pashamur

Most likely under-reported COVID deaths. Having looked at the Russia data at least, many deaths (earlier on) were marked with "pneumonia" and they didn't even bother testing for COVID.

Isn't there always a contracting option where you can take on as many jobs as you'd like?

The other reason that prices are way cheaper second hand is that the buyer is taking the risk of buying a lemon - versus some sort of guarantee (usually) when you buy new. The seller has more information about the object in question than the buyer (i.e. wifi card on laptop is flaky, for example), so buying secondhand implies more risk, which drops the exchange price.

I think that this affects the price of new vs used moreso than the experience of purchasing it.

Basic economics assumes a functional and competitive market. The majority of markets in America no longer fit this criteria - today's corporate environment is closer to neo-feudal than capitalist; if we want to return to "true" capitalism, we need a lot stronger anti-merger and monopoly busting efforts.

I highly recommend listening to "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber on the observed inverse relationship between pay and [actual] value (if we're talking about societal value, for example). There are exceptions to the rule, but the correlation is quite strong.

Yes, chess masters at the top actually have groups of coaches (if they're preparing for an important match). Sometimes up to 5-10 people. Though it might not be so much coaches as "preparation team" - one of them might be the lead coach, one responsible for openings, one responsible for mental game, etc etc.

Novel writing is more subjective - if it were a clearly competitive endeavor with objective rules, I'm sure that the top performers would have coaches as well.

Jim Browning (the renowned anti-scammer) recently fell for one of his own, where someone tricked him into disabling his Youtube account.

So if the situation is right, almost anyone can fall for it (Gorilla on basketball court experiment)

The poorer/richer argument only makes sense in the context of a specific consumption basket. If your main goal in life is to buy as many bananas as you can (for example), then you would measure the house appreciation in bananas. Can you get more bananas for your house now (at $1M - 250k) than you could when you got it? Then you're "richer", otherwise you're not.

Usually we use CPI as a proxy for it. However, most people when evaluating houses ignore the implied rent paid; owning a house means not having to pay rent - and that has a specific price on it, depending on your local rental market. So in a relative sense, you owning that house makes you richer relative to the people that did not own a house (who did not get the same nominal appreciation at all and are much worse off), and leaves you at the same place with other people owning the house. You're unlikely to be worse off (on a relative standing) than if you hadn't gotten the house. So I'm not sure richer/poorer makes sense without considering the alternatives (i.e. renting & investing)

Big crashes (and fast-drop bottoms) happen not because of panic selling, but because of forced selling (covering margin calls, getting liquidated, etc). Panic selling usually leads to slow grind downs.

Shorts usually cover once the rebound starts, not when things are free-falling (their trailing stops get triggered, etc)

I posted an interview about the open-pricing surgery center of Oklahoma which actually goes into how a free market healthcare system would work.

A free market system would make for even more uneven differentiation in health care quality - with some people not being able to receive care at all at the end of the day. Yes, on average we would have better health outcomes (same as most people would have better outcomes on average if you didn't require car insurance, since most people don't end up using it), but the few outlier cases would be significantly more tragic than they already are.

I wonder if the TSA has some signaling effect though apart from the actual efficacy of the security theatre. Even if it catches things rarely, the fact that it exists makes people more aware and potentially look out more for abnormal behavior in airports (and catching some things some times still probably acts as a deterrent - at least more so than not having the security theatre around)