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I took "or" in your previous comment to be exclusive, so that "the general population" does not include stockholders. Are you now saying that your two categories are "stock holders" and "everyone, including stock holders"? (And presumably meant "stock holders" when you wrote "stock brokers" in you most recent comment")
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What legal ways do people make a profit that produce the largest net loss in utility?
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What legal ways do people make a profit that produce the largest net loss in utility?
yes, that's what I meant; thank you.
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What legal ways do people make a profit that produce the largest net loss in utility?
So... what utility will be calculated will depend on whether one arbitrarily excludes a set of humans from the utility calculation?
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What legal ways do people make a profit that produce the largest net loss in utility?
Sorry I guess it wasn't clear. I was contrasting two naive utility functions: a flat one which adds up the utilons of all people versus one that only counts the utilons of stock brokers. I'm not asserting that one or the other is "right". Both utilities would have some additional term giving utility for preserving resources, but I'm not being concrete about how that's factored in. [I'm also not addressing in any depth the complications that a full utilitarian calculation would need like estimated discounted future utilons, etc.] Did I clear it up or make it worse?
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Open thread, 24-30 March 2014
I tried to code a simple bot for recurring threads on LW based on bots written for Reddit. It doesn't work as there is apparently no API or a different one from the vanilla version of Reddit. If there is an API is there a documentation for it that I can access?
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What legal ways do people make a profit that produce the largest net loss in utility?
Monopoly businesses. Net loss of utility through inefficiency.
However, increasing returns to scale may make a monopoly a more efficient producer than a non-monopoly. In those cases the efficiency loss due to the lack of competition may be more than cancelled out by the efficiency gain from exploiting returns to scale.
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What legal ways do people make a profit that produce the largest net loss in utility?
The "canceled out" part depends on whether your interested in the utility of stockholders and the reduced resource consumption of the manufacturing process or the utility of the general population which might have to consume less of the product than they'd otherwise be able (because of higher prices) or more generally have less capital left to buy other things they need/want. Monopolies with regulated price structures sometimes work, I guess, though it's complicated.
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What legal ways do people make a profit that produce the largest net loss in utility?
One possibility is computer games, e.g. I've certainly lost a good chunk of hours to the game Diablo. Modern things like Farmville seem especially pernicious. [This is not to be construed as all gaming is bad, etc.]
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Open thread, 24-30 March 2014
Every "proof" of Godel's incompleteness theorem I've found online seems to stop after what I would consider to be the introduction. I find myself saying "yes, good, you've shown that it suffices to prove this fixed point theorem... now where's the proof of the fixed point theorem, surely that's the actual meat of the proof?" Anyone have a good source that shows the full proof, including why for a particular encoding of sentences as numbers the function "P -> P is not provable" must have a fixed point?
I suggest reading a translation.
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What legal ways do people make a profit that produce the largest net loss in utility?
Why are we thinking about this again?
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What legal ways do people make a profit that produce the largest net loss in utility?
Why are we thinking about this again?
It seems to me these are obvious targets for regulation. I'd guess the OP is worried that we've overlooked something. The game theory of it might make it difficult to implement in practice: e.g. if one country bans casinos that just makes casinos more profitable for the nearby ones. ... but that's what treaties are for.
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What legal ways do people make a profit that produce the largest net loss in utility?
Your question makes me think of what economists call negative externalities. Wikipedia has a list of them
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Discovering Your Secretly Secret Sensory Experiences
Both my eyes may from time to time perceive colors in a different way. When they do, one would see everything in more greenish-blue hues, the other in more red-yellowish hues. It's often the case when I closed one eye for a moment, or when that eye was on the pillow side after resting. So I assume it's either temperature-related, or simply that one of my eyes' cone cells were too exposed to, say, red, because of red light filtering through my closed eyelid, and therefore were less sensitive to it afterwards.
(I scored 3 on http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/how-well-do-you-see-color-173018)
I have observed different color temperatures in my left or right eyes some times and observed that these can be changed after wearing red/blue glasses; by swapping which lens covered which eye, I could correct them both back to a more balanced condition.
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An interesting take is to have a game where programming is an integral part of solving the puzzles.