Defining "bubble" can be surprisingly difficult and in some cases the illusion of a bubble persists after history proves the speculation or enthusiasm to have been correct despite an earlier collapse in prices. So one interpretation of "Not all bubbles have negative consequences for the economy" is that there are events that are widely perceived to have been bubbles that were not, in fact, widespread misallocations of investment capital.
The benefit of S-corps is to pass through taxation to the owner's personal tax return in order to avoid double taxation. There is no added benefit with lower corporate taxes because they are effectively 0% at the corporate level.
whether the corporate rate will also apply to pass-through entities is still an open question. most news articles about this topic just ignore this very important detail. the more tax-oriented sources however discuss the vagueness openly:
Agreed. There is a very interesting and recent EconTalk podcast that touches on this. A great majority Americans are proud to be taxpayers, but many also feel that the money is spended wastefully. When interviewed in depth, this often reflects partisan misunderstanding.
I'm a huge fan of spaced repetition and a regular Anki user. I think the value proposition is a little too vague here. It seems like your target market is people that don't already know about or use spaced repetition. In order to win them over, I think you need a more specific reason to use the product.
I saw another YC company recently that is using spaced repetition as a means for corporate training. I'm not saying it's the best or correct market, but that strategy seems plausible to me.
Footnote 9 seems like a glaring issue with this analysis:
9 Technically speaking, the claim that “a large majority of those admitted to prison never
serve time for a drug charge” means that for that majority of inmates the most serious charge
was never a drug charge. Many inmates are convicted of multiple charges, and someone convicted
of a violent or property offense along with a drug charge will be classified as a “violent”
or “property” offender, not a “drug” offender.
Opponents of the War on Drugs believe that a significant portion of violent and property crimes are causally linked to strict enforcement of prohibition. Prohibition gives an implicit monopoly to criminal organizations, which causes violent crimes in the form of territorial disputes. This monopoly also increases the price of drugs for addicted users, which drives property crime, e.g. stripping copper to sell for scrap. An analysis that categorizes a heroin dealer that shoots a victim as a "Violent" offender but not a "Drug" offender seems flawed.
The criminals have lots of violent disputes, not just over territory, and the users commit more than just property crime, e.g. robbery. People up and down the supply chain try to rip each other off. It seems that the author did not expend much imagination in looking for prohibition-driven crime.
Unless you think a violent drug dealer is less likely than a nonviolent offender to ever have been charged with a drug offense, the data doesn't bear this out. According to the author's data, it seems that most violent offenders have never been sentenced for a drug charge.
Violent offenders are younger on average where drug offenders come in a wider age range. So, on that basis alone you would expect violent offenders to be less likely to have a drug charge than the population as a whole.
If a violent offender that was also charged with a drug offense is classified in the "Violent" category, how can you draw any conclusions about how likely they are to have ever been charged with a drug offense? The data seem to only show that you are unlikely to end up in prison with a drug offense as your most serious crime.
This jives with David Simon's description of the prevailing attitude of enforcement in The Corner. The justice system is too overwhelmed to press charges for mere drug offenses, so you are less likely to end up with a conviction without a more serious crime attached.
This is discussed towards the end of Section 2, where he attempts to establish that the set of inmates charged with violent offenses is mostly disjoint with the set of inmates charged with drug offenses.
Thanks for the pointer. Are you referring to Sections II C&D? Tables 4A and 4B seem like they would have the same categorization issue I described above. As I read it, the "Never drugs" column refers to a given offender never having a drug offense as the most serious offense for a conviction. This doesn't mean that the offender was never charged with a drug offense.
For those interested in learning more about geology, I highly recommend John McPhee's Annals of a Former World [1]. It won a Pulitzer in 1999. Through a series of 5 books written between 1978 and 1998, McPhee weaves together the geological development of North America with highly detailed and beautifully written portraits of the geologists that study various sections of the continent. It touches on both basics of geology and highly detailed accounts of geological events in North America as they were understood at the time.
Putin (or his representatives) knows his audience. This piece eschews the normal alpha bravado that I would expect from Putin in favor of a coherent argument in favor of restraint. I found myself not merely nodding along, but inspired, and I hope that we can at least agree with him on this.
It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”
Correct, as Putin pointed out in the piece (in the section I quoted above).
The point I was making was that this a political play by an invested actor, not the passionate reasoned plea it was trying to come across as. That was quite an omission he made there, though it made sense rhetorically for his purpose. The poster above found him/herself "not only nodding along but inspired" by they man who is responsible for the weapons that have killed tens of thousands in this conflict so far.
Assad's media consultants also did an excellent job with his TV appearance (I assume they were Lebanese?). He basically was in the context of a US voter or politician making a seemingly sane and rational appeal.
This is nothing more than a political slap in the face on the international stage to the US. It is almost on par with mingling with internal affairs of the US.
The irony of Putin is doubtless there, and the words logical and true, but the greater truth is that this is just nothing more than tit for tat on the international stage. Hopefully it will work out and bloodshed will be prevented...
There are some grammatical and capitalization errors, and numerous comma splices (stringing similar sentence fragments together in an effort to form a coherent statement). There was also usage of very short sentences in repeated succession.
Those are mostly stylistic issues but they're indicative of non-native grasp of the English language.
Furthermore it's clearly written by someone with enough capability to express themselves eloquently and succinctly, but as mentioned it's clearly non-native.
Not the same person, but I've found that learning other languages (and making mistakes in other languages) makes you attuned to what kinds of mistakes happen when speakers of that language learn English.
Just off the top of my head, Russian doesn't have articles. A Russian learning English is more likely to confuse definite and indefinite articles than a speaker of a Romance language.
I've been learning Thai and teaching English in Thailand. Thai has no articles, no tenses (in the way we think about them) and a simpler syntax with many prepositions and other "small words" omitted. When they start learning English, they often omit too many words and don't conjugate anything, so a sentence like "I don't have any pencils." becomes "No have pencil".
From my experience, these are things I wish I had known, not should have known, at 20. As Rod Stewart said, "I wish that I knew what I know now... when I was younger."
There are good and bad VC's, and with funds lasting 10 years it takes a long time to sort them out. It'll be interesting to see if the institutional money really pulls out of the industry or if they start driving up the price of the good VC's. Folks with solid track records might use this data to justify a better deal than 2 and 20 with their LPs.
Defining "bubble" can be surprisingly difficult and in some cases the illusion of a bubble persists after history proves the speculation or enthusiasm to have been correct despite an earlier collapse in prices. So one interpretation of "Not all bubbles have negative consequences for the economy" is that there are events that are widely perceived to have been bubbles that were not, in fact, widespread misallocations of investment capital.