acslater00

Fake news.

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.

Lyft contributed essentially everything back to OSM

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.

Source - I led this team

might buy an Oculus just for this

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.

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.

> and single story ranch homes with sad little yards

This is so spot-on it literally pains me

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

Regulation benefits incumbents.

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.

Surprising that paying people to not work didn't lead to more people working!

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.