This is a measure of where inflation "goes", not what fuels inflation. The narrative that profits are "fueling" inflation is completely made up and the people pushing it are lying to everyone for political reasons.
Inflation is caused - in most countries - by excessively loose monetary policy (sometimes fiscal policy, sometimes both). If government policy creates inflation (average prices go up) that money can flow to a domestic labor or domestic investors or leave the country. This depends on supply-side factors that are basically orthogonal to the inflation question. It is true that in the most recent round of inflation it primarily led to increased corporate profits.
There is a theory from the 80s called the wage-price spiral [Blanchard] that talks about how inflation (which is initially caused by fiscal or monetary policy) can become self-sustaining if wages and prices are set in a staggered back-and-forth kind of way, as workers react to higher prices by demanding raises, and firms react to higher labor costs by raising prices. However, there is no serious theory that such a process would happen with profits. That makes no sense at all! The exact opposite would be true, if anything. High profits in some time period would likely regress to the mean as price competition sets in. In fact, this is exactly what is happening right now, as corporate profits after spiking over the past 12 months are shrinking.
The "profit-price spiral" narrative is being pushed by the same disingenous idiots pushing the "greedflation" narrative - it is not a serious attempt to explain inflation, it is an attempt to use reasonable-sounding economics words to blame inflation on companies instead of the actual culprit: governments that overstimulated their economies to such a degree that they caused both inflation and profits to spike.
Yes - Lyft contributed the overwhelming majority of the new data back into OSM. The only exceptions were layers that didn't meet OSM community standards for various technical reasons.
Article is half correct. It’s true that major consumption purchases (nice house, nice car) are better thought of as liabilities not assets. But the investment story here suffers from what I’ve heard someone call the “my portfolio is 3 car washes in downtown Omaha” problem.
Long story short: this is actually not the best way to accumulate investment returns. The numbers in the post are not just realistic. Small $ private equity investments (that’s what this is) often lose money when costs are properly accounted for, especially if you include the value of time. And if you pay someone to manage the asset (rental property manager for example) it eats your return.
My dad once came into possession of a coin operated laundromat. It was exciting for a while. I’d go with him down to the laundromat and we’d pick up the quarters and do inventory. We bought a coin counter on eBay to make it go faster. Eventually we did the math and realized the business barely broke even, and was occupying 20% of his professional attention. He shut it down after 3 months and sold off the equipment.
Anyway you can make these kinds of businesses work but it’s a grind, not a free lunch. You’re better off with ETFs or a good dividend stock.
I can't speak for COPD but I'm very familiar with a different chronic pulmonary disease (Cystic Fibrosis), and it seems to _strangely_ not be a huge risk factor for poor COVID outcomes.
No one really has a good story for why (and it may not hold) but it seems to be consistent with the idea that the most important variable is truly just age.
It's amazing and wonderful how much environmental damage seems to be recovering. Air pollution is down, carbon emissions are down as much as 17%, fish and sharks are repopulating shorelines and beaches - and to think, all it took was the most severe public health crisis in 100 years, a catastrophic global recession, and an overpowering wave of human misery and death
Correct, the author is describing the effect of a competitive, liquid talent market. The other dynamic he correctly identified was asymmetry in switching costs (cheap for me to quit my job and go work at Google, expensive for Google if I quit and leave some project in the lurch). But he didn't call it this, and it's not a risk premium per se.
It doesn’t matter if corporations pay taxes because the money just flows to people who own equity in or work for those corporations, and they pay taxes.
Only surprised it took this long. One of the below-the-surface purposes of regulation is to provide a mechanism for private players to shed liability (and public accountability) for things that go wrong in their businesses. A builder can make 1000 choices that might increase or decrease the risk of a fire in a new project, but as long he is within the regulated parameters of "fire code" he is unlikely to face liability if there happens to be a fire, since compliance will be used as a defense against a charge of negligence.
Now imagine you build nearly every building in the state of California, have a personal relationship with the governor, and have the means to subtly influence the development of fire codes in such a way that makes it easy for you to comply, minimizes the effect on your business, but may make it harder for other competitors to gain compliance. This is regulatory capture, and it is endemic in almost every industry in America, with the glaring exception of software.
Facebook has finally realized that they have enough influence and market power to be confident that a regulatory regime for data and content will benefit them over the long-run. They will not get 100% of what they want, but they will get 80%, and in the long run, they will reap the benefit of knowing:
- that they can continue to shape the evolution of these rules over time
- that they no longer have to worry as much about black swan liability arising from UGC on their network
- that the next generation of UGC startups will have a hard time achieving compliance, either hurting their growth or motivating them to sell to larger players like Facebook
I ask most candidates to write code on a whiteboard in front of me and I’m not apologizing for it!
The problem is usually fairly easy and if the candidate cannot get to a “describe solution in words” milestone then I will guide them to one. After that I ask them to write code. I will also tell them “the code is the part I care about”.
The specific competency I am evaluating here is “can you turn thoughts into code”. I repeat that phrase in interview training so much I think people make fun of me for it.
Imagine I give you a python list with 100 elements and I ask you to write code that will find all instances of the number “5” and move them to the front of the list. I don’t care about performance.
You know you have to write a loop and whenever you see a 5, remove it and put it at the front. Easy. Not even really an “algorithm”. Some people can make code happen very easily and accurately. But some people really need to really think about it - what control flow to use, off by one errors, bounds issues - and make mistakes. Some people don’t see their own bugs. Some people do weird stuff that makes me think they haven’t seen a lot of code before.
I teach interviewers to evaluate the act of the writing as much as the end product, kind of like when airport security asks you “where did you stay in New York” and doesn’t really care about the answer so much as how shifty you look when answering it. It doesn’t mean you have to materialize perfect code on the board to pass - not even close! But this exercise provides information, and when other exercises corroborate that information we use it to make a hire/nohire decision.
Anyway, bottom line is whiteboard code is a completely reasonable technique to deploy in an interview setting and if you do this you shouldn’t feel bad about it. Much more depends on (a) whether the interviewer is trained and calibrated and (b) whether the company knows what it is even trying to evaluate than the question format.
This is ridiculous. "Greed" didn't kill newspapers. You think the classified business would be any better today off if newspapers had artificially held ad. and sub. prices down in the 80s and 90s? $0 is $0, and that's what people will pay for classifieds now.
"Hedge Funds", everyone's favorite bogeyman. "Lack of Innovation", as if the Chicago Tribune was going to save itself by opening a geocities page in 1996.
The 'news' business is a zombie because it sells a product that is basically free to produce and free to consume. That's it! You don't really need a newsroom to give you "the news" anymore, and so the market for a product whose main feature is a professional, standing writing staff that simply yesterday's events no longer meaningfully exists. No amount of investment in technology by media companies in the 90s was going to do anything but _hasten_ that shift.
But, there's plenty of great media out there. You can sell good writing if it is actually good; you can monetize your opinions if people will actually pay attention to them; you can sell your access if you actually have it; these are media business models with staying power. They might not be billion-dollar properties and they might not report "the news" per se but they provide value and they will be fine. My household subscribes to The Athletic, Foreign Affairs, Tablet, The New Yorker, and The Information, to name a few. All great.
The math here is based on the idea that MFA would reduce the per-person expenditures by 19% (19.2% actually)
(1) 5.9% by unilaterally reducing drug prices by 40%
(2) 2.8% by unilaterally reducing medical service prices by 20%
(3) 1.5% through the claim that MFA would have fewer "excess services"
(4) 9.0% from allegedly increased efficiency due to only having to deal with one payer
Is this at all plausible?
Achieving (1) and (2) would be - um - difficult, to say the least! In real life, prices would be set by a political process. Our actual history of attempts to unilaterally reduce medical reimbursement reates is not promising! [see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_Sustainable_Growth_Ra... or the debate over Medicare drug price negotiation].
(1) & (2) con't: Imposing a single-payer system and then having that payer set prices is effectively the same as imposing a national price control regime, which we in theory could do without MFA. We have not done this, despite the fact that it would save everyone an enormous amount of money. Why not? Because it would be insanely controversial and take a ton of money out of some people's pockets, especially doctors and nurses. Will this be easier under MFA?
(3) The idea that MFA would be structurally less likely to provide "excess" health services seems pretty optimistic indeed. Our military, for example, is not really known for being budget conscious and aggressively efficiency minded. Nor are our state and local level agencies, e.g. the MTA here in NY. Spending policies are set by a political process, and political processes are prone to over- rather than under- spending in every case I can think of.
(4) The 9%(!) savings from "billing efficiencies" is based on an assumption that billing expenses in medical offices will be reduced by 2/3 when there is only a single payer. Why would this be? Billing expenses scale with the number of bills, not the number of vendors. Will MFA lead to fewer procedures on net? Will it eliminate the concept of prior authorizations, which represent the bulk of these "excess" BIR expenses? Will providers and patients not have coverage disputes? Will MFA have dramatically superior automation than private payers? Note that Germany has a multi-payer system and has Canada-like administrative costs [https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2013....]. There are hidden variables here.
Here's the thing:
The most superficial argument in favor of MFA is to look at a country like Canada and say "Canada spends X / pp on healthcare and they have a single payer system, therefore if the US adopts a single payer system, our costs will drop to X!". That's not real analysis, and it ignores all the cost drivers that have nothing to do with the payer. This paper is a drill-down to component costs, but ultimately is no less superficial. MFA billing will be 65% more efficient because Australia billing is 65% more efficient than the US. Prescription drugs will be 40% cheaper because Canada pays 40% less than the US. And so on.
If you could realize any of these cost savings in MFA, you could realize them now. But you probably can't - not easily, anyway, and after burning all your political capital on a $1T/year tax hike it will only be harder. The cost-savings will be compromised to get the medical industry on board, just like it was during the Obamacare debate. And now you can toss this whole analysis in the garbage.
This is wish-casting dressed up in 200 pages of rigorous-looking analysis, designed to get people to read the abstract, then look at the page count, and then treat it as credible.
MFA is not going to save the system money. Take it to the bank.
Yeah - sure I'm not literally saying that all clubs are full of people with identical politics. I'm just pointing out that most communities in America are actually not that diverse or polarized.
The proposed link between civic participation ("cooperation") and both inequality and political polarization is a strange one to me, since civic participation seems like it would be a local phenomenon, and both inequality and political polarization mostly show up as regional differences rather than differences within communities.
Sure, the political space between Allegany County, NY (low income and trump voting) and Westchester County, NY (high income and clinton voting) is huge. But if you go to an elk lodge in Allegany or a (i dunno) running club in Westchester, you're going to find that everybody there has basically the same politics and basically the same income.
My personal opinion is that it's because insurance leads to, basically, 1/2 of a market. We allow suppliers to set prices however they want, but we mandate that insurance buy the thing, which essentially gives them no negotiating leverage. (Worse: post-obamacare, we mandate that insurance co profits are a fixed percentage of insurance premiums, so they don't have any incentive to negotiate low prices anyway). The data showing "specialists are expensive", I think, is mostly just a historical accident; primary care and prescription drugs have traditionally been more sensitive to demand pressure because of the way deductibles and copays worked. I suspect that since primary care is now a required $0 copay service, in 10 years those costs will look aberrantly high as well.
This is definitely true, so far as it goes. For many types of medical care it is unreasonable to expect a patient to act in a price setting capacity on the demand side.
However there are many types of medical care where that is very reasonable! LASIK and cosmetic surgery are classic examples because they elective and have historically not been covered by any insurance. You can see cosmetic surgery prices on ads in the NY city subway. Other kinds of care, such as dentistry, orthodontia, and vision services, also have very well-functioning markets, largely because insurance has historically not covered these things. Lots of non-urgent care (primary medicine, pediatrics, dermatology, psychiatrics, orthopedics, many surgeries) would probably have well-functioning markets if they were separated from the insurance system.
Now, that's all the cheap stuff. The expensive stuff (hospitalizations, cancers, chronic disease) that makes up the bulk of the US health expenditure - yeah. You can't expect a patient to come in and argue with the doctor about whether they really need that saline drip. But in a properly functioning market, there is another entity that can and should (and does) act as a price-setter mechanism on the demand side, and that is the insurance company.
The problems show up when
1. there is only one supplier in a market
2. the insurer is required by law to cover a certain thing
3. the supplier does not face a price control, and through (1) and (2) has unlimited pricing power
This is very acute with prescription drugs. Even generic drugs sometimes only have one supplier because the process of getting FDA approval is so onerous. It is also very acute when you have hospital and physician consolidation within markets, so that medical suppliers can effectively act as a cartel.
So - deal with the supply side problems. Stop the cartel behavior. Make it easier to sell prescription drugs and open hospitals. Allow consumers to act as consumers when it makes sense (by excluding basic medical services from the insurance system) and reserve insurance for the risky, expensive, hairy stuff. This is the path forward, and it all follows very neatly from basic supply and demand.
This is a measure of where inflation "goes", not what fuels inflation. The narrative that profits are "fueling" inflation is completely made up and the people pushing it are lying to everyone for political reasons.
Inflation is caused - in most countries - by excessively loose monetary policy (sometimes fiscal policy, sometimes both). If government policy creates inflation (average prices go up) that money can flow to a domestic labor or domestic investors or leave the country. This depends on supply-side factors that are basically orthogonal to the inflation question. It is true that in the most recent round of inflation it primarily led to increased corporate profits.
There is a theory from the 80s called the wage-price spiral [Blanchard] that talks about how inflation (which is initially caused by fiscal or monetary policy) can become self-sustaining if wages and prices are set in a staggered back-and-forth kind of way, as workers react to higher prices by demanding raises, and firms react to higher labor costs by raising prices. However, there is no serious theory that such a process would happen with profits. That makes no sense at all! The exact opposite would be true, if anything. High profits in some time period would likely regress to the mean as price competition sets in. In fact, this is exactly what is happening right now, as corporate profits after spiking over the past 12 months are shrinking.
The "profit-price spiral" narrative is being pushed by the same disingenous idiots pushing the "greedflation" narrative - it is not a serious attempt to explain inflation, it is an attempt to use reasonable-sounding economics words to blame inflation on companies instead of the actual culprit: governments that overstimulated their economies to such a degree that they caused both inflation and profits to spike.