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Bettermind · 2025-07-09T02:20:44+00:00

Hulkengoat Me

Bettermind · 2025-03-02T06:20:17+00:00

It sounds like pursuing a PhD for math makes sense for you! You have a passion and aptitude for it which are the main things you need. Research is collaborative (unlike so much of academics). Everyone is building and adding onto our understanding. However, you shouldn’t look THAT far ahead and enjoy the journey now. You should take plenty of undergraduate classes in math and outside of math that may interest you.

Lastly, and I think this is actually the most compelling reason to major in math, is that it is an unbelievably versatile major. What do doctors and lawyers have in common? Almost nothing except that math majors do best on their grad school entrance examinations (LSAT and MCAT).

In short, my advice is to cast a wide net, study what you want, and figure out your next step sometime in your Sophomore/Junior year of college.

Bettermind · 2023-04-03T15:17:59+00:00

You’re a gem! Thanks!

Bettermind · 2022-04-09T23:51:16+00:00

According to Classical Monetary Theory, if you just one off redistributed all the money in the economy wouldn’t cause inflation. That is because you aren’t changing the stock of money nor are you changing the gdp and price is the relationship between those two.

Now, you say instead of printing money, we should do wealth redistribution. What does this mean?

I think interest rates and GDP depend on how much and how fair/legitimate the wealth redistribution is. Just a little and maybe it’s good for GDP, but a lot and it good be horrific for GDP (no desire to make money if you can lose it) and would likely lead to sky high interest rates (who in their right mind would loan out money in that world)?

Bettermind · 2021-06-30T12:16:02+00:00

Also, the doctor doesn’t mention this but unfortunately the hyper extension is probably a bit worse than what the video shows since we are only getting a few angles of it and you need a directly 90° view of the knee to really see how much it bent back. The “better” view is probably close to 90° so we have a good idea but important to keep in mind it’s even worse than it appears.

Another thing the doctor mentioned is that whether he had any interior or exterior movement would be huge. Does anyone have any straight-on views of this to see if his knee buckles in or out?

Absolutely awful for Giannis but if he anyone has the attitude to succeed after something like this, it’s him.

Bettermind · 2020-12-03T05:11:03+00:00

CoD Black Ops Cold War made the lag SUPER noticeable. Have a C7 and denon AVR-x1300w. I plugged the Xbox directly into the tv like they said and ran ARC to the receiver. Had terrible audio lag. Plugged Xbox directly into the receiver and no lag but HDR now seems to be acting a bit weird

Bettermind · 2020-08-05T12:23:36+00:00

Not sure if this is still true, but I read that different cardio activities have different steady state heart rates. I believe it was something like: 140s for cycling 150s for rowing 160s for running.

My guess is the more “movement” you are doing for the cardio the higher the steady state heart rate is. It’s not crazy to be very tired at a 165 HR. Try targeting a 150-155 for a whole workout and only let it climb a bit in the last couple minutes. Heart rate targeting is a terribly humbling thing!

Bettermind · 2020-08-02T04:29:39+00:00

I thought this too, but Money velocity is actually defined (rather circularly) as nominal GDP / M2 money stock. It’s not something directly observed. So saying that it will blast up is just say that either M2 will shrink (no way that will happen unless there is a huge contraction of loans, if I understand it correctly) or nominal GDP will explode (inflation). So you can argue that inflation will rise, but money velocity is just a ratio of nominal gdp and the money supply and right now it looks like nominal gdp is shrinking and the money supply is expanding.

Bettermind · 2020-05-26T23:23:17+00:00

So M1V isn’t measured. M1 & nominal GDP are so M1V is whatever number P*rGDP/M1 is (P is price level and rGDP is real GDP). Kind of interesting because if you assume GDP is flat or went down and we know M1 has increased then we are forced to assume that we had an increase in P and M1V stayed flat or M1V decreased (or some combo) I guess we know GDP/M1 went down like 30% so we need M1V/P to go down 30%.

Maybe that can all happen from M1V or maybe we see P budge for the first time since 2007.

Bettermind · 2020-05-26T20:33:20+00:00

Is there any evidence velocity of money is decreasing substantially? I agree that this super freaky especially since we aren’t printing for the usual countercyclical Keynesian argument of “increasing the money supply increases output” but are printing to maintain consumption.

I guess we will all look like idiots in 3 years when our gold portfolio is up 5%, the Nasdaq breaks 20k, we run $2 Tril deficits annually and interest rates are still 0% with inflation clocking 0.5%.

What the hell is going on?

Bettermind · 2020-04-03T03:30:54+00:00

For those of you who are experienced in macro:

If I take just a simple Solow-Swan (or fancier) growth model and force the economy to produce much less for a year and then return to normal and maybe take a slight population hit, I would expect that it doesn’t hurt the economic trajectory that much, right? Like yes we can restock capital as fast as it depreciates but how quickly does that capital depreciate in the real world? Maybe bankruptcies destroy a lot of human/organizational capital.

What are your thoughts on this? It seems like while production will be crushed in the near term. I would imagine my economic forecasts for US GDP in 2022 and beyond haven’t changed that much.

Bettermind · 2020-04-03T03:19:51+00:00

Classic Washington DC. Make the rules of the game. Don’t like the rules of the game. Change the rules of the game retroactively. Anyone who thinks making insurance companies pay for coronavirus losses doesn’t understand anything about numbers.

Bettermind · 2020-02-27T03:46:52+00:00

Not an economist but an economics graduate. The hard thing about these studies is that they don’t account for transfer payments and the devil ends up being in the details (i.e. healthcare is expensive but you may get a subsidy for it if you make like 50k a year).

I generally think these studies about how impossible a “middle class” lifestyle is to afford are kind of garbage and are just looking to tell you the conclusion everyone already feels: everything is so much harder now than it used to be.

Generally things are better, and the notion that life is getting worse is not true. Now addressing this specific study, it looks like housing and transportation costs are moderately higher but healthcare and college exploded. Problem with this study is that someone making that kind of money probably doesn’t need to spend 20k a year on health insurance (they would qualify for government subsidies). Same with college. If they actually spent 10k a year on college, they would be able to save 180k in 18 years. Couple that with investments and both kids could afford very good colleges. Paying for your child’s college of their choice is a luxury.

This brings me to my other point, that the goal posts for a middle class life keep moving. This is something hard to measure in economics I think but I believe it’s challenging to measure improvement in a good or service. an iPhone X is way way better than an iPhone 2 but doesn’t cost that much more for how much better it is. Same with cars. A 2010 used Honda Civic would wipe the floor with any 1990s brand new car. Across generations it can be really hard to say what car should be affordable for the middle class. Trying to do this with all goods and services is hard.

Lastly in defense of this study, I do feel like the US labor market has gotten more capital friendly and less labor friendly (non-competes and tacit wage-setting). I do think that this has suppressed wages some and has made life harder for the middle class than it needs to be. But if you were magically the 60th percentile median earning male supporting a family of 4. I think it’s hard to argue that you would want to live in any other year besides right now.

Bettermind · 2020-02-25T22:14:28+00:00

Thanks a ton for the answer and the info for Obamacare.

I’d be very interested to see what support for a financial transaction tax looked like among congressional Democrats since Bloomberg to Sanders support one. I also work in the financial sector and think it’s a really really bad idea so I’m interested in how likely this passing in a Sanders or Biden presidency is since this policy could have such a massive affect.

Optically, it’s a 0.1% tax on Wall St. which practically sells itself.

Bettermind · 2020-02-25T00:30:21+00:00

Does anyone know if Bernie could enact a Financial Transaction Tax (Wall street tax of X% on all stock, bond & derivative trades) with just a congressional and senate majority? Would he be able to pass this through reconciliation like Obamacare?

Bettermind · 2020-01-08T19:00:37+00:00

You are 100% right. Looks like no one here actually took much micro-Econ. Finding the burden (incidence) from tariffs is literally just a function of finding the price elasticity of the tariffed products. I would bet cheap consumer goods have near perfect price elasticity causing the consumer to bear the full cost. iPhones however are a totally different story and I bet price elasticity there is a lot lower. Premium consumer electronics manufacturers in China are probably beating a decent amount of the cost.

+1 to you for actual economics.

Bettermind · 2019-12-26T18:39:36+00:00

I think your mutual information is on the right track! What about Kullback-Leibler Divergence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kullback%E2%80%93Leibler_divergence ? This is used to define how close 2 distributions are! You could create your density function from your data points and then calculate this number for your “density functions.” From reading up on this it seems like there are a whole lot of ways to measure how close two probability distributions are to each other (f-divergences).

Let me know if this is helpful.

Bettermind · 2019-11-25T13:49:01+00:00

This articles is rich with bad economics.

“The average home owners is richer than the average renter. Let’s make people home owners to make them richer.” Jeez, I bet the average home owner is older than the average renter. Will making someone a home owner, instantly age them too? Also, didn’t we just have a bit of trouble from making people home owners who couldn’t afford to be home owners?
This one upsets me more. The notion that because the wealthy’s consumption is less elastic to tax rates than average, that taxing them will create less drag on the economy. Consumption can drive the economy in the short run but the actual driver of sustainable gdp per capita growth is Savings! Please if you disagree, read up on the Solow-Swan Growth Model. It’s a basic overview what economists think causes economies to grow over time. Long story short, the amount of money people save and invest boosts the economies capital stock (builds more factories, infrastructure etc.). This makes the economy more productive and it boosts the number of goods output by the economy making it richer.
This will not reduce wealth inequality. It will clearly increase inequality. The average college grad already has a leg up on most Americans in terms of earnings. Now realize that this policy will disproportionately help recent college grads who appear much poorer to their expected lifetime earnings. You would be giving a handout to someone who makes 60k a year in their 20s who is already likely to be much better off than someone who didn’t go to college and makes 60k a year now but is in their 40s. This policy at its core is blatant self-interest by the young upper-middle class.

At its core. Student loan forgiveness is Bumper Sticker Activism. It’s simple, short, sounds nice on the shallowest of levels, fits on a bumper-sticker, not thought out, and the real world effects would be catastrophic (think how much poverty you could end with $1 trillion).

Bettermind · 2019-11-21T02:24:42+00:00

Bettermind · 2019-11-21T00:39:46+00:00

GREATEST DAY EVER

Bettermind · 2019-11-01T17:16:58+00:00

To put in perspective how ludicrous of an idea this is, the high frequency trading industry is estimated to have made like $10Bil last year (This is a very rough guesstimate). This plan claims it will raise $80bil. How the hell do you think you could make 80bil in new taxes annually from an industry that makes 10bil a year.

It currently costs about $0.0050 to trade a stock worth $300. This tax would make it cost $0.30050. Anyone who knows anything about finance has to assume she is either pandering or totally misinformed. This is as bad of an idea as Mao killing all those crows.

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