This reminds of a fun fact I remember learning in university.
Elasticity is the relationship between demand and supply, and there are actually very rare instances where it can be negative (where demand increases with price).
Inelastic demand is when a good is demanded so much, that an increase in price has little affect on the total quantity (people still demand it, think like addictive substances)
So a perfectly inelastic product would be a straight line where any amount is demanded at any price.
So having the curve keep going it would get a positive slope, where higher price makes demand go up.
If I remember the example I was given was food during a famine. Supply is already low, but an additional pressure on price is the known shortage. The idea being that as the price goes up people see it as harder to get.
It’s been so long since I studied the subject so I might have gotten some things wrong here.
The terminology is actually split; sometimes they're called Giffen goods and sometimes they're called Veblen goods.
The two types have identical behavior, so there's no good reason to have two different names, but in concept Giffen goods are something poor people buy, while Veblen goods are something rich people buy.
(There is a difference if you're willing to look at responses to changes other than a change in the price of a good: if you give a household more money, it will increase consumption of Veblen goods, but decrease consumption of Giffen goods.)
2. If it’s only banned in the US, yes it pays out, you just need to get a VPN or go to another country.
Also even it’s banned everywhere, the markets are blockchain contracts so you should be able to access it without the website, which is just the frontend. (this is where my technical expertise breaks down, someone who knows blockchain is a better expert)
It’s different because the prediction markets companies don’t make money on spreads. You aren’t betting against the house. Sports betting, every bet you take has a house edge.
Polymarket, for example, makes money on the data. So it must be worth something because people are paying for that predication data. They don’t take a slice of the winnings.
Platforms like polymarket can be used to bet on the outcome of sporting events. Does the fact that you are betting against another bettor change that from sports betting to a prediction market? If I am playing poker am I still gambling even if the house is just another player in the hand?
Yeah I guess that’s fair, but I wouldn’t say that predictions aren’t the point of the market. My point was more that the predictions must be the point, because people are paying polymarket to get that data.
They don’t make money by taking a spread, they make it by providing information.
And people bet on emotion for sure, but “wisdom of crowds” suggests that generally that will balance out to somewhat accurate odds.
the current reform is complicated, and reasonable people can disagree on how to vote, but it goes a bit further than separating prosecutors from judges.
Namely, it also changes the self-regulating body (the CSM, Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura) of the judiciary so that the government and parliament have a bit more authority and the judiciary have a bit less: the organ is split in two, its judiciary members are no longer elected but picked randomly while a part is decided by the political side, and there's an even higher special tribunal.
Proponents say this is necessary, opponents say this is leading towards stronger power of the political majority over the judiciary.
Now, roughly one third of CSM members is nominated by the Parliament and the other one is elected by judges, according to the "correnti" (a sort of parties)
Damn, is anyone an expert that can speak to the criminal law involved here?
It’s crazy that executives can jump around the law and not face any criminal charges, then the company picks up the bill (although I’m not ignorant thinking this isn’t usual)
I’m just curious to learn more about how often this is the case and you usually what happens with people afterward
I don't know about Italian law, but in the US tax evasion is pretty difficult in many cases to prove. It is illegal in the US to deliberately defraud the IRS to evade paying taxes, it is not illegal to make a mistake, or claim a deduction you think you can claim when the IRS decides you can't, etc. So prosecutors must prove you had an intent to evade taxes you knew you owed. Because they can rarely meet that bar, criminal charges are rarely brought.
it's for the civil part. (so you need to show the tax office some paper trail that you based your filings on. invoices, bills, contracts, emails, receipts. and if they are formally okay, then the tax agency has to show that they are just fake papers.)
as far as I understand the criminal part still considers intent and so on (and has a higher standard for burden of proof), but if you file for VAT return and then you have zero invoices (and so the numbers simply don't add up) the court can easily find that there was intent to defraud the state. (and then sentencing is based on the amount of damages.)
Realizing that GDP growth can be achieved while average joe on Main Street is struggling. The billionaires doing well masks everyone else struggling to afford groceries.
In general, people are kind of calling BS on what the definition should be because we are all collectively feeling that things are doing poorly but no one is quite willing to recognize it due to the definitional stuff.
What did your response have to do with your quote?
We can have the most growth ever as a civilization and still have the common person lose out.
The Industrial Revolution also famously had a lot of people pushed into impoverished situations while robber barons or the highland clearing lords won out, despite the GDP of those respective countries increasing.
> What did your response have to do with your quote?
The notion that growth can be unequal is not something that has changed. The anomaly was the post-WWII eventide regime.
That doesn't mean there is anything natural about unequal growth. But if we want to return to that previous mode, we have to first understand what it was. And what it was was anomalous.
> Why do you think I responded to you the way I did?
How is the rhethorical-question style working out?
I'm pointing out an ahistorical claim in the top post. You want to broaden the discussion without acknowledging that, and without actually saying anything, which isn't particularly interesting to engage on.
You didn’t point out an ahistorical claim. They didn’t claim that GDP wasn’t growing. They said that it wasn’t helping the common man and you jumped in with an equivalent of “but the DOW is over 50k”
> They didn’t claim that GDP wasn’t growing. They said that it wasn’t helping the common man and you jumped in with an equivalent of “but the DOW is over 50k”
No, this is a ridiculous misreading. They said that "realizing that GDP growth can be achieved while average joe on Main Street is struggling" is "what changed." That is ahistorical. I may realize, today, that the sky is blue, but that's a personal discovery, not a general one. GDP growth amidst widespread poverty has been the default in most of human history; it isn't what changed.
Whether or not GDP is growing was never brought up by anyone except you.
The connection is that GDP/Recession has never been about mainstreet or average joe.
Recession is usually bad for Joe and mainstreat, but the opposite is not implied. It is ignorant to think it is or was defined by the average experience.
I feel it’s also ignorant to think it shouldn’t be defined by that experience. Our metrics have been misleading or we just need better ones and/or possibly a new word for how average joe talks about “recession”. A purely academic definition that has no basis in reality seems pointless to me.
purely academic definistions have a tremendous number of purposes.
Just as it would be silly to define a countries military equipment production capacity by public sentiment, the same is true for purely financial GDP.
There are tons of metrics that can used to articulate how the economy feels for average joe. We have low consumer sentiment, lagging median income, GINI, opinion surveys, ect.
Using the word "recession" adds gravitas by claiming something that isnt true.
> it’s also ignorant to think it shouldn’t be defined by that experience
If defined rigorously, sure. But the literature is replete with measureas of downturns.
What more commonly comes up in online discussions is some dude with a vibe, which isn't particularly useful for talking about anything larger in scale than that one dude.
Even during the Industrial Revolution as well. And even the idealized vision of the 1950s-60s that is common on the Internet was itself a fantasy for a plurality of Americans until the Great Deal began sinking in.
There was a period of slightly more income equality in the 1930s-1960s as Piketty [0] and Zucman [1] show, but this was also at the expense of racial and gender equality.
The 1970s was probably the most equal period economically speaking as Zucman showed [1].
We should not strive to return to the 1950s - we should strive to be better than anytime previously.
I think that’s what’s changed though, as GP asked, people want to define recession as closer to the social wellbeing than a metric like gdp that is divorced
Doesn’t this kinda create a problem though? Like a recession implies economic slowdown, but social wellbeing can decrease while the economy is fine.
For example, a plague or severe weather might make the average person have a worse standard of living, but if the economy isn’t net affected, it seems wrong to say we are in a recession.
Our vocabulary is too limited then. I know average people only use the word recession when things are compounding negative towards their personal finances / economics AND they feel like most people they know are dealing with the same. They don't claim it's a Katrina/Harvey/[any storm name] recession, they know the differences and that storm driven struggles are usually localized / temporary with a known amount of work to rebuild - average joe feels helpless in a macro-recession as it's only going to be solved in time and/or with help of politicians they don't trust.
Plagues are a weird example, because I can't think of any situation where a plague would not affect the economy - and it should effect it negatively. I think COVID effected it negatively, we just chose to have a financial long COVID and drag out what should have been a financial disaster without all the government programs. Instead of economic collapse and starvation, we chose to massively spend money knowing it would be paid in time through inflation and also knowing it wouldn't get reallocated in an even way as pre-COVID. (That's my take, I don't know if there's any validity to it but it's just my gut feeling.)
Historically, both politicians and yhe media considered two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. The Biden administration changed that, basically arguing that the definition is too narrow and they preferred to use a more broad set of indicators that just so happened to avoid calling a recession when they wanted to claim a strong economy.
The Biden administration argued for a change. They did not convince others. It's like saying "Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico" - no one but loyalists bought in.
Economists continue to use the same definition as before, despite your attempt to blame Biden.
It wasn’t “revoked under Biden.” That implies the Biden administration (or any administration) gets to define this. They don’t. Recessions in the United States are generally demarcated by NBER.¹
>It does imply that because the Trump admin killed the group involved with preventing pandemics[1]
No it doesn't, not without massively reading in between the lines. This is getting to absurd levels of nitpicking over wording, like "autistic people" vs "people with autism".
>I assume you are being disingenuous by using that claim while also trying to smear the Biden admin.
Two can play at this game. I assume you're being disingenuous by trying to put words in my mouth over tiny disagreements in wording.
That was never such a "rule"; that was 1 of 4 considerations from a 1974 NY Times opinion piece, and those 4 considerations were in turn a simplification of the overall recession considerations, as the combined 4 items were intended to be more understandable by the general public than the actual items.
Where had you heard that there was such a "rule"?
(And as others pointed out, it's a private organization, not the government, that has set and evaluates recession criteria.)
Recessions without an external shock are rare. But you could say the rest of the economy is in stagnation. I‘m expecting real recession as soon as the LLM bubble begins to burst.
Thanks for advice, and yeah that makes sense that I’ll have to learn a whole new skill set, but I enjoy learning.
When talking about a feature, am I doing basically high level system design? Similar to what a senior engineer does (aka this should be a cache, it’s best to change this to streaming so let’s remove the audit db, etc) or is it even more high level than that?
Also lol at the last line, never heard that but I can see why people might make the assumption.
I literally had a dev manager say it to my face! "I guess you were a mediocre programmer or you wouldn't have become a PM"!
No, you aren't doing that kind of high-level design. For example, I was the PM for the "connect to Wi-Fi via a QR code" feature in Windows (you're welcome!). As PM, my job was to :
- demonstrate that this was "thing" people would want to do
- demonstrate that it slotted into the existing feature set (the existing Windows camera already reads QR codes, so we just had to use their existing hoooks)
- do a quick evaluation of the WIFI: protocol (which, BTW, sucks; it's one of the worst standards I've ever seen)
- do an evaluation of the overall market (like, what do other operating systems do)
There was also some discussions with the Windows Wi-Fi team for how to store the connection data since it wasn't a perfect fit for the our existing connection store, plus a security evaluation. You won't do anything about caches or streaming except that they will naturally fall out of your spec.
You'll learn a ton about writing convincing documents, how to find users and partners, tracking schedules, and stuff
Elasticity is the relationship between demand and supply, and there are actually very rare instances where it can be negative (where demand increases with price).
These are called Giffen goods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good
Explanation (that I remember)
Inelastic demand is when a good is demanded so much, that an increase in price has little affect on the total quantity (people still demand it, think like addictive substances)
So a perfectly inelastic product would be a straight line where any amount is demanded at any price.
So having the curve keep going it would get a positive slope, where higher price makes demand go up.
If I remember the example I was given was food during a famine. Supply is already low, but an additional pressure on price is the known shortage. The idea being that as the price goes up people see it as harder to get.
It’s been so long since I studied the subject so I might have gotten some things wrong here.
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