151–160 of 267 posts
> Webvan failed, but Instacart and UberEats are now thriving. Instacart has been in business since 2013 and had its first profitable month last year during the height of the quarantine. It’s probably closer to Webvan than anywhere near Amazon.
> “Don’t buy stocks when the P/E ratio is over 20” was a good lesson to learn from the 1970s when interest rates were 7%, the Fed hadn’t yet learned what it’s capable of, and most businesses were cyclical manufacturing companies vs. asset-light digital services. Is it relevant today? At a broad, philosophical level, yes. In practical terms, probably not. In the same sense, buying stocks at all seemed like nothing but…
The problem is we're all now dependent on stock market performance to make retirement feasible. Employer guaranteed defined-benefit pension schemes are dead. My uncles pension scheme was structured to pay out 1.5% of his final salary, inflation adjusted for the rest of his life, for each year he'd worked. He worked at one company his whole career, from age 18 to age 55, when he retired. Factoring in his mortgage, whi…
401ks that my generation is used to are a concept only ~36years old, even at that most companies didn't start offering them until the 90s.
It's a very young tool that we're only just now seeing play out for people reaching retirement age that missed the ubiquitous pension era.
And roth IRA was introduced in 1997.
No comment on any of this being good or bad, I think it's interesting to look at the historical perspective of it though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cornel West has only published 3-4 or so slim volumes in 4 decades. how does he still have a job?
http://www.cornelwest.com/books.html#.YZlPiWiIY4M
> “Don’t buy stocks when the P/E ratio is over 20” was a good lesson to learn from the 1970s when interest rates were 7%, the Fed hadn’t yet learned what it’s capable of, and most businesses were cyclical manufacturing companies vs. asset-light digital services. Is it relevant today? At a broad, philosophical level, yes. In practical terms, probably not. In the same sense, buying stocks at all seemed like nothing but…
This is what I think more people should be paying attention to. I keep seeing the FIRE(financially independent; retire early) people talk about the returns they have gotten the past 100 years, not taking into account that the first 50 of those years saw tremendous growth, and the last of those 50 years saw tremendous stagnation and debt that doesn't seem sustainable.
The world's first billionaire was Rockefeller in the early 1900's. By 1970 the world's richest man was Hughes, who had amassed a fortune of $2.5 billion. In 70 years the number doubled. Since then in the next 50 years the world's richest man is now Musk, with a wealth 100x that of Hughes at $290 billion. In 1970 the minimum wage was $1.70 compared to today's $7.25, an increase of 4.2x. 100x vs 4.2x.
When you extrapolate that growth out another 50 years, the world's richest man ends up at $25 trillion. Minimum wage would grow to $30/hour. Another 50 years further, $2.5 Quadrillion, minimum wage is now $125/hour.
It's ludicrous. Have we been boiling frogs the past 50 years? If the wealthy at those price levels tried to sell even 1% of their wealth/year the system would crash. So it's clear from my standpoint that those growth levels will simply not happen. How does it break? Does it break with minimum wage growth? Does it break with everything going to 0? Something else happens?
What happens when interest rates are unable to fall further? Are we already at the end of the ball? How much higher can it go?
Hilarious that he had to write all of this just to be able to sneak in a justification for MMT in the last paragraph. This is a complete fallacy. Don't listen to reason or experts, the world has changed! Don't worry about debt and deficits, we've invented fiscal policy(which has been around since forever), that old wisdom no longer applies! Believe it if you want. We live more or less in a society with free markets w…
Doesn't MMT just tell us that we should focus on inflation instead of The Deficit?
I don't think any of its adherents believe that printing money is consequence-free; rather, MMT states that over-printing money will eventually result in inflation, and we can choose to respond to that inflation by either reigning in government spending (which enables us to dial back the money printing), or by raising taxes (thereby decreasing the money supply).
Its prescriptions are largely the same as the current mode of economic thought. If you spend too much, you'll have to pay for it somehow. Arguably, it just offers a better model of the trade-offs between taxation/spending/printing/inflation, and suggests a different feedback mechanism to drive policymaking decisions (inflation instead of deficit levels.)
Maybe “expert” is no longer a useful term. Instead we could differentiate between creators and power users.
In one case I was brought in only to give a high level synopsis about how deleted files can often be carved out either in full or in part, may appear in multiple places at once, sometimes clearly showing edits, and also come with useful metadata stored within the directory entries both past and present.
They referred to me as the "Computer Filesystem Expert" which I thought was a bit strange, because I'm not what I'd consider an expert in file systems. Hell, I only barely know how journaling works without breaking down. I just know a lot about a very specific set of details that are useful in a forensic investigation.
So there is yet another use of the word "expert" that doesn't necessarily mean the same thing to everyone. It's not a useless title in this case, but it's really ambiguous to a person who understands more than the role requires.
> “Don’t buy stocks when the P/E ratio is over 20” was a good lesson to learn from the 1970s when interest rates were 7%, the Fed hadn’t yet learned what it’s capable of, and most businesses were cyclical manufacturing companies vs. asset-light digital services. Is it relevant today? At a broad, philosophical level, yes. In practical terms, probably not. In the same sense, buying stocks at all seemed like nothing but…
The problem is we're all now dependent on stock market performance to make retirement feasible. Employer guaranteed defined-benefit pension schemes are dead. My uncles pension scheme was structured to pay out 1.5% of his final salary, inflation adjusted for the rest of his life, for each year he'd worked. He worked at one company his whole career, from age 18 to age 55, when he retired. Factoring in his mortgage, whi…
This seems to assume that experts' advice can only be valued (or not) as an appeal to authority. But that would ignore that experts can also provide _explanations_: "This won't work because this subsystem would violate the laws of physics" e.g. -- and that explanation might then spur someone to find an equivalent subsystem without that flaw, or perhaps one would find a flaw in the initial reasoning, or whatever. Simi…
we avoid negativity during brainstorming to create psychological safety. that in turn expands the boundaries of creativity. the process doesn't end there however, which is what your criticism sems to assume, since we need to winnow down the ideas generated to a feasible subset, and then further to a pursued option. this latter part is where criticism (but not negativity) is employed to iterate toward the chosen optio…
Regarding groups, research challenges your claim that avoiding criticism during brainstorming "expands the boundaries of creativity", and that criticism is only useful for "winnowing down [already proposed] options." There are multiple studies showing that criticism during discussion _produces_ (not just selects) better ideas.
This is a good academic review of literature covering these topics https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/full/10.1287/orsc.2020.14...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't help but wonder how much better our governments would operate if the median age of their workers were somewhat lower (IIRC that's around 45).
This doesn't make any sense. Aging is certainly a problem that needs to be solved, but the idea that you expressed here seems to be that younger people are better at their jobs - which is very wrong. This line of thinking is akin to "If less of the postmen had diabetes, I would get more of my mail faster!" Don't fall for these ageist logical inconsistencies
That is not the idea I took from the GP's comment about government workers being younger.
Younger people have a different perspective to older people. That might lead to a better direction.
If you think about progress/improvement as a vector, there's speed and direction. Young and old people might have the same speed but different directions, and younger people might have a direction which is more beneficial long term.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17tEc9ETL4tjfTmNbpwJJ5OSx...