I also thought it was going to be a fad. What is interesting is that everything people use Facebook for day-to-day existed back in 2005. We used email for sharing life updates, various tools for photo sharing, AOL Instant Messenger for chatting, mailing lists for groups, email and evite for organizing events, etc. The novelty of Facebook was profile browsing and poking each other. And if Facebook had just remained that it would have been a fad. What is impressive about Facebook, is how they managed to little-by-little get everyone on their network, and little-by-little beat out the tools people were using before Facebook.
Interesting, now, in 2015, Facebook is a worse tool for me than it was in 2009. Any tool that my boss is on, my aunt is on, my old high school classmates is on, etc, has lost any coherence to it. I now have to obey standard internet security: anything posted on the internet or on Facebook in my real name has to be treated like it is on my resume. Because, de facto, it is.
The issue is that you need to find an idea for a product, wherein 1) the product has the potential to generate tens of millions of dollars of value 2) the first, valuable, version of the product can be built in a couple man years. That is really, really hard to do. There are tens of thousands of smart, competent people searching for such ideas, working on such ideas.
If you want to make millions of dollars, if you want to make much more money than the average smart engineer, you need some secret. You need some idea or skill that happens to be the right thing at the right time. Nobody can tell you what that secret is. If Sam could tell you, it would not be a secret.
So you are right. There is something critical missing. What is missing is the actual secret, the actual idea that you have a unique insight into. But nobody can tell you what that will be.
In the first cut of your analysis (without rebalancing) the portfolio actually goes negative (I'm looking at the first graph in the notebook). An equity portfolio cannot go negative unless you are using leverage. Then from late 2012 to 2015 the portfolio rises by 400%. Looking at the companies in the portfolio, I don't see how they could have generated that kind of return. Is this algorithm using leverage? If not, I don't see how you can get those results. If the algorithm is using leverage, then comparing to a simple investment in the S&P is not valid.
Say that the initial offering is for 10 million shares at $20 a share. Then the price pops to $30. That $30 share price is based on a much smaller net influx of investment. It does not follow that you could have sold 10 million of shares at that price. The $20 price is a discount that is needed to make the market clear a very large number of shares, all at once. Furthermore, the pop to $30 only happened because retail investors know that the institutions buying into the IPO are reputable, long-haul investors like Fidelity, who will not be dumping the stock immediately. So if you don't have Fidelity and other reputable investors putting in money at $20, you will never get the pop to $30. And because of their size and reputation and relationships, institutions like Fidelity will be able to command discounts, like any big buyer can. The IPO-ing company generally needs Fidelity much more Fidelity needs to buy the company's stock. Thus Fidelity can command the discount.
The company and investment banker make you sign a contract saying that you will not buy or sell any derivatives or options or any security based on the stock. Now they probably couldn't catch you, and I'm not exactly sure what happens if you refuse to sign the contract, but it is also not necessarily worth the legal risk to attempt your proposed strategy.
Funny you mention this, I have just started building a site to help with this exact problem. Seems like there is so much good content out there, but it is hard to find the good evergreen content once it leaves the front pages of social media sites. I am not starting with scientific subjects (I'm starting with history, sociology, and general life issues). The difficultly will be that there is a lot of content to get through, so I'm going to have to figure out a way to crowdsource the curation, somehow.
"heck, it's Valentines day, do something sappy and tell them how I feel"
I have never seen this actually work. I have failed doing it myself.
Sappiness is what girls want from the guys they are already head-over-heels attracted to. It does not work for converting a girl from neutral or slightly attracted into wanting to go with you.
The best thing to do is just to hang out with her casually, flirt, be playful, tease her, do active things, go for walks, have fun, and gradually escalate physically, escalate touching, escalate sexual innuendo in your conversation. If she reacts positively, escalate more, if not, then there is sometimes nothing you can do.
1. From reading their post, it seems like they made their own REST API for the key server. So it would be nice if they open sourced the service behind it, to alleviate fears of lock in.
A 1% tax is a little bit steep. But what if the tax was only .1%? Or maybe you make it a 0% tax for the first ten years, .1% tax for the next twenty years, and 1% a year after that?
If the tax was only .1%, the corporation with big pockets would have to raise their bid to millions of dollars in order to bankrupt you. And in that case, just take their bid and walk away with the millions!
It seems fair to me. If you want something protected by the long arm of the state, if you want to impose a burden of DMCA compliance across all of industry, you should have to pay some tax to pay for that service.
From my observation, if someone is smart, they can teach themselves out of a book, with a bit of guidance to keep them on the right track. If someone simply lacks the cognitive power, there is nothing a teacher can do to make them smart. The student can improve somewhat with practice and drilling, but they still plateau at a lower point than the smart student. So we need to spend enough money that their is a guide to help students get through roadblocks, but I see no evidence that we are spending too little to provide appropriate guidance. I think one hour of personal guidance for every 10 to 20 hours of self-practice is a perfectly normal ratio. That is what we do when training new engineers, or learning a musical instrument, and there really isn't much of a way to gain more benefit by increasing the quantity of guidance.
I think that teaching could be improved somewhat, at the high-end. But it could be done by reallocating existing spending, not spending more. I do think that mentorship helps a lot, but mentorship needs to come from an experienced practitioner. So what we need is a system where a programmer can work a job for a few years, then take a mentoring job for a year, then work for a few years, etc. This would require eliminating the need for education degrees, and optimizing teacher's time for personal mentorship rather than grading tests, building lesson plans, and performing classroom management. It really would be an entirely different job than what is now considered a teacher. A "teacher" now is really just a glorified day-care worker, paying them more won't help much.
Instead of focusing on reducing the inequality, we need to convince the rich people that paying more tax to educate the majority of the population is a good thing for themselves in the long run.
Education spending has steadily risen over the last fifty years. Years of schooling has steadily increased.
In my experience, the impact of spending money on education is greatly exaggerated. I was a smart kid, probably 2.5+ STD above the norm in IQ, who went to public school for a while, then to private school. In public school, I learned math mostly by going through problems in the text book. At expensive private school, I learned math mostly by going through problems in the text book. Kids who were at the bottom of the bell curve at this private school still struggled, there was nothing money could buy to make them struggle less. The primary benefit of an expensive private school is that I was surrounded with other smart people, who I could have nerdy conversations with, rather than being a weirdo nerd. The second benefit is that you get to start building a network earlier. This benefit was very limited though, as we all scattered after graduation into different locations and careers. Most of that $40k is being spent on luxuries, not on stuff needed to educate, because education is inherently quite cheap. Mostly you just need to read stuff and practice, with just a bit of guidance from a mentor to check your work and keep you on the right path.
Anyone who wants to spend more money on education needs to state exactly what the money should be spent on, why they believe spending that money will have a positive ROI, and also needs an explanation of why the money we are already spending has not equalized things.
Imagine you had the freedom to design an education for your child and a group of his or her peers. Any money that you save could be spent on helping them get started with a mortgage or investing in their startup or spent on interesting travel or vacations. How much would you need to spend to max-out their learning? How would you spend it?
If the bottleneck to learning is nutrition or lead exposure, then one should advocate directly for policies that would fix nutrition or mitigate lead exposure, rather than generically advocating for more school funding.
You can cite academic articles, but only do so if you can personally vouch for them being good, rather than just relying on the echo chamber of citations. Because if I follow your link, and look at the paper, and find it is the typical esoteric nonsense, in which the key assumptions are completely hand-waved away, then I will be annoyed.
The usage of words has shifted, but my point remains. The genetic/ethnic/racial difference between Irish and British was much, much less than that between the British and Black Africans. So my point remains that it may be much more difficult to assimilate across very large ethnic/racial differences.
The quantity of citation, within an echo-chamber, means nothing to me. Academia is in its own world, and it is very easy for academic papers to become increasingly divorced from reality, since there is no mechanism for overall accountability. This is common across many institutions throughout history, such as with scholasticism and the Catholic Church. Also, academia is highly politicized, and people cite what they believe they want to be true, and rationalize after the fact. The process of becoming an academic is now so fraught and grueling, that only people who buy into the overall methodology and way of thinking will go to grad school and join the mandarinate. So quantity of citation among the same group who all share the same biases, is not proof of anything.
I lost my respect for academic papers in college when taking a political science course. We were reading these absolutely absurd mathematical models of how bureaucracies made decisions. Having interned in various parts of government, I found the whole thing absurd. Bureaucracy is actually very interesting, there are many great books on the topic, there are many great memoirs that can aid in understanding what goes on. But we were reading none of them. I told my professor as such, and she had no defense, she said that was just the way political science was done. The entire field was completely divorced from reality, and producing nothing of actual value to someone who wanted to learn about bureaucracy. They were in their own bubble of citing and building upon each other's esoteric models that had nothing to do with how the world actually works.
Further reading since then, in reading many economic papers, then comparing what happens in the real world, in reading computer science papers, and then seeing how divorced it is from real world problems, has only reinforced my view.
Academia does produce some good stuff. But there are a lot of bubbles of useless paper-writing, and a lot of politicized research. So now I only trust output that I have verified or that has been widely replicated by people outside the bubble.
As for this paper in particular, it makes some big assumptions - that immigrant labor is an imperfect substitute, that natural resources don't matter, that increasing immigration will increase the amount of capital, etc. If I adopt the same assumptions, I am sure I could construct a mathematical model to replicate the author's results. But all those assumptions are very dubious, and yet the author spends little time justifying them. So this paper adds nothing to the debate over immigration, because it does not justify its assumptions, and it is these assumptions which are the core of the issue.
Although my argument may be wrong, at least they're cited (by me and over 2000 other peer-reviewed articles, for what its worth).
Citing useless/irrelevant articles that you have not read and verified yourself, and claiming these articles are "facts" when they are really interpretations and models that hinge on layers of debatable assumptions, is much worse than citing nothing at all. (I didn't leave citations on my comments because I'm providing interpretations for people who already share the same facts and background knowledge, if you don't share the same facts, you can ask for citations on particular statements, but I may not have time to actually hunt them down at the moment).
Here's the The Economist on wages and immigration written for the lay person, lest I may Euler you.
Umm, this is simply the Economist parroting the point of the Euler-er, the Economist is not adding value. Periodicals like the economist are written by journalists who generally have little life experience or domain expertise. They went straight to journalism out of college, and so they default to just accepting academic papers as being the authoritative word, because they do not know better.
The issue is that most Americans don't have high enough literacy (including math) ability to benefit from the best of free online education.
Notice your slippery phrasing. Most Americans don't have enough literacy ability to benefit from the best free online education. Well, yeah, if you define the best as the advanced stuff then that is true by definition. There is plenty of free basic education material out there too. The core of math literacy is just lots of drilling on multiplication tables and such, which does not cost money at all.
I don't see you addressing my central point. For the Americans without basic abilities, is lack of money the bottleneck? Every American already gets many, many years of quite expensive schooling trying to teach the basics. Reading and textbook material for teaching the basics is not, and need not be, expensive. So either a) schools are grossly incompetent at actually teaching or b) schools are being asked to do the impossible, and are hitting up on innate cognitive limits in the average person (or maybe a bit of both).
Interesting, now, in 2015, Facebook is a worse tool for me than it was in 2009. Any tool that my boss is on, my aunt is on, my old high school classmates is on, etc, has lost any coherence to it. I now have to obey standard internet security: anything posted on the internet or on Facebook in my real name has to be treated like it is on my resume. Because, de facto, it is.