It's great to see Matt Levine on HN - for those interested in finance, his Money Stuff [0] daily column is absolutely excellent. His writing has a really fantastic funny and informal style.
He does a great job presenting a fair and deep view of a lot of finance issues, like HFT or Unicorn valuations.
Gfycat seems to use a randomized adjective-adjective-animal_name for their URL structure. Certainly more memorable than the imgur six-character alphaneumeric string.
So teachers will also eventually get fired for teaching Evolution in a Creationist school district. Tenure doesn't seem to actually do anything other than add red tape and drag out the process. Voters, via school boards, get their say either way. Teachers just get fired in two years rather than a month. Why not just mandate that all employees in all businesses can't be fired for two years after being hired?
And if you're arguing that tenure isn't about protecting radical ideas, but instead about job security regardless of political ideas, why should teachers have more job security than anyone else?
On the flipside, doesn't tenure allow teachers to defy a progressive administration and teach Creationism just as easily? Tenure doesn't help any particular agenda, such as science and evolution; rather it enables all agendas, and teachers can be just as bad as they can be good, like all people. The solution is to make teachers accountable to a curriculum and ensure that the curriculum is teaching evolution, via the courts if necessary.
Joe is right, you did contradict yourself. You originally said that tenure allows teachers to violate stupid school board decisions and to teach evolution anyway. Here, you said that tenure does not allow teachers to not teach evolution if the school board mandates it.
Which is it? Can the school board fire teachers for not following the curriculum? If so, then school boards can stop teachers from teaching evolution. If not, then teachers can choose to teach Creationism. Either way, tenure doesn't matter.
> Forbidding short-term rentals, in theory, can increase the pool for annual rentals, thus bringing the cost down.
That's completely contrary to how supply and demand would work--if you forbid short-term rentals you move all the short-term demand into the annual market, increasing annual demand, which drives up prices and causes more scarcity.
Since short-term housing can house multiple people each year and annual housing can house only one per year, each new annual housing unit added will be accompanied by multiple new demanders that were previously in the short-term market and could have been all housed in one year by that apartment as a short-term rental. You increase annual supply by one and increase annual demand by more than one--likely by more than half a dozen--and so prices skyrocket as demand outstrips supply and the shortage is exacerbated.
Of course, city governments are not exactly the gold standard of understanding economics when passing housing laws.
The Clinton administration bears a lot of blame for that--the government had a unique way of not, you know, actually making the credits conditional on rolling out nationwide fiber. Business is as business does, government is as government does, and apparently no one had the idea of modulating ISP rewards _after_ broadband service levels changed. I'm not sure you can blame the telcos for maximizing shareholder value as much as you can blame regulators for not understanding that the sky is blue.
Indeed. No one should be pitied for losing money in the stock market. If you know what you're doing, you'll know that there's risk involved; if you don't know what you're doing, you shouldn't be picking stocks in the first place.
People who lose out by being on the selling-too-low side of arbitrage have nothing to complain about. If you had a stop-loss order, you cede your position to the possibility of being sold too low. Moral being that like you said, if you're investing in something that might warrant a stop-loss order, you should be sophisticated enough to use something better instead.
There's as much wealth created when the price rises again as there is destroyed when the price first erroneously falls, all other things equal. What's really being described is turning a profit on prices that are, for whatever reason, set too low and return to previous levels soon after.
It's interesting that you think that this is an issue of capitalism, when it has nothing to do with capitalism at all. The vast majority of space junk is the result of governmental programs like NASA and its peers [1].
May I also add, in addition to the excellent rebuttals that other commenters have made to you, that you're making a false analogy between welfare and contract law by confusing positive and negative rights. Positive rights entitle people to something, while negative rights protect people from something. The ideals that most libertarian philosophies are based on maximize negative rights and minimize positive rights. This is based on the core insight that one person's positive rights can only ever come at the expense of another's negative rights. Also, strawman allusions to Somalia don't help this discourse.
This was already answered in my big comment. There is no trend towards any unemployment at all; there never has been any unemployment associated with tech growth; tech growth is smoother and more iterative than people are conceptualizing, so it's not like there's any technical reason that this would change; and the current tech is no revolutionary exception to the trends of tech growth we've had in the past. Basically, you assume that a certain level of tech growth implies that people who can't keep up with it will be out of a job, but we empirically observe that there is no reason to suspect this. The sorts of events that could break these patterns are singularities, not mobile apps.
That's a flagrantly false analogy. But see above--it's not time for humans to be outmoded quite yet. And when it is, it won't just be low-skill jobs that disappear.
>if what you're really trying to model isn't that common.
Technology increases are quite common. Again, look at that GDP per capita chart I linked; the logarithmic growth of technology as measured by GDP per capita benefit has been both continual, and, importantly, very steady. It's surprisingly steady, all the way up to the end of the 20th century. To echo some of the articles that have been posted on HN recently, we are in a time of unprecedented growth and social change; but we always have been. It's not like something is magically different this time around just because the HN demographic is the one participating in it, and everyone is making smartphone apps instead of web 2.0 pages, or laying intercontinental fiber before that, and so on. Technological growth is gradual and smooth in aggregate, even if individual markets can be disrupted more noticeably, which is one of the prime reasons why the job market is able to keep unemployment as low as it has been for so long, and will continue to do so in the future.
The "data set" you're thinking of seems to be something along the lines of one data point being "the industrial revolution happened, and long-term unemployment levels didn't rise." But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how we know that technology has been increasing for hundreds of years, as measured by things like the GDP per capita chart I linked, something including hundreds and thousands of data points. That all comes down to a single check: despite hundreds of years of technological growth, which is growth just like we are experiencing now and will be in the future, is unemployment higher? No. Assembly lines were a paradigm shift, cars were a paradigm shift, the modern western office environment was a paradigm shift, computers were a paradigm shift, and the internet was a paradigm shift. The entire country was always unprepared in terms of skills to capitalize on those shifts, but the unemployment rate stayed low. Apparently, if people want and need jobs, jobs will come into existence. The law of supply and demand.
I really want to stress that there's nothing substantially different in terms of innovation currently, contrary to your argument. If nanotechnology makes physical manufacturing of products functionally costless, or if the singularity makes all decision-making and programming jobs irrelevant, then sure. But social media? Smartphones and tablets? Hardly. The skills required to do these things have existed for decades; the underlying technologies are very iterative, as technological progress usually is.
Technology levels can be measured in terms of GDP per capita, which can be followed back hundreds of years. Same with unemployment rates. But in the end, is the unemployment rate 50% or 75% right now because half of the workforce is simply unneeded or unskilled, or unable? No. Non-recessionary unemployment baselines are still around 5%. To say that this particular, incremental paradigm shift that we're currently experiencing of increasing virtualization of our lives is any different is to be mistaken into thinking that our current era is a special snowflake apart from all the others before it; and that your judgement of technological change being too much for the job market to handle is different than that of Thomas Malthus's two centuries earlier, or all those thousands of voices in between.
I want to note that I'm very optimistic about the future of technology. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the human era will be over by the end of the century. But I also recognize that Malthusian-spectrum arguments never pan out, no matter how unique this current era is supposed to be in comparison to all the previous unprecedentedly unique eras.
edit: and can I add that I would be quite happy to see some technological change so rapid and sudden that it would put something like 5-10% of our workers out of a job pseudo-permanently. That would mean that some tremendous benefit to the economy has suddenly descended from the heavens of innovation. But those kinds of things just don't happen in eras like our own--unemployment shocks are instead currently temporary (usually being fixed in less than a decade) and due to very non-technology reasons, like the housing bubble and credit crunch this past decade.
Past data isn't limited at all. We have at least 2 centuries of rapid innovation to draw on when we note that unemployment has not skyrocketed with technological progress. Real GDP per capita has risen almost uninterrupted over the last 200 years [1], and is on the order of 20 times what it was 200 years ago. Yet, unemployment is still exceedingly low by world and historical standards.
The market works to provide jobs to those who demand jobs. Shifts in technology are not discrete jumps, but continual trends that price mechanisms can smoothly correct for.
>assembly lines needed a large amount of labor
The reason that assembly lines became so useful was that they needed substantially less labor per product, and could produce products far more cheaply. What you're missing is that the reason that people were still employed at relatively similar levels and GDP per capitas was because consumer demand rose to meet lower prices. These are all matters of supply and demand.
> the currently in-progress one, of moving from industrial employment to service-sector and/or information-sector employment
This shift is already very much completed. Over 80% of the USA's economy is service-sector at this point, and we haven't observed any unemployment issues that can be attributed to technology growth.
What we can predict about the future is what our modern understanding of economics and historical perspectives tell us. As long as there is demand for jobs in a market economy, there will be jobs.
Note that we don't have a 75% unemployment rate following the industrial revolution. You are hardly the first person to make this argument--it's been made for centuries. The market mechanism is an amazingly effective thing at providing jobs to those who demand jobs, both in economic theory and in observed reality over the last two hundred years.
