Sexless In Silicon Valley: Why Nobody's Getting Laid In America's Tech Hub

[Exodus2011]

ok yea i can see the probably blonde popular girl type saying "omg! how is no one having sex in that place with all the nice nerdy guys!" LOL

 

[Afro_Vacancy]

ok yea i can see the probably blonde popular girl type saying "omg! how is no one having sex in that place with all the nice nerdy guys!" LOL

I see more the general media narrative that whatever problems men have, it's their fault for being failures.

"web developer that didnt know the alphabet"

If we truly want women, we just need to learn the alphabet.

Or not.

The article just doesn't jove with my reality as I experience it and it reminds of that vast offset. If I fall asleep for just a minute I might truly collapse into an bottomless abyss of lies.

One of the examples in there is of a woman who went out with a guy living in a box in a friend's apartment, and she was ok with it, just not with the fact that he was ok with it. That's the portrayal the media makes of the dating game, about how women are willing to compromise, but guys require them to compromise too much.

It does seem like a lie.

 

[Guzam]

WSJ, FT, Bloomberg and Reuters still remain very reliable sources for business news, and are doing okay financially too. Broadly speaking, Zero Hedge is not a reliable source and a poor way to stay informed unless you're hyper-literate in finance and economics and able to use it as a sort of contrarian signal.

Frankly, I'd say that Bloomberg and Reuters are complete garbage. The public arm of Bloomberg is trash and a scam. The proper Bloomberg goes on the Terminals, which almost no one except professionals can access.

WSJ is good in economics reporting, together with the low-key Econ section of The Economist (ironic isn't it), but they tend to be unreliable about finance. I actually think the market is semi-strong in EMH but not efficiently strong. This means the proper news about financial economics belong to very few insiders in Central Banks and major publicly traded corporations. This is also why insider trading is a crime.

I suggest to read academic papers or books used in top college courses to make your minds up. I study Econ and it's not something the average Joe can understand without study and preparation and, above all, critical and analytical thinking. Many people spout about economics like they know sh*t after reading a few books but guess what, they actually don't know nothing. It's like talking about Physics without proper preparation: empty words. This is some complex matter.

 

[Guzam]

Economics is nothing like physics though. It really wishes it were a hard science, and sometimes has the trappings of one, but it's not.

Certainly, for some very liquid instruments, at certain points in time, you'll get something close to a semi-strong version of efficient markets where new information is incorporated almost instantly in prices. Things like algo trading actually do help make the market more efficient by more quickly picking up on new information and making trading decisions based on it. In general, the emerging market hypothesis is useful as a general lens through which to view the markets. Inefficiencies in pricing of publicly traded instruments are generally small and big movements are usually because of information which is not yet public knowledge, like you mention.

And Reuters and Bloomberg are complete garbage now? I use Reuters articles all the time for research and haven't run into any obvious mistakes or flaws. There may have been some heavily publicized ones that I haven't picked up on. I'll say I interface with public BB mostly through their magazine and their television station. Certainly, it's made for a different audience, with more editorializing and more commercial content as opposed to pure wire-style articles. But in general, the standards of journalism (fact-checking and timeliness) and the quality of the commentary is quite high.

Since you bring up the Economist here, I think what people mean when they criticize maintream sources is that they want editorializing and more specifically, the shrewd insider-type voice who seems to be giving you the real dirt on how the market is doing. Certainly, there's a place for that but it's unfair to bring down traditional, mainstream journalism as there is a good bit of craft that goes into it and the business newspapers especially are quite well-funded and diligent in doing their job. They are very useful sources if you keep in mind the limits of what they can do; i.e., they can't and shouldn't tell you what to think, they give you pieces to put together inside your frame of understanding and prior knowledge.

Economics is not a hard science, as you rightfully say and I agree with you, but it shares many kinds of complexieties with Physics. Physics is known to go against common sense regarding many issues

(lol what's behind this simple thing?) unless effort and knowledge are applied to understand it critically.

Economics goes like this, for example regarding financial structure in Modigliani-Miller theorem, which is very easy to understand but totally goes against common sense: in a world with taxes, the firm with debt is more valuable than the firm without debt; the more the debt, the bigger the value (up to a certain point where failure costs kick in). Needless to say they took the Nobel for this seemingly anti-logical thing.

This is why I call everyone to study the issues in Econ more deeply than a few library books by using college books instead.

 

[Guzam]

That seems to be a superficial similarity though, in my opinion you can't really argue that physics and economics are broadly similar since they both produce counter-intuitive results. Without having looked all too much into this, I would assume that the tendency towards counter-intuitive findings is shared across most fields; take sociology for example, over the years studies have shown that children learn better the less homework they're given, and that recidivism decreases the better the criminals are treated, both findings that go against common sense.

Re-interpreting your statements here, I'll say that there is definitely a huge value-add in getting a deeper understanding of finance and economics through non-ideological sources. It gives you a framework through which you can interpret current events and the reporting you read in mainstream and alternative sources. So much of what passes for literature on "economics" is biased and ideologically charged, to where it's hard to know where the punditry ends and the science begins. In particular, there is a ton of Austrian sh*t out there which I generally just find useless.

That's why without framework and education, people get tricked and fooled easily by merchants of dreams and ideologies (politicians and journalists). Sadly, humility has never been a characteristic of the 'people': many will claim to 'know' about economics without actually knowing; instead, they appeal to their favorite authority.

Even those who study economics (PhDs too) are greatly encouraged to never claim to 'know', because it's a highly imperfect subject. Physics is 'harder' because, unlike economics, one can do experiments. How the hell is one supposed to 'experiment' macroeconomic policies, when the environment in which the policy is enacted changes continuously?

I suggest to NEVER believe 'authors' and 'authorities' who claim to know what's the best policy, the best thing for you, because that thing simply is not possible to know. Socialists and the broader 'Green' movement are part of this crowd, together with any kind of Nationalism and extremism and every news outlet which does not take the objective/informative approach (practically not found today in its purest form. The Economist had this incredible feature until the Obama years, when all its sections became ideologically charged, except the most 'technical' ones, which look like they still are written by experts).

 

[Exodus2011]

did you major in economics in college zircon? also please keep up this discussion, its fascinating as f***

*michaeljacksonpopcorn.gif*

and economy question do you think it would be realistic for artificial intelligences to dominate the stock markets like in the matrix?

 

[cocohot]

Back on topic:

Baldness is disgusting.

 

[CopeForLife]

overcomplicated BS used to confuse people and that people pretend to understand to feel superior.

this suits to a lot of fields

 

[Afro_Vacancy]

@Guzam it would be informative if you could link to one or two articles from Bloomberg that you consider representative and provided a brief explanation as to why you consider them problematic. In general I find Bloomberg media more reliable than the rest of the mainstream media, they make a more honest and more rigorous effort to look at multiple sides and to do actual investigation and critical thinking, rather than just stenography like CNN and the Washington Post engage in.

You made a comparison to physics, which is fitting as a lot of economics was built by lapsed physicists such as Robert Lucas. You said the distinction is that physics can be empirically verified. That's true. However, I'll note that there is a huge branch of physics which is highly speculative and not empirically verified, multiple branches in fact. We have string theory, the multiverse, grand unified theory, supersymmetric theory, weakly-interacting massive particles, f(R) gravity, et cetera. These are beautifully structured models that many people to be true that currently cannot be tested, and they are derived coherently from base axioms. They are as such a decent analogy for economics and the fact is ... they don't do that well. Some of them eventually do get tested, and they fail. For example no proton decay got measured in the 1980s, when it was finally testable. The current WIMP dark matter experiments are all failing. There is no supersymmetry seen at the large hadron collider.

These are great theories (not including the multiverse in my opinion), developed by brilliant people. The mathematics are robust. But we have to accept that they may be inaccurate, that they may be missing assumptions in their axioms, or that the axioms are simply incorrect. The same may be true of the Modigliani-Miller theorem.

 

[Guzam]

@Guzam it would be informative if you could link to one or two articles from Bloomberg that you consider representative and provided a brief explanation as to why you consider them problematic. In general I find Bloomberg media more reliable than the rest of the mainstream media, they make a more honest and more rigorous effort to look at multiple sides and to do actual investigation and critical thinking, rather than just stenography like CNN and the Washington Post engage in.

You made a comparison to physics, which is fitting as a lot of economics was built by lapsed physicists such as Robert Lucas. You said the distinction is that physics can be empirically verified. That's true. However, I'll note that there is a huge branch of physics which is highly speculative and not empirically verified, multiple branches in fact. We have string theory, the multiverse, grand unified theory, supersymmetric theory, weakly-interacting massive particles, f(R) gravity, et cetera. These are beautifully structured models that many people to be true that currently cannot be tested, and they are derived coherently from base axioms. They are as such a decent analogy for economics and the fact is ... they don't do that well. Some of them eventually do get tested, and they fail. For example no proton decay got measured in the 1980s, when it was finally testable. The current WIMP dark matter experiments are all failing. There is no supersymmetry seen at the large hadron collider.

These are great theories (not including the multiverse in my opinion), developed by brilliant people. The mathematics are robust. But we have to accept that they may be inaccurate, that they may be missing assumptions in their axioms, or that the axioms are simply incorrect. The same may be true of the Modigliani-Miller theorem.

I find two things very problematic in Bloomberg Media.

The first one is the divide between the 'free' Bloomberg (the website, social media accounts) and the 'true and expensive' Bloomberg, which is available only on the Bloomberg Terminals.

Such phenomenon is highly problematic: what is worth reporting of the things they come to know isn't available to the vast majority of the people who follow them. This is not a journalistic approach to news. They actually don't want news to spread: instead, they keep them for those who handsomely pay. I'm talking about funds, banks, corps with a capital markets division who can actually afford the Terminal AND reap a consistent profit from it.

This thing makes me wonder what are they actually reporting on their public divisions; probably, they are reporting only things that are already available somewhere. Thus, there might be no value added at all by reading Bloomberg regarding economics and finance and articles such as this one

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/...organic&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social


might actually be real scams or at least incomplete, asymmetric information. The business management issues are well reported but many times they are just bullet-point lists of what millionaires do to get richer (such as '5 of the Best Million Dollar Rolls Royces'), bullshit articles such 'These Are The Oddest Hotel Jobs On Earth'. These kinds of articles dilute the Bloomberg value, from my perspective: they look like click baits (this is the second problematic point in Bloomberg). What stops to make more subtle click baits with exaggerated information when talking about economic or political issues? Are they reliable at all, in anything? Furthermore, it is biased towards the Democratic Party: during the elections, it greatly favored Hillary Clinton. Do not expect objective reporting in politics from Bloomberg then.


The Physics-economics comparison I made had a particular aim: as both of them are complicated fields (not on the same level though), people who are not prepared and educated should not talk about Economics; or at least they should admit their ignorance in a Socratic manner, as much as people who are not prepared in Physics should not talk about string theory, or at least admit they know close to nothing and probably they get it wrong. Furthermore, the only way to learn Physics is college books and publications. The same goes with Economics. No library book can teach about Economics nor Physics in a manner that goes beyond entertainment and simple curiosity.