msellout

Give `destructure` a try https://github.com/selik/destructure

What do you think of this library: https://github.com/selik/destructure

It'll enforce schema and destructure the nested dict/list that results from JSON decoding.

Note that at the most-selective universities there does appear to be a relationship between selectivity and education ROI.

The trouble with linear methods is that they often fit to the bulk of the population and have poor fit at the extremes.

What effect do you think that has?

If smart students choose selective schools and smartness is associated with ROI, we would expect to see a correlation between ROI and school selectivity. That we don't is interesting.

If merit is highly correlated with school selectivity, then selectivity can be considered a proxy for smartness/determination/etc. If that's the case, education ROI appears to be not strongly correlated with merit (via the selectivity proxy). That is very interesting.

Good point. That's why it's likely the youth and the not-yet-born will pay a higher percent of their lifetime incomes in taxes while probably receiving less benefit. Americans have a history of voting wealth transfers to themselves from their grandchildren.

some people "pay for more than they use."

The author was addressing the opposite situation -- people using more than what they pay for.

It would be just as ridiculous to write an article about how "people with children in schools aren't paying the cost of the school"

A more similar analogy to what the author was pointing out would be that current taxpayers will receive more Social Security benefit over their lifetimes than the future value of their lifetime payments, meaning that the system is only financially sound if we assume the working population will grow at an appropriate rate such that we'll always have enough workers to pay for retirees.

Or, adjusting the analogies you provided: we are borrowing from other countries to pay for our schools and fire departments. This happens to be true. Is it bad? Unknown.

The author excluded roads financed by gasoline tax from the analysis. I don't remember reading about sales and income taxes in the article, but perhaps those are in the same category.

No, seems like it's not entrapment [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_car

More variant pricing will better distribute usage. The unfortunate effects on the poor can be negated by a sales tax paid back to all citizens equally as a lump sum.

Yikes. Yes, of course technology is driven by human preferences. But, No, humans must occasionally accept that certain habits are not sustainable given current and near-future technologies.

I'm often annoyed when reading reports that use percentages instead of the actual ratios. For example, "2 out of 3" is much better than "66.7%".

Did you recover any money? How difficult was the process?

The buyer of non-voting shares is betting that eventually the company will start a dividend or share-buyback program, or that there will be a subsequent buyer that will pay more than the current price.

A chart of growth rate might have a peak, but a chart of the thing that is growing is more simply modeled as a sigmoid that has an initial exponential growth portion, then a logarithmic portion which ends in a plateau.

I asked a guy who had taken four startups to IPO how it was he seemed to work such reasonable hours while other entrepreneurs worked much longer. He said he assumed they were mostly doing trial and error, while he had a better sense of what to do.

Lending does not necessarily encourage spending. During the housing price collapse crisis, the US government lent money to banks at a cheap rate, expecting to spur more consumer lending. Instead the banks just kept the money under the mattress, so to speak.

The government does have a responsibility to alleviate the pain of economic dislocation. The nation might gain as companies fail and jobs are lost, but individuals are hurt. Unfortunately, the best solutions -- unemployment insurance, free education, free healthcare, or basic income -- are politically unpalatable (for the strange ethics of "fairness"), so we end up with awkward compromises that set us up for catastrophic failures.

Circles in circles is a terrible chart. Humans have a very difficult time comparing relative areas of circles.

Much better would be to add a separate bar chart comparing all the countries and each bar separated into stripes for the city vs total. Perhaps on a log scale.

The chart they made might be more beautiful, but it's less informative.

Not all science is statistics. That's just the current paradigm and not applicable in all cases. I agree the reward system is flawed, but it ain't so easy to improve it.

every monitoring system eventually is used for social control

That statement, even if true, does not specify what time frame "eventually" is, to what degree the "control" is, or whether the result is a net benefit to civil liberties. Perhaps the control is in the form of reducing violence, which increases liberty. There's always a trade-off.

Still, he's got a point. They are very mysterious about what their margins are.

I don't think he's trying to help them. He was experimenting to see if he could train/domesticate them.

Sometimes it's really nice to see a multinational corporation. They can help reduce corruption and set higher standards for all sorts of things. Yeah, they sometimes displace local entrepreneurs, but the consumers generally benefit (though there are some downsides for consumers as well).

If you travel enough, everything starts to look the same, whether it's a multinational corporation or some local character.

You're a bit out of date.

Wikipedia says there are an estimated 268 billion barrels in Saudi Aramco's proven oil reserves, with maybe 90 billion more undiscovered. It produces somewhere between 3 and 4 billion barrels annually. If a barrel of oil is worth about $50, then the total value of Aramco is about $18 trillion. We can put a discount on that for time, but you might also want to consider that oil will get more difficult to pump out of the ground and price should increase faster than inflation. CPI is pegged to the price of oil, so all this stuff gets complicated.

should be understood easily enough

I think you'll find you have an easier time communicating if you stick to terms that people have heard before, even if they're slightly less accurate than new creations.

Of course, if you're trying to get famous, you should absolutely invent new words. Take Thomas Friedman's "glocalization". That one didn't do so well. Steven Colbert's "truthiness", that was a gem.

It is impossible to create a total ordering of preference when you have conflicting priorities (or "tension" between priorities). This reflects reality. Humans often get in weird situations where they prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A. The issue is not that the principles are incorrect, but that their application is confused for objectivity.

"Uber for cleaning service" had/has the chance to expand the market, yet those companies seem to be having some trouble. That suggests the regulation aspect is somewhat of a factor.

In fact, many people should pay more than they do -- get better lawyers, more thorough inspections, better negotiators, etc.

I'm having trouble determining if you're being sarcastic.