ponow

Define competence. What fraction of graduates in EE and CS from top 50 schools would you regard as competent?

Let's not valorize zero profits. Be suspect of high rates of profit. Why invest if there's no profit?

> One easy test is how they feel about sustained high profits. To people who value markets for their ability to drive improvements through competition, that's a sign of something wrong, like insufficient price competition.

We'd need more context. Those sustained profits are "money on the table". There may be real advantages to the company earning them, like sustained innovation or other quality, that others have trouble competing with. But if those profits are coincident with lots of lobbying and various shenanigans (controversially maybe including patents and copyright)... you'll get more sympathy.

And that is so because they made it a priority for it to be so.

Yet some artists do believe that it's morally wrong that producing whatever they deem as good art isn't guaranteed to be self-supporting. They shouldn't ultimately have to answer to anyone else's opinion to earn a living. Which is highly entitled, and non-evolutionary.

Ignoring the entertainment industry, if there were no copyright for software applications beyond that which can be achieved by contract, what would the CAD software landscape be like? Clearly it would exist, but with a completely different revenue model. Predictions?

Deregulate medicine and include benefits as income (and lower income tax rates to prevent revenue windfall).

France is especially like that, with consequent mass unemployment. That's the model the progressive side of our politics wants to emulate.

A major reason poor people don't save is the inflationary currency and government control of interest rates (plus other central bank policy) encourages debt over saving. We slowly put a noose around our necks because our laws put lights on that runway. We need major reform to get back to a saving mindset. It'll be a world where the government will borrow and print far less money.

Our regulations (including the medical guild) and legal structure (including crazy malpractice payouts for unintentional mistakes) forces everything to be more expensive than necessary. We are very far from a free market, even if we stopped with the untaxed benefits.

Thanks for reminding us that state intervention is the source of the problem.

Stop linking medical insurance to employment via this tax bigotry. Buy it on the open market instead, or subsidize it if you're a leftist, but don't put that burden on jobs, you'll only get fewer jobs with greater hassle. People can agree to the arrangements they prefer, and it's not for us to second guess that. If there are people who end up coming up short, then you can help them yourself, or force the whole society to chip in (again, if you're a leftist), but don't force such considerations on the fragile links among private individuals and businesses.

When do they ban legacy admissions to weddings? Do uncles and great grandmothers really warrant admission?

> Distribution of labor and resources based upon the needs of society

Not a goal for me, and not for evolution. Survival, health, prosperity, thriving and complexity rate higher. Not everyone makes it.

But very interesting.

Now add cross-platform GUI interaction for apps and web apps. [Ducks]

> early evidence of social engineering

Or early adaptation of culture to nature.

Supporting extra architectures isn't free, and cost matters in an era when devs are getting laid off in numbers.

So, do the habit every day, but don't do it because of any secondary goal (like money), other than the immediate goal doing the habit itself.

Problem is, if you haven't completely bought into the habit yet, and it feels uncomfortable relative to other options, I don't know that you can avoid asking yourself "why" you're doing the habit.

In your example, I guess you already find programming fascinating, but hadn't found the discipline to practice regularly. But I still don't know how many people wouldn't abandon developing the habit if they get stuck in the weeds.

Imagine learning the violin, because you've liked to listen to classical music. It takes a lot of faith when you're stuck hearing how bad you sound at the beginning, and how you have to duck nasty glances or comments from others in your household that have to endure your practicing. A secondary goal might be to be admitted to an orchestra and do concerts that your friends and family might attend. But that being "vanity" means that we should only focus on the primary goal of enjoying violin music. Again, I see many people getting lost in the weeds without secondary goals of some sort acting as a lodestar.

OP written by someone well-employed, so anything done outside steady paid work ought to be done for enjoyment. Nice luxury, that many don't enjoy.

A read of the data shows that, but it's not the only read nor the only data.

So we can say wages have increased to keep up with inflation, but left out is all the money lost during the time lag before wages caught up. And whose wages caught up? If you use average wages, then you can hide the details. You really need to look at different income levels, or at least the median wage and the inflation experienced for that median person, bare minimum.

Yes, for living arrangements.

We should use debt only as much as necessary. Normalization, promotion, even subsidy of debt leads people to make poorer choices and to think in the short term. It destabilizes the world, and sets up traps for the many naive people, traps that benefit lenders.

Secular deflation existed in the late 19th century during growth periods.

Deflation associated with debt deleveraging can be bad. But the problem is that we got into debt. Debt was not nearly as high in the 19th century. Debt addiction is relative modern.

Our inflationary 2%++ regime tends to encourage debt, and the Trumps of the world can leverage their lives to the hilt. Poor people have much more difficulty juggling debt and fail spectacularly. Debt growth increases economic instability.

So people should ignore their expenses going way up, and not bother plotting them or whatever because...?

Yeah, it angers me to hear people argue that inflation is good because it encourages people to invest instead of hoarding cash.

1. It's your money, so it's not for others to control.

2. You may have a good reason for keeping money under your mattress. For example, you're poor and inexperienced with investing and have heard how people lose their shirts if they don't know what they're doing. There is a lot of complexity to investing, and scary contracts and qualifiers, and then you find out that you don't really own clear title to the stocks you've bought, and hear stories that brokerage firms transfer stock that they don't even have, but will protect favored rich clients if push comes to shove.

3. Maybe there's real risk in the economy, so recklessly investing despite that danger shouldn't be forced one someone with the threat of stealing value.

4. The rich can afford advisors who will help them invest so that they don't have to hold onto inflating cash, and know of ways to preserve value. Only the poor have a sizeable portion of their wealth in cash.

I wish I knew how to play that game. It's a game primarily played by the rich, and is part of the reason that the primary losers from inflation are poor.

Excessive debt is not good. Encouraging debt by the effective subsidy of inflation tends to be coupled with varying interest rates to control that inflation, and therefore there are periods of low interest rates. Savvy investors try to borrow heavily during these low interest periods creating a boom, even though the enterprises they might invest in are no more worthy of investment. This is malinvestment, because real physical capital (including skilled labor) becomes reallocated into more risky ventures because of the influx of easy money. When reality returns and it's clear that many of those risks don't pan out, there is upheaval, bankrupcy, layoffs, etc., a "bust". This is a bad thing for economic stability and human happiness.

Debt should not be encouraged nor discouraged. Interest rates should be natural, based on market forces about the time value of money.

Homeowners don't deserve a mortgage subsidy paid via inflation. If there is a subsidy, make it explicit through law.

Firms can do uniform pay cuts (say 2%) instead of targeted layoffs. That way all employees are in it together, and yet there's still market discipline in whether to cut.

But isn't that money multiplier due to fractional-reserve banking essentially a one-shot deal, and doesn't continue to expand over long time periods?

So if banks keep 10% in reserves, then a cash deposit gets multiplied by 1/.1 = 10 times, and that factor does not grow with time. Even if there were no law against continually lowering reserve ratios (and therefore increasing this multiplier), the market would tend to create a bound, for otherwise the bank would have greater risk of collapse from runs and unexpected loan defaults.

By contrast, if the central bank (Fed) keeps increasing its balance sheet (by buying assets using money it created from thin air), we have continual growth in the money supply (since the folks who sold the assets have new money in their accounts, granted magically by the central bank).

In fact, if we had a law that banned fractional-reserve banking for all commercial banks, so that all commercial banks had to have 100% / full reserves, eliminating your dilution, the central bank could still perform open market operations and buy assets with printed money, and thereby continue to increase the money supply. Full reserve for private/commercial banks is still compatible with money printing by a central bank.

So I know fractional-reserve gets a lot of heat by sound money folks, but the continual inflation observed since the 70s is not primarily a fractional-reserve problem, but a central bank money printing problem.

Why should firms get a free 2% cut in salaries paid? Generally, firms are in a stronger negotiating position about salary, especially for the lowest skill labor and poorest people.

If there's a downturn, then everyone will have to tighten belts, and firms can make that case to employees.

Making a real 2% salary cut the universal default is cruel, and if your typical hourly wage-earner understood clearly the choice being made on their behalf, they'd be pissed.

Deals shouldn't be altered without agreement, but that's what 2% inflation targets do. If you agree to a salary, then nobody should be specifically putting their thumb on the scale one way or the the other.

Professionals and job-hoppers have less problem negotiating to keep up with inflation. It's the poor people who get screwed.

Also, inflation is less steady the farther away from zero it is, I'd wager. So we have inflation spikes sometimes, like we've seen. There's always a time lag between spikes in price increases on goods, and wage increases (which require negotiation). During that lag period before a compensating wage increase, savings get used and real loss is suffered. I highly doubt that the loss in savings is generally recovered, and the Fed never even aims to recover that loss. The most vulnerable people lose the most, and are impeded from building wealth as a result, and probably come to depend on government more.