Then Github's up :)
775 karma · joined January 2, 2016
Nearly all hedge funds still take 2/20 for example, and their returns have been questionable for a decade, so idk we have reason to have faith in high finance's ability to self correct.
How's about: an act that is socially valuable has benefits, immediate or otherwise, realized by parties that aren't directly involved in the transaction.
Eg, a blackjack dealer's labor probably only matters to her players and her boss, but a cancer researcher impacts well beyond that. Both can be lucrative, but one is clearly more socially valuable.
I def. don't hold Facebook etc in a much higher regard here, but if we're talking about brain drain from socially useful fields, I don't think anyone can credibly argue that finance (esp. HFT et al) provides any meaningful social value.
In fact I'll go one further: by sucking up the best and brightest, high finance is doing a net harm to more socially useful sectors.
I'm not being prescriptive wrt what choices people should make, btw, just speaking in terms of social good.
Did some experiments and learned the queue downloaded every task in the queue each time it started. The authors assured me that wasn't the case at first, but eventually acknowledged that this was exactly how it worked.
Terrible experience overall, glad to have moved away from firebase.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cheekydevs...
They're $10/gb flat with refunds for unused GB. At what usage levels do you think they're 'some of the highest rates in the industry?'
I use <3 gb/MO, mainly because the mobile <-> WiFi switching is so seamless, and I've never paid more than $50/mo off contract. The UX is also top tier, which i couldn't say about Straight Talk (my last provider).
I'll buy that they're not the cheapest, but which plan offers substantially cheaper?
Normally I'm a sucker for irony, but when they sent me an auto email a few weeks later asking _me_ for feedback (ie, a survey on the hiring process), I didn't find it immediately funny.
MBA teachings are useful in the same way that any guru's lessons find a following: they offer a general framework for tackling large, ambiguous problems that would otherwise feel intractable.
I came from a diff't background than most of my classmates, but the sense I got was that, for a lot of them, life was a series of clearly defined competitions & steps. I took to calling it the Gilded Pipeline, but in general, it was ivy undergrad -> banking/consulting -> private equity -> MBA -> ???.
The '???' triggered a surprising # of identity crises. A lot of people felt they'd had a clear way ahead their entire lives, and now there was no clear goal in the horizon.
Most of them had strong convictions--from community work to personal beliefs to long-term goals--at least as strong as the general pop., I'd argue. But give anyone $100k of student debt & the promise of exit options galore, and I'd wager most would take the 'last big thing.'
I try to be optimistic about venture capital, and I want to believe when I hear investors opine on the importance of integrity, honesty, etc. in founders, but this seems like pretty naked evidence of $ > all.
Here is more of a nuclear option that lets you micro manage your activity on an os-level. Unfortunately no Linux client afaik. A bit pricy, but very customizable and very effective: https://focusme.com
It's unsettling how readily their audience accepts their claims that snopes et al are liberal rags. I've done some due diligence in the past on snopes, and afaik any bias is well within the margin of error from zero.
The narrative is that fact checking is a "globalist"-orchestrated move to suppress what they call the "independent media" in favor of the "MSM" (mainstream media).
I argue that whenever someone spends more time defaming their critics than defending their stances and claims, readers ought to run away. But following these news sources, it seems like most readers are completely trapped in an unfalsifiable narrative. It's really disheartening to think that our current best weapon against this sort of charlatinism is screening content thru fact-checkers. But I do think these platforms are obligated here, and indeed long overdue.
Tom Friedman makes a compelling argument about platforms' responsibilities here: 'Facebook et al want the NYT readership, the NYT page views, but none of the NYT overhead that comes with being accountable for the information they share. And that's bullshit.'
Bridgewater is easily one of the most consistently performant hedge funds in history, so it's hard to argue there isn't anything at all to ways in which they're different. Capital-T-Truth is worth its weight in gold when your business is predicting the future.
My conclusion was that the system for which Principles sets the stage really does seem like a sort of Truth-utopia. I say that with no hint of irony--it really does sound like bliss to have so many unproductive communication complexities actively suppressed. If you've ever felt like work shouldn't be about navigating complex political landscapes, or other people's egos and insecurities, but instead about the team's mission, then a system built on Dalio's principles is probably up your alley.
In practice, it turns out it might be a little tricky. Understandably, there's a tremendous stigma at Bridgewater with becoming defensive when confronted with your potential 'wrongness.' It's one of the things they screen heavily for: can you receive aggressive critique of your argument, often bordering on personal attack, without feeling threatened or defensive--ie, while still maintaining a relentless pursuit of Truth?
Problems start (again, as I understand it second-hand) at the point where people use Truth-seeking methodology like a cudgel. Consider a simple example, not significantly altered from a friend's first-hand experience:
You: "I think we ought to do X, because of [etc etc]"
Colleague: "What? It feels like you're not even considering Y. I think what we're seeing is that you're consistently refusing to get your head out of your ass and see [etc etc]. You have a bias that leads you towards X, and it's making you useless to this project."
You: "I understand your argument and I think it's fair to think I have that bias. However, I've thought a lot about that particular bias, and I've concluded that it isn't a bias because of [etc etc]. So I think the premise of your objection is flawed."
In this example, were 'You' responding to the merits of the argument presented, or were you being defensive? How do you know? How do you disagree with arguments couched in critiques of your objectiveness, self-awareness, etc?
The conclusion I ultimately settled on was that so-called 'social niceties' don't just serve as kid-gloves for fragile egos. They're also a reliable mechanism of giving people the space to engage in honest discussions about their own short-comings as they relate to the argument.
Because the Colleague in this example had been conditioned to understand that more aggressive arguments can functionally shut-out a dissenting opinion (because, again, of the stigma around defensiveness), I'd argue he/she had incentive to act aggressively.
In some respects, the Colleague in this example has failed to check their own emotions (irritation, frustration, etc.)--a slip-up that isn't nearly as vilified as failing to control emotions when confronted. This sort of asymmetry, I think, is one of the bigger risks in this type of system.
Like I said at the top, though, I ultimately did apply. My reasoning was simple: every work culture has its baggage (I'd come from investment banking), and I felt this baggage was more manageable than most other types I was familiar with.
Now that I'm building my own company, I've been re-reading Dalio's stuff. I really respect what Bridgewater is trying to do culturally, and I'm anxious to see if parts of it are transferable to a more tech-oriented workplace (and one where the average worker doesn't gross $200k+, fwiw).
The alternative is making users share the root URL, or scroll back to a menu and click a link to get the url directly to that #anchor.