I wonder how the DJs will react to this hackernews post about them, when and if they find it in their regular searching, or if somebody tweets it at them.
Wait what's wrong with voluntary eugenics? Perhaps the fact that something both "feels like eugenics" and is understood as the "correct medical and scientific thing to do" should cause one to reassess any unexamined, knee-jerk, blanket revulsion to the concept of eugenics that one may have.
James Yeh, Ken Griffin's "first quant" and eventual co-CIO of Citadel, used to say, when annoyed by a junior who was overfitting to the backtest, "I don't let the computer boss me around! I tell the computer what to do!"
All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
It's noticeably improving, though! Over the last 10 years or so, both their GDP per capita and household income per capita have roughly doubled. Now when I visit medium-sized cities there I am amazed to find latte-slinging coffee shops and craft beer-pouring gastropubs that would look right at home in Brooklyn.
$8,400 over three years is about $230/month. And aside from the opportunity cost of your labor to optimize that, you should also theoretically account for any purchases that you wouldn't have made if you weren't trying to optimize your points (if any; I'm sure it's hard to attribute).
With current interest rates of around 5%, one could get the same stream of income ($2.8k/y) by just plonking $50k or so into a high-yield savings account or money market fund.
Mark Twain had just finished building that house the year prior, and he would die the next year; the house itself would burn down not long after that :-(
> I am struggling to find the right words to express how wrong your view is to me.
Then surely I have failed to convey it!
In any case, my edited point about "deadweight loss" is perfectly consonant with the parent poster's feeling of guilt, and with what I presume is your feeling of disgust; it is in fact the economic term of art for that at which you intuitively recoil.
(Although you're kind of equating a very, very expensive home, in the overall scheme of things, with the minimum requirements of decency, if you really think that he's exploiting someone's inability to afford housing, but w/e.)
Now let's get into the controversial stuff...
> Housing is a basic human need like food and clothing.
Agreed. But it's also an asset, because someone has to build and maintain it and have exclusive use of (at least parts of) it, and being a basic need doesn't automatically create a right to something (for obvious reasons) so that asset is gonna trade hands voluntarily like any other. Its price will fluctuate, sorry.
Now, NIMBYs using government fiat to drive down housing supply in their market is an annoyingly common failure mode of local democracy, maybe that's all you're upset about.
> That $230,000 was taken from the pockets of my non-homeowning friends.
Nope! First of all, it's come from no one's pockets until you sell. Until then it's just a hypothetical, theoretical gain on paper.
Second of all, when you do sell it, the money will come from the pockets of your willing buyer :-)
Edit: if you still want to feel bad about something, let it be this: that the rise in your home's value represents wealth that has been created "by the community" in the sense that it's only because of many variables of the surrounding community that the land has become more desirable and therefore more expensive; and your ability to capture all of that increase via your untaxed monopoly on the ground rent creates a deadweight loss for the broader economy.
But that's why we created the universal land value tax and used it to replace all other taxes! (Hello from the year 2078!)
> Interesting to see how companies adapted to the changes in noncompete laws. What will be the next fallback position?
a friend of mine just left a quantitative hedge fund recently that, in anxious anticipation of noncompetes possibly being banned in new york, asked all of its employees to sign new "nonassociation agreements" as a fallback... these basically say you're not allowed to work with your current colleagues at future employers... which is arguably more draconian than a noncompete... it would be ironic if this became the replacement.
I used to work at Two Sigma Investments, and back in 2012-2014 or so, after the publication of his "irrationality" books (before the ones about dishonesty), Dan Ariely gave a well-attended talk at the company headquarters (I wonder what his speaking fee was!).
I remember thinking even then that there was something off about his arguments, and I'm not surprised that he has since been exposed as a likely fraud. For example, throughout his talk, he kept making the point that when someone made a self-serving claim or argument, he would "hold on to his wallet," making an analogy to pickpockets. He then concluded his talk with a transparently self-serving argument that the importance of studying irrationality was growing over time because (as just one example, I suppose), the share of deaths attributed to preventable causes (self-inflicted, etc.) was increasing over the decades, making it sound like society is becoming more irrational. This seemed very weak to me, because that's exactly what you would expect if civilization is making progress over time... if science and technology keep eliminating the exogenous causes of death, over time we should be left with just the endogenous ones. Anyway, I thought of raising my hand to ask if I should reach for my own wallet, but was too young and nervous.
> Meritocracy is tyranny by another name. [You then go on to elaborate with historical examples of how merit != virtue.]
As far as I can tell, the linked article in fact makes exactly the same point:
> They [the founders] also knew that merit was not enough; merit without virtue to accompany it could produce tyranny. They knew this, of course, through history.
In Las Vegas they solve this by blowing cold air onto the sidewalk through an always-open door, thereby cooling passersby, and perhaps enticing a few to enter for a game of slots.
As described by an attendee, Robert Gaskins [0], who would later invent PowerPoint:
This meet-up was initiated by Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand, and designed by Lee Felsenstein, Bill Budge, Andy Hertzfeld, and Doug Carlston, timed to coincide with the publication of Steven Levy’s book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.
Stewart Brand claimed that the invitees were “the most interesting and effective body of intellectuals since the framers of the U.S. Constitution,” a claim that escaped criticism from those attending. Invitees paid a flat $90 for the weekend, including conference, round-the-clock food and drink, and dormitory bunks. Steve Wozniak donated $5,000 for videotaping, and scraps of footage from the weekend later became a DVD [1]. The t-shirt design was by Don Knuth’s student Scott Kim [2].