According to the first article, Shiller said in 1996 that stock prices were at irrationally high levels. In 2005, he predicted a real estate bubble. Noticing that a bubble is developing, I would say, is the relatively easy part; predicting when it will collapse is the difficult part. As Keynes said, "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", so there is limited value in betting against bubbles. Paulson may have made billions, but undoubtedly there have been people that followed similar shortly before he did, but lost it all. The reason we know Paulson is because of the survivorship bias.
Though T-Mobile seems to have adopted an interesting strategy in the US - as a European customer I find their proposition not to be notably better than that of other carriers. Here, it takes European commissioners to lower international roaming charges. T-Mobile doesn't rock across the globe.
The commisioners only lowered the charges for users in the EU roaming in other EU-countries.
For example, if you bought your contract in Germany, you'll have to pay only 0.10 € / minute while you're in Denmark.
(Which is quite funny, 'cause I have to pay 0.11€ / minute for calling to other german carriers.)
What's the problem exactly? Job growth has been stagnant for 5 years?
Productivity is the ratio of units of output per unit of input, where you can abstract input as being either capital or labor. Indeed, productivity continues to grow as a consequence of technological advances. When mankind started using oxes to plough fields, landworkers' productivity rose significantly. As we develop more tools to aid us in daily tasks, less labor - and sometimes even less capital - is required to perform those tasks.
During the relatively prosperous past decades, organizations have grown heavy, and were able to do so because of a continuously rising product demand. People started over-working and over-consuming. Then there was an external shock, media started talking about a financial crisis, people started being more considerate of their consumption in the face of job insecurity, and businesses that grew too heavy needed to get back into shape. This is a process that has significant feedback effects. The process of business getting back into shape means the cutting non-contributing jobs (think of excess layers of management), which by itself causes a growth in productivity. In this sense, employment growth and productivity growth can be negatively correlated, and it is not necessarily "technological advances" that drive productivity growth.
Telling us that technology is destroying our jobs is the same as telling us that China is stealing our jobs, though they may affect different industries (I don't see Chinese laborers replacing our butchers.) The thing is that the working population is very flexible, and despite offshoring certain jobs the average American still works over 50 hours a week. Population growth hasn't justified job growth in the US for the past 40 years, so perhaps a stagnant job growth is a good thing in that it draws things back to "normality".
The problem is the very real human suffering caused by these economic dislocations. It is totally unnecessary and a failure of politics and morals. Our social "safety net" is anemic at best. We could use some of the profits from increased automation and efficiency to improve the social safety net, but instead we have allowed the vast majority of it to flow to the already wealthy owners of capital.
One problem is that we have trained people to do (and are still training people to do) jobs which are being replaced by computers and technologists who can do the same job more productively. This is beginning to have a significant impact upon all industries.
The economy is doing great, productivity is doing great, but there are increasing numbers of people with obsolete skills who can't find work and are struggling to survive this improving economy, through no fault of their own. A small number of people are taking all the benefits of the new economy - entrenching inequality.
The replacement of muscle by automation was 20th century. In the current wave, we see a replacement of office workers with a mix of more productive office workers outsourced, online or in house.
I think we are seeing a restructure of skilled work generally as technology becomes able to do portions of skilled work. For example, look at education.
Interestingly, muscle jobs are more-or-less immune as they have already been automated as much as is reasonable.
The problem is that jobs will be worth less and less compensation and the balance between work and capital is turning towards capital.
There will be new jobs, but fewer and fewer people qualify. Network effect and superstar economy mean that the distribution of workforce compensation will change dramatically. Majority of workers will be worth less. More of them will drop below the point where it's not worth to hire them.
The website or post in no way implies that this is the case.
One reason to choose Syria is that the situation may be more acute than it is in most other places in the world at the moment.
One reason to choose programmers could be that this is also the industry that the founder is active in, perhaps making it easier to approach potential customers.
It would be just as easy to divide up the population into any other constituent subgroup and select only those for help.
Any of these would also be a valid goal according to the effort being proposed here:
Syrian auto mechanics
Syrian bakers
Syrian musicians
Syrian nurses
You are presupposing that you can ONLY easily help programmers and furthermore, ONLY those Syrians with programing skill SHOULD be helped. Taken to it's logical extension, you end up helping people based on Ethnicity or Religion.
Why not instead focus on trying to help the greatest number of people in the most expedient way possible: by working to END this terrible civil war. That's CERTAINLY possible given the assemblage of talent reading these words.
OP is organizing something that might end up helping (or even saving) many Syrians. You're just bikeshedding.
This is HN, it's only natural to focus on programming. There are many here with the authority to hire programmers, not many people hiring nurses or mechanics. Besides, it's easier to get a visa if you're a programmer, and it's also easier to get remote work (e.g. in case a Syrian can't get a visa to US or EU but can move to Lebanon or Turkey).
I think it does hurt the NSA's recruiting position indeed. The NSA naturally hires mostly technical people, and in general I think it is exactly this population that is disgusted most by what the NSA is doing. For me, the issue wouldn't be as much about prestige, but more about morality.
As for the more general public, they're just following the news. The news has devoted a lot of attention to the NSA lately, but will move on to different topics sooner or later, and the general public will forget.
If I were PayPal, I wouldn't primarily be focused on buying items, as it would be very expensive strategy. I'd try sending sellers email first, indicating that you are interested in purchasing their product and asking them if they support PayPal. Having thousands of sellers just visiting your site to see what this "PayPal" is about is a great way of getting your name out there at no cost.
Also, if I'm not mistaking, buyers have no right to force sellers to accept a payment method that the seller did not support. Of course you could try to persuade them after you've bought their product, but insisting goes way too far.
>buyers have no right to force sellers to accept a payment method that the seller did not support.
sure they do. after you've won an auction or otherwise agreed to buy you are restricted to only the accepted payment methods, but before making a purchase you can contact a seller saying "i'll buy this if you can accept paypal"
But your compensation still depends on having some "provably lousy coworkers", or worse, if they're all gone some people who are good will perforce get labeled as lousy.
The quiet ones, the different ones disabled, gay, female etc who wont push back look for the ones who where bullied at school. If you team is lucky you might have some terminally ill people you can dump at the base of the stack - this sounds worse than it is as there was medical retirement available for these poor devils.
They might be selling it as a users' benefit, but in the case of the Amazon app, users are at a loss.
As long as the developers submit themselves to Apple's authority, Apple and its related products could offer superior service. Most developers are still accepting the "Apple way", even in cases where it hurts their own business proposition. The reason Apple has such a strong supplier power is that they have a very strong market share. However, Apple's arrogance will one day contribute to their downfall. Developers choose to develop first and foremost for the platform that offers the greatest benefits; as Apple's market shares are falling, the userbase is less of a reason to choose to develop for Apple first. Also, because alternatives are strengthening on various fronts, developers will be less likely to swallow Apple's authoritative terms if those terms hurt their own business model - even if that means offering a suboptimal service to Apple's customers.
