johnm111888

Love the discussion. Will write a long response because I don’t have time for a short one. In regard to the first paragraph can you name any examples? The most regulated industries have the most power. Banking, energy & utilities, healthcare insurance are all examples. Can you name one sustained US monopoly that has existed without government assistance?

2nd paragraph. Uber might transfer risk to workers but without uber these workers wouldn't even have jobs as taxicabbers due to the cost of fees/regulation government applies to taxi services. I find it ironic the employees are complaining about a company they voluntarily work for, and arguing against the practices that allow the company to exist and employ them. Uber has ample competition so I wouldn’t say they exactly wield power— they are trying to fight the consolidated power where their competitors are in bed with the government whose laws provide a barrier of entry to the existing inefficient industry. Same thing is happening with Telsa. Whenever a transformative company enters an industry, the existing players lobby government for regulation and/or to enforce the regulation already in place. Throughout history it has been 1.big company(ies) establish huge market share in an industry 2. Said companies lobby government for regulation that prevents new entrants. RR, coal, automotive, finance, health insurance, utility industries have all done this.

3rd paragraph. This is ridiculous. Government’s role is to serve the people. Government knows better than the people? The government needs to protect citizens from themselves? How would they determine when an “unelected body” gains too much control over people’s lives? The fact is the free market determines winners and losers and is the most efficient way to allocate resources. Transactions only occur when both parties think they’ll benefit. No one is forced to do anything. To think the government knows better than everyone else is naïve at best and destructive at worst.

Referencing the time period in which the economy grew at its fastest rate in history in regards to GDP and real wages? Gilded Age transformed US into the economic superpower that it is today -- regulatory vacuum helped this. Government corruption and high tariffs helped prevent competition and helped establish the monopolies it later set out to break up. RRs benefitted from the creation of the interstate commerce commission

um you would probably need 10s of millions to do this. If you had 10s of millions you probably don't enter money-losing ventures on purpose

I would argue that capitalism does not favor this "concentration of power," in fact quite the opposite. Most industries where there is huge concentration of power (i.e. banks) is largely due to regulation. These new SV companies disrupted other big businesses and will eventually be disrupted by another wave of businesses themselves. A look at the top 10 companies by market cap in 1995 is probably very different than the top 10 currently.

I'm not sure how you site "exploitative practices by big business" then give an example of Uber. Uber is % of cab services? I would not classify them as big business. And while you might have a point with Google and privacy, users are not their customer but rather their product they sell to advertisers. So to argue they use exploitative practices and comparing to Amazon is weak considering the users aren't really a part of the supply chain but rather opt-in voluntarily.

"Algorithmic investing has long been a high-priced, secret weapon used by Wall Street" Fails to note most algorithmic trading on the street is HFT. Being a retail investor running your own algorithms would be extremely difficult to profit from. Great coding practice though.

"why are you interviewing for this position?" awful question in my opinion.

Property rights are the basis of human freedom. All these comments supporting the government taking your property after you've already paid taxes on it is troubling.

i don't understand where all this demonizing the rich rhetoric comes from. "or more so than the way the rich aquire their money." What? Did they steal their money? Or were they participating in a volunteer economy comprised of mutually beneficial exchanges (i.e. capitalism)? Maybe you live in China or Russia and that's where my misunderstanding comes from.

his competitive advantage is the algorithm not the tools he's using

NFL was thinking about saying they own the stats -- afterall it is their product. Needless to say that would require lots of lawyers but could potentially bring in huge new revenue stream.

lower barriers --> more competition

From a cost perspective it's easy to see this. I've made plenty of trivial VB scripts in large/bureaucratic companies to automate tasks that a customer service person(or a whole department) had been doing for an hour a day for the last decade.

From my experience VBAs used a lot in the corporate world. Learning VB in high school can be of great use in the future if you're not looking for a tech career. Front-end MS Access, Excel Macros, screen-scraping, vb script to call SQL queries can all give you a leg up in a non programming career path.