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From Warren's own words, if you are looking at the price of an asset from day to day, you aren't an investor - you are a speculator, and a speculator generally shouldn't be interested in his company as his investment philosophy is completely at odds with theirs. Obviously this statement applies just as much to the person referred to in the comment you replied to as to your comment.

I would think this is more like what happens in each individual on a given topic - you start off with little packets and eventually you integrate them into a map. How well you are at doing this depends on how good you are at linking the packets together, how you are taught or learn them, and whether you have constructed a similar enough map before to construct the new one more easily.

Things like this where the costs are dominated by the need to build lots of infrastructure before you can even sell to your first customer are naturally uncompetitive, and even may be natural monopolies. Without significant competition private companies will generally perform worse (as far as the consumer is concerned) than government.

This is certainly not Socialism, as the use of government to provide services that individuals and businesses cannot efficiently provide goes back thousands of years, well before Marx started writing.

This sort of thing makes you wonder about how valuable protecting biodiversity is - how easily one of the hundreds of thousands of species being wiped out could be critical in allowing us to find out some key potential understanding of how DNA can work, which otherwise it could take us centuries to uncover without a natural example to start from.

SO2 injection is just such a bad idea it is scary there are still people talking about it. The problem is even if you ignore the nasty side effects, as CO2 carries on rising you have to inject more and more SO2 every year to counter the increased CO2 (especially combined with SO2's much lower residence time in the atmosphere being in the range of a few days/weeks instead of CO2 being measured in centuries).

It would also tie us in - if SO2 stopped being injected into the atmosphere for any reason, all the CO2 is still there and as the SO2 washes out of the atmosphere within a few weeks, the CO2 warming would come back full force immediately - the longer SO2 had been used to offset CO2, the worse it would be.

Offsetting CO2 warming with a seperate cooling effect is risky, the real solutions are either reduction of CO2 output - and even that might not be enough for many countries/cities because of the decades of delays in any meaningful action that have been engineered since we knew what was happening - or some technology to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Yes, the problem really is the undefined "proportionality" clause which needs to reviewed by some body, and some broad guidelines need to be set of what isn't proportional. The vast majority of the uses are quite reasonable, but when individual councils are left to make their mind up about clauses like this, some are bound to go off the deep end when someone is on a crusade against dog poo or whatever.

Less fun, but it meant computers went from being a novelty to the core of the vast majority of businesses. This was not a coincidence.

I would have thought the idea that CDO sellers keeping the most vulnerable tranch protecting against cherry picking was a fairly obvious non-starter anyway. (The following will be massively oversimplified for easier explanation, but I think it still applies in the far more complicated real life equivalent)

If I make 10 CDOs and I think 5% of the underlying assets are bad, if I share them out equally the top tranch takes all the damage for each CDO - if the top tranch is 5% then I make nothing basically. If I make one CDO with 50% bad assets, and 9 with 100% good assets, then some of those losses go to other people deeper into the bad CDO tranch, suddenly 90% of my assets pay off instead of 0%.

I would especially recommend the chores thing - maybe this is relating to watching something on BBC3 where they dumped a load of 18-25 year olds still living at home into a house and essentially simulated them having to live on their own, manage their own budgets, cook their own food, do their own shopping, do worklike tasks during the day, etc. They obviously completely failed in every way imaginable.

It is very easy with all the labour saving devices we now have for parents to just do pretty much all the chores, rather than expend the possibly greater effort of browbeating the kids into do them regularly. The other part is to mix it up - they all need in the end to be able to iron, wash clothes, put out trash, help with shopping, etc., so ensure they all do some of each rather than one "easy" chore they like every day/week (some are age dependant of course, but you have a decade or so to cover everything so that shouldn't be an issue)

I think the problem is largely standardized teaching - you set a syllabus that works for the median pupil, and depending on the deviation in ability most students might be in the range that it is ok. But at least a minority will be bored as they pick up the concept first time, and then have to wait while everyone else is walked through a number of iterations to ensure it sinks in. Meanwhile another minority is out of their depth, and can never keep up no matter how hard they try, and eventually they give up and/or become troublemakers (which can happen at the other end of the spectrum as well).

I remember the only time in school (5-16) I actually enjoyed it - instead of learning from the board, we had a year where the maths lessons were all taught from little booklets each with 10-20 pages, with a number of different subjects - about a third of the books were "core/basic" that everyone had to do by the end of the year, the rest you could move onto if you could pass the mini tests you could ask for once you had read it.

Everyone got to go at their own pace, the teacher just handed out and marked tests and answered questions as needed or helped out those most in need to get the basics covered.

Although on the other hand you have to factor in the "General Purpose Technology", even within IT - some things are generally applicable and cause a great leap forward - things like Lotus 1-2-3, GUI/mouse, RDBMS, html/web, etc. (using older examples as the older a technological leap forward is, the more unambiguously you can identify it clearly as being a step change rather than an iterative improvement or of limited applicability). Of course in the same way all these are followed up by thousands of small iterative improvements and boring stuff to slowly creep utility forward while waiting for the next big leap.

Interesting that 87.5% of the players didn't cheat, and the one that did bid 0.3% of the supposed equilibrium price, but this is somehow supporting the theory put forward.

It reminds me of the RAND corporation experiment, an economist and a mathematician play the game and reach Nash Equilibrium in a handful of moves. Same game played by secretaries and they all co-operate all the time completely defying all of the theories they build up like a house of cards. So in an economy where everyone studies math for decades and has no social skills we have a great tool to predict the economy, but for most of the real world isn't much help.

Sure it can work in certain financial markets with no contact between participants outside the market mechanism and most of the players can be assumed reasonably expert, so it has its uses, but a lot of care needs to be used when trying to take it outside that sort of area because the assumptions break down very badly in most situations.

Yeah, I tried Evony for a while recently, and it has the same effects - it starts to interrupt your sleep because you don't want to risk not being there and someone attacks you. That is when you know you shouldn't be playing it any more. Even then I bizarrely caught myself spending several hours taking down my cities to ensure there was nothing left to steal after I stopped playing (conversely this is a deliberate tactic to use to stop yourself being tempted back so maybe it was a worthwhile investment).

Except for every immigrant that comes in taking a job, they also come with an indivisible consumer unit that makes other people jobs. Strangely almost always in an average $1:1 ratio.

This probably explains things like why the population of the US roughly trebled over the last 100 years and yet unemployment didn't rise to 66%+ of the working population during that time.

Of course the slight problem is that the underlying axioms of capitalism/free marketism is that the only possible consumer is God, as you need to have perfect information about the entire universe so that you can make the correct transactions. When your economic system is based on the idea that omniscience is required of everyone taking part, it is impossible to make statements about how fool proof the system is.

This leads to the fundamental weakness of how governments are perceived of course - even if you make a really great law it has to be a "clear line", so it can't be complicated enough to cover every possibility - which means there will always be some wiggle room for some to take advantage of, and some will be hit by the law that shouldn't be.

As the media deals in anecdotes, even if you really minimise the amount of people in either of these categories by an exceptionally well crafted law, it is still easy for them to generate stories that make the law look too weak, or too draconian (depending on the political preference of the journalist/news organisation) by trotting out whichever handful of cases they dredge up that supports their views.

Of course this works at the top and bottom - so you should also bid one dollar lower than the lowest if you think it is lower than everyone thought. This is all only true if you are bidding last, any time before that you should be honest* to give the later players the toughest choice of going higher or lower than you.

If you go last and think it is between two other bids you chose 1 higher than the lower bid (because of the too high bids being ignored).

*I think in fact because of the high bids rule there is always an incentive to shave your bid to err on the low side, but it is difficult to quantify what size this effect is.

In politics what it usually means that while there can be advantages for two parties to tend towards the political centre, they always tend to keep enough distance between themselves to be clearly differentiated. The same logic still applies more or less - although the further towards the extremes the parties get, the larger the gap between them will tend to have to be.

I remember watching a program about venture capitalists and the internet bubble and some experienced VC talking about how many millions he had blown trying to get a scheme somewhat along these lines up and running. Maybe the increased prevalanced and usability of mobiles might make it more feasible, but it a massively non-trivial undertaking - certainly trying to do it from on top. Some sort of organically growing website that vendors/customers use might work, but it is one of those chicken/egg problems - unless you have customers coming to the site it is a waste of time for the vendors to have to deal with the trickle of orders from it, and until a large number of vendors are present customers will get little use from it.

One way I could see working is a widespread existing business collection/franchise spreading out into more and more products over time - so companies/organisations as diverse as interflora or starbucks might start by offering products in their core competancy online, maybe start allowing other companies to join the scheme to cover gaps in their coverage, and eventually spread out to cover a wide range of goods so the website/app grows beyond the original founder.