Why aren't other companies doing the same thing to compete against them, then?

Fair point.

For what it's worth, I read that competing mutual funds traditionally took a more expensive approach to manually picking stocks according to analysts recommendations, whereas simply letting a simple formula pick an ETF turns out to be just as good. Apparently other mutual funds have begun to consider the cheaper more straightforward approach, but by now they have lost a lot of market share to Vanguard, which was able to offer much cheaper rates. That sounds a lot like an example of a market which actually turns out to be working like it should in this case.

Also in defense of Vanguard, I hear John Bogle praised in the same breath as Buffet and Graham, among folks who despise stock brokers as shady middlemen conferring very dubious benefits.

One of my RRSPs is 100% in Vanguard index funds. It's not because I sought out Vanguard funds, it's because the group RRSP vendor didn't offer non-Vanguard index funds. Ain't that a tad fishy?

Yes, that is strange.

I don't see that as a bias?



What's unproductive about teaching, or science? If anything I read a ****load of bias in what you're saying right here, because you're basically saying any career that depends on government funding is "unproductive".





How are they problematic? What exactly is wrong about saying the structure of society is ultimately economically regressive?

Damn, no jobs for mathematicians at Valve.



#triggered

The funny thing is, the entire silly mythos the religious right holds about the founding of the United States is as often as false as the "alternative facts" of the alt-right that the more moderate Republicans have distanced themselves from. Though in some ways saying "America was founded as a Christian nation" is not false, it's just that the people who use that quote don't know enough to know what exactly that means, instead believing the Constitution is somehow infused with their religious views.

Well, when not reduced to code monkey status, they're called programmers (C.S. is applied math, programming is C.S. + domain knowledge).

The most important figures in early computer science and programming were originally mathematicians.

Like, IIRC, separation of church and state exists as a doctrine because none of the states would ratify the constitution if it gave any of the other state's majority Christian sects more power. So they had to promise each state that the newly founded federal government would not push any one sect. So as a doctrine it existed to appease sectarians, not out of some lofty ideal about all religions being treated fairly. Not that it's a bad reading, but the founding of America has more to do with people being pissy about which of their exact Christian beliefs will dictate policy than true secularism of any sort.

Color me surprised that a group of people who twist the gospel for ends directly contrary to Christ's actual teachings misrepresented a part of our culture heritage for selfish convenience.

I know that's true of Donald Knuth (thanks for linking that Youtube bio, btw, I watched (listened to) the entirety of it). But I was more joking that you can't study higher homotopy theory then get a job selling digital crap to neckbeards, which I think is Steam's primary market. Which is why I probably won't study category theory, despite being interested in it.

To be fair, Puritan society was founded on the doctrine that every man should be free to practice his oppressive religion freely (after having been shown the boot when they tried the exact same **** in the Netherlands following their exodous from England).

You will do basic category theory anyway if you go far enough in algebra if only as a convenient generalized language to describe what is already clear from the concrete example from algebra.

As for programming, you don't need to know too much about linear logic to take advantage of Rust's memory model, or know category theory to use ML's type system, or know a ton of logic to use prolog. But you probably won't be using math to come up with new such things if math isn't on your radar when you try to invent new **** in software from scratch, although to be fair most of that stuff was already done by the late 70s.

If you want a job at valve and appreciate what they do, a simple guess says that you should probably learn how to program using linear algebra and computer graphics before expecting topology to pay off. Also, knowing probability, calculus, and combinatorics also is helpful pretty much in anything anywhere in life no matter what.

Who `ya calling a neckbeard?

One thing I noticed from those recordings is that Knuth only makes eye contact about 10% of the time. I guess he's pretty well re-purposed his visual and spatial faculties for abstract stuff and doesn't like those neural circuits to be thrown off by facial cues.

Joke: How do you find the extroverted mathematician from the group?

S/he will be looking at the other person's shoes.

.

This is fun because when i was a kid I remember being confused because people told me that if we became a communist country that they would make people who weren't my family live in my house, and I couldn't figure out why all of the young adults I knew had roommates. And now the sharing economy has taken that to a whole new level, somehow as a bulwark against communism.

Is it a symptom of late-stage capitalism when people are starting companies solely/almost singularly-purposed for the hope of being acquired by another, much much larger company? Genuine question

I also can't help but wonder if it gets to the point where they give them offers they "can't refuse", and proceed to destroy them should they refuse to sell out. Say, by litigating patent infringement, etc. I am sure something like this has happened already.

Shockingly, no. It's the same thing as manufacturing capital (tools/machines) for the primary and secondary sectors.

The "capital" of the quaternary sector is a productive team of engineers, or a ready-made audience. The fact that we're talking about teams and intellectual property changes the terminology and the legal structure of the arrangement; the venture capitalists are the manufacturers, and the startup founders are the line managers - but that linguistic shift doesn't change what's really happening.

The real symptom of late-stage capitalism is the fact that quaternary capital manufacturing is the only type of business being started.

Jon, where did you learn everything you know about economics?

Yes, Jon, where DID you learn everything you know about economics? Huh?

Are you asking him how he obviously learned about it from people and books, or that he tell you which ones?

I used to be a pro-globalism pro-capitalist who didn't really know or care much about economics beyond maintaining that grade school orthodoxy. Then I took university Econ courses from a neoliberal faculty. Being exposed to neoliberal thought, and analyzing their arguments, drastically changed my opinion about the subject. Far from being indoctrinated into their cult of thought, I realized that their ideas imply a lot of very bad things but nobody wanted to talk about them.

Since then, I've simply been a lot more interested and competent in the subject. It makes economic papers and publications much more accessible, especially when it comes to filtering out the bull**** (e.g. The Economist's conclusions about pretty much anything)

This is pretty funny, because I was about to make another post in which I would sarcastically pretend that actually, Jon could only have been brainwashed by 'liberals' in public school.

I was just making fun of his question a bit. I'm actually highly envious of Jon's speed reading skills.

What can you recommend I read? I've seen only your typical 101 supply curve stuff.

I believe this is wear he recommends some gigantic or dense book. This has all happened here before and this will all happen here again.

That's alright, I can handle that.

The weird part is when you get a political movement which bashes 'liberal brainwashing' in public schools, and which also happens to rally around conserving a neoliberal system that the very school system they bash is propagating.

But I guess made up cultural issues are more tantalizing than (not cartoon) economics.

Whether you plan to handle it or wear the gigantic book, I recommend buying a book bag instead.

You need to understand and be able to reason about the 101 supply curve stuff, and the 102 policy stuff, until you can really learn about anything else.

Once you understand the language, you can research pretty much anything that interests you. It doesn't really matter. Economics is a social science concerned with how humans cooperate together, and you can read pretty much any subject from an economic perspective if you choose to do so.

time is a flat circle

Oh man, I can't handle those big books full of words. I hope there's something like a booklet conveying most of this stuff in pictures.

Perhaps some sort of manifesto?

You could actually do worse than read The Principles of Communism by Engels. It is an easy 13 page read, much of which discusses the changing living conditions at the dawn of capitalism as told by someone who was alive to witness them.

Oh darn, I was going to recommend the book of mormon since the mormons tried communism for a while but then gave up and went full capitalists, with a (semi) brief period of theocracy.

Seriously, read it.

Once you're done, if you find yourself wondering why Marx and Engels had the same complaints about capitalism in the 1840s that we have today, but for some reason our parents and grandparents thought it was just swell, then you should read Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a billion pages of terse French which discusses in exhaustive detail exactly why capitalism didn't suck so bad after WW2 ended.

Spoiler alert: It's because WW2 temporarily destroyed capitalism. The proletariat class only started to re-emerge in the late 1970s.

Oh is that why the 70s was the peak of western civilization and we have been circling the drain and producing superficial gains since then?

Oh wait but technology

Yeah, I bet your moon rockets have gotten way better since then

That was surprisingly astute, never before read any of the distinction between communists and socialists, and I can't think of a better way to describe the divide between the alt-right (reactionary socialists) versus bourgeois socialists (partisan democrats i.e. wealthy clinton supporters)