While that's definitely a blunder, if you look at the right figures (in the article: inflation-adjusted median income of $48,500 then and $60,000 now, and inflation-adjusted average house price of $154,587 then and $369,677 now), the average house price went from 3.2 times the median income to 6.2.
That's a lot, his point still stands, and there's no need to call him an idiot.
I think even if you ignore the question of whether the economy is fair, it should at least be quite clear that the younger generation will be poorer than the previous one.
Flash Crashes are not a phenomenon caused by algorithms.
The SEC/CFTC report on the 2010 Flash Crash describes how it happened. Quote:
One key lesson is that under stressed market conditions, the automated execution of a large
sell order can trigger extreme price movements, especially if the automated execution
algorithm does not take prices into account. Moreover, the interaction between automated
execution programs and algorithmic trading strategies can quickly erode liquidity and result in
disorderly markets.
I agree. In general, I find the task of "introduce yourself to a specific person" or "make a specific case for something" much much easier than "talk to people about nothing in particular", if only because there is always a specific goal that I keep in mind while talking. So long as I deliver a presentation well and impart all the main ideas, it's going well. I find that small talk is impossible to handle like that because it's too random and there is no specific easy-to-see criterion of success or failure. Others simply paying attention could indeed mean politeness rather than interest.
Staying quiet, I feel, has the unfortunate side effect of making me seem asocial, and I am not quite sure that it is a viable thing to do in a social situation.
The author does explicitly state that his proposal is only about publicly-traded stocks, so your first point is moot.
Secondly, regarding your second point, some company or person would be holding those publicly-traded shares, which means that they will be paying tax under this proposal.
Maybe feeding the troll, but in case you were serious...
My point was that the author is forced to use some arbitrary standard like "publicly traded" since such a proposal is inherently unworkable for illiquid investments. But in doing so, the author creates an obvious problem: if "publicly traded" is the litmus test for this new mark-to-market tax, then investors will move investments into non-public vehicles to avoid paying the tax.
As to your second point, the amount of publicly traded float is not zero sum: companies regularly go public and take themselves private to achieve financial, governance, and other objectives. So it is not the case that anyone necessarily would be paying the mark-to-market tax on shares of a currently publicly traded company, any more than it is the case that having an X% corporate tax rate means US companies pay X% of profits in tax to the US government.
If this proposal were enacted, future-incredibly-valuable company F woud avoid becoming a publicly traded company entirely. Facebook, which the author cites because it's headline-grabbing, harms rather than helps his case: they've intentionally avoided going public until now, and could into the arbitrary future if it were especially onerous for the founders/investors for the company to do so. The rational expectation of Facebook principals right now is that the benefits of going public (at least for the founders and investors) outweigh the negatives, because there is a massive liquidity and valuation improvement from doing so.
But under the author's proposal, that cost/benefit analysis would change, and companies would simply stay private and achieve liquidity for founders and investors via other mechanisms. Over time, these mechanisms would evolve into processes that were as close to indistinguishable from public company registration as possible without actually triggering the language of the market-to-market tax law. SEC rules about selling shares to non-qualified investors would still hold, obviously, but I'm sure with so much potential tax to be saved, investors would find ways to legally aggregate non-qualified investors into qualified vehicles to get around this. Or just live with qualified investors, and no others, owning their companies.
So the idea is to use Prozac to make it easier for therapy to reprogram a brain's responses to social situations that induce anxiety. I'd be curious to know what this says, if anything, about the kinds of problems that have less to do with fear/anxiety than something else, like autistic spectrum disorders. Would using antidepressants to help rewire a brain be effective then? It's a very cool idea regardless.
Because Google has a monopoly on non-shitty free email with GMail, in the same way that Microsoft has (had?) a monopoly on hardware-independent operating systems with DOS/Windows. (I wish I was really being sarcastic, you know because there are actually a billion web-based e-mail alternatives besides GMail that actually don't suck... right? Anybody know of any? At this point I'm earnestly inquiring.)
Gmail might be 'the best', but not enough to get a everyone to switch. So, IMO it's a question of where your suck threshold than anything specifically wrong with Hotmail / yahoo.
I think it's interesting how the focus of the Nature articles is on elucidating the process by which autism develops and affects people, and not on whatever coping mechanisms there are for people on ASD or their relatives. I don't think it is a bad thing, just a particular focus of their research.
On the one hand, it is immensely important to understand the biological basis of autism. But on the other, they say autism is not understood nearly well enough now, and there are many people on autism spectrum and their relatives/friends who need reasonable advice now, grounded in proper scientific research. Advice for high-functioning ASD people/relatives would presumably talk about developing social skills, coping behaviours, and whatever else is needed for them to function well in the wider society. Identifying the biological basis of ASD seems to be a long-term research programme with little payoff in the immediate future.
It's not that I think it's wrong to focus on the biology of it, it's just that they seem to completely skip the psychology aspect of ASD that is probably just as important.
It advises using Strunk and White. I think it would be helpful to point out that S&W need not be considered all that authoritative:
http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/2549...
The people behind Language Log often have something to say about writing advice.
One of the finer points of that book is that it is a biography of Dirac's life, not just a description of his insights into physics. His personal life was unhappy and makes for rather depressing reading. When Feynman was described as a second Dirac, only this time human, it is difficult to appreciate fully just how fundamentally different the personalities of the two geniuses were.
Between studying electrical engineering and going to Cambridge he also earned a degree in mathematics, if I recall correctly. He was not given a sufficiently large scholarship the first time he was accepted to Cambridge, and so he had to wait.
That's a lot, his point still stands, and there's no need to call him an idiot.
I think even if you ignore the question of whether the economy is fair, it should at least be quite clear that the younger generation will be poorer than the previous one.