The issue is that we have too many people per representative.
You representative doesn't need to care about you, they need to care about donors for mass media.
I see parallels in tech as well. Some companies are openly anti consumer but run massive advertising/brainwashing campaigns. One will go as far as saying 'privacy' but turn around and give your information to the US government and China.
FPTP isn’t “also” a problem, it (and more broadly the absence of proportionality in the electoral system) is the empirically verifiable problem. (See, e.g., Lijphardt’s Patterns of Democracy.)
Representation ratio is much discussed, but unlIke FPTP there's not really support in comparative study of democracies for it being a source of adverse results (poor satisfaction, reduce dimensionality of the policy option space, etc.)
Much as the accuracy of sampling is, despite common intuition to the contrary, dependent on the absolute, not relative, size of the sample, representation ratio probably doesn't practically matter much once the absolute size of the representative body gets past a certain point (and beyond a certain absolute size, logistics make size increases adverse independent of ratio.)
The US government could tax the population at 100% of GDP and it wouldn't make a dent in the national debt. Also the US government can print it's own money.
It's not like the banks and lenders aren't wise to the idea of mortgage's getting reduced by inflation. They calculate and compensate for inflation and make offers accordingly.
The banks take the current interest rate from the Fed into account and base the mortgage rate on that. They can try to project out and add some percentage for risk + inflation but if they add too much then there are 100 other banks ready to undercut them.
So you get a fixed-rate mortgage based on the current interest rate from the central bank. And the amount of money that your mortgage covers (basically the price of your house) doesn't change. Which means that every year, as inflation causes wages to go up, you are paying for a house that cost whatever it cost when you bought it.
But! Most people shop for houses based on what they can afford as an all-in payment. To put it another way, people can afford $x/month on housing, and it doesn't matter to them really how much is going to the price of the house and how much is going to interest. If interest rates rise (which happens along with inflation) then that means the percentage of someone's monthly payment that goes to the price of the house goes down, which has a depressing effect on housing prices. So your house payment becomes more affordable but the amount you can expect to get when you sell your house goes down (or rises more slowly).
I think this has cause and effect somewhat backwards.
Often mortgage rates are based on the interest rate set by the central bank ("prime"). So if inflation is rampant and the central bank increases the prime rate to try to reduce inflation, variable mortgage interest rates will also increase. In the US, however, it's possible to get 25 year fixed rate mortgages. With the prime rate being so low, these can be had for 2-3%. This is very low! If many on HN are to be believed regarding a coming inflationary crisis this kind of mortgage will be hugely advantageous to those that have one because the debt will be massively devalued by rampant inflation.
wages rarely keep up with inflation, real inflation, most companies are till running on 1-2% COLA annually, that is far far lower than actual inflation was, and much lower than inflation is now
This is on the back of many companies having a wage freeze in 2020 due to the pandemic
This is also why you will see alot of companies having a turn over crisis as switching employers will not be more profitable for employee's than every before. I see every limited signs that the HR dept's at most companies even recognize this problem currently, and the few that due are powerless to stop it because it seems many companies just refuse to give large annual raises to current staff but will happily replace them at high rates.
This is with out even getting started on the Time bomb of SocSec, as they also have not kept payments up to meet inflation largely because they can not. there is no money to fund it. So if your retired depending on SocSec income for your survival you are screwed, better hope you have family you can live with
>If you hold a mortgage, it can potentially be good...
Hold debt is only good if you wages go up more than inflation. While sure you may pay less for the home itself, you repair and maintenance expenses are going up... Right now, some repair and maintenance cost for home ownership are leading inflation by ALOT
For your 1 year old, it's not a problem if that $1000 is invested in say an S&P fund
In the 1970's when the US had stagflation, S&P inflation adjusted returns from ~1968 to 1982. If you bought in 1968 you wouldn't really show gains until the early 1990s.
Inflation is going to make that $1000 worth less unless your 1 yr old is a great investor. If they have any tips, pass them on. I some cash and no freaking idea how to protect the value.
To a college kid with savings from teenage jobs, it is.
See above inflation is tough on savings. Might be good for a young adult with college debt that can be paid back with inflated dollars.
To people who's wages didn't go up, it is.
Only if wages rise faster than prices. Wages often trail prices in high inflation environments. In extreme scenarios, prices can go up in restaurants and stores every day, but wages may only go up after a pay period, or after yearly review.
Yeah, Blink was the first and last of his books I read. Nice anecdotes but it struck me as nothing more than saying "Your gut feeling is right, except when it's wrong"
More like, your intuitive jump related to areas in which you are experienced and expert, can and does give you conclusions way way quicker than it gives you justifications.
Hoving looking at a fake sculpture and instantly going 'NOPE' is not a Joe Average reaction, but draws on lots of experience. The story of gamblers giving stress reactions to unfamiliar and dangerous card games is GAMBLERS.
Your gut feeling has nothing to do with it. What are you so expert at, that you can just glance and you'll know? (as in, more than would be justified by the lack of analysis and prolonged exposure)
Being able to plausibly form hugely accelerated judgements and have them check out, is interesting. It's also plausible to me that few people build up that much expertise, to be able to do that. But for those who do… and it can be in any field, from any person… it's an interesting perspective.
Same!! I watched his TED talk on David and Goliath story and I thought he was interesting. Then I picked up Blink. 25 pages in, I realized he was full of shit.
Just finished Talking to Strangers. That's an unfair ungenerous depiction, by omission. Specifically, the punch line.
Wide spread cargo cult adoption of Kansas City's policing strategy ignored the science, explaining why few reproduced KC's successes, with all sorts of terrible consequences, resulting many senseless deaths, and destroying trust and legitmacy of policing.
Just another tale of bad policy, unintended consequences, railing against entrenched dogma.
In this case, Gladwell's quixotic suggestion is to step back, reassess, try again. Daylighting the science during this cycle of turmoil seems reasonable. Might even help.
I used to work on a government project where we were tasked with building lie detectors based off the concepts of blink (micro expressions) (and really Paul Ekman [1], where the concepts in blink came from)
After a few years at it, I came away thinking the whole thing was bullshit. Unfortunately, countless tax dollars were wasted.
Talking To Strangers was a choice for Zoom book club I was in during the shutdown. I was looking forward to it a little since I recognized but didn't know the name. I couldn't make my way through it and dropped out.
He has a New Yorker writing style but without having anything to say.
The only Gladwell book I have read is "Outliers". When reading it I couldn't shake the feeling that he was cherry picking his examples. It never pulled back far enough to study the phenomenon systematically and the examples he did use were scattered all across the world and decades. I ended up being fairly disappointed and have not bothered with any of his other work.
I guess I was most disappointed because it was getting absolutely stellar reviews at the time and I'm not sure why.
Blink is just an application of the Pareto distribution to what information can be gleaned from someone in what amount of time. 80% of what you’ll get, you’ll get in those first few seconds.
I think the point about the workforce being flexible is tremendous.
I had an engineer tell me- in America people don't care about your title, they care about how much money you have. In Europe it's all about titles. In Japan it's about seniority.
I've had no problem picking the job that pays the highest and it changed me from chem engineer to programmer.
My peers that are obsessed with a title have fallen behind, making 80k a year as a 30 year old. I think these people have a significantly harder time finding a new job, where as being a programmer and engineer, I'm able to work in any industry.
So? Software demand is driven by the tasks software need to solve. Whether those tasks involve human interaction or not is surely irrelevant for the demand for software?
LLCs aren't really relevant to this. The poster was commenting on bankruptcy laws with the assumption of familiarity. You can check out articles like https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10657-006-8978-..., but the gist is that bankruptcy in the US is forgiving versus being a terminal state in Europe. This is both in law and in society.
Once someone has gone bankrupt in Europe, they are historically, are a pariah. They will struggle to get financing to take a risk with another company. This is on top of a risk-averse system that generally places much higher requirements on non-bankrupt people seeking financing.
Compare this to the situation in the US. Here there is relatively easy access to financing at all sizes of organization. It only noticeably tightens when there is a recession or there are very serious issues with the founders. When a company fails there are more options for recovery, sell-off, acquisition, etc. Labor law permits companies to jettison all employees easily too in certain situations whereas that is much more difficult in Europe. Although this is starting to get away from pure bankruptcy law it overlaps.
This. In addition, in some countries like Germany, having your name connected to a bankruptcy will ruin your credit score, making it difficult to e.g. rent an apartment.
What does that mean? A BV protects you unless you pierce the veil. You are negligent or a malicious if you do so; otherwise it does protect you. But maybe you mean something else.
I only have apple devices and I enjoy developing apps in swift, way easier and less tedious than other systems imho. Also SwiftUI makes UI design a lot easier than standard
The issue is that we have too many people per representative.
You representative doesn't need to care about you, they need to care about donors for mass media.
I see parallels in tech as well. Some companies are openly anti consumer but run massive advertising/brainwashing campaigns. One will go as far as saying 'privacy' but turn around and give your information to the US government and China.