dokein

I don’t understand the second forumulation. What is (drug addicts than students) as an entity?

This is, I think, partially the result of decriminalization. When a vocal sub-population says "oh no, but poor people have no agency, and therefore no choice but to commit crime / evade fares, etc. and we should be more lenient" this is the result. And the people who suffer the disproportionately are the working class who rely on public transit.

Even if BART doesn't have enough officers, spending a few thousand to put up high-def cameras so some other PD can kick open these assailants' doors and arrest them would help significantly.

In many other eras these two would be dead. Can you imagine a couple farmers in the 1200s with planning this shitty?

Instead, modern society has provided Tom and Kate with stable upbringings, solid graduate-level education, good jobs, readily accessible resources, and even a mini bail-out of their own.

I get that this is an outlier case, and am not arguing that this story supports libertarianism. But surely this story is not by itself an argument AGAINST capitalism.

If Tom and Kate can’t be expected to exercise even a modicum of agency and self-control, then most people are just automatons in dire need of a nanny state ruled by a philosopher-king.

After reading the original article linked within the slate re-reporting bullshit:

It’s a sad indictment of Tom and Kate, not capitalism. They both make decent money — significantly more than their parents. They both have graduate level education.

I get that humans do not make perfect decisions and there are systems controls that are needed to counteract predatory behavior. But this particular story is Tom and Kate’s failure alone. The slate title is the same “we are all victims” bullshit that seems particularly present in the media these days.

This isn’t going to be popular, but:

Should parents be allowed to try to give their children a boost in life? If the answer is yes, then it follows that parents with more resources will be more able to provide that boost.

For me, the line is drawn at “legacy” admissions or jobs, where a clearly lesser candidate is given the nod over someone who is more qualified. But if the parent is able to provide e.g. volunteer opportunities or early business exposure, tutoring, and other extracurriculars, and their child grows as a result of that, I think that’s actually progressive at a societal level (spurring more growth at earlier ages).

The problem with summary statistics like in this article is that there’s no nuance — just a brute “unfair” reflex triggered in the reader.

From the article, no mention of this applying to subcontractors, who do some of Amazon's packing and deliveries.

A week ago, at the stop nearest me, the E train uptown was re-routed. The C train had an 18 minute wait (the next one after that -- 19 minutes). The station was somewhere north of 100 degrees F and packed. As the trains were one floor below the turnstiles, these issues were only visible AFTER swiping $3(A) to get into the station. The escalator was broken too, which is fine for me but bad for many others.

Meanwhile, I am already paying one of the highest state and local taxes in the nation. But I'm not complaining about the taxes -- rather, I'm complaining that these dollars don't go very far -- it cost 3.5 BILLION per mile of track(B) because of graft and poor city management.

For those in parts of Brooklyn, looks like the L train will take 15 months to fix. Would anyone take a $100 bet that it finishes on schedule (at 1:1 odds)?

The last time I was in a cab, the driver yelled at me for using an iPhone, accusing me of using Chinese children to assemble them. Somewhat confusingly, he also yelled at me for being Chinese and taking away jobs. I looked up how to report this and it involves showing up in person at a hearing during work hours.

Uber isn't perfect, but banning it doesn't magically fix the subway. Even if the ride takes just as long, at least it's quiet and air-conditioned, and I can read or nap. Rather, Uber's major fault seems to be not greasing the politicans' hands like the medallion industry is. The parent article references the book "The Power Broker" when citing traffic. Funny, because it sure seems that Tammany Hall is still around.

(A) The metro card fare is $2.75, but the machine prevents you from putting in exact change -- only $5 increments -- so anyone who visits town usually wastes some fare.

(B) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

When I first started evaluating research, I was able to deconstruct studies and show why they were bad left and right. I thought I was so smart, but then when I started trying to do my own research it became obvious that we operate under the same limitations as everyone else -- how do we design the best imperfect study given the limitations of money, time, people, and geography?

In that context, I think this study is great. It is always true that the results of a study in a narrow group do not extrapolate to a larger group and it is good to be aware. However, that doesn't mean it can't generate hypotheses for a larger group (which can then be studied). The researchers likely would not have had the pull to generate an equivalent amount of data and follow-up data for a world-wide population, but I'm glad they did the best they could rather than spend their day posting criticisms on HackerNews.

Not clear from the article:

- What hardship / not-boring is (i.e. Buffet's father became a congressman when he was still in his formative years; but that doesn't count for Bezos because his adoptive father was well-off).

- What proportion of "old" billionaires come from it

- What proportion of "new" billionaires come from it

- The difference between the two proportions, and whether it is significant. A brief mention is made of inherited wealth (which is arguably the most boring, by the author's definition) but isn't discussed further.

- Why billionaires are used as the definition, given that exclusively analyzing outliers is probably a poor way to assess class mobility.

The article optimizes for words rather than clarity of thought.

For the sake of argument, let’s grant that his B.A. was someone else’s fault. But the masters? After four years of undergraduate, presumably at a decent university, was he still uneducated and unable to think for himself? If yes, that degree is worth even less than I thought. We should immediately clawback the tuition from the university—-at least, it would definitely be the wrong approach to have society systematically agree to pay for such a fraudulent product.

We don’t hesitate to hold the terrorist responsible either. That’s the wonderful thing about responsibility: multiple people can have it, without dilution!

Can you clarify: does inflaming one’s intellect require one to NOT understand what 6% of 200,000 is?

When my parents couldn't spare $40, I took a job at a local motel. The author, in contrast, asked them to cosign for $200,040.

But... I thought taking English classes and reading literature was supposed to provide one with critical thinking skills? How many years of "critical thinking" does one need to take before realizing that $200K on 6% variable interest is a whole lot of loans to take for no job prospects? How poignant and vivid should one's description of poverty be (parents crying over a yearbook purchase) before actually thinking about their own responsibilities?

One of the issues with polarizing politics these days is that, although I am against affirmative action (with moderate confidence), I will, as a direct result of the Trump administration taking the same side, not ever again voice this opinion in my very liberal work environment.

Did anyone else who has the same beliefs read this article and think "wait, am I the baddie?" (I know it's conflating the person with the opinion.)

It sounds like the article is asserting that tax breaks result in decreased public services per capita, but most of the people interviewed were priced out from a housing perspective.

Also, while touching, it is not clear that a few anecdotes is evidence of a town going downhill due to tax cuts; finding 4-5 people to talk about how great or how miserable things are is always possible no matter in which direction ground conditions have actually changed.

It turns out that regulations are made largely by old lawyers, who are more connected and charismatic than smart and practical, and haven't operated in the real-world for decades.

100% agree. 100 years ago, if you didn't have access to a textbook or a teacher, you were largely shit outta luck. Today, with adequately motivated parents / students (and a moderate amount of resources, i.e. access to the internet and/or public library and the knowledge to seek things there), one can bypass these issues. One can even gain knowledge and skill that is far beyond the high-school level.

I actually wonder if the internet will magnify cultural differences over time. So the children who are motivated (whether intrinsic, parents, or culture) will get even further ahead by taking online courses, while the children who are not will fall even further behind.

Given the most-penalized people in this situation are Asian first or second-generation immigrants, I don't follow your point. Also, although I agree that part of the variation between recent immigrants and historically-forced immigrants is explained by societal disenfranchisement, another part of the explanation is that more recent immigrants (i.e. from Nigeria) are culturally more aligned with education, since that's how they got to be immigrants in the first place.

Annual revenue, monthly fee.

So obviously relationships are bad when there's a power dynamic, and between different management levels is a common subset of this.

However it feels like many people are spending more and more time at work, and it also seems cruel to say: "you cannot get to know anyone romantically during 50-75% of your waking day."

Broadly, I've been doing a 5-fund portfolio with a mix of several index funds in decreasing percentages (total US stock, total international, US bonds, international bonds, REIT). If I had enough money for it to be meaningful, I'd probably invest something on the order of 0.1% in cryptocurrency too.

The rationale is that uncorrelated assets result in average returns (across the set of assets) but decreased risk.

What's unclear to me is the performance of e.g. the S&P 500 once the percentage of investments that are just index funds passes a certain threshold. Presumably if all investors were index fund investors the market would be super stupid, so is there a point before 100% where there will be significantly aberrant behavior? If so, what is that percentage and what is the behavior?

Hard to judge whether this is true, but with billions of dollars in play I wouldn’t put it past human nature to do something immoral.

As far as anecdata goes, I know someone who makes around $800K a year even without some crazy-impressive a follower count on Youtube (around 600K). This is not factoring in free trips, etc.

As with any commercial exchange, there's a lot of variables other than size of audience, including the composition of the audience, how good the channel is at moving a specific product, whether there are side-opportunities related to the main influencer role, how good of a B2B salesperson one is, etc.

This particular person works as hard as anyone in a startup, around 100 hours a week, and treats it as such. She also happens to be pretty good looking which helps with the videos.

It used to piss me off a little bit, given how hard I have had to work to get to this stage, but one can think of it as very similar to modeling with probably a similar income distribution too (and I seem to intrinsically understand that top tier models make a lot and am ok with it).

My question is -- of all the people making a lot in their 20s and early 30s, how many are going to be making the same amount in their 40s and 50s? I suppose by then their peer generation will also be the same age so it's hard for me to project. I also expect it to be much more of a mature market at that time.

In my opinion, Harvard needs to just be straight about why they're doing what they're doing. If it's race-based quotas for the sake of class diversity or long-term societal benefit, then just say it outright and we can have a discussion as a society as to whether that's ok. I personally think this is bad (with medium confidence), but understand that there are arguments for why it may be necessary.

What they shouldn't do is try to say: Asian people have worse personal characteristics, when evaluated by our admissions committee, even though no such deficit is found by the face-to-face interviewers. That's not propping up one race for well-intentioned reasons, but rather suggesting that a specific race is timid, not leadership qualities, worker bees, and many of the other negative stereotypes assigned to Asians.

Can you imagine what the newspapers would say if Harvard just said that Jewish people, on average, had worse personalities? Say, less honest and forthcoming than other ethnic groups?

Student loans should be dischargeable in bankruptcy after 10 years post-graduation (and not fully guaranteed past a certain amount, say $10K or $20K) -- hear me out.

The common reason student loans are NOT allowed to be dischargeable is because, in the minute after graduating and without collateral, the student can declare bankruptcy with no effect (the vast majority are not buying a house within the time it would take for their credit to repair).

This has the side effect of blunting market forces. It is the same amount of interest and same approval process to get 200K for medical school as it does for an art degree, despite market forces suggesting that the former are vastly more needed (ok, granted, there's the AMA, but that's another discussion). It doesn't matter to the bank -- after all you can just repay a little bit until you're 70 years old.

Allowing things to be dischargeable 10 years after graduation would reintroduce market forces. You want 200K for medical school (maybe we change the post-graduation length a bit to account for residency / fellowship)? Great! Almost guaranteed well-paying job out the other end.

But 150K for an expensive art school + MFA? You better be prepared to have your credit looked at under a microscope. Application rejected.

What would this mean? This would mean that schools would actually have either a) provide more value to the individual, b) charge less or c) accept much smaller classes. It would mean they would probably have to focus most of their energy on education + job placement rather than funding more school athletics and building a fancier dorm.

You're right. Fever often feels bad, and like pain, is often worth treating. I just ask the patient if it's bothering them, and treat it if it is; the only exception is sometimes leaving a fever unmasked is useful to determine if one's treatment is working.

I know this is an aside, but speaking as a physician the treatment of fever doesn't actually do much of anything [1]. The rates of certain injuries e.g. febrile seizures are the same with or without Tylenol [2].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1488736/, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12076499/ [2] http://adc.bmj.com/content/88/7/641

Thank you for this--I missed it in my read of the article! Thinking about it further, it's a careful balance between defining market supply correctly (e.g. high performing individuals who would normally be hired at Google) without the definition itself being discriminatory (e.g. high performers look like our current high performers).

To what extent should diversity be the responsibility of companies? I would argue the responsibility is in proportion to added-discrimination, so to speak (kind of like your profit should be in proportion to your added value).

So, as an example, if 90% of your applicants are male and 10% are female, presuming quality is randomly distributed, the default assumption is that the company ends up with 90% male employees and 10% female employees. You might make some adjustments arguing that diversity is better for work environment / productivity / decision-making but that's a post-hoc adjustment.

If that is the case at Google (and I have no way of knowing), then I would argue the burden falls on society for having 90% of applicants be male and 10% of the applicants be female in the first place. That sharp of a gender gap is not the case in Eastern Europe.

The solution is obviously best targeted toward the problem and not the symptom. If you have a fever because of a bacterial pneumonia, antibiotics are much better than Tylenol.