Viewing profile — _whbj

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 r…

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 re…

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 th…

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 tr…

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 abou…

> and misery the news (Twitter) was bringing into my life. That's because you were not getting news. You were getting social media. It amazes me that comments here don't distinguis…

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 worke…

I think that was precisely the point of the parent comment.

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 C…

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 Euro…

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 r…

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…

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 f…

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 hard…

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…

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 (alt…

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 …

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…

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…

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 cree…

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 s…

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…

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, wor…

It's almost like the industry is not perfectly competitive...

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 lik…