Lurker > red sox 777

As I understand it, starting a few years ago, there have been very few new private student loans from banks because the government has sort of taken over the market. Initially, it was with government guaranteed loans (the bank gives you the money, but the government guarantees the loan if you don't repay it), and now the government just directly lends money to students.

Also, ex post facto breaking of contracts by fiat is clearly unconstitutional. The government cannot just declare private student loans null and void without paying the banks. Not to mention the massive moral hazard there. The government's gotta pay the price to do that, which is inflation. You can inflate away debt, but you've gotta inflate everything else too.

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Why? The reason the contract, made before school works, is that it reduces risk. You don't know which students are going to end up rich and which aren't, so you have to deal with them equally. So a percentage of income is fixed at that time, and everybody is happy. Your premium for incurring this risk is a higher price (higher percentage of income). Which is still far below what students are willing to pay before college to get rid of that risk!

If there's no contract, the whole thing is eviscerated.

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This is what schools do already in the form of donations from alumni. If you get rich, you are most likely going to donate a ton to your school. The difference is that this is entirely optional, instead of a contract.

Which is why it's not as helpful. You don't have to do it. And if you do do it, it'll probably be for a lower amount than you would negotiate in a contract prior to starting school. It doesn't impact the price of college because it is a donation, purely optional.

Switching from a debt to an equity system shifts the risk of college costs from students to investors. Which is good, because students mostly don't want risk and investors do (because risk => profit).

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This seems like such a profitable idea I really don't know why someone hasn't done it yet. Other than that I guess it could potentially run afoul of the 13th Amendment against slavery. Does owning a percentage of someone's income over the next 25 years count as slavery? Because the government sure does it already.....

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What would be a much better system is to have students sell a portion of their future income in exchange for tuition money. The rate would depend on the quality of the school, as determined by the free market. This way, if you end up making a lot of money, whoever paid for your college makes big profits. If you don't, you don't owe anything. "Lenders" would stand to make much higher profits because the mean income is always far higher than the median. It doesn't matter if 80% of student equity contracts lose money, because you'll make it back at the top end.

And this system is also much better for investment. If the economy improves, the value of a basket of student equity contracts from X college will go up. If we go into recession, the opposite happens. It's a much better distribution of risk and allows market forces to better set the price of college.

Of course, the total amount paid by students to lenders/investors will increase. But it will decrease for 80% of people, and the people for whom it will increase a lot are the ones most able to handle it.

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I'm tempted to apply for a federal subsidized loan now and sit on the money and see if the debt is forgiven >_>

I think you have to actually enroll in a school, which would use up said money.

No way to make big profits = no bubble.

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There's one problem with the purported student loan bubble though: where are the profits? If it's a real bubble, you should be able to buy it, but there doesn't seem to be much of a market for it yet.....especially as the government has essentially killed the creation of private student loans recently.

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Gotta keep the bailouts going. Inflate it all away. Banks, mortgages, government debt, credit cards, student loans, you name it. Cheers to $10 gas and Dow 30,000.

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Also, I'm fairly sure both Santorum and Gingrich would support Romney over RP in a heartbeat if it came to that. The most RP will be able to get at a brokered convention is to choose who gets the nomination.

And looks like Santorum won, but dayum, Romney is getting 30% in the Deep South. Looks like the voters have decided that this one is over and it's time to fall in line. But fortunately for Paul, the logic of falling in line means that states like California and Illinois can give him 45%+ as long as Romney is in no danger of actually losing.

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If they want a brokered convention at this point, it'd be better for one of them to drop out, because they continue to LFF each other and Romney is getting more delegates as a result.

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Here's a thank you to both Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum for sticking around this far. I fear that if one of you had quit, the other one would be winning against Romney now.

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Haha, if Romney wins Alabama and Mississippi, it's really time for Gingrich and Santorum to quit. I want to see Ron Paul pull down 48% in the California primary, which he can do with those two gone.

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It was a simple site with a simple model. His only real cost was bandwidth.

That's a good reason for why Gamefaqs was a better business than most of the internet companies of 1999. Very low costs. It's also easy to pitch- here's a company where people volunteer to give content to it for free. I'm sure it was a labor of love, but that doesn't make it any less profitable.

If you look at internet stocks in in 1999 Jan-Mar 2000, they basically universally did amazing. Then they all fell off a cliff. You really didn't need anything to pitch a company to investors in that time beyond that it was an internet company.

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I don't think I visited Gamefaqs in 1999, but I'm pretty sure there were ads. I doubt CJayC just ran the site with no revenue for 4 years. And I'm quite sure he wasn't doing anything as bad as spending 20 times on advertising alone what he got in revenue. And even if there were no ads, he could easily have added them in the future, whereas Pets.com was losing money on every item sold even before counting advertising costs.

Besides, the point of the Pets.com example was to show that in 1999/early 2000, you didn't need any plan to make money to send your stock into the stratosphere. All you needed were the two words "internet company."

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Your comment about inefficiently run companies reminded me of the Tech Bubble of 1999/2000. Consider the case of Pets.com. In 1999 the company had revenue of 619k and advertising expenses alone of 11.8 million. Nonetheless, the company went public in February 2000 and garnered a market cap of 300 million. By November 2000, the stock had lost over 98% of its value, and the company liquidated its remaining assets to shareholders (it evidently had the good fortune of obtaining capital through equity investment rather than debt).

Poor CJayC should have taken GameFAQs public in 1999. If he sold at the top he could probably have gotten like 100 times what he ended up getting in 2003.

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Google has really gone downhill lately. Prediction: Facebook has a higher market cap by the end of 2012.

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Like, I assume you're talking about the military or something, but we could quite easily have a policy of the military being like insurance, and they stand by and watch you get killed if you didn't pay your premiums, like those fire departments in rural kentucky or wherever that was.

It doesn't work that way though. When the Persians invaded Greece, the Greek coalition defended Thermopylae and then the Isthmus of Corinth- because those were the chokepoints that gave them the best chance of winning. It didn't matter which cities behind those two lines actually supported the cause. You can't just let the enemy army in past the chokepoints so they can attack the cities that didn't help the cause, because then the enemy army is behind your lines, and you're going to lose the war.

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Isn't that the exact OPPOSITE of a free rider problem?

Er yes. We have programs that don't happen because any one person paying for them would not result in a gain, but everyone paying for it would result in a gain to everyone.

Actually, no, it is directly a free rider problem. People who don't pay taxes would be free riders for government programs like education, military, etc. that help their interests. But if you can be a free rider, why would you pay for it? So everyone tries to free ride, and nobody gets anything.

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Of course then we get into a major free rider problem as the total tax revenue decreases sharply and people don't want to fund programs that don't help them personally.

Maybe we need to indoctrinate people by putting everyone on welfare. Each day in school, right after the pledge of allegiance, children will receive their welfare checks from the government. And it continues until the day you die. You get them no matter how rich you are, and you cannot refuse them without being sent to jail. That'll stop the self-righteous people who oppose handouts. At least the non-hypocrites.

I really have no sympathy for the middle class people who keep complaining about how the government helps the poor too much. Newsflash, the poor didn't create your problems or the gigantic inefficient government, you did. Seriously, drug testing welfare recipients? So, you manage to degrade human beings and add another wasteful useless government expense at the same time? And then you'll complain that Mitt Romney is building a new $11 million oceanfront mansion while your house gets foreclosed on.

Okay, end rant about the greedy middle class.

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Well I didn't say that was a good idea, just the only way I could think of to subject tax rates to free market incentives. Perhaps it would work a little better if the vote depended on percentage of income paid in tax as opposed to absolute dollar amount.

I believe if this happens, 1) the rich will have more control over government and 2) the taxation system will be substantially more progressive than it is now. We'll probably see the top 1% contributing well over 50% of all taxes, perhaps as high as 70-80%, under such a system.

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Personally I'd get rid of the corporate tax (because the shareholders are ultimately taxed anyways, so there's no need to have 2 levels of taxation). Then the individual tax would be set to something like the following:

<$30,000 = 0
$30,000 - $100,000 = 10%
$100,000 - $300,000 = 19%
$300,000 - $1,000,000 = 27%
$1,000,000 - $3,000,000 = 34%
$3,000,000 - $9,000,000 = 40%
$9,000,000 - $27,000,000 = 45%
$27,000,000 - $81,000,000 = 49%
$81,000,000 - $243,000,000 = 52%
$243,000,000 - $1,000,000,000 = 54%
>$1,000,000,000 = 55%

If you're below median, you shouldn't be paying any taxes, and if you're below the mean, you shouldn't be paying very much. If there were a way to find out willingness to pay through a free market system for tax rates, I think you'd find something like this- the richer you are the less that percentage of income means to you. But I can't think of a way to do that other than tying your vote to how much tax you choose to pay.

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http://seekingalpha.com/article/426851-team-berkshire-vs-the-taxman-the-game-is-about-to-change

Today I finally saw an article with a principled reason for why Warren Buffett might want high capital gains taxes on individuals. The idea is that with the current low taxes on individual capital gains, people are better off copying Berkshire's portfolio themselves than buy Berkshire stock.

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I don't particularly like this name, but I want to keep those spaces.

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Obama - 35
Romney - 11

Wow, this has really turned into a landslide.

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Or we could just create a bunch of jobs for newborns and infants so that they can own their own living and be independent. Bring the textile industry back to the US!

But we don't want people to be independent, we want them to be hanging onto every word that drops from the mouth of the enlightened one Ben Bernanke.

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We don't let babies make decisions in other contexts either.

If babies aren't responsible enough to make vital decisions regarding their own lives, then it's clearly time for government to step in. Let's see......

To eliminate abortions that arise because the parents think they cannot take care of the baby, the Fed can just print money and give it in a trust to any baby who is conceived at conception. If the baby is aborted the money will escheat to the state. If the baby is born, the parents can be the trustees. More inflation. Roar.

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That's like telling a man without legs: if you don't want to be euthanized by the death panel, run out the door!

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Tip jars are a great innovation, yeah.

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Baby's life, baby's choice.

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A socialist would have blamed corporate greed!

I do wish companies would stop charging non-whole number prices (after tax). If I pay $5.96 and get 4 pennies back those pennies are probably going to end up lost somewhere and never used. And it wastes everyone's time.

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http://www.bmcc.cuny.edu/finaid/grants/pellawardschedule.html

Actually, here's a chart. Now I guess you'd just need to calculate EFC. Which based on personal experience, can be surprisingly high even with negative income.

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No idea. Might depend on your parents' income too, depending on the program.

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I don't think you need to be that good at Go to recognize that. At least at the 1-dan level, I can say that looking at a 17x17 board, I can feel that the strategy would be quite different and the center influence would be worth much much less. I wouldn't want to play on it- it feels cramped, like a whole dimension of the game has been sharply reduced.* I don't feel the same way about 21x21 and would be interested in playing on it, but perhaps that's natural because 21x21 must be more complex than 19x19, even if it's not as balanced between center and edges. I might also just be somewhat biased due to liking to use central influence.

*It's true that skill (among humans) on 17x17 would probably be very similar to skill on 19x19, because 90%+ of skill in Go is tactical fighting skill. Or rather, it's a limiting factor. If you have the greatest strategic play in the world but the fighting skill of a 5k, your rank will be something like 3k. On the other hand, you could know nothing about opening theory and it probably wouldn't hurt you more than 1 or 2 ranks- because your opening or strategic play would have to be amazingly bad to be worse than just letting your opponent play 2 handicap stones. But the strategy is probably where the majority of the fun and creativity comes from, so it's painful to lose it.


Is 8x8 Go actually harder than 8x8 Chess, though?

Chess can loop game states much more than Go can. The entire set of possible moves in Go for an 8x8 board is like...about (64!) assuming people don't place a piece in the same square more than once.

Hmm...yeah, ok, so that's roughly 64^64 = 2^(6*64) = 2^(384). Haha, ok, yeah, no, you're not searching the entire decision tree by brute force.

I believe 7x7 Go has been solved. I don't know if 8x8 Go would be easier to solve than Chess, but computers could probably crush humans on it at least. 9x9 Go is already for humans much less "hard" a game than Chess, but that could be a consequence of how humans think.

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Also, the choice of 19x19 for Go is not arbitrary from a game design point of view, though it's difficult to say how it got there historically. There are good reasons the board should be 19x19 rather than 17x17 or 21x21. And that is that with 19x19, the corner/sides of the board balance the center just about perfectly. With anything smaller, the center is worth less than the edges, and with anything more, the center is bigger (and what happens on one side of the board also has less impact on the other side). The balance results in fun, strategically interesting games in which players have a lot of viable whole board strategies.

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Go is hard for computers primarily because the board is huuuuuuge. Do Go on an 8x8 board and I suspect computers would just crush humans.

Go is pretty much never played on 8x8, but it is sometimes played on 9x9 by beginners, people looking for a fast game, and people who want to just have one tactical battle only. Computers are indeed very good at 9x9 already, as in professional level (= grandmaster level in Chess).

Well generally for a game like Go or Chess you're not going to compute every possible remaining game state (that would take way too long), but you can use a number of different strategies to make good moves. Like, you could look a few moves into the future and choose the move that results in the best game state for you assuming your opponent plays optimally (minimax), or do a genetic algorithm where you "train" a computer with various sample games (this is what they did with IBM's Watson to train a computer to play Jeopardy).

The newer Go programs use a "monte carlo tree search" which involves taking candidate moves and playing out the rest of the game randomly (with some pruning I'm assuming) many, many, times. The program then chooses the move that maximizes the probability of winning. This seems to work a lot better than brute force minimax searching. It's probably also what leads to a lot of the really strange-looking moves (for example, if the computer thinks it is ahead, it will play an uber safe move that results in it winning by 0.5 points rather than something that a player of its level could easily read out as leading to a 20 point victory).

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How about a Go match? Computers still can't beat good human players at it, though they're improving pretty fast. They play such strange moves too (from a human point of view).

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So is it trying to say like, there's so many different possibilities for moves that Mario/Zelda/etc could make that a computer would have extreme difficulty determining which moves are necessary to complete the game?

(as opposed to a game like Chess or something, where computers have essentially mastered the game)

Fairly sure that according to this paper, Mario/Zelda are not shown to be harder for computers than Chess. Just harder than one might expect.

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There might be a difference of standards here between hard math/science fields and other fields.

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I think this is a case where the acronyms are more recognizable than the full written out form.

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Hmm, Wikipedia says Go under the Japanese ko rule is EXPTIME-Complete, but it is yet to be shown whether it is under the Chinese rules. I'm guessing that's because of the superko rule, which eliminates the possibility of triple ko.

Some people think superko is elegant, but I'm not sure why you would want to a ruleset that gets rid of triple ko- it's the rarest of rare things in Go, that almost never arises in a real game. If one in 10,000 games ends in triple ko resulting in a result of "no result," that seems like a good thing to me.

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I assume you mean a complex game like go and a simple game like tic-tac-toe right?

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Not a CS major, but I've heard of both those terms, though I don't admittedly understand them very well.

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Maybe you could argue that they should hire you for diversification of portfolio though.

How much Austrian economists work for your firm? None? Well the past few years have shown you the danger of groupthink so you should let me bring some diversity of thought to the company!

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And on healthcare I think if a Republican president had brought it up it probably would have passed much more easily and have much more support. Obamacare was popular until it got filibustered for a few months.

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Romney lying or dissimulating is reality. Clearly Romney must say that he will be different from Obama. We think in reality he will be quite similar. Obviously not identical, but substantively similar on the important issues. Obama ended up being quite similar to bush's second term too.

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,Would a President Romney really have pushed for something similar to Obamacare (on a national level), fought to repeal DADT, and fought to raise income tax rates on high earners given the current philosophies of the Republican party? I don't think Obama and Romney would be that similar as presidents.

He pushed for Romneycare in Massachusetts, so probably on the healthcare. DADT- maybe, once he doesn't have to pander to the right anymore. Raise income taxes? Sure, Romney might do it in exchange for another pound of flesh- say, another couple trillion dollars injected into the economy that first goes through the banks. It's not like Obama has made a serious attempt to raise taxes either- it's mostly just a talking point to appear like he supports the 99%.

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Obama - 31
Romney - 10
Friedrich Engels - 4

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So it seems like B8 has gone all-in on the "Republicans and Democrats are the exact same" conspiracy theory. Oh well.

That's not a conspiracy theory. That's the last 20 years of policy decisions!

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Also, if you ever apply for a job at one of these banks, don't mention that you don't believe in math in economics. These people have more faith in math applied to life than practically anyone. Back in the glory days they used to hire 2/3 of MIT's graduating engineering majors, because they were good at math. Of course if your school wasn't super elite (with a much more restrictive definition of elite than most people), you could forget about it.

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Imagine the scene......

FED: So, should we bail out Greece?
MS: Yes, you should. We made massive bets on Greece and if they fail, we will fail causing other banks to fail, and causing the whole world economy to implode.
DB: We concur.
JPM: Same here.
ECB: So, what about Portugal?
GS: Portugal is the same situation as Greece.
BOE: What about Spain then, or Italy?
GS: Same, same, same!
FED: Was AIG the same?
WFC: Yes!
PBOC: Is there any country or major financial institution you didn't place big bets on, that would cause the implosion of the global economy if it went bad?
Banks: Um, let us think about it...........................No.
BOJ: So we have to bail out everyone who asks?
GS: Yes!
ECB: But we don't want to spend taxpayer money bailing out you people.
GS: Printers. You've got 'em.
FED: Okay guys, it looks like we have no choice. Turn on the printers.

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