...what has happened so fundamentally in our country (US) where people don't care about actual citizenship, and protecting our borders?
If you are here in this country illegally, you have criminally trespassed. You should be deported.
That is the current law.
I don't know the current law and if what type of deportation it prescribes, but a few key questions are: (1) is the law being applied correctly? (2) is the law the one that "the people" want? and (3) if "the people" don't want the current laws, how do they change them?
I would suggest considering the parallel between these prank calls and the civil disobedience that Rosa Parks and many others performed in the Civil Rights era. We might get to different answers, but I hope we can agree on the questions.
This looks like a creative re-telling of a story from ~6 years ago, which pleasantly linked to a good explanation of how algorithmic pricing leads to these oddities.
This feels like a joke. This is a joke right? Because the value proposition, besides creating controversy, doesn't make sense. It seems like they're offering to solve information asymmetries, when supply differs from demand. But this creates new problems.
Landlords Now need to figure out when to close their auction to get the maximal volume of the best tenants paying the best prices. How do I even think about that?
Renters need to figure out on which rentals to bid. It seems like bids are binding - are they not? Is there conditional bidding and Rentberry is solving so complex logic problem? Or combinatoric bidding where renters can win only one item?
I'm somewhat new to the industry, but my understanding is that there aren't copyright protections for fonts. So that won't work. However there is trademark protections, and the standard there is confusion.
If consumers think Googe and Google are affiliated then Googe might be in trouble.
I'm an economist; I recently finished my PhD and am now working in the tech industry.
I am hugely in favor of UBI. I think of it in 3 ways:
Is it doable?
Yes, of course. Existing social programs are very costly, and this will replace many of them. Furthermore, there are a lot of profits that have been created by technology in the last 50 years. And yet work weeks have increased, and many people have a lower quality of life than before. You might ask why this is. I'll give you a hint: the answer isn't population growth.
What is the cost?
Social disruption in the short term. Probably a cost to some or many very wealthy individuals. New regulations are required, but these may be less in total than existing regulations.
What is the benefit?
Many. Increased social stability. A simpler social safety net for one. A promise that each individual will be better off as technology improves and jobs may be destroyed.
That last piece I believe to be very important. The looming driverless car revolution has highlighted the risk of technology: jobs lost there have no promise of replacements.
I don't want to condone or condemn these actions, but it just seems like a low-hanging fruit. If someone could do their job much more effectively at such a low cost (who reads the ToS anyways), is it surprising that they'd do this?
No, game theory tells us that sociopaths do well in a society that is primarily composed of non-sociopaths, but do not do so well in a society where they are the majority (and that society also doesn't do well as a whole).
Please check your source on this, I do not think you can conclude that based on game theory, or even a reasonable application of game theory. Alternatively, how do you reach this conclusion?
It's not impossible to know the impact, see regression discontinuity for an example. The issue is effectiveness. Do we want to save some people now and learn less, or save lots of people later but risk some now?
...[you need to] recognize his base assumptions from his math, or you're still not qualified to check his math.
As an economist, I want to reiterate that point.
That said, I wouldn't take the article at face value. Look at how they describe 'unaccepted research practice.' Playing devil's advocate, splitting research into smaller publishable piece makes sense if you want to get it out as quickly as possible. Or their statement about checking the contents of work cited? Do they mean ensuring that works cited are correct? Because that's ridiculous, no one can do that. Or do they mean glancing at the work cited? Because that's equally ridiculous.
It's a little more complicated than that. The issue is match quality between workers and firms. Match quality increases over a worker's tenure at a firm (as they learn the systems / practices / whatever). To better model the issue you'll want to include training costs and long term contracts.
For example, it won't work out if a firm trains workers and then those workers just find better jobs, so one solution is long term contracts. Long term contracts may be forbidden, so firms need other ways to retain workers who they've spent a lot of money to train. Anti-poaching rules may be another solution.
I'm not saying implicit anti-poaching agreements are good, but it's not a black and white issue.
An `irrational' person would answer (Yes, No, Yes), or (No, Yes, No).
Actually those answers could be perfectly rational depending on how hungry you are, how much cash is in your wallet, and which fast food restaurants are within walking distance.
I'm not sure if you're being pedantic, I'll assume you're not. Yes, that's true, rationality (complete and transitive preferences) is different from what they're testing. They're saying inconsistent without providing a baseline. The example I gave is one equating rationality to having a monotonic marginal utility for wealth gains, which is a pretty weak assumption as economics goes, I think it's weaker than the example given in the news article, which is an argument for prospect theory.
Kids and young folks are more motivated to get $5 since they have low resources. If you are retired, why not take the chance on $20 vs a sure $5 you don't need?
Yes. They would need to.
The idea is this:
Would you take $1 or a coin flip for $2?
Would you take $5 or a coin flip for $10?
Would you take $10 or a coin flip for $20?
An `irrational' person would answer (Yes, No, Yes), or (No, Yes, No). Someone that answered all Yes or all No would not be inconsistent, nor would someone who answered (Yes, Yes, No) or (No, No, Yes), those people would be labeled as risk averse then risk loving.
As someone who has to sit through a lot of talks about research like this, GrumpySteen got it right in saying:
After a few dozen questions like that, I'd be so bored that I'd start choosing randomly without thinking about it just to get it over with. There's no way in hell I would seriously think about each and every question out of a list of 320.
A great paper on the topic is the 2001 paper "GARP For Kids", which asks the same question about children, and does a good job arguing that inconsistencies decrease with age going from young to college.
There's been research on the issue of advertising and marketing. On one hand advertising facilitates better matching (consumers learn about products that they want to buy). On the other hand, this is money spent that doesn't produce anything. For example, Coke and Pepsi's advertising budgets are huge, and it's hard to argue that these ads help consumers.
There have been papers investigating the welfare effects of matching and competition (matching is good, competition in advertising is bad). The current literature (and I can't find the citation) agrees advertising is bad in total, as the useless competition outweighs the better matching, but it's not obvious and it's not an overwhelming effect.
Whether or not posters on/. like code.org is inconsequential. We are the wrong audience. I think code.org is saying "it's not just nerds that benefit from knowing how to code."
The question is, might code.org get more people or less people programming. To give an example, how many people here idolize Enrique Iglesias? Probably close to zero. Yet in the broader world, I think there are some who take his (or some of the other leaders/trendetters') words as gospel, and those people might take his encouragement to program seriously. Is this a good thing? I say yes.
It's not the anecdotes being criticized, it's the confounding factors. It's like if you want to lose weight, so you take a weight loss pill, start exercising, and eating healthy. It's hard to say that the weight loss pill was highly successful.
Research has shown that in some markets if we outlawed advertising, prices would drop while demand wouldn't decrease as significantly, and everyone would be better off.
If you also consider that this may be a 'price as a signal' market, knowing marginal cost could let consumers make better choices, and we could get better outcomes.
I'm an economist so I might be biased, but this seems like a good thing.
According to all known studies on happiness, there are only 2 things that affect happiness overall - everything else people adapt to after a while and get back to their normal levels of happiness.
1. Get a pet dog - people are always happier with this on average and the buzz doesn't wear off.
2. Have a long commute - people are always unhappy with this on average and they never get used to it.
A lot of people applying for the jobs you want will have taken many math classes. Think about what your resume says if you don't have those same difficult classes.
Can you replace them with something that will tell the employer you are even more qualified?
P=NP. The easy way to understand NP (non-deterministic polynomial time) are problems that can be solved with age old the guess and check method. P=NP roughly implies that any problem that can be solved with guess and check can also be solved deterministically.
Full tuition and fees may be $50K per year at some places, and the true cost to the university (per student per year) may be higher, but what's the true cost to the student?
The elite colleges and universities have need-blind admissions and financial aid that is entirely driven by a family's resources. That means the rich families who can easily afford that $50K don't mind the cost, and the families that can't, don't suffer it. Furthermore, the best school of those schools have been implementing no debt policies, where all the financial aid is in grants (instead of loans), so having debt after graduation isn't even an issue.
It's just dishonest to tell kids "Don't bother with Princeton, you can't afford it" when the reality is: for the elite colleges, if you can get in, they'll help you with the cost.
If I buy 10 of the new Xbox 360 from the local Walmart where there are lots, and sell them on eBay for a profit, is that "scalping" 360s ?
That's not scalping, that is a strawman.
To fix your example, Microsoft releases XBox's a very small number of consoles, well below market price (they make money on games). You give a bum 40$ to wait 5 days first in line. Then you buy all the consoles, turn around to the others in line, and offer to sell at a 500% markup.
Slashdot Mirror
Would appreciate a citation/source for this please.
...what has happened so fundamentally in our country (US) where people don't care about actual citizenship, and protecting our borders?
If you are here in this country illegally, you have criminally trespassed. You should be deported.
That is the current law.
I don't know the current law and if what type of deportation it prescribes, but a few key questions are: (1) is the law being applied correctly? (2) is the law the one that "the people" want? and (3) if "the people" don't want the current laws, how do they change them?
I would suggest considering the parallel between these prank calls and the civil disobedience that Rosa Parks and many others performed in the Civil Rights era. We might get to different answers, but I hope we can agree on the questions.
This looks like a creative re-telling of a story from ~6 years ago, which pleasantly linked to a good explanation of how algorithmic pricing leads to these oddities.
Can any corporate finance experts explain why companies would do this? Should we buy that they're just being generous/trying to foster goodwill?
This feels like a joke. This is a joke right? Because the value proposition, besides creating controversy, doesn't make sense. It seems like they're offering to solve information asymmetries, when supply differs from demand. But this creates new problems.
Landlords Now need to figure out when to close their auction to get the maximal volume of the best tenants paying the best prices. How do I even think about that?
Renters need to figure out on which rentals to bid. It seems like bids are binding - are they not? Is there conditional bidding and Rentberry is solving so complex logic problem? Or combinatoric bidding where renters can win only one item?
I'm somewhat new to the industry, but my understanding is that there aren't copyright protections for fonts. So that won't work. However there is trademark protections, and the standard there is confusion.
If consumers think Googe and Google are affiliated then Googe might be in trouble.
I'm an economist; I recently finished my PhD and am now working in the tech industry.
I am hugely in favor of UBI. I think of it in 3 ways:
Is it doable?
Yes, of course. Existing social programs are very costly, and this will replace many of them. Furthermore, there are a lot of profits that have been created by technology in the last 50 years. And yet work weeks have increased, and many people have a lower quality of life than before. You might ask why this is. I'll give you a hint: the answer isn't population growth.
What is the cost?
Social disruption in the short term. Probably a cost to some or many very wealthy individuals. New regulations are required, but these may be less in total than existing regulations.
What is the benefit?
Many. Increased social stability. A simpler social safety net for one. A promise that each individual will be better off as technology improves and jobs may be destroyed.
That last piece I believe to be very important. The looming driverless car revolution has highlighted the risk of technology: jobs lost there have no promise of replacements.
I don't want to condone or condemn these actions, but it just seems like a low-hanging fruit. If someone could do their job much more effectively at such a low cost (who reads the ToS anyways), is it surprising that they'd do this?
No, game theory tells us that sociopaths do well in a society that is primarily composed of non-sociopaths, but do not do so well in a society where they are the majority (and that society also doesn't do well as a whole).
Please check your source on this, I do not think you can conclude that based on game theory, or even a reasonable application of game theory. Alternatively, how do you reach this conclusion?
I wonder about that. Terrorism is considered an uninsurable risk and so not often covered.
It's not impossible to know the impact, see regression discontinuity for an example. The issue is effectiveness. Do we want to save some people now and learn less, or save lots of people later but risk some now?
...[you need to] recognize his base assumptions from his math, or you're still not qualified to check his math.
As an economist, I want to reiterate that point.
That said, I wouldn't take the article at face value. Look at how they describe 'unaccepted research practice.' Playing devil's advocate, splitting research into smaller publishable piece makes sense if you want to get it out as quickly as possible. Or their statement about checking the contents of work cited? Do they mean ensuring that works cited are correct? Because that's ridiculous, no one can do that. Or do they mean glancing at the work cited? Because that's equally ridiculous.
It's a little more complicated than that. The issue is match quality between workers and firms. Match quality increases over a worker's tenure at a firm (as they learn the systems / practices / whatever). To better model the issue you'll want to include training costs and long term contracts.
For example, it won't work out if a firm trains workers and then those workers just find better jobs, so one solution is long term contracts. Long term contracts may be forbidden, so firms need other ways to retain workers who they've spent a lot of money to train. Anti-poaching rules may be another solution.
I'm not saying implicit anti-poaching agreements are good, but it's not a black and white issue.
An `irrational' person would answer (Yes, No, Yes), or (No, Yes, No).
Actually those answers could be perfectly rational depending on how hungry you are, how much cash is in your wallet, and which fast food restaurants are within walking distance.
I'm not sure if you're being pedantic, I'll assume you're not. Yes, that's true, rationality (complete and transitive preferences) is different from what they're testing. They're saying inconsistent without providing a baseline. The example I gave is one equating rationality to having a monotonic marginal utility for wealth gains, which is a pretty weak assumption as economics goes, I think it's weaker than the example given in the news article, which is an argument for prospect theory.
Did they correct for income?
Kids and young folks are more motivated to get $5 since they have low resources. If you are retired, why not take the chance on $20 vs a sure $5 you don't need?
Yes. They would need to.
The idea is this:
Would you take $1 or a coin flip for $2?
Would you take $5 or a coin flip for $10?
Would you take $10 or a coin flip for $20?
An `irrational' person would answer (Yes, No, Yes), or (No, Yes, No). Someone that answered all Yes or all No would not be inconsistent, nor would someone who answered (Yes, Yes, No) or (No, No, Yes), those people would be labeled as risk averse then risk loving.
As someone who has to sit through a lot of talks about research like this, GrumpySteen got it right in saying:
After a few dozen questions like that, I'd be so bored that I'd start choosing randomly without thinking about it just to get it over with. There's no way in hell I would seriously think about each and every question out of a list of 320.
A great paper on the topic is the 2001 paper "GARP For Kids", which asks the same question about children, and does a good job arguing that inconsistencies decrease with age going from young to college.
There's been research on the issue of advertising and marketing. On one hand advertising facilitates better matching (consumers learn about products that they want to buy). On the other hand, this is money spent that doesn't produce anything. For example, Coke and Pepsi's advertising budgets are huge, and it's hard to argue that these ads help consumers.
There have been papers investigating the welfare effects of matching and competition (matching is good, competition in advertising is bad). The current literature (and I can't find the citation) agrees advertising is bad in total, as the useless competition outweighs the better matching, but it's not obvious and it's not an overwhelming effect.
Whether or not posters on /. like code.org is inconsequential. We are the wrong audience. I think code.org is saying "it's not just nerds that benefit from knowing how to code."
The question is, might code.org get more people or less people programming. To give an example, how many people here idolize Enrique Iglesias? Probably close to zero. Yet in the broader world, I think there are some who take his (or some of the other leaders/trendetters') words as gospel, and those people might take his encouragement to program seriously. Is this a good thing? I say yes.
It's not the anecdotes being criticized, it's the confounding factors. It's like if you want to lose weight, so you take a weight loss pill, start exercising, and eating healthy. It's hard to say that the weight loss pill was highly successful.
Research has shown that in some markets if we outlawed advertising, prices would drop while demand wouldn't decrease as significantly, and everyone would be better off.
If you also consider that this may be a 'price as a signal' market, knowing marginal cost could let consumers make better choices, and we could get better outcomes.
I'm an economist so I might be biased, but this seems like a good thing.
According to all known studies on happiness, there are only 2 things that affect happiness overall - everything else people adapt to after a while and get back to their normal levels of happiness.
1. Get a pet dog - people are always happier with this on average and the buzz doesn't wear off. 2. Have a long commute - people are always unhappy with this on average and they never get used to it.
I hadn't heard of this, is there a citation?
A lot of people applying for the jobs you want will have taken many math classes. Think about what your resume says if you don't have those same difficult classes. Can you replace them with something that will tell the employer you are even more qualified?
P=NP. The easy way to understand NP (non-deterministic polynomial time) are problems that can be solved with age old the guess and check method. P=NP roughly implies that any problem that can be solved with guess and check can also be solved deterministically.
Full tuition and fees may be $50K per year at some places, and the true cost to the university (per student per year) may be higher, but what's the true cost to the student?
The elite colleges and universities have need-blind admissions and financial aid that is entirely driven by a family's resources. That means the rich families who can easily afford that $50K don't mind the cost, and the families that can't, don't suffer it. Furthermore, the best school of those schools have been implementing no debt policies, where all the financial aid is in grants (instead of loans), so having debt after graduation isn't even an issue.
It's just dishonest to tell kids "Don't bother with Princeton, you can't afford it" when the reality is: for the elite colleges, if you can get in, they'll help you with the cost.
If I buy 10 of the new Xbox 360 from the local Walmart where there are lots, and sell them on eBay for a profit, is that "scalping" 360s ?
That's not scalping, that is a strawman. To fix your example, Microsoft releases XBox's a very small number of consoles, well below market price (they make money on games). You give a bum 40$ to wait 5 days first in line. Then you buy all the consoles, turn around to the others in line, and offer to sell at a 500% markup.
Skynet's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness.