I was given advice when shopping for a new screen to find the highest model range, as in the highest leading numbers, and then get the lowest number within that range as that usually trims out the "features". However, looking at LG's range of OLEDs, everything comes with "features", even the lowest model in the highest model range.
I think part of that resistance is that by giving in to urbanization, they are subsidizing SF's resistance to the same thing. If SF relaxed their laws and allowed for more density, San Jose could go back to being a suburb. As your post alludes, most of the jobs for people in SJ are further up the peninsula and I imagine most would want to live closer if they could.
I find it odd that the baseline used is after the holiday sales period, in the doldrums of retail.Couldn't the lower price after the holiday season be explained by excess stocks due to insufficient demand relative to forecasts during the holiday season?
I think the fact that toys, a product highly prone to fads and trends, are the main culprit would reinforce such an explanation. It would be nice if they had a baseline both before and after or an even average of multiple non-shopping holiday points, rather than one day.
In your example, aren't you implying that landlords and other wealthy individuals aren't simply not spending, but actually hoarding cash?
Most wealthy individuals aren't holding cash, they put the money in a savings account or investment that has a return. This money appears to be held to most people, but even money in a savings account makes its way back into the economy by affecting the reserve requirements of banks. Its a proportional effect, because reserve requirements are greater than 0% but lower than 100%, but it still contributes.
If they actually are hoarding, the question is why and in the past that is usually because savings returns and investment returns are expected to be negative. In which case, thats the problem to solve.
In theory that money in a savings account or investment vehicle gets circulated back into the rest of the economy, but I think what we're seeing is that cash is tied up in some sort of buffer/holding effect in the financial sector, basically accumulating in ineffective places. The bulk of the money certainly doesn't seem to be circulating through the hands of individuals where it would likely spur more economic activity than we're seeing now.
This is a really interesting observation. I've never heard someone mention a "buffer/holding effect" before, but that makes a lot of sense.
I wonder if it's something like... the average individual spends half of whatever cash they have available every year... but the average business that takes investment lets 6 to 12 months of it sit in accounts. I realize the bank would then loan against the money in those accounts, but is it "turtles all the way down"?
I'll have to refresh my understanding of fractional reserve banking, but I don't think a loan from Bank A being put into Bank B and so on can lead to infinite money supply. If I remember correctly it somehow leads to some multiple of the input money being generated. Here's a Wikipedia article about it:
At some point all the institutions sitting on their money eventually does result in that money being sat on, and not being circulated through the economy.
Money creation in practice differs from some popular misconceptions — banks do not act simply
as intermediaries, lending out deposits that savers place with them, and nor do they ‘multiply up’
central bank money to create new loans and deposits. (...)
Whenever a bank makes a loan, it
simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the
borrower’s bank account, thereby creating new money.
>Most wealthy individuals aren't holding cash, they put the money in a savings account or investment that has a return.
Not necessarily true, given what the yields on savings accounts have been recently. Yes, a completely rational actor will invest capital in whatever market is currently generating the highest rate of return. But people are not rational actors. More specifically, people tend to be extremely loss averse - they will go to far greater lengths to avoid a result of -$1 than they will go to achieve a result of +$1, even though the delta (a dollar either way) is exactly the same for both situations. This loss aversion only gets worse when you scale up the numbers to -$1,000,000 and +$1,000,000.
This is why higher levels of inequality are correlated with lower growth. Capital owning rentiers are entirely happy with a 2% (or less) rate of return, so long as the risk of a negative rate of return is negligible. Meanwhile entrepreneurs who can generate much higher rates of return (but with a correspondingly higher probability of negative returns) are starved for capital.
While you're right the wealthy people don't usually hold all most of their cash in their mattresses or checking accounts, that's not the definition of "hoarding cash" in the context of the story posted here.
In corporate finance and equities analysis, the term "cash equivalents" includes very liquid short-term investments like US treasuries, CDs and money-market accounts.
> If they actually are hoarding, the question is why and in the past that is usually because savings returns and investment returns are expected to be negative. In which case, thats the problem to solve.
Er, no. The question is why companies -- which traditionally need to borrow money to operate -- are keeping large amounts of savings (earning positive but still very small returns) instead of increasing their capital expenditures by building factories, or writing more software, etc.
I managed to make do with 50K a year, but I lived in San Jose and didn't have the expenses of car ownership.
Living in SJ required a 20 minute walk to CalTrain and then a 45 minute ride to the city by CalTrain (if I caught the express) and then another 15 minute walk to work.
I wonder if a solution would be a payment to extend copyright.
I think the strongest argument in the article is about the disappearance of works, but, as pointed out, this doesn't really apply to Mickey Mouse. Instead of having a universal expiration, which is causing some works to die, have a shorter expiration but then allow those who are still monetizing their works to pay a portion to extend it. This would provide a less grey market alternative to lobbying and perhaps the revenue generated could be put back into the arts.
I've thought the same thing. This seems like a simple way to deal with it. And since most created works don't make money, even fewer after X years this would seem to do the most "public" good while allowing Disney to keep Mickey.
This is especially true for software games where you can't even get the hardware, thus software sales are essentially 0. A lot of the older games will just get forgotten while the copyright runs out. Some get remade and sold and have no problem with that.
Companies won't like it though, because some will forget to register and loose out on potential profits.
To make it really work I think the cost would have to go up exponentially with time. Maybe once a decade you pay. And you could even pre-purchase but at the exponential price. This would allow most works protection early on at an affordable price and companies like Disney that make a lot of money to be able to keep their copyrights.
The other major benefit is that if something is successful and people want it such as a book you have a monetary incentive to publish it to pay the copyright fees. When it's not popular enough to make money with the copyright alone than that's a good signal that it's been copyrighted long enough
Not to downplay the seriousness, but that site is quite surprising. I grew up about an hour outside of DC and according to that site, greatly overestimated the danger of a nuclear blast in the nation's capital.
I used it for a solid year when it first came out and have recently switched to Android, so that I can use Project Fi.
I found the systems to be pretty comparable. Google Now still creeps me out a bit because it assumes I want it to do many things without asking. This may be a product of me not customizing the options, but the fact that it has pinged me while I was sleeping to tell me I was late for a flight in a different country that a family member was taking was irritating. I didn't have that kind of issue with Cortana because it seemed to only do what I directly requested of it.
The voice recognition and speed seemed a little better than Google and Siri at the time too. During lunch, we frequently had faceoffs between digital assistants and Cortana won more than its share. It also seemed to be better at not just showing search results for a question, but actually answering it like a human would. I've even found that it's song recognition works faster than Shazaam, although it has a higher rate of returning no results.
From my experience, unless you are in the MS ecosystem, there is probably little reason to switch from your native assistant. The one exception being, if you find the data policies or certain features to be too intrusive in your current assistant.
I think Scott addresses that critique in the article:
HHIPP: “Radical candor is humble, it’s helpful, it’s immediate, it’s in person — in private if it’s criticism and in public if it’s praise — and it doesn’t personalize.” That last P makes a key distinction: “My boss didn’t say, ‘You're stupid.’ She said, ‘You sounded stupid when you said um.’ There's a big difference between the two.”
I don't think they're going for that market directly.
The housing market is connected though, so interest in these, which may be limited to singles or couples without children, will remove some of the demand on larger units, such as yours, which can house children and families.
I was given advice when shopping for a new screen to find the highest model range, as in the highest leading numbers, and then get the lowest number within that range as that usually trims out the "features". However, looking at LG's range of OLEDs, everything comes with "features", even the lowest model in the highest model range.