pjscott

Any investment that includes stock can go down in value. That doesn't make it a scam.

Thank you. We are nowhere close to the Pareto-efficient frontier for risk reduction. We could be safer, while sacrificing much less prosperity for that safety, if things were structured better.

(The optimal number of plane crashes is not zero, as the saying goes, and it’s probably more than we have now.)

Making it part of the cost of doing business is precisely the point -- you allow business to go on when it passes a cost/benefit test, and the business tries to minimize that cost by taking safety measures. There's a middle ground between "basically nonexistent" and "insanely high".

Indeed, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise.

The usual hack for dealing with this is to require liability insurance. The insurer has incentives to set premiums at a level that reflect risk, along with reasonable contract conditions -- e.g. "Put guards on all your rotary saws, and yes we will be sending inspectors in to make sure they're being used properly."

(How is this different from an ordinary procedural regulator? Because the insurance market has competition, which means that the insurance companies aren't only trying to optimize for reducing risk -- they're trying to reduce risk efficiently. And if they're not very good at it, they can be outcompeted by someone who is.)

> They mention, but don't really endorse, liability law models. But today's adversarial legal model in the US is also slow, expensive, and results in tons of cover-your-ass legalese at large places.

They allude to no-fault workman's compensation laws, discussed at greater length in this excellent article:

https://rootsofprogress.org/history-of-factory-safety

The trick there was to take the liability out of the adversarial court system, by not requiring the injured party to prove that the employer was at fault -- only that they got injured somehow. And it worked much more reliably, with less ass-covering and less overhead, than the previous tort-based model.

> The regulator can still set legal penalties high enough to stop any innovation, if they want to.

A liability model has a couple of advantages despite this:

1. The regulator has some slack to not set penalties insanely high. As long as they're seen enforcing those penalties against someone periodically, and as long as the penalties sound like a big number to the general public, they can look like Stern Serious Regulators who are doing their jobs properly. The difference between a $5M fine and a $10M fine can have huge financial implications, but to the political circus those numbers are both roughly the same size, i.e. big. This allows the regulators to be more reasonable if they want to be.

2. Using liability rather than specific procedural rules lets the people closer to the ground decide how to most efficiently mitigate risk. Suppose that you run a factory, and sometimes people get injured by careless operation of a rotary saw. A naive regulatory approach might be to require that an additional person be watching whenever the rotary saw is in use. And that would probably help with safety somewhat, though at great cost. But if the regulator instead just requires workman's compensation payments to be made when someone gets hurt, then you can try to figure out a better way using your own knowledge of how your factory operates. (Historically, the adoption of workman's comp laws led to factories hiring engineers to make the equipment harder to accidentally misuse. That rotary saw, for example, would have had a cheap guard retrofitted -- and that would improve safety much more, for a much lower cost, than the "have an observer at all times" rule.)

The old ones where everything is behind the counter, fetched for you by the checkout clerk, to prevent shoplifting? I've seen the pictures, and I never want to go back to that kind of low-trust society. Please, I'm begging everyone who will listen: do not erode the social norms that let us have nice supermarkets. Or most other nice things.

In healthier workplace cultures, this kind of don't-give-a-shit behavior is socially stigmatized, while behaving like someone who wants to do things right is socially rewarded. It's easy to forget, but not all incentives are measured in dollars.

I'm not trying to go full Confucius here, but people who do better work than they have to shouldn't be made to feel like chumps by the people around them. They should get respect, so they feel good for doing good things.

Those are functioning communication satellites, not yet junk. At the end of their (fairly short) planned lifetimes, they will use their maneuvering thrusters to de-orbit. And even if that fails, they're in a low enough orbit that they'll naturally fall out of the sky and burn up in the atmosphere about a decade after launch. Do you have any further objections?

Even a "polluted beyond help" Earth would be easier to live on than Mars. We have liquid water, a nice thick atmosphere that isn't 95% carbon dioxide, a better ionosphere, easy access to nitrogen as a synthetic fertilizer feedstock, and various other advantages. Musk knows this; he's not an idiot, nor is he a cartoon villain motivated by a desire to be Evil.

It bothers me when people just make up outlandish accusations.

Evolution didn't understand a darn thing, and yet it created us.

Oh, that actually sounds really convenient. Next time I'm scaling a recipe by a factor other than 2, I'll get out the slide rule and enjoy the incredulous looks from everybody nearby. I can hardly wait!

That's put there by Substack, not the author. (And of course the blog post would fall under copyright even without it.)

Bless you. I appreciate this, and my mother who has some neurological issues related to auditory processing definitely appreciates it.

It's not heavy water. It's very slightly tritiated water, and the tritium concentration is low enough that you could drink it without worry.

That's from the book "Discrimination and Disparities".

Yes, that's exactly the historical rationale for the adoption of the SAT. It gained popularity in the first half of the 20th century as an attempt to identify poor kids with academic potential, so they could get educational opportunities that would otherwise have been out of their reach. Harvard, for example, used to be populated almost entirely by people who had gone to expensive private schools -- and then in 1934 they started giving admission and scholarships to students from lower classes who scored well on standardized tests, as part of an effort to improve socioeconomic mobility.

I remember taking the SAT and ACT, and didn't notice any multiple-choice question which didn't have exactly one right answer and three unambiguously wrong answers. They put actual effort into making sure this is the case.

In the case of Iowa specifically, the trick (if you can handle the coursework) is to go to Iowa State and major in engineering. They're reasonably affordable and surprisingly high-tier. Quite a few other flyover states that you wouldn't intuitively expect to have really good engineering schools actually do.

(The trouble, of course, is with career paths in which networking and prestige matter a lot more.)

Yes, the whole field has pretty much fallen to the replication crisis. The thing this article is complaining about is that "Science" magazine apparently has a section in which it uncritically repeats politically-fashionable junk science.

There's a market for getting underqualified students into fancy universities via legalized semi-bribery, but it would be bad for their image if they openly admitted to it. Hence the obfuscation.

If you put the money mostly into bonds or stocks that don't issue significant dividends, you'll pretty much just have to worry about capital gains (form 1099-B), and those aren't taxed until the fiscal year in which they're realized.

Deming had some genuinely counterintuitive stuff to say. The focus on reducing variance was obvious in retrospect, once you do the math, but important at the time.

I'm curious how you explain Japan. Their traditional religions have never been very big on moral instruction, certainly not the way Christianity is, and today a supermajority of the population doesn't take religion seriously at all. And yet you have a generally well-behaved populace, low crime, very low rates of out-of-wedlock births, and so on. They have their own problems, of course, but not so much these particular problems.

I guess you could argue that a particular self-reinforcing system of social norms could be considered a sort of orthopractic religion, but that would be a bit of a definitional stretch.

I'm not sure how size of government is supposed to affect "expectations on behavior, cultural output, language use, dress, or anything else". Do European countries have Bureaus of Politeness and Decorum that send civil servants around to tell people to tuck their shirts in, queue properly, and be courteous to strangers?

Alright, I'll moderate my argument a bit by acknowledging that I'd have to use both hands to count the number of places that ABC reported as having newsworthy municipal water problems. But that's roughly what I'd expect in a country that's doing pretty darn well at water provision! Elected officials focus on doing what will get them re-elected, and nobody gets re-elected by saying "During my time in office, I made sure the water department replaced their intake filters on the schedule recommended by the manufacturer."

When you consider the political incentives, it's an under-appreciated miracle that politicians in the US serve the public at all and that things shamble along as well as they do.

Also recommended is this remarkably clear explanation of the mechanisms at work here, and how things could in theory be much better:

https://equilibriabook.com/molochs-toolbox/

In those decades most consumer goods have become cheaper (adjusted for inflation), but we've seen drastic increases in the cost of housing, medicine, education, and infrastructure. Those are big money pits.

As for why this happened, and continues to happen, and what could be done to fix it... those are hard questions. You can see some good grappling with the subject in this article, and the follow-up listing other people's responses to it:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-co...

It's worth noting that, in a country of 330 million people, you only came up with two examples. Those things are newsworthy because they're outliers.