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phrogdriver | 4 years ago | on: The death of the ‘Millionaire Next Door’ dream

Growing up in the midwest prior to working FAANG in the Bay Area, this is my exact experience. With a graduate degree and making ridiculous money, I and my peers had no realistic path to homeownership on any reasonable time-scale in the Bay. Family members working HVAC, plumbing, electrician or other skilled blue-collar jobs in low-cost of living areas bought beautiful craftsman bungalows within walking distance to a decent school for $80K. Professionals with either no student debt or a few thousand from land-grant state university degree paid off in 5-7 years. This has knock-on effects to family formation and number of children. Many of my high school classmates had their first kid at 24-25 and have 3-5 kids now, versus Bay Area average of what seems like 1-2 starting in your late 30s. When you feel like you can finally afford it. I started making plans to leave as soon as I got there, it truly was "structurally hostile to families."

phrogdriver | 4 years ago | on: The Contemplative Life: the monastic cowl (2020)

It is even more striking that it's written in the first person, so the error sounds like it's coming from the monk and not the writer. For the HN reader not aware, the Cistercians "broke away" from the Benedictines in the 11th century and are still very much "in" the Catholic Church. My great uncle is a Trappist monk and I have great memories of visiting the monastery to see him as a child.

phrogdriver | 5 years ago | on: Facebook reported fake numbers to advertisers

Marketing spend, especially online, is one of the most studied inputs to business strategy. Long term lift studies of both brand and direct response advertising show that it absolutely drives consumer behavior. Whether or not that's good for consumers might be debatable. I'm happy to buy unbranded consumer packaged goods if I can ensure quality but there's a reason Procter and Gamble can make >50% gross margins.

phrogdriver | 10 years ago | on: Goldman Sachs May Be Forced to Fundamentally Question How Capitalism Is Working

>We are always wary of guiding for mean reversion. But, if we are wrong and high margins manage to endure for the next few years (particularly when global demand growth is below trend), there are broader questions to be asked about the efficacy of capitalism.

I find this title to be misleading. The above quote can be paraphrased as, "We think profit margins will revert to the mean. If they don't, we will be really surprised that capitalism isn't working as we think it should."

phrogdriver | 10 years ago | on: Request For Research: Basic Income

Absolutely. In the book "Ahead of the Curve" the author describes his MBA classmates at HBS emptying their bank accounts by buying BMWs so that they qualify for more student aid. I've also seen medical doctors in private practice leave for a public health or VA job when their children are nearing college so that they can qualify for more aid, then return to private practice after the children finish college. When the system is set up to charge a high sticker price and then discount based on an "ability to pay" formula, people will do everything in their power to adjust their finances to appear unable to pay.

phrogdriver | 10 years ago | on: Request For Research: Basic Income

I've often wondered about the reasons someone might be unbanked. I've only ever considered the lack of immigration status or proof of address, as most unbanked people I've come in contact with were Latin American immigrants to the United States. I've never considered the "playing close to $0" and the effect it could have if your account was closed and you were placed on a blacklist. That would seem to underline the parent commenter's assertion that money transfer should be treated as a right.

phrogdriver | 10 years ago | on: Request For Research: Basic Income

Not to nitpick, but in my experience growing up in the Midwest of the US most "poor, but educated, families" like mine pushed children into state schools where they pay in-state tuition and graduate with $10-40k in debt. Most careers are open to them and you would almost definitely not be working at McDs or in jail.

phrogdriver | 10 years ago | on: The lingering health effects of the Civil War

>Modern-day heart disease deaths were higher in states that experienced a rapid rise out of poverty between 1950 and 1980 — even when controlling for the effects of obesity, smoking and education level.

No mention of controlling for a predilection for sweet tea, fried everything, and vegetables being limited to fried okra or green tomatoes. I loved southern cuisine when living in the South, but the cultural effects seem to have a much greater impact than biological. Take as a control anyone who has the biological makeup described and grew up in the South but then moved. It seems like poor study design to me.

phrogdriver | 10 years ago | on: Social Engineering from Kevin Mitnick

I used to work at a large organization with annual security training requirements for all employees. It consisted of hours of ridiculous scenarios where the correct answer was always "don't open attachments from people you don't know and report anything suspicious to IT." I've often thought that requiring everyone to read "Ghost in the Wires" would be a much more effective way to show people how social engineering and phishing would actually work.

phrogdriver | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: What's your favorite online course?

Damodaran and Graham are fantastic, as is Shiller's Financial Markets. His 2008 course on Open Yale was an early spark in my career.

After a quick look at the "Technical Analysis" book preview on Amazon, I would caution that technical analysis is generally a rorschach test of humans finding patterns in data when there really aren't any. Skip that one.

phrogdriver | 10 years ago | on: GDP growth of humanity over the very long run

Like all models, incorrect but useful, I think that the most useful model to view "value" and GDP is as a crude approximation of the human input that goes into making something or making it useful. Natural resources are only useful if humans exert effort to extract and refine them, services are only useful if some humans exert effort to save other humans more effort, manufacturing is only useful if the effort exerted is repaid in improved productivity or utility gained, etc. Once you abstract away from monetary units to say that we're all trading units of human effort at varying degrees of efficiency, it's clear that GDP growth and "the ability of limited resources to support a growing population" is dependent on the growth of both the amount and the efficiency of human capital rather than physical resources. I'd take Ehrlich's wager [0] at any point in the future. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager

phrogdriver | 10 years ago | on: The Decay of Twitter

>I would be willing to pay a subscription fee if that helps it sustain.

The really interesting part of this problem is the network value, not the individual value. The fact that "the network is valuable enough to you that you would be willing to pay" is precisely because of the value provided by the other nodes. Many of those nodes are present only because they do not have to pay. Demand curves are downward sloping but the value of the network is some function of the total nodes, probably the square of the nodes.

phrogdriver | 10 years ago | on: California Lawn Watering Economics

If only humankind had a discipline dedicated to the efficient allocation of scarce resources... Car washing? Absolument pas! Growing rice paddies in a desert? Sure, go ahead.
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