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acslater00 commented on Profit-Price Spiral: Excess Profits Fuelling Inflation, Not Wages   futurework.org.au/post/pr... · Posted by u/bacheaul
acslater00 · 3 years ago
Fake news.

This is a measure of where inflation "goes", not what fuels inflation. The narrative that profits are "fueling" inflation is completely made up and the people pushing it are lying to everyone for political reasons.

Inflation is caused - in most countries - by excessively loose monetary policy (sometimes fiscal policy, sometimes both). If government policy creates inflation (average prices go up) that money can flow to a domestic labor or domestic investors or leave the country. This depends on supply-side factors that are basically orthogonal to the inflation question. It is true that in the most recent round of inflation it primarily led to increased corporate profits.

There is a theory from the 80s called the wage-price spiral [Blanchard] that talks about how inflation (which is initially caused by fiscal or monetary policy) can become self-sustaining if wages and prices are set in a staggered back-and-forth kind of way, as workers react to higher prices by demanding raises, and firms react to higher labor costs by raising prices. However, there is no serious theory that such a process would happen with profits. That makes no sense at all! The exact opposite would be true, if anything. High profits in some time period would likely regress to the mean as price competition sets in. In fact, this is exactly what is happening right now, as corporate profits after spiking over the past 12 months are shrinking.

The "profit-price spiral" narrative is being pushed by the same disingenous idiots pushing the "greedflation" narrative - it is not a serious attempt to explain inflation, it is an attempt to use reasonable-sounding economics words to blame inflation on companies instead of the actual culprit: governments that overstimulated their economies to such a degree that they caused both inflation and profits to spike.

acslater00 commented on Lyft’s plan to take control of its maps and its future   lyft.com/rev/posts/lyfts-... · Posted by u/edward
DoctorOW · 3 years ago
This is yet another "We found a community project providing us with billions of dollars in free work but don't find it worth the effort to contribute anything back"
acslater00 · 3 years ago
Lyft contributed essentially everything back to OSM
acslater00 commented on Lyft’s plan to take control of its maps and its future   lyft.com/rev/posts/lyfts-... · Posted by u/edward
bri3d · 3 years ago
Does anyone know if Lyft plan to contribute their map corrections back to OSM? They mention other companies doing so in this blog post, but don't make it clear whether or not they, too, intend to.

I'm curious to see how good Lyft Maps is, too. Uber Maps is, frankly, a disaster in my area, frequently suggesting illegal and/or impossible turns. I try to submit map feedback every trip (very hard as a rider, as most forms of available feedback seem to be to punish the driver rather than the platform), and it's still never been fixed. Most drivers seem to use Google Maps or Waze instead and if I see a driver using Uber Maps, I need to watch the trip and suggest several corrections. Ironically, I'm only a few miles from the office where most Uber Maps staff used to work.

acslater00 · 3 years ago
Yes - Lyft contributed the overwhelming majority of the new data back into OSM. The only exceptions were layers that didn't meet OSM community standards for various technical reasons.

Source - I led this team

acslater00 commented on Alex Honnold: The Soloist VR   thesoloist-vr.com/... · Posted by u/iamwil
acslater00 · 4 years ago
might buy an Oculus just for this
acslater00 commented on Wealthy use debt to buy future cash flow everyone else uses debt to buy stuff (2020)   themdpreneur.com/purchase... · Posted by u/themdpreneur
acslater00 · 5 years ago
Article is half correct. It’s true that major consumption purchases (nice house, nice car) are better thought of as liabilities not assets. But the investment story here suffers from what I’ve heard someone call the “my portfolio is 3 car washes in downtown Omaha” problem.

Long story short: this is actually not the best way to accumulate investment returns. The numbers in the post are not just realistic. Small $ private equity investments (that’s what this is) often lose money when costs are properly accounted for, especially if you include the value of time. And if you pay someone to manage the asset (rental property manager for example) it eats your return.

My dad once came into possession of a coin operated laundromat. It was exciting for a while. I’d go with him down to the laundromat and we’d pick up the quarters and do inventory. We bought a coin counter on eBay to make it go faster. Eventually we did the math and realized the business barely broke even, and was occupying 20% of his professional attention. He shut it down after 3 months and sold off the equipment.

Anyway you can make these kinds of businesses work but it’s a grind, not a free lunch. You’re better off with ETFs or a good dividend stock.

acslater00 commented on Mount Everest is visible from Kathmandu for first time in living memory   snowbrains.com/everest-vi... · Posted by u/ProAm
TeMPOraL · 6 years ago
COPD + COVID sounds like a death sentence, so if I suffered from it, I too would avoid hospitals (and anyone else) like the literal plague.
acslater00 · 6 years ago
I can't speak for COPD but I'm very familiar with a different chronic pulmonary disease (Cystic Fibrosis), and it seems to _strangely_ not be a huge risk factor for poor COVID outcomes.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S156919932...

No one really has a good story for why (and it may not hold) but it seems to be consistent with the idea that the most important variable is truly just age.

acslater00 commented on Mount Everest is visible from Kathmandu for first time in living memory   snowbrains.com/everest-vi... · Posted by u/ProAm
acslater00 · 6 years ago
It's amazing and wonderful how much environmental damage seems to be recovering. Air pollution is down, carbon emissions are down as much as 17%, fish and sharks are repopulating shorelines and beaches - and to think, all it took was the most severe public health crisis in 100 years, a catastrophic global recession, and an overpowering wave of human misery and death
acslater00 commented on Tech salaries are risk premiums   phildini.dev/tech-salarie... · Posted by u/mooreds
rahimnathwani · 6 years ago
Tech salaries aren't risk premia:

If tech salaries were risk premia, you would expect the expected value (weighted average over all foreseeable futures) of compensation packages at startups to be higher than those at established tech giants. This might be true, but it doesn't seem obvious: there are often comments on HN doubting the claims of high packages at tech giants, suggesting the commenters aren't getting paid more at their more risky (p(fired | laid off | shutdown)) jobs.

Software engineering salaries are high because there's competition for the 'best' software engineers. In a competitive hiring market, the absolute upper cap on compensation is the marginal contribution of an additional engineer, less some percentage to account for uncertainties. That marginal contribution is high at the largest tech companies, so salaries are high. Other companies can either pay high, too or, if they can't use a software engineer as efficiently (e.g. because they don't get as much leverage from software, or if their engineering is poorly managed), they won't be willing to pay the market rate.

acslater00 · 6 years ago
Correct, the author is describing the effect of a competitive, liquid talent market. The other dynamic he correctly identified was asymmetry in switching costs (cheap for me to quit my job and go work at Google, expensive for Google if I quit and leave some project in the lurch). But he didn't call it this, and it's not a risk premium per se.
acslater00 commented on San Francisco Spent a Decade Being Rich, Important, and Hating Itself   buzzfeednews.com/scottluc... · Posted by u/smadge
ericd · 6 years ago
Thing is, it doesn't need to be skyscrapers to house vastly more people than it does, it just needs to be 5 story walkups. And SV is currently one long stretch of strip malls, open air parking lots, and single story ranch homes with sad little yards.
acslater00 · 6 years ago
> and single story ranch homes with sad little yards

This is so spot-on it literally pains me

acslater00 commented on Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax   nytimes.com/2019/04/29/us... · Posted by u/Cbasedlifeform
acslater00 · 7 years ago
It doesn’t matter if corporations pay taxes because the money just flows to people who own equity in or work for those corporations, and they pay taxes.

u/acslater00

KarmaCake day1569November 13, 2010
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