It’s arguably more harmful to give a poor person $120K in debt to study something that almost certainly returns little, especially as those same people (statistically) may not know that some college degrees are worth significantly less than others.
This isn’t fully fleshed out, but the government could set a cap in loans based on anticipated the future earnings. Johnny gets into Med School and wants a $400K loan? Great! Iowa Central College wants to charge $200K for a dance major? Good luck finding students to enroll!
This also has the benefit of placing downward pressure on college tuition.
Whether you give me capital at a 1% interest rate of a 50% interest rate; whether you buy 1% of my company for $1,000 or 1% of my company for $100,000,000; are independently determined by each provider of capital. Collusion would be all banks working together to only provide me a loan for 30% interest even if it's obvious I can pay it back.
The use of capital is irrelevant to the question of collusion for providing capital. That's like saying all the workers on a factory line are inherently already colluding because they work towards producing the same car.
I think we're roughly in agreement. Businesses are composed of the capital providers, the organizers (who decide how to deploy the capital), and the workers.
Capital providers colluding to set a loan rate is illegal. We shouldn't allow them to collude legally; they are a small number of experienced actors operating with information asymmetry already.
Organizers (i.e. senior management) colluding is--I don't know the legality--just unnecessary. They often are paid based on value add (equity, bonuses, etc.), so they are already reasonably aligned and need no further protection.
Workers can exist and do exist with or without collusion (i.e. unions). As a society, we've reasonably decided that colluding is legal, because workers often add a lot of value but have individual low value-over-replacement (hard to organize because of numbers, often inexperienced, etc.). Unions exist to help raise individual value-over-replacement closer to value-add.
What's being discussed here is the pluses and minuses of unionization. What I disagree with is people in this thread--not specifically you--comparing the collusion of workers to the existence of capital or organization (i.e. corporations are sometimes bad! why doesn't anyone discuss that!).
First, obviously people complain about corporations all the time. But second, private companies (capital and organization and workers) add value, and no society has done well without a large component of this.
There are many pluses to unions. But, especially as currently implemented, the minuses exist too, including that many of them focus on raising VOR but wholly ignore value-add, in a way that forces the business into slower and poorer decisions; or shielding some workers from the consequences of adding little to no value.
Businesses create value. That's not universal -- there's regulatory capture, monopolies, tragedy of the commons, etc. -- but it is fundamentally why capitalist economies have raised billions of people out of poverty.
Unions fundamentally redistribute the value that's been captured. That's not universal -- there's unions that make workers happier and result in more productivity, unions that are not adversarial and take on an HR function that's more in tune with employees -- but it is fundamentally why there can be successful companies with no unions, but of course no successful unions with no companies. Arguably, U.S. unions are more adversarial than European unions, and in many manufacturing, automobile, shipping industries have prevented their parent companies from adopting new technology, rolling out new practices, etc. to the extent that said parent companies were no longer competitive.
Yes, perhaps all those scientists are idiots and you're the only smart person, even though you're too lazy to Google it before making a snarky comment.
Hi! I used Wanderlog to plan a recent month-long group trip, which was definitely the most complex vacation I've had to plan. For context I am very active when traveling (e.g. multiple activities each day); so not sure how my experiences map to others.
The best part of it was (going to a foreign country) being able to find / identify all the attractions relative to each other, so I could go to cluster A on Monday, cluster B, on Tuesday, etc.
The hardest part of it (and why I needed to create a separate google sheets anyways) was--once I figured out opening hours of different locations, hard-to-book activities with limited reservations--the ease of moving things around more fluidly e.g. cluster B on Monday, cluster A on Tuesday, etc. and having a more information-dense view so I could see larger portions of the itinerary at once.
It would be cool to have an "input everything" --> "input time restrictions / unmovable things" --> output planned activity cluster type workflow.
Ah, for what it’s worth I looked for a while and didn’t see the download icon until you told me it was there, and I consider myself pretty good at picking up new user interfaces relative to your average user (e.g. became competent at Photoshop, Excel, etc. without handholding). It wasn’t intuitive that’s where the model weights would be stored so my brain never looked for a download icon.
For this to be usable to me (level of knowledge: I can do all of what's done on this page in Python / R, but don't have a PhD in stats or anything), I would need:
- Some sense of how training and validation is done
- Model weights
- Something that helps interpret fitting / overfitting
I'm not sure it's super useful for someone below my level of knowledge (or maybe at my level but just don't know Python?). It seems like a random marketing person, shopify person, etc. would need:
- Better understanding of when to use regression vs. classification
- Help interpreting of whether the MAE / loss is good or bad
- Some automatic way to prevent overfitting
- Guidance on what consitutes good data and how to structure it for input
- Examples of how it might be applied to their use case
- Knowledge of how often models fail / how much they should be indexing on the model
I am not aware of any data that colleges--liberal arts or otherwise--teach much in terms of critical thinking. Rather their value seems to derive primarily from their ability to select talented students and provide them with a network of similarly talented peers. That and they get "credit" for the learnings of students as they age from 18 - 22/26, when that's a pretty ripe time for maturing thought with or without the classroom.
Moreover, it's clear that most colleges agree with my viewpoint. For example, if Harvard's product was an amazing curriculum, they could expand that to many, many more students than their current class size and charge for it (instead, their actions are rational when their product is exclusivity and high-talent networks).
CEOs are generally not going to take on any risk to the company -- especially one that exists in a highly regulated segment of the market -- for the purpose of an interesting interview. I would be surprised if the author genuinely expected to get an honest answer from the Pfizer CEO about whether the FDA is doing a good job.
Unfortunately, there's many corporate environments where technical staff are managed by non-technical staff. This comment isn't debating the merits of that, but when the manager (or especially their manager) doesn't really intuitively understand the difficulty of your work or how much you've accomplished, they measure by other things like "responsiveness".
This is similar to how patients will rate doctors (lawyers, auto-mechanics, electricians) higher by things like waiting room design, ability to make small-talk, willingness to give antibiotics, etc. which are important but actually do not correlate with better care.
So I've found that optimizing for "responsiveness" is important in and of itself, and much easier than the alternative of "let me make sure non-technical senior management person X spends the time to understand my contributions at a deeper level".
Agree 100%. Many riots / burning of buildings / lootings were allowed while media spurred them on and called them peaceful protests. Police in many cities gave up on enforcement.
In those scenarios the state no longer has a monopoly on violence.
Like most readers of this forum, I advocate supplying free drugs and free housing in some of the most expensive real-estate in the world, no strings attached, to people suffering mental health and addiction issues that destroy their insight and self control. Anyone who is against this position or wants to have a more nuanced discussion is privileged and clearly suffering from a lack of empathy and is therefore a worse human being.
When you consider incentives, you have to think about more than just what one average person would do.
There are 300M Americans. If 999/1,000 people say "hey, free housing is great, but I'm going to keep working" and 1/1,000 people say "hey, free housing! I can just kick back", we now have an extra 300,000 people who are on the dole (almost DOUBLE the current number of homeless).
If you take the premise that there is a set amount of wealth, and that it changes hands from one person to another, then that is fair. However that's a false premise. The act of labor (including the act of organizing the labor of millions of people in a productive way) creates net new wealth.
Now, we can argue about Jeff Bezos specifically and we can debate what percentage of his equity is by creating new wealth versus what percentage was a transfer from e.g. underpaying his workers, but that's very different than saying being a billionaire is itself morally wrong.
I'm not sure that's counter evidence (i.e. it doesn't lend proof to the OP's position either, it just decreases the certainty of both positions).
The only source I could find with respect to your question is that "Students from the 19 poorest districts, who make up about 31% of kindergarteners citywide, represented about 28% of gifted offers last year" (https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/ny-gifted-adm...), but I do not have the primary data.
Given the overall ethnic representation of the school, it is statistically extremely likely that a large fraction of the 28% are Asian.
I also find no cited evidence in many of the pro-ending-G&T articles that G&T programs cater to wealthy students, and presumably De Blasio and others who have access to the data and want to end the programs would have pushed those facts out there.
Anecdotally, wealthy whites and asians have the opportunity to send their children to private schools without spending a large portion of their young lives testing into G&T programs.
I think (5) is the weakest point, and also the major reason for getting an MBA.
With respect to the other points:
(1) Most '20 year old aspiring tech founders' can hardly be thought of as either a specialist nor experienced, but that doesn't make it any less a valuable experience.
(2) Hiring is an extremely difficult process, and most startups can take risks on experience and tangible contributions primarily because they can fire more easily (and the applicant pool is self-selecting) when it doesn't work out. At a large company signals are proportionally more important because you can't rely on interviewers, etc. to have high accuracy in judging candidates (I recognize this should be improved, but it's not currently).
(3) This is generalizable to all schooling except for e.g. chemistry labs or other things requiring expensive equipment and not specifically to MBAs.
(4) I would argue that more African-Americans have demonstrated "leadership qualities" and "emotional IQ in social settings" than have excelled at algorithms, and their representation as VPs or SVPs of a generic corporate function is higher than their representation as quants.
There's some conclusions that I disagree with here assuming the same starting facts. Also, I think calling things "racist" or "segregated" usually ends critical thinking because they have the same emotional label as the initial definition (systematic differences in treatment due to skin color) even as the definitions have expanded (systematic differences in outcomes, independent of cause).
Let's presume that intelligence is heritable. Given the difference between humans and other species I do not see how this can be argued.
Let's also presume that intelligence varies between humans. If there is no variation across a population, then it cannot be selected for, unless you argue a stepwise change that's completely uniform, for which I don't see any other evolutionary proxy.
Let's NOT presume that intelligence varies between races.
My question to you is this:
Can the children of a group of humans selected for intelligence (e.g. completed enough education despite a cultural revolution, had enough finances, etc. -- Asians; escaped systematic genocide, etc. -- Jews) be, on average and not uniformly and with lots of overlap, smarter than the children of a group of humans not selected for intelligence (e.g. sold by other Africans into slavery, so presumably disadvantaged in the original African society, lower-educational-barrier illegal immigration as with many Central and South Americans)?
Note for the purposes of this question that reproduction within each group (Asian immigrants : Asian immigrants; Jews : Jews; African-Americans : African-Americans; Hispanics : Hispanics) is much larger than reproduction between groups, preventing admixing over time.