u/throw3142

!remindme 1 day

It's a strawman. No one says "I make minimum wage and I want to make less because I love laissez-faire capitalism." There are a few sensible arguments that I've heard:

• Most workers in America make more than the minimum wage. According to the BLS, 81M workers received hourly wage, and 870K received at or below the federal minimum wage. In other words, 99% of Americans receiving an hourly wage make more than the minimum wage. If you raise the minimum wage, more companies may start offering exactly the minimum wage. You risk anchoring expectations low and achieving the opposite effect that you want.
• Minimum wage jobs fill an economic niche. If you raise the minimum wage, you will lose those jobs. Companies won't pay more, they will just fire people instead. Everyone suffers and no one benefits.
• Many people work minimum wage jobs as a "stepping stone" when they don't have experience or are between jobs. It's not like most people are receiving minimum wage for years and years. Minimum wage is a much worse metric for "everyday person's wage" than a percentile (e.g. 50% for median wage, or 10-25% for the lower end).
• By focusing on raising the minimum wage, you are wasting political capital to make fake numbers go up, instead of focusing on what actually matters such as providing access to education and job training, updating outdated labor laws, and better safety nets to provide workers with more leverage.

I am not arguing these points, by the way. I am not educated in these topics. This is just what I've heard over time - and it's definitely not as simple as "So you want to make less money?"

Don't make such comments if you've never seriously worked a Python job (which is painfully evident). As a serious user of both languages, for several months, it is obvious that Rust has some clear benefits (performance, compile-time error reporting, etc) while Python has others (overall popularity / ease of hiring, numerical computing ecosystem, etc). They are different tools for different jobs.

Btw, Python is indeed rapidly making changes at a fundamental level - as fast as it can without breaking the enormous volumes of code that depend on it :)

Apparently a group of cats may be called a "glaring".

Tired of all these Fed conspiracies. The Fed is not a profit-generating entity. Yes, it does buy bonds and collect interest payments, but it sends these payments back to the Treasury, it doesn't keep them for itself. The Fed has a dual mandate to support full employment and low inflation. It does not have a profit motive.

As an effectively non-profit entity, the Fed doesn't have a market cap. It does have a balance sheet, the size of which is a good approximation of the cumulative level of assistance the Fed has provided to the markets over the past several years.

"Free market at all cost" people want the balance sheet to be lower because they want to lose their savings and experience pain (masochism). MMT people want the Fed to print more and more money because the value of money is apparently not affected by supply and demand, only the ability of the state to collect taxes.

The true optimal level of Fed support is probably somewhere between these two extremes. It's good to have a backstop to the financial system so that we don't lose our savings in a banking panic every 5 years (like most of US history between the national banks). It's also good to avoid enabling fiscal stupidity and deliberately causing hyperinflation.

We call it inverse arbitrage. It's a way to lose money regardless of what the market does. For example:

If you see a stock trading at $100 on exchange 1 and $105 on exchange 2, you can buy on exchange 2 and sell on exchange 1, locking in a $5 loss. The technical term for this kind of trade is pure inverse arbitrage.

The term can also be extended to some situations where there is a nonzero risk of gain (though technically pure arbitrage in the economic sense requires no risk). Keep these secrets close to your chest, as they're some of the best known ways to practically guarantee losses.

Buying long-term bonds at 0% yield and holding them while rates rise (technical term: SVB arbitrage)

Buying a stock after a short squeeze and then continuing to wait for the squeeze for the next 3 years (technical term: GME arbitrage)

Betting 100% of your portfolio on $SPY puts and calls until you eventually lose once and then can't afford to trade anymore (technical term: martingale arbitrage)

Putting in a market buy order for an illiquid put option and getting filled above the strike price (technical term: price improvement arbitrage)

Putting in a limit sell-to-close order for an illiquid option but forgetting to add a zero (technical term: fat finger arbitrage)

Short selling Tesla (technical term: Bill Gates arbitrage)

Buying Tesla (technical term: ARKK arbitrage)

Buying when lagging technical indicators tell you to buy (technical term: momentum arbitrage)

Selling when contrarian technical indicators tell you to sell (technical term: paper hands arbitrage)

Holding your money in a bank that went bust (technical term: Wall Street donation arbitrage)

Holding your cryptocurrency in an exchange that went bust (technical term: SBF offshore account donation arbitrage)

Supporting any national politician's campaign (technical term: DC lobbyist donation arbitrage)

mfw I walk right into someone's land, decide I like it so it's mine, and subsequently "defend" it. Then rationalize my actions ex post facto because they weren't extracting the maximum possible value from their land, so they didn't deserve it anyway.

Yeah exactly lol