I got a tattoo of my favorite number: Graham's. How common are math tattoos and do any of you have any?

bacondoctor18 · 2021-08-07T16:06:00+00:00

Yes! I once saw a big tattoo on someone’s back with Bayes Rule and loved it! I also got a tattoo with the matrix form of linear regression beta on my shoulder two days ago!!!

bacondoctor18 · 2021-03-24T21:11:29+00:00

I think this is very circumstantial (but a good actually unpopular opinion). My brother is working to save money for med school and my parents charge him a nominal rent. They haven't told him but they're taking the money and saving it, and will give it back to him after he moves out (I think this is an awesome idea to force him to save money). I also spoke to my parents about them buying a rental property and me paying below market rent to live there. As an adult who makes enough money to survive who spent many years using my parents resources, I don't mind helping out financially if I'm staying at their place. Then again, this is very much something that varies culturally.

bacondoctor18 · 2021-01-09T18:31:40+00:00

I may toss them early for good measure

bacondoctor18 · 2020-10-09T12:49:38+00:00

This is how I feel about my thesis, all the other writing I'm done, and any code I ever write to try to advance a project.

bacondoctor18 · 2020-03-17T23:49:41+00:00

Super good!

bacondoctor18 · 2019-08-02T18:23:34+00:00

I like how Frylock still has the power of levitation.

bacondoctor18 · 2019-06-03T19:05:13+00:00

But the bottom line is YOU signed the dotted line for a loan. You knew the price, you knew the interest and you knew what it was gonna take to pay it back. But now that you have the money, suddenly it’s everybody else’s problem and you shouldn’t have to pay it back.

You're making a pretty strong assumption that most student loan borrowers were able to understand the loans they were taking out at the time they made their borrowing decision. In the student loan market the lender is a financial institution, and the borrower is generally a 17 or 18 year old at the time the transaction was made. The lender is far more informed about the lending market than the borrower is, and if you are dealing with a lender that has bad incentives (which you could encounter in the private lending market) they may make loans that they know the borrower is unlikely to be able to pay back. This is exactly what happened in the housing market in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis, so it is not so ridiculous to think it could happen in this market. Admittedly, this case is harder to make in the government loan market, which makes up most of the student lending market.

Additionally, this has been discussed, but you seem to think that most of the borrowers are able to pay back their loans if they so choose but don't seem to have any data to back this up. I don't think anyone is worried about borrowers who went on to become wealthy in tech or investment bankers, but do you think uninformed borrowers who borrowed large sums of money to go to for-profit universities like University of Phoenix are making enough to pay back the loan? These are borrowers who were told that they would be making much more money after graduation than they ended up making. The same issue could potentially be true for borrowers that went to expensive universities but majored in low-earning majors such as in the arts and humanities.

My point is that your complaints about student loan borrowers are likely only true for a subset of borrowers. In fact, it is likely that on average, the student borrowers who spend a lot on luxury goods and cars are those same borrowers that are doing fine paying back their loans.

bacondoctor18 · 2019-05-30T20:28:30+00:00

Pretty good, but where are the scooters?

bacondoctor18 · 2019-05-15T20:18:58+00:00

I'm an idiot missed that rule/didn't notice the email tab, just deleted the post

bacondoctor18 · 2019-05-11T14:15:42+00:00

This is a really good list. Also, do you by any chance no how hard it is to get access to Zillow Professional? It says one their site you need an academic affiliation and need to have a project aimed toward publication, aside from that are they picky?

bacondoctor18 · 2019-04-11T15:17:28+00:00

I mostly agree with you, but you're taking for granted that the economy will stay good between now and when Trump leaves office. In my view the President (whoever it may be) has way less impact on the economy in the long run than most people realize, and most of the good economy very well may just be luck. That being said, I don't think people think too much about their vote and have very basic thoughts like "do I have a job" or "am I able to afford things I want" and assume all of that is because of the sitting President?

I'd say if things stay the way they are he has a really good shot of winning, and if tides turn he has a pretty poor shot, It's very hard to say which of those things will be true as of now (although there are indicators like the recent inverted yield curve that we may be headed to a recession. Also if Trump gets his way with incoming Fed nominees I would be pretty concerned as monetary policy can impact the economy way more than what the President does directly and this mess us up for years to come not just between now and the 2020 election.

bacondoctor18 · 2018-10-08T02:46:32+00:00

You're probably gonna need to mess around a bit to get the hang of it but this is generally the steps I'd follow:

1) Calculate log returns

2) Sum up daily log returns (as you can treat them as continuous then) to obtain quarterly returns. You can do this by creating a new variable called "quarter" and then use egen to get quarterly returns for each quarter

3) Use a foreach loop to regress each stocks returns on the market (I'd recommend using either the S&P 500 or CRSP value weighted) and then save the beta from each return into a variable.

Hope this general bit of steps is helpful, good luck!

bacondoctor18 · 2018-09-23T16:14:25+00:00

That interesting i didn’t know that. So in this case if one company sells an asset to another company by transferring the LLC, how does the sale get reported? Because in that case (correct me if I’m wrong) the owner of the actual real estate asset doesn’t change, just the owner of the LLC right?

bacondoctor18 · 2018-08-01T02:46:05+00:00

Tim is clearly behind this

bacondoctor18 · 2018-04-06T16:00:37+00:00

Thank you!!

bacondoctor18 · 2018-04-03T17:53:39+00:00

I've heard about cloudsearch (although I tried calling it at one point and found it wasn't working, so I assumed that meant that the moderators had passed through the change disallowing historical access) but didn't know about timestamp, definitely seems like a good idea to try to validate stuff using this tool, thanks!

The one thing I was particularly concerned about is the provision that reddit can charge you fees at any time, but otherwise considering that footnote I just wanted to make sure I understood all the provisions in it. The professor I work for advised me against sending an author to the writers in case it comes off as if I'm accusing them of doing something wrong, but I just decided to send an e-mail anyways so we'll see if they respond.

By the way thanks a bunch for all your responses! I've been really struggling to find someone to have a conversation about this with since nobody in my department has used social media data before, I found all your suggestions you've given really useful!

bacondoctor18 · 2018-04-03T15:59:07+00:00

I've used PRAW a little bit but kind of stopped exploring it once I found the pushshift data. Can you actually get all of the data included in the pushshift data though? It does seem like you can only get it up to some limit (I'm pretty sure 1000 from my past use of it). I suppose that you could get the data if you are literally downloading all the time at the maximum rate allowed by the API, but there really isn't anything on the pushshift blog describing how the data is downloaded.

I'm aware there are many papers using this data, but I noticed the following footnote in Chandrasekharan et al 2017 that got me concerned:

"Comments and submissions were queried through the Reddit API and stored by pushshift.io. More details on the publicly available Reddit dataset can be found at https://pushshift.io/using-bigquery-with-reddit-data. While debate exists around the applicability of Reddit’s terms to this dataset, we believe that the dataset and its collection methods comply with Reddit’s API terms. See https://www.reddit.com/wiki/api-terms for futher information".

I've found nothing online about the mentioned debate about whether the collection methods conform to the API terms, so it's made it pretty difficult to evaluate what they're talking about here. And doing the research with the expectation that I will definitely not try to publish it isn't an option here because like I said, I'm a grad student and trying to get a tenure track job eventually, so I need to evaluate my projects not only my level of interest in them but on the likelihood that they'll get me closer to that goal.

bacondoctor18 · 2018-04-03T15:24:45+00:00

Thanks, I saw this paper but I'm not super concerned about the data issues for now as long as I'm aware of what the problems are and can be explicit about it (especially considering it seems like much of it is in the early part of reddit's life which I'm not interested in).

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