phrogdriver

Growing up in the midwest prior to working FAANG in the Bay Area, this is my exact experience. With a graduate degree and making ridiculous money, I and my peers had no realistic path to homeownership on any reasonable time-scale in the Bay. Family members working HVAC, plumbing, electrician or other skilled blue-collar jobs in low-cost of living areas bought beautiful craftsman bungalows within walking distance to a decent school for $80K. Professionals with either no student debt or a few thousand from land-grant state university degree paid off in 5-7 years. This has knock-on effects to family formation and number of children. Many of my high school classmates had their first kid at 24-25 and have 3-5 kids now, versus Bay Area average of what seems like 1-2 starting in your late 30s. When you feel like you can finally afford it. I started making plans to leave as soon as I got there, it truly was "structurally hostile to families."

It is even more striking that it's written in the first person, so the error sounds like it's coming from the monk and not the writer. For the HN reader not aware, the Cistercians "broke away" from the Benedictines in the 11th century and are still very much "in" the Catholic Church. My great uncle is a Trappist monk and I have great memories of visiting the monastery to see him as a child.

Marketing spend, especially online, is one of the most studied inputs to business strategy. Long term lift studies of both brand and direct response advertising show that it absolutely drives consumer behavior. Whether or not that's good for consumers might be debatable. I'm happy to buy unbranded consumer packaged goods if I can ensure quality but there's a reason Procter and Gamble can make >50% gross margins.

So interesting to back into the numbers through partial information. This was also a good look at what good into the manufacturing process. https://blog.jonasneubert.com/2021/01/10/exploring-the-suppl...

I used to work at a startup called Trusker doing the same thing, I can't give your comment enough up votes on 1. not very tech savvy, 2. margins were low, 3. too much hand holding and I would add 4. a 1200 mile trip between commercial locations with weird hours and instructions is nothing like the intracity taxi markets.

I think the founder would disagree. He's working on this specifically because he finds self-cathing difficult and cumbersome.

>We are always wary of guiding for mean reversion. But, if we are wrong and high margins manage to endure for the next few years (particularly when global demand growth is below trend), there are broader questions to be asked about the efficacy of capitalism.

I find this title to be misleading. The above quote can be paraphrased as, "We think profit margins will revert to the mean. If they don't, we will be really surprised that capitalism isn't working as we think it should."

Absolutely. In the book "Ahead of the Curve" the author describes his MBA classmates at HBS emptying their bank accounts by buying BMWs so that they qualify for more student aid. I've also seen medical doctors in private practice leave for a public health or VA job when their children are nearing college so that they can qualify for more aid, then return to private practice after the children finish college. When the system is set up to charge a high sticker price and then discount based on an "ability to pay" formula, people will do everything in their power to adjust their finances to appear unable to pay.

I've often wondered about the reasons someone might be unbanked. I've only ever considered the lack of immigration status or proof of address, as most unbanked people I've come in contact with were Latin American immigrants to the United States. I've never considered the "playing close to $0" and the effect it could have if your account was closed and you were placed on a blacklist. That would seem to underline the parent commenter's assertion that money transfer should be treated as a right.

Not to nitpick, but in my experience growing up in the Midwest of the US most "poor, but educated, families" like mine pushed children into state schools where they pay in-state tuition and graduate with $10-40k in debt. Most careers are open to them and you would almost definitely not be working at McDs or in jail.

>why not skip OpenRefine and teach them numpy/scipy/pandas/matplotlib for analysis and visualization

OpenRefine is fantastic for cleaning and imputing missing data, especially for this audience. I don't think they are teaching users to do a lot of analysis and visualization in OpenRefine.

>Modern-day heart disease deaths were higher in states that experienced a rapid rise out of poverty between 1950 and 1980 — even when controlling for the effects of obesity, smoking and education level.

No mention of controlling for a predilection for sweet tea, fried everything, and vegetables being limited to fried okra or green tomatoes. I loved southern cuisine when living in the South, but the cultural effects seem to have a much greater impact than biological. Take as a control anyone who has the biological makeup described and grew up in the South but then moved. It seems like poor study design to me.

I used to work at a large organization with annual security training requirements for all employees. It consisted of hours of ridiculous scenarios where the correct answer was always "don't open attachments from people you don't know and report anything suspicious to IT." I've often thought that requiring everyone to read "Ghost in the Wires" would be a much more effective way to show people how social engineering and phishing would actually work.

Damodaran and Graham are fantastic, as is Shiller's Financial Markets. His 2008 course on Open Yale was an early spark in my career.

After a quick look at the "Technical Analysis" book preview on Amazon, I would caution that technical analysis is generally a rorschach test of humans finding patterns in data when there really aren't any. Skip that one.

Or it could just be a disagreement that it is an exponential function on a longer timescale.

Like all models, incorrect but useful, I think that the most useful model to view "value" and GDP is as a crude approximation of the human input that goes into making something or making it useful. Natural resources are only useful if humans exert effort to extract and refine them, services are only useful if some humans exert effort to save other humans more effort, manufacturing is only useful if the effort exerted is repaid in improved productivity or utility gained, etc. Once you abstract away from monetary units to say that we're all trading units of human effort at varying degrees of efficiency, it's clear that GDP growth and "the ability of limited resources to support a growing population" is dependent on the growth of both the amount and the efficiency of human capital rather than physical resources. I'd take Ehrlich's wager [0] at any point in the future. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager

>I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain.

The really interesting part of this problem is the network value, not the individual value. The fact that "the network is valuable enough to you that you would be willing to pay" is precisely because of the value provided by the other nodes. Many of those nodes are present only because they do not have to pay. Demand curves are downward sloping but the value of the network is some function of the total nodes, probably the square of the nodes.

If only humankind had a discipline dedicated to the efficient allocation of scarce resources... Car washing? Absolument pas! Growing rice paddies in a desert? Sure, go ahead.

Thank you for 0), you may be able to guess why from my user name.

https://github.com/MrChrisJ/World-Citizenship for the curious.

Strong jus ad bellum and jus in bello traditions in the military? For better or worse, people can justify killing in war.

We have similar courses covering strategy, but I would much appreciate the syllabus to compare and see which cases you used. You can DM me your email on twitter @adamgengler if you don't want to post it publicly. Thanks!

Any suggestions from the HN community would be much appreciated!

The suggestion that complacency due to automated aircraft systems is somehow not acknowledged or well-known is simply false. It is a well documented occurence that we train for, both in terms of recognizing it in ourselves and others, and in combating it. Most of the "we didn't get to fly with all of this new fangled autopilot" is as misguided as the "we should add another computer to solve this complacency problem too."

10 minutes until some kid figures out how to disable the app.

Absolutely. The Marines designed an "innovative" uniform that worked better than the status quo and increased esprit de corps because it was distinctive. The problem is the ridiculous "me too" copycat designs that proliferated since then. Everyone I know hates the Army's "floral couch", the Navy's "hope I don't fall overboard", and the Air Force's tiger stripes.