I know a lot of people who work at the OECD and the place is a bullshit-factory.
Do they have any specific reasons? Haven't heard that sentiment before so curious to learn something new
Readit Newsbartart commented on The average college student today hilariusbookbinder.substa... · Posted by u/Jyaif
my experience is that while data keeps growing at an exponential rate, its information content does not. In finance at least, you can easily get 100 million data points per series per day if you want everything, and you might be dealing with thousands of series. That sample rate, and the number of series, is usually 99.99% redundant, because the eigenvalues drop off almost to zero very quickly after about 10 dimensions, and often far fewer. There's very little reason to store petabytes of ticks that you will never query. It's much more reasonable in many cases to do brutal (and yes, lossy) dimensionality reduction _at ingests time_, store the first few principal components + outliers, and monitor eigenvalue stability (in case some new, previously negligable, factor, starts increasing in importance). It results in a much smaller dataset that is tractable and in many cases revelatory, because it's actually usable.
That’s very interesting, so thank you — how do you handle if the eigenvectors change over time?
I don't know that these are very good examples. The box office and newspapers have been declining for years. Companies like Apple of course have a higher revenue relative to US gdp because they can sell their products with ease to rich people all over the world, not just in the US.
It is also completely unsurprising that the internet's most viewed websites is unchanging as the industry has matured, following the pattern of every industry since the industrial revolution.
And the structure of US elections completely discourages third parties, and this is not a new thing. In Europe things are much more dynamic -- France's current president founded his own party and then won the presidency and legislature like a year later. It's also probably good that people are living closer together, ideally as densely as possible, from an environmental perspective.
bartart commented on As unions decline, inequality rises epi.org/publication/union... · Posted by u/vivekmgeorge
Moving goal posts, but yeah, Europe lacks a SV with venture capitalists raining money on every crazy idea, with Tony Stark like feudal lords pushing their minions to sleep in office with promises of free drinks and pizza, hoping to capitalize on the startup being sold.
Thankfully.
I am curious, is putting up with the occasional self-obsessed ceo not worth it?
For example Tesla has a market value greater than every European carmaker combined, having gone from approximately 0 annual car deliveries to over a million in just a few years while revolutionizing electric travel. Or with space x developing reusable rockets that have utterly transformed the industry. These companies will contribute to economic dynamism and wealth creation for years and decades.
Macron said of American space companies, “Unfortunately they’re not European, but they took a bet”. Perhaps at a certain level you need people with lots of money who are willing to risk it
bartart commented on Ask HN: Where do you escape for non-clickbait thoughtful/informational content? · Posted by u/_xivi
Ft.com is worth paying for. Especially the big read, weekend FT articles and some opinion pieces.
The big read is definitely very good https://www.ft.com/the-big-read. You can read the articles by googling any article title in a private window.
Just to give some examples, in the last week they published lengthy articles all with charts on topics as varied as a European private equity company's IPO, Ben & Jerry's activism, and tech companies shredding old memory disks.
> I'd argue the same thing about the Clinton administration and Greenspan specifically.
I'm curious, what are the things that happened during the Clinton administration that you think were short-term gains at the expense of long-term improvements? I've always felt that many of the fiscal policies of Clinton were in favor of long-term stability (e.g. specifically his tax policies and balancing the budget).
Now, with monetary policy and Greenspan specifically, I 100% agree that the "Greenspan put" was absolutely a disaster for long-term stability, but Greenspan was in office from 1987 - 2006 (originally nominated by Reagan), so I see his choices as pretty orthogonal to whoever was president at the time.
Here is an interesting article outlining some specific Clinton-era laws that were an enormous help to private equity: https://prospect.org/economy/cut-off-private-equitys-money-s...
There used to be strict leverage restrictions on funds that raised money from investors, as well as limits on who/what entities could invest in the funds. The article really goes into more detail but lawmakers and the Clinton administration eliminated these laws and birthed the modern private equity industry which is pretty much the definition of short term focus.
bartart commented on Apple Car: Bad Idea After All mondaynote.com/apple-car-... · Posted by u/spking
Apple doesn't get into low margin businesses. They get into an adjacent business. A prime example is TVs. There is no Apple TV set. There is AppleTV, a high margin add on for any TV with HDMI that makes it "just work".
They had the chance to buy a cellular carrier, but chose not to, because it's low margin. Instead they make a phone that works on any carrier.
Cars are a low margin business. But a car add-on could be a high margin business. They already have CarPlay, but I can see them making a hardware add-on for cars.
Aren't products like smartphones, laptops, desktops, etc all low-margin businesses though? At least for every other company in the market. Apple just sticks to the high end?
Porsche sells hundreds of thousands of vehicles per year with something like $20k profit per car on a $90k average selling price. There could be big demand for an innovative Tesla equivalent that didn't have so many build quality issues.
And Foxconn is desperate to get an Apple car contract. Car companies really screwed themselves by outsourcing everything to suppliers (who have much higher profit margins than the car manufacturers at this point) except the internal combustion engine which is losing importance fast. What I am seeing here for Apple is big demand, low barrier to entry, and high profits.
150K is not anywhere close to the poverty line. In fact median household income in San Francisco is 112K.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/sanfranciscocitycalifornia
Honestly this comes off pretty elitist. "Well, George, if you're not earning 400K then you're dreadfully poor!"
The low-income threshold in sf for a family of four is about $120,000. And $150,000 is not far off from that. And even more important, the extraordinary rents in sf more than outpace the higher incomes:
For example, a fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the San Francisco area is considered to be $3,121 (£2,340) per month - nearly twice the 2008 figure of $1,592 (£1,190). In Cincinnati, Ohio, the figure is $845 (£632). This difference (270%) is much larger than the difference in median family incomes (50%).
That question which the article claims is asking whether respondents are generally happy with their lives was completely misinterpreted. I had a difficult time discerning the meaning of it without seeking out the actual appendix from the PEW study. But certainly more than 2% of americans are happy in life, we're not all that depressed and stressed out.
Yeah, the actual pew summary for that question was "Germans more likely than those in other publics to say they are satisfied while offering few specifics".
It seems like the takeaway is only two percent of Americans say vague positive things when talking about what gives them life satisfaction, with many more saying specific positive things
bartart commented on October had the biggest U.S. inflation surge in more than 30 years cnbc.com/2021/11/10/consu... · Posted by u/Bostonian
It seems like this inflation is not broad-based:
“In the quarter to August used cars, hotel rooms and airfares made up less than 5% of America’s consumer-price index, but together accounted for the majority of overall inflation”
If we’re having inflation due to a tiny number of goods having large price spikes, it might be too early to predict disaster
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/11/06/a-handfu...