Viewing profile — hpkuarg

It's more possible than you think for people who share the same ethnic background to have had radically different experiences from each other, and people who look very different fr…

> Refusing to give alms to the poor "because it would discriminate against the rich" seems obviously fallacious to me. In what way is this obviously fallacious? Alms have to come f…

Why would anybody want to trade with Mr. Smith's contract in particular when a market for the contract still exists, with market makers and other participants providing bids and of…

"Some government intervention" has dramatically increased over the past century (after having stayed relatively flat for the century before that, since Adam Smith first came into t…

Obviously we cannot do controlled experiments here the same way we can in the physical sciences, but it seems that historical evidence is pretty clear by this point on whether free…

That's not how it works! You can't just make up a valuation when you donate things, and whatever higher valuation you get, you have now incurred capital gains on which you must pay…

Only tangentially related, but let's not fall into the fallacy of the middleman -- middlemen are only bad if they are legally or otherwise monopolistically required to be there. In…

Thank you for pointing me to this -- apparently it's not so classic that I have read it already. ;-) Since I assume you didn't write it, I won't go into a point-by-point rebuttal o…

It's not some immutable law of capitalism. There is such a thing as diseconomies of scale, where firms that are too large end up being less competitive and unable to innovate as qu…

One man's environmental crisis is another man being lifted out of crushing poverty by the abundant energy and wealth produced by that same industrialization and profit motive. Unle…

Seems strange that we'd optimize for making modifications easier, when such modifications are much fewer and farther between than the everyday living that fills the time between, d…

Larry Haun's book The Very Efficient Carpenter. Comes with companion videos that you can find on YouTube, as well.

"In any market" is too strong a statement. In markets with high barriers to entry or other factors that make it less competitive, sure, and we call them natural monopolies. But you…

There's about four thousand four-year-degree-granting institutions in this country. How much recruiting should Jane Street do at all of them?

Why not? Having a company with multiple billions of dollars doesn't in itself produce any returns without high quality labor to work it, especially in competition against other suc…

Yes, folks are being priced out of healthcare, but the healthcare that is being provided is of superior quality than can be found in other countries -- even first world countries w…

That's fine. Considering the business Jane Street engages in is highly competitive (maybe even the most competitive in the world), if their hiring practices cause them to have lowe…

Not the OP, but Americans as a whole are very unhealthy (with 42% of the population being obese and over two-thirds being overweight) and culturally have very high expectations of …

See North Korea for a contemporary example of a country that produces everything internally.

Neutral and elected are mutually exclusive. ;-)

Similarly, a lot of people think it's inherently wasteful (at least in terms of climate change-related sensitivities) to live in the southern US where it's commonly accepted to run…

> it’s much easier to warm up in cold weather than it is to cool down in hot weather May be true for the human body, but when you're talking about heating a living space to a comfo…

That's because the consumer has the ability to choose (at least currently in the automotive market) a different manufacturer that won't control and squeeze them like Tesla or BMW w…

Sandia National Labs working on the big questions of our time, I see ;-) Disclaimer: I love New Mexico -- I'm just taking the piss. It's probably one of the most underrated states …

Every day there's more evidence that we live in a simulation. ;-)