barry-cotter

If someone does things that are bad out of sincere moral belief they’re just as bad as if they did them out of desire for enrichment. Khan’s attempt to return anti-trust law to its roots of ignoring consumer harms and straightforwardly punishing size and success is bad.

Can you provide some links to anything that supports that? Her antitrust philosophy is built on a hostility to business success as such so I don’t see why she would have any positive disposition to smaller businesses.

This is trolling, right? You think there’s a meaningful moral differences between whether the constituency for keeping more people locked up for longer are government employees or private sector companies?

> Using precision fermentation, a process commonly used to produce insulin and vitamins, food technology startups are cultivating microbes to produce milk proteins such as casein and whey. Thriving on just water and carbohydrates, the genetically engineered yeast and fungi pump out the creamy base for dairy products to deliver the same taste, texture, and performance — froth, whip, melt, and all — as their bovine-sourced counterparts. It’s an innovation that could send dairy stampeding toward a more sustainable future. Already, the German startup Formo is looking to replace a tenth of Europe’s conventional supply by 2030.

> Why does government violence deter political challengers in one context but inflame them in the next? This paper argues that repression increases opposition activity at low and moderate levels but decreases it in the extreme. There is a threshold level of violence, where the opposition becomes unable to recruit new members, and the rebellion unravels—even if the government kills more innocents. We find empirical support for this proposition in disaggregated data from Chechnya and a meta-analysis of sub-national conflict dynamics in 71 countries. The data suggest that a threshold exists, but the level of violence needed to reach it varies. Many governments, thankfully, are unable or unwilling to go that far. We explore conditions under which this threshold may be higher or lower and highlight a fundamental trade-off between reducing government violence and preserving civil liberties.

See El Salvador for another example of this.

Both of them got it for not being Bush.

> Except that if they put the same money into their public school that they do into the private schools, they'd get even more superior outcomes than they do from funding private schools.

No, they wouldn’t. Schools have extremely small effects on student learning, if that[1]. Private schools buy a safer, more class homogeneous environment which is worth a lot but you can get the same effect by living in the right suburbs.

[1] Education and Intelligence: Pity the Poor Teacher because Student Characteristics are more Significant than Teachers or Schools

Education has not changed from the beginning of recorded history. The problem is that focus has been on schools and teachers and not students. Here is a simple thought experiment with two conditions: 1) 50 teachers are assigned by their teaching quality to randomly composed classes of 20 students, 2) 50 classes of 20 each are composed by selecting the most able students to fill each class in order and teachers are assigned randomly to classes. In condition 1, teaching ability of each teacher and in condition 2, mean ability level of students in each class is correlated with average gain over the course of instruction. Educational gain will be best predicted by student abilities (up to r = 0.95) and much less by teachers’ skill (up to r = 0.32). I argue that seemingly immutable education will not change until we fully understand students and particularly human intelligence. Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with learning gains. This evidence is reviewed.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/spanish-journal-of-p...

> Singer is one of the few philosophers writing today who is willing to follow the logic of arguments made in defense of abortion all the way to the end of the long, dusty road, concluding ultimately that there is no important moral distinction between abortion and infanticide, and that the killing of some newborn babies ought to be permitted in law.

> “Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time,” he explains. “So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living.” Singer can make such claims because he rejects the notion that there is something special (dare we say, sacred) about human beings, whatever their age or cognitive abilities. He argues that one ought to assess a being’s rights based on his or her individual capacities, not on his or her membership of the human species. Within this argument is, writes McBryde Johnson, a “terrible purity.”

> The European police agency, Europol, has requested unfiltered access to data that would be harvested under a controversial EU proposal to scan online content for child sexual abuse images and for the AI technology behind it to be applied to other crimes too, according to minutes of a high-level meeting in mid-2022.

…

> In the meeting, the minutes of which were obtained under a Freedom of Information request, Europol requested unlimited access to the data produced from the detection and scanning of communications, and that no boundaries be set on how this data is used.

> “All data is useful and should be passed on to law enforcement, there should be no filtering by the [EU] Centre because even an innocent image might contain information that could at some point be useful to law enforcement,” the minutes state. The name of the speaker is redacted, but it is clear from the exchange that it is a Europol official.

You have confused the equilibrium state of perfect competition and knowledge in frictionless markets with how dynamic markets work. In a properly working market in real life there will sometimes be large profit opportunities. Then someone will notice them and exploit them and eventually someone else will enter the same market niche and compete, eventually reducing economic profits to something approaching the rate of interest. This is very far from profits should be zero and everyone earns the same. In a market with no market imperfections, completely interchangeable goods and no market power from either buyers or sellers there will be no economic profits. Even in this toy market participants will earn more or less depending on how much capital they have.

Zero economic profit holds only in equilibrium and there are no markets where equilibrium ever holds for long because the global and local economy is constantly in flux and entrepreneurs are constantly trying to find new ways to solve old problems cheaper or new markets or ways to solve a problem when one of the inputs suddenly dectupled in price.

The system is working well if 90% of revenue is profit at pip squeak levels, yes. If Microsoft could manage 90% profit margins on billions of dollars of working capital that would be concerning. Individuals or small companies finding tiny market imperfections and becoming wildly rich exploiting them is the system working, incentivising people to produce value.

Schumpeter: Entrepreneurs make new things and that’s great. Outside capitalism those people turn that energy into taking more of the pie, as warlords or tax farmers. Capitalism is better.

McCloskey: Capitalism is good because it inculcates patience, diligence and tolerance in people.

Your understanding of the practical and philosophical backing for capitalism is limited and reads more like an Econ 101 description of perfectly competitive markets than anything else. If you would like to learn more you could read Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy[1] or Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Virtues[2]

[1] http://libgen.is/book/index.phpmd5=21EE8F203D5C3F9530D55985B...

[2] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo375063...

Anyone who is less than 100% confident that they can in fact “do” should not be teaching. If your ego is that fragile you’re not going to last, whether because students don’t worship you, or because management ask you to do something differently.

Why are you on this forum if you hate capitalism? It’s an advertising funnel for a VC firm, in case you don’t know.

I regret reading about half of that article and suggest you save the precious moments of your life that reading it would take and do something that is valuable out interesting instead.

That people don’t care about those in developing countries does not mean they missed it.

Not all brutalism is bad. But none of it is beautiful and most of it is so ugly it’s an assault on the soul. It can relatively easily be striking or interesting to look at but it’s a testament to how difficult or expensive it is to make concrete an attractive colour that no one ever does it.

If you ever feel like writing up your initial analysis or the longer version from your supervisor I’d love to read it and I’m sure others would too. Email in profile.

Why?

> It's that I'm saying they design a very specific thing, a very specific way, for hire, then go make that exact specific thing, that same specific way.

I really doubt this unless all the inputs are commoditised. Industrial espionage usually fails because if you don’t have the know how to make the tools that make the tools it’s difficult to impossible to literally copy it. Not saying what you’re saying doesn’t happen, it does, all the time. But usually the engineering is substantially different if only because different things are cheap or expensive, or just unavailable.

> If it were in any other country but China, it wouldn't be allowed to happen.

Historically, the US, Japan, Korea, Taiwan all did it. No doubt Vietnam does it now too. Not like they have an excellent civil legal system. Joys of working in developing countries.

Formal economic aid, i.e. public, announced, above board. The point of the whole exchange was to humiliate the CIA. They assumed Lee was for sale and he wasn’t and he could prove they tried to buy him.

> If the public transport systems were that good, why would anyone need to drive in?

If they need to drive in that badly to the only city in the US with a world class public transport system then they can pay for it.

People talk about climate change as causing a 1m rise in sea levels. Averting that kind of economic and population dislocation makes the kind of energy costs being discussed seem like pissing into the ocean.

> Scaling up the mining operations to the necessary level alone would be tangled in politics for decades, since it implies strip-mining the planet for the raw materials.

Better to resign ourselves to poverty and lower living standards than try to actually solve the problem quickly because it seems hard, right?

> Birmingham was a boom city after the war and might have come to rival London. So why did planners deliberately sabotage its economy?

> Back in the 1950s and 60s, the Midlands was booming. Leicester at the time had so many jobs that employers waited at the gates of other factories to poach workers, and even chased up potential recruits who forgot to come to interviews. In the decade to 1964, service businesses around Birmingham grew faster than any other part of the country; in 1961, West Midlands households earned more on average than any other British region, including London and the South East.

> But all this was ended by London-based planners, who virtually banned new factories, offices and housing south of Manchester in a failed attempt to rebalance the economy. In 1960, the Government even refused Fox’s Glacier Mints permission for a new factory in Leicester to replace its existing building facing demolition for a ring road. That began the story of Fox’s decline in the city, culminating in its recent controversial decision to leave Leicester forever, and illustrates the profound damage caused to the Midlands and the British economy as a whole.

Pay transparency, good for employers, bad for high performers, limited effects for the average worker.

> The public discourse around pay transparency has focused on the direct effect: how workers seek to rectify pay inequities through renegotiation. The question of how wage-setting and employment practices of the firm respond has received less attention. To study these equilibrium outcomes, we test our model of bargaining under incomplete information with an analysis of pay transparency mandates in the context of the U.S. private sector. Our model predicts that transparency reduces the individual bargaining power of workers, leading to lower average wages. A key insight is that employers credibly refuse to pay high wages to any one worker to avoid costly renegotiations with others under transparency. In situations where workers do not have individual bargaining power, such as under a collective bargaining agreement or in markets with posted wages, greater transparency has a muted impact on average wages. We test these predictions by evaluating the adoption of U.S. state legislation protecting the right of workers to inquire about the salaries of their coworkers. Consistent with our prediction, the laws lead wages to decline by approximately 2% overall, but effects are muted when workers have low individual bargaining power. Our model provides a unified framework to analyze a wide range of transparency policies, and reconciles effects of transparency mandates documented in a variety of countries and contexts.

That’s what the evidence shows, yeah. Pay transparency benefits employers at the cost of high performers because they can credibly commit to not paying more.

> Equilibrium effects of pay transparency in a simple labor market

> Public discourse on pay transparency has not focused on equilibrium effects: how greater transparency impacts hiring and bargaining. To study these effects, we combine a dynamic wage-bargaining model with data from online markets for low-skill, temporary jobs that differ in their level of transparency. Wages are more equal, but lower under transparency. Transparency increases hiring and employer profits, rising 27% in an online field experiment. A key intuition is high transparency commits employers to negotiating aggressively, because a highly paid worker's salary affects negotiations with other workers. We discuss implications for the gender wage gap and employers' endogenous transparency choices.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3328526.3329645

> Equilibrium effects of pay transparency

> The discourse around pay transparency has focused on partial equilibrium effects: how workers rectify pay inequities through informed renegotiation. We investigate how employers respond in equilibrium. We study a model of bargaining under two‐sided incomplete information. Our model predicts that transparency reduces the individual bargaining power of workers, leading to lower average wages. A key insight is that employers credibly refuse to pay high wages to any one worker to avoid costly renegotiations with others. When workers have low individual bargaining power, pay transparency has a muted effect. We test our model with an event‐study analysis of U.S. state‐level laws protecting the right of private sector workers to communicate salary information with their coworkers. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, transparency laws empirically lead wages to decline by approximately 2%, and wage declines are smallest in magnitude when workers have low individual bargaining power.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28903/w289...

Whatever the EU was it is not now a trade agreement. Trade agreements don’t have delegations to the UN.

https://www.eeas.europa.eu/delegations/un-new-york_en?s=63

> How many steps between that and the Māori having a casus belli to engage in open warfare?

Of course they have a casus belli. They’d lose if there was a war though so there’s that.

> Doxa is what in English we might call hearsay. It’s the stuff you know because someone told you about it. If you know the Earth is round because you read it in a book, that’s doxa.

> Episteme is what we most often mean by “knowledge” in English. It’s the stuff you know because you thought about it and reasoned it out. If you know the Earth is round because you measured shadows at different locations and did the math to prove that the only logical conclusion is that the Earth is round, that’s episteme.

> Gnosis has no good equivalent in English, but the closest we come is when people talk about personal experience because gnosis is the stuff you know because you experienced it. If you know the Earth is round because you traveled all the way around it or observed it from space, that’s gnosis.

They are exposed to the material on which the sorting and ranking will be done.