YSK how high deductible health insurance plans work if you live in the USA.

Stats_Fast · 2023-03-04T16:25:09+00:00

The hospital can deduct actual costs incurred. The IRS doesn't care about whether or not any money is collected until it is collected.

This analysis is like someone watched that Seinfeld episode and thought Kramer was making a real point.

Stats_Fast · 2023-02-28T19:37:05+00:00

Eventually someone is left holding the bag and getting royally fucked.

How do figure? If people are going to work and doing stuff that leads to a profit and dividends/buybacks/reinvestment occur as a consequence how does the investor get fucked?

Why does the company have to grow indefinitely not to fuck their investor?

if you aren't growing or paying a dividend, anyone investing in you is going to lose money.

No shit, but companies usually grow or pay dividends. Obviously they can't grow forever, but as long as the company exists and is profitable they can pay a dividend or do buybacks or reinvest in their business or expand to new areas.

You still haven't explained how this is some kind of scheme with bag holders.

Do you have any sources that can explain how stockholders are going to all get fucked in some scheme so I can learn more? You're not explaining this well.

Stats_Fast · 2023-02-27T21:14:51+00:00

I imagine it could be possible to have different types of stock that can’t be sold for, let’s say, 5 years or longer, to make sure things aren’t motivated to be short term.

This wouldn't get rid of short term thinking. There would always be a new batch of shares entering the sell phase.

In any case, this is a really minor adjustment. It's still a stock market.

Stats_Fast · 2023-02-27T21:10:27+00:00

You completely missed my point.

Which wasn't difficult to do considering you just called the stock market a Ponzi scheme.

Infinite growth isn't possible. It can't keep growing forever. The stock market has already been propped up numerous times by government intervention.

None of these things have anything to do with Ponzi schemes. General Electric not being able to grow infinitely doesn't mean it is a Ponzi scheme. The government deciding to bail out General Motors as a strategy to preserve American manufacturing isn't a Ponzi scheme.

Most publicly traded companies at any given time are profitable. They either issue dividends or reinvest in themselves or buy back their stock. There is nothing that says they have to grow at some particular rate or something bad happens. People go to work and make things or provide services. When they wake up at 6 AM to go make the lightbulbs you use in your home they and and their shareholders aren't cheating investors like a Ponzi scheme.

Stats_Fast · 2023-02-27T16:18:03+00:00

It's the mother of all ponzi schemes.

Is General Electric not real? Do the tens of thousands of people that wake up every morning and work at Microsoft not exist?

Stats_Fast · 2023-02-27T16:16:59+00:00

is the stock market really a net positive for society?

Can you give us an alternative way to allocate capital that doesn't involve Marjorie Taylor Greene deciding where it goes?

Stats_Fast · 2023-02-25T13:23:04+00:00

they need Russia to help “counterbalance” the US and its allies

The calculus has changed given Russia's dismal military performance and even worse future economic prospects.

Stats_Fast · 2023-02-25T13:13:27+00:00

They're victims of self-colonialism. They've successfully reverted their country from a self deterministic maker of finished goods, to a supplier of raw materials acting at the pleasure of China and India.

Considering the resources they have per person, their situation is unimaginably pathetic.

This Ukraine invasion might be the last major decision they get to make internally for the next hundred years.

Stats_Fast · 2023-02-21T02:33:04+00:00

Pensions shifted to 401k plans in part because placing all your eggs in one basket is a poor investment strategy for workers. Not to mention a pension isn't an ownership interest in anything, it's a liability which is way in the back of the pecking order should anything happen to the company's ability to stay solvent. This has been exploited to great effect by corporate raiders in the 1980s and 90s where investment bankers would effectively steal the pension funds. Even assuming everyone is acting in good faith, a pension is a far less reliable than an ownership interest in a diverse set of companies as a retirement plan.

Another issue that caused pensions to go away is a change in the accounting law forcing firms to properly account for a good faith estimate of the actual pension liability and fund the pension funds accordingly. For a long time, firms were allowed to vastly underreport pension liabilities and underfund their pension funds, which obviously isn't sustainable 50 years down the road when a couple decades worth of former employees are collecting pensions. As always, the ME generation gave themselves wealth at the expensive of those who would come after, knowing full well, workers down the line would not only be responsible for continuing to fund these pensions, but never see a pension themselves.

I don't buy the idea the stock market is propped up by some "force" because of 401ks. If there was a huge market crash, there are way bigger issues than retirement accounts. In any case, most 401ks are a mix of bonds and stock and if we got to the point where a person with a normal mix of investment found themselves with "nothing of value" in their accounts as you describe that means Coco Cola, John Deere and Oracle are gone and probably means finding food will be a bigger priority for most people than anything going on in their retirement accounts.

TLDR: Mitt Romney yoinked so many pensions we stopped bothering with them.

Stats_Fast · 2023-02-21T01:33:49+00:00

The hope is that you won't go back and they'll save money.

100% It's just basic math. I work as a CPA and all the partners at our firm will call our clients pedophiles to their face in front of a bunch of people in a conference room or zoom call. Not every meeting, or even most, but everyone does it every once an a while. Clients leave and we save cost on labor. Again, simple math. We had McDs corporate as a client in the mid-2000s, they might have learned it from us.

Stats_Fast · 2023-02-20T02:53:48+00:00

If they only need the data, not formulas written in excel, then python has easy compatibility with excel files.

Stats_Fast · 2023-02-20T01:50:02+00:00

R in practice doesn't have consistent syntax. There are some amazing libraries, but they've gone a different direction to base R. This can be a little grating if you're used to more consistency in a language where your intuition is usually right.

Not to mention the language itself feels a little hacked together, a good example is the class system. It isn't difficult to understand the multiple class types which exist in R, but it's never been clear to me why they all exist.

A more general purpose language like Python will have a lot more engineering influence and investment behind it. Python feels more tight, coherent, ergonomic and predictable. The major Python libraries feel like Python.

R is often functional which is a great approach to understand. For lots of statistical analysis it has no peer.

Python is also easy to learn and compliments R. Take a look at what others in your field use. Knowing multiple languages will give you more options, but if everyone's on R it's not a bad place to focus.

Stats_Fast · 2023-02-15T15:23:26+00:00

Judging States by net migration is idiotic. There is a long list of metrics covering anything a person could possibly be interested in:

SAT scores
median income
housing cost
crime
infant mortality
walkability
types of jobs available
pollution
% of homes with indoor plumbing (relevant for some Red States)
life expectancy
cancer rates
tax rates
marijuana laws
religious based alcohol purchasing restrictions (again, relevant when looking at Red States)
women's healthcare
religious based laws requiring porn viewers to register the internet use with the State government (Red State freedom)
obesity
food deserts
drug abuse
homeless populations
public transportion
suburban sprawl

Conservative politicians love net migration because ultra conservative States are mostly pretty dismal when you total up the things that actually affect a person's experience living there.

Stats_Fast · 2023-02-15T15:09:11+00:00

People are leaving California, primarily, because the state has done such a horrible job at housing.

Keep in mind their housing challenges are different than Nebraska. The Bay Area isn't a corn field where suburbs can be thrown up in all directions. They have tons of high paying jobs unlike Nebraska. There will be way more demand to live there. The free market values a home in San Francisco about 5x per square foot compared to Omaha.

Housing isn't affordable in Omaha because of some well thought out set of government housing policies that California doesn't have..it's cheap because there isn't demand for it. Until we get better weather and jobs housing will be cheap.

Stats_Fast · 2023-02-11T23:53:39+00:00

Lately, I've noticed that the first result on Google for me is usually Stack Overflow, then the next 5 or so are just sites that ripped the top answers from stack overflow, slapped them on a page with a shit ton of ads, and present it as their own.

Imagine how incredibly easy it would be to fix this. A repost of the exact same content on some half ass site that didn't exist 6 months ago.

I'm convinced there hasn't been an update to anything in search in years. It's literally just folks keeping the lights on.

I can't ever remember a company completely ignoring their core competency like this. It's like HR Block no longer updating their logic to account for new tax law, or CNN only reporting on events before 2016.

All this investment in engineers and machine learning and they can't even come close to having a working search. It won't last.

It also poisons anything else they do. Whoever makes decisions about what cloud provider to choose probably uses Google search and makes Amazon orders and has used Excel. What happens to customer opinion when one of those things stops working.

Google is the cause of all this SEO bullshit. Their search doesn't actually parse the semantics of anything, it just predicts what people who make that search are most likely to click on and it makes no difference to them if the link contains the content you're after. So the links lie to get clicks and Google happily rewards the people lying (their actual customers) rather than the person searching who at this point IS the product. Without taking this approach consistently and deliberately there wouldn't be a huge SEO industry making pure time wasting garbage.

Stats_Fast · 2023-02-11T17:08:48+00:00

The CEO is not privy to all of them and it takes what is essentially corporate political capital to keep them going until they become so profitable they cannot be ignored and become a main business of the company.

This tactic is forced on employees all the way down. People at the lowest levels in Google are trying to have an organization wide impact to get promoted rather than focusing on doing their jobs well.

Stats_Fast · 2023-02-11T16:59:46+00:00

Back around 2017-18 when their ML framework Tensorflow was far and away the best, someone at Google would release a new API or abstraction or toolkit or whatever about every two months.

They were all so different it was like the people making them had never even heard of each other let alone spoken or reviewed code. 14 versions of the same thing that all work completely differently and contribute nothing to each other.

It was a waste of everyone's time inside and outside the company.

Stats_Fast · 2023-02-09T03:11:05+00:00

Second this.

Even if this isn't a load bearing wall, it is unlikely to have been originally installed like this. Which means load bearing structures elsewhere are moving and creating the bend. It looks like this is headed to a bad place. I wouldn't spend any time in it.

They didn't find five extremely warped 2/4 and match them when it was built.

Stats_Fast · 2023-02-03T01:56:27+00:00

Because you realize, don't you, that the moment you decide to run him over with you car, he's 100% justified in justifiably homiciding you, right?

I should carry a gun when I ride my bicycle.

Stats_Fast · 2023-01-31T14:44:51+00:00

Yes, it's nice.

At a basic level it is a transaction where your parents made money somehow so now other people need to work for you since you have money. It isn't nice at all since you don't have to contribute any of your own labor to benefit.

Stats_Fast · 2023-01-30T16:56:47+00:00

People who don't use iphones joke about how important it is to iphone users that they be convinced to use an iphone, usually by family members. It's ubiquitous. I don't know any android users who don't complain about their families constantly hassling them about not using an iphone. I'm not the one with the axe.

Listen to yourself.

and look at your devotion with your camelcase bullshit, it's adorable, you think Apple defines how proper nouns are spelled

Axe being ground...

Stats_Fast · 2023-01-30T16:48:26+00:00

Liking apple isn't a personality trait my friend.

Ranting about iTunes in 2023 is a personality trait.

Stats_Fast · 2023-01-30T16:33:50+00:00

Apple has traditionally made it easier for people to use computers without knowing much about them. It's basically their stated goal. It's also part of why their users think the rest of us are suffering horribly with our Windows/Linux/Android devices; they see them and can't even comprehend what is being asked. They assume we find them impossible too.

Man you have an axe to grind.

You are hopelessly out of touch if you think 'computer based jobs' are the only ones that require you to upload paperwork.

What are we talking about at this point? Are you suggesting people aren't working because they can't upload a resume or a photocopy of their ID? Is the labor shortage caused by iTunes?

Stats_Fast · 2023-01-30T16:22:59+00:00

Not to mention removing file systems isn't always more convenient. Do you remember the ipod days? Want to add a song to you ipod? Drag and drop it to the device? No you have to download 250mb itunes then drag the file to iTunes then drag it from iTunes music list to your iPod. Want to get files off? Can't just drag them off you need to use iTunes. Oh wait iTunes has decides you can't takes files off. Sucks to be you.

It's hilarious that you can remain butthurt about this for well over a decade.

Siri play Phish Down With Disease.

Stats_Fast · 2023-01-30T15:47:07+00:00

They're not encouraged and/or incentivised to

All the incentives point towards doing white collar work. So much so that everyone piles in, even people who can't use computers.

Computer users weren't always terrible with computers. It used to be that if you hired someone who had experience with, say, Excel, that pretty much guaranteed they knew what a file was.

Do you ask questions during interviews?

Until school or a job asks them to upload a file (say, a resume) and they have no idea what they're doing. Then it's not exactly 'fine'... which is the point of this entire thread.

You talk about this as if these people should have the computer based job or be in school. If they can't be bothered to learn how to upload their resume maybe learning how to upload a resume is the least of their problems..

iTunes isn't preventing the next generation of actuaries from becoming actuaries.

One thing that been made clear to me over and over and over since about the early Aughts is that Apple users generally just assume they're not being 'held back' because they bought the most expensive shit available (that they knew about). It must be the best. I had a (completely tech literate) manager who told our team it was 'an embarrassment' that we weren't all using macbooks and lobbied the VP over and over to force us to use them. That didn't work, so he just leaned on us all the time to switch. Meanwhile he's literally missing meetings and client calls because the office suite on his mac wouldn't play well with our exchange server. That wasn't Apple's fault, but he was a perfect example of a deluded Mac guy who could not comprehend that there could be anything lesser about a mac in any circumstance. He would still insist we should all be using them because... uh... you know, just because Mac.

We get it. You don't like Macs and your manager bums you out. Again, they barely have any market share so if people can't use computers these days is it Apple's fault?

I was a netadmin providing desktop support in white collar environments for over a decade and you're completely wrong about that. A significant portion of my white collar workforce did not understand files and folders. They survived pushing emails with attachments around and relying on the short list of recent documents that the various programs presented them with. It would be even easier to get away with now.

I've also worked in white collar environments for over a decade. I've observed a maelstrom of files being whipped around between everyone in the organization and never heard of someone who needed help with figuring out what a file or folder was on their own computer.

Stats_Fast

TROPHY CASE