ins will help everyone improve over time. I still think there are program
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by jgmjgm 9y ago
Yes, monopolies do have the resources to invest in R&D. The problem is that they often lack the incentive because they have control of a market. Government regulations that mandate some return (think telecommunications services for thos
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by jgmjgm 9y ago
This is a great point. Canada has a long history of developing branch plants to the US and selling mid-sized companies rather than growing them. I mean, there are worse things. It took a long time before the country realized that inward flo

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