The other answers here are fairly uninformed. AI has been reliably beating humans in NHLE since 2019 with just deep learning [1], modern solvers can play within a small epsilon of a nash equilibrium (a perfect strategy) and are effectively unbeatable.
Referencing a solver while playing (what people call real-time assistance or RTA) is definitely a problem in online poker and is always prohibited. Solvers however play in a fairly predictable way and poker sites can detect if people are using them, though I'd imagine imperfectly. Saying that 99% of online poker is vs AIs is a hilarious overstatement.
Makes me think the AI should know and learn to try to play more like humans, so it doesn't get detected. AI needs to make itself look more stupid than it really is, to win in this game. And perhaps that has been part of Poker always, not "revealing your cards".
But it feels to me a bit awkward that I can't use all the tools that could help me play a better game. But of course rules are rules. In Formula-1 you can only drive a specific type of car. But the car-machine still helps you move faster. The car has a cockpit and I assume it is much computer controlled.
Comparing living near jobs and quality schools to living by a mansion on the beach is quite unfair - people don't solely desire the luxury of cities, they desire the opportunity for themselves and their families.
"Working your way up the property ladder"? The median sale price for a house in Westchester County, NY is seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. With insurance and property taxes and the current interest rate, that's over six grand a month. That's a hair shy of the US median household income (before taxes!). How exactly is a person ever supposed to afford that?
Cities have jobs. Cities have opportunity. Cities have diversity. Why should we expect, encourage, or even desire that young people sacrifice economic and social opportunity and mobility?
Why is the response to high housing cost in cities lecturing "current generations" about their choices? There are glaringly obvious problems in many of our cities that make housing so expensive. Is it so outrageous to try to solve those problems, and allow people to be able to live where they want to live?
But why do cities have all the opportunity? Most likely because the capital owning class lives in cities and has been systematically draining wealth from more rural areas via globalization and the erosion of workers' rights. I'm not saying young professionals need to concern themselves with such lofty ideals, but I do think it's a valid to question why there are only a few pockets of opportunity left in the country.
Exactly what wealth are cities draining from rural America?
Is it possible there's a simpler explanation? That the economy of the twenty-first century is dominated by information and technology, and that these demands are better matched to the agglomeration affects of true urban density, where the best and brightest can learn from each other?
> Exactly what wealth are cities draining from rural America?
Obviously it's not the cities themselves draining the wealth, but rather a spiral of excess capital accumulation. It just so happens that many of the people perpetuating this cycle live in cities. Generally, increasing one's capital is done by taking money that was being funneled one place, and funneling it to yourself instead. For example, CVS can open a pharmacy and undercut local competition. Once the local pharmacies close, cash flows that were once destined for local pharmacies go to CVS instead. Local pharmacies would have kept the profits locally, but CVS siphons them from the community into the pockets of shareholders, most of whom happen to live in cities. These city-dwelling shareholders can they pay others to perpetuate this cycle.
> Is it possible there's a simpler explanation? That the economy of the twenty-first century is dominated by information and technology.
Is it, though? Consumer spending is about 70% of GDP. What is your personal spending on tech vs. non-tech items? Personally, I spend vastly more money on non-tech items compared to tech items. The margins are obviously much lower, so they don't have splashy stock tickers.
Density increases exchange of ideas and promoted specialisation, which increases productivity. This has been true throughout history and may as well be the zeroth law of economics.
The actual 0th law of economics is the law of decreasing marginal utility. You can't expect specialization and productivity to increase indefinitely as density increases. Clearly, we're at an inflection point. How can people specialize and be productive if they can't even afford a place to live?
The actual zeroth law would be a corollary of the second law of thermodynamics: scarcity.
> Clearly, we're at an inflection point
This has been claimed repeatedly throughout history. Without knowledge of the future, it is impossible to know whether we are at an inflection local or global. With resepct to any American city, we know we are far from the inflection point because we have counterexamples abroad.
> With resepct to any American city, we know we are far from the inflection point because we have counterexamples abroad.
Such as? There are very few places in the world that match the productivity of the U.S. I don't think Luxembourg counts as a counterexample, for instance (population 640K). Singapore, maybe, but its population is under 5.5 million.
The simple explanation is that many of these communities are the proverbial railroad towns that the train no longer stops at. Their key industries have dried up, and the infrastructure costs are unsustainable for the remaining population and economic activity.
The US overbuilt in rural areas during the late 1800s and early 1900s as the railroads pushed west, others had a major industry that has dried up, and a lot of these areas just aren’t sustainable anymore. But America doesn’t have a system for handling de-ruralization gracefully, you still have to deliver power and phone regardless of whether someone wants to live in the middle of Wyoming. We rarely ever rip up a road, etc. Infrastructure is a one-way ratchet.
On top of that most of americas infrastructure is aging in general and we have a general crisis of insufficient revenue to maintain let alone fully replace it. Everything is built on the assumption that it will catch traction and grow, and when it shrinks then there’s no money to maintain or replace it. This is a general crisis across our whole infrastructure - even apart from de-ruralization we’d have overbuilt infrastructure in most places relative to sustainable revenue.
I cannot find this reference now—I want to say ancient, possibly Roman—but cities have a brain-drain effect and lead specialization; whereas rural individuals have to do many things in order survive.
Cities offer opportunity at the extreme end of the spectrum due to the concentration of people offering scalability. A professional spots team in the city, for example, can attract tens of thousands of paying spectators. "Field of Dreams" might attract a half dozen spectators on a good night. That's the difference between making millions and not being able to put food on the table.
But for the average Joe who will never leverage themselves into those extremes, I'm not sure the data actually shows greater opportunity. My read from the data is the average Joe is generally worse off in the city with respect to job prospects and compensation.
This is an overstatement. In large parts of Midwest United States (and Canada), you can be middle class by farming. That is "opportunity" -- not amazing, but a good, middle class life in a small, safe town. Also, it is easy to own your home in a farming community -- much easier than large city or suburbs. It would better to ask why do cities have so much more opportunity in the 21st Century? Probably due to the structure of a highly advanced economy. Most of the (economically) valuable work in services is done in and around large cities.
As soon as your middle-class farmer children finish high school they will be 1 of 3 (descending, from most likely to least):
- Leaving for the big city/college
- Staying in your small town, but slowly becoming helpless as they fall into bad crowds, bad habits, or both
- Staying in your small town, but successfully continuing the way of life
It is unsustainable in its current form, unless you inoculate your children against modern ideas and technology (like the Amish) or make it more desirable for people to stay. I will point to European villages as a counter example. And then I will point to: lack of cultural homogeneity, the tenuous nature of living in the United States without a stable and growing source of income, and a lack of spiritually-enriching outlets as reasons why people move out of small U.S. towns towards cities.
The first leads to unstable communities. The second leads to subconscious unease and anxiety. The last leads to a restlessness which to leads to various mental ailments like consumerism, that can only be fulfilled by staying on the hedonic treadmill.
I posit that it is not cities that have all the opportunities, but that it is small communities that lack them.
You can't just move to the midwest and become a farmer. Particularly if you don't have incredible financial mobility in the first place. The cost of land alone is immense and that isn't factoring in equipment.
Having come from such a town, I would not describe it as safe. Things are cheap and most of the people who are there are stuck there because they have no economic mobility. Yes, there are plenty who choose to and enjoy it but that isn't the bulk of the population.
Eh. Largely society transfers money from urban areas to subsidize rural ones. Thousands of miles of road and power and other services to sparse populations would not be sustainable without these transfers. And far from everyone who lives out there is a farmer, plenty of people just live on a mountain somewhere, 30 miles from the nearest grocery store, I remember this doing some driving in the Santa Barbara mountains.
Housing prices in cities are rising across the world.
And it's all driven by simple economics. Demand is increasing faster than supply.
Now if young people want to participate in this market then all the best to them. I'm not stopping them. But statistically they have less purchasing power and demanding that the entire world ignore that fact is not realistic.
Hell it’s not even just trendy neighborhoods that are out of reach. Wages have stagnated while housing prices continue to rise. The upshot is that fewer and fewer people can afford a house no matter where they are.
I think the answer is both. We should work to improve city conditions but the reality is that there is a supply/demand mismatch and not everyone gets to live comfortably wherever they want.
The city I grew up in is too expensive for me to afford as an adult. It would be nice if I could, but I've never felt like the world owed it to me to live there because I want to. People moving to cheaper and less crowded areas to try and improve their quality of life is a story as old as time.
This bigoted, and frankly deranged misconception about small towns perfectly explains why someone would rather live in squalor and complain rather than move to a small town.
Imagine saying that to the families of the victims in the couple high-profile stabbings in European cities over the last week, where foreign men set out deliberately and explicitly to kill White people.
I moved to a quiet country town, >99% White, and the worst part about it is that my arm is getting tired from waving back to all the lovely strangers who smile and greet me everywhere I go. I really can't imagine any of them wanting to kill me for my identity, which is more than citizens of diverse cities can say.
While I can't speak for all European cities, we know basically nothing about why a man in Dublin (who was white, btw) stabbed some kids. It's a little early to be deciding why that happened.
Yea, the bonus point is interesting, especially in finance where bonuses can be > 100% of base. You can't insist on firms paying last years bonus, or else people would just quit and get a non compete if they had an insane year. But paying only base also seems a bit unfair.
A thought I had was you'd have to pay whatever their new offer is paying. The argument is that if you want to prevent someone from working, you should have to pay them their worth - which, in the case of someone resigning with a competing offer - has just been priced by the hiring market!
Paying the wage of the new offer leads to bad incentives w.r.t. nepotism. It also discourages starting your own small business where you tend to pay yourself a small wage.
> If companies actually paid employees not to compete they would be able to keep them
Why is this true? If someone is making $200k and leaving to make $350k, an employer may well be able to afford the $100k for 6 months to prevent them from immediately handing over IP, but not be able to match the $350k their new employer is offering.
> So, it's conceivable that an ex-employee could receive 6 months severance in trade for a non-compete of that length, but I doubt it's very popular.
It's quite popular in finance. Also, it's not a one time severance, its paid as a standard paycheck. A firm might "release" someone from their non compete while it is still active (basically saying it's no longer active and we are no longer paying you).
> Why is this true? If someone is making $200k and leaving to make $350k, an employer may well be able to afford the $100k for 6 months to prevent them from immediately handing over IP, but not be able to match the $350k their new employer is offering.
Sorry, I worded that poorly. I meant companies could keep the ability to impose non-competes if they originally compensated employees who were let go.
I know it gets muddled when it comes to employees moving around for increased pay, but non-competes aren't supposed to be a mechanism for holding down salaries. They're only intended to protect vital corporate secrets that, if they were released, would be so costly to the company that they'd risk bankruptcy. The value of those secrets would likely be enough that many competitors would be hesitant to hire those employees because they might fear opening themselves up to future litigation for patent infringement or IP or whatnot.
The fact that many HR
departments apply them to every single rank and file employee and don't explicitly define what constitutes a direct competitor or what explicit activities/information are protected by the NC is why they're a pretty useless legal tool in most circumstances.
And there are a ton of other reasons people change companies as well.
>an employer may well be able to afford the $100k for 6 months to prevent them from immediately handing over IP
Presumably there are other restrictions to just handing over IP but at least some of the reasoning for non-competes is that you can't really restrict the transfer of a lot of know-how even if they don't share corporate strategy decks.
When were trades reversed when a market maker had a bad algo? If you are doing market manipulation, sure, your trades might get reversed, but if someone wants to puke money across the tape it's absolutely legal to take it.
I'm not able to find the story now, but there was a European (UK?) youngish person (teen?) who took advantage of bad market maker code to make hundreds of thousands. Those trades were reversed. The trades were under US jurisdiction.
They go bankrupt, because their liabilities exceed their assets. There are three main sets of creditors - the US government who are receiving this $142.7 billion, equity shareholders who own $MMM, and bondholders. In a bankruptcy, you arrange levels of creditors by "seniority", where more senior creditors are paid first. In this case, I would imagine the levels of seniority are:
1. The US government
2. Bondholders
3. Equity shareholders
3M has plenty of assets to be distributed to the creditors - the manufacturing capabilities that you mention, intellectual property, relationships with purchasers. These assets might be sold directly on the market (this is easier with physical assets like manufacturing labs). A new corporation with new management might be established to handle liquidating the assets, or even running the business (this is what happened with FTX). Either way, it seems like bondholders and shareholders alike would get zero'd out and the US government could do what it want with 3M's assets.
To answer your question succintly:
> 3M is the only manufacturer of tons of important materials as I understand it, so it's not like they can just get erased from the market
3M is a corporation and one of their assets is their ability to manufacture tons of important materials. 3M the corporation would be obliterated but their ability to manufacture tons of important material would likely be sold off.
Everyone's hating on this, but I do think we have to rethink limited liability because of some of these contexts. 3M paid out dividends for years while producing these chemicals. Their liabilities exceed their _current market cap_, but their market cap could have been higher had they not decided to consistently make those payouts.
Consider J&J's (failed) attempt to spin out a new company to hold their liability over the talcum powder case. It was attacked and shot down because it was so clearly a post-hoc maneuver. If they had merely spun out that child company earlier, would it have been ok?
What if the new playbook is:
- spin out a new company for every potentially risky product line. A parent company may hold a large stake, but other investors can hold shares too.
- sell, grow revenue, but keep few assets in the company; pay out dividends aggressively
- drag out or quash or deny any research or evidence suggesting your product is dangerous, or being sold in an irresponsible way
- when you're finally sued and lose, the company has very little money left in it; plaintiffs get relatively little compensation for their harm, but you don't care because you're busy growing your next dangerous company
If that works, it sounds like a broken system. If you're doing something you should expect will cause large liabilities to crop up later, it seems abusive to pay out dividends to shareholders today and become insolvent tomorrow.
Exactly. Dollars are fungible, and spread around the economy pretty quickly. It's just not clear the "right" way to do any clawbbacks after a few years. If not done carefully, someone who inherits $1,000 worth of stock from their rich uncle on just the wrong day could the very next day discover they've inherited a $100,000 debt through the crime of being born in the wrong family. People die, people inherit stock, there are lots of second- and third-order effects to take into account in order to have a proper accounting of everyone who profited from the misbehavior.
In a relatively short period, the answer becomes "pretty much the whole economy benefited financially". On the one hand, that's a good argument in favor of partially funding the healthcare system via a financial transaction tax, but is also less emotionally satisfying than what you're looking for.
If you want to make long-term clawbacks practical, you need to do something like force all dividends to be paid as long-duration low-seniority zero-coupon corporate bonds backed by a special-purpose legal entity that holds cash/treasuries to fully back the bonds and can only be raided via bankruptcy hearings. That way, the value is kept non-fungible and risk explicitly tracked.
Though, in practice, equity holders would probably sell those bonds immediately on the market, offloading the risk to third parties. You could make the bonds non-transferable except in case of inheritance, and ban short-selling/creating derivatives to prevent transferring the risk, but that's a lot of complication and overhead with little chance of improving corporate behavior.
Ultimately, long-term corporate responsibility is much harder to enforce than long-term personal responsibility. You need a licensed Professional Engineer (or something similar) overseeing safety testing of the chemicals putting their personal career on the line with their stamp of approval. "If everyone's responsible, nobody is responsible." You need a mechanism to make individuals both responsible and legally empowered.
what’s the point of even typing such silliness? you just said “confiscate the property of everyone on the _planet_ who has ever had a retirement account”
you might as well propose “we should just snap our fingers and wish really hard for utopia”
