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Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

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Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#401

Post by eru »

harry8 wrote: post #375
eru wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The theorems about the efficiency of a free market assume perfect information. Huh? That comparatively freer markets make people better off in the real world is an empirical observation, and doesn't rely on theorems. (You can make a few assumptions and prove a few theorems, if you want to. But it's not essential.) > If someone reads Consumer Reports and decides that brand XYZ is making a good product they want to b…

> Btw, that's not an externality. That's just a regular cost. It can be either or both. Information discovery can simply be a cost of transaction, sure, fine. Find out about the stuff you're thinking of buying. Regular transaction cost. Where there are markets and methods of transacting in those markets where one can assume the product that was being sold previously with a given name is precisely similar to the one b…

I know the jargon. (But explaining it doesn't hurt.)

The 'perfect competition' model is indeed not applicable here. But that's not a problem: we know empirically that markets work (and work better the freer they are). The theory just gives us the intellectual tools to investigate why that is so.

What you are describing is still not a proper externality. In the same sense that eg having a competitor is not described as an externality.

(Or similarly, given your logic, the existence of shops where people have to pay for stuff would be an externality, because now they have to make sure that they are not in a 'shop' where everything is free first. The example is admittedly a bit silly, but if you substitute 'hospital' for 'shop', it's somewhat applicable to the UK.)

About 'perfect competition' about real world competition: you might like to have a look at https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/compet

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#402

Post by eru »

harry8 wrote: post #379
eru wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right that a more nuanced analysis needs to take risk into account. Sorry, I was talking about real interest rates. Inflation doesn't make a difference to them. Real interest rates _do_ make a difference. > Just get the hell away from bonds which will hemorrhage value from the inflation. Bond interest rates already price in expected inflation.

Real interest rates are the growth rate in the overall economy, which doesn't change much or at least shouldn't in the absence of a crash and recession. For a country getting much above the world economy growth rate is a short term thing that doesn't last. You hit oil (norway) Your capital stock was low (post ww2 germany & japan, pre economic liberalization of china) but you have an educated and entrepreneurial popul…

No, real interest rates are not (necessarily) the growth of the entire economy. Interest rates are the cost of borrowing capital.

Eg if we discovered that an asteroid was going to hit earth in ten years, you can bet that interest rates would go up like crazy---without any growth nor growth expectations.

Of course, real interest rates can be related to real growth in the economy.

> Look at the incredible growth in the S&P500 during a pandemic with all the economic carnage going on with that vs the bond rates.

I'm not sure what you mean here? Econ 101 says that the price of stocks is the discounted present value of all expected future dividends (and stock buybacks etc). If you follow that simple model, it would already predict that a short term disruption to the economy should not impact stock prices.

Of course, reality is more complicated. But even this simple model captures the phenomenon of robust stock prices while a pandemic is still going on.

> Bond returns are depressed by central bank policy and some capital is forced to allocate there when its a bad deal. (Pension funds mandated to invest in bonds and nothing "risky" like equity).

Yes, regulation makes things more complicated here. Also keep in mind that in most jurisdictions companies pay bond or loan interest with pre-tax money, but they pay dividends or stock buybacks with post-tax money.

The wider context of the discussion was about junk bonds from private equity. They benefit from the difference in tax treatment, but don't benefit from pensions funds' mandates to invest in safe assets or central bank purchases of government debt.

I'm not sure why you would cite 20 Year US Govt Bond yields here? If you are interested in inflation expectation in the US, just look at TIPS spreads https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10YIE which give you that information directly.

TIPS spreads are the difference in price between inflation adjusted bonds and non-inflation adjusted US government bonds.

> It's always "unanticipated" in most of the yield curve when it hits.

Eh, there's also unanticipated lack of inflation. The risk goes towards both sides. (A risk that only goes in one direction would be rather strange, if you have at least a few smart market participants who can benefit from correction prices.)

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#403

Post by eru »

RNCTX wrote: post #380
harry8 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an issue in market information where regulation can't really work [1]. Vendors have a brand. They establish the value of the brand such that purchasers have a signal that they aren't going to be ripped off. For example you can be pretty sure coca-cola isn't going to cut costs to the point where they don't care about putting poison in the bottle - and you don't need regulation to know they won't do it. Zeus-Cola?…

How do you know you prefer unregulated markets? I'm coming up on 45 and through my whole life, markets have been regulated in favor of corporate officers and the government agencies and officials paid to represent them.

There's lots of different markets around the world in different goods and services.

If you are sufficiently purist, none of them is free or unregulated. But they are regulated in different ways and to different degrees.

You can learn a lot by observing how these varying degrees impact outcomes.

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#404

Post by Hermitian909 »

shagie wrote: post #191
Hermitian909 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most CS programs do not have 99% placement. There are a few reasons 1. Some people who graduate with CS degrees can't write good code. It is shocking how little you can learn while still graduating. 2. Some college graduates are lack the social/organizational skills for office work 3. Industry has a limited appetite for junior engineers because they're often a net drain on the company for the first 6-12 months and on…

Additional items: Many new grads have exaggerated expectations and refuse to consider or accept "lower" than working in big tech. Related to this, there are also the new grads that have some extremely niche role that they want to fill. I recall from a bit ago a new grad on reddit that wanted to do machine learning to save the whales while traveling on a research ship. Coming to the realization that most jobs aren't i…

> I also suspect there is a common thought process of new grads that the quantity of applications is more important than the quality of the application -- sending out hundreds of applications even if there significant mismatches between the resume and the job posting that could be trivially corrected.

In fairness to new grads, the minimum requirements on job posting are often wildly out of line with what the job requires and what the employer will accept. I still meet plenty of junior engineers getting their first gig by applying to jobs that say 2+ years of experience when they have 0.

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#405

Post by doetoe »

cm2012 wrote: post #230
rossdavidh wrote: post #110

So, I learned to code at an odd program at Univ. of Texas - Austin, essentially a bootcamp for coders that began in the 1970's and still runs today. They take about 9 months to get you to a beginning programmer level, then you program (for UT administration) up through a kind of apprenticeship. It worked very well, and the washout rate has historically been about 10%; that is, 90% of those initially admitted go on to…

That the dirty secret of all higher education. The value of the credential comes from the screening, not the education. Research shows people accepted to ivy league schools who don't attend have the same future incomes as the people who attend.

That research could also be interpreted as showing that the value of the credential is not the education, just the bare credential on your CV.

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#406

Post by selimthegrim »

harry8 wrote: post #361
selimthegrim wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But the higher issue is information. Should you be able to sell the same product with a very different quality under the same name? Barq's famously does this and doesn't seem to have any issues.

Barq's make their product garbage and sell it for the same price with the same name as product they sold before? With no issues? Really?

Barq’s used to sell a different product in Louisiana due to preexisting bottling/distribution relationships

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#407

Post by antasvara »

mbesto wrote: post #396
antasvara wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is incentive structure. Running a business successfully is hard, and getting one to profitability is difficult. The easiest way to make money on a purchased business is to cut costs while people perceive it positively, ride that wave until the business isn't perceived positively, then sell the remaining assets. This method, given that it happens frequently, seems to be the easiest and most reliable way…

> This method, given that it happens frequently, seems to be the easiest and most reliable way to turn a profit I think you're naively looking at the headlines of PE that focus on large cap buyouts. For every story about Toys R' Us, there are hundreds of PE buyouts that do no cost cutting and use PE capital to grow their businesses. As I noted earlier, the big PE funds - Apollo, KKR, etc. - are notorious for strippin…

That makes perfect sense! I'll look into those firms, thank you.

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#408

Post by exporectomy »

homo_ergaster wrote: post #390
exporectomy wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's false. America has probably the most advanced healthcare in the world. Almost every new treatment is invented and made available there. Other countries don't provide that cutting edge stuff for free, they simply don't provide it at all. I live in New Zealand which has free healthcare but we sometimes hear about people pressuring the government to pay for some expensive new drug, or a dying person using crowdfu…

>That's false What part of my comment are you referring to? I can’t really tell from what you wrote

Excuse me. It was this "a society allowing people to suffer from treatable illnesses is completely unnecessary and cruel considering that providing free care to everyone is something many countries do successfully"

I'm saying no country provides free healthcare for all treatable illnesses. And not providing it is necessary because the cost would be too great.

I agree it's cruel though.

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#409

Post by tziki »

nzmsv wrote: post #248
tziki wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe in some engineering/phd bubbles that's true, but that most definitely doesn't work the majority of the time.

An organization that treats their students with a "your feeble minds won't understand, so let me put some spin on this for you" deserves all the eventual backlash they get.

That's more or less every large organization then.

Re: Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years

#410

Post by njarboe »

eru wrote: post #346
njarboe wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"consenting adults" By that did you mean "the Fed"?

No, I did not mean the Fed. Why? The Fed mostly buys government debt, don't they? Have they recently taken to buying private equity debt?

They started buying them during the pandemic but, looking into it in more detail, it looks like it was only a few tens of billions, so not that much.
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