throwawaymsft

Is wealth truly proportional to matter? How many physical resources are used when making software, music, art, theater, writing? How much wealth did the internet create and how much matter did it use?

There may be a finite limit on potential wealth but it’s effectively limitless for human planning purposes.

(For the trees, we can certainly mismanage our resources; it doesn’t mean it’s a priori impossible to create a growing and sustainable form of wealth.)

Banks will money into existence every time they issue a loan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation

When I deposit $1k in the bank and you take a $500 loan, $500 is created out of nowhere. You are using my deposit yet I still have a balance of $1000 on the books.

(As people use forests, others will notice and start making tree farms.)

I don't see how it's inherently wrong for a CEO to take 10% of revenue and employees split 10%. And why do companies have a fixed pile: shouldn't an effective CEO grow top-line revenue? What if employees are splitting twice the revenue compared to a year ago? (If the company isn't growing, replace the CEO for someone who earns their 10%.)

Money-making inequality, on its face, doesn't seem different than artistic inequality. Should I be angry that Warren Buffet gets 20% annual return on his investments while index funds only do 8%?

The word 'allocate' presupposes a fixed pie that we're expected to split in a zero-sum game. That works for redistributing the fraction of wealth captured in taxes. But the parent's argument is about the process of accumulating wealth itself being zero-sum somehow.

Thinking "someone earned money which would have gone to me otherwise" is like thinking "someone got in shape and that physical fitness would have gone to me otherwise".

Do I care if someone has 1000x the artistic talent I do? Is there a shared river of inspiration we're all drinking from?

You seem to believe there's a fixed pile of money in the world that every human competes for (e.g., 16th century Mercantilism).

Go into the woods and turn a tree into a chair. Where did that value come from? Will it run out?

This is one of the most important reasons for FIRE / FU money. It's not about drinking martinis on a beach, it's about not having your values held hostage to economics.

> What justifies 30% of sales by app stores?

Supply and demand. If you think you could sell 70% as much outside the store then go for it. How much do you think Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart and Target mark up their inventory?

Additional meaning and connection are emotionally valuable (especially when rare or irreproducible).

I assume you’d prefer to have Newton’s Principia, Turing’s papers, or your grandfather’s watch vs. a reproduction, even if the practical value of the information is the same.

Sounds like there’s a few objections: the book is so effective its techniques will be adopted by everyone, and the book is based on flawed survivorship bias so the techniques are unlikely to work.

But is that a problem for the first passerby? Do you not read the book because the strategies won't work in perpetuity?

An economist walks down the street and sees a $20 on the ground. “That can’t be real, if it were, someone would have picked it up.”

A passerby stoops down and picks it up.

But where does that line of reasoning end? If asked to join a gang, do you agree because they'll simply find someone else?

It sounds fine in theory -- people are being helped -- but in practice, I don't think it's so simple.

People _register_ for a course, presumably, with the goal of finishing it. (Otherwise, why not do a google/wiki search for topic X? Find that specific topic on youtube/MIT OCW?)

When the vast majority of people fail to complete the goal, you decrease their confidence in the process. Unless someone starts with strong academic confidence, they may be demoralized by giving up/failing a course. We shouldn't be happy that 5% of people enjoy high school math class if 95% of people graduate hating it, and never touch the subject again.

We can move goalposts and now pretend that MOOCs primarily exist as a random buffet of knowledge and not replacements for actual courses, but that's not how they were positioned.

"That pill I sold you, turns out it's no better than placebo... but placebos are 30% effective, so it all worked out, right?"

More like driving with your rear view mirror. You don’t notice it.

That’s the nature of retail. If my art was a USB cable, and my gallery was Best Buy, the markup would be similar.

Here's an example of what a soccer game would look like if commented the usual way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vJn5XxWg9U

Drug prices don't dip when the government outlaws them. If anything, the need to outlaw crypto validates their utility.

I worked in security around the Vista timeframe, and remember the “think of the children” logic for the UAC prompts.

It’s insecure to not warn people constantly. Full stop. (Never mind that desensitizing people or any of a dozen predictable side effects are ignored). It’s oversimplified black-and-white thinking endemic of many management mistakes.

I'd posit it's hard to know what the dynamic would be. Consider certain luxury goods (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good) where increasing the price increases the demand. (Conveniently, economists have a model and also a name for things that don't follow the model. The universe can be divided into bananas and non-bananas.)

Cleveland isn't a prestigious world-class city attractive to the wealthy, but if new luxury condos in a tier-1 city come online, it may induce demand from wealthy/speculators who would not otherwise have considered that city, or were picking between alternatives. (Investment, signaling/status-seeking, etc.)

Treated as an investment vehicle, increasing supply (e.g., having an IPO where no shares existed before) can unlock latent demand (people divert income into that investment and drive up the price). Perhaps housing needs to be modeled as a mix of investment, local demand for shelter, status symbol, tax haven, political baton (keeping existing homeowners above water), etc.

Again, not sure how housing actually behaves but it seems complex enough to defy my econ 101 understanding.

That new luxury housing makes a city more attractive and induces demand from outside. Adding new roads can make driving more attractive and worsen congestion.

Not saying that’s what happens, but a simple supply/demand analysis (ceteris paribus) may not suffice.

There are numerous thought experiments on how transparent salaries affect team cohesion and go against human nature.

Meanwhile, professional sports teams and the military, who rely on team cohesion more than random white collar professionals, have transparent salaries. If teams worked better with opaque salaries wouldn’t these ultra competitive/life-or-death industries have figured it out?

A company is incentivized to keep supporting a product that is profitable.

Have you taken and completed an online course yourself? What have you noticed was difficult?

From the paper:

> Defeat the best Go players, training only on as many games as the best Go players have played. For reference, DeepMind’s AlphaGo has probably played a hundred million games of self-play, while Lee Sedol has probably played 50,000 games in his life.

download js -> run through JIT compiler -> execute

vs.

run through JIT compiler -> download js -> execute

Whatever overhead the JIT compiler adds will be latency for the user.

Try buying an Apple charger or cable on Amazon (even sold by Amazon directly):

https://9to5mac.com/2016/10/19/amazon-fake-apple-chargers-ca...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2016/10/23/apple-n...

Apple has the clout to force Amazon clean up their listings, most manufacturers don't. Why does Apple have to coerce Amazon to do this, instead of them being proactive?

If you're conscientious enough to ask the question you don't have to worry about being a jerk :).

Thanks for the catch; I didn't account for the split. Still, it looks like the SPY handily beat MSFT's return over that time period.

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=0&...

I'd say he was average at making money. It sounds impressive but you need to annualize and compare it to the market as a whole.

5.36B to 22B in 12 years = 11.7% annualized profit increase from 2012 to 2014.

However, MSFT stock appreciation was 22 -> 41 or 5.2% annualized. (Stock includes expectations of future growth, etc.)

Average S&P was ~7.8% for that time period.

Ballmer would have done better for investors by just investing in an index fund.

It's not just about "trying something audacious" or "sticking with it". Do that with your social photo sharing site.

People's medical diagnoses and health is on the line here. The cavalier attitude of "getting caught up in taking nothing feasible to market" makes me sick.