Yes. They would need to.

The idea is this:

Would you take $1 or a coin flip for $2?
Would you take $5 or a coin flip for $10?
Would you take $10 or a coin flip for $20?

An `irrational' person would answer (Yes, No, Yes), or (No, Yes, No). Someone that answered all Yes or all No would not be inconsistent, nor would someone who answered (Yes, Yes, No) or (No, No, Yes), those people would be labeled as risk averse then risk loving.

As someone who has to sit through a lot of talks about research like this, GrumpySteen got it right in saying:

A great paper on the topic is the 2001 paper "GARP For Kids", which asks the same question about children, and does a good job arguing that inconsistencies decrease with age going from young to college.

There's been research on the issue of advertising and marketing. On one hand advertising facilitates better matching (consumers learn about products that they want to buy). On the other hand, this is money spent that doesn't produce anything. For example, Coke and Pepsi's advertising budgets are huge, and it's hard to argue that these ads help consumers.

There have been papers investigating the welfare effects of matching and competition (matching is good, competition in advertising is bad). The current literature (and I can't find the citation) agrees advertising is bad in total, as the useless competition outweighs the better matching, but it's not obvious and it's not an overwhelming effect.

Whether or not posters on /. like code.org is inconsequential. We are the wrong audience. I think code.org is saying "it's not just nerds that benefit from knowing how to code."

The question is, might code.org get more people or less people programming. To give an example, how many people here idolize Enrique Iglesias? Probably close to zero. Yet in the broader world, I think there are some who take his (or some of the other leaders/trendetters') words as gospel, and those people might take his encouragement to program seriously. Is this a good thing? I say yes.

It's not the anecdotes being criticized, it's the confounding factors. It's like if you want to lose weight, so you take a weight loss pill, start exercising, and eating healthy. It's hard to say that the weight loss pill was highly successful.

Research has shown that in some markets if we outlawed advertising, prices would drop while demand wouldn't decrease as significantly, and everyone would be better off.

If you also consider that this may be a 'price as a signal' market, knowing marginal cost could let consumers make better choices, and we could get better outcomes.

I'm an economist so I might be biased, but this seems like a good thing.

I hadn't heard of this, is there a citation?

A lot of people applying for the jobs you want will have taken many math classes. Think about what your resume says if you don't have those same difficult classes. Can you replace them with something that will tell the employer you are even more qualified?

P=NP. The easy way to understand NP (non-deterministic polynomial time) are problems that can be solved with age old the guess and check method. P=NP roughly implies that any problem that can be solved with guess and check can also be solved deterministically.

Full tuition and fees may be $50K per year at some places, and the true cost to the university (per student per year) may be higher, but what's the true cost to the student?

The elite colleges and universities have need-blind admissions and financial aid that is entirely driven by a family's resources. That means the rich families who can easily afford that $50K don't mind the cost, and the families that can't, don't suffer it. Furthermore, the best school of those schools have been implementing no debt policies, where all the financial aid is in grants (instead of loans), so having debt after graduation isn't even an issue.

It's just dishonest to tell kids "Don't bother with Princeton, you can't afford it" when the reality is: for the elite colleges, if you can get in, they'll help you with the cost.

That's not scalping, that is a strawman. To fix your example, Microsoft releases XBox's a very small number of consoles, well below market price (they make money on games). You give a bum 40$ to wait 5 days first in line. Then you buy all the consoles, turn around to the others in line, and offer to sell at a 500% markup.

Skynet's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness.

What's the reason for the price increase? Nature doesn't operate off of donations, where would the additional money go?

Not being a know it all should be easy, you'll need to become familiar with the culture, tools, and goals of your team. But try to maintain high energy. If you finish your work early, ask someone nearby if he or she has time to pass off some of their work on to you, so you can (1) help him or her and (2) improve your skillset. There's nothing more frustrating for me than trying to work with someone who's stuck in their role and refuses to improve.

I saw a few of these signs yesterday. There's a 4 second delay between the two messages. It is very distracting, so mission accomplished.