I thought the "hedge" in "hedge fund" meant the investment managers were constantly hedging investment bets. In other words, they would have a lot of bets, some of which would only pay off is other ones did not. For example, take some positions which paid off if gold rose, others which paid if gold fell, and now regardless of what gold does, you make some money. The net result is you get a more consistent return rather than what this fund did, spectacular returns followed by a crater. And with that reduced risk comes lower average returns.

What I'd call this fund is a "leverage fund", not a "hedge fund".

When did hedge funds stop hedging bets and become vehicles for highly leveraged, high risk, high return investing? I must have missed that transition.

I have a friend who's pet theory was HR's main goal was to tune compensation to keep the attrition level where the company wanted it. If too few people quit, you're paying too much. If too many, you're not paying enough.

I doubt anyone in HR would put it in quite such cold blooded terms but I think it's at least partly right. Any company needs to think about what type of employees they want and what compensation/benefits/physical environment/work culture will get them that. The right answer isn't always "pay the most for the best of the best".

That seems implausible. Too many disparate organizations have RTO policies for it to be driven by a cabal of real-estate owning moguls.

I can imagine some C-level types saying "we own these building, we have to do something with them." But, since they're flinty hearted greedy bastards (they are, right?), I can more likely imagine them saying "great, we can sell a bunch of real estate and/or terminate our leases and use the proceeds to give ourselves a bonus."

There's an aphorism in encryption development: "anyone can design an encryption system strong enough they personally can't figure out how to break it."

Problem is, of course, that someone else might figure out how to break it. I think we can expect that to eventually happen to any encryption system. It's a matter of when it will happen, not whether. Of course, if "when" is 50 years from now, that's effectively forever.

This is why "I'll write a new encryption system" is almost always the wrong answer. Not always but almost.

There's at least some evidence that AI does not, in fact, lead to job losses. Now, that may be confirmation bias on my part because I'm a free market fanboi but never the less.

Here's the thing though. I'm a software developer in the Santa Clara valley. No one likes layoffs. Everyone knows someone who's been laid off. Virtually every techie I know has been laid off at least once. Unless you're really, really new, you know this is a boom and bust business, and that even the very best engineers at the most stable companies are not 100% secure.

At the same time, virtually every techie I know also has experienced that what our jobs entailed 10, 20, 30 years ago is vastly different from how we work now. Shoot, when I started we still sent paper memos and we shared VT-100 terminals. The only constant is that things always change at a frantic pace. So while AI could be quite disruptive, I'm not ready to confidently panic just yet. It's going to be a jarring transition but so was converting everything from client/server code running on a mainframe to web services and browsers.

Translation: "Give us a bribe and we'll approve your deal."

I know it's difficult to write hard and fast rules but giving politicians unbounded discretion is just asking for corruption.

I'm sure real estate in upstate New York is relatively reasonable. It's mostly still farmland and forests.

Thing is, the people who want to build data centers have no doubt figured that all in. Given the budget for a data center, I'm not sure the land cost is a significant issue. Electricity is something else, which is why people are hot to trot to build a dedicated power plant colocated with the compute.

I'm sorry, your expertise on this comes from...what exactly?

I have no idea how many data centers we need. I've never run the numbers. I wouldn't know what numbers to run. I doubt you have either.

You know who I bet has run the numbers and thinks they can sell a data center's worth of service to willing customers? The person about to write the $10 billion check to build one.

By "there" you mean "the money will remain in California". To an extent, yes. You can live in Austin and found a company where most of the workers are in San Jose. That's just inefficient and a pain. It makes it more likely that, at the margin, a founder will decide Austin is good enough, and hire there.

Can't let that slide. Wealthy people pay the lion's share of income and capital gains taxes, both federally and in California. They pay both more dollars and a higher proportion of income than poor people. The myth that billionaires pay little in taxes is just that, a myth.

FICA, sales, and property taxes may be a different story. There are instances where a rich person pays little but those are the exceptions, not the rule. California in particular is very vulnerable to stock market downturns because capital gains taxes plummet and Sacramento is left with an enormous budget hole.

It gets a bit murky when you start talking about who actually pays corporate income taxes. Some part of it is paid by consumers through higher prices, some by employees through depressed wages, and some by investors through lower dividends and capital gains. I don't think there's general agreement who pays what share of corporate income taxes.

That's the crux of the difference of opinions when people talk about gig work.

(Side note: if a job is easy to get, it's not going to pay super well. Supply and demand, and all that.)

My understanding based on interviews with actual gig workers is substantial numbers of them are just supplementing their income with gig work. The canonical examples are students who need beer money and retirees who want to supplement retirement income and get out of the house for a bit.

I have no doubt there are also people who are trying to make a full time living doing gig work. Driving a taxi was never a great job in terms of income, I don't see why we'd would expect driving for Uber or Lyft would be any different.

We also have to realize not all gig jobs are the same. At one end of the spectrum is food delivery: that's a low skill, relatively low value occupation. No kidding it doesn't pay well. I got paid a pittance when I washed dishes because anyone could do it if you could put up with the sweat, exhaustion, and smell.

On the other end are people like freelancers and the factory workers in TFA. Those are high skill, high value jobs which people really do hold as full time positions. But there are many people who apparently don't want to work full time 9-5. That's not me, I like having a steady job, but that's the point: my preferences and the preferences of those people are vastly different. I don't see any reason why I should have any say in what work arrangements other people are willing to agree too.

It is bestowed from upon high: Washington DC and various state capitals. Labor law enshrines eight hour days, five day workweeks as the One True Schedule.

This is why I find all the restrictions on gig work so odious. Clearly some people prefer flexibility over a 8x5 work schedule. Why in the world would we want to force both employers and employees into a schedule neither one is thrilled by?

Yes, it would be nice if the article drilled into whether the declines were in certain degree programs or broadly spread across all fields.

TFA does mention this was a survey of "research institutions" and has a picture of MIT's Great Dome so we're intended to think this is STEM programs. OTOH, Harvard is a quite respectable research institute which also has Graduate School of Education.

Not entirely. Some people go to college to goof off for a few years. I have a number of nieces and nephews who aren't using their college degrees for anything. Granted they were not in PhD programs but still, learning is not necessarily the primary reason some people attend college.

In addition, not all learning is equally valuable. I just saw some stats about what degree programs produce what lifetime earnings, the most objective way we have to measure educational value. Engineering degrees were on the top, education was on the bottom.

But let's assume the article is talking about PhDs in STEM degree programs. Perhaps this is a good time to consider whether we want to depend so much on federal funding. Perhaps STEM schools need to make a case to private donors that, since their degrees are so valuable, the donors ought to fund them directly. Not only would this get politics out of education, it would reduce the number of strings a nefarious administration can pull.

For two reasons:

First, that the wealth will be shared. It'll be squandered on various boondoggles.

Second, that the Trump administration won't want a second bite of that apple. I think if you tell The Orange Man that he has to do something because he agreed to it, he'd give you that confused head tilt dogs do.

The US Federal government owes about $114,000 per capita. That's your cut. Make your check payable to the US Treasury.

(Note, that'd just debt held by the public today, not inter-agency debt or unfunded future liabilities.)