****ed. If. I. Know.

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.

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.

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.

Why not just give them an IQ test?

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).

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.

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 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.

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.

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...

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.

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)?

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

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)?

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.

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

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.

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.

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."

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.

Chinese manufacturing frees up American workers to do things they're better at, like playing video games and killing themselves with fentanyl.

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

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.

Trump is a moron.

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.