It is a concern that this could simply reflect changing naming conventions for private funds. There is nothing that requires a fund to use the "Fund I" convention.
Would it be possible to confirm the trend using Form ADV instead of Form D filings?
Readit NewsBlandDuck commented on It is worth it to buy the fast CPU blog.howardjohn.info/post... · Posted by u/ingve
I think you're maybe underestimating the aggregate cost of totally unconstrained hardware/travel spending across tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, and overestimating the benefits. There need to be some limits or speedbumps to spending, or a handful of careless employees will spend the moon.
Scaling cuts both ways. You may also be underestimating the aggregate benefits of slight improvements added up across hundreds or thousands of employees.
For a single person, slight improvements added up over regular, e.g., daily or weekly, intervals compound to enormous benefits over time.
XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1205/
BlandDuck commented on Is economics education fit for the 21st century? rethinkeconomics.org/reso... · Posted by u/pramodbiligiri
Marginal thinking is useful on the demand side (that's what the marginal revolution was about). But it makes absolutely zero sense on the supply side: for pretty much every business, upfront costs dwarf marginal cost of production. Think of most businesses: the salaries are negotiated in advance, you must order stuff to your suppliers before you can sell them and all the CapEx is spent before you can use the productive capital. The cost of producing one more item with what you already have paid (inputs+workers+capital) is pretty much zero.
What makes sense if working on average costs, and that's why it's the metric that is being used by every real companies out there.
But then you can't show the nice graphic showing supply and demand curves nicely crossing each other at the equilibrium price anymore…
Economists should have ditched Ricardo's view of the supply side long ago like they did for the demand side (labor theory of value was crap and was rightly abandoned).
Standard theories of production clearly distinguish between fixed and variable costs. Moreover, it is well understood that this distinction depends on the time horizon, with more costs being variable for longer horizons.
Moreover, concepts like economics of scale (with low marginal costs of producing an additional unit, as you state as an example) are well understood for certain products in certain circumstances.
The distinction between and relevance of average and marginal costs is taught in undergraduate classes.
Whether or not you can draw a nice diagram of supply and demand is pretty irrelevant for professional economists and our understanding of markets, their dynamics, and equilibria.
I judge technical explanations of audio gear by their description of balanced signals. A common error is to focus on the positive and negative signals having opposite polarity, which is entirely irrelevant for canceling out interference (it may improve headroom, but what is actually important for eliminating common mode noise is to have identical impedance with respect to ground).
I would say this text fails this test, which gives me pause. The description is: "The two conductors carry the same signal, but with reverse polarity (meaning that one conductor carries a signal that is the mirror image of the other). If external noise and interference enters the cable, it will probably affect both conductors equally."
BlandDuck commented on See how a dollar would have grown over the past 94 years [pdf] newyorklifeinvestments.co... · Posted by u/mooreds
Not comparing apples to apples, though. Those government bonds were, by any reasonable measurement, risk free (EDIT: as another commenter noted, not exactly, we could call them "minimal risk"), while "the market" is not.
Looking back in hindsight is always risk-free, though, which can lead to faulty conclusions.
Exactly, if it had been obvious at the time that "the market" would deliver a better return, for certain, then nobody would have bought bonds at those prices.
Then bond prices would have declined (and their expected returns or interest rate would have increased) until, in equilibrium, the anticipation was that the stocks and bonds would deliver comparable expected risk-adjusted returns.
BlandDuck commented on See how a dollar would have grown over the past 94 years [pdf] newyorklifeinvestments.co... · Posted by u/mooreds
"Estimate of the remaining time before universe decays expected to be revised 10^76 times before its finally over"
(conservatively assuming the estimate will be revised about once every hundred years as we learn more).
BlandDuck commented on Rams is a documentary portrait of Dieter Rams (2018) hustwit.com/rams... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11
As someone who read quite a bit about Rams and what he has done, what football teams are named after him or not would probably go pretty far down on the list of stuff I'd like to know.
If anything, this makes the documentary sound even better in my head, as then they haven't wasted run time on useless details that aren't about his philosophy of design or him as a person.
You may want to look up the words "rams" (plural of "ram") and "humor" in an english dictionary.
I always found this statement to be rather wishful. Individual lowering of prices makes sense if and only if your competitor is capable of saturating the market. Otherwise, demand elasticity becomes very relevant. Sure, your competitor may take the larger share of the market, but then you can compensate with higher per item profit.
The common wisdom is that in properly functional markets there's enough supply with n-1 market participants, therefore given a market signal of one participant lowering their prices the last one standing without lowering prices gets kicked out of the market, making maintaining prices the losing move. Yet, if the rest of the market does not react to the signal, the one lowering their prices hurts their profits and possibly kicks themselves out of the market. Making price maintenance, and depending on elasticity maybe even jacking of prices, the winning move in the presence of this signal.
Turns out the probability of either move being the winning move is dependent on probability of other market participants colluding/defecting. However, since lowering the prices hurts the profit a rational market participant would conclude that the rest of the market is inclined, even if a little bit, not to lower their prices in reaction given price cutting signal and similarly a bit more inclined to raise the prices given price hike signal.
You should check the distinction between Bertrand and Cournot competition. Bertrand competition is price competition where the competitor can saturate the market, as you mention. Cournot competition, on the other hand, captures your intuition of competition on quantities rather than prices.