danteembermage

The best social safety net in the world can only protect you so much from the needs of your own children, absent some sort of young ladies illustrated primer taking over. So in that since parenting becomes more important to parents human thriving when other struggles die.

If you follow Raj Chetty's work on income mobility it appears that single parents in the neighborhood matter a lot more than single parents themselves. Since single parenthood is much more common for black families and our cities tend to be segregated, black kids tend to grow up around single parented kids which is a disadvantage. Basically having two awesome parents doesn't make up for having your entire world be not that. And having a single parent doesn't ruin an upbringing surrounded by people with two parent families. I think it's as much about shared culture as anything, the social norms get established by majority rule basically.

I tend to think atmospheric pressure was higher then:

https://gdesilvestri.wordpress.com/2015/10/13/was-the-atmosp...

I suspect "know the right answer" is "my institution is too bureaucratic to actually implement obvious right things" "managers don't listen" "I think I know what I'm talking about, but I don't see above my little serfdom and upper level decisions look weird from here" "I'm a prideful jerk with strong opinions"

Scare quotes are meant to cover 3 and 4 I think

Wilson in his speech asking for American involvement in the war cited the injustice of submarine warfare more than anything, so I agree this point at least seems to fall flat.

I think a reasonable metaphor for thinking about this issue is to consider a grocery store, where is aisle represents a different kind of income and each store represents a different country. If prices get too high in one aisle, shoppers that spend a lot of time in that aisle will switch stores if they can afford the drive. It seems like both people and politicians tend to focus on the "earned income" aisle because that's what people are familiar with. That serves as a nice area for politicking because they can "tax the wealthy" without actually hitting the real donors in any meaningful way since most of their income comes from other sources. At the same time corporations and high net worth individuals are more than capable of leaving, hence the double-irish, etc. If they go, tax revenues go to 0 rather than small, so it would seem to be in the strategic interest of the United States government (assuming we want to maximize revenue which is probably not the goal but will work for this purpose) to be the lowest tax domicile for that kind of income, but just barely. That way we attract wealthy individuals but still "extract" the maximum feasible wealth from them. I really don't like the adversarial nature of this kind of thinking, but you have to at least admit that people are corporations do venue shop. If that's not brought up at all, someone's being naiive, or more likely, disingenuous.

Just for fun!

My thought was how about a HFT microwave style network: https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2014/09/22/hft-in-my-ba...

So I checked the distance from the Keys to Havanna: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

Which turned out to be 2500 meters via this: http://www.hamuniverse.com/lineofsightcalculator.html

It's four times larger than the largest non-skyscraper (a TV tower in North Dakota): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_and_...

So sadly we cannot beam Netflix or anything else to our entrepreneurial hacker Mr. Weekly Packet. Added incentive to fund space elevator research?

If I find myself being convinced by the argument, does that mean I should adopt Epistemic learned helplessness in response or not adopt Epistemic learned helplessness in response?

I'm partly being facetious, but it would be interesting to try to use a non-argumentative approach to persuade to use one, I'm just not exactly sure what that would look like.

As a kid I remember being told "brush your teeth in circles, it's better" and thinking "I'm sure something else will be recommended in ten years so I'm just going to go back and forth horizontally like I want to" and sure enough circles clean more plaque but push your gums up so downward flicks were recommended. Maybe a dentist can weigh in on current tooth brushing practice... That said, was I better off with my inferior method? That's kind of the crux of it. If we're blown about by every plausible theory, is that better than being blown about by nothing? It seems like this is a nested Bayesian decision problem that needs to incorporate switching costs, which I'd guess for some things are trivial and for other things are quite large.

What happened to HR professionals? That was a devastating decline in an otherwise stable sector.

Groupon has lots of debt, just not the long-term kind. Why is having debt due sooner somehow better? For reference check out this http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=1490281&ac... their current assets and current liabilities are about the same, with cash and what they owe their merchants about the same too.

That said, I always teach Groupon as the quintessential example of the power of having a negative payables cycle. They don't deserve any laughter for the growth engine they created; whether the business itself is sustainable is still an open question, but I'd say the same thing about GM so that comment doesn't really count as derision.

I'm going to take a stab at this, but trust me I don't speak from a position of authority on this one, just a couple of good college-level chemistry classes.

So water will transition from liquid to solid and back through a phase change which consumes or produces energy. So any melting will cool the drink assuming it's warmer than 0 degrees C.

So let's take as our starting point a mass of ice uniformly 0 degrees C. Regardless of geometry, any cooling of whisky will inevitably produce a phase change to liquid water in the exact amount required by the energy absorbed by the ice. So you get 0 degree ice, 0 degree water, and cooler whiskey. Assuming a 0 degree ice ball geometry is irrelevant.

Of course water can be cooler than 0! So let's assume some really cool ice and do some thought experiment geometries. Take super thin sheets of ice for example. The total amount of energy available to cool the drink without melting is the specific heat of the ice times the temperature difference from zero (there might be some non-linearity here but I doubt it's relevant) times the volume of the ice. So if you have enough volume and cold enough ice you should be able to achieve a 0 degree drink at which point you have no more cooling and therefore no melting and no water.

Unless the heat is transferred out of the water unevenly, say a large mass of it with a central core inaccessible from the outside liquid. Then it would matter how fast heat travels from the interface to the core relative to how fast heat travels from the drink to the interface. This probably has something to do with the outside liquid being turbulent and the inside solid being a lattice but I'm not sure.

So, pure speculation here, I'd guess a large ball would have smaller surface to volume and so would cool more slowly for equivalent volume, but you get a large volume so you might be okay assuming the cold core of the large ice ball does the job of cooling the surface faster than the drink can heat it up.

It seems to be it would be more effective to get very small ice chunks, a ton of them, make them really cold, then you have lots of surface area and if you do the math you could approximately guarantee no melting and you'd cool fast. Then strain out the chunks and put whatever you want in there since it's already 0 (maybe something cool looking you can condescend about?)

But whatever you do don't put it in a glass you grab with your whole hand, the air is a really good insulator, glass much less so and palms work like a circulating hot-fluid heat exchanger.

Not necessarily! Suppose a bunch of noise traders are piling into a stock because all seven green lights are on in the software they bought for 29.95 from an infomercial. Let's take as an assumption that this algorithm has no idea what it's doing. The smart money thing to do would be to buy now (since investors are going to keep buying as they notice their text alerts or sound alarms or whatever tells them to buy the stock) then sell again knowing full well you are driving the price further from fundamentals in the short term. The best response to past irrationality is to trade against it. The best response to future irrationality is to trade with it. That irrational behavior might be forecast-able should not be a huge surprise.

Momentum is a well established empirical regularity in stock prices. Knowing this, you trade with the momentum at then trade against it later. This does not help momentum go away.

One weeks worth of plate tectonic tension apparently

I tried to dig into the source to see, but can anyone tell what algorithm they are using to propagate the ripples? Normally this would be a Finite Difference Time Domain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-difference_time-domain_m... but I'm wondering if they didn't just use growing circles and a sine wave.

Other people think this way e.g. "The Earth's creation, according to Mormon scripture, was not ex nihilo, but organized from existing matter." If God did not create the earth out of nothing, but rather organized it from existing matter, it's not that much of a jump to assume that He doesn't run simulations with infinite memory either.

Sorry, maybe I wasn't being clear. When I said "Doesn't pay more than you would have" what I meant was "Doesn't pay more [transactions costs e.g. fees and bid / ask spread] than you would have [had you just pursued an indexing strategy" In that light the current price of Berkshire Hathaway isn't particularly relevant because even if I just bought Berkshire stock I would still pay the spread. In fact the current B/A spread on BRK.A is 183218.7-174644 = 8574.7 which is considerably higher in percentage terms than a stock with more volume. Of course that's probably exactly how Uncle Warren wants it given he's let the price go so high with out a split.

I think the key here is that you are "buying" stocks rather than "trading" stocks. If you invest Warren Buffet style you make a significant investment in a company you think is a good value and you never sell. Thus, your transactions costs are exactly the same as someone buying a broad market ETF and you have more fun at the expense of a little diversification for a while. But once you get to 15 stocks you're basically diversified as long as you didn't industry clump.

So, the only reason not to trade is that you should expect to do exactly as well as the market and pay a bunch of transactions costs which makes you strictly worse off, but the Buffet approach doesn't pay more than you would have anyway.

A point not mentioned is that individual investors can have planning horizons 3 to 50 years long while a lot of Wall Street money is on a 3 month put up or shut up investment time frame. Strategies that take a long time to mature are tough to do when you can get performance-fired for not having your thesis pan out fast enough. You don't have that restriction with your own money.

I think a key point is that, unless planets rotate in a plane that nearly osculates our line of sight vector they will not be observed by current methods. Basically any planet whose orbit from our perspective looks like an oval rather than a left-right wobble will not be observed by current methods which check for light flickers as the planets cross their star. There are complex factors at work here, but I'd think a reasonable approximation would be that solar systems plane of rotation are oriented randomly.

So, given random rotation, if we would expect to observe 1 out of 100 plants using this method and then find that there are planets around 1 out of 200, we can extrapolate that (1/100)/(1/200)= 1/2 of suns have planets. That explains the discrepancy anyway; since so many don't rotate in the right plane the fact that we observe them at the frequency we do, rare as it is, means they are in fact quite common. The universe just got a lot more exciting!

Unfortunately you public in-state advice is almost now outdated; many privates are cost-competitive with public schools and it's not because the private schools are cheap. e.g.:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/nyregion/seton-hall-univer...

This is definitely a trend in private education pricing as sticker shock is a real problem for students considering private schools and the privates compete for the same students the publics do.

Worth pointing out is that even $40,000 houses appear to have $1,800 a year tax bills. Treating that tax as a perpetuity you would need to invest 1800/.0357 = $50139 at mortgage rates to break even. It's still surprisingly inexpensive, but property taxes tell at least some of the story. A $4000 sedan that obligates you to $2000 in annual license fees is not a particularly good deal, even if it will run for another ten years.

I'm also wondering if there aren't deeply ingrained subconscious feelings about raising children that come from a natural even evolutionary response to crowding in our immediate environment. A species which naturally reduces fertility in response to crowding will be less likely to experience explosive growth followed by terrible crashes as all available food sources are exhausted for mere survival. The fertility rates were really low in the NIMH mice utopia studies when population density was high. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun

And in this case there is an obvious omitted factor (which is important to consider when levying this allegation) age. Perhaps being old makes you sleep worse and have trouble retaining memories, but sleep has nothing to do with memories at all (although we have lots of reasons to suspect that it does). They would also have found arthritis, type II diabetes, prostate cancer, and a host of other things reduced memory if their design was as described by the article. Given that they have fMRI data it would be fairly simple to run a correlation between quality of sleep and retention within an age cohort and see what you get. Given that they got funding to do the MRIs I'm suspicious that in the actual study they did, I'm not sure you need scans to know the elders often don't sleep well.

But if that works, perhaps it was weight causing poor sleep and memory retention. Or alcohol abuse. I'm not saying this research can't be done but it's a lot more trustworthy if you either 1. randomize subjects and do a treatment or 2. have a much larger dataset and statistically control for these suspicious factors.

I took an exam where the median score is typically zero

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lowell_Putnam_Mathemati...