Jurgis

If person X is on your side of the book, they are genius. If person Y is on the other side of your book, they are sh*t actor.

You don't understand. The fact that revenues are down 20% means that the stock should be flat or up. Since the revenue growth will be 25%+ just to get back to the old revenues! Market is forward looking, duh! Not happy to admit it, but I very clearly do not understand! It was a joke, just in case you took it seriously. Good luck.

You don't understand. The fact that revenues are down 20% means that the stock should be flat or up. Since the revenue growth will be 25%+ just to get back to the old revenues! Market is forward looking, duh!

So I just had this crazy thought in the shower after reading this: What if the real reason stocks were going up despite all the seemingly bad news is that they all improve the chances of Trump being replaced by someone better suited for the job? That is a bull case I can actually buy. Throughout 2019 and beginning of 2020 majority of money managers polled by Barron's expected Trump to win and considered his expected win to be bullish. I doubt (m)any of them changed their minds on Trump.

Who cares about the protests, the real action is in Las Vegas casinos: https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2020/06/04/las-vegas-reopening-casinos-downtown-open-coronavirus-measures/3133863001/ If you gamble with your life, gamble for money homies!

BRANDING! BOOTY! SPREADSHEETS! AAARGHH! The pirate's life for me!

Ohhh, I think you're very smart. These babies hold tons of fuel. So really you're positioning yourself to buy that negative-cost WTI and have it stored on the yacht. How are you gonna get the yacht to Cushing is the only question... 8)

That's targeted specifically at you. :P When are we doing that Ferrari race? 8)

They should have robots building submarines, aircraft carriers and fighter jets with automatic weapon systems. What could go wrong.

Becoming an expert in a field X to overcome incentives of the salesperson in field X is a possible solution, but it's also a costly solution. To take the OP example, you'll never be a real dentist (unless you go to dentist school ;)). You might be able to bullshit a level-1 dental procedure salesperson, but you won't be able to bullshit level-2 one. Also there is a risk: what if they agree with you that procedure is unnecessary (because they are level-1 in sales or because they don't want to argue), but then you discover in couple months that instead of a cheaper filling you now have to do a root canal or crown? Are you gonna seek second opinion? Are you gonna read dental x-rays yourself? Ultimately, this is IMO not an easily resolvable problem apart from simple or (obviously) scammy situations. It is tough to know if: 1. The salesperson is just pushing unneeded product/service because of incentives. 2. They really think you need this product/service 3. They are misinformed and think that you need this product/service and on your side 4. You really don't need this product/service 5. You are misinformed and need this product/service ------------------------------------- Another subtopic is self-incentives or pros/cons for decisions (this goes a bit above just incentives). There's a popular advice to write pros/cons for some decision (financial or not) to ease making the decision. The issue there is that sometimes the pros/cons are difficult to measure, evaluate, and compare. To take LC's example, moving to Denver from NYC would probably fill pages of pros and cons on a paper. How would one evaluate and weigh each of these? Even in a simpler case, how much one would value extra half hour commute vs. $XX cheaper or YY-sqft bigger house? People make these decisions, but I'd say they are mostly hand-waved even if they try to make a rational weighted decision. And BTW hand-waved or emotional decisions might be better than 10-spreadsheet ones... ::)

Incentives are incredibly complex topic (as LC has observed) and probably deserve a thread for themselves. Overall, I think that a thread per bias would work better than single thread for multiple biases.

Works just fine. Not sure why you are so negative about other people. I haven't seen this happen through X number of distributed teams. None of this is an issue. Yeah, sure people send emails and messages at weird times. And other people answer them when they can. It's not an issue unless you make it one. In good distributed team nobody makes it into an issue. Not an issue. Actually possibly positive since hiring then is done on merits and not based on (unconscious) biases.

This thread and people in it are just rehashing the same arguments again and again that were already rehashed in other threads. Not to (particularly) pick on you: I know two people in tech company who did the fastest career advances while working completely remotely. Closest office within maybe 100 miles or so. And yeah they learn, mentor, lead, etc. And they went up the career ladder way faster than people in the office who can schmooze, etc. So perhaps you should be more open minded. Although I mostly agree that offices will survive.

They never learn, do they. ::)

(and the first comment: "But he's a cunning old sod, and he sends a project manager down... and it all turns to shit and the engineer begs for release .") All the project managers were down there already, so really none of the improvements happened, engineer immediately sent SOS to God, got uplifted, and lived happily every after.

Look who wrote this: Any true red blooded Americans in this list? Clearly fake news from illegal immigrant liberals.

Yes. Now can all you have to is turn Americans into Japanese. Hygiene obsessed, mask wearing little drones, social distance, no kissy huggy stuff. Good luck. https://youtu.be/XedDyR0opow?t=63

THEY ARE BOTH! Nasty little hobbitses! We hates them! We hates them all!

Indiegogo project for reusable N99 masks: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/lmp-s2-reusable-protective-face-mask#/ Cautionary notes: This is not buying a mask - the project may fail. I have had both positive and negative experiences with kickstarter and indiegogo. Shipping to US is extra.

Daily stats from states are unreliable and I hope people don't make conclusions based on them. There were zero cases in MA one of the days: https://covidtracking.com/data/state/massachusetts#historical Of course. It's still a better sign to see it down than up, it's just a small update to priors that should be tracked over time to get a significant sample. I mostly didn't know that MA had done this about masks, that was the most interesting part of it, so it'll be interesting to track It's not as restrictive as you probably think. It just pretty much means that you have to wear mask inside a business. You can go maskless outside. Edit: Here is the official ref: https://www.mass.gov/info-details/frequently-asked-questions-about-covid-19#should-i-wear-a-mask-when-i-go-out-in-public?

Daily stats from states are unreliable and I hope people don't make conclusions based on them. There were zero cases in MA one of the days: https://covidtracking.com/data/state/massachusetts#historical

Would it not have been more informative to tweet "Emergency Rooms still open!" than "Liberate Michigan!"? I sympathize with the difficulty in public messaging during a time of panic and confusion. But I don't think public figures have devoted enough attention to nor sounded the alarm enough about the huge public health collateral damage. The media hasn't helped either. That treatments for all these afflictions that are many times as deadly as COVID have been forgone can only be charitably viewed as a failure by public health officials. Moreover, we won't see the effects immediately - they'll only surface over time at which point they'll surely be another data point and forgotten. My wife is in HR at a large healthcare company that owns and operates hospitals and clinics. She was telling me that some organ transplants didn't happen because they were classified as "elective surgery". She works from home so I hear a lot on the conference calls about the red ink spilling. Yeah, just sad. What demarcates the line between elective and non-elective? It also seems like an arbitrary line that hospitals are unsure of as well. Any scheduled surgery is elective. Cancer surgery is elective because it is scheduled. They were all banned in order to make room for the surge that never came close to occurring. Meanwhile, the elective surgeries are the bread-and-butter cash cow for the company. Cancelling surgeries was supposed to free up staff, but instead they had to lay off staff. Mistakes were made in what was locked down, but it would look different if the surge really did come. This pretty much. I think this discussion is a bit colored by locality too. Some clinics closed everything preparing for the surge. Some already reopened. Some never closed. Even in California friend's wife works in Stanford cancer center (not sure exact name), and AFAIK they never closed.

The prior article on the suicides suggested that lifting the lockdown will reduce the suicide rate. Those new articles you offer are suggesting that COVID-19 is scaring them from coming in to the hospital or clinic, which were never locked down for heart attack and stroke patients. They will vaccinate your children. Lifting a lockdown may scare these people even more if it led to an increase in the numbers of people infected with COVID-19. If a major part of the rationale for a lockdown was its practicality, then I think that public health officials were very impractical in not sufficiently considering the second order effects from the lockdown. Yes, emergency care was never stopped but how many people would really know that? Can you expect the vast majority to distinguish between what's considered an emergency and what's not? Can you expect the majority to properly weigh health risks and think rationally when everywhere they look they're reminded of COVID? I think the answer is a clear no given the data in the articles and I think it's a leap too far to assume that the majority of the populace will make rational decisions when the public health messaging on this topic has been ambiguous at best yet extremely black and white on lockdowns. So basically you are saying that everything should open and people should be told that going out is perfectly safe so that the people who don't understand that medical clinics are open would go there? Medical clinics actually have been emailing their patients and telling them what is open and what they should do if they have medical condition - whether emergency or chronic one.

You know that you are voodoo cursed now, right?

Definitely this.