mcbrown

Former professional investment manager here...

The biggest problem with things like this, which almost nobody talks about in the context of investing, is publication bias.

100 people try to develop a profitable trading algorithm. 1 comes up with one that looks great on back-tests at a 1% confidence (in other words, exactly what you'd expect from random chance alone over 100 trials).

That person writes an article/pitch/business plan based on their algorithm. You never see results from the 99 who failed.

Going forward, the successful algorithm is no more likely to work than the failed 99, but from the perspective of the general public it sure looks like a winner!

If you buy a MacBook Air:

Once in a blue moon you might be stuck without access to power for hours and hours, and you will be thankful for the battery life.

Every other day you will be cursing the subpar display and lousy performance.

Yes, like the fact that there is not a single accessible Uber vehicle in New York City... we THOUGHT the ADA had outlawed that sort of thing, but apparently not.

Because of malware delivered through unblocked ad networks.

(FTFY)

'Truckers have to deal with a sort of standard "road safety dilemma" all the time...'

I think you mean that truckers FEEL like they deal with that dilemma all the time. If they ACTUALLY dealt with an A or B dilemma, they would routinely end up in situation A or B: running over a passenger car or flipping the truck. It happens SOMETIMES, but infrequently.

In reality the situations where other drivers do something stupid are probably much better handled by the self-driving truck, which doesn't panic, doesn't feel a fight-or-flight response, doesn't overstate the gravity of the situation... doesn't do anything except assess what to do next without emotion.

Without more context, the information here is titillating but not ultimately all that useful.

Let's generalize the content so you can see what I mean:

"A massive trove of documents was just leaked from a law firm that helps companies and individuals create and operate shell companies in [jurisdiction X]. We don't know what those shell companies are used for, but they could be used for wrongdoing! And this law firm was suspiciously focused on protecting its clients' identities, which further suggests wrongdoing."

Jurisdiction X in this case in Panama. Ok, it sounds dubious to us 'Muricans.

What if jurisdiction X was Delaware? Would you think the law firm was setting up shell companies for "wrongdoing", or because starting and operating a business is complicated and there are a variety of practical reasons to base your corporate in entities in Delaware rather than (say) Maine? Would you think the law firm is protecting its clients identities because of an effort to conduct fraud, or because law firms generally err on the side of preserving the sanctity of attorney-client privilege whenever possible?

Now let's say Jurisdiction X is Ireland. Are the companies that use Irish shell companies engaged in wrongdoing? Or are they responding to the bizarre and complicated world of international regulation and taxation as any rational actor would? Certainly secrecy is not the goal - everyone, including the IRS, knows everything about how e.g. Apple uses Irish entities to conduct business.

Now let's say Jurisdiction X is Cyprus. Are the shell companies for tax avoidance in the home country, or for the reasonable avoidance of double-taxation? One reason investment firms use structures based in Cyprus (or the Caymans, or BVI, or Luxembourg) is that these countries have mutual tax treaties with most Western nations, while the US does not. Those tax treaties ensure that the investor will end up paying taxes only in their own domicile, not the nation they invest in AND their own domicile. For US persons investing in (say) Poland through a Cyprus entity, they end up paying their full slate US taxes (NOT avoiding them - in fact they usually pay higher US taxes than they otherwise would, because for technical reasons the Cyprus blocker often results in paying ordinary income tax rates on what would otherwise be treated as capital gains) but they avoid having to pay BOTH Polish taxes AND US taxes. This is akin to the reasons why many/most private US businesses are set up as pass-through entities rather than corporations - avoiding double taxation is not the same as dodging taxes.

*

I'm not an expert on Panama, or international tax for that matter - I just have some experience dealing with these issues. So I can't say for sure in what specific purposes using a Panama entity is equivalent to using a Delaware entity or a Cyprus entity, vs. a blatant attempt to dodge taxes.

All I know is that, from my own experience, there is a huge gap between the public PERCEIVED reasons why companies and individuals establish overseas shell corporations (tax avoidance! money laundering! bribery!) and the ACTUAL reasons they do so (procedural efficiency, clear legal rules, full payment of taxes but not OVERpayment of taxes, etc.).

BayesDB and BQL are great ideas in theory. But the problem with building any "general" analysis tool to abstract away underlying complexity is that it must either be (a) a least common denominator solution, or (b) the proverbial hammer to which everything will look like a nail.

The reason why there are lots of different statistical methods is that different problems and different samples from different populations call for different approaches. And frequently the reason why a certain approach is invalid in a particular use case is subtle, difficult to explain, and easy to miss. Abstracting that complexity away from the would-be "scientist" is an invitation for them to develop unreasonable confidence in their results "because the model said so." We have more than enough of that attitude already, thank you very much.

If so, it's the cohort I see (the "survivors") that are routinely underestimated by tech bros. Which suggests the problem is even worse: if it visibly affects the best of the best, how bad is it for the average?

"With age comes experience and also comes a strengthening of biases. Older people, so the stereotype goes, are inflexible and set in their ways, if very experienced in those ways."

Like most stereotypes, it might be true in some cases but far from universal. The literal two best developers I know, both over 50, are FAR from set in their ways. They are both constantly seeking new ways of doing things, exploring new languages and technologies, sometimes playing with low level projects (like making lights blink in interesting ways on breadboards), sometimes playing with high level projects (spawning hundreds or thousands of cloud instances to see how it works), but always looking for new things.

They might SEEM set in their ways when they shoot down bad ideas from expert beginners, but that's only because the expert beginner is confusing wisdom for lack of flexibility.

This (partly) explains a major paradox I see: all the best software engineers I know are over 50, and yet the young'uns who dominate the tech zeitgeist assume these same people are incompetent dinosaurs. The young'uns have reached the expert beginner stage, and because they assume they're experts, they refuse to seek out the actual experts to discover what it is they don't know. And if the young'uns ARE the experts, and older developers aren't part of their in-group, then by definition the older developers must not be experts.

This is why I (for one) am strongly biased towards hiring older developers.

I will generalize his argument, since it's not really about MBA's:

"If you make major life decisions against your clear preference in a vague effort to please your parents, you will probably regret it."

Well you're just engaging in the tactic of discrediting the defenders. You must be one of the foreign agitators threatening the community.

Then again, the authoritarian dictator has to play up the credibility of the foreign agitators so they seem more real. I must be a member of the regime trying to consolidate power.

It's bots and sock puppets all the way down.

One simple solution would be to require employers to pay at least the workers' prior base salary for the duration they wish to enforce the non-compete. I've held senior positions where non-competes are to be expected, and that is always a standard term. Of course, the only reason it became a standard term is because people like me are represented by expensive lawyers who consistently demand it, and an Amazon warehouse worker isn't in the position to follow our lead. So the warehouse worker should be given the same protection by statute: if the employer wants to enforce a non-compete, they must do so affirmatively by paying the worker's salary (i.e. if they elect not to pay then the non-compete is automatically null and void).

Of course the odds of something like that making its way through the dysfunctional legislatures of 48 states is vanishingly low. But we can hope.

See my comment on why that is a poor example.

All the men I know who view the dating "game" as zero-sum in this way are divorced, on their way to divorce, or on their way to another marriage without having addressed any of the issues that led to their prior divorces (suggesting yet another one is in the cards down the road).

Like Joshua eventually learned, the only way to win this game is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

I'm pretty sure the premium-only airlines have all failed because (a) it's hard to start an airline, (b) there are only a few routes where there is enough demand to fill a premium-only plane (which exacerbates all kinds of issues from competition to poor gate/crew utilization to maintenance costs and so on), (c) most of the routes that could theoretically work are capacity-constrained, forcing these startups to use more remote airports (e.g. Eos flew into Stansted rather than Heathrow) which reduces their utility, and (d) did I mention that starting an airline is hard?

Other than that quibble, I enjoyed this post.

That is just... stupid. Calling out a major corporation for deceptive practices is "stirring up trouble"? A non-profit organization is supposed to be "on the same side" as some company you arbitrarily annoint as the holy one? Someone who "knows who they are" seriously believes they are "being paid" to do what they always do, shine a light on troubling events in the digital world?

Are you a t-mobile employee?

The advantage of vine-ripening is a myth, as I have discovered first-hand by growing tomatoes in a home garden. For optimal flavor, tomatoes should be picked when they have just a slight blush of color but are still almost entirely green, and then finish ripening OFF the vine. When allowed to ripen on the vine their texture and flavor suffer - they tend to taste and feel almost rotten.

The reason mass-market tomatoes taste worse, and your California tomatoes taste better, is because they are different varieties. The varieties that make it to e.g. Boston in the winter are selected to be edible after a long journey, not for flavor. The varieties that you get in San Francisco year-round are grown closer to their ultimate destination and can be selected more for flavor than for their ability to survive long journeys.

Dense cities also have higher cost per unit of infrastructure. Just think about the cost of digging up a gas line in Manhattan vs. in the suburbs.

Which effect dominates - revenue vs. cost? I don't know. But that article certainly doesn't do anything to illuminate the issue.