xiler
Joined 11 years ago
Karma
193
Submissions
58
Member since
Jun 7
Recent submissions
Comment · 6 years ago
Nuclear companies generally aren't prepared to assume full liability for nuclear accidents [1]. This makes me pretty skeptical that nuclear power is really that safe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
Comment · 6 years ago
Roads are non-rivalrous (to an extent). Meaning during off-peak times a private toll road would likely be under utilized if it were not regulated/subsidized. Another reason is that if a road happens to be the shortest path between a populous area and an in-demand destination it would likely be something close to a natural monopoly. This could potentially lead to high prices, too many billboards, etc.
Comment · 6 years ago
> actual unions are a far cry from how they are portrayed as helping the worker.
I think it's a fairly well established industry trend that, on average, union membership is a net positive for the worker.
Comment · 6 years ago
Another measure is major sector labor productivity (labor inputs vs outputs):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_productivity#/media/...
Comment · 6 years ago
> And I would also expect that social mobility would decrease as an economy "matures". If you're in a developing country seeing 7-10% GDP growth, then you'd hope mobility is higher than an economy growing at 1-2% per year.
They address that in the paper:
> Higher GDP growth rates do not substantially increase the number of children who earn more than their parents because a large fraction of GDP goes to a small number of high income earners today. To see why absolute mobility is insensitive to the growth rate when growth is distributed unequally, consider the extreme case in which one child obtains all of the increase in GDP. In this case, higher GDP growth rates would have no effect on absolute mobility. More generally, GDP growth has larger effects on absolute mobility when growth is spread more broadly, allowing more children to achieve higher living standards than their parents. Higher GDP growth and a broader distribution of growth have a multiplicative effect on absolute mobility: Absolute mobility is highest when GDP growth rates are high and growth is spread broadly across the distribution.
Comment · 6 years ago
Interesting read, but supposedly when we're talking about changes in social mobility we really care about the change in the percentage of people that are richer than their parents? Indeed towards the end of the article the author says:
> There is one study of progress over time that follows parents and children that is gloomy and that is “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Mobility Since 1940” by Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca, Jimmy Narang (Chetty et al) They find that if you were born in 1940, you had a 92% chance of surpassing your parents income. But if you were born in 1984, the number is a depressing 50%. Chetty et al control for age — this is for parents and children when they are both 30. This does suggest that the American dream is dead or at least dying — half of the children do better than their parents but half do worse, suggesting no progress over time.
The author then says that we should measure income differently by using a non-standard measure of inflation. But if we had just used that non-standard measure on the wage data of Piketty et al., we would've arrived at the same conclusion anyway?
Comment · 6 years ago
> We seek to do this as far as the law allows us to do, and other companies do that as well. We operate within the rules placed on us by the legislatures of this country and its states.
Sure, but this is an antitrust hearing and trusts aren't really legal in the US.
Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
He also works on Google's Knowledge Graph
https://research.google/people/vrandecic/
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
Comment · 6 years ago
Off the top of my head the risk of identity theft and black mail are probably biggest reasons why privacy is important. This is especially concerning when you realize how "secure" data often leaks and becomes public.
Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
Employees are subject to intense competition for employment, while big companies face much less competition [1]. This means that, all other things being equal, big companies are less unaccountable than their employees. While this dynamic certainly doesn't guarantee abuses of power on behalf of big companies I think it makes sense to be inherently suspicious of their actions.
Comment · 6 years ago
I'd say that's a bit of a false dilemma. Countries like South Korea and Taiwan have dealt with this problem far better than other countries despite having very few lockdowns [1,2]. Instead they have made use of government funded distribution of free masks and testing and now have a low or declining number of active cases [3,4,5].
[1] https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/30...
[2] https://chinapost.nownews.com/20200317-1094238
[3] https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3869320
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_T...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_S...
Comment · 6 years ago
I think this practice is a bit worse than other forms of electioneering since it is not clear if views being expressed come directly from the candidate or not (unlike a TV ad or a rally). When governments do something similar this, their methods are rightly criticized as being undemocratic [1,2]. I think a similar line of reasoning applies to US election politics.
Comment · 6 years ago
A. Einstein