Between 14 and 25 I felt exactly this way. At 25 I started combating this state of mind after my motivation dropped dead for 5 months because of depression. It took me 3 years to improve and I'm still working at it. I'm not a natural leader or an extrovert, so I trained myself to become one. I'll try to describe as briefly as possible the methods I used.


Introspect and understand the forces that shaped your mind
Your personality is the accumulation of all of the events in your life. Start listing on paper all the major bad and good events from your whole life. Then start analyzing, find your own explanations on how these events affected your mind and personality. Try to go deep and search the root cause of each event and the habits that you developed afterwards. This took me months of self-examination and countless interpretations of the events. In time the best explanations will keep recurring. Don't forget to also examine your present actions and the reasons behind them. You will notice the same patterns that keep recurring. This will help you to pin point what are you fighting against and be constantly aware of them. Spend at least 2 hours a week on this task.


Study scientific literature that explains how the mind works
Take some time to improve your know-how about the inner workings of the mind and body. I am an avid documentary watcher. This is ok to get started but to really understand how the mind works you need more. I recall how many things clicked after reading Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps: How We're Different and What to Do About It. Afterwards I had an exceptional great time binge watching this course from Stanford University: Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology, professor Robert Sapolsky. Fantastic lessons and also a lot more things clicked. Feel free to search your own materials to study.


--> Pro tip: Don't fool yourself by chasing astrology, faith BS, the secret, good energies and yada yada. Stay on the clear path. The scientific method has took the beating over the centuries and has constantly survived and thrived by exposing itself to investigation.


Develop a succinct list of the top factors that shaped you, use mnemonics
The purpose of repeatedly writing your thoughts is twofold: first you find out how you got the bad habits and what to do about them, secondly you laser etch in your memory the top most important steps you want to exercise daily in order to improve. My mnemonic is PE-WF which expands to: Personality - Experiences / Work - Fun. What that means? For me, it means that my personality creates/triggers the events that I experience and the experiences that I encounter in return shape my personality. Good experiences shape good habits and vice versa. I see these two as an uninterrupted cycle that feeds itself. There's a saying "Garbage in, garbage out". You get the point. Work-Fun cycle is also important because the feeling that I hadn't had enough fun, makes me work really bad. I'm unfocused, constantly day dreaming and procrastinating. And worse, when I'm supposed to have fun, such as at a party, I cannot enjoy myself because my mind is constantly annoying me with thoughts about the work that I haven't done on time, the money that I don't have, and so and so. Main take-away: be aware of these cycles, don't live on autopilot, take initiative and do something to improve these life cycles.


Start unlearning the bad habits, get going on good habits and thought patterns
By studying about biology, neurology, psychology, evolution, civilization history, economics I got a few jems stuck in my mind.

• Humans have evolved to be social creatures, and by developing language they got the edge in the evolution/survival game. All the elements from the habitat of the ancient human have shaped the modern humans in some distinct ways. By joining in tribes humans were able to share resources and also specialize on certain tasks. Those more willing to take risks, explore and learn new things we're naturally rewarded with resources and success and also became leaders. Good Leaders are a powerful asset for a tribe/community and can mean the difference between starvation and excellent life conditions.
  
• Evolution just cares about the survival of the genes and will do anything for this. In some scenarios it is advantageous to collaborate in harmony, but in other scenarios, predatory behavior and exploitation tend to be just fine. This means there is no actual intrinsic need for a perfect utopia. Survival is enough, and this by itself can bring tons of misery in the world.
  
• Humans need to feel important, it's hardwired in the DNA. You need it, period. Ancient humans, got plenty of food and reproduction opportunities by becoming important in the community. The question is how? What are your expectations. What is enough for you? You want a decent life, or you want to be a exceptional person and go in history? Find what suits you and remember to cater to this need. Pro tip: You don't need to be a jerk while you are at it. Read Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't. This can also turn ugly, people become narcissistic, self-interested and toxic in society. Narcissism breads narcissism.
  
• Long Term Potentiation. In lay man terms: the more you excite a neuron the more it is prone to receive the signal and also it reacts with more powerful signals and more often. In practice this means, the more you think of yourself as being pathetic the more you believe and act like this. Also the reverse is true: the more you think you are powerful, the more you act like that and this in turn reinforces the belief itself.
  There are many more gems to learn but I will leave this to you! These are the tools that help you inspect and debug your behavior. Do this as often as possible.
  
  
  <!>PITFALS<!>
  
  
• Giving up to early. Diets take time, studying takes time, body building takes time... well you see where I'm going with this. Take your time and don't give up early!
  
• Caring too much of the way you are perceived. This blocks your ability to distinguish yourself and become interesting. You inhibit any action because you fear the critics, and you become boring and invisible. Remember: fear of rejection is hardwired in DNA. Ancient man who were cast out of tribes suffered a lot even facing certain death. Modern society has tons of safety nets. If you fail with some friends, you are able at anytime to find new and better friends. Be strong, and accept rejection, this will make you more happy on the long run. Don’t trade compromises that leave you frustrated for social confort.
  
• Chasing fame. Fame is toxic venom. Just don't let it alter your brain. Chase what makes you happy. Fame is a trap. Fame is a dead end. Good life experiences, wonderful friends, healthy diet and exercise, these are the things you need. Not fame.
  
• Vices of all sorts: TV, Gaming, Betting, Drugs, etc. Nothing good comes out of addiction. Here's a nice and short video about the mechanics of Addiction. Addiction is all about compensating for lack of good social life.
  
• Don’t confuse love with power Be strong, self sufficient and love somebody just because you love them, not because you feel weak and you need comfort. Don’t chase somebody just for the feeling of empowerment and social status.
  
  
  TIPS & TRICKS
  
  
• Meditate/Introspect weekly You know the benefits. Just don't get lazy! The more you accept yourself the faster you will progress.
  
• Become good at your hobbies Excellence in hobbies can boost your self esteem a lot. Why not have fun and also improve your mindset at the same time?
  
• Running, diet and good sleep I cannot overstate the benefits of running and dieting. I recently started a serious training plan, and the benefits manifested almost instantly. Good physical shape builds self-esteem. You get complimented. You train your motivation. You get healthy, fast!
  
• Find social groups that gather around a certain activity For me is running. I don't feel awkward being there. I can make lots of friends fast. I can feel good sharing stories of things I like and I can praise other for their achievements.
  
• Learn to understand people and support them Knowing how your mind works means knowing how anybody's mind works. This enables you to be a supportive and a patient friend for others. This will improve your social life a lot. Read How to Win Friends & Influence People, by Dale Carnagie
  
• Information gathering I find Reddit and outstanding source of information that allows me to stay up to date in the shortest time possible. No clickbait, no wasted time. Thank you Reddit! Also YouTube has some great channels. I recommend Stefan Molyneux as good source to get started on politics, geopolitics, social issues, philosophy, etc. Great commentary and explanations on his channel. Also other channels are available that cover topics from different angles.
  
  TLDR: Understand how your past experiences shaped your personality. Find what triggers your bad habits. Learn how the mind functions (the science behind biology, neurology, psychology, evolution) and use these as your tools to improve your mindset. Exercise daily your mindset and try to review your actions, find better ways to react and apply these findings in the present. Find wonderful people trough hobbies. Enjoy life!
  

Oh boy, this shall be fun, it's a little disappointing that people are downvoting this, as I think it's a fairly reasonable question given the idea's spat out about economics from politicians and journalists.

Edit (this paragraph is the edit, not the huge wall of text, that was always there): Also I think one of the other problems seen is often it's not actually the economists who even get to make the important decisions in the end, time after time I have seen politicians implement policies that economists will repeatedly facepalm over. My biggest issue with modern day politics is that it is a popularity contest, rather than vote between the most qualified people of who we think could do the right job, we vote mostly on unqualified people who we think would do the least bad job, or for most people, who they think appeals the best to their self interests. I don't have a perfect solution, but fuck, there must be a better way.

(also part of edit) I guess you also have the problem of the agenda of the economist, are they trying to optimise social welfare, their own interests, or the interests of someone providing for them by other means.

I myself am still only an undergraduate, I graduate at the end of this year with majors in analytical economics, computer science and pure mathematics. Next year I am doing an honours year in just mathematics, followed possibly by a 2 year masters in the same three area's my undergrad is in, then I'm not really sure what I will do my PhD in yet, other than the topic will most probably be on game theory. I also work as a research assistant for a somewhat well known macroeconomist at my uni who also has a research position at Cambridge (they're actually over there for a month at the moment).

What I will say I have come to find holds across all fields of science, only in the social sciences there seems to be a greater number of pseudoscientists (my personal branding of them). Basically, any of the topics termed a science, whether they be a natural or social science, are really complex. Most of the mathematics scientists find useful can be used across any of these fields, and one can't necessarily say that a physicist is smarter than say a political scientist, or that the work the physicist is doing is harder than that of the political scientist.

One can however, obviously, point out that the average (take any measure of that you want) person that studies physics is generally smarter, knows a lot more maths etc. than the average political science or economics student (hell, I even think the average economics student learns a lot more than the average political science student). I think this is sad, I don't necessarily expect quite the same level, but people are given economics degree's these days without even taking a multivariable calc course, that should be illegal! (only half /s).

Okay, now to kind of move onto what you were asking. If you want resources that debunk economic models, then you merely need to find an economic model you have a problem with and search for criticisms of that, I expect it works much the same for any other science.

If you as a mathematician were interested in actually learning a bit about how real economists model different aspects of the economy, here is a bit about some of the main subject areas (there are a lot of sub-areas to these and somewhat large area's that fit into multiple or none of the areas well), any of the texts linked you could acquire off rapidlibrary for a look if you want, or should be in the library of any uni you are at.

One must remember that economics deals with a subject that has a lot of randomness (much like biology, giving a natural science counterpart), so a lot of the models don't give an exact answer, or even model anything that you can assign good specific numbers to, a lot of the time you are just trying to model as many of the effects of different things as you can, then trying to see what happens when you control certain things like interest rates, or how consumers can optimally make decisions etc.

Microeconomics tends to deal with the economic decisions faced by individual entities, whether it be people/consumers or firms/producers etc. This is where game theory is probably used more than any other area of economics, but it certainly isn't the only area.

Consumer theory is basically built up on the idea of utility, which is basically defined as someone's "enjoyment" of consuming something (one can have negative utility for something, sometimes referred to as a bad rather than a good for obvious reasons). Utility is only defined to be ordinal, so one can say someone strictly prefers one good to another for example, but not that they like it twice as much or anything like that.

Utility also has to satisfy a few assumptions (which is where it is mostly criticized) for the theory that gets developed to mostly hold, but on the most part they aren't too bad if the person is actually trying to make an optimal decision, they are things like preferences should be complete, transitive, consistent etc.

One of the simple first models one would be taught in microeconomics is that of a simplified world where there is one consumer trying to pick a consumption bundle out of 2 existing goods that will maximise their level of utility (very straight forward constrained maximisation problem). If you ever hear someone say that microeconomics is just one simple constrained optimisation problem, it's because they are under the impression that "microeconomics == n-good utility maximisation problem", which it is not.

A lot of the main theory for micro now works with general equilibrium models, which has n-consumers and n-producers. The maths for this gets rather messy, and I wont try to explain it here, if you want to learn more about microeconomics with a background in mathematics I would suggest you pick up Microeconomic Theory. This is essentially the text used by most post grad micro courses at the better universities.

Macroeconomics tends to deal with the aggregate effects in economy. What's going on with the interest rate/price level, what is the aggregate level of income inside the economy, what is the average level of welfare for a person. For example a model I did in my third year macro unit was the central banks problem of setting the interest rate to help optimise an objective of the bank. Basically the bank has a target interest rate and target level of output, then it models the effects in the economy (which direction the forces are on inflation and output, given any output gaps and the interest rate) and sets the interest rate to minimise the weighted sum of difference from target inflation and target output. Looking back it was very much an optimal control problem in disguise.

From what I have been able to gather (I have managed a postgrad micro unit during undegrad but not macro) most of modern day macro models are built up using dynamic programming methods (I just took a course on calculus of variations with a large chunk on optimal control theory which was awesome, I love it). If you want to learn more about that go look at Recursive Macroeconomics.

Game Theory (which you might have actually learnt something about) is also vital for modern economic theories, as essentially it is the study of agents optimal decisions when interacting with other self thinking agents. This is where my main interest is along with micro, if you wanted to learn about this I would suggest Myerson's Analysis of Conflict book, or possibly Fudenberg or Tiroles, as it covers more, but I don't think it's as good for an introduction, and trust me, game theory takes a bit of work to learn properly.

There are many different kinds of games, strategic deals with situations where all players make their move (surprise) simultaneously, extensive form will allow turn based games. Then you have a whole array of others, Bayesian games deals with players having multiple possible types, differential games is basically multiplayer optimal control theory (set of state variables and control varaibles, each player tries to find optimal control function given others will be doing the same to maximise their utility of the terminal state), stochastic games is similarly pretty much multiplayer dynamic programming I think.

Like I previously mentioned, game theory is my main love, I am currently working on a fairly large game theory library in c++ which I'm hoping may end up being the standard tool for research in game theory, and economics certainly isn't the only area currently interested in game theory, there are biologists, computer scientists, mathematicians, political scientists etc. that are doing research with it as well. (<3 Von-Neumann!).

It's tough to offer any kind of advice for your situation because you talk in a lot of generalities.

However, my wife and I have struggled quite a bit over the last few years and it sucks. I feel like things are getting better, but there are always mis-steps even on the up-swing.

If your wive really has checked out, there's not much you can do. It takes two to make a couple.

However. You can work on yourself. In so doing, you might find that it helps your relationship. Or it might not. But even if your relationship falls apart, you will be in a much better space to cope with that and move on -- as difficult as it seems right now.

So, here's my suggestions ... things that I have been doing and reading over the last couple of years that have really helped me.

1. Stop looking at all the things she is doing wrong. Focus on what she is doing right. This is tough and requires a huge shift in thinking and an even bigger thinking around letting go of your ego.
   
   
2. Every day do something to show some appreciation for someone in your life. One person every day. Say thank you and tell them what they mean to you. This will help you focus on more positive things overall. Include your wife in this, though she doesn't need to be the focus of this every day.
   
   
3. Be honest with yourself and her. Can you give her what she wants. There are some things that I just can't give my wife. And some things she can't give me. How important are these things? And are there other ways to get them?
   
   
4. Adopt a meditation practice. Download the Headspace app. It has a nice introduction to meditation. It has helped me immensely.
   https://www.headspace.com/
   
   
5. If you don't exercise, start. Personally, I enjoy weight lifting. Try Strong Lifts if you can. It's a simple program that will show fast results.
   http://stronglifts.com/
   
   
6. If you don't eat healthy, start. There are so many diets out there. Even if you just start eating smaller portions and cut out snacking, you'll see some positive results. That's where I started. I eventually started doing the Alt Shift Diet. Yeah, you can call it a fad diet or whatever. I don't care. It works for me and that's the key -- find a diet that works for you.
   http://altshiftdiet.com/
   
   
7. Read How to talk so your kids will listen and listen so your kids will talk. Great advice that applies even when you are talking to adults.
   https://www.amazon.com/How-Talk-Kids-Will-Listen/dp/1451663889/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1474568476&sr=1-1&keywords=how+to+talk+so+kids+will+listen+%26+listen+so+kids+will+talk
   
   
8. Read People Skills. This is a great book on active listening and conflict resolution. Helpful in so many situations.
   https://www.amazon.com/People-Skills-Yourself-Resolve-Conflicts/dp/067162248X
   
   
9. Read this post and some of the posts that follow it. Incredibly insightful
   https://np.reddit.com/r/sexover30/comments/538uat/mismatched_couples/d7r5hys
   
   
10. Read Never Split the Difference. Another great book that is geared more toward business negotiation, but has been a great help in my personal life. I can take the time to understand someone else's perspective without letting go of mine. Also great to help assert myself better in my relationship. His description of active listening was also helpful.
    https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-Depended/dp/0062407805/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1474568493&sr=1-1&keywords=chris+voss
    
    
11. Read Come as You Are. A great book on women's sexuality specifically, but it's really about sexuality in general. It's backed by a lot of research. Has a lot of insight into human sexuality. Great reading. Helped me understand myself and my wife better. (Goes beyond the typical High Libido and Low Libido stuff that I always found less than helpful.)
    http://www.amazon.com/Come-You-Are-Surprising-Transform/dp/1476762090/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1436544375&sr=8-1&keywords=come+as+you+are
    
    
12. Do stuff on your own. Go out with friends. Go to the movies by yourself. Make sure both of you get breathing room away from each other.
    
    
13. Be honest. If you feel something tell her. You don't have to be mean. But do be honest. "You are making me angry right now, can we talk about it later when I have calmed down." "Your tone sounds rude and condescending. Please talk to me like I am an adult or we can wait and talk later." This one is tough and statements should be made from your perspective rather than made as statements of fact.
    
    Anyway, those are my suggestions and have helped me immensely. Take what you think will work for you. Ignore the rest.
    
    Best of luck!
    

I'm trying to be more on the SEO/IM side of things for my own personal affiliate sites so in my opinion, the best way to learn is trial and error. I put a bunch of things online and see how they do and then test and adjust. That being said, I do use a fair few other things to try and boost my knowledge.

YouTube

Steven Bartlett
24 year old owner of a successful social media marketing company in the UK, vlogs his daily life and shares a few nuggets now and then.

Valuetainment
Based on an Iranian immigrant to the USA, not 100% on his back history but the way he talks about the immigrant fire to earn money I am pretty sure he went there with little to nothing in his pocket. Judging by his house, cars and life style he has did very well. He has kind of diluted the channel recently in my opinion though by letting other people make videos for him.

Gary Vaynerchuk
Pretty much owns the entrepreneur vlogging space right now. He seems the type of guy where you either love him or hate him. Personally, I like his no BS approach of giving people reality checks on what it really takes to be an entrepreneur rather than posting photos on Instagram of a nice life.

Podcasts

How I Built This
He basically interviews a bunch of CEO/MD types of massive successful businesses. It's not really a how to type of thing but I enjoy listening to how people got their projects off the ground and I have picked up a fair few things from it.

Indie Hackers
Only recently found thing one but so far so good.

Black Hearted
I'm a bit of a fan boy when it comes to these guys to be honest, they are US military vets who now own a number of successful businesses and they get other vets on the podcast who also own their own businesses and talk about them. Its not just focused on business though but I love the military humor and get it done attitude of them.

Reading

I update this post with all of the books I have read but here are my top picks.

Zero To One
The first book that I couldn't put down until I completed it. Picked a fair few things up from it as well as a bunch of things I hope to move forward with in the future with startups.

The 33 Strategies of War
Not a business book but definitely my style if you take the examples and strategies and turn them into business. This is the second book I have not been able to put down once picking it up.

The E-Myth Revisited
Although I had a decent understanding of how to allocate duties to people depending on their job role this helped me better understand it as well as the importance of doing it.

ReWork
Another book I loved, just introduced me to a bunch of new concepts with a fair few I hope to use in the future.

Black Box Thinking
Coming from and engineering background I was already used to being ok with my failures provided I was learning from them but this book is based around how different industries treat failure and how it is important to accept it and grow from it.

The 50th Law
Currently reading it but so far i'm loving it. Never realized how much crap 50 cent had to go through and I love Robert Greene's work so I can see my classing this as a tier one book.

>After a few dates we realised that we still love eachother and that not maintaining our relationship was the biggest mistake we made.

On this point specifically - I ran into a similar problem many years ago. Like 6 months into my marriage, the honeymoon period was over, as they say. All relationships have their ups & downs & it's super easy to feel like quitting when you feel like there's nothing left. We talked it over & looked at the situation & realized that we weren't dating each other anymore. When you're married, you're just kind of there at home all the time, so why go out & why put any effort into anything? The chase was over, you got what you wanted, end of story, right?

As it turns out, actively doing things together is what helps you bond & grow (this is only obvious once the lightbulb goes off in your brain, haha!), whether it's dating or moving in or fixing up an old house or having kids or whatever. The core thing that we realized was that we weren't actively planning out any kind of one-on-one time, so - as dumb as this sounds - we setup a weekly appointment for a date. We were both very busy at the time with our respective jobs, but we made it a point to carve out a date night every week. We alternated who planned it, so it was my job to figure out dinner & an activity every other week. That way, the job load was split, we both had to put some effort into doing something fun together, and it was a surprise what we'd be doing together on the weeks when I didn't have to plan.

Sounds pretty lame, but it worked AWESOME! It also opened my eyes to the concept of "plot vs. story", especially regarding checklists - checklists were the plot, the required parts, the engine - to keep the story moving; checklists were NOT the purpose or meaning of the story! It's super easy to get those confused, because using things like a personal productivity system requires interaction with the system's controls on our part, and we get duped into feeling like the system is the point, not the output of the system, which is getting stuff done & enjoying stuff!

Being kind of a free-range artist growing up, things like checklists & schedules were mentally & emotionally extremely demotivating for me. Mainly, they felt super restrictive. I didn't like feeling tied down to a schedule or locking out my options. As it turns out, in practice, that is not the case at ALL! As it turns out, living by checklists & alarm reminders is like having a secret superpower! One of the books that really cemented this concept into my brain was The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gaw:

• https://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0312430000
  
  Adopting checklists with triggers across the spectrum of my life & my responsibilities proved to be a real gamechanger in several ways:
  
  

1. In how I experienced doing things
   
2. In what stuff I actually ended up doing
   
3. In my results
   
   I lived an incredibly reactive life before adopting a checklist-based personal productivity system; using checklists allowed me to be proactive & actively decide not only what I wanted to invite into my life, but how I wanted to experience things & what kind of results I got. The system we implemented in our marriage was pretty simple & outwardly boring, but had profound impacts on our relationship, because we weren't just on reactive cruise-control anymore, we were proactive about taking adult control over our lives. I've since applied these basic concepts to pretty much every aspect of my life:
   
   

• Why am I so tired & low-energy all the time? How can I feel better?
  
• How do you eat for energy & good health, while still eating for happiness & enjoyment? (macros & meal-prep!)
  
• How can you do a daily workout at home & get shredded, without having to go to the gym? (calisthenics!)
  
• How can I improve my relationship with my wife? (alternating scheduled date nights every week!)
  
• How can I manage my finances in a low-hassle way & get ahead of the curve? (personal financial system!)
  
• How can I easily keep a clean & tidy house all the time & integrate deep cleaning into that system so that I could spread the work out over time?
  
• How could I remember to maintain my car through its regular maintenance schedule for oil changes, tire rotations, fluids replacements, etc.?
  
  The list goes on & on & on. We have to be aware of what all of our personal situations are, and then we have to decide how we want to tackle each situation, and the way we implement that, after the decision-making is done, is via trigger-driven checklists (in my case, mostly via smartphone alarms). This creates a shift from "bah, I have to do this" to "what do I have the opportunity to do right now?". For example, when I was in school, having things broken down like that into step-by-step lists of next-action items mean that I suddenly had the opportunity to knock out my homework right away & get it done early, rather than procrastinating & putting it off day after day & letting it build up to horrific levels of work, lol.
  
  So I had a very distorted view of what checklists really were & what they really meant in my life. I thought they were restrictive, when in reality, it was my own poor, non-productive behavior that was trapping me in crappy situations, like having to stay up late to do homework because I goofed off first & being tired the next day, or having my relationship drift apart because I wasn't treating it like a living thing & feeding & caring for it on a regular basis. All of which simply boil down to checklists with alarms, haha!

Apologies for being THAT Psych PhD student here, but there is this awesome pop-psychology book called The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell that basically describes in depth how trends happen (fashion trends, lifestyle trends, all of the trends). Its honestly a great read if you're into this kind of stuff! I'll summarize some of my fav points:

Gladwell describes three types of people that are essential for any trend:

• Connectors - these people are just insanely good at knowing and maintaining good relationships with a LOT of people. As a fun exercise, try to make a list of as many friends/acquaintances etc as you can, and trace them back to how you met them. Most people will find the same few individuals in their life who are responsible for a lot of the people they know. Basically 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon :)
  
  
• Mavens - these people are information and market EXPERTS. You know that friend who always seems to know exactly where you can get a better deal on literally anything? Who knows the best apps before others do? Who has knowledge to share on anything you could bring up? That's a market maven!
  
  
• Salesmen - these individuals have charisma up the wazoo. They are just that type who make you want to buy into whatever they're telling you about. Its impossible to not want to be like them. Ever seen that movie The Joneses? If you haven't you should. That is who they mean.
  
  Beyond these, he has great points about things such as the stickiness factor which describes something inherent about trends that is memorable and makes you continue thinking about the item/idea/etc. He talks about the context that allows a trend to flourish. There is a bonus awesome story about Paul Revere and how he was in a unique position to spread the word about the British coming. Awesome, right?

There are handful standard theories of labor market value that are relevant to this conversation

1. Negotiating power, outside options, and surplus. The classic example is 100 farms that each need only one worker. If there are 99 workers, the workers have all the power, and can negotiate all the surplus value from the farm so they will be well paid because they can hold the farmers 'hostage' in the negotiations. This is the debate between wage takers vs wage setters.
   
   
2. Marginal revenue product of labor - workers earn in real terms the marginal value of their production. Effectively, the amount of revenue earned from the marginal worker.
   
   
3. Contract theory and incentives - Management is paid to optimize effort and appropriate risk taking. Because of the unique way managers operate, incentives are developed to encourage desired behavior. They still are assumed to not be worth more than the marginal revenue product of their labor, but as that is less clear than for other workers, there are incentive structures to align their pay along with profits, finding generally show management should and is paid in accordance with what is believed to be their marginal contribution to profits.
   
   We add on top of these theories of search, learning, risk and expectations, stickiness, and such but the two above are the key drivers of wage. CEO pay is more complicated because they're generally not seen as interchangeable marginal producers of value like most labor - they are different
   
   As the fortune 500's profits are on average only 7% of sales, I thought I was playing the part safe just keeping the discussion to profits but for what it's worth, CEO salaries are 0.04% of revenue on average in the fortune 500. Surely it's reasonable that CEOs marginal product of labor is at least .04% of total revenue and incentive alignment can expect them to be compensated up to 1% of profits? Do you really disagree with that?
   
   As for other labor, that becomes harder. There really isn't much theory tying their pay in to profit. Is the first, negotiating wage market a reasonable way to look at it? I don't really think so, especially in dynamic economies firms and labor is so constantly adjusting that bargaining power has to be at best temporary. If that was the case, immigration and other increases in the labor supply would probably be met with greater evidence of bringing down wages. We'd also not see as much movement between jobs as we do as it depends on a much more static wage formulation. I think firms learn over time what marginal value workers bring, there is probably bargaining power problems in the lowest wage occupations, but the average worker spends time searching for a good fit - somewhere where their marginal value is best.
   
   ----
   I got most of the numbers from this article and quick googling skills. The economic concepts come from grad school but can be found in detail in this grad school bibl and in this undegrad text.

I'll bite.

First and foremost, there are many different breeds of libertarians (or people that call themselves libertarians). For instance, Glenn Beck has even used the word to describe himself as such--however, I don't think many libertarians really take him seriously on that claim.

More seriously, libertarians tend to be divided into two camps: those that want small government providing basic protection of individual rights (called minarchy) and those that want no government at all (usually labeled as anarcho-capitalists, voluntaryists, agorists, etc.). I consider myself a voluntaryist, which in addition to being an anarcho-capitalist, also qualifies me as someone who does not wish to participate in electoral politics and views it as an approach that really cannot help--and also means that I only prefer voluntary means through which to achieve a voluntary society.

To make matters more complicated, the anarchists of us have two different ways to speak of a free market: a David Friedman approach which concentrates on how free markets solve problems more efficiently than States, and a more deontological approach made famous by Murray Rothbard. Usually, you'll see us taking both angles--sometimes it helps to show how a free market is ipso facto better than a State, and sometimes it's better to show that we have the ethical high ground. (And some of us can be absolute in this sense--some might even recognize a failing of a free market but say that it still doesn't justify violating the ethics of libertarianism.)

There is, however a hurdle that needs to be jumped, I think, to truly grasp the libertarian position: familiarization with Austrian Economics. Austrian Economics is usually regarded as a fringe school of economics, and not taken seriously--it is taught in only a few of the colleges around the United States. In spite of that, Austrian business cycle theory, which puts the blame on fractional reserve banking, and specifically, the Federal Reserve, for the ebb and flow of today's marketplace, has proven itself time and time again. Frederick Hayek, the pioneer of this theory (and a winner of a Nobel Prize because of it), predicted the 1929 stock market crash, and more recently, Peter Schiff used it to predict the current recession. (It also explains bubbles that have inflated and popped in the past, when applied.) The best layman's explanation and the theory's real world applications that I can give you is the recent book Meltdown by Thomas Woods. It's not too long and does a great job at explaining Austrian business cycle theory.

There are many differences between Austrian Economics and the more mainstream schools, but I highlighted Austrian business cycle theory because that is the really important one. To emphasize this even more, I can say that if I could change one thing about the current State (sans abolishing it), it would be to abolish the Federal Reserve by establishing a free market currency. Unhesitatingly.

I personally arrived to my conclusion through a deontological perspective, and later familiarized myself with how free markets can provide services that most people widely regard as services that only States can provide. The deontological perspective essentially leads up to the non-aggression principle (NAP): aggression, which is defined as the initiation of physical force, the threat of such, or fraud upon persons or their property, is inherently illegitimate. (I can hammer out the details of the NAP's justification if you like, but I've chosen to omit it here in the interest of brevity.) The most important thing to realize about the NAP is that it is proportional: if you violate my property, I don't have the right to kill you (i.e., the idea that I can shoot a little boy that trespasses onto my yard to collect his baseball). As once I have quelled your aggression, any further aggression on my part is an over-abundance, and therefore an initiation of aggression--and that is illegitimate.

So with this in light, you can see that libertarians (at least, my style, anyway) are a bit of a mix: we simultaneously believe that libertarianism is the only ethical stance consistent with the idea of liberty, and its natural conclusion, a free market, is an inherently better solution to the problem of "infinite wants" and "scare resources" then centralized control through a State. That is, the State is both illegitimate and inefficient.

So the key to the free market, or capitalism, is to understand its most fundamental truth: two individuals voluntarily committing a transaction. What does it mean to commit a transaction? It means that I am giving you X in return for Y because I value Y more than X, AND because you value X more than Y. It's a win-win scenario, and not zero-sum: we both get something we desire.

For example, if my toilet is clogged, and despite my best attempts, I cannot unclog it, I probably need to call a professional. When the plummer comes over, he tells me that it will be $100 to fix my toilet. Immediately, his actions indicate, "I value $100 more than the value of my services as a plummer." When I agree to his proposal, my action indicates, "I value your services as a plummer more than I value $100." At this most basic level, we can see the Subjective Theory of Value in action brilliantly. That is, things don't have intrinsic value, only the value that each individual assigns.

Now, with that background, I think I can answer your questions:

(Wow, I went over the character limit for comments... yikes...)

> Yet the bankers just keep doing it again and again. They do it with and without central banks.

Fractional reserve should be prosecutable as fraud. Having said that, banks would be much more responsible if they faced a risk of going out of business. The occasional bankruns of the late 19th century, did not significantly impede the surging prosperity of the gilded age. They were a good thing -- just like when a crappy restaurant goes out of business.

> > but your own devotion to Keynesianism fails to live up to the standards by which you judge the Austrian School.

> I fail to see how. Keynesianism doesn't pretend to be deductive logic.

It seems to me that Keynesians are able to put numbers around little things. Unemployment, inflations (both of which are heavily manipulated). They have graphs and charts and look very much like their distant colleagues in the hard sciences. The play empiricism, but all the big things and important decisions are made by pure deduction, just like the Austrians. For example:

We need a central bank.
We need to bailout company/industry X
The economy can be centrally steared by manipulating the reserve rate in a positive way.
We need to force people to use their state's currency.
The liquidity trap occurs when there's a shortage of money circulating.
The free market is inherently unstable.
Crashes are caused by animal spirits / the bursting of asset bubbles.

> > it just restructures production for long-term projects.

> That directly contradicts the concept of "flight to liquidity".

Not a contradiction. A flight to liquidity can mean a flight to savings and checking accounts. That's money ready for lending.

> If savers were making long term investments, we wouldn't have a problem.

Ugh. Right now, you Keynesians think we need long-term investment, and your policies are creating an illusion of savings by lowering the interest rate to zero. In actuality, there are almost no savings. People need to work, busy consumer goods, and save (or not -- it's up to them). Keynesian policies have pushed a lot of land labor and capital into long-term projects at a time when people are thinking about the short term.

Your statement presumes a "correct" way for savers to be investing. The only correct way is one which is in harmony with the level of savings, and the market signal which creates that harmony -- the interest rate -- is centrally controlled and, for the moment, pushed to near-zero, creating an illusion of savings which don't really exist.

> How do you know? [regarding consciousness] . . . There is no evidence that the human brain consists of anything but physical processes

Because physics cannot even entertain (much less provide answers for) simple questions like what do you want to do? When there's meaningful progress on the Turing test, I'll reconsider.

> if you really believe it is such a great thing and will work well in the real world, go find a small country and convince them to adopt pure Austrianism. . . . Honestly, I'd write a letter … to advocate giving you guys an island in the Pacific ocean to test your system.

Liberty is a threat to the gov't. Allowing it would mean exposure of their fraud.

I'd love to, and I think about it often. Small states have many advantages over large ones. There's a theoretical project by Friedman's grandson which involves a nation consisting of floating barges.

> Even the anarcho-capitalist advocates say that there must be private militaries that are hired by insurance companies (which is really all a state is) to protect their customers. Overall, the idea that violence is magically going to disappear is very naive.

No one says violence is going to go away. A state is not a hired insurance company, because the client does not the right to walk away. The service of security is not subject to market pressure. The state unilaterally decides both the nature of security (invading Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, bombing Somalia and Yemen, TSA, full body scanners), and the cost of security. This is the difference.

> for placing the extreme long term conservation of value for mattress stuffers

It is not just mattress stuffers. Huge quantities of wealth are transferred from people in general to whomever is closest to the place where new money enters the economy. Even Keynes admits this:

"By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens."

And I think you're full of shit for trying to muddy the waters on the ethic argument I raised. The dollar is backed by force. Voilence will be used against Americans who attempt to work around the dollar system. Yes, violence has been used before in history. No, this doesn't justify today's.

> gold

You were comparing the dollar's 97% loss in value to the instability of gold. That dog don't hunt.

> As I said, the 1921 recession ended when the fed cut rates.

I'm going to look more deeply into this. It seemed that the 29 crash happened when they stopped their easy money policies. Do you think we can get out of today's easy money without a catastrophe?

>

> Please stop calling an increase in the money supply inflation... just say "an increase in the money supply".

No.

> voluntarily decided it likes fractional reserve banking. In 400 years or so of modern banking, full reserve banking simply hasn't emerged.

Not true. It's contradicted by the video you posted. Government enshrined and protected the fractional reserve system.

> That era was a miserable failure.

Not true at all. Yes, lots of banks went out of business. (It is good when bad companies go out of business). But it was a time of sky-rocketting prosperity.

Your baromoter is laughable. When banks go out of business this is bad. When today's commercial banks survive for a long time, this is good. Dark world. How much wealth has to be taken to give irresponsible banks a long life?

> So which is it? Do you support free banking or gold? A gold standard (at least in the form that the US and most other countries had in its past) is mandated from a central government, by the way.

Free banking gets my vote, though either one would be huge, mind-blowing progress. I'll mention again that fractional reserve banking should be prosecutable as fraud instead of enshrined by law.

> Except it has been done successfully that way for long periods of time. You shouldn't get your ethics confused with your evidence. You might not like central banking, but to say that it can't work is absurd given how successful the US economy was under the periods with central banks.

Typical of your positivist and keynesian approach, whenever you connect two data points you jump for joy. Can we likewise conclude that the Soviet system worked because it brought electrification, had zero unemployment and a growing GDP?

You know, Keynesian economist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Samuelson predicted into the late 1980's that the soviet union, the fucking soviet union!!!!! would outpace the US economically. He asked whether their surging economy didn't make the political oppression (43-62 million killed) worth while. But it's the Austrians who are cruel. Right?

Also, not all the evidence supports you. The biggest depression in American history. The only time there has been wide-spread malnutrition in the US. A 97% drop in purchasing power.

> I believe the burden of proof is on you if you want to make claims about government failure. You haven't done that with the CRA or with any other program.

The long history of bailouts are facts. What proving do they need?

Also:

FACT: In 2008, CRA loans accounted for just 7% of Bank of America's total mortgage lending, but 29% of its losses on home loans. Also, banks with the highest CRA ratings tend to have the lowest safety and soundness ratings.

FICTION: Only 6% of subprime loans were originated by banks subject to the CRA, so the vast majority of risky lending was not tied to the law.

FACT: Among other things, the figure does not count the trillions of dollars in CRA "commitments" that WaMu, BofA, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo and other large banks pledged to radical inner-city groups like Acorn, Greenlining and Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America (NACA) after they used the public comment process to protest bank merger applications on CRA grounds.

[Earlier this week I noted that I had changed my mind on the Community Reinvestment Act. Contrary to my initial conclusion, the evidence is overwhelming that the CRA played a significant role in creating lax lending standards that fueled the housing bubble. Once I realized this, I had to abandon my suspicion that the anti-CRA case was a figment of the rhetoric of Republicans attempting to distract attention from their own role in the mortgage mess.]http://www.businessinsider.com/the-cra-debate-a-users-guide-2009-6#ixzz1RTwfW5or)

Prior to 1995, such subprime home loans constituted less than 2% of new home loans, but by 2000 they were over 9% of new home loans, and by 2008 they were 20% of new home loans. To make matters worse, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae began to buy and/or guarantee more and more of these risky subprime loans.

If you want more opinions supporting my view, look here,
here, here.

When i first read your rant, I was a bit annoyed, but working through it, it became clear that you are pointing to some of the weak spots that a lot of other practitioners have also noticed. fx a lack of coherent definitions, people practising "nudging" without any idea of what it is, a systematic lack of knowledge of the psychology behind the interventions.

So please read everything below here with the kindest voice you can make in you mind. :) Text is a horrible medium for some things.

Realization #1
>He did a great job explaining that "Nudges" are subtle changes to the environment that do not require effort from the Nudger or the Nudgee. Indeed, they work implicitly by acknowledging underlying (system 1) psychological processes. Examples he gave were classics: painting a fly on a urinal, traffic stripes to slow drivers, defaults in organ donation.

I thoroughly agree that many people don't understand what nudges are. It's understandable that lay people don't know, as they have very little reason to care at all about it. However, I also see many practitioners and even academics that somehow comes to very different ideas about what nudging is, but seems to have no interest in forming or accepting a proper definition.

To this point I have to add that I have never seen anywhere, that a critical part of a nudge is that it is (1) subtle, (2) confined to being changes in the environment or (3) effortless for everyone involved.

At (1); there is several examples of nudges that work particularly because they are not subtle. Think of trucks backing up making beeps. A clear attention-grabbing nudge, using an audio version of the fly in the urinal. Not at all subtle though.

At (2); Changes in psychology, that does not stem from direct environmental change can also be regarded as nudges. People get a lot less critical of different ideas when they are horny. :)

At (3); There is a classic prompt for increased sales, where you are offered a complimentary good at checkout. "Do you want a lighter with those cigarettes?". everyone involved knows that lighters available, but still the sales increase when the prompt is in place. It does require continual effort from the sales person however. Better examples might come to mind later.


> Folks who worked in the NHS wanted to come up with structural challenges like figuring out ways to rearrange doctor's (GP's) check-up routine

This is a dream scenario for any choice architect to work with. If you ever read The Checklist Manifesto you will see that there is tremendous opportunity in structuring rutine tasks more.


Realization #2

To repackage and replicate preexisting nudges, is one of the most promising ways of figuring our what parts of the nudges actually works and in what way. As artifacts of the ways people process information and not the information itself, nudges are usually not sector specific, meaning, that the same ideas that works really well in tax collecting, might be worth a shot in healthcare as well.

Most people will learn some very valuable lessons about what kind of nudges that makes the most sense, when they have to test them. Having the experiment as an integral part of implementation of any behavioural intervention is whats going to change the world, by showing that you can do more than raise awareness or make laws, and that it will actually have an effect. The bad ideas will fade, and the good ideas will stand strong. :) (Hopefully)

Don't worry As a lot of people might be considering nudging a fad, it has been gaining considerable ground in the last 10 years, and behaviourally informed interventions is now fast becoming a part of the "standard" public policy toolkit. Because it has proven merits, it will remain in one way or another. However the name might change. :)

> A useful asset would seem to be someone the company couldn't afford to turn away. An unpaid intern is use a valuable resource to exploit. How do you reconcile these ideas?

Both the company and the employee should be useful assets to each other. (Or, if you're more cynical about it, both the company and employee will be mutually exploiting each other.)

One of the top-selling business books - Good to Great says that the best leaders "Confront the brutal facts, but never give up hope." It's talking about CEOs, but you can apply it to new grads just entering the job market. Brutal facts for a new grad:

• You have less experience and fewer tangible skills than anybody else on the job market.
  
• You lack a track record or any public information about your past accomplishments. It's hard to convince a hiring manager to trust you when you have no data.
  
• You lack connections and a network of people that have worked with you before.
  
• You often lack a conceptual framework for what professional success in the working world looks like or what employers are looking for.
  
  Balancing that, you do have some assets:
  
  
• First and foremost, you have time. When you're a new grad, your whole working life is ahead of you. Many companies hire new grads specifically because they hope that they will get a long, fruitful career out of them.
  
• You're often willing to work very hard and try new things.
  
• You have few commitments as a young 20-something, meaning that you have freedom to take bold career moves like relocating, or the ability to work extra hours to complete a project.
  
• If you completed a 4-year degree, you have demonstrated the ability to show persistence and follow through on something challenge.
  
• You hopefully have decent social skills and experience hanging out with other people.
  
• You often have better technology skills than older people, and are more in touch with recent cultural developments than them.
  
  If you want to approach your career strategically, you should leverage the assets you have to convince other people to give you the assets you need. You do this by giving them what they want and asking for things in return. So pretty much all of the advice that the OP gave is about highlighting the assets you have:
  
  
• When you request a face-to-face meeting with a hiring manager, you have a chance to demonstrate social skills and ability to work with people.
  
• When you do this politely but repeatedly, you show persistence.
  
• When you go for the hiring manager instead of HR, you show that you are thinking of what others need and not what you need.
  
• When you talk face-to-face and offer to shadow the team, you demonstrate time and flexibility.
  
  In return, you should be looking to acquire the assets that you don't have, so that you are not so disadvantaged in your next job hunt. For example:
  
  
• By entering the workforce, you learn tangible skills that you can apply to a future employer.
  
• You get the brand name of your previous employer, which makes future ones more inclined to trust you.
  
• You can build a network of people that are personally acquainted with your skills, all of whom have their own networks of personal contacts.
  
  The OP suggested going blue-chip, which is the traditional advice. I personally didn't - I worked for a couple startups, founded my own, and then ended up at Google, relying much more heavily on skill development than the brand name. It doesn't actually matter - your actual career path will depend heavily on the opportunities that are available to you. (I wasn't looking to end up at Google, for example, but they said "yes" and I figured it was an opportunity worth taking.) The important thing is that you very honestly take stock of what you lack as an employee and then take the steps to acquire that, using all the resources you have available to you.

In case you haven't read it yet, Scorecasting speaks to this problem, as well as a number of others. I.e. applying economic theory and statistical analysis to a lot of common-sense notions in sports.

MLS is in a bit of an odd position -- partly because of its rigid economics, partly because of its age, and partly because of its still small footprint in the US sports landscape.

In particular, there is little correlation between salary and on-field success, although this is a lot harder to quantify than the linked analysis implies.

One question Scorecasting tries to address is the importance of the 'star' player -- think of it as a proxy for a DP. The conclusion is that in a game with a lot of players (e.g. NFL), a single star is rarely enough to make a team.

Obviously there are exceptions -- the Colts without Peyton Manning are terrible, for example. On the other hand, Joe Gibbs' Redskins won three Super Bowls with three different QBs, none of whom are hall-of-famers.

In contrast, an NBA team more or less needs a star player to even attempt to be competitive. One player has a much bigger impact among five starters than among 22 (plus special teams).

I think one can quantify what a DP means to a team, but one has to do it in a different way. For example: what's the difference in goal differential one can expect per game from a top-flight DP?

Or to put it another way, what is the plot of expected goal differential per game vs salary for a DP?

I don't know how realistic a calculation this would be, but I bet you could arrive at some numbers -- e.g. Beckham is worth +0.5, Henry is worth +0.3, Marquez is worth -0.2 (a DP with a minus rating is terrible).

All the same, there's this fact: a correlation between salary spending and consistent on-field results is only strong in unconstrained leagues. And always with caveats, exceptions, and outliers.

The Yankees are a consistently competitive team, and are consistently the highest spenders. On the other hand, the Orioles are consistently among the highest spenders and have been a terrible team for over a decade.

Man U are consistently among the highest spenders in the EPL, and are the most consistently successful team; Liverpool are also regularly near the top of the spend table and, let's face it, have seen a lot better days.

All the same, these are unconstrained leagues. If you look at the NFL (in a CBA year), there is not much of a relationship between spending and success. The Cowboys are consistently at the top of the spend scale, but when have they last won a Super Bowl? When have they last been in one?

The salary cap in MLS is even more extreme. And one could argue that weakness at one position is not balanced out by strength at another -- e.g. if your right center back is terrible, you'll give up more goals than your DP attacking mid will create for you.

Or in other words: Do DPs matter? Yes. Are they important? Yes. How important are they? I don't know.

But I do think it's possible to quantify what a DP should be worth at a given salary in terms of extra goals per game, and therefore possible to quantify whether that DP is living up to expectations.

But as for drawing up the specific equations, I'll leave that to someone else.

tl;dr: If you like thinking about this kind of questions, read Scorecasting. And throw Soccernomics on your list as well. And as a side-note: I love this forum for having discussions like this one. Keep it up.

Yes but the question is why investor 1's should be significantly different than investor 2's in regards to their covariates. If you have issues with the methodology of the paper, you have an issue with every single pharmaceutical study ever run.

In addition, the issue isn't really whether investor 1's and investor 2's balance (though they should and do), it is whether there is a significant difference within investor 2's. Category B and C are being compared to the category A baseline, which captures the possible prior-networking effects you mention.

>The follow up survey relies on honesty

To a degree yes. When the vast majority of your responses are weighted 90%+ in one direction or the other? Probably no issues there.

>something that people with some experinece and some sense already know

Yes, but there's the question of quantifying it. It doesn't strike you as interesting that knowing a friend owns an asset vs. knowing they want to buy it vs. knowing they bought it and currently own it have 3 very different levels of influence on your purchase decision?

EDIT: Since I think we're rapidly approaching the point of intransigence, I will just say this: I think you need to give the field as a whole a bit more credit. I know that's a tough ask considering your opinion that the field as a whole is bunk. I'd ask you to consider that most of the economists that I've met are seriously intelligent, with a great grasp of graduate level mathematics, statistics and of course, economics. Many share your views about basic fallacies in the field, others don't. The long and short of it is: they spend months of their lives thinking about these topics. Don't get me wrong, there are bad papers and there are bad economists. That said, most papers published in top journals are actually pretty good, and are actually pretty interesting. They're not out to get you, they're not out to get anyone. They're just searching for causal relationships in an environment which makes causal relationships very difficult to find.

If you're interested in reading more about how economics works, I'd suggest reading Mostly Harmless Econometrics. I find it a lot better than the more popular Freakonomics in explaining the basic (modern) tenents of applied economic research. Anyway, have a good day, I hope this discussion wasn't a complete waste of your time!

Here are all the books with amazon links, Alphabetical order :)

---

• Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim et al. Link: http://amzn.com/1591396190
  
• Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh et al. Link: http://amzn.com/160941280X
  
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown Link: http://amzn.com/0804137382
  
• Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston Link: http://amzn.com/1590597141
  
• How Google Works by Eric Schmidt et al. Link: http://amzn.com/1455582344
  
• Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World by Gary Vaynerchuk Link: http://amzn.com/006227306X
  
• Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way by Richard Branson Link: http://amzn.com/0307720748
  
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath et al. Link: http://amzn.com/1400064287
  
• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck Link: http://amzn.com/0345472322
  
• Never Eat Alone, Expanded and Updated: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazzi et al. Link: http://amzn.com/0385346654
  
• Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable by Tim S. Grover et al. Link: http://amzn.com/1476714207
  
• Rework by Jason Fried et al. Link: http://amzn.com/0307463745
  
• Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin Link: http://amzn.com/1591842948
  
• The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss Link: http://amzn.com/0307465357
  
• The Choose Yourself Guide To Wealth by James Altucher Link: http://amzn.com/150100994X
  
• The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: *God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison by Mike Wilson Link: http://amzn.com/0060008768
  
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz Link: http://amzn.com/0062273205
  
• The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business by Clayton M. Christensen Link: http://amzn.com/0062060244
  
• The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries Link: http://amzn.com/0307887898
  
• The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime by MJ DeMarco Link: http://amzn.com/B004BDOUAI
  
• The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by Ryan Holiday Link: http://amzn.com/1591846358
  
• The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller et al. Link: http://amzn.com/1885167776
  
• The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company by Steve Blank et al. Link: http://amzn.com/0984999302
  
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell Link: http://amzn.com/0316346624
  
• Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg et al. Link: http://amzn.com/1591848369
  
• Unlabel: Selling You Without Selling Out by Marc Ecko Link: http://amzn.com/1451685319
  
• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel et al. Link: http://amzn.com/0804139296

How many of you have read this book? When you've seen the growth that the USA had made since hosting in 1994 to winning their group (a group that included England hehe) in 2010, we're seeing some significant gains. U.S. Soccer is rising, perhaps not as fast as we'd like, but it's gaining in status (and subsequently talent) and anyone who's willing to deny it is, frankly put, an idiot. The USA has a tremendous talent pool to select (many Americans play in all leagues now) from and it is unfortunate that we've lost some near-World Class youth talent (Subotic and Giuseppe Rossi) to other nations. Often neglected as well, the MLS is attracting talent from all corners of the Americas (enticed perhaps by the prospect of a higher form of living in America or monetary opportunities.) Some of these individuals will have played long enough in the MLS to one day consider switching nationalities. Despite your personal beliefs, it is only an added bonus for the US talent pool and one that Americans don't make much fuss about (Claudio Reyna is a prime example of such a figure.) Most importantly, the US and MLS are now making significant investments in youth football. We saw some of the benefits that this had in producing talent like Donovan or Howard, however that was with a small and select group of individuals. Now the MLS and the USSF is extending that opportunity to a greater number of youth players, also in an effort to draw quality athletes away from competing American sports. The MLS is now commonplace in sports discussions, it is also expanding to accommodate more cities and common folks are genuinely intrigued by a game that is two 45 minute half's of solid play (uninterrupted by 5,000 commercials.) I wouldn't say that the US is a sleeping giant, it's definitely awake but not exercising it's full abilities yet.

In any case, this is all conjecture on my half but it's damn fucking exciting! For those of you who are looking for something to read, I highly recommend this book.

Before killing yourself to try to promote a company that's paying you less than minimum wage you should make sure you have a clear path to success mapped out. If you double the listeners of this radio station by breaking your back for a pittance -- who's say that the owner/manager decides to hire someone with a more marketing-focused background once they have additional revenue coming in?

A good plan would be to do this: Schedule a meeting with your superior and tell him that you're interested in expanding your roles and responsibility with the organization. Make sure to stress that you're not trying to shirk your current duties and responsibilities but rather you have an interest in helping the company to grow. Ask him, politely but plainly, if company growth could somehow benefit your wages / salary; for example, if you do well and show that you're improving the company over the next 30-60 days, if that could translate directly to another £1. Then another £1. And so on.

Be careful about this because it could backfire and you could lose your job entirely, but it's worth the effort because then at least you know where things stand. Once you know where things stand - go wild. Buy some basic marketing books such as Zag: The Number One Strategy of High Performance Brands and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. These don't necessarily have immediate strategies/tactics, rather they'll help your mind start working properly in terms of what type of marketing strategies can be successful. Then, for immediate strategies, start reading sites like Entrepreneur's Marketing section every day. You'd be surprised at many growth efforts are simply logical. The formula is simple: knowledge + time = growth -> success.

Good luck!

EDIT: Source - I build companies.

Wow, I'm seriously explaining this to someone on a debate forum.

> So, they move money from one rich person to another?

No, this applies to everyone with credit, loans, savings/checking accounts, and investments.

What do you think interest is?

Say you open up a Merril Edge account with BOA, they are able to store your money and give you some percentage atop of it depending on how much risk you take.

At no point are you forced to invest. You merely do so because you value future gains over access to that money immediately.

The bank, then lends your money as well as the money of many others in big lump sums to certain corporations and individuals. They promise to pay that money back with interest.

Additionally, depending on how much risk you wish to take on, the bank also buys stock in aggregate, using part of your money and the money of others.

> Yeah, so you are going to start a corporation by borrowing money from a corporation thru another corporation (a bank) so then you can lend money to another guy who wants to start another corporation in order to make more money? Where is any of this benefitting society?

I think I understand what you're saying. A corporation creates profit by providing immense amounts of value to people - which is how it makes money. For one reason or another, the corporation invests in securities(stocks/bonds).

So, without that initial startup investment from the bank/investors, the corporation likely wouldn't exist. By investing, the corporation allows other corporations to come into existence and provide value for many others.

Simply put, it's an equation of valuing money now vs valuing more money in the future(with some risk).

> So they make decisions to protect their own wealth like literally everyone else, how does that make them useful to society?

I addressed this. They allow efficient allocation of societal capital.

> By "overly confine" you mean bail them out and give them "free" money when they fucked up?

What are you talking about? The banks didn't have the wacky regional restrictions we did in the US.

> Yeah, so if you have money you give someone money and make money? Again, how is society being benefitted?

I addressed this repeatedly. At its most simplest, if I'm paying you to give me $50,000 immediately, it means that you're immensely valuable to me. You are benefiting society by giving my something I value. If I am able to pay you back, it means I've used your investment, earned it back, and with the interest I promised. The only way I can pay it back is to provide some service and benefit to others. That's why people paid me.

> Link one

Possibly the best and most succinct option

Depends on how old you are.

• Middle school: I really enjoyed this, this, and this, but I don't think I can read those books now (29) without cringing a little bit. Especially, Getting Things Done because I already know how to make to do list, but I still flip through all 3 books occastionally.
  
  
• High school: I really enjoyed this, this, and this, but if you're a well adjusted human and responsible adult, then I don't think you'll find a lot of helpful advice from these 6 books so far because it'll be pretty basic information.
  
  
• College: I really enjoyed this, this, and started doing Malcolm Gladwell books. The checklist book helped me get more organized and So Good They Can't Ignore You was helpful starting my career path.
  
• Graduate School: I really enjoyed this, this, and this. I already stopped with most "self help" books and reading more about how to manage my money or books that looked interesting like Stiff.
  
  
• Currently: I'm working on this, this, and this. Now I'm reading mostly for fun, but all three of these books are way out of my league and I have no idea what their talking about, but they're areas of my interest. History and AI.

my company, cymbal, is trying to answer this question directly.

trends largely suggest listeners are transitioning from mp3s to streaming services. streaming services have partly competed by attempting to differentiate their catalogs, but it's hard to imagine these differences persisting over time. sure, kanye is holding TLOP on tidal for now, but eventually even the beatles broke.

peter thiel, in "zero to one", used card readers like square to illustrate the challenges of entering a market where it's hard to differentiate from competition, and streaming services know their goals will have to orient around platform-specific offerings, rather than differences in libraries. i think there's reason to believe that because the simple proposition of $10/month for the entire recorded history of music has been replicated, the challenge will need to be about helping users navigate that vastness.

speaking specifically to the future of the music business, it's important to remember that streaming music is still a very new phenomenon, and on-demand services have yet to penetrate their market. growth, across demographics and nationalities, could scale these services' revenue models many times over. changes in how we listen – in our cars, for example – are just as important to this discussion as how we get the music itself delivered to us.

if i had to predict, i'd expect streaming to become increasingly dominant now that smartphones have proliferated, and the most-dominant software providers to these devices (android and ios) have built streaming services (google music / youtube red / youtube music and apple music) that come pre-loaded on devices. i'd also expect a consolidation of streaming apps, which the fall of rdio and songza already suggest.

which brings me back to why i believe the future of the music business has less to do with libraries or delivery, and more with recommendation and navigating those services' tens of millions of songs. music creation, dissemination, and promotion that is almost entirely digital needs a very different staffing model than the compound structure that now exists and serves physical and digital sales, distributed over myriad channels from radio to streaming playlists. that's tough, though, because streaming services weren't built for sharing, and can only ever speak to their segment of the market. alternatively, a focus on the promotional models that have worked in other realms of celebrity – viral and social marketing, using instagram, twitter, snapchat – might really work. but those platforms weren't made for listening to music.

our idea is that the best recommendations come from the people – friends, artists – who matter to you. we want to let our users show up from any streaming service (right now we support soundcloud and spotify) and find their friends, regardless of how those friends listen, to discover the songs they love. and since every play on cymbal counts on spotify and soundcloud, premium users on our app are driving revenue to the artists they like.

i think we're in as volatile a period of change the music industry's ever seen, but streaming services are proving successful in price and product in their battle against piracy. the next frontier is figuring out how to get everybody listening to the right stuff on them.

I have a friend I worked with at a fortune 500 Investment firm (Multi billion dollars in assets), who was worried about asking for new monitors for his desk after he landed a new position at the company because they were $150 each. I reminded him that stuff like this is always budgeted for and they spend more than that on buying lunch for meetings sometimes and to also never feel bad for the gigantic bank.

Your company has a budget for retention/raises/bonuses they aren't going to fire the janitor to give you $10k. It's fine if you want to try to take the best interest of the place you work in mind, but its not good to be a doormat. That is how you get to a place of $15k wage disparity.

Wages aren't a race either, you want to be paid on your merit and skills, not because someone else gets paid more. You need to make a list of what you bring to the table but only as a reflection of yourself don't bring any of your colleagues into the mix by trying to compare output. just talk about you and all the work you do and show how it has ramped up for you in particular since you have started. This takes the conversation from "they have more" to "I am underpaid for the value I provide" Make a list of accomplishments, cost savings, late nights. Then have a nice conversation about how you feel you are underpaid and would like to have your wages adjusted. Start with the $15k and when they scoff just tell them its where you think you should be based on market/title/workload etc (glassdoor can be your friend at this point)

If they say yes then you are good, if they counter offer, with what you wanted, you are good, if they come back lower, lets say $5k, ask if it would be possible for you to get the pay you are looking for spread over 3 years instead of one, or start asking for non monetary things that you might like maybe an extra week of vacation, depending on what your company offers for benefits you may be able to get them extended. Companies tend to give those out easier because they don't come out of the payroll bucket.

If they still say no, well the job market is currently like 3.7% unemployment and there are tons of places hiring for hr.

Tl:dr your company can afford to pay you more don't take their shit, they will happily keep you at the same salary for years don't feel bad for them they don't feel bad when they do that shit to you.

Also try reading never split the difference it can help you get better with negotiation tactics.
https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-Depended/dp/0062407805

Well, I just read a bunch of stuff. So regarding the marginal cost supply curve debate going on, I googled decreasing marginal cost and came up with this, where the second answer says:

> Again, there's nothing significant, necessary, or truthful about a U-shaped MC curve. It's just a common element in the exposition at the introductory level. More advanced texts (e.g., Mas-Colell) examine other "shapes".

So this is the textbook in question I'm pretty sure. According to this it's "the textbook almost every first year grad micro class uses, regardless of rank." Which seems to be true looking at syllabi on google. Also something by someone named Kreps maybe.

If you google "mas-colell pdf", you can get a pdf of the book. So I did, because I obviously have nothing better to do. Chapter 5, "Production," is about supply stuff. I didn't look at any other chapters. I can't copy and paste from the pdf, and summarizing it is kind of hard and boring, especially because some of it relies on theorems from previous chapters. But here's a couple of points:

If you're looking for an objection to the shape of the supply curve, free disposal seems more important than increasing marginal cost. On page 138 it lists a set of theorems that follow from free disposal and the existence of a production set. These theorems imply the direct relationship between supply and price, but they don't mention increasing marginal cost. This is on page 138 by the way, and it seems like you need some stuff from chapter 3 to get it all.

Second, further down on page 144-146 it shows a bunch of graphs of marginal cost under various situations. Marginal cost is sometimes horizontal, sometimes upward sloping, sometimes U shaped. There isn't one of it just sloping down, it always slopes back up after, and this is consistent with other graphs I've seen. Which honestly makes sense, why wouldn't a firm keep producing until its marginal costs are increasing? When your marginal costs are falling, then what you receive from each sale needs to be falling even faster to deter you from producing more to sell, right?

So I don't know, but I feel like if you want to say economists are ignoring falling marginal costs, or however you want to put it, you need to grapple with economics on the level of rigor of this textbook. This book is a major step up from something like this.

(I feel like a rationalist principle for these kinds of debates is that the conversation should go something like this: "I think X." "Well I think Y." "Hold on, are you a random guy on the Internet?" "I'm a random zuy, but yes." "Oh, right - sorry. Anyway, I don't know a whole lot about this." "Me neither." "Hey, /r/badeconomics is right over there. Let's pop into their open thread and ask them." "$@#! you, Nazi." "Back at you, cuck." It would save me having to do any work ever.)

A reading group for this economics textbook would be really fun, by the way. It was interesting trying to read it, probably even more so if you start at chapter one. It has a lot of math but nothing nerdy STEM types shouldn't be able to handle. It could be a great way to understand economics on a level higher than blogs and Wikipedia can give you, which is honestly kind of interesting. Think of the "well, actually" opportunities for your next Internet debate! We could do a chapter a week or something and focus on comprehension and interpretation. Anyone want to try it?

Entrepreneur Reading List

1. Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
   
2. The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
   
3. The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It
   
4. The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything
   
5. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win
   
6. Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers
   
7. Ikigai
   
8. Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition
   
9. Bootstrap: Lessons Learned Building a Successful Company from Scratch
   
10. The Marketing Gurus: Lessons from the Best Marketing Books of All Time
    
11. Content Rich: Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web
    
12. The Web Startup Success Guide
    
13. The Best of Guerrilla Marketing: Guerrilla Marketing Remix
    
14. From Program to Product: Turning Your Code into a Saleable Product
    
15. This Little Program Went to Market: Create, Deploy, Distribute, Market, and Sell Software and More on the Internet at Little or No Cost to You
    
16. The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully
    
17. The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
    
18. Startups Open Sourced: Stories to Inspire and Educate
    
19. In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters
    
20. Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup
    
21. Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business
    
22. Maximum Achievement: Strategies and Skills That Will Unlock Your Hidden Powers to Succeed
    
23. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
    
24. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
    
25. Eric Sink on the Business of Software
    
26. Words that Sell: More than 6000 Entries to Help You Promote Your Products, Services, and Ideas
    
27. Anything You Want
    
28. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers
    
29. The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business
    
30. Tao Te Ching
    
31. Philip & Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
    
32. The Tao of Programming
    
33. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
    
34. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
    
    

    Computer Science Grad School Reading List
    

    
    

35. All the Mathematics You Missed: But Need to Know for Graduate School
    
36. Introductory Linear Algebra: An Applied First Course
    
37. Introduction to Probability
    
38. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
    
39. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society
    
40. Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery
    
41. What Is This Thing Called Science?
    
42. The Art of Computer Programming
    
43. The Little Schemer
    
44. The Seasoned Schemer
    
45. Data Structures Using C and C++
    
46. Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs
    
47. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
    
48. Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming
    
49. How to Design Programs: An Introduction to Programming and Computing
    
50. A Science of Operations: Machines, Logic and the Invention of Programming
    
51. Algorithms on Strings, Trees, and Sequences: Computer Science and Computational Biology
    
52. The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation
    
53. The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine
    
54. Computability: An Introduction to Recursive Function Theory
    
55. How To Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method
    
56. Types and Programming Languages
    
57. Computer Algebra and Symbolic Computation: Elementary Algorithms
    
58. Computer Algebra and Symbolic Computation: Mathematical Methods
    
59. Commonsense Reasoning
    
60. Using Language
    
61. Computer Vision
    
62. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
    
63. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
    
    

    Video Game Development Reading List
    

    
    

64. Game Programming Gems - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
    
65. AI Game Programming Wisdom - 1 2 3 4
    
66. Making Games with Python and Pygame
    
67. Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python
    
68. Bit by Bit

Some things never change.

I was in your shoes about 15 years ago as a wide eyed, broke new comer being told to invest in my business by experienced financial advisors with big books of business and money to burn. Fortunately for me I had a fantastic manager/mentor who helped me build a financially and professionally rewarding career. Here's what I learned to invest in early on:

1. Product knowledge - You should know your products inside out. Insurance/finance companies actually do a pretty good job of this as their wholesalers are constantly picking up lunch tabs to make sure advisors know their products well enough to push them. Take advantage of them. If there's something you don't know about a product then pick up the phone, call your wholesaler, and don't let him off the phone until you know it.
   
   
2. Sales kills - 15 years in business and I'm continuously amazed at how little time is actually spent developing sales skills. Learn how to sell. Three books I'd recommend today are: Never Split the Difference, Your 1st Year in Sales, and The 12 Week Year. OK, they're not all sales books but knowing how to organize your life is vital.
   
   
3. General insurance/financial knowledge - I know SO many advisors that don't know the first things about their industries. I read The Wall Street Journal every single day to keep abreast of what's going on in the industry. I have a handful of Google Alerts for different things regarding insurance, annuities, managed money, etc. I don't watch a lot of TV but most of what I watch is CNBC and Fox Business. I've also perused additional licenses and certifications. I have my Series 7 and CFP.
   
   
4. Your appearance - Looks matter in sales. I'm always dressed professionally and exercise daily to relieve stress and, well, look good. My suits are always pressed and I cut my hair once a week because any longer and I look like Cousin It from the Addams Family.
   
   
5. Relationships - I basically built my career off of friends and experienced agents who let me call their book of business for 50% of the commission. 50% of something is a lot better than 100% of nothing. Some of my biggest clients are friends who never knew they were on an appointment with me. Play your cards right and beers with the guy from high school you haven't seen in 15 years could result in him rolling over an old 401(k) to you and buying life insurance policies for him and his wife. Play your cards really right and he'll even spring for those beers.
   
   So at this point in your career investing in your business could look like going for a 3 mile run in the morning, running an iron over your shirt, and role playing your sales pitch with your manager when no one is answering their phones. As business comes you can invest further with a mailing campaign and some door knocking. When that turns to money look at things like seminars. Your wholesalers will be happy to cover the cost of food and do a presentation so long as you can fill a room with prospects for them. Etc.

This is definitely the right sub. A few notes:

1. You can approach applied economics papers with just a semester of economic statistics / econometrics and a semester of intermediate theory. Applied papers can be either micro or macro. For example, at this point you should be able to comfortably read Mankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992).
   
   Most applied economics paper boil down to I ran a regression of Y on X. The key question you have to ask yourself is, "Do I buy their identification?" To assess such claims, you don't need much more than a semester or two of econometrics and critical thinking. Sure, some of the more obscure estimators might be beyond your ability, but the broad swath of applied papers boil down to some kind of instrumental variables regression.
   
   A somewhat more advanced paper that should still be readable to you is Gali and Gertler (1999).
   
   The game here is: write down your model to be estimated; argue that you have a good identification strategy; show us the tables of coefficients; argue that your results are robust; tell me why I should care. The trick is clean identification and economically & statistically significant results.
   
   Resources: your companion here should be Mostly Harmless Econometrics.
   
   
2. Then there are theory papers, which can be micro or macro. These will generally set up an economic model and prove some results analytically. The limiting factor in reading them will be your mathematical maturity: here is where the real analysis and topology come into play. A typical theory paper (that you cannot probably read comfortably) might look like Mas-Colell (1975).
   
   The game here is: write down a model; derive some mathematical results (typically about certain partial derivatives, cross-elasticities, or existence of equilibria); tell me why I should care. The trick is to write down a model that makes sense and bring results that are applicable, either to other theoretical problems or that can be applied to practical problems.
   
   Resources: MWG is probably good preparation for these papers, at least in form.
   
   
3. Third, there are computational papers. These tend to be macro, and within macro tend to be oriented around business cycle analysis. Here there is a lot of assumed background knowledge: macroeconomists expect to see models written down in particular ways and have certain preconceived expectations of what your "results" should look like. Again, I don't think these are approachable right out of the undergrad curriculum. I certainly could not follow the arguments of Ireland (2004) when I was an undergrad. I could barely work through the first few pages of Clarida, Gali and Gertler (1999).
   
   The game here is: write down a model; solve it approximately near the steady-state; simulate the model; show me some dynamics around the steady-state; show me how the model reacts to shocks; tell me why I should care. The trick is: write down a sensible model that captures the phenomena of interest, and show how the economy reacts to the shocks that you hit the economy with. Sometimes you want to show how policy can counteract those shocks.
   
   Resources: while reading a few chapters of Sargent & Ljungqvist is nice, there is still a lot of assumed background when reading macro that makes these papers a bit forbidding if you haven't had graduate training in the subject. Yes, I find it deplorable, but that's how the profession has evolved.
   
   A fantastic place to start in macro is Models of Business Cycles. You can probably read it if you know a little calculus and have taken a course in intermediate macro.
   
   By the way, all of the papers I've linked to are "classics" and are worth perusing, even if you don't fully grasp what's going on in them. I'm biased, so you've gotten a sampling of macro papers. Let me know if you want details/context on any of the papers I linked to.
   
   My deepest apologies if, in these summaries, I have offended the sensibilities of my applied and theoretical brethren. I'm stepping a bit out of the bounds of my field (money & macro). :)
   
   (Anyone know of good "classics" in applied micro that are readable? Card-Krueger (1994) is probably readable, as is Angrist (1990). But I'm not familiar with the classics in labor and IO.)

Basically, America is the most populous wealthy nation with a long history in the games. Having read a book written by an economist about why certain national soccer teams do well (this), I think the theory can be applied to the Olympics. The economist identified three important factors for international sporting success:

• Population
  
• Wealth
  
• Experience at the sport (which results in pre-existing facilities and coaches etc)
  
  If you look at India, which has a large population, it has no real experience at competing successfully at the Olympics. Basically, the only sport Indians care about is cricket. Whereas the US has been in the modern Olympics from the start.
  
  If you look at China and Russia, they have the experience and big populations, but are quite poor countries compared to the US. An even more extreme example would be; how many people in Uganda do you think can afford high spec road bikes to train on?
  
  Lastly, compared to countries like Great Britain and France, which are wealthy and have a long history at the games, the US has a much bigger population. It may only be 5% of the world population, but it is still the third most populous country.
  
  If you look at medals tables adjusted for population and GDP, both can be seen here or here, the US isn’t near the top. Then again, I would argue that athletes from countries in the Caribbean often benefit from training in the US, with its per-existing sports infrastructure and wealth – which these charts don’t adjust for. Also, European and Australasian countries will have large scale sports programs despite their smaller sizes, so that they are more likely to find talent despite their smaller populations. Nevertheless, the US does benefit from its large population, but it still captured 11% of the medals compared to having 5% of the world’s population, so I guess the rest is down to wealth and experience.
  
  I suppose this is why the Olympic organizing committee says that there is no official medal ranking, because the medals are given for individual achievements. If someone from Latvia won a medal, it is as much down to their hard work and dedication, as anything else. The Olympics is about humanity coming together to celebrate sport, this is why non-medalists, such as the Iranian judo player/fighter(?) Wojdan Shaherkani, embody the Olympic spirit as much as Usain Bolt.
  
  Now let’s all hold hands and cry because David Rhodesia is so polite…
  

We're in the opening stages of buying out a large company. Similar sized (international, thousands of employees, dozens of sites all over the place) to us; but naturally there's months of procedure before the buyout is complete. Gov't approval, shareholders vote, board voting, etc. I'm not allowed to communicate with my counterparts at the incoming company, but have contacts in other industries that do business with both of us. I got word a couple weeks ago that their entire team in a specific IT specialty is quitting. They're all scared that my company is going to fire them all as soon as the ink dries.

First off, nothing could be further from the truth. My company may be an outlier, but we do lots of M&As every year; tempted to say 1-2 a month. Mostly small shops, but every now and then we bag a big one like this. Vulture capitalism is a real thing, but it makes up a very very small amount of buyout and mergers. You're still right to be scared, people are always fearful of change. Buying a new house/car, moving to a new place, taking a new job, etc. Perfectly natural.

I'll take a minute to hit on your core concerns:

> Everything I look after is old

So what? If the old hardware is still meeting its requirements in the production environment, that's fine. It's nice to have newer stuff, but I've never seen management update hardware simply because it was "old". If it was constantly at risk of losing customer data, or had unsolvable security concerns, then upgrading it to newer hardware would make sense.

About 1/3rd of my environment (+1500 servers) is what I would call ancient.... but they're still running. Supporting apps that customers use. Preforming some special process that needs specific hardware/software. In some cases, the team that owned the hardware was divested years ago and nobody told us to turn off their shit when they left. It kinda common. During the merger process, everything will be inventoried and documented, including what the server is actually doing (ie: hosting). This is where the curtain is lifted and suddenly we don't need to keep all these boxes running. The ones that do need to stay will get P2V'ed or V2V'd to better systems, if there's a reason it can't stay in its current environment.

> I get the feeling we're kept here temporarily to keep the old stuff running.

Yes, of course you are. Who else? Your team has the knowledge and experience keeping it all running. You're kinda stuck in a holding pattern though. Until the merger is complete, you can't get a job at the new company, and you can't move up at your current one. If you quit your job, you wont get a place at the new company, even if you fit the bill.

At my place, we do very little external hiring, and even then only for esoteric positions (IE: Lync Engineer, Sharepoint admin, Citrix, etc). M&A's are the primary source of our onboarding. Not just because you have experience with the current systems that the company is inheriting as part of the merger; but because you've played an important role in making your current company attractive to mine, which is what lead to the buyout. If your IT systems were shit, and always crashing/losing data, your company wouldn't have grown to the point where it'd be attractive to buy it out. Also, you're keeping these ancient systems running? Nice... obviously you know what you're doing.

Which brings me to the next part... have you met anyone from the new company's HR team yet? We always send in a team of people (directors, HR, advisors) to meet with the employees of the newly acquired company. Figure out who are the good apples and who are bad. Who knows what they're talking about and who is just faking it for the paycheck. If you haven't met with the other company yet, I'd strongly advise you to not jump ship yet. You could be throwing away an excellent opportunity just because you're scared of the pending change.

> Management is off-site.

This is perfectly normal. My manager is 1000mi away, and I only talk to him over Lync/email. Somehow we take care of all our datacenters, around the world, without having to see each other in person. But hey, this is the 21st century and this is how it works. The best people for the job may not live within 50mi of your office, but are within range of another office. If you need someone sitting in the same building to give you guidance on what needs to be done, then you need to ask yourself why. It shouldn't matter if your orders come over an email, a voicemail, or a sit-down meeting. In my experience, having remote management makes the subordinates much more responsible. They're allowed to get their job done their way, in their time (as long as it meets the metric of success), and then report success over an email/chat/call. Almost everyone I've met loves this kind of system. Much more laid back then say, a micromanaging boss who hovers over your desk and asks for constant updates.

> Pay is low, turnover rate high

This too is normal during your M&A. Accounting doesn't want to introduce extra financial liabilities for the new parent company, because it can throw off their forecasting models. Don't be surprised if you get the bare minimum until about ~6mo after the ink dries on the merger. This applies to new hardware, facilities requests, bonuses, perks, etc. It's not a bad sign... but it can be bad for morale. My suggestion is to just suck it up, because you're not going to win a fight with the accountants.

> Change management is more strict.

Get used to this in larger companies. Can you imagine the chaos of hundreds/thousands of people with their hands in thousands of servers? If a customer app goes down at 9am without CC, how do you figure out who did what where? Was it the app owners doing a code change? Was it the network team upgrading a switch? Was it security rolling out an update to the firewall? Change control saves your ass. I was befuddled by the process too when I started, but they've made a believer out of me.

Why should the company wake up 100 people in the middle of the night, to play Sherlock Holmes in the environment, looking for what has changed, because some developer made an opps?

[Also, if you've never read The Phoenix Project, I strongly recommend it. It'll give you a look at how a company without change control "tries" to get things done, and then you can see how change control, once properly implemented, makes everyone's lives soooooo much easier].

> What to do?

Nothing you've done at this point has been unreasonable. Like I said before, your reaction to the change in your company will naturally cause feelings of fear, anticipation, anxiety; which leads to second-guessing and the sense of flight. Your paycheck is at risk, which puts food on the table, gas in your car, and a roof over your head. Totally normal to be up late at night wondering what the future holds.

I'd suggest you get your CV updated... and also put together a portfolio. If/when the new company comes to visit, they'll want to meet with the team who has kept everything running and see if they can be integrated into the new company. You're not re-interviewing for your current job a la 'Office Space', they want to see if you can provide extra value to the company if given the chance. This is where you impress them with how you saved the day keeping X-system online, or how you automated something that used to take days, into minutes. Things like that.

I would NOT suggest signing a 1yr committal on a new lease with the intention of staying with the company. My advice is from someone who has sat on the other side of the table, and while I'm painting you a rosy picture because you've given me no reason to think less of you.... I will state that someone people will be laid off. Duplicate positions, fakers, incompatible team members, etc. Not everyone makes the cut. If you're a decent worker who can be taught new tricks, odds are on your side of being "asked" to join the new company (where you'll still do your current job, and take on more responsibility for a while, until we can find a way to reduce your criticality to the old entity).


tl;dr - Fear of uncertainty is normal. You don't have the full picture of what's going on behind the scenes. You'll see the writing on the wall IF layoffs are coming. Don't do anything rash.

As you're both (you and the team) very new to scrum, you should start with some of the supporting basics that help tie everything together.

You're pretty far from the ideal situation, but there's nothing preventing you from learning and growing together. it's much harder without a careful guiding hand, but not impossible. There's a lot of things you're not going to know/understand simply because you haven't been exposed to it yet.

1. Always begin with why. Why do we have planning. Why do we have BL grooming. etc. by understanding the purpose of each ceremony you will be able to better understand how to execute these ceremonies against the context of your organization.
   
   IE: scrum doesn't have a set way to do these ceremonies (other than loose guidelines. the by-the-book approach) because how they are run is environment specific. Most places are not equipped to do scrum by-the-book exactly. IE: they have QA. and QA is not a role within the scrum framework. The team should clearly define the roles and responsibilities of each team member. These definitions will change over time through the retrospective. every standard, process, etc. should be treated the same way. you should always be verifying that your processes are still valid. As the team matures and grows their needs will change and your processes should reflect that.
   
   
2. The loose guidelines are a starting point. these are not an end-goal. IE: in the retrospective we typically ask three questions: What should we start doing, what should we keep doing, what should we stop doing. you answer these questions in the context of product (what you're working on), process, and people.
   
   However this is a 'crutch' for teams that don't understand the retro yet. this format should eventually change, but you won't have to worry about this for a while.
   
   
3. do everything you can to understand the basics of software development. (IE: things that should be done independently of Scrum) These are things like understanding the 5 levels of estimation, the difference between relative and absolute estimations, why the team needs to establish standards for processes and definitions (IE: definition of done, when should something be a task vs a story), the difference between data and information, roles and responsibilities, etc.
   
   This is the kind of stuff that really differentiates between a scrum master/agile coach and a project manager.
   
   
4. Also understand that Scrum is an agile framework. Just like the 3 question approach to the retrospective, scrum is a stepping stone to becoming agile. If you haven't, you should read the original HBR article about scrum to get a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the framework. this should help you understand the 'why' behind each ceremony and allow you to better make adjustments based on your environment.
   
   6 months to a year from now, what you're doing should look different than scrum by-the-book. I highly recommend you start reading books to help cover the gaps in your understanding. I suggest you start with Phoenix Project and a book on writing user stories.
   
   
5. Think of scrum as a problem finding mechanism and not a problem solving mechanism. This is why the retrospective is the most critical ceremony of scrum. DO NOT WORK AROUND PAIN POINTS. If the team says they feel like they have too many meetings, figure out why. If something took longer than expected, dig into what dependencies were missed in planning and take steps to make sure those aren't forgotten again.
   
   The point of a sprint is to iterate. Yes, we also get shippable increments out of a sprint and that's important, but this pales in comparison to iterating against your product (so you can fail faster and get more value to your customer) and your own development process (this is what will truly enable you to iterate faster and faster as you mature)
   
   This means you will often but heads with leadership, as better development practices often require a shift in culture. Ultimately you want to be able to have autonomous teams that are aligned to the business needs.
   
   -----------------------
   
   Recomended reading:
   
   https://hbr.org/1986/01/the-new-new-product-development-game
   
   https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262509
   
   https://www.amazon.com/User-Story-Mapping-Discover-Product/dp/1491904909/
   
   https://www.amazon.com/User-Stories-Applied-Software-Development/dp/0321205685/
   
   https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog
   

> I actually think libertarianism is an incredibly naive worldview

I can see how someone might think that, but I don't think it's fair. Libertarians typically have the strongest understanding of economics, and libertarians are typically intellectuals. Also, transitioning from a typical Republican or Democrat to a libertarian requires a pretty substantial shift in how you view the role of government as a whole. You'll also never see a libertarian who confuses capitalism with democracy (which happens on the internet all. the. fn. time.).


But! I will admit that we have a potential blind spot that will make it difficult to ever become a major party: libertarians will choose the whole over the individual, which means we lose pretty much every emotional argument ever. The free market works most efficiency when prices aren't controlled at all, and libertarians will choose efficiency because it drives innovation and lowering of prices the fastest, which we believe is the best for the whole. It's through innovation that we raise the standard of living for everyone (e.g., Ford inventing the assembly line eventually led to cars being widely available). Where this gets tough for most people to support is that most people will choose stability over efficiency.


When you put money in a bank, you want to make sure the bank doesn't go under. When you rent an apartment, you want to make sure landlords can't force you out by raising rent. If you're working 40 hours a week, you feel like you deserve to make a living wage. If you've spent your entire life mining coal, you don't want the coal mine to go under, leaving you with no skills for another job and leaving your town w/o its largest source of income. If a hurricane hits your town, you don't want the local convenience store jacking up the price of water and flashlights. If your child gets diagnosed with cancer, you don't want money to get in the way of getting your child everything they need to survive.


All of those thoughts are completely reasonable, but libertarians put higher emphasis on the whole than the individual. Banks and auto-makers have gotten away with horrible business decisions because they're "too big to fail." Rent control works fine in the short term, but in the long term it always leads to an ever-increasing shortage of low-income housing while the quality of that housing consistently declines and no new low-income housing is constructed. Industries rise and fall all the time, and we're just no longer in need of so much coal or elevator operators or fast food cashiers. Increasing the prices on goods after a hurricane helps insure that people don't overbuy, leaving late-comers without a chance at supplies, and it incentivizes new sellers to enter the market to take advantage of the high prices, thus increasing supply, which will lower prices over time. A more free market approach to healthcare would result in much, much lower costs, and faster innovation.


The problem is that once you say that, yes, people will lose jobs and die because of poor luck, decisions, or timing, you immediately turn most of the population, and Jimmy Kimmel starts crying. It doesn't matter to them that it will be a huge net benefit for the vast majority of people if an unlucky few are willingly left behind.


I also feel like there's this huge misconception that libertarians don't care about the poor when they're probably our main concern. We believe so strongly in the free market because we think it gives the poor the highest standard of living. Anyway, I'm not a particularly eloquent person, so I recommend this book. It does a really good job of explaining why the free market best helps the poor over the long term at the cost of short term volatility. It's a pretty good read too.

As you realize becoming great at social skills is just like training any other skill. Realizing you can train it will allow you to build the skill stronger than others who stumble into it. So many will say you can't get better or amazing by reading in a chair. They're right. Read a little, apply a lot, take notes, then review what you did right and what you did wrong, repeat. Get a mentor or training buddy if you can, it accelerates learning, because we can't see ourselves the same as those outside us can. Make a regimen to go out, greet and meet people every day. Or at least three times a week minimum, make it a habit.

I can tell you that I've been in customer service and sales jobs, they taught me nothing because my skills were garbage and sub-par. So I didn't have a paddle for my raft in the world of social interaction. All I got was "people get irritated if I cold approach or try to sell them. Or worse I have to dump mountains of information to make them feel safe." So after studying for the better part of a decade, here's some points that got me to the basics and more advanced subjects. With the basics under your belt, then a job or daily practice will get you understanding and results.

First, learn how to steady yourself mentally, breathing exercise here. Breathing is important as we seem to be learning your heart rate and beat pattern determine more about our emotions than we'd like to admit.

Second, Accept and love yourself, (both those terms may be undefined or wishy-washy to you at the moment, defining them is part of the journey.) Because you can only accept and love others the way you apply it to yourself first.

Third, pick up and read the charisma myth. It has habits/meditations that will be a practice you use every day. I'd say a basic understanding will happen after applying them over three months. Never stop practicing these basics, they are your fundamentals. They determine your body language. The difference between a romantic gaze and a creepy stare is context of the meeting and body language, especially in the eyes.

Sales or cold approach networking will do the same for practice. If you do sales or meeting new people, it is a negotiation. You're trying to trade "value" (safety + an emotion). So if you figure out how to make yourself feel emotion, then inspire emotion in others, mutual agreements happen. Start with Why is a good reference. Here is a summary video. Chris Voss will help you find out that you don't tap into people rationally, you tap people emotionally, big think summary video. Or the full book treatment, Never Split the Difference. The supporting book for Chris Voss' position can be helped by reading Start With No

For training habits and understanding how we execute behaviors, Thinking, Fast and Slow

For dealing with hard arguments and heavy topics both Nonviolent Communication and Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

Learning what listening is, instead of "hearing" people. Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone is a good book for that. This is touched on in Never Split the Difference and in the Charisma Myth because true listening, making the person you are speaking with feel "listened to and understood" is most of what makes a charismatic person work.

!!! It makes me happy to hear that people who do this stuff are interested.

I mostly deal with software so I don't have a ton of knowledge about hardware design in particular, but for more general design-related stuff, there are a few things that come to mind:

• The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, who's independently a very big deal in interaction design (you may have seen him in a Vox video about how a lot of doors are designed terribly).
  
• Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling was pretty influential on me. This isn't immediately actionable stuff, but it's a great way of thinking about these things (edit: you can definitely find this online for free if you look around ahem)
  
  You also might find the GOMS model useful for thinking about design and thinking about how to evaluate designs, and "cognitive load". I've seen people use the NASA-TLX survey (Task Load Index, I think) to try to turn something amorphous like workload and effort and whatnot into something quantifiable. An important underlying point here is that sometimes fewer keystrokes, or faster processes, or whatever, are worse if they require more effort or cause more frustration.
  
  There are also some academic papers and concepts that might be useful:
  
  
• Parallel Prototyping Leads to Better Design Results, More Divergence, and Increased Self-Efficacy is a ~20 page paper that basically shows that making several designs in parallel and getting feedback on the different options actually measurably yields better final products. Showing someone one prototype to evaluate makes it difficult to think critically about. Anything is better than nothing, and they can't tell you the relative strengths or weaknesses of an idea if it's by itself. Another under-riding point here is to get feedback from other people not in the loop. Novices tend to think that they're capable of shifting their mindset and evaluating their own designs, but it's just not true. Lots of feedback is extremely important.
  
• I don't remember the name of the paper but there are the concepts of low/medium/high fidelity prototypes. The important thing to know is that if you give someone a high fidelity prototype they'll nitpick all the little details. The takeaway is that you'll get feedback about the concept if you can give people low fidelity prototypes and ask for feedback. This also allows you to iterate quickly and often. This is hugely applicable to hardware/physical design.
  
  I'll think if anything else comes to mind.

>\> happens to the price of Bitcoin when the supply caps at 21million?

This occurs in 2140 so shouldn't be much of a concern outside of a speculative hypothetical , but removing all monetary inflation for a product in demand means that bitcoin will likely keep appreciating in value.

>How is value determined outside speculation when it's not tied to anything tangible.

Supply and demand is what determines the price for all goods and services irrespective if its digital or physical(tangible). Bitcoin has intrinsic value as well, much akin to twitter and the internet having intrinsic value. Bitcoin is a very useful tool that allows people to exchange value for high risk transactions. There is a circular economy and inelastic demand of users for bitcoin that give it value. States indirectly subsidize this value in bitcoin and will continue to as long as laws and regulations exist.

>\> Also, a gallon of milk could cost 1btc or .0001btc

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Units

more likely referred to as "2 bits" in the future

>\> you can fragment a bitcoin as small as you want? So does a supply cap even matter?

Yes , sub satoshis already exist on the lightning network for microtransactions . This is not a form of inflation but further decimalization ... I.E... instead of 1 usd =100 cents , 1USD = 1,000,000 units of 1/1,000,000 a usd= 1usd without adding anything to the monetary supply. Adding more bitcoins into circulation is inflation lowering the value of everyones BTC , further dividing the unit decimalization does not have this effect.

These articles will better help you understand the economics and value of bitcoin -

https://medium.com/@jimmysong/why-bitcoin-is-different-e17b813fd947

https://medium.com/@jimmysong/why-bitcoin-works-fe32879a73f5

or better yet get her this book :

https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Alternative-Central/dp/1119473861

I don't want to sound like a dick, but you're making assumptions and treating them as fact. There is no reason manufacturing jobs NEED to move overseas other than the top echelons of corporate America want it that way so they can maximize their profits at the expense of American workers. The supposed beauty and inevitability of neoliberal trade policies have been touted for so long by folks like Paul Krugman, that many have just assumed this is the inevitable way of the world. It isn't. This is not to say that free trade between equals in the global community isn't good and sometimes in fact necessary to spur on needed competition and efficiencies. But the idea that the American worker, as well developing economies overseas and their workers, must submit to free trade policies over all other tools of trade policy, such as tariffs, is simply untrue. There needs to be a more healthy mix of free trade and protectionism. Otherwise America and the world community devolves into a feudal system that does much to contribute to unrest, dissatisfaction and even violence all over the world.

The manufacturing jobs exist, they just don't exist in this country as much as they once did. Sure, some of these jobs are being replaced by automation. But free trade globalism and technology do not have to leave American workers or workers overseas ravaged. That happens as a result of political choices made in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere around the world.

Obama and Hillary have employed "incrementalism" in a vain effort to keep workers and others in need placated while they keep their richest donors happy. It doesn't have to be this way and it shouldn't be this way.

We can eliminate and/or redo trade deals. We can let workers have a meaningful seat at the table as these deals are negotiated. We can do much to restore the middle and working classes. That we haven't, again, is in large part a political choice.

Check out these books if you want, or at least know they exist. (https://www.amazon.com/Winner-Take-All-Politics-Washington-Richer-Turned/dp/1416588701)

(https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986)

These authors don't have all the answers, but it's a good start.

> Or that communism creates starvation (joke)

I don't think this is a joke. While causal designs would be difficult to apply, the spatio-temporal correlation is hard to ignore.


>Regarding causality- as you know that’s nearly impossible to prove in the social sciences.

Actually, these days the application of designs and approaches that provide strong support for causal claims have become quite prevalent. Some standard references-



1

2

3

4

good framework reference or a slightly heavier read

and the old classic


In fact, the Nobel prize in economics this year went to some people who have built their careers doing exactly that

It's actually become quite hard to publish in ranking journals in some fields without a convincing (causal) identification strategy.


But we digress.


>We will never be able to do an apples to apples study between heterosexual and homosexual child rearing for some of the reasons you mentioned above. (Diversity of relationship styles, not both biological parents within gay/lesbian couples)

In this case it isn't far fetched at all. The data collection for the survey data used in the study you linked could just as easily have disagregated the parents involved in same sex romantic relationships instead of pooling them. If I understood correctly, the researcher had obtained the data as a secondary source, so they didn't have control over this.

Outcomes for children in the foster care system are well studied, so one could in principal easily replicate the study comparing outcomes between children in the foster care system and those adopted into homes shared by stable same sex couples (you couldn't likely restrict it to married same sex couples, though, because laws permitting same sex civil marriage are too recent to observe outcomes).

>My bottom line-that I don’t see many disagree with if they are being intellectually honest, is a stable monogamous heterosexual family structure is the best model for immediate families. Or would you disagree?

But that's not the question at hand, is it? What we are interested in here is comparing kids bouncing around the state care system to those adopted into homes with two same-sex parents in a stable relationship.

That is exactly my point. The comparison you propose is uninformative relative to the question of permitting same sex couples to "foster to adopt". Because the counterfactual for those children is not likely to be a "stable monogamous heterosexual family". It is bouncing around the foster care system.

The Four-Hour Workweek seems to spark up a lot of controversy when mentioned, I was even skeptical when reading it, but it honestly changed my life. It inspired me to become an entrepreneur, it's packed with case studies that inspire you to escape 9 to 5, and has plenty of great resources for someone starting their first online business, or for anyone looking to improve their work efficiency and spend less time at the office.

I'm also currently reading:

• The Tipping Point
  
  
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
  
  
• How to Win Friends and Influence People
  
  
  May seem overly mentioned or cliche, but they're cliche for a reason!

Both Economics in One Lesson and Basic Economics are golden, though for very different reasons.

Economics is One Lesson starts with a truth that is obvious and simple once you hear it explained. You think to yourself, "Well, yeah. Who could possibly think otherwise?" And then you hop onto Reddit and see that a substantial preponderance of Reddit are afflicted with a mindset and beliefs that fly in the face of this simple truth. It then spends time expanding on this truth and applying it to tons of different things that you wouldn't intuitively see it applying to.

Basic Economics is better though. Both are well worth reading, but Sowell's work is incredibly comprehensive. When I read it, it didn't come across as someone trying to prove any world view, as tends to be the case from so many economists. It is him simply seeking to explain economics to someone who is new to the field. To his credit, he uses terminology that is accessible to anyone and doesn't spend a single moment trying to prove to how smart he is. (Though his brilliance is immediately evident.) Its most important quality is that it doesn't ask you to partake in a string of thought experiments to reach some grand conclusions. Every assertion he makes is supported by multiple studies and historical examples. This happens time and time again. And the bolder the claim, the more evidence he provides. It's remarkable.

While it does weigh in at 700-ish pages, Basic Economics is almost certainly the perfect book for getting your feet wet when in economics.

> They would also be pretty unhappy if you told them that they had to walk to the grocery store instead of taking a bus or driving a car.

Actaully they would be unhappy, but only because they would see rich people driving by them.

If the entire country suddenly had to walk to the store, people would be fine with it. It would suck at first, but as I said, the issue is the income GAP, not GDP.

>Quick.. start informing people in China that economic growth isn't that important. Millions of people are being pulled out of poverty every day.

Standard /r/econ talking point. "Its ok, some people over there got out of poverty". No one who pushed free trade agreements ever gave a shit about poor people in china.

The thing is... China might have done just as well withotu those agreements. And mexico had better per capita income growth before NAFTA. The overall GDP has risen since then, but per capita income has stagnated... the reason for that is that mexico now has rich billionaires, so while GDP has gone up, NAFTA didn't really help the average worker. NAFTA increased the income gap. Interesting that free trade makes things worse.

>The article you cited looks nice, but it doesn't give us the entire picture. But it's good for cherry picking feel good stories to justify welfare.

Come on, /r/econ shouts 'lots of chinese are less poor now!' and that's not cherry picking?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/world/africa/02malawi.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Here is another article that explains why free trade and neoliberalism is a sham.

http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986

This book also talks about it.

Im not sure if youre the guy I already said this stuff to, if so, sorry. I just lose interest in these discussions, people are not open minded here much at all.

Lets get rid of copyright and patent laws, if you are so eager to remove global poverty. S Korea gained it's success by pirating the software and books to educate its people. If it had had to pay more for books and software, it would have been able to educate many less people. Instead decades ago they stole books and software and many people there were able to get educations.

So... we're all about eliminating poverty around the globe right? Lets remove patents and copyright laws, and allow our knowledge and IP to flow freely into these poor nations!

Suddenly, freedom isn't so appealing, is it? Now all the business and tech people suddenly get all protectionist. Funny how that is.

>Regarding science, the flourishing of scientific development didn't start with the Enlightenment, but it exploded afterwards. Chinese science and technology was vastly better than Europe for about 400 years, but the Industrial Revolution still happened in Europe.

He isn't contesting that modern science and technology is mainly a European thing, what he is contesting is the idea that it happened as the result of Enlightenment thought.

Europe was already a world power before the first Enlightenment thinkers ever put pen to paper, and it had achieved this status through technological means.

When it comes to science, interest in performing scientific measurements with specialized instruments (such as astrolabes) was widespread in niche circles, and so was interest in Greco-Roman thought, before the Renaissance.

>Modern economics allowed science to be used by the average person, not just the elites. That was only able to flourish after the idea of individual property and innovation spread.

Modern economics (as in: capital markets, global trade) can be traced to the colonial companies (East Indian, etc), and to various Italian city-state ventures who traded on the Mediterranean, which happened before the Enlightenment. Niall Ferguson documents this in The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.

>The fact that a woman can leave an abusive marriage and raise children on her own is pretty damn great, too.

That kind of implies that the "old view" would be ok with abusive marriages, but that really isn't the case. It is true that women are vulnerable to abuse by their husbands, but the kind of tight communities of the past where women also had the support of their extended family (many brothers, etc.) were a buffer.

And while the effort of single mothers is to be praised, as they do truly heroic work, it still remains the case that single-parent households are not the preferred way to raise children.

>there was no system of nobility or inherited titles.

That is true, but as the case of the British shows, that wasn't an impediment to them eventually developing a stable, fair and balanced political system. The British had had already gone through several steps in reducing the assymetry between the various ranks in the hierarchy. Elsewhere in Europe, the Habsburg regime was progressing towards decentralization, with more power accumulating into the hands of the merchants and artisans, simply as a result of their increased economic strength. By contrast, the economic activity of the nobility was land ownership, which didn't scale.

So my point here is that the good effects attributed to the political innovations which came with Enlightenment were also possible in regimes which were more conservative.

I see the Enlightenment as an expression of political trends that were already "in the air". Some of these trends introduced good changes, while some things turned out to not need changing.

This is by no means either academic or comprehensive, but it's short, fun, and just might kick-start your interest, so give it a watch. There are a couple others following up. I seriously recommend you get one of the more accessible books on economics. NPR's Planet Money has a reading list of books they recommend, and a quick peek at top results in Amazon also indicate bestsellers like Basic Economics, Economics in One Lesson, or the humorously titled and fun Naked Economics.

Any of those will do wonders. Just select whichever looks like a good time.

Or don't -- what to do with scarce resources like your own time is of course your choice. An economic choice ;)

I'm not sure about an online course, but I can recommend some econometrics textbooks.

Goldberger's "A Course in Econometrics" is well written and covers a lot of important ideas. I especially like his treatment of residual regression in chapter 17 (I think): https://www.amazon.com/Course-Econometrics-Arthur-S-Goldberger/dp/0674175441/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1465847395&sr=8-1&keywords=goldberger+econometrics

Many people teach regression as minimizing the squared residual from a linear model. While that's a correct way to think about it, in my opinion it is easier to understand regression as performing matrix algebra on a data-generating process. That is, a linear model says that x causes y according to

y = xb + e

where y is an observed column vector of length n (for number of observations) x is an observed matrix, possibly including a constant, e is unobserved, and b is a parameter (vector) to be estimated. Well, just do algebra on it.

you want to "move" x to the left-hand side, but x doesn't have an inverse. Instead, multiply both sides by the transpose of x, which is x', and then you have x'x in front of b. If this can be inverted, then multiply both side by it's inverse. (x'x)^-1 x'x cancels, yielding

(x'x)^-1 x'y=b+(x'x)^-1 x'e

if (x'x)^-1 x'e=0, then you have just solved for b. In expectation, this is true under the OLS assumptions, and as the sample gets large, it is approximately true in sample. This is why OLS can recover b if the error is orthogonal to x. If not, then OLS gives you biased estimates of the causal parameter b.

Regression algebra is indeed quite simple. This makes regression algebra satisfying -- you are doing something extremely powerful without requiring comparably sophisticated mathematical technology.

Anyway, Goldberger's treatment of regression algebra really clicked for me, especially making sense of residual regression (why "all else equal" makes sense). You don't need to read every chapter. Chapter 17 works pretty well on it's own, for example. But the other stuff is useful as well.


"Mostly Harmless Econometrics" is not too hard to read without coursework forcing you to focus: https://www.amazon.com/Mostly-Harmless-Econometrics-Empiricists-Companion/dp/0691120358/ref=pd_sim_14_6?ie=UTF8&dpID=51qgNUMbyXL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR104%2C160_&refRID=NY8XZVBAX0ZHXXV69SAT

You might as well get Wooldridge's graduate level textbook on panel data econometrics -- you'll probably need to buy it in grad school anyway. It's hard to make sense of until until you've been forced to work through a lot of the math. After your first quarter or two of graduate level course work you should be comfortable enough with the material to teach yourself anything in this textbook. Before that though and you might not have the discipline or background to make heads or tails of this: https://www.amazon.com/Econometric-Analysis-Cross-Section-Panel/dp/0262232197/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1465847582&sr=1-7&keywords=wooldridge

I sort of am on the fence of recommending these books but have you read?

• Phoenix Project link
  
  
• Art of the Start link
  
  
• The hard Truth link
  
  Learning how businesses work definitely improves your tech skills. It helps build logic based around what is best for the business, not what is best for IT, or what is best for you. Learning how IT becomes a finely tuned oiled machine for your business is even better.
  
  I have read some of the books on start ups and business so I can understand where they come from, what they are trying to accomplish as a business.
  
  The soft skills will come as you work with more and more people. Just always try to walk into a situation as a neutral part, listen, observe, learn and don't be a jerk. The soft skills will develop pretty easily that way

Disclaimer: I am referring to US PhD programs. Things are a bit different in Europe/Canada, but not in terms of material, only structure.

So what you learn in an Econ PhD is drastically different from undergrad. Unless you go to a heterodox PhD program, an Econ PhD is a “STEM” PhD whereas the same can’t be said for most undergrad Econ degrees. I wouldn't say it's impossible to learn the material on your own; however, 1) only wannabe researchers will gain from learning the material at the level of rigor of a Ph.D. program (some of the exercises are just intellectual exercises rather than providing you with tools you can use at a "normal job") and 2) the material is rather high level and it can be difficult to grasp if not being explained by someone who really understands it. The first year sequence at almost all schools is Micro 1, Macro 1, and Econometrics 1 in the fall, the the corresponding “course_title 2” course in the spring.

The first year sequence essentially lays the standard models/techniques in each of the overarching fields (micro, macro, Econometrics) along with the assumptions that those models rely on. The goal is for you to not just be able to memorize the assumptions and solve the standard models, but to truly understand why we need each assumption, what we gain by using it, and what limitations it imposes on the model. That way when we’re doing our own research and we have to relax an assumption or derive a completely new model, we understand what we’re doing.

After the first year, you choose a subfield of specialization (micro theory, macro theory, applied micro, Industrial Organization, behavioral economics, Econometrics, etc) and take courses which continue doing what you learned in your first year, but specifically for your subfield. Then after the second year, you write your dissertation.

If you’re curious what you learn in a first year micro class, here’s a link to download Ariel Rubinstein’s book Lecture Notes in Microeconomic Theory: The Economic Agent. It’s free on his website as long as you provide an email address. While Microeconomic Theory by MWG is a more standard book for first year Micro, I think Rubinstein’s book is better written, especially when compared to the consumer/producer theory sections of MWG. Also, it’s free :)

I really like applied stats but think a good understanding of stats theory is important for any researcher. A good "litmus" test, I think, would be reading Mostly Harmless Econometrics (you can probably find a place to check the book out for free). It isn't about health statistics at all but it is a very good "applied" theory book. If you get into the first bit and go "this isn't for me," that is fine and epi probably won't be a problem. If you go "this is interesting," then you might be worth looking at doing the required pre-reqs for the MS biostats program.

Relatedly, check out this free biostatistics bootcamp on Coursera. Check out the first few weeks of lectures and if you decide that the stat theory is more than you care for, epi is a good place.

Epi is a good field, don't get me wrong, but if you are interested in statistics, then it might not be a great fit. MHE and a few of those lectures might be very helpful in deciding if you are at all unsure of how you lean.

I got about 25 minutes into the video; I'm not wasting more time. If you want to know serious data about the dangers of central planning of the monetary system, there are vastly better sources that talk in real, economics, and not lofty, sensationalist terms.

The International Role of the Dollar: Theory and Prospect by Paul krugman

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

The Creature from Jekyll Island by Griffin

Milton Friedman's Free to Choose videos

--------

My main objections in the first 25 minutes of this "documentary" are:

1) They're not correctly defining or using the terms currency or money and not identifying their economic role. Money is not the center of an economy, it is the lubrication that permits economics to happen. Economics is the analysis of how scarce resources that have alternative uses are allocated by people (by markets).

Money doesn't create those allocations, money enables those allocations.

Even in an economic system without money, there would still be allocations of scarce resources that have alternative uses by people; whether that is choosing to use your time to cut down a tree for your neighbor in exchange for beef or choosing to use your time to mow a lawn for your mother in exchange for a smile and a thank you; your time is a scarce resource and you're choosing how to allocate it with zero money being involved.

Money is any medium of exchange and is created as a store of one's labor.

You receive a dollar in exchange for X minutes of your labor. That piece of paper stores those X minutes of your labor and you can use it in exchange for something you value.

So anyway - this video does a shitty job identifying what money is at the outset... I don't think it'll get better.

2) The banking system, monetary policy, and politicians making a killing off of those systems has not been hidden from anyone. As they admit, almost in a very quick juxtaposition with their incorrect statement, the bankers, academics, and politicians are very open about their systems.

The problem is that people are just happy with their lives and are safer than they've ever been throughout history.

3) A complete misunderstanding of what "interest" is and what fractional reserve banking is.

Interest is the cost of lending money... it is the price tag on a product just like on the coat or iPod you buy. The baker isn't going to give you all his bread for free; why should a bank give you money for free?

Fractional reserve banking can be done responsibly. Much like the interest rate, it should be done at the rate set by free markets. A fractional reserve rate of 90% almost completely guarantees that when you withdraw, you will always be able to withdraw all of your money. In exchange, banks will give you vastly lower of an interest rate than at a 10% fractional reserve rate because it is higher risk and lower reward for the bank.

Anyway - like so many other documentaries out there about extremely complex matters, this one is just trying to sell a product like every other good capitalist out there. They need to catch your attention and get you to talk about it to others to make money - so of course they're going to play to the 8th grade education market.

The problem is that click-bait is the only way to keep the lights on for most of these sites. They just don't make that much money.

Consider how this translates to employee pay and, in turn, the incentive for these employees to pursue virtuous journalistic careers and invest the time required to keep things on the straight and narrow.

As a result, we don't get journalism - we get op-ed and clickbait. We get toxicity.

This is part of a vicious cycle. Toxicity and clickbait are more profitable.

It is in human nature for us to have our interest piqued by negative headlines and bad news. Our brains work by recognizing patterns and relationships between facts and situations. We've evolved to be more interested in the facts that jut out and are potentially more threatening to our survival.

So, bad news and negativity gets clicks. Weird-ass headlines gets clicks. Misinformation drives clicks. Toxicity drives traffic. Clickbait drives traffic.

Go look at the headlines and "hot" articles on top gaming blogs. You'll see tons of negative articles or headlines that stir toxicity.

• The more people get upset, feel that they're getting taken advantage of, or feel threatened, the more likely they are to click.
  
  
• The more inflammatory the article, the more likely people are to comment.
  
  
• The more likely they are to comment, the more likely they are to return to the article.
  
  
• The more likely people are to return to an article, the more page views the blog gets.
  
  
• The more page views the blog gets, the more they make.
  
  So, if you're the editor for a gaming blog site, what do you do? Even if you're not intending to run toxic content, you might unconsciously start becoming conditioned to run toxic content through the positive feedback you get through page stats.
  
  In systems like Forbes where anyone can submit and the most popular articles get featured, it's easy to see how the most divisive and potentially toxic content gets featured.
  
  Consider this. Here's a fictional made-up quote we can use for the sake of argument.
  
  > "In the new game, the brothers go to Africa. It's a fascinating place," said Jim Drawerson, artist on Super Plumber Brothers 2. "It was hard to capture all of the culture and ethnic diversity, but I think we did a good job."
  
  Which of these three headlines do you think will get the most clicks and comments?
  
  > 1. Super Plumber Brothers 2 artist interview
  
  > 2. Super Plumber Brothers 2 artist talk about setting game in Africa
  
  > 3. Super Plumber Brothers 2 artist slammed for racist comments
  
  For the third headline, all you have to do is find a few people on Twitter who were offended (someone is always offended about something), screenshot their comments, and paste them into your article.
  
  The third headline will drive clicks, even if it's not accurate. But who's going to hold the gaming bloggers accountable?
  
  Gaming blogs are largely not accountable to anyone except the stats that keep the doors open. I'm not going to name names or sites, but I can tell you that, having worked in the industry, there are a handful of very popular sites that do not fact check and do not run corrections. It should come as no surprise that these sites also make most of their revenue on click bait.
  
  So what can we do?
  
  
• Do not click on clickbait. Look at the headline of an article and ask yourself - Is this going to help me understand or know more about gaming?
  
  
• Do not comment on inflammatory articles. This only gives toxic clickbait more views.
  
  
• Question sources. What are the facts that the author is asserting? Where did they get these facts? Did they talk to the developer/publisher?
  
  
• Question credentials. Who wrote this article? What is their qualification? What kind of articles do they typically write? Have they contacted the publisher/developer to get the facts?
  
  
• Question authority. Who is writing this? Do they have special knowledge? Do they have special access?
  
  
• Tell authors and editors when you see clickbait and you don't like it. Do this through Twitter - not through the site. Do not contribute to toxic comments sections.
  
  
• If you find a factual error in an article, tell the author. Do this for Twitter. They will probably censor you in the comments section.
  
  
• Comment on articles that are well-written and contain facts and thank the author.
  
  It's a huge effort, but a lot of the toxicity in the gaming community comes from ignorance. And that ignorance is driven, willfully or not, by clickbait.
  
  
  At the end of the day, there's just not that much gaming news. So someone has to stir up drama to fill columns and drive clicks.
  
  EDIT -- This is a great book that covers some of this subject matter. Very quick read.
  
  http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285
  
  To be clear, I am not affiliated with this book and am not using Amazon affiliate to make money on clicks/purchases of this book. I think it's a great resource for people who would like to know more about this topic.

I can think of a few

• Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" - WHY and how whole empires fall
  
  
• Niall Ferguson's "The Ascent of Money" - How money rules the world - here's how.
  
  
• Jarred Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" - his thesis might not be entirely correct - but it's a VERY fair look at how our history was influenced by these factors.
  
  
• Bruce Bueno De Mesquita's - "The Predictioneer's Game" - - How quantitative models are SCARILY accurate
  
  
• Emanuel Derman's "Models Behaving Badly" - And how sometimes quantitative models are totally wrong.
  
  
• Paul Roberts - "The End of Oil" - Probably the most serious and balanced read on what could be one of the most important economic problems facing our modern civilization in the next 20 years.
  
  
• Frank & Cook's "Winner Take All Society" - and why things are a problem.
  
  
• Richard Florida's "The Great Reset" - Florida is a pretty good author all around - far better than some others in the pitch.
  
  
• James Bamford's amazing "Body of Secrets" - Not all our enemies are external, and sometimes our allies turn out to actually be thuggish & deadly enemies.
  
  
• Iris Chang's "The Rape of Nanking" - Nobody here is exactly as they appear.
  
  
• Carl Sagan's "A Demon Haunted World"
  
  
• Robin Marantz Henig's "A Monk in the Garden" - Yeah - the priest that proved Darwin's theory, in 1865.....oh yeah and he invented statistics along the way.
  
  
• Brian Sykes' "The seven Daughters of Eve"
  
  
• Douglas Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" - Every page is practically amazing - a collection of amazing old articles from Dr. H's work
  
  
• Kristina Borjesson's edit of "Into the Buzzsaw" - the hard truth about a couple of things in the US media
  
  
• Richard Dawkins' "Climbing Mount Improbable" - a great work about such an amazing idea.
  
  
• Kim Sterelny's "Dawkins vs. Gould" - this is a REAL debate about evolution!
  

> In order to bring in enough money to live, I'd probably have to advertise […]

My main point is that word-of-mouth can be very powerful, viral advertising. I highly recommend reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

> […] and work with unknown clients. That's when things get stressful and annoying.

My secondary point is that if you're aquiring clients through closer connections such as friends, friends of friends, or even friends of friends of friends, yes, they will be progressively more "unknown" and "untrustworthy" but it's still (in my opinion) the best method of finding the most trustworthy first.

What have you got to lose? Not much, when you consider the flexible time schedule. That is, start with a full-time job supporting you financially, and do freelance work in your (little) free time until you reach a point where you can support yourself with a part-time job plus freelancing. From there you can try progressing to supporting yourself mostly or fully with freelance work.

> That's when things get stressful and annoying.

So, your present job is neither stressful nor annoying?

>Veterans unemplotement is currently around 30%, so I would argue that the provate sector is that shallow. Some businesses are very helpful and respectful towards the men and women who have served this nation, but most, sadly, aren't. And you're right, college degrees do not automatically create success. But, college grad. unemployment is around 4% right now, while non-college educated people have an unemployment above 10%.

Even if we sent all of those unemployed veterans to college (or all of the other non-college educated), they would still face a stagnant job market with a college degree. That’s why we must seek policies that favor robust, but sound, economic expansion. Even if we assume the private sector is that shallow, which it’s not, the best way to force their hand is to generate so much growth that demand for labor outstrips supply. Siphoning more and more of their operating capital and/or increasingly regulating every corner of business simply cannot logically have this effect.

>These are not jobs added, and they would be jobs whether the tax rates on the rich are 1% or 50%.

These are jobs added/maintained. It’s simple supply/demand in this case: when more people can afford yachts, cabins in exotic locations, expensive cars, and other luxury items, demand increases. Given the prospect of profit, supply responds by increasing as well. Supply increasing doesn’t mean only existing firms expand, it also means new firms open in hopes of soaking up some of the increasing market. By taxing, you’re diminishing the demand for these products by reducing the amount of consumers who are capable of purchasing these luxury products. When demand falls, supply must respond as well: downsizing, layoffs, bankruptcies, etc. The reason is simply that the demand market for these goods can no longer sustain the existing crop of suppliers. This concept applies across the entire economy over every sector. Some firms would stay, but more would fall the more we reduce income.

> Why should we all be slaves to the rich? Why should all of oour jobs depend on what they choose to pruchese or not purchase?

We’re not slaves nor are all of our jobs dependent on what they choose to purchase. I’m only highlighting that wealthy individuals do fully/partially support certain sectors of our economy. Enormous sectors of the economy are largely supported by lower-income individuals as well: Goodwill Industries and other discount clothing retailers like TJ Maxx, McDonalds, Dollar Tree, flea-markets, etc. all quickly come to mind. Similarly, large portions of our economy are supported by the middle class” most automotive companies, casual dining restaurants, Polo Ralph Lauren, American Eagle, etc. come to mind. Importantly, though, this only represents the consumer side of our economy and not the more-important capital-investment side, but I’ll just leave it at that for now.

>They were going into bankrupcy and then government came in, and loaned them money, which they payed back, and are now workign at a profit for. Government was not in control of them under teh Bush years when thigns got fucked up to shit. Obama's stimulus package saved us from a depression, but if it was bigger, I would argure that it could have saved us from a recession.

They didn’t pay all of it back. The government still owns large shares of GM and Ally Bank, for example. Tax payers are expected to lose over 25 billion on the former. The amount of worldwide derivative debt is even larger than in 2008 (ie, the “too big to fail” banks are only bigger). All of this was only made possible by government attempting to circumvent the natural market regulation, the profit-loss incentive, which would’ve punished the firms with real bankruptcy for their mistakes and allowed their capital to redistribute to more efficient uses. Instead, their inefficient and dangerous activities were only reinforced by government, and thus they will continue until market forces ultimately win out and another bubble bursts.

Furthermore, our economic instability far pre-dates Bush and Obama. The prevailing economic philosophy, Keynesianism, in this nation has largely been unchanged since the Progressive era and all of our woes have simply been compounding. The only difference really is that the philosophy has been painted red or blue, Republican or Democrat, and called “conservative” or “liberal”. We won’t fix the economy until we fix the philosophy, which is why a large number of libertarians favor the polar-opposite philosophy of Austrian economics.

Ultimately, I think a lot of the disconnect here, as it is with the rest of the typical capitalists and the anti-capitalists is a misunderstanding of real capitalism and the result of capitalist policies. The GOP has done a wonderful job of completely misrepresenting what it means to stand for free-markets and the Democrats have done an equally wonderful job of exploiting that flawed portrayal. For that reason and since we’re limited to responding to only specific pieces of the larger argument in defense of capitalism, I strongly recommend you read these books to understand where we’re coming from. The first three are available for free (Bastiat’s are both less than 100 pages as well). These five books, along with several others, are what turned me from a born and raised neoconservative war-mongering Republican to a Libertarian today.

• Frederic Bastiat’s The Law
  
• Henry Hazlitt’s Economics In One Lesson -- refutes a long list of common economic fallacies
  
• Frederic Bastiat’s That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen
  
• Tom Wood’s Meltdown -- examines the cause of the 2008 housing crisis
  
• Burt Folsom Jr.’s New Deal or Raw Deal -- examines how government stimulus does not promote recovery
  

Don't bother with a 4 year Comp Sci degree or any 4 year degree if you're looking to become a programmer. I've done software engineering for the last 9 years without a degree and without massive debt. Life is much better and you will learn skills that you'll need later.

You need to be able to teach yourself programming skills because of the nature of the job. Teach yourself a few languages which cover various paradigms of languages. Start with more practical ones like Python, then move towards languages that will teach you to solve problems differently like FORTH or Squeak.

Understand what your fellow software people will expect of you. Move towards being a more competent programmer. Build things that are just slightly larger than anything you've built before - but finish your projects before you start a new one and don't let your eyes get bigger than your stomach. If you want to work with smaller businesses, learn a breadth of skills. If you want to work with large companies, find something you have a serious interest in and exploit it until you're a specialist in that domain. Pay heavy attention to design. Software is not a strictly technical field like accounting.

Most importantly, have fun with it. You will gain the ability to create amazing things without worrying about the cost of resources or building materials.

>Anybody in the bitcoin sphere delve deep into what economies actually look like and function using bitcoin as default world currency/reserve?

No. We're all just a bunch of "lambo moon boys" and none of us have any formal study or experience in the world of economics. ^(/s)

You do realise that this is a multi-billion dollar industry? A lot of very smart people have spent a lot of time and effort examining this from many angles.

If you want a good introduction to what a world based on Bitcoin might look like, I'd recommend starting off with forgetting about Bitcoin specifically and first reading some of the basic works from the Austrian economists such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Once those concepts are in your head (whether you agree with them or not), then move on to "The Bitcoin Standard" by Saifedean Ammous (which also spends over half the book not talking about Bitcoin before it finally does; for good reason).

The reason I suggest to start off with the Austrian economists is that you need to first realise that you've got a lot of assumptions that might not necessarily be grounded in reality. One of the most common that I see for example is people saying, "deflation is bad!" as a general rule without further context. I agree that under our current economic model, deflation causes significant issues, but things that are true under our current model are not necessarily true under every model.

>Any experts that talk about the reality of Bitcoin adoption?

As above, Dr Ammous is an economist with multiple degrees in relevant fields. I think he qualifies as at least one kind of expert.

There's also myself, but since you don't know who I am and I have no intention of linking my pseudonym to my real name, any credentials I say that I hold are something you'd just have to trust me on, and I fully understand you have no reason to.

>And also, what will psychological make people trust a newly created digital asset class? It's untested.

Everything new is untested and untrusted at some point and over time this changes. I've seen enough "new tech" in my lifetime to know that this really isn't such an issue.

>And whether true or not people will assume it's 'so-called' security will eventually be compromised as just about every technology becomes obsolete and has breaches. I'm talking public opinion.

This is a combination of education and experience. Everybody knows that theoretically banks can get hacked, but they still trust their money to the bank. Even if they wrongly assume that Bitcoin is somehow able to completely compromised (and this definitely is wrong, because it's based on a false assumption of how the network operates), they only need to trust it to a similar or greater level than their bank in order to be willing to use it. And for that trust to be built, it only takes enough time of the system not being compromised.

>Empirical methodology is about running regressions in order to establish causal or at least predictive relationships within the dataset.

Perhaps this is what empirical rigor means in practice, but the view that this is what empirical rigor should mean is ultimately untenable.

Josh Angrist might re-assert /u/OMG_TRIGGER_WARNING's question like this: it doesn't matter if X predicts Y almost with certainty, if tomorrow some policy change will cause the relationship to fall apart entirely. Causality is more important than correlation, because causality is the only true test of an actual economic model. Moreover, causality isn't something that you get from matching your data with some DSGE equations, finding p<.00001 with Newey-West standard errors, then passing a Hausman test. Unless you have a plausible quasi-experiment with a tight chain of causality, you have nothing except a statistical relationship. You can't even identify a diagram like X -> Y -> Z -> X.

There is a sort of nihilism in that worldview. If someone makes a valid criticism that breaks your chain of causality, there's no honest response except to ask for a suspension of disbelief. When all's said and done, you're not allowed to believe anything except local average treatment effects (LATEs) from randomized experiments. I don't see this as a useful standard to hold every single piece of empirical research to, because it's unreasonably demanding.

That's why I would agree with your general response, since I think macro is useful. This is because of one of the other reasons you've mentioned - there seems to be a sort of stationarity in the data where predictive relationships remain stable for a while. That's where I permit some suspension of disbelief. I think that makes me relatively lax, but I don't see a better alternative to answering the kinds of questions macroeconomists and policymakers need to ask. I might rephrase your answer to OP's question like this: macro is useful if we're OK accepting a lower standard for what constitutes useful information. There is use for statistical relationships which we hope will continue into the future but which aren't, currently, causally founded.

Another "lunches" book to read after the first is Powershell Toolmaking in a month of lunches there's another book coming out on the matter of Scripting later this year.

Also, for reference see if you can get Powershell in Action

It was written by the man who architected and designed the bloody thing, so you're in good hands. I've not read it cover to cover, but it's certainly the definitive reference on the subject.

All above books rated 5/5 stars on amazon by a lot of people.

If you're so bogged down, stitched up and scared to even think about automating anything, then I'd absolutely recommend The Phoenix Project this is the paradigm shift IT has gone through over the past decade. Essentially, IT has taken on board efficiency and best practices that have been standard in the manufacturing industry for decades, to incredible success.

Seriously, "Bag of Nails" IT shops are on their way out. If they're that unwilling to take a step back and do things the smart way, they're a shit company to work for. Learn about technical debt and why it's critical to pay it off.

DevOps and Site Reliability are in essence the latest buzzwords in IT service management, but there's a lot of positive change going on in the industry off the back of it. There's a sort of productivity Gold Rush.

If you're bogged down your current job sounds like the perfect place to cut your teeth and leapfrog off the back of it to move into a better organisation who wants to work smart.

Have fun!

I'm a Political Methodologist; I'm happy to give you some help. It would be useful to know what your mathematical background is, and what sort of things you're interested in doing. You have to understand, to me, this question is a little bit like "I'm interested in American Politics; suggest an introductory text, please." There's a huge variety of stuff going on here, it's hard to know where to start.

Do you want to be able to read statistics wrt PoliSci? Or are you interested in figuring out how everything works, so that you can create / replicate?

If you want something very undergraduate centric, my undergrad research methods class used the Kellstedt and Whitten book. It was fine, but obviously very rudimentary. It will get you to understand some of the big picture type stuff, as well as some of the simple statistical nuts and bolts you'd want to understand. This class also used the everpresent King, Keohane and Verba text, which is oriented around qualitative work, but Gary King is the foremost quantitative methodologist in the discipline, so it's still pretty good (and "qualitative" certainly doesn't mean "non-rigorous" -- it's cited a lot because it really delves into deeply into research design). That said, I don't remember a whole lot about this class anymore, and I haven't looked in these books for ages. My feeling is that both of these books will probably be close to what you're looking for -- they're oriented around intuition and identifying the main issues in inference in the social sciences, without getting too bogged down in all of the math.

That said, if you have more math background, I'd suggest Mostly Harmless Econometrics which is often used as a first year graduate level quant methods book. It's absolutely fantastic, but it isn't easy if you don't have the math background. It may also assume some preexisting rudimentary probability or statistical knowledge. I'd also suggest the Morgan and Winship. These two books are structured more around causal inference, which is a subtle reframing of the whole "statistics in the social sciences".

For more nuts and bolts econometrics, Baby Wooldridge is one of the standards. I think it's pretty often used in undergrad econ classes.

In general, though, statistics is statistics, so if you want to learn it, find an appropriate level of statistics/econometrics book.

Take a look at those books in your library/online/etc and see if any of them are what you're looking for.

I love the crap out of books. One of life's greatest joys is learning and books are such an excellent way to do it.

Business books you should read:

• Zero To One by Peter Thiel - Short, awesome ideas and well written.
  
  
• My Startup Life by Ben Casnocha. Ben's a super sharp guy. Learn from him. He started a company in his teens. He was most recently the personal 'body man' for Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn)
  
  
• The Lean Startup by Eric Reis - Fail fast and fail early. Build something, test, get feedback, and refine.
  
  Non Business Books (That Are Essential To Business
  
  
• Money Master The Game by Tony Robbins - I am a personal finance Nerd Extraordinaire and I thought Tony Robbins was a joke. Boy was I wrong. Hands down the best personal finance book I've ever read. Period.
  
  
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Ever seen Gladiator? This is the REAL Roman Emperor behind Russel Crowe's character. This book was his private diary.
  
  
• Man's Search For Meaning by Victor Frankl - Hands down one of the most profound and moving books ever written. Victor was a psychologist and survived the Nazi training camps
  
  As a way of background I have newsletter where I share proven case studies of successful entrepreneurs. I outline step by step how they made money and got freedom from their day job. If you’re interested let me know and I can PM you the link to the newsletter or if you have any questions.

I don't know of any that compare, but, the Napoleon's Buttons is SUPPOSED to be good.

http://www.amazon.com/Napoleons-Buttons-Molecules-Changed-History/dp/1585423319/

Other books, engineering related, that I liked are:

Norm Lieberman's Process Troubleshooting books, the guy cracks me up!

Working Guide to Process Equipment (3rd edition probably cheaper): http://www.amazon.com/Working-Guide-Process-Equipment-Fourth/dp/0071828060/

Process Equipment Malfunctions (not as good as the other one, some overlap, but still worthwhile, and covers more breadth for individual issues): http://www.amazon.com/Process-Equipment-Malfunctions-Techniques-Identify/dp/0071770208/

The Prize (mentioned above): http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1439110123/ref=redir_mdp_mobile/188-3799228-4803548

The Quest (Follow on to The Prize): http://www.amazon.com/Quest-Energy-Security-Remaking-Modern/dp/0143121944/

Oil 101: http://www.amazon.com/Oil-101-Morgan-Downey/dp/0982039204/

The Mythical Man Month (Not engineering directly as it pertains to software, but, projects and project management are huge in engineering, though this book is timeless): http://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Software-Engineering-Anniversary/dp/0201835959/

Piping Systems Manual (You can NEVER know enough about pipe!): http://www.amazon.com/Piping-Systems-Manual-Brian-Silowash/dp/0071592768/

Pumps and Pumping Operations (OMG it is $4, hardcover, go buy now! This book is great... did you know OSU didn't teach their Chem E's about pumps? I was flabbergasted, gave this to our intern and he became not a scrub by learning about pumps!): http://www.amazon.com/Pumping-Operations-Prentice-Pollution-Equipment/dp/0137393199/

Any good engineer needs to understand MONEY too:

The Ascent of Money: http://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/dp/0143116177/

It's Nial Fergesuon, who has had his own series of dramas and dumb stuff. The Ascent of Money has a SLIGHT libertarian tinge... but it wasn't bad enough that I didn't enjoy it. I consider it a history book, and he attempts to write it like one.

Have fun!

Well, perhaps the most famous, and certainly the most influential, is the Dying Earth series by Jack Vance. Not only are the original books by Vance still available, but there was also a recent anthology by many famous SF authors set in the same milieu.

Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is the next most famous work. Amazing stuff and highly recommended.

I can also recommend Hiero's Journey (and its sequel) as perfect examples of what you're looking for. One catch, though, is that these are out of print now. Very entertaining if you can find them (second hand copies available easily enough online).

And of course there are the Shanara books.

I recommend Gene Wolfe's masterpiece The Book of the New Sun, easily my favourite fantasy work alongside AoIaF and LotR. Wolfe is not that well known about fantasy readers, but he deserves a top spot; Neil Gaiman calls him his hero.

The New Sun is wonderfully dense and complex, easily as complex as ASoIaF. The writing is superb (at a much higher literary level than Martin), with plenty of violence and darkness and weirdness. It starts out deceptively like a straight-faced sword and sorcery novel, and then it gets… complicated. It's notable for deconstructing traditional sword-and-sorcery fantasy and turning the heroic epic on its head. It's fairly gritty, and deals with amorality in a way which can be off-putting to some. Its plot is positively panoramic, spanning a huge amount of time. It even has a bit of apparent time travel, in a good way.

It's a single novel, comes in five volumes (with hoary cover art, just ignore it) plus an extra volume written later that is not mandatory reading. If you like New Sun, Wolfe has two series set in the same universe that could be considered sequels, and which together comprise a sort of thematic trilogy about the nature of identity and narrative.

Beyond intermediate texts, my classes ended up just reading papers from econ journals. You may want to pick up an econometrics text, get familiar with the methods, then read papers (here is a list of the 100 most cited).

I wrote my opinions on econometric textbooks I've used for another reddit comment, so I just pasted it in below. If you get into it, I'd recommend reading a less rigorous book straight through, then using a more rigorous text as reference or to do the practice stuff.

Less Mathematically Rigorous

• Kennedy - survey of modeling issues without the math. More about how to think about modeling rather than how do it. Easy to read, I liked it
  
  
• Angrist - similar to Kennedy, covers the why & how econometrics answers questions, very little math. Each chapter starts with a hitchhikers guide to the galaxy quote, which is fun. Just as good as Kennedy
  
  
• Long - this book is more about just "doing stuff" and presenting results, absolutely non-technical, but also dodges the heavy thinking in Angrist & Kennedy so I wasn't a big fan
  
  
• King - covers the thinking of Angrist & content of Maddala. It is more accessible but wordier, so give it a go if Kennedy or Angrist are too much. It is aimed at Poli Sci rather than econ.
  
  Middle of the Road
  
  
• Gujarati - I used this for a class. It wasn't hard to follow, but it mostly taught methodology and the how/why/when/what, and I didn't like that - a little too "push button" and slow moving.
  
  
• Woodlridge - a bit more rigorous than Gujarati, but it was more interesting and was clearer about motivations from the standpoint of interesting problems
  
  
• Cameron & Trivedi - I liked the few chapters I read, the math is there, but the methodology isn't driven by the math. I ddin't get too far into it
  
  More Mathematically Rigorous
  
  
• Greene - lots of math, so much it was distracting for me, but probably good for people who really want to learn the methodology
  
  
• Wooldridge - similar to Greene, you need a solid understanding before diving into this book. Some of the chapters are impenetrable
  
  
• Maddala - this book is best for probit/logit/tobit models and is somewhat technical but dated. My best econometrics teacher loved it

I honestly think any kind of customer service. That is where I was able to develop a lot of soft skills. Volunteering for a nonprofit thrift shop or something like that would give you a good start and would be minimal hours.

In addition, taking on a leadership role in anything (a local chapter of rotary, etc.) can be very good experience.

That being said, a certain amount of soft skills will have to do with personality type and personal motivation. I was personally motivated to go out of my way to attain leadership positions throughout my high school and college years and have been overall successful with it.

One book I see recommended a lot is How to Win Friends and Influence People. Dale Carnegie has a lot of other books as well that pertain to your interests.

Also, my work has a special obsession with The Checklist Manifesto and The Advantage. The equity firm that owns my company requires all managers and higher ups to read those two books, so obviously they've got something going for them!

>So Bitcoin’s main goal is to let people use their money when/how/where they want and replace or bypass the banking system of the world?

Bitcoin has no main goal. It's just a ledger. It trustlessly moves tokens on a digital ledger between parties that don't trust each other.

>Is there an endless amount of Bitcoin available to the world ie printing paper and susceptible to inflation/deflation?

Bitcoin is deflationary. There will only ever be 21 million coins. A certain number are mined every 10 minutes. Every ~4 years the distribution amount halves (we call this the halvening).

>“Okay I’m ready to buy some bitcoin but this site is charging a fee for my purchase”. Where is a good place to buy bitcoin from the U.S. without having to pay a fee?

Limit orders on a professional exchange like Coinbase Pro or Gemini often have low/no fees. This is the best way to go about it.

>What is the state of Bitcoin ie is it close to being recognized as a form of currency on the world stage and from governments? If not, what would it take for Bitcoin to surpass say an entire continents financial system and maintain a regular usage instead of paper notes?

World governments are very differing in their positions on Bitcoin. Iran for example isn't a big fan. Venezuela's government isn't either, but their citizens are. The G5 countries are tolerating (and taxing) crypto earnings. The SEC is regulating some of the projects in the space. Merchants do accept it for payment, but the tax structure makes it harder to spend as a day-to-day currency currently. Calculating capital gains on every purchase of coffee is a PITA.

>Can Bitcoin handle Billions of people using the system for daily use? Is this where other crypto currency’s come into play to fill the void of an overloaded system?

Right now? No. But Bitcoin is scaling up slowly. Other crypto currencies are mostly pump/dump scams that serve no real purpose. They would have issues scaling up to a large payment network without compromising decentralization. Check out the lightning network, segwit, schnorr signatures a bit technical, but you can find some great summaries.

>Does Bitcoin become the “gold standard” and nations start to utilize hoarding Bitcoin or will it turn into nations valuing their own currency against Bitcoin like the world values everything against the USD? (If that last part makes sense)

Here's a great book. https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Alternative-Central/dp/1119473861

I'm still a young C# developper, around 3 years of C# for websites and APis for small and big companies, but it's not because your predecessors built an in-house framework that this is the right way to build a system. C# is a great language but it shine thanks to the core orientation of productivity delivered by the .NET framework and ASP.MVC.


Of course if your needs are so specifics that you want a custom framework, don't forget that it will become a HR problem. Talented people rarely want to jail themselves to a company and build a specific set of skills that can't be transferred.


But as I said, I'm young. I do think that we are living on the shoulders of giants and that not everything need to be rebuilt. Some of the coolest techs we've seen these past years around containers and micro-services were actually already implemented in the 70's.

That said, I didn't read this book, so I will read it and predictably learn a lot of things. If you didn't already, I would recommend the following books. They aren't C# specific but will help you in the environment you are describing:

• [Working Effectively with Legacy Code] (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0131177052/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)
  A mountain of pattern for common uses cases to improve stability and efficiency of legacy apps.
  
• [The Phoenix Project]
  (https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262509/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1498813798&sr=8-1&keywords=the+phoenix+project)
  An inspiring guide on how to work and migrate from waterfall project toward a more predictable project management methodology.

Both time series and regression are not strictly econometric methods per se, and there are a range of wonderful statistics textbooks that detail them. If you're looking for methods more closely aligned with econometrics (e.g. difference in difference, instrumental variables) then the recommendation for Angrist 'Mostly Harmless Econometrics' is a good one. Another oft-prescribed econometric text that goes beyond Angrist is Wooldridge 'Introductory Econometrics: A Modern Approach'.

For a very well considered and basic approach to statistics up to regression including an excellent treatment of probability theory and the basic assumptions of statistical methodology, Andy Field (and co's) books 'Discovering Statistics Using...' (SPSS/SAS/R) are excellent.

Two excellent all-rounders are Cohen and Cohen 'Applied Multiple Regression/Correlation Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences' and Gelman and Hill 'Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Modelling' although I would suggest both are more advanced than I am guessing you need right now.

For time series I can recommend Rob Hyndman's book/s on forecasting (online copy freely available)

For longitudinal data analysis I really like Judith Singer's book 'Applied Longitudinal Data Analysis'.

It sounds however as if you're looking for a bit of a book to explain why you would want to use one method over another. In my experience I wanted to know this when I was just starting. It really comes down to your own research questions and the available data. For example I had to learn Longitudinal/fixed/random effects modelling because I had to do a project with a longitudinal survey. Only after I put it into practice (and completed my stats training) did I come to understand why the modelling I used was appropriate.

Happy belated birthday. I finally have some time to respond to this when I'm at the office and have relevant things handy.

Books to read:

• 
  
  
• The Board Member's Book: Making a Difference in Voluntary Organizations by Brian O'Connell, published by the Foundation Center. If you only read one of these books, read this one. Despite the title, this book is about creating and using good volunteers at all levels. For organizations I work with, every time a new "class" of volunteers comes in, I like to give all of them copies of this book and have a few discussions about it.
  
  
• Developing Dynamic Boards by James Hardy. This book is more focused on the board of directors, and it's very detailed-- a good textbook and road map.
  
  
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. This one may even have been translated into Estonian. In brief, it's a system for looking at big processes and finding the places where your effort can make a difference.
  
  
• Good To Great: Why some companies make the leap and others don't by Jim Collins. This book looks at factors that create success or failure in growing organizations.
  
  
  

I'd like to post just a bit of clarification on this expiration from a developer perspective - firstly with some addition details on the code-signing certificates specifically and secondly some speculation on how oculus got here.

Example

Think of this scenario - you have an application that you built and seldom release updates, maybe once per year. Additionally, you don't have an auto update mechanism in your application so your users have to seek out an update. This means some users may never update, some may update every 3 or 4 versions, or some may update every version.

Even if you are diligent on keeping your certificates up to date, you can't go back and put the new certs in old versions of your software as the public key is baked into the executable. What this means is inevitably your code signing certificate will be renewed and some users will have software with an old, expired certificate. This is why the certificate timestamp mechanism exists - the certificate says "this executable was produced by ABC Software on 1/1/2010" but the countersignature/timestamp says "this signature was valid on 1/1/2010 when it was signed and verified by Symantec on 1/1/2010".

Oculus Speculation

Now, with all that said above one of the things I left out was the amount of details that go into building and releasing software. Many times these details are figured out once and then put into an automated build system such as TeamCity, Jenkins, or TFS. Many times when a process like a build gets automated, it gets handed off at some point and all the details that led up to its creation are no longer in someone's head. This can lead to details getting dropped or missed even when they're extremely important. More than likely the certificate signing is deep in the build chain and the details are obscured.

One important thing to mention is Oculus DOES have an automatic update mechanism in their software so deploying updated executables with renewed certs is much easier for them. This doesn't mean that their renewed cert gets added to their build chain but that they at least have the ability to push updates more regularly than my example.

Does this excuse Oculus? Not at all, but I don't believe there should be calls for people to resign over something like this. While it's an unfortunate outage, this is a great opportunity to teach an individual engineer (or set of build engineers/managers) and learn as an organization. Rest assured mistakes like this happen all the time especially when automated processes and approvals are in the chain without a checklist at the end of the process. One of the books we recommend to our clients when we are going through process and quality improvement is The Checklist Manifesto. For some insight into what might be going on at Oculus right now this is a great youtube video about debugging in production by Bryan Cantrill, a former Sun engineer who is now CTO at Joyent

It's hard to go back and try to find what really clicked about Bitcoin. I had kind of a background on network security and cryptography (although not at the level to be a Bitcoin developer myself, unfortunately...).

I first heard about Bitcoin on the Security Now podcast probably in 2013 and completely ignored it. I didn't know anything about investing, money or the economy so I just didn't care.

Later in 2015/2016 I started to hear about it again. I was starting to get interested in economy, finance, valuation and all that stuff. So I've tried to read the wikipedia article about Bitcoin and didn't understand any of it. Public ledger and all that stuff...

Then finally I've stumbled on the original Bitcoin whitepaper. Read it. Loved it.

I was lucky enough to have just enough background in cryptography to understand it. It's very well written, very easy to read. You should read it if you haven't done it already. I believe you only need to have an idea of what a hash function is and what public key cryptography is to understand it pretty well.

Then I've started to dive into the question of "What is money?". Everyone will have a different opinion on it. In my opinion money is just a technology to help people make transactions and if possible to store some value that can be used in the future...

I've read The Bitcoin Standard which is kind of interesting and the famous post Shelling Out: The Origins of Money by Nick Szabo which some people believe might be the real Satoshi Nakamoto.

I really don't care if some economists believe that money needs "intrinsic value" or it needs to be "backed" by something. If you are trading it for goods and services and you can store it it is some sort of money.

And then there are some properties that makes some money more desirable than another.

Some of the properties of Bitcoin are very similar to the properties that make gold a good store of value. It is kind of neutral, nobody controls it, there's a limit amount of it. But it adds a lot of stuff that can make it better than gold:

• It's digital.
  
• Easier to transact.
  
• Easier to transport.
  
• Easier to conceal.
  
• You can travel with millions in Bitcoin without being noticed, without putting yourself or your family at risk (just imagine if you're running from war in your country)
  
• Easier to prove you own it.
  
• Easier to prove it's real and not a counterfeit.
  
• When demand goes higher you can't create more supply of it. (You can produce more physical gold by using more miners and machines when demand goes higher. But you can't create more Bitcoins/time)
  
• You are not dependent on monetary policies that change over time and might be subject to political and social influence. The monetary policy was defined on its creation. No one can change it.
  
• Bitcoins stock-to-flow will be greater than gold on the next halving. And will keep doubling every 4 years.
  
  I can certainly remember some more properties that make it more interesting than gold. But of course it doesn't have the track record. It just didn't exist 1000 year ago... It is not a good electrical conductor and it is not shinny and beautiful. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
  
  Bitcoin might not work out but it looks like a good asymmetrical bet to take. Gold current market cap is around $7 Trillion. Bitcoin's market cap is around $150 Billion...

Sure!

This is kind of long, but it's the first video I watched. It gives you a nice intro into his thoughts, his style, and who he is. It's from the 1990's, but a lot of it still utterly relevant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2hPQ86lGV0

If you want something a little bit shorter, this is very good recent one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SDLBqIubCs

Also, it's a thick book, but Basic Economics is mind blowingly good.
https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465060730/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1491578598&sr=8-1&keywords=basic+economics

Sowell covers a lot of issues, and I don't always agree with him, but he is highly intelligent, he makes very logical and persuasive arguments. When I was more left leaning, one of the things that started to change me was the examination of economics. I watched Sowell and found that I could not disagree with him, hence the red pill.

Interestingly, when I debate friends who are form the left, usually referencing Sowell's point stumps people. I don't know why, but a lot of people seem to have shaky basis for their economic positions, but economics is very important when taking into account who we are (and have been) as a nation, and what's in the national interest.

Your opinion isn't how capitalism works.

I actually wrote a paper that touches on this topic a little bit. Here is an excerpt. I site this book throughout it.

"The book uses the example of Brad Pit being an insurance salesman rather than an actor. It explains how he is “one of a handful of people in the world who can ‘open’ a movie”(13) and how “millions of people around the world will go see a film just because Brad Pit is in it.”(13) It would therefore be a waste of his talents to sell insurance. There are many people who are able to sell insurance, but very few who can ‘open’ a movie with such high rates of success. This is why Brad Pit is paid so much money."

Similarly, (and I don't want to dismiss the hard work of many around the world but...) it is more likely that an individual will become a scientist than the next great basketball player or superstar of sorts. My point is that these people are valued more because they, in and of themselves are a very valuable commodity to many companies. In the brad pit example, a ton of companies would want him in a movie because he can basically guarantee that movie's success and make hundreds of millions of dollars.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

http://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296

If you want to build a better future, you must believe in secrets.

The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things.

Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we're too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice. Information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself.

Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. Tomorrow's champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today's marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique.

Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places.

Ok, possibly secret nugget of awesome: Tad Williams' Otherland series. Starts off fairly slow but when it gets going, you're in for a good, long ride, as there are four books in the series, each with nearly 1000 pages.

Also, Connie Willis has a clever, almost frenetic writing style that I really enjoy. I particularly liked To Say Nothing of the Dog but she has a number of novels that involve her own particular take on time travel.

An older classic that not everyone reads, Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. Like Frank Herbert, Wolfe definitely writes for adults, and also like Herbert it's hard to say whether what he has to say is really significant or if he's just pulling philosophy from his ass.

> You mentioned our GDP. 2/3 of our GDP comes from consumer spending.

Consumer spending and the output of the economy is impacted by how much people have to pay for gas, heat, oil, etc ENORMOUSLY(think about how much the average citizen spends on gas throughout a year and then think about them spending that on other things). Like I said you are uneducated in subject matters that are essential to comment on these matters and you are going to go on as if you aren't. All while arguing a position no analyst in the world would(hyperbole).

https://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/dp/0143116177/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1466453148&sr=8-1&keywords=Ascent+of+money

https://www.amazon.com/Prize-Epic-Quest-Money-Power/dp/1439110123/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1466453203&sr=8-1&keywords=The+prize

Read these two books and you will have a clearer picture of this macro picture I was referring to and you will understand how absurd your position is. The ascent of money was made into a pbs documentary, albeit a 4 hour one. It doesn't do the book justice though.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ascentofmoney/

The Prize was a Pulitzer Prize, non fiction book that will educate you on oil and why the middle east is important.

https://careers.state.gov/work/foreign-service/suggested-reading
Click on the suggested reading list on that page.

To get the whole macro picture I was referring to, read these books. You may want to start with their recommended International Relations textbook. These are books the State Department recommends you read if you are going to negotiate and do diplomacy on behalf of United States government(pretty hardcore stuff).


Best of luck with your studies/investigations and enjoy the rabbit hole, it really is an eye opener into another world that is not really discussed in the media.

That book? nothing but scaremongering. returning to the gold standard? what a crock of shit. Tell me, what is the difference between gold and fiat currency? can you eat gold? can you live in it? can you burn it? Anything useful? no, you can't. Fiat currency works fine as long as their is a perceived value, much like the gold standard, but with the ability to print more to match growth, and to control inflation.

boom and busts existed long before the creation of the federal reserve, hell, the idea of a federal reserve system isn't purely american, the The Bank of England pre-dates the american one by several hundred years, so idea isn't new and it has been tested out before hand, with great success. Probably something about the Rothschilds in their, wouldn't be surprised if it their was a mention of them. Do you have any idea what the Fed does by any chance? You know what they do?

1. they release US t-bills, sovereign debt, in an attempt to balance the BOP (balance of payments)
   
   
2. they set inflationary goals that they try to meet.
   
   
3. they provide economic data.
   
   
4. they provide short term lending to banks, as a way of injecting cash in to the economy ( i stress the term loan, they arn't giving away the cash)
   
   
5. they attempt to catch bubbles and collapsing banks before they get out of hand.
   
   
   please, read these, they are wonderful reads and provide the bases to understanding economics and public financing.
   
   http://www.amazon.com/The-Wealth-Nations-Adam-Smith/dp/161382081X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335219858&sr=1-1
   
   http://www.amazon.com/General-Theory-Employment-Interest-Money/dp/1467934925/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335219936&sr=1-1
   
   http://www.amazon.com/The-Ascent-Money-Financial-History/dp/0143116177/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335220011&sr=1-1

Hi, Econ undergrad here!

Econ is a little special when it comes to education because the vast majority of books in bookstores and youtube videos are not based on mainstream orthodox economics as you would learn in a university. Most of it is bunk and if you attempt to learn economic theory from youtube you'll probably end up misinforming yourself(It's happened to me firsthand). I would highly recommend you pirate 1 college micro and 1 macro textbooks and go through the math problems chapter by chapter. If you want a quicker intro to econ I highly recommend reading Naked economics since it summarizes intro micro and macro very well.


I wrote up a small explanation on how to debate economics a few days ago. Here's a edited version of why theory is so important.

• First: If you don't have a foundation in theory you won't understand why a policy is favored even if you understand what economists support. What makes the current generation of new Keynesian macro models so great is that by manipulating the microfoundation a economist can adapt the model for different situations and assumptions to get varying accurate solutions.
  
• Second: Models will oftentimes give welfare maximizing answers. Therefore economists who've gone through the math beforehand can just argue about tradeoffs of policies and picking the right model, and not argue about the equations themselves.
  
• Third: The effects of policies vary heavily the longer they're implemented. Using short term models to describe changes decades in the future will oftentimes give wrong results. Some mechanics and theories from econ 101 are used even in advanced macro but you gotta have the intuition to know what is relevant and what is deceptive in order to pick optimal policies.
  
• fourth(not included in previous post): While theory may tell you roughly the effects of policies and their tradeoffs for different groups at the end of the day you still need to make choices between those tradeoffs. A good example is trade policy as theory will tell you in most circumstances that its unambiguously better to lower tariffs and redistribute the efficiency gains to the losers but in practice those who immediately lose will fight with every part of their being to stop greater free trade even if in the long run they'd be better off. That kind of struggle requires political choices in which it may be better to favor the protectionists even if the economics says its not the optimal answer.
  
  
  Edit:
  
  To answer your question of how to form good economic opinions. If you learn micro and macro theory for the short and long term you can use it to form opinions on a wide variety of policies. It's extremely important that you study the long term growth models immediately after you learn the short term growth models as their policy recommendations oftentimes directly contradict.
  
  Edit 2: Changed "current generation of macro models" to "current generation of new keynesian macro models"

If I may - I humbly recommend to read a proper book on bitcoin, not some fluff piece.. Just assuming from the way that you chose your post title that you might be interested in a more substantial bitcoin reading :) Please ignore if that's not the case, don't wanna ruin your reading pleasure or anything.

Economic perspective: The Bitcoin Standard - The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

Not technical at all, very beginner friendly, but also not a lot of practical information: The Internet Of Money

Gently technical, beginner friendly: Inventing Bitcoin: The Technology Behind the First Truly Scarce and Decentralized Money Explained

Technical deep dives:

• Mastering Bitcoin (also available for free online, as it's an open source book)
  
  
• Programming Bitcoin
  
  
• Grokking Bitcoin

>The key difference is that the government controls corporations in China instead of the other way around.

that's interesting. I can't speak to the truth of that claim. but there is a lot of Propaganda in the US and Canada that the opposite is true. Corporations in Canada and the US are literally writing laws now. More so in the states. And there is a concerted effort my right wing media to promote this as a good thing.

>The whole concept centers around getting some people to become super rich first to act as the engine for economic growth

That sounds like the route that south Korea took in the 70's and 80's. This book talks about it.



http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321403002&sr=1-2

Have you heard about this?

My pleasure friend!

Best negotiations I ever had were from me standing my ground and saying "I appreciate the offer, that really is super generous of you, but unfortunately that doesn't work for me." then they end up trying to compromise but if it's enough you need to say something to that effect again. Sometimes you even have to say "no" more than once in a negotiation to get where you need to be.

If you want to get some handy tips for negotiations I highly recommend Never Split the Difference. It's written by a highly successful ex-FBI hostage negotiator and has a wealth of information. I've reread it three times now just to make sure it sticks.

Haiti, Africa, Latin America. These are capitalist countries. And more free market than most (not that true free markets actually exist anywhere).

Many of the countries that have moved from poverty to prosperity did it with capitalism, but they did it with a highly regulated capitalism with large amounts of government regulation. S Korea, Japan, Great Britain, the United States. What then happens is when a country becomes rich with government intervention they then find it is advantageous to deny government intervention to others. They reach the pinnacle. They then kick away the ladder for potential competitors.

Ha Joon Chang's "Bad Samaritans" is a good primer on this.

The Idea Writers - Tons of Case Studies, but they're all told excellently.

It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be - Inspiration not to settl and to do great work.

Baked In - A lot like an updated Purple Cow. All about integrating product, management, and marketing.

Blink or Tipping Point - About the little things that cause shifts in culture to happen.

Also, some Seth Godin action never hurts. Definitely recommend his blog.

If you want more "How to make ads" type stuff there are more down that path, too. Just let me know.

I like your comment. Fair enough. The main reason is a certain frustration due to reading incorrect claims that people repeat because they heard it before, but spent absolutely zero time validating.

I've had a few chats where I tried to educate and share but realized the other person never really researched it much and just kept repeating the same common myths over and over again. "It's a ponzi" "Tulips" "Miners control it" "Same as any other coin" "too slow for coffee" "Criminals" etc, etc without the slightest interest in putting some time to check the facts.

Now and then, someone appears and really wants to learn, which can be satisfying. I'm still learning a lot and also dismissed it as nonsense years ago (wasted time), but at least never claimed to be sure before researching - it was more of a "Meeehhh don't think so, seems nonsense" and that was it. it's fine to be skeptical, I am too, but I don't think it is fine to dismiss things so publicly with these claims, without putting any time into validating them. That is noise. Fake news.


Of course it doesn't help that the "Crypto" scene is full of scams and absolute nonsense. I'm not into "crypto" or "blockchain" in general anymore because with time I realized only BTC (the oldest, longest original chain) was worth taking seriously. All the other tokens/shitcoins are an absolute waste of resources in almost all cases.

If you're curious, I'd recommend checking out these three sources for a start, as they are technically competent and legit:


-Saifedean Ammous' book (mostly about money, but also partially about BTC)

-Andreas Antonopolous videos (half are technical, the rest a bit higher level)

-Jameson Lopp's list of resources (a mix of content)

The learning curve is steep, but very rewarding. After just a bit you won't be producing these posts anymore because they won't feel accurate. That doesn't mean BTC is flawless or guaranteed to succeed, it's still highly experimental, but certainly not the nonsense some claim it to be before looking into it.

Two books may change that outlook:

Growing great people: http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Great-Employees-Extraordinary-Performers/dp/1591841909

Good to great: http://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others/dp/0066620996/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406870853&sr=1-1&keywords=good+to+great

These books will show you that really successful companies never treat their employees as cogs or slaves. The really great companies treat mgmt as a coaching responsibility and most people at these kinds of companies love their employers.

As a manager, your primary responsibilities are retention and recruiting, removing obstacles, and assisting people with their careers. All of that starts with listening.

Leaving aside aside the issue of TRP dating advice vs. 'mainstream' dating advice, what you have written here is not advice.

> Before you go about attracting women, you need to be worth having one attracted to you. Don't be an ass, basically.

This is a great example of non-advice. You don't define any of the key terms you use- attract, worth, ass. It's so vague its meaningless.

> They aren't numbers on a hotness scale. They aren't prizes. They aren't vaginas with a guard-body attached. They are individual people.

Again, while many would agree with you here, this is still just a set of truisms. Even if you phrased it to be advice, "you'll have more success with women if you treat them like people, not objects," it is still basically worthless because of your lack of investigation into what these terms mean. What does it mean to treat someone like a person? If I don't know how to do that, what are some ways I can move forward?

> The important thing to remember about approaching women is that many of them are approached a lot, and not necessarily by nice guys. Many women will reject any kind of approach from a strange man, and there's nothing you can do about it. If you are approaching in a setting where that is not expected (walking down the street), the intrusion is probably unwelcome. You know canvassers who call out to you and try to get you to sign stuff, and you feel awkward about it and avoid their eyes and keep on walking? It's like that.

This section is no doubt a valid statement of your experience, and possibly many other women's as well. Still, no advice to be found. You just say that many women are uncomfortable with being cold approached out of nowhere. Advice would be building on that to advise a specific course of actions. For example, "help women feel more comfortable by doing x, y, or z. Or "So avoid cold approaches and try to meeting women by expanding your social circle."

> Also, to many women, it comes off as offensive. After all, you are literally approaching a random stranger. She knows that a guy approaching her in this context knows nothing about her except that he's attracted to her.
Sex is also a bigger risk to the average woman than the average man. They fear potential rape and violence. There's also the risk of pregnancy. Odds of her enjoying the experience are lower as well.

More of the same here. Just more discussion of what some women's reality may be with no actionable items.

> Why are you trying to have sex? Is it because that's what you want...or are you embarrassed by being a virgin at your age? Is your self-esteem dependent on it? Make sure you aren't trying to solve a completely different problem.

Introspection is very important to self-improvement no argument here. You fail to provide any specifics though. Simply stating the need for introspective thought in regard to people's sex lives is not advice.

> Self-assurance is sexy, and it makes for better relationships. Figure out what an idealized version of you looks like, and aim for it. Get happy.

Seriously? This is what you think of as advice? Imagine going to a therapist and asking for help, and all they give you is 'get happy'. If you ever go over to /r/depression you will find tons of posts complaining about people treating emotional dysfunctional this way. "Why aren't you just happy? Why don't you just get over it? Just find your true self and become that. Become self-confident".

> Google for details, as there's plenty of stuff out there that's better than what I can give you.

When it comes to a point where you might have to give some specifics, you just tell people to google it. I've got news for you. Everyone already knows to do that. You have just passed the advice burden off to a set of algorithms and search engine marketers.

> Be positive, confident, authentic, funny, and friendly. Don't push. Focus on creating an enjoyable interaction instead of trying to pass some kind of test. Also, flirt.

If I am not already positive, how to I adopt this attitude? Same question for every attribute. What is authenticity? What is flirting? How do I flirt effectively? I could go on. There is nothing here that has not been said a thousand times before, or that anyone could make any use of if they are struggling.

> Use dat Google to find lots of info on fashion, exercise, etc. Don't try to be something you're not; instead, find a sexy style that works for you and go for that. Try to make yourself feel sexy.

More passing off advice here. What is a sexy style? Will the kinds of women I am into be into this style or that style? How do I go about feeling sexy if I don't already?

> I like Doctor Nerdlove. Use him.

Imagine if I posted an article to /r/investing or something claiming to have advice about how to get rich. And then just told people to "think big," "companies are more than their credit rating," "many times it will be hard to get into hot private equity deals, but remember, fund managers are people too," "idk google".

Or if my bulimic cousin came to me and asked about how to improve her self-image, and I said "get happy," "be self-assured," "be positive," "start feeling sexy," "idk google it".

I am not sure if you inability to truly advise on this issue is a lack of experience, an by-product of your view on gender relations, lack of strategic insight, or something else. But whatever it is please try to understand that what you have written does not constitute advice.

I highly recommend reading some books on business strategy just to get a sense of what real strategic and tactical advice is. Good Strategy Bad Strategy and Good to Great are decent places to start.


> I like Doctor Nerdlove. Use him.

About the only advice you have given here is to go to people other than you for advice. Which is frankly good advice.

Where are you in economics right now? Undergraduate? Graduate?

Advanced mathematics appears everywhere in economics, though your mileage may vary depending on your definition of "advanced". As a mathematician, I suspect that quantitative finance contains the most advanced mathematics, since in modern mathematics research the majority of interaction with economics is through quantitative finance. But unless you plan on doing the most advanced math, there's more than enough advanced math in non-finance economics to keep you interested.

Generally speaking, professional economists build up some skill in real and functional analysis, as well as a variety of other skills like optimization, stochastics, and PDEs, depending on their specific research interests. These are all graduate-level math topics, so I'd consider them reasonably advanced. Take a look into econ PhD prelim coursework. When I took the sequence, we used the texts Microeconomic Theory by Mas-Colell-Whinston-Green, Recursive Macroeconomic Theory by Ljungqvist and Sargent, and Econometrics by Hayashi. I think they're good springboards for you to evaluate the math in higher economics.

In quantitative finance, I'd maybe start by checking out Portfolio Risk Analysis by Connor, Goldberg, and Korajczyk, then if you're still interested, I'd pick up measure-theoretic probability. I recommend Probability with Martingales by Williams. Once you're comfortable with measure theory, look through Stochastic Calculus and Financial Applications by Steele. You'll very quickly enter the area of research mathematics while studying quantitative finance, e.g. jump-diffusion models and Levy processes appear in the pricing of exotic derivatives, and they're heavily studied by even pure mathematicians.

Watch The Rubin Report on YouTube. Dave Rubin interviewed both Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, as well as MANY of the other names I see posted by others here. He interviews people from different political, social, and economic philosophies. I even fund him on Patreon because his channel is great (and important).

 

If I had to pick three people that made the most dramatic impact on my life in terms of how I think, seek and evaluate evidence, and use reason, these people would be at the top. While the people on my list did not always agree on everything, I do believe that they are/were intellectually honest:

 

Thomas Sowell

• One of many interviews
  
  
• Basic Economics
  
  
• Black Rednecks and White Liberals - this book changed the way I think quite a bit
  
  Carl Sagan (Science-related things aside, he wrote a bit on Philosophy of thought)
  
  
• MUST WATCH - Great excerpt read by him in his book Pale Blue Dot
  
  
• The Demon-Haunted World
  
  Ayn Rand
  
  
• Interview with Mike Wallace
  
  
• The Fountainhead
  
  
• Read Atlas Shrugged after Fountainhead - this book honestly changed my life
  
  I hope that helps! :)

Having a good art or design teacher can help tremendously, but you can get quite a bit out of those classes even if they are bad. It's not graphic design you necessarily want. I was speaking of design itself. You may laugh but, learning interior decorating is pretty important. Color theory from art courses. Eye travel/focal point theory can really help level design. Lighting & exposure theory from photography(used in rendering). Architecture/engineering(gotta build stuff somehow). Geology(so you can make pretty rocks right/better). Animation techniques(omg do this). Biology, cellular structures and how/why things such as leaves grow the way they do. Statistics(Loot tables, enemy spawn rates, hit rates). Graphic Design(UI & any other sign in a game).

I highly suggest reading books on design. The Design of Everyday Things](https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/1452654123) is a freakin manual for making stuff actually functional/look functional.

History can help too. For instance, the horse is basically the reason towns are as far apart as they are. It's the distance a rider on a horse can travel in a day. Its for a personal project by I just used that to decide distances between towns for an RPG setting(table top).

The courses themselves may be a sham, the teacher may suck, heck the book may be garbage too, but they should still help you build a foundation on which you can do more research into the subject. I remember a post about an electrical engineer that went into Dying Light and drunkenly posted about how the power transformers made no sense found the article. Now this is clearly a case of the artists wanting power lines, and just making them "look" like power lines, but with maybe a little research or understanding they could have made it just that much more believable.

You don't necessarily need to do any of this, but you can draw inspiration/knowledge from anywhere.

Sorry for the long post.

Keep at it, and good luck!

I think you and I aren't going to see eye-to-eye here on these subjects. We both agree that these jobs are going to be automated, so I'm perfectly happy having these jobs that will eventually go away stay here for the interim. At least this way, folks have jobs before automation eventually removes them. Without a strong safety-net and public welfare system offshoring the jobs effectively creates the situation now that automation eventually will. And we're no where near ready as a society mentally and politically to deal with the fallout of automation.

As for tariffs, those have a long and sordid history. According to Ha-Joon Chang the countries that are doing well now, European countries, US, Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, and others got that way by using tariffs to their advantage. They keep tariffs high in certain sectors so that their budding companies and industries could flourish internally until they were ready to compete globally. So tariffs and free trade aren't necessarily as clear cut as "free-trade good, tariffs bad". If you have something you would like me to check out, send a link, I'd like to read more on the subject.

The rapid change in transfer spending over the years is definitely true, and you can thank Chelsea for that.

The reality is United have been insulated due to our fantastic academy and Fergie's habit of betting on young talent instead dropping cash on established players. We HAVE been spending millions on players, just in a very different way. Our wage bill has been among the highest in the world, even before Chelsea and City started their crazy spending fees.

I agree 100% that transfer spending does not equal success, player wages are a far better indicator. If you own the best players in the world (ex. Ronaldo) you don't have to buy them, you just have to pay them. The problem is that we have struggled lately in turning our young buys into truely world class players (ex. Anderson and Young). We also gave away Pogba for nothing, which I am sure you would agree was a terrible mistake.

Check out Soccernomics it is a great read about how football finances are changing, and addresses a lot of the points you raised.

TLDR; Don't be a dick, we are all United fans here bud. :)

Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan
https://www.amazon.com/Naked-Economics-Undressing-Science-Revised/dp/0393337642

Doesn't really address e-commerce, but honestly one of the better intro into economics books out there written in modern times.

For Globalization topics I also like:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1118950143/ref=pd_aw_sim_14_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=BPHV27XJSYHBS8RKBT3J

For virtual currencies and such I think your best source that is not academic papers will just be the Internet.

Good Luck, and remember Economics is a social science and is not the only field with ideas and solutions to social problems.

Also a "Windows" DevOps guy.

I'd recommend this .NET Rocks podcast episode. It's a pretty healthy way of look at the meta.

1. Understand where this hype train came from -- i.e. Gene Kim's The Phoenix Project. It's a good read and illustrates all the prescriptive advise sold by consultants nowadays is just that--sold.
   
2. All labels are arbitrary, but sometimes you need the hype train to get stuff done inside organizations. This is a fact of life; I'm sorry.
   
3. Understand your goals and objectives. Are you there to reduce the feedback loop for the developers? Are you there to help unburden the release management operations in the SDLC? Are you there because they really wanted a systems engineer who can also handle the developer stuff?
   
4. While tools aren't what make the man, try to get a sense of what tools won't become vaporware. Some companies can go as far as to rewrite the kernel by hand if they need to. Is your Org one of those companies?
   
5. Understand where the process breaks down. Sometimes new tools won't do it better. All tools have an activation cost, some strange edge case, and tons of implementation pains. But sometimes--even if under the hood it works EXACTLY THE SAME--the transparency/ease-of-use are worth it to the organization.
   
6. This is the single best book I have ever read for my business career: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It
   
7. If you're a Windows guy, learn to love Powershell. This is seriously the backbone of the direction MS is going. Even with the best orchestration/container/whatever tools on the market, you're gonna have to get down and dirty with it.

I started a freelance web design business about 5 years ago. Within a year or so I had doubled the income of my FT job.

Now I help people learn to do the same at https://selfmadewebdesigner.com

I agree with refractal. Sales is a muscle you’ve got to build. And pay your taxes 🤣

One way you can start is by reaching out to people you know that have businesses and could use your skills. Practice your pitch on them.

Since they have a relationship with you all ready it’s not as a big a deal if you flop the pitch.

I think a lot of people have a problem with sales because they feel like they’re trying to pull one over on something.

Like you’re a multi level marketer convincing someone to get on the ground floor of this amazing deal.

A sales conversation is all about building a relationship with someone and seeing if you can help them. Don’t hide your limits and don’t over promise.

If you walk into it just wanting to care for and do what’s best for the person you’re talking to then it’s tough to get it wrong.

A good book to read is called Never Split the Difference

The team I'm on is somewhat unique in our organization and we have been using a modified and always evolving Kanban method.

Our choice to try Kanban came after having read The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim. We really loved the iterative feedback that a system like Kanban can provide.

We started with yarn and sticky notes on a whiteboard until we felt comfortable with the process and then migrated to Kanbanflow. We do individual task time tracking in Toggl.

We had played with bigger solutions targeted for VAR/MSPs but found that they also wanted to be CRM solutions (and a lot of other cruft that we didn't need). Basically, we were wasting our time trying to learn tools instead of processes.

Will we be using these solutions six months from now? Who knows. We are able to shift pretty easily between tools and like to be able to pick what we need. We tend towards simple, useful SaaS offerings that know what they want to provide and do it really well.

I would highly recommend the following book: Mostly harmless econometrics

http://www.amazon.com/Mostly-Harmless-Econometrics-Empiricists-Companion/dp/0691120358/ref=wl_it_dp_o?ie=UTF8&coliid=IVHBGLQH4VJ3I&colid=21QCK3AR703JR

It is very problem driven book and will help build up your knowledge base to know what models are appropriate for a given situation or dataset.

You will then need to start practicing in a statistical program to gain the practical skills of applying those models to real data. Excel works, but I don't know a good book to recommend to guide you through using excel on real problems.

I recommend Stata to new data analysts and have them pick up "microeconomics using stata"; once they've worked through these two books they get excited and start grabbing data all over and begin running models, its exciting to watch new data modellers apply tools they're learning. R is free and open source but is more difficult to learn, if you're willing to ask there are tons of people willing to help you through R.

Start With Why [Simon Sinek]

48 Laws of Power [Robert Greene] (33 Strategies of War, Art of Seduction)

The 50th Law [Curtis James Jackson]

Tipping Point:How Little Things Can Make a Difference and Outliers: The story of Succes [Malcolm Gladwell]

The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy [Ryan Holiday] (stoicism)

[Tim Ferris] (actually haven't read any of his books, but seems to know a way to use social media, podcast, youtube)

Get an understanding to finance, economics, marketing, investing [Graham, Buffet], philosophy [Jordan Peterson]

I like to think us/you/business is about personal development, consciousness, observing recognizable patterns in human behavior and historical significance. It's an understanding of vast areas of subjects that connect and intertwine then returns back to the first book you’ve read (Start with Why) and learn what you've read past to present. Business is spectacular, so is golf.



To Add:

Irrationally Predictable:The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions - [Dan Ariely] (marketing)

The Hard Things About Hard Things - [Ben Horowitz] (business management)

Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It - [Charlamagne Tha God] (motivation)

The Lean Startup: Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses - [Eric Ries]

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, How to Build the Future - [Peter Theil]

Atul Gawande - Better, Complications, and checklist manifesto.

Sandeep Jauhar - Intern

Jerome Groopman - How doctor's think

Michael Collins - Hot lights, cold steel and Blue collar, blue scrubs

Samuel Shem - House of God

Brian Eule - Match day

Paul Ruggieri - Confessions of a surgeon

Emily R. Transue - On call

Okay so I was in the same position you are in right now. I wanted to read as much as I could because I truly found it fascinating. I read these books and I'm glad I did. These books just give you an idea of how hard doctors work and what the life of a doctor is like. Another recommendation is Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential. It has nothing to do with medicine but I read it and I think you should too. He talks about the life of a chef and how perfection and long long hours are demanded of him. I feel like there are some overlaps between the different settings. Chef/doctor and Restaurant/hospital. Anyways, This list should last you a long time. Hope you enjoy.


Edit: Added links.

A few white Pastors I know are becoming more vocal and critical regarding POTUS and Friends, but in general I've found that while the conversation can be had, its next to impossible to actually change anyone's mind. Of course, we could just chalk it up to my poor persuasion skills.


It's truly tragic that the Republicans grabbed the 'God' theme. Sure, sure, we wanted to avoid the domino effect and wanted to unite the country, but hey, guess what? Jesus mentioned something about preaching to ALL nations, so I'd think that'd include communists and even countries labeled as an 'enemy'.


I'd also want to suggest that there are plenty of 'phony' Christians out there who are warping the image of "Christians voting for Trump", but I've met enough 'real' Christians who voted Trump. Something about economics and saving babies. It'd be nice if they read some literature, such as Basic Economics so that they'd actually have a basic understanding of the topic, and maybe even Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger so that they can better understand how well they truly have it (and might even stop griping about 'government handouts').


Despite the uphill battle, I'd encourage the conversation. Best case, they learn that Jesus wasn't a rich white man who bought off the Pharisees and only loved English-speaking peoples of pale complexion. Apologies for the minor rant, I'm somewhat annoyed with the world on this fine morning.

This is devolving and becoming unhelpful to everyone. Tediously citing sources for every opinion is not helpful and often overburdens a social platform such as reddit. I'll finish off my thoughts here, but will leave you the last word if you want it.

• I listed infrastructure -- which would include utilities -- for you. We agree on utilities.
  
• The budget (https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/browse/collection.action?collectionCode=BUDGET&browsePath=Fiscal+Year+2018&isCollapsed=false&leafLevelBrowse=false&isDocumentResults=true&ycord=0) is 4 trillion dollars. Of that, the following i have stated would cost precious little:
  
  

• Military - 574.5B
  
• Energy - 28B
  
• DOJ - 27.7B
  
• Transportation - 16.2B
  
• TOTAL: 646.4B
  
  So, you see, that would be 16% of our current 4T budget. This is what I meant by the term "precious little".
  
  You seem to value citing papers, studies, and even an online course. I'll list some here to support my earlier claims.
  
  
• https://mises.org/library/myth-efficient-government-service
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465060730
  
• https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ari-herzog/why-83-of-us-government-m_b_173617.html
  
  

My suggestions:

1. Check out pro.coinbase.com and learn how to use it. You'll use the same credentials that you do on coinbase, but save a lot on fees.
   
2. Don't bother with all the alt-coins.
   
3. Start purchasing Bitcoin with each paycheck.
   
4. Read "The Bitcoin Standard" (https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Alternative-Central/dp/1119473861)
   
5. Get a hardware wallet (I recommend Trezor) and start storing your Bitcoin on it.
   
6. Research the benefits of decentralized exchanges, learn how to use one (I recommend Bisq), and if it meets your needs, start using it as soon as possible.
   
7. Read "Mastering Bitcoin" (https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Bitcoin-Unlocking-Digital-Cryptocurrencies/dp/1449374042)
   
8. Develop a long term outlook, don't worry too much about price swings.
   
   From your post, it sounds like you might be interested in just trading. In that case, my suggestions won't help a lot. I think that the majority that try trading end up losing. If you do decide to buy/sell/trade, be sure to spend some time learning about trading, limits, stops, strategies, etc. Start small, win some, lose some, learn some, before going in big.

I think that's a great article, and definitely something I keep in mind when doing level design. Understandably it gets a bit trickier to do on a large scale for a 2D platformer.

I suppose another good general reference that's applicable to pretty much all design is Donald A. Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things". One of the big take-aways from this book is designing things with affordances that encourage the desired behavior. For example, if you want people to pull a door to open it, give them something to grab, and conversely, if you want people to push the door to open it, don't distract them with a handle to grab and make an obvious cue where they should push the door.

So perhaps for your 2D platformer, I would try to steer players by guiding them through paths by peppering the different paths with things that they would expect to find in the different regions, to clue them into what lies off screen. For example, imagine there's a city section that has lots of taxi cabs, and another that's got a school. You come to a branch where one path takes you to the taxi cab area, and another takes you to the school, place an add for a taxi service on a bench for one path, and the other a school crossing sign. Even having background characters like children walking to school or getting on a school bus, versus people waiting for cabs could help convey this information while at the same time helping to cement your environments as a living breathing worlds.

Subtle things like these can foreshadow the directions players should take without having a giant obnoxious arrow that feels like it's saying "HEY STUPID PLAYER - GO THIS WAY FOR CABS." This foreshadowing can also be emphasized with shifts in the color pallet and art scheme too.

"Good To Great" is a great read on what fantastic leadership looks like.

While I'd be cautious to form opinions based on one article, it seems to coincide with the findings of the 10-year research project "Good To Great" underwent... namely that the best CEOs aren't motivated by money, and that internally vetting successors is crucial to a company's sustainability.

>Would anybody who knows more than me be kind enough to summarise why fractional-reserve won't cause the end of the world?

The world itself won't end, because the Earth doesn't care about the shenanigans of "fractional reserve banking" just like it doesn't care about some street huckster tricking people out of money with a "shell-game" or "3-Card Monty". The sun will still rise and set, the waves will still crash and, the tides will still rise and fall, and the seasons will still change and then return again.

---

Now if you meant TEOTWAWKI (The end of the world as we know it) -- then, yes fractional reserve banking will inevitably "implode" and the "world" as experienced by human beings in civilized countries will dramatically change (possibly for the better, probably for the worse).

A couple of REALLY good works to read in this regard are: This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly and The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.

And if you're up for a series of videos of WHY growth cannot continued unabated (and why the anomaly of the past one hundred years have seemed to been "exception") I would highly recommend you spend the time watching Physic's Professor Al Bartlett's FREE presentation on Arithmetic, Population and Energy. His presentation doesn't deal with "banking" per se, but rather what the meaning/consequence of say "5% annual growth" actually means in the real world (which reflects back upon a banking system that is built on the assumption that such growth is sustainable... forever. Hint: it most certainly is not). The presentation is entirely "free" from what anyone would call "tin-foil conspiracy" and deals with fundamentals of exponential growth of systems versus fixed resources. Again I highly recommend spend the time to you watch it.

---

BTW, as to the "evil bankers" -- certainly there are fraudulent individuals and con-men, always have been, always will be -- but the massive con operations are always a collusion of government interests and those in positions of government power with the "capabilities" that such con-men can provide for them. A good resource on understanding how this phenomenon has worked in the past is William K. Black's book on the S&L crisis from the 1980's: The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry.

---

Finally, if you then want a presentation that "combines" all of the above and applies (from one man's view) to the current situation, and the likely consequences he predicts for the coming decades, then Chris Martenson's Crash Course (also free online) may be of interest to you.

---

But remember... the sun will still rise ...and set, trees will still grow ...and die, the world itself will continue. (The question mark is around humanity and what will happen to our civilization. Best to be prepared for the worst.)

no, trade restrictions are there to safeguard budding industries in a rising economy. only when their industry is strong enough to compete in the global economy does it make sense to allow competition from the outside. why allow competition from the outside? because if you don't let them in, they won't let you in. if you really care about whether you are right or not then you should at least read this book and decide for yourself. he proposes a very convincing argument. bad samaritan

the book answers a very important question. why does the western world want everyone to have a free market economy when they did not rise to that position with a free market themselves?


>And that just happened magically based on its geographic location? Hardly.

no it's not the location. it's the reliable english speaking port with english laws that the western world can trust when doing business with. after traveling half way across the world, you want to dump your goods at a reliable place and be on your way. you don't want to deal with bribing the locals and things like that. that requires addition expertise and labor and have much higher risk. your response to me really shows that you have not thought about it thoroughly at all.

also, im not going to ever argue with anyone here again. i don't think i've received a reasonable and well thought out answer yet. basically the responses have been, i'm right and you're wrong. i thought like you guys too in my early 20s. i saw the same videos you did. i didn't do any research at all. as it turns out, persuasion is a skill that is not necessarily related to logic or facts. you should not so readily believe what you see. someone spend 100s of hours crafting that message that you just absorbed in 1 hour. you can't fully understand the message's true nature in 1 hour.

I'm going to recommend that you read a book, not as a way of implying that 'ugh u so dum', but because it does a fantastic job of explaining away your concerns, in a way I couldn't possibly do better. The ebook is like $7, the paperback is $7, or you can get it used for even cheaper.

https://www.amazon.com/Naked-Economics-Undressing-Science-Revised/dp/0393337642

You've hit upon a quite complex topic. The gist of things though, is that when automation kills one job, it is really just freeing up that labor to fill some other niche. Let's start with a hypothetical stone-age society. Everybody gets by, on their own, but planting their own crops by hand. The grow just enough to live.

One day, someone comes by, and introduces the plow. This is a machine that automates some portion of the farming process, letting farmers create more crops with the same amount of time. Those farmers would have a surplus. The plow guy starts selling and repairing plows for the community, in exchange for some of the future surplus crops. All parties are better off.

So, almost everyone here says you should not renegotiate. I am going to disagree with that and say you never lose anything by negotiating, unless you do it very, very wrong.

Couple points:

• At this point, they sunk a lot of time and effort to find you, they won't rescind the offer, they will just say no to the raise
  
• Negotiating when you're working there is going to be more difficult than now. Plus there's nothing stopping you from doing both
  
• Salary negotiations will be forgotten by anyone about a month in. You're not setting yourself up to fail by asking for more
  
• If they say anything other than "That sounds like a lot" to your initial offer, you've low balled yourself. Especially if they respond with something along the lines of "Seems reasonable".
  
  On how to actually phrase this: I like your approach, and would say being honest is usually good policy. When you get the call with their offer, you can say something like: "Thanks for the offer. Based on the interview process and research I've done, I really think I'd enjoy working with the team, <more reasons why you like company >. I really appreciate your offer of X. However, upon doing further research on the salaries among my peers, it seems top companies in this area are paying between <your new range, low end ~+20% of their offer>". And then you shut up and wait for their response. Couple things can happen:
  
  
• they come back and say "sure", give you lower end of new range. Success!
  
• they come back and say "can't do that, <reasons>", and meet you half way or don't budge at all. This is your decision now. Either accept or push them further. Just note that pushing after a "no" might actually cost you the offer
  
  Couple points on how to do the negotiation:
  
  
• always give them a way to say no without loosing face. Don't say "Give me 60k, or I go to your competitor" or "Anything below 60k is unreasonable".
  
• express a lot of interest and excitement about the job. The goal is to convey you really like the company and role, and it's now just the money that stands in the way
  
• if they don't budge on salary at all, try asking what other things they can do. Maybe you can get a hiring bonus, extra vacation, whatever matters to you. Might be easier for them to provide and as valuable to you
  
  Good luck!
  
  Source: Analytics team manager, hired several people over the years and been in your position more than once. I never once lost the offer because of negotiation. I got paid much less than my peers at the same company because I didn't negotiate several times.
  
  Also, if you're curious about the topic, I'd recommend a book called Never split the difference. Explains a lot of negotiation dynamics in great detail, but gives very applicable tips

This app, like WhatsApp, is dependent on network effects -- both parties need to have the app to reap any benefits. But unlike this app, What'sApp has over 500 million users all across the world and they've also got Facebook behind the platform to ensure global domination...

This app has to start from scratch and there is little to distinguish it from the many competitors... competitors like Google Hangouts. The Stock Android App which ships on every Android smartphone & CANNOT be uninstalled ^(w/o root). Hangouts is also being pushed as The default app for SMS and IM on Android. Hangouts now offers free calling throughout the US and free calls among Gmail/Google users across the world.

Like I said before, this app is going to have to face tremendous hurdles... just because they got into YC != success.


Also the Dropbox analogy is pretty terrible.

For one, dropbox use isn't subject to network effects. Secondly, Dropbox is getting crushed by Google, and Microsoft, and Amazon and Box and iCloud and other services who are battling for the same cloud storage market. They're undercutting each other like crazy to lock down users and profits are razor thin. Dropbox's entire business is dependent on Storage whereas the 'other guys' have other cash-flows to keep them in the fight. The hope of Dropbox IPO has also evaporated.... so in short yes, competition is crushing Dropbox.

>What if student loans were based on the job prospects their college experience grants? Degrees that result in high degree-related employment would have more loan opportunities (chemical engineering, petroleum engineering, CS, etc), while those with low degree-related employment would have fewer loan opportunities (history, [random language], etc).

This would be the case in a free market. Banks would A) look at a highschool students grades to estimate the likelihood of a student graduating college, B) evaluate the like job outlook of the career the student is getting a degree in, and C) hand out degree's to jobs that will actually make it available for the student to pay the loan back in the future.

The current student loans are going through the same process that created the housing bubble. Replace housing loans with student loans, and FannieMae/FreddieMac with Sallie Mae, and you get the same result. Banks give out student loans because they can turn around and sell them to the government sponsored entity (GSE) Sally Mae.

In a truly free market, the bankers would provide loans to students that would likely pay them back, likely graduate, and likely have a job offer after school. It would be a self regulating system.

Read Tom Wood's Meltdown, and you'll see the similarities to the housing bubble/collapse I just described.

> Why do people use Sketch more over PS?

Sketch is light weight, easy to use, and largely focused built. PS is a generic image editing tool that isn't.

Don't get caught up in tools though. UXD is a process not a toolset competency.

> Do you guys have any beginner friendly tutorials for a material or flat design interface?

A large chunk of user experience design comes from interaction design which inherits a sizeable chunk from anthropology. So, instead of starting you off on a tutorial which will likely focus you on technology as the process I'd rather start you off with reading.

Plans and Situated Actions - Lucy and other researchers at XEROX Parc defined Interaction Design. This is the birthplace of the idea.

https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Plans_and_Situated_Actions.html?id=AJ_eBJtHxmsC&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y

Lucy Suchman again - Human-Machine Reconfiguration talks about a higher level of thinking when it comes to how people interact with machines.

https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Human_Machine_Reconfigurations.html?id=KES20V7aP4YC&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y

Alan Cooper is one of the early leaders in Interaction Design. In this book he goes over the 101 of user research and how it has been applied in digital technologies.

https://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Essentials-Interaction-Design/dp/0470084111

Love him or hate him Donald Norman helped define early Usability and the transition to Interaction design.

https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/1452654123

Don't make me think. Was one of the definitive books highlighting the approach of user centred design.

https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited-Usability/dp/0321965515/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=TN8VJJHK9NKZ1KAA10V5

After you get through all of that I recommend that you spend some time in whatever tool you think works for you and then replicate somebody else's design. Say there's a mobile app (choose a small app) that you use all the time. Replicate every single screen and document with a flow chart how you interact with it to get to every single screen. Break them all up into individual interactions.

Make sure that you design it in the most reusable way possible. If your tool lets you make your own widgets then use them. If your tool allows you to inherit multiple layers, like Axure, then use that too.

Now find some people and test with them. Do some User Testing on the product to find flaws. Do some high level User Research to find out what their core goals are. Iterate. Don't forget that you're an amateur, it's okay to reuse your friend base.

I just finished reading The Checklist Manifesto (Fantastic, I highly recommend it.) One section details the Miracle on the Hudson and credits it to a synchronized effort of a Team sticking to their checklists. Apparently when Sully and the co-pilot deboarded they looked at each other and said, "Well, that wasn't that bad." The author makes the point that we tend to celebrate lone heroes. The myth of the "master builder." One man has all the information and experience in his head to accomplish a complicated task. When the truth (and more importantly, saving lives) is about teamwork, management, and following a checklist.

Oh boy, have I got some stuff for you. There's endless information about how to market your podcast. Here's some stuff to get you started.

• Libsyn Webinar: Growing your podcast audience
  
• Libsyn Webinar: Social media best practices for podcasters
  
• Talk: Growth Hacking by Sam Ellis
  
• Podcast: Masters of Scale - Why finding fans that love what you do is the most important thing to growing
  
• Talk: GaryVee on marketing online in 2018
  
• Talk: Seth Godin on getting you idea to spread
  
• Book: Small Giants - why targetting a small audience is the key to becoming a giant
  
• Book: Tipping Point or in other words, what is critical mass, how to get there, and why it's important to growing your thing.
  
• Article: 1,000 True Fans
  
  There's tons more on this topic. Let me know if you want more. I'm also curious to hear what you do yourself to grow your show and what's worked.

Opinion: The unspoken truth about managing geeks


As you move up the org chart to manage larger segments of the IT staff, your ability to influence projects and priorities obviously increases.

An MBA is seldom a wrong answer in these roles, but a complete degree isn't always required - depending on the employer.
But a complete understanding of the budget cycle and CapEx / OpEx is essential.

IT Infrastructure Teams have two budgeting priorities:

1. Maintenance & Life-Cycle planning for the stuff we already have.
   
2. Planning to meet the needs of the business for the upcoming budget cycle.
   
   You must maintain some form of relationship or communications channel with the business and app Teams to keep an eye on what they are working on.
   
   ITIL, Agile, and to some extent CISSP, or PMP can all help ensure you have the correct vocabulary, which can help you keep doing the things you already know need to be done.
   
   I just finished reading The Phoenix Project and I'd say its a worthwhile read for all of IT management - and the business counterparts too. It helped me wrap my mind around the impact of Docker and Containers, so now I think I see what all the excitement is about.
   
   
   

You wish. I think you should pick up Soccernomics. They have a pretty good argument as to why England will continue to under perform for years to come.

(it's basically because they don't have the networking prowess of the rest of Europe. [being an island] They also are too stubborn and self intitled to make the right decisions when it comes down to it. Don't get me wrong though, I love the English game and would love even more to see you guys win. I just thought this book made a good point.

I'll give you two book tips:

1. Never split the difference by Chris Voss, an ex FBI hostage negotiator. This is about negotiation techniques that everybody can use. A better negotiator has more power. Negotiating is not about overpowering and bluff, it's about finding common ground and making a connection.
   
2. Simon Simek - Start with why. This book was for me really useful, but given your situation, your "why" may be very clear. Still it's a good book as your "why", your (underlying) motivation may not be entirely clear to yourself. Sometimes you do things without really knowing why. Don't expect this book to explain the whole complexity of your inner self - it doesn't, but well - if you have the time and energy, it might help.
   
   I don't know if you can order these books. Both are available as EPUB as well if you use a normal e-reader or laptop.

I usually stick to Christian books - there’s some great one’s out there. I value learning new ideas based on scripture.

However these are good books recommended by my pastor -
The Fred Factor: How Passion in Your Work and Life Can Turn the Ordinary into the Extraordinary https://www.amazon.com/dp/0385513518/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_IjuZDbQQ2VTZX

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't https://www.amazon.com/dp/0066620996/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_cmuZDb23KNDR1

Both are related to leadership - which we all are leaders as Christians.

You are asking good questions. I appreciate your openness and I hope I can add something here. I hope we are not divided as it feels sometimes. Also, you might find it comforting that our country has survived division of similar if not greater magnitude before.

" why can’t you adults do the same "- I hope you will find that some of us can. Can you think of a marketing strategy for us? How many clicks/views would this headline get: "Nobody slams anybody- two dudes who disagree have an amicable conversation and agree to keep the dialog open despite disagreement" Are you familiar with the phrase "If it bleeds, it leads" ?

Also, I will note that nuanced argument takes more time and effort than the sort of shit in the two links below:

​

Here is an anti-Trump post relying on an emotional appeal. How much of the Republican party do you think this picture accurately represents? Does it matter what the opposition looks like?

https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalHumor/comments/ceca5l/a_gentle_reminder/

Here is an anti-liberal post based on a straw man argument. (IE- they are dunking on an imaginary liberal, they didn't find a person- let alone a majority of people- who espouse this view)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/cbiydd/the_thought_process_of_the_left/

​

For more on the financial incentives involved in sensational headlines I like this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285

From an economics perspective:

• Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell
  
• The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek
  
• Wealth of Nations
  
  From a social perspective:
  
  
• The Conscience of a Conservative, Barry Goldwater
  
• On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
  
• The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
  
• The Undiscovered Self: The Dilemma of the Individual in Modern Society, Carl Jung
  
  From a moral perspective:
  
  
• Mere Christianity
  
• The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  
  There's many more than just these, and there's a lot of underlying philosophy that modern conservationism is based on. I'd also categorize these books as a basis for "intellectual conservatism" as opposed to say "cultural conservatism". Something to note is that little of the conservative mindset is focused on policy and politics, per se. There is instead a strong emphasis on personal action and collective culture, the value of morals, and a focus on introspection. So while these books will perhaps help you understand a conservative perspective better, they will not likely provide a good basis for engaging in political debate. For that maybe you want a book by Ben Shapiro or something.

Life got busy again and i lost track of what was happening in terms of books. You said you read Ron Paul's book, so i thought i might throw out some of the books i enjoyed.

Henry Dent

George Soros

Tom Wood & Ron Paul

They're outdated, but provided some good economic thought behind what has happened and their forecasts. Tom Wood's and Ron Paul's book was interesting, but i'm not sure how relevant it ever was. At best, it served as a warning. Don't get me wrong, i'm a fan of Ron Paul, but the system will never remove the Federal Reserve. Also looks like there's some updated editions out too.

I'm looking at new books as we speak.

Mitnick's books are indeed mostly anecdotal, but The Art of Deception spends quite some time to explain WHY the attack worked and how it could have been mitigated. If you are to read one of Mitnick's books, this is definitely the one closer to what you want to do

As /u/demonbrew suggested, Cialdini's Influence is an iconic book on how you can use psychology to manipulate others. There are other schools, and you can read more about it in this thesis (as you can see Social Engineering was really popular at my university). My focus was Cialdini's work, my colleagues focused on comparing different psychological frameworks used in Social Engineering.

Carnegie's book is indeed focused in socializing, but the TL;DR of the book is: "How do i make people like me?". If you combine this, with one of the Cialdini principles - "Liking" - you can see how it can help you improve your Social Engineering skills

>High leverage risky loans from bankers crippled our economy and we are still hurting.

If you're interested in understanding a different perspective on this particular subject, the book Meltdown by Thomas Woods is an excellent resource. I greatly enjoyed it, and I think you might as well.

>it almost sounds like you are in favor of anarchy, which I believe libertarianists don't desire

You might be surprised how many of us r/libertarians are anarcho-capitalists. Don't worry, we don't throw molotov cocktails. If you're interested in learning more, here's a good start on understanding the basic theory.

Take a look at "corporate economics" or "finance" blogs or books.

Another great book that is absolutely amazing is Naked Economics. I highly recommend it. You should buy it but you can find it on the internet easily. It goes into economic concepts first, and then once it tells you although economic concepts are self-evidently powerful, they are misused so many times and result in the fuckups we see everyday.

The issue above is called the Agency Problem. Where agents/managers' incentives do not align with the health of the company. Stock options is a huge culprit of this. Where an exec's bonus pay is tied to the stock's performance.

>> if LN or any second layer solution is the preferred scaling method it would take ~8 years for 1Billion users to open just one LN channel, no other commerce happening on chain just opening LN channels
>
>
> In order to make it a fair apples-to-apples comparison, please think about what will happen if these 1Billion users decide to buy their morning coffee using BCH on the same day?
>
>
> I'll tell you. Only these coffee purchases alone will instantly create at least a 220GB backlog in the BCH mempool. Which will take around 48 days (!) to clear with full 32MB blocks. Of course assuming that no other commerce is happening on chain.

• If BTC can only scale on second layers ---> custodial solutions, see - Why is BTC Hard Money and all forks are Shitcoins BTC White Paper 2.0
  
  
  Now what most Core maximalists fail to grasp: I and many others are not against 2nd layers see - the need for 2nd layers Emin Gün Sirer - Scaling Bitcoin x100000: The Next Few Orders of Magnitude we favour letting the system (blocksize) grow as it had been up to 2016 & see where it can get us
  
  
  the fundamental difference
  
  
  
• BTC: 1 Billion entities to be soverign over their own money on 1MB BTC it would take about 8 years for each to get 1 channel open which is clearly unrealistic and so leads to custodial solutions - Hal Finney Bitcoin Backed Banks.
  
  
  
• BCH: Now with only 50MB blocks those same Billion people could put their discretionary spends into a 2nd layer solution once a Month (your math) and perform as many tx's as they like during that month, while still being soverign over their own money.
  
  
  Though we are actully aiming for 1GB blocks, see - jtoomim: My performance target with Blocktorrent is to be able to propagate a 1 GB block in about 5-10 seconds to all nodes in the network that have 100 Mbps connectivity and quad core CPUs. bringing channel opening for 1 Billion people to every other day plus 25% left over for all other "Big Commerce" (your $200 Million transfers.)
  
  
  The BTC future clearly is a custodial one for most people. BCH - jurys still out, I am not even against custodial solutions, I assume a hard money standard would still be a better system than what we currently have.
  
  
  I personally am not 100% convinced either way, Unforkable Ultrahard Money (BTC) or a money that can at this early stage still incorporate the best ideas of the space CTOR etc. eventually forking less and less until it too is unforkable. The latter being the better long term option imo, is the BTC protocol currently optimal? I am hedged either way are you?

> Accept cash for an online social media service? Are you well in the head, mate?

Yes, you have a physical address do you not? Could even get a PO box.

>Bitcoin, the service which goverments are actively trying to contain and is super volatile. Yeah, sound investment, guy.

And which is still going strong and holding steady despite having the bubble (predictably) burst? yes, it is.

>But, if you are content with getting fucked over into being a serf willing to drink leadwater all so you can claim to believe in this fanciful idea which will literally never happen, I can't convince you. I can only laugh at you.

Yawn. Same tired argument that falls apart when you realize in a market economy where people are free to choose you need to provide the best service and everyone is uplifited.

Here's some reading material for ya

The text likely refers to the first welfare theorem in general equilibrium theory, which states that a competitive equilibrium is a Pareto efficient allocation. On one hand, this is often considered a formalization of the invisible hand argument. On the other hand, the model in which the theorem holds abstracts away from a lot of real-world issues that may lead to suboptimal market outcomes. The best way to think about it, IMO, is as a theoretical benchmark that allows us to better understand properties of markets, not as an actual policy-relevant result.

A classic reference is Debreu's Theory of Value. More modern treatments can be found in graduale-level microeconomics texts, such as the one by Mas-Collel, Whinston & Green. There are also several lecture notes online, for example these by J. Levin are quite short and accessible.

Hello all,

I am a college student interested in learning more about the financial markets and how they operate through either textbooks or regular books. I think having a very basic investing knowledge would be helpful, then moving onto the markets in and of themselves.

I specifically want to gain a greater understanding of how they interact with one another (U.S. markets with Chinese markets), how they became to be so developed and deep, and how everyday occurrences come to affect the market.

I have the following on my list to read:

• The Intelligent Investor.
  
  
• Boglehead's Guide to Investing.
  
  
• The Ascent of Money.
  
  Does anyone have other suggestions that are of an appropriate level? I am not worried by dullness.
  
  Thank you!

Very interesting topic. The economies of Korea and Japan are not the neo liberal free market capitalistic states that the mainstream would like you to believe. I highly recommend reading Ha-Joon Chang’s book bad samaritans, which is basically where my knowledge of how Asian economies like Japan and Korea work https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986

I’ll try to phrase the spirit of your question the best I can, thanks!

This is actually the central premise of the book, Trust Me I'm Lying:

https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285

Essentially, now that most media is online, and advertising sales are driven by clicks, clicks become the all important goal of most articles. And this is ushering in a new era of yellow journalism.

What drives clicks are anger / outrage/ fear / hate/ humor / sex - things that produce 'emotional valences.'

So take two headlines examples.

1. "Trumps election due to democrats's failure address the economic concerns of middle america, research shows."
   
2. "10 reasons why debate is pointless, and flyover state conservatards need to be put in re-education camps."
   
   Article 1 could be a wonderfully written, deeply researched article with a nuanced world view and actionable advice for winning in 2020. Yet, its not an exciting headline, and certainly does not spike a readers emotions. It gets 12,000 clicks.
   
   Article 2 could be raging drivel; an emotional , opinion based listicle with 250 words and 10 memes stolen from Reddit. But that headline is pure click gold. Those who are angry/hateful about trumps win will click, while trump supporters angry/afraid about the prospect of being put in political re-education camp will also click. Further, both sides will share this article with their 'sides' of the aisle online. Result, 1.2 million clicks.
   
   While article 1 is much better quality, article 2 is far more profitable for attracting advertising. As such, writers and editors will pursue more 'stories' like article 2.

Hands down, The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. It's actually a series of four books (The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch) following Severian the Torturer after he is banished from his guild for showing mercy to one of their "clients."

It's just...beautiful and complex and you'll discover something new and fascinating each time you read it. The tetralogy has been ranked on par with the works of Tolkein and has been recognized all the major sci-fi awards, and gained wider literary recognition as well. See the editorial reviews section on the linked Amazon pages:

>"Outstanding...A major work of twentieth-century American literature." --The New York Times Book Review

>"Wonderfully vivid and inventive...the most extraordinary hero in the history of the heroic epic." --Washington Post Book World

>"Brilliant...terrific...a fantasy so epic it beggars the mind. An extraordinary work of art!" --Philadelphia Inquirer

>About the Author: Gene Wolfe has been called "the finest writer the science fiction world has yet produced" by The Washington Post. A former engineer, he has written numerous books and won a variety of awards for his SF writing.

Anyway...yeah, I kind of like these books.

EDIT: A Canticle For Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. is great, too. It's kind of post post apocalyptic, and it examines the self destructive nature of humanity.

Ouch, tough, man. It's always a delicate balance between living in your own bubble (http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/03/my_beautiful_bu.html) and making compromises to expand your circle of friends.

As to how to argue more easily, see

http://voluntaryistreader.wordpress.com/2012/12/22/success-socratic-style/

This will allow you to exploit the weaknesses in your opponent's arguments more easily.

As to the actual topics mentioned, here's what I have:

1. You need to press him on which ones they are. This book is a good overview of why essentially all government regulations suck:
   
   http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2006/9/monetarypolicy%20winston/20061003
   
   
2. Check out the article I linked above. I apply the Socratic Method to the claim that deregulation caused the Great Recession
   
   
3. To fix this misconception, you need to understand the competitive process:
   
   http://thelibertyhq.org/learn/index.php?articleID=257&parentID=32
   
   Working conditions are just another condition of employment besides wages, and is set by supply and demand. Furthermore, about OSHA - see the book linked in #1. It shows that OSHA has had no statistically significant impact on safety. You could also try http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-handbook-policymakers/1999/9/hb106-34.pdf
   
   On occupational licensing and other licensing, see
   
   http://econjwatch.org/articles/occupational-licensing-scant-treatment-in-labor-texts
   
   http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/06/your_sort_is_pr.html
   
   http://t.co/WQKpPYM8Kw
   
   As well as the book in #1. Summary of all of the above: licensing is useless at best.
   
   
4. This might be a good starting point: http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/11/10/roderick-t-long/corporations-versus-market-or-whip-conflation-now
   
   After that, try http://www.amazon.com/The-Triumph-Conservatism-Reinterpretation-1900-1916/dp/0029166500
   
   The above book is written by a socialist historian who actually argues that competition was alive and kicking during the Guilded Age, and that it was the big corporations which asked government for more regulations to control competition.
   
   
5. He got that big because he was simply good. He lowered prices and increased quality. Claims of predatory pricing are baseless, upon an economic analysis. See my writeup about Standard Oil on the Mises Wiki: http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Standard_Oil
   
   
6. Start with http://mises.org/daily/2317#1
   
   Also, point out that the actually bad robber barons got big through help from the government.
   
   
7. See #2. Also, read Meldown, by Tom Woods: http://www.amazon.com/Meltdown-Free-Market-Collapsed-Government-Bailouts/dp/1596985879
   
   See http://www.tomwoods.com/blog/deregulation-caused-the-financial-crisis/
   
   and http://www.tomwoods.com/blog/did-deregulation-cause-the-financial-crisis/
   
   
8. Well, it wouldn't be just ostracism. The police would still get the money back...
   
   
9. Reasons are mixed, I suppose. I don't know enough about Civil War history. You might want to read DiLorenzo on the issue, though I have also heard from some libertarians that he is sometimes dishonest in how he presents the facts.
   
   
10. The facts speak - real per-student funding has more than doubled in the last 30 years with no impact on scores. If full socialism works in education (as is essentially currently the case, and as your friend suggests would be nice), why not have the entire economy be socialistically planned?
    
    More about education: http://thelibertyhq.org/learn/index.php?listID=9
    
    If you want to see the Socratic Method in action, check out this convo of mine:
    
    http://libertyhq.freeforums.org/socratic-method-in-action-t477.html
    
    But once again, I highly recommend reading my article linked in #1. It's a super helpful debate tactic.
    
    Edit: Screw automatic fixing of numbering.

The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat By Oliver Sacks is an amazing book about odd neurological disorders and what they do to people. It is a fascinating, well-written book that was very easy to read.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain By Oliver Sacks is another very interesting book about how music affects the brain.

The Definitive Book of Body Language is another good book that'll make you a bit more observant of people.

The Art of War is always a classic, good, and informative read.

Those have been my favorite. I have a friend who suggest The Tipping Point is a really good book, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

Hope that helped.

Edit: Me grammar wrongs

Bernie is not "isolationist" in any respect, neither in foreign policy nor trade.

Isolationism is keeping the affairs of other countries at a distance. Bernie isn't proposing a withdrawal from world affairs. What he is proposing is a halt to the "bomb first, ask questions later" foreign policy of the United States that has contributed to displacement and chaos in the Middle East, and has cost the United States trillions of dollars without any real benefit. Unless you see establishing military bases thoughtout the region to strong arm our way to foreign oil access as a benefit, or see feeding the military industrial complex at the expense of peace in the world a benefit. I would argue that the economic and political downside of this way of engaging the world far outweighs any supposed economic or political gains.

As to trade, he is not against trade agreements. He's against neoliberal free trade policies that benefit large, multi-national corporations by opening new markets to them, but that are devastating to U.S. workers who are forced to compete with low wage labor in other countries.

These free trade policies are also devastating to developing economies around the world, because under these agreements, in order to get any money at all from the IMF and the World Bank, these countries are forced to open their borders, almost unconditionally, to U.S. goods and goods from other developed industrial nations. In this way, these developing economies are not allowed to engage in protectionist measures that would allow them to place high tariffs on foreign goods so that their own indigenous industries are allowed to develop until such time as they can compete on an even playing field with the developed countries. The exploitation of developing economies by the U.S. and other already developed nations is leading to a world where developing countries remain perpetually poor as they are not allowed to establish a foothold from which to establish their own developed economies. Our free trade policies actually exacerbate global poverty, which is ultimately bad for the entire world.

Countries like the U.S., Great Britain, and Japan would not have the industries they do today if not for years of protectionist policies that allowed them to develop their industries into world-class competitors.
This book is a bit dry, but it's a great introduction to the hazards of unbridled neoliberal free trade policies, and also makes clear that throughout history, a healthy dose of protectionism is what has allowed countries like the U.S. to become economic giants.

Anyway, I think Bernie, ultimately, is not isolationist, but is proposing a more constructive and productive way to engage the rest of the world. It's one thing to look at the Iraq war and NAFTA and TPP as "bad" or mistakes. It's another thing to imagine what the alternative to these actions could have been. I don't think those alternatives include isolationism, but do include diplomacy and a more equitable way of promoting world trade that doesn't come at the expense of workers and nations with developing economies.

This isn't a short and sweet answer by any means, but if you're interested in understanding what it is about modern-day journalism that makes it so intrinsically difficult for honest journalism to flourish, I highly suggest you read Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday. I jut got done reading it a few weeks ago and found it fascinating.

How could you forget the granddaddy of Micro texts: Mas-Colell. This book is the standard in many first year grad courses, and it covers everything pretty well -- the game theory is a little obtuse, though. It won't help much with economic intuition, but for people like the OP who want to learn the mathematical models, it's encyclopedic and definitive.

Otherwise, you have some very good links.

Edit: Apologies, I just noticed that the OP only wanted online links. I'll still recommend Mas-Colell in the case that the OP wants a good Micro text.

I actually do design things for a living, although not board games. I design medical devices and I guess there are more devices out there that I designed than there are Pandemic board games.

That's kind of irrelevant though, because design is best judged by naive users, not by design experts. When a device has a common stumbling block, that is considered a design risk, and in the case of medical devices it is not considered acceptable by regulatory agencies to mitigate that risk through the instruction.

A good design from my field is one where the operation is so intuitive that instructions are minimal or not necessary at all.

Board games are awesome for people with an interest in design because they take a lot of risks and even the best and most successful games have areas in which they have failed. If you aren't completely discouraged by this conversation and have any interest in design I highly recommend The Design of Everday Things. It's used by everyone from medical device designers to web developers.

Well, we hit the 10000 limit. Reserving this comment for the misc. section.

FREE TIME/FUN/MISC.
The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security
The Art of War
Steal This Computer Book 4.0: What They Won't Tell You about the Internet
How to Disappear: Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish without a Trace
The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey
Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart
Casting the Net: From ARPANET to INTERNET and Beyond thanks sjhill
A Quarter Century of UNIX thanks sjhill
A Reading List For the Self-Taught Computer Scientist thanks zinver
How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk thanks segamix
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable thanks AgonistAgent
Snow Crash thanks AgonistAgent
Cryptonomicon thanks Mirple

Well, if you're actively working on Mr. Smith's case or file or whatever, I would do the two minute task. As I said, if it's important to log your progress for a project, I would definitely do it. If you have a template that you use for many customers, I would personally create a checklist and then attach a copy of that checklist to every person's file. That way you can see whether or not you've done X or Y for any given customer. I'm a huge proponent of checklists. If you're interested, I would seriously recommend The Checklist Manifesto.

I mostly do this in my head, but yeah sometimes I make real lists. It's a huge help. Real LPT material. Lists are incredibly useful both in professional life and personal life.

Also, be sure to adapt this idea for your personal style of thinking. You can see in these replies that people have different methods for breaking down large goals into simpler tasks. Figure out what works for you.

Further reading: The Checklist Manifesto

Or listening: NPR interview about The Checklist Manifesto

Omg you've moved again revealed your profound ignorance. Are you capable of reading? That quote regarding supply effects was referring to earned income rather than capital gains. Cmon at least read if your going to try to pull a gotcha.

Your land isn't being taxed, the property on your land is what is taxed. It's an important distinction and no I shouldn't have to explain basic economic terminology to you. If you deem yourself qualified to comment on economic policy you should have at least an intermediate level understanding of microeconomic and macroeconomic analysis. I'm not going to spoon feed you.

I like how you didn't address the border adjustment tax as I linked. It is very much like a VAT tax, just sold under a different name. Please read before commenting.

I have no reason to entertain beginners mistakes. You went into this discussion in bad faith. I've caught you several times being unaware of economic concepts that even undergrads know. You've been spouting talking points hoping for them to stick. You're the reason the economic discourse in this country had dropped to the level of Donald Trump.

When I was an undergraduate, then had us read a very straightforward book that doesn't require any knowledge of advanced mathematics. It conveys the complex models underpinning economics in a very digestible format. I hope you abstain from commenting on matters of economic policy until you've acquired a bare minimum understanding. The political discourse in this country is abysmal and lacks rigor. I hope you decide to take steps to buck the trend that you're clearly contributing to.

https://www.amazon.com/Naked-Economics-Undressing-Science-Revised/dp/0393337642

Not sarcastic! If you are interested in international finance, this book is super readable and goes through a lot of the history behind why we have currency, insurance, bonds, options, and all sorts of fun financial instruments. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143116177/

Really like where your head is at - always pays to be skeptical as an entrepreneur. I'm bearish on bitcoin but I like to hang out here to see if there are any interesting projects or opportunities in the crypto space.

1. ''Young'' as in your 20s-30s. Teenagers are practically children. Most political pollsters don't look to ppl that young. These are children that largely can't distinguish between fantasy and reality. Thats why they're not polled. Undeveloped brains.
   
   
2. Right wing free market laissez faire economic policy hasn't developed a single 1st world country. Hamiltonian economics is what was used for every 1st world country. This required heavy government intervention that went against conservative economic theory. The parts about lack of worker rights fits conservative ideas, but that was reversed. This book explains it well https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1500605237&sr=8-1&keywords=bad+samaritans
   
   >"a liberal anthropologist named J.D. Unwin did a massive amount of research trying to find a successful sexually libertine society at some point in history and wrote a book describing his findings, which were that virtually every society and civilization throughout history developed to great success when marriage, the nuclear family, and traditional morals and ethics became the accepted norm"
   
   Oh look, an anecdote. The Catholic Church is right I guess. You have to not wear contraception and stay in marriages you hate to stabilize society.

How are you marketing your business currently?

Here's some good books to read although they're geared more towards managing and motivating a workforce. Others may have better recommendations for books on growing as a startup or small business. Ultimately, you need to focus on marketing your company and targeting your ideal customer.

Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet
https://www.amazon.com/Turn-Ship-Around-Turning-Followers/dp/1591846404

How to Become a Great Boss by Jeffrey Fox
https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Great-Boss-Employees/dp/0786868236/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1484506909&sr=1-2&keywords=how+to+a+great+boss

How to Be a Great Boss by Gino Wickman
https://www.amazon.com/How-Great-Boss-Gino-Wickman/dp/1942952848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1484506909&sr=1-1&keywords=how+to+a+great+boss

Good to Great by Jim Collins (I just started this)
https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others/dp/0066620996/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1484507074&sr=1-1&keywords=good+to+great

EDIT: Here's another one.

Traction. Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman. I haven't read this but the CEO did and we use the structure and methods from this book to run our company. https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Get-Grip-Your-Business/dp/1936661837/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

I wrote this previously to answer the same question someone else was asking—

​

This is what many of the cool kids (and your new competition) are doing:

• GA UX Design Immersive: https://generalassemb.ly/ (I've met a bunch of 'grads' of the GA course and they all seem decently well equipped to tackle junior level UX positions, although GA's course seems weak on tools and stronger on process.)
  
• Jared Spool's: http://centercentre.com/ (Jared Spool is one of the industry leaders in UX)
  
• Interaction Design Foundation (One of the mods of this subreddit has bad things to say about IDF. I've reviewed their content before and it seemed fine at a glance.): https://www.interaction-design.org/
  
• University of Michigan UX Micromasters: https://ai.umich.edu/portfolio/user-experience-micromasters/
  
• University of Washington Certificate in UX&Visual Design: https://www.pce.uw.edu/certificates/ux-and-visual-interface-design
  
• IDEO+Acumen 9-Week Human Centered Design course: https://www.plusacumen.org/courses/introduction-human-centered-design
  
  There are a lot of programs around right now to help career-changers get their foot into UX Design. Do not follow the advice of youtubers. A lot of the core of UX you cannot really learn without being hands on. Moderating user tests, ideation sessions, conducting interviews, and group/team activities like journey mapping, persona building, affinity diagramming, card sorts, etc. all need to be done in collaboration with other people.
  
  Additional knowledge in subjects like Human Factors, Human Computer Interaction, Interaction Design, User Interface Design, Motion Design, User Research, is also attractive in someone who is transitioning into UX Design.
  
  Otherwise, start reading through this list: https://designerhangout.co/books
  
  The first two on the list are especially good:
  
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/0321344758
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/dp/1452654123
  
  A side note: As a UX designer, you'll likely have to wear even more hats. And be better at wearing them too.

We all want to do well, but we also all want others to think we're doing well. That's why it seems like everyone else is doing better: they're trying to make it look like that. They're managing their image. It's like Facebook, when your friends are only posting the good things that happen to them, and it looks like you're the only one anything bad happens to.

Unless you're a celebrity, you are your own harshest critic.

> Medical school, for me, has been a never-ending cycle of wanting so badly to be better, trying, failing, and barely making it to the next course.

Why did you keep trying each time you failed or nearly failed? What made you think it would be any different the next time? Here's my theory: because you believe you have the potential to succeed. That's the paradox of ADHD, the blessing and the curse: it's not that you try, fail, and assume you're just not capable. You try, fail, and believe that you failed despite being capable. This is the dangerous part - if you didn't fail due to lack of skill or knowledge or innate intelligence, you and others assume it must be a character flaw. This is why people with ADHD are often labelled "lazy" instead of "stupid." People look at a person with dyslexia, and it looks like they're trying hard but still failing, so they assume that person is stupid. People look at a person with ADHD, and it looks like they're doing fine for a bit, but then they just get distracted and stop trying - if only they had a bit of self-discipline, they'd do fine. So they assume that person is lazy and weak-willed.

Hidden in all these negative perceptions is an important but easy to miss fact: if it's not clear that someone has the potential to succeed at something, then people don't blame them for failing or wanting to give up. It's clear that you have incredible potential. You're in med school at 24 despite having ADHD and depression. You've accomplished a lot, and you know you can succeed. That's why you're hard on yourself.

> I have to believe it will get better. I don't believe it right now but I have to eventually.

There's a huge difference between not believing you can, and not believing you will. If you don't believe you can do something, then it's very easy to say, "why bother trying?" It's logical, if a bit defeatist. It's how many people live their lives, content because they don't think they could do better. If you don't believe you will do something, that just means you could do it, but when you try to picture yourself doing it, you see it just not happening, for some reason or another, and you judge your hypothetical self. This is a symptom of depression. All you can think of are the times you failed in the past, not the times you succeeded - in getting through high school, in getting through college, in getting into med school, in meeting your SO and maintaining a relationship with them (That's hard for people with ADHD).

Because you know that you didn't fail because you just aren't smart enough or clever enough, that means there was just something wrong with your approach. Try looking at one of your recent mis-steps from a detached, analytical point of view. Instead of treating it like evidence of some weakness of character, treat it like a symptom, because that's what it is. Put on your medical professional hat and scientifically examine what went wrong, as if it's someone else's experience.

Imagine a person recently diagnosed with diabetes. Maybe a kid with type 1, or an adult with type 2. They try to keep in mind their disease, but sometimes they get caught up in the moment, maybe at a restaurant with their friends, or too absorbed in their work or school, and they crash or spike. It's not that they're stupid, and it's not that they lacked the willpower to constantly mind their levels. It just happens sometimes, because people tend to assume they're normal, and it's easy to forget when everyone else can do something "the normal way" that you can't. The wrong approach is to tell that diabetic person that they can never participate in "normal person" things, that they must always eat at home from carefully prepared special boring meals and must choose a job, a life that makes it easy to manage their diabetes. No. You work with that person to help them come up with strategies that let them live life by dealing with their illness as just another part of life. It's just a slightly different way of doing things. Maybe they carry a little finger-pricker thing and some emergency glucose in their purse or manly man bag when they're out with friends, and they set up subtle reminders on their phone to check themselves every so often at work or at school. With the right support system, they can get used to it and live life with relatively little overhead.

Like that diabetic person, you can't pretend you can approach life exactly the same way someone without ADHD can. Someone else can say, "Oh, I'll remember that," and have a chance of actually remembering. Us, not so much. But that doesn't mean you're doomed to a life of forgetting important things and your license expiring or your rent being late. It means every time you get a bill, you ALWAYS put 5 different reminders in your phone to beep at you before it's due. It means when you get some important paperwork, you leave it paperclipped to your keys, or taped to your bathroom mirror, somewhere you CANNOT miss it. It means when a patient mentions a symptom, you write it down, and when your boss verbally asks you to do something, you ask them to please send you an email and then you write that shit down in two different places right then and there because you carry at least 3 moleskines or folded-up pieces of loose leaf or just ANY paper you can write on, and at least 5 pens with ink on your person AT ALL TIMES, and then you put a reminder in your phone or your Outlook or both to remind yourself to do that thing. It means that you take the Checklist Manifesto to the n^th degree. It also means you plan every day, and schedule time to plan every day, and set multiple reminders that hey, it's planning time for the next 15 minutes and hey, that's enough planning for today, you're getting bogged down in details.

There are so many of these little coping mechanisms mentioned in various books and various threads in this subreddit that it seems overwhelming. But once you have one in place, it melts into the background, and it's just there helping you, and if it doesn't work, you're not a failure, it's just not for you, and you try another, because it's worth it to have a life that's not consumed by your ADHD. You can be in crisis mode, or you can be in management mode, and once you can get into management mode, it just gets easier and easier. You don't remove the structure you created for yourself any more than a diabetic person would stop checking themselves and assume they know what low or high feels like; you just optimize your systems for your life.

Fun Fact: The stereotypical Jewish association with money and wealth goes back to Medieval Europe, especially Italy because under old church law Christians were not allowed to charge interest to each other on loans.

This meant that for shipping expeditions, which would have to raise large amounts of capital to fund and outfit a trade expedition, could really only borrow from Jewish lenders. The Jewish lenders could charge interest and therefore be in a better position to accept risk that these voyages may not return with a profit (or even at all). This was true for other large ventures that required the raising of large sums of money but would not see a profit for some time as well.

Combine with this a general and long historical antisemitism in Europe, which drove Jews out of other professions, and you've got a recipe for creating a class of fairly wealthy Jewish money lenders which exist in a fairly segregated community.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ascentofmoney/lessons/you-can-take-that-to-the-bank/lesson-activities/?p=46

http://www.amazon.com/The-Ascent-Money-Financial-History/dp/0143116177

> (https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596915986) If post length were the basis for winning an argument, you'd win. However, you have little idea what you are talking about due to your neoliberal blinders. Try reading the book at the link, which exactly supports the point I made.

Why is your only source a book that supports your prior beliefs? Why is it that a huge majority of economists support free trade, and you choose to disagree based on one book?

Maybe "you have little idea what you are talking about due to your neoliberal blinders" corporate shilling.

It's generally considered important to take a lot of math as an undergrad, and if you don't have at least a minor, it will be difficult to compete with those who do, or even have a second major. I asked my undergraduate advisor a similar question in my sophomore year, and I was told that math courses were the most important thing you can do in preparation for Grad School. He was right - you can have holes in your Economics knowledge, that's what they're teaching you, after all. If you have to go back and learn the math to follow the theory, though, the first year will absolutely bury you. If you want to see what you're up against, your school's library might have a copy of Mas-Colell or Romer, which are the standard first year theory books in Micro and Macro.

Leaving admissions completely aside, you should have a good foundation in Multivariate Calculus, Differential Equations, Linear Algebra, and Analysis just to make sure you don't have to learn that alongside your actual coursework. By the time you take those classes and the prerequisites, you may find that you already have basically everything for a math minor. Add a couple stats/probability classes on top to fill out the credits, and you're probably done.

Before you get too discouraged, note that you don't have to do really well in those courses to be considered. You (presumably) aren't looking to do the sort of high-end theory that's more like pure math, so if you can make it through with Bs and the occasional C you still have a shot at respectable programs. You don't have to be the next Walter Rudin to remember a concept that you saw in an undergrad math class when it shows up on the board and not be totally lost.

EDIT: On a related note, if you want to go to Graduate School, don't be one of those undergrads that shies away from Econometrics. Take as much of it as you can.

u/TheGreatMuffin gave you golden advice. you need a solid philosophical foundation of what bitcoin is - otherwise you'll get rekted by the price and fud.


start with andreas antonopoulos - watch every single video no matter how old they are or how long they are because all of the info is relevant to today. the q&a after his talks are sometimes even more valuable than his lecture.


then for a deep dive visit jameson's site to get into detail about what andreas talked about. andreas also has a couple of books:

https://www.amazon.com/Internet-Money-Andreas-M-Antonopoulos/dp/194791006X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1540574615&sr=1-2&keywords=internet+of+money&dpID=4137Zf9hIaL&preST=_SY344_BO1,204,203,200_QL70_&dpSrc=srch
https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Bitcoin-Programming-Open-Blockchain/dp/1491954388/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1540574648&sr=1-1&keywords=mastering+bitcoin&dpID=51nnYGq964L&preST=_SX218_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch

​

also check out saifdean ammous' book: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Alternative-Central/dp/1119473861


very easy read and a clear explanation to the economic significance of bitcoin. good luck.