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Inauguration Day, Inauguration Hooooooraaay!
2017-04-23, 11:45 PM #1561
Originally posted by Jon`C:
****ed. If. I. Know.


I remember in a job interview (for 911 operator) asking if they had a high turnover and if they did, what they thought the reason was. Of course this was at a point in the interview where they asked me what questions I might have. Anyway, it was like I totally blindsided them and they couldn't really answer the question. I didn't get the job which only bothered me slightly because I didn't get chosen but not much beyond that.
"I would rather claim to be an uneducated man than be mal-educated and claim to be otherwise." - Wookie 03:16

2017-04-23, 11:50 PM #1562
Originally posted by Reverend Jones:
There are axiomatic treatments of econ that try to be "mathematical" in a more rigorous sense. Not really sure how much of a cargo cult this is, or more to the point, whether or not its worth your time to go down this road (not sure if I can emphasize this enough, don't let rigor-mortis hide the elementary utility of the theory be hidden by abstract non-sense), but I've heard good things about Ariel Rubinstein's books, which he has available for free as PDFs on his site. I've glanced through his micro book, which seems to be geared for grad students, but the prose seems to be good, and it uses precise mathematical language that you might appreciate as a mathematician.

Some other reasons I think he might be a good author:
  1. There was an Amazon reviewer who was a fan of Ayn Rand and got super pissed that he talked about his socialist views in the epilogue of one of his texts
  2. He basically thinks that economics is no more than a collection of fables, and is highly skeptical that game theory can possibly be useful, except as allegories--despite the fact that he himself is a game theorist and has published a book on game theory



Disclaimer: I don't even know econ 101, so don't listen to me. But if I had to hold my nose and learn it, this is the route I might take, with the qualification that it's worse to be fooled by fake mathematical rigor than read an econ book that uses "sloppy" math but gets all the important basics right.


Oh good, I agree very much with 1 and 2. What I see going on in this microeconomics section of the text is they're just giving you a crash course in linear optimization, though they're being quiet about all of the finicky math details, and also saying mathematically false things if read as proper mathematics (which is a low form of pedantry, but still).

Though I do appreciate the links. What's going to happen is I'll download the PDFs and put them in my to-read folder, and probably never read them, even though I want to.
2017-04-23, 11:50 PM #1563
Originally posted by Reid:
I feel like asking someone a question which embeds the K_{3,3} graph and seeing how long it will take them to realize it's impossible to embed on a plane would be a good filter. Or maybe I'm optimistic? I want to help even though I know nothing about hiring.


Why not just give them an IQ test?
2017-04-23, 11:51 PM #1564
Originally posted by Reid:
Though I do appreciate the links. What's going to happen is I'll download the PDFs and put them in my to-read folder, and probably never read them, even though I want to.


This is where there are on my computer too. In fact I put all the econ stuff in a folder called "blah".
2017-04-23, 11:54 PM #1565
The one I was talking about is on the far left of that page (no pun intended). "Lecture Notes in Microeconomic Theory: The Economic Agent". The rest are even more advanced and expect you to be 2nd year econ grad student rather than just a grad student (with the exception of the one on the far right, "Economic Fables", which seems to be more like bedtime reading).
2017-04-24, 12:07 AM #1566
Originally posted by Reverend Jones:
Why not just give them an IQ test?


Because seeing how people react to an impossible request is pretty important. If the person refuses to quit, or admit they can't solve it, or doesn't even ask question, that's a bad sign for when things get difficult.
2017-04-24, 12:08 AM #1567
Originally posted by Reverend Jones:
The one I was talking about is on the far left of that page (no pun intended). "Lecture Notes in Microeconomic Theory: The Economic Agent". The rest are even more advanced and expect you to be 2nd year econ grad student rather than just a grad student (with the exception of the one on the far right, "Economic Fables", which seems to be more like bedtime reading).


Sounds good. I don't expect it's difficult to get an undergraduate education in economics on one's own time, which I'm bombastically setting myself on that path right now.
2017-04-24, 12:10 AM #1568
Originally posted by Reid:
Because seeing how people react to an impossible request is pretty important. If the person refuses to quit, or admit they can't solve it, or doesn't even ask question, that's a bad sign for when things get difficult.


Ah, I see where you were going. The only winning move is not to play.

As a math major I may well have failed that test.
2017-04-24, 12:12 AM #1569
I like how this text spends a long time discussing comparative advantage, before using that to justify international trade. Because there's no necessary comparative advantage in manufacturing quality whether a Chinese or American factory builds your refrigerator, aside from labor costs and regulation. But there's actually not much trade restriction in the world, unlike what Trump says, so really the comparative advantage is that it's super economical to rip of Chinese workers. So like, a couple chapters in they're already slipping in justification of basically exploiting the global proletariat. I always knew economics was bad, but yeah, it's pretty interesting to read this in this mindset.
2017-04-24, 12:16 AM #1570
Originally posted by Reid:
Sounds good. I don't expect it's difficult to get an undergraduate education in economics on one's own time, which I'm bombastically setting myself on that path right now.


I just read the introduction of the book I haphazardly passed onto you. I also looked at a few pages of the undergrad book you quoted from. The biggest difference I can see between the undergrad book and the more rigorous grad level ones is that econ 101 books all give you tons of examples and problems to practice, which would be super important. Maybe even better would be to do the old "site:edu" google search for course syllabi and problem sets. But the introduction in the Rubinstein's book imparts some healthy skepticism about the assumptions of economic models, and the book is food for thought that a mathematically minded reader would be hungry for after reading a bunch of pseudo-mathematical gobbldy-gook.
2017-04-24, 12:19 AM #1571
Originally posted by Reid:
I like how this text spends a long time discussing comparative advantage, before using that to justify international trade. Because there's no necessary comparative advantage in manufacturing quality whether a Chinese or American factory builds your refrigerator, aside from labor costs and regulation. But there's actually not much trade restriction in the world, unlike what Trump says, so really the comparative advantage is that it's super economical to rip of Chinese workers. So like, a couple chapters in they're already slipping in justification of basically exploiting the global proletariat. I always knew economics was bad, but yeah, it's pretty interesting to read this in this mindset.


From Rubinstein's introduction:

Quote:
Most often, we do have in mind that the economic agent is an
individual, a person with one head, one heart, two eyes, and two ears.
However, in some economic models, an economic agent is taken to be
a nation, a family, or a parliament. At other times, the “individual”
is broken down into a collection of economic agents, each operating in
distinct circumstances, and each regarded as an economic agent.
We should not be too cheerful about the statement that an economic
agent in microeconomics is not constrained to being an individual. The
facade of generality in economic theory might be misleading. We have
to be careful and aware that when we take an economic agent to be a
group of individuals, the reasonable assumptions we might impose on it
are distinct from those we might want to impose on a single individual.
For example, although it is quite natural to talk about the will of a
person, it is not clear what is meant by the will of a group when the
members of the group differ in their preferences.
An economic agent is described in our models as a unit that responds
to a scenario called a choice problem, where the agent must make a
choice from a set of available alternatives. The economic agent appears
in the microeconomic model with a specified deliberation process he uses
to make a decision. In most of current economic theory, the deliberation
process is what is called rational choice. The agent decides what action
to take through a three-step process:

1. He asks himself, what is desirable?
2. He asks himself, what is feasible?
3. He chooses the most desirable from among the feasible alternatives.
2017-04-24, 12:22 AM #1572
So maybe the point of reading a grad level book in tandem with the undergrad econ 101 stuff is to keep in mind just where their assumptions break down and the logical train wreck exactly began.
2017-04-24, 12:26 AM #1573
OTOH maybe the point of learning basic econ is just to grasp the conceptual language that economists use, so that when you go reading their papers like Jon`C did you can spot the contradictions and taboos.
2017-04-24, 12:50 AM #1574
Forget about that book I recommended, I just skimmed it in more depth and it hardly gets you very far at all in 100+ pages of inequalities and set theoretic proofs. Unless you really care about modelling rational economic actors from scratch.
2017-04-24, 1:11 AM #1575
This sounds like good advice, contrary to my bogus book recommendation:

Quote:
Please beware that "economics" is a very dangerous subject in that the notions of "right" or "wrong" are very, very different from theoretical fields like mathematics, practical fields like engineering, or experimental fields like physics (yes, I'm aware this is perhaps overgeneralizing, but you get my point).

My practical advice to a beginner would be: Please disregard any theories in the beginning, by which I mean both rigorous microeconomic models and (especially) the narrative sort found in books for layreaders or newspapers.

Stick to data! Read a lot of data. And then some more. Also, instead of theories about the data generating processes, read their concrete definitions, what exactly do they measure (not just the general idea they're intended to capture but what exactly, like "192 vendors of banana in location X are self-reporting Y"), how are they collected, what market mechanisms exist (market microstructure), etc. Stick to the concrete and read data.

Only when you're ready to make a commitment, take a year or two off and dive into economic literature. Economics is a field where, if you don't know what's what, you will be "had" by the next plausible-sounding, impressive-looking idée du jour if you're not careful.

One has to know quite a bit to see the assumptions underlying the theories and how they influence its results, and I can tell you that the mainstream theory rests on very shaky theoretical foundations. The typical structure of economics literature is that this weak foundation is first brushed over in one sentence (usually starting with "we assume that..." and ending with "...to keep things simple/tractable/whatever"), then comes some big mathematical exercise, and then comes a very plausible-sounding discussion of the main idea that is constructed to either resonate or astonish you. there is also quite a bit of advocacy here, don't forget we're dealing with a real-world subject with somewhat fuzzy notions of "right" and "wrong", hence the incentive is there to fund/get funded for certain lines of research or results that support or refute political views.

Also, unlike in other fields, you will generally not find that the "best" economists naturally emerge in brand-name departments, like Harvard or MIT. It's very political. In my own opinion, the better thinkers are found on the fringes, perhaps with "official" specializations in physics or sociology or psychology and not officially branded "economists" at all!

So stick to data, you will know more than most branded economists and you can't go wrong, after all, the data is the data... ;)
2017-04-24, 3:01 PM #1576
Originally posted by Reid:
I like how this text spends a long time discussing comparative advantage, before using that to justify international trade. Because there's no necessary comparative advantage in manufacturing quality whether a Chinese or American factory builds your refrigerator, aside from labor costs and regulation. But there's actually not much trade restriction in the world, unlike what Trump says, so really the comparative advantage is that it's super economical to rip of Chinese workers. So like, a couple chapters in they're already slipping in justification of basically exploiting the global proletariat. I always knew economics was bad, but yeah, it's pretty interesting to read this in this mindset.


Chinese manufacturing frees up American workers to do things they're better at, like playing video games and killing themselves with fentanyl.
2017-04-24, 3:01 PM #1577
Basically you're on the right track so far, Reid.
2017-04-24, 4:52 PM #1578
So I get that SV startup acquisitions are analogous to the purchase of capital by primary industry, and that founders are like line managers.

But... why do they insist on laying out the floorplan of their office to literally resemble a 19th century factory? Who in their right mind would want to work at Uber (shown below)?

2017-04-24, 4:56 PM #1579
Originally posted by Reverend Jones:
So I get that SV startup acquisitions are analogous to the purchase of capital by primary industry, and that founders are like line managers.

But... why do they insist on laying out the floorplan of their office to literally resemble a 19th century factory? Who in their right mind would want to work at Uber (shown below)?



because they ~don't give a ****~.

Edit: I mean, cubicles happened in the first place because cubicle walls were considered furniture, and the government gave businesses advantageous depreciation rules for furniture vs. physical walls. Companies switched over to cubicles knowing they were worse for productivity, but the tax benefit was worth more than the loss. Since then it's been an operations-led downhill circlejerk of uncritically pushing open concept offices to their radical limit, in order to cram the most furniture possible into a space containing the least fixed capital. Companies like Facebook and Uber, on the other hand, are basically little kids playing make-believe, copying what GE did 40 years ago for tax reasons and misattributing it all to revolutionary managerial competence. And the only reason they do it is because they don't actually give a **** about learning what's actually best for their business and their industry and doing it right.


Edit 2:
Quote:
Who in their right mind would want to work at Uber (shown below)?


Also, seriously though, a poor office is probably the least bad thing about Uber. They are shady AF. If the US government bothered prosecuting businessmen anymore, they'd be in for a rough time.
2017-04-24, 5:00 PM #1580
Apparently Uber is a horrible company anyway.
Looks like we're not going down after all, so nevermind.
2017-04-24, 5:03 PM #1581
Originally posted by Reverend Jones:
So I get that SV startup acquisitions are analogous to the purchase of capital by primary industry, and that founders are like line managers.

But... why do they insist on laying out the floorplan of their office to literally resemble a 19th century factory? Who in their right mind would want to work at Uber (shown below)?


It makes me ill to think about working there. Can they rent out the space under their desk to live in?
Epstein didn't kill himself.
2017-04-24, 5:12 PM #1582
Originally posted by Krokodile:
Apparently Uber is a horrible company anyway.


Their business model is to run on huge losses now as a wager on the prospect that they will some day attain a monopoly, automize their cars and hike their prices to start making a ton of money.

I don't even know if that's true, but I read it somewhere.
Looks like we're not going down after all, so nevermind.
2017-04-24, 5:17 PM #1583
Originally posted by Krokodile:
Their business model is to run on huge losses now as a wager on the prospect that they will some day attain a monopoly, automize their cars and hike their prices to start making a ton of money.

I don't even know if that's true, but I read it somewhere.


Selling your services at a loss in order to drive out competition is called dumping, and it is illegal. But in addition they also evade collecting service taxes, ignore labor standards and transit industry regulations, and they use their analytics platform to obstruct government investigations into their business practices. Uber's only competitive advantage is the fact that they willfully violate any law they consider inconvenient, something that would never be tolerated if done by a traditional taxi service.

I don't call Uber a "criminal enterprise" for kicks, y'all. Uber is literally organized crime.
2017-04-24, 5:26 PM #1584
They'll crack down on Silk Road for facilitating and intermediating the purchase of illegal services, but Uber gets a pass. Sure. Maybe Silk Road should have paid Eric Holder a retainer, too.
2017-04-24, 5:41 PM #1585
Jon's comments inspired me to pick up the copy of DeMarco and Lister's Peopleware I'd checked out from the library. They talk about a metric which measures the amount of time an engineer or designer can be in the "flow" state of mind, called the "E-Factor", defined as Uninterrupted Hours / Body-Present-Hours. Basically, if you spend 30% of your time working alone, 50% working with a co-worker, and 20% in a group of three or more, then an open office plan consequently results in a very low E-Factor for everybody in the shared area, since at any given time at least one interruption is occurring.

They also site an IBM study, which was "designed by the architect Gerald McCue with the assistance of IBM area managers."†

Apparently, the study found that "the minimum accommodation for the mix of people slated to occupy the new space would be the following:

  • 100 square feet of dedicated space per worker
  • 30 square feet of work surface per person
  • Noise protection in the form of enclosed offices or 6 foot-high partitions (they ended up with about half of all professional personnel in enclosed one- and two-person offices)"


Jon's remark about switching to cubicles to save money on taxes is at once amusing, sad, and completely unsurprising.

† G. McCue, "IBM's Santa Teresa Laboratory," IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1978), pp. 320-41
2017-04-24, 5:46 PM #1586
Originally posted by Jon`C:
I don't call Uber a "criminal enterprise" for kicks, y'all. Uber is literally organized crime.


If the conduct and character of their CEO is any indication, this would not be surprising in the least.
2017-04-25, 5:51 AM #1587
http://time.com/4753613/united-dragging-police-reports-dao/

Quote:
Police Reports Blame United Passenger for Injuries He Sustained While Dragged Off Flight
Joseph Hincks

Dr. David Dao, whose forcible removal from an overbooked United Airlines flight unleashed a PR maelstrom for the carrier, was "aggressive" and "flailing his arms" as he fought with officers. That's according to incident reports filed by the Chicago aviation officers who dragged him from the plane.

The reports, released on Monday in response to Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Los Angeles Times and others, show that the officers portrayed a significantly different version of events from those depicted in videos Dao's fellow passengers filmed on their cellphones.


Here are the actual reports.

Quote:
The incident reports reveal for the first time the names of the four officers involved in the incident, and they contradict cellphone videos viewed by millions of people worldwide. The reports were released Monday in response to Freedom of Information Act requests by the Los Angeles Times and others.


It's almost like US authorities protect corporate interests to the detriment of citizens' legal rights. Just some more bad apples, I guess.
Looks like we're not going down after all, so nevermind.
2017-04-25, 7:06 PM #1588
Quote:
President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he did not fear a trade war with Canada because of the trade dynamics between the two neighbours.

"They have a tremendous surplus with the United States, whenever they have a surplus I have no fear," Trump said during a White House meeting with farmers. "We have massive trade deficits, so when we're the country with trade deficits, we have no fear."


The Canada-US deficit is because Canada sells low-value-add materials to the US, which adds value and exports them worldwide (including back to Canada).

Trump is a moron.
2017-04-25, 7:43 PM #1589
Another problem with a US-Canada trade war is that, while Canada is overall not that important a market to the US overall, it is a strategic market for many specific US exports.

For example, if Canada banned US plastics and paper board, it would make Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell unelectable.
2017-04-25, 9:37 PM #1590
Fun news: just recently it wad found out that the creator of /r/theredpill, a PUA ****hole on reddit, is a Republican lawmaker.
2017-04-25, 9:46 PM #1591
“Rape isn’t an absolute bad, because the rapist probably likes it a lot. I think he’d say it’s quite good, really.” — Rep.Robert Fisher (R-NH)
2017-04-25, 9:47 PM #1592
Though he stated he “doesn’t advocate breaking the law,” Fisher said online in 2012 that a 40-year-old man asking to see the breasts of a 15-year-old wasn’t creepy. Instead, he said it was “evolutionarily advantageous and perfectly natural.”

Of course, being a rapist or condoning rape doesn't seem to be a problem to conservative Christians.
2017-04-25, 9:52 PM #1593
I wonder if there is a Dark Forces II subreddit, and if so, who would start such a thing.
2017-04-25, 9:53 PM #1594
Wtf 444 subscribers
2017-04-25, 10:02 PM #1595
Why does "evolutionary advantageous" trump all other conception of morality? That is taking the idea of conservativism to a whole new level.

Also, why can't they also apply this logic to conservation? It seems evolutionary advantageous to have a habitat to be alive in.
2017-04-25, 11:47 PM #1596
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2017/04/25/as-barry-ritholtz-says-its-awesome-being-poor-today/#7213192d3b56

Let them eat thinkpieces!
2017-04-26, 12:05 AM #1597
Originally posted by Reverend Jones:
Why does "evolutionary advantageous" trump all other conception of morality? That is taking the idea of conservativism to a whole new level.

Also, why can't they also apply this logic to conservation? It seems evolutionary advantageous to have a habitat to be alive in.


I feel like you're missing a very important point.

They are stupid.
2017-04-27, 3:33 PM #1598
Originally posted by Jon`C:
Chinese manufacturing frees up American workers to do things they're better at, like playing video games and killing themselves with fentanyl.


and making the hottest new Pepes on 4chan to trigger cucks.
2017-04-27, 3:37 PM #1599
Originally posted by Reverend Jones:
Jon's comments inspired me to pick up the copy of DeMarco and Lister's Peopleware I'd checked out from the library. They talk about a metric which measures the amount of time an engineer or designer can be in the "flow" state of mind, called the "E-Factor", defined as Uninterrupted Hours / Body-Present-Hours. Basically, if you spend 30% of your time working alone, 50% working with a co-worker, and 20% in a group of three or more, then an open office plan consequently results in a very low E-Factor for everybody in the shared area, since at any given time at least one interruption is occurring.

They also site an IBM study, which was "designed by the architect Gerald McCue with the assistance of IBM area managers."†

Apparently, the study found that "the minimum accommodation for the mix of people slated to occupy the new space would be the following:

  • 100 square feet of dedicated space per worker
  • 30 square feet of work surface per person
  • Noise protection in the form of enclosed offices or 6 foot-high partitions (they ended up with about half of all professional personnel in enclosed one- and two-person offices)"


Jon's remark about switching to cubicles to save money on taxes is at once amusing, sad, and completely unsurprising.

† G. McCue, "IBM's Santa Teresa Laboratory," IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1978), pp. 320-41


Yeah, seeing as I'm poor as **** (literally, grad school is a huge step up for me moneywise), I have to live with roommates, which makes studying anything very hard, because isolation is impossible. I'd suspect that these environments are far less productive.

Originally posted by Jon`C:
Selling your services at a loss in order to drive out competition is called dumping, and it is illegal. But in addition they also evade collecting service taxes, ignore labor standards and transit industry regulations, and they use their analytics platform to obstruct government investigations into their business practices. Uber's only competitive advantage is the fact that they willfully violate any law they consider inconvenient, something that would never be tolerated if done by a traditional taxi service.

I don't call Uber a "criminal enterprise" for kicks, y'all. Uber is literally organized crime.


Why hasn't the taxi industry lobbied harder to stop it?
2017-04-27, 3:39 PM #1600
Originally posted by Jon`C:
Trump is a moron.


Ah, the words that so many people don't seem to get. People always seemed to focus on all sorts of other things, but you can really understand who Trump is by just understanding this. He's truly just a moron who learned how to get away with bullying, there's literally nothing else you need to know about who he is.

The sad part is, he successfully played U.S. media outlets.

Originally posted by Reverend Jones:
Why does "evolutionary advantageous" trump all other conception of morality? That is taking the idea of conservativism to a whole new level.

Also, why can't they also apply this logic to conservation? It seems evolutionary advantageous to have a habitat to be alive in.


Like Jon says, it helps to realize that like 80% of people are literally incapable of self reflection.
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