vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
I never said I agreed with you. Nor does your experience line up with almost a decade of my own academic and teaching experience.  The higher education system is dysfunctional because it is trying to operate as a feeder institution for an industrial economy when we are clearly in a post-industrial economy that doesn't lend itself well to a 3 or 4 year bachelor program designed to turn people into technical specialists (accountants, engineers, lawyers, etc.).   College is absolutely designed to mold people for jobs, why else would businesses provide so many grants and scholarships to business schools? They expect academic institutions to produce workers that are ready to function without any on-the-job training.  Speaking from experience working in the consulting industry right now: I think there is a serious problem when liberal arts graduates in a business environment show more aptitude and willingness to learn and prove themselves than individuals who have specifically taken business-centric degrees, yet are constantly unable to think beyond the confines of what they were taught in school and refuse to open themselves up to different ways of thinking.  You would not believe how many lawyers and MBAs are unable to express themselves in writing, to the point where clients become upset because they can't understand what they are being told. The basics of education are no longer systematically taught to students.
I've read analyst reports (from analysts that clearly don't follow the biotech sector) that base their forecasts for the biotech sector on the activities of companies like Dell, Zynga, HP, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Clearly, it's problematic when an analyst sees the word ""technology"" and automatically assumes that the biotech sector is responsive to the same factors as social media firms, hardware manufacturers, etc. This isn't to say that the biotech sector is completely isolated from this, but when I read a report that talks about Facebook's IPO being bad news for companies like Gilead Sciences without mentioning upcoming FDA decisions about Gilead's products or any biotech-specific factors, I'm not convinced the analyst has performed due diligence. I keep using the phrase ""some analysts"" because I want to stress that the opinions stated above aren't universal. Although they're popular, not everyone is so optimistic. Also, I don't want you to see these reasons and think that I'm making a buy recommendation, because I'm not. I'm not making a recommendation one way or another. I'm happy to clarify my answer too; I follow the biotechnology sector extensively. If you want to get a rough feel for the daily movements of the sector as a whole, a good place to start is IBB, the iShares Nasdaq Biotechnology Index Fund. The four largest holdings are Regeneron, Gilead Sciences, Amgen, and Celgene, which are all big players in the industry (obviously). These are a little different from the big name pharma companies like Pfizer, Merck, Novartis, etc. but they're still considered pharma companies. It's also worthwhile to follow the FDA press announcements. By the time the news is published there, it's probably already leaked or known to people in the industry (the biotech/pharm sectors are rife with accusations of insider trading), so you might not find trading opportunities, but it's important to get familiar with the information the releases contain if you want to know more about the industry. Volatility trades are always popular trades around FDA drug approvals."
"I used to work in finance for a number of years and I believe some of the use of these cliches are context-relevant (as others have said), but I also think they are often used as a placeholder for an actual thought or point, when one is lacking. It is also quite jarring to hear these phrases for the first time, as I had when I first started working at an investment bank. I thought they were sealing themselves within their culture. I found it limiting and really suffocating. My (least) favorite was ""it is what it is."" I always wanted to say: ""When isn't it?""  In any event, I have been collecting articles like this for a while. I have an idea to write a short story about a newly minted undergrad (or MBA) joining a company and all the other characters *only* speak in these phrases and sentences. And the main character is forced to deal with his/her initial confusion and then struggles to decide whether to assimilate (drink the kool-aid, if you will) and then realize his/her ability to think and identify as an individual is being challenged, so he/she ultimately abandons that company/job/industry."
I am quite sure you can set up an office in your basement for a lot less than $15,000. Don't build any walls, install any flooring, or upgrade the ceiling. Just install more lights and plugs. Set up your desks, bookshelves and what not in whatever corner is furthest from noises like the laundry room or the furnace. The kids and the nanny get the main floor - just let the whole living room be a giant playroom, for example. This gives you the separation you need to work at home, but you can hear if something really needs your attention.  When the kids go off to school, you can refinish the basement into a playroom for kids who don't always need supervision, using the money you are no longer spending on the nanny to install carpeting, real walls, a drop ceiling and so on. Your office stuff can move up to the main floor or to a spare room upstairs if you had one but it wasn't usable during the baby years when upstairs generally has to be quiet. As the kids get older the basement can get tailored to what preteens and teens like. This is essentially what we did, and our square footages and child counts match yours almost precisely. We did eventually convert our garage to carpeted and finished space, and it spent time as an office with staff coming in each day, then some time as a teen playroom (think video games and loud music) after the business rented office space outside the house, but if you don't intend to hire staff for your business you don't need to do this part. We did the majority of the basement wiring ourselves and got an electrician to hook it into the panel and check our work. The budget would probably be less than 10% of the guess from your real estate agent.
I'll just copypasta out of the book for the sake of clarity:   * If you think about it, you see that the only brokers who touch the switch for light bulb number 64 are those whose numbers are divisors of 64. That is, light bulb 64 has its state changed by brokers whose numbers are factors of 64. This means brokers 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64. Because light bulb 64 is originally off, it must be after this odd number of switches that it is on.   * You want to be short a put if you expect a price rise. In this case, you expect to keep the option premium when the option expires worthless.   There are a few pages worth of questions for the options, so the explanation for the IBM one is somewhat limited.
"I think this needs to be stressed a lot more if you ask me.  As a society, we seem to be falling into this weird paradigm where businesses somehow have a right to a profit and that is basically creating this odd sentiment that somehow ""burdening"" businesses with paying a decent wage and offering benefits is ruining business. If you ask me, all it is doing is ruining the businesses that aren't viable anyway.  If the only reason your business turns a profit is because you are gaming the part-time/full-time employment rules for cost cutting purposes, guess what? Your business deserves to fucking die. I think far too many ""business men"" feel entitled to profit and can't see that maybe it isn't how high their costs are, but how fucking little people want what they are selling."
I understand that they made a mistake but I think we're missing the point here. Nothing in business goes swimmingly and besides, if you aren't making mistakes, you aren't trying anything new. I think the media is blinded by short-term macroeconomic factors, meagre company issues and forecasts. Forecasts are just that, forecasts. They're not certain and of course, some years they'll miss them. That's no problem. Management is actively engaged in resolving these issues and they're aware of them, they're not complacent. They're expected to sell roughly $1.6 billion of Teavana products through Starbucks this year and are expanding Teavana's offerings through Anheuser-Busch.   When Starbucks opened their first store in Chicago, it underperformed. Needless to say, Starbucks is flourishing today.   I think we all need to take a step back here and focus on long-term objectives rather than insignificant short-term issues when management are prudently resolving them.
These spots could easily be filled by MSFT, but they're going to do whatever they can to make you think they can't be...  The problem with the programming and computer engineering industry is that anyone smart enough to be good at their craft can probably put food on their table on their own (subcontracting, developing their own software, consulting, etc.).   In other words, they have plenty of leverage in salary negotiations.    Foreigners are a different story.  I've worked with plenty, and most are great at what they do.  But, the biggest barrier they have that keeps them from going into business in the Western market themselves is often their communication ability, or the fact that they are so specialized in their knowledge that they aren't very business savvy (and xenophobic ignorance by many Westerner's, to be honest).  Put those two factors together, and I'm more than willing to bet that MSFT gets a fat discount during negotiations, that saves them way more than the 10g's that the Visa's would cost.
Ok, so by doubling down you mean when I said that ms as well as 3/4 of the country don't consider sexual orientation a protected class...ok, then apparently I am not the only one who has their mind made up.   You entire argument is based on it being a protected class...it is, but only in a few states. Ms is not one of them. I agree that they should not think like that and their business should hurt because they are bigots...but that does not mean another business can do the same thing because you agree with them.  It is ok to have a difference of opinion but you seem to think that a company providing a service based on their bias is ok for some and not for others. How can you not see the similar aspects of the two.   I agree with you that ms is wrong in this case, and I also agree that the nazi wannabes are wrong...We are on the same side...but I don't think that PayPal should get a free pass when it aligns with my thinking. They are not offering service based on an ideal, the businesses in ms were as well. So, I think they are both wrong and should be blasted in public...either you can show biased when dealing with customers or you can't. It is that simple.   You are agreeing with a company choosing to do business with whom they want to, but then you are doubling down on having another business doing the same thing because you think that sexual orientation is a protected class everywhere.  If it was we would not be having this discussion, but here we are. You are trying to have it both ways. I don't know how else to explain it.
Some of this is demand management.  The local BJ's wholesale club sells gas $0.10-0.15/gallon less than the prevailing rate. Typically there are lines of 3-5 cars waiting for a pump during busy periods. People are price-conscious when buying gas, which draws crowds and the retailer actually wants a line -- the whole point of the gas station is to draw traffic to the warehouse club. Other gas stations have the opposite problem -- big crowds lead to fewer people buying food and drinks in the convenience store, which is where the business actually makes its money. They want a steady stream of people. In my area, there is a gas station that is on a busy intersection right off the highway ramp going to the airport. Their problem is that people returning rental cars used to swarm the gas station and cause traffic tie-ups on the road -- a problem averted by marking up the gas $0.30.
"The implication is market irrationality is stronger than market rationality. Aka nothing makes sense when TSLA climbs to $400 or when CMG rises to $750. I wouldn't say there is a systematic flaw in valuation. I think there is just a lot of ignorance. Markets are more open to household investors than ever before. You used to go to your broker and ask him what's up and he'd give you the inside scoop since you pay them money. Now you go onto marketwatch and get some random nobody's opinion on everything and make stock selections based on that. But eventually the chickens come home to roost and things will correct itself. Big players will jump ship and cause signals to other traders to jump ship. The public can pump stocks up pretty high but it doesn't just go to infinity. Eventually someone will stop and say, ""wtf is going on"" and start selling. Stocks are sold on a basis of a limit order book so it's real prices that people are paying. People don't care about prices currently because most don't have any finance knowledge but want to invest their own money. They just hear about Tesla doing something amazing (from some clickbait article or news outlet) and can't stop thinking about buying Tesla. They go to Chipotle and think ""wow this place is so good and hip, they must be a great investment"". The markets have been filled with more subjective analysis than ever before especially with so much low quality information at your fingertips. Equally ignorant people startin blogs about investment and personal finance being shepherds for other ignorant people. In the end they all lose. People who exclaim ""this stock is going up to $250 easily"" with literally zero quantitative analysis or even a baseline reference point to back it up are prime examples of this. Ignorance of markets and cheap money almost always lead to market runs that end catastrophically. Dot com bubble, 1929 market crash, 2008, it's always the same. People who have no business taking loans out or buying on margin or leveraging positions with debt only to get fucked over once things are brought back down to Earth.
I'm a pretty big Yelp user. I have been frequenting a new local business and have come to understand how their reviews get filtered to help them. It's very simple to get the filtered reviews to come up on the main page.   If you sign up and do one review it will be on the main page for a little while, a week or two, then drop off. They give the new user time to start doing reviews and to become part of the community. If there is no other activity, they become filtered. To get them back to the main page all the user has to do is friend a few people and do some more reviews. Not many even. They are a small sandwich shop and know their regulars. I shared with them this simple information and I have seen their page go from two reviews to seven. They just asked their customers to review other places and their reviews came back.   The Yelp system is to stop the one review and done people. It works the same for bad reviews as well.
The author makes some assertions that can be debatable, e.g. that low rates are a bad time to buy because they already pushed the price too high. In my opinion, the US has had the crash, but the rates are still low. Buying is a personal decision, and the own/rent ratios are only one tool to be added to a list of factors in making the decision. Of course the article, as written, does the math based on the rates at time of publication (4%/30years). And the ratio of income to mortgage one can afford is tied to the current rate. The $60K couple, at 4%, can afford just over a $260K mortgage, but at 6%, $208K, and 8%, $170K. The struggle isn't with the payment, but the downpayment. The analysis isn't too different for a purchase to invest. If the rent exceeds 1% of the home price, an investor should be able to turn a profit after expenses."
"For the person being hired this is a tricky situation. Specially with the new laws. There is no real magic number that can be applied as a lot will depend on what benefits you want, and what is actually available. This will really shift the spectrum quite a bit. Under the affordibal care act, everyone has to have insurance or pay a ?fine? (were really not sure what to call this yet) but there are two provisions that really mess with the numbers you look at as an employee. First, the cost of heath care has skyrocketed. So the same benefits that you had 5 years ago now cost maybe 10-15 times as much as they used to. This gets swept under the rug a bit because the ""main costs"" of insurance has only increased a tiny amount. What this actually comes down to is does your new ACA approved heath plan cover exactly the benefits you need, or does it cut corners. Sorry this is complicated, and I don't mean it to come off as a speech against the ACA so I will give an example. My wife has RA, she really has it under control with the help of her RA doctor. This is not something she ever wants to change. Because she has had RA from the age of 15, and because it's degenerative, she doesn't want to spend 5 years working with a new doctor to get to the same place she is with her current doctor. In addition, the main drugs she takes for RA are not covered under any ACA plan, nor are the ""substitutions"" that her doctor makes (we are trying to have kids so she has to be off the main meds, and a couple of the things this doctor has tried has been meds that reduce inflammation, are pregnancy safe, but are not for the treatment of RA) You now have to take into effect rather the cost of health insurance + the cost of the things now not covered by the heath insurance + the out of pocket expenses is worth the insurance. Second the ACA has set up provisions to straight up trick those people that have lower income and are not paying close attention. When shopping for insurance, they get quotes like ""$50 a month"" or ""$100 a month"".
how do these margins vary over time Depends on a lot of factors. The bank's financial health, bank's ongoing business activities, profits generated from it's other businesses. If it is new to mortgages, it mightn't take a bigger margin to grow its business. If it is in the business for long, it might not be ready to tweak it down. If the housing market is down, they might lower their margin's to make lending attractive. If their competitors are lowering their margins, the bank in question might also. Do they rise when the base rate rises, or fall, or are they uncorrelated? When rates rise(money is being sucked out to curb spending), large amount of spending decreases. So you can imagine margins will need to decrease to keep the mortgage lending at previous levels. Would economic growth drive them up or down? Economic growth might make them go up. Like in case 1, base rates are low -> people are spending(chances are inflation will be high) -> margins will be higher(but real value of money will be dependent on inflation)  Is there any kind of empirical or theoretical basis to guess at their movement? Get a basic text book on macroeconomics, the rates and inflation portion will be there. How the rates influence the money supply and all. It will much more sense. But the answer will encompass a mixture of all conditions and not a single one in isolation. So there isn't a definitive answer.  This might give you an idea of how it works. It is for variable mortgage but should be more or less near to what you desire.
&gt; the less chance of people defaulting,  You know a non-trivial part of the mortgages out there are adjustable right?  Did you never study what happened when in '07 after rates went up 4% in a year or two?  Rising interest rates are also a factor in rent prices. Meaning rent prices go up and people won't be saving as much. Investment accounts (savings) will be taking a shit because of severe contractionary fiscal policy.   &gt; more people buying with flat cash,  How much cash do you think the average American has ready to pay for a home?  I agree higher interest rates will definitely lead to lower home prices (that's ultimately what happened in '07) but you need to stop thinking about a ceteris paribus model and begin considering the cascade of other variables and what the impact of housing affordability is from their respective changes as well.
You may simply be asking why stocks 'gap up' or 'gap down' when the stock market opens. This is because the price adjusts to news that occurred while the exchanges were closed overnight. Perhaps Asian stocks crashed, or perhaps a news story was released in the New York Times about some major company. There are thousands of factors that affect market sentiment, and the big gaps that happen at the open of every trading day is the price of the stocks catching up to those factors.
"Ryan's suggestion to index for your main strategy is dead on. Your risk is highest with one given stock, and decreases as you diversify. Yet, picking the stocks one at a time is an effort, when done right, it's time consuming. For what one can say about Jim ""mad money"" Cramer, his advice to spend an hour a month studying each stock you own, is pretty decent advice.  Penny stocks are sub one dollar priced, typically small companies which in theory can grow to be large companies, but the available information tends to be tougher to get hold of.  Options are a discussion for a different thread, I discussed the covered call strategy elsewhere and show that options are not necessarily high risk, it depends how they are used."
Insurance companies represent a large group of people and lots of business, so they can get better rates on dealing with recovering from losses. They can negotiate for better health care rates or better repair rates or cheaper replacement parts. This can potentially save more than the administrative overhead and profit that they take off the top, even when compared to self-insuring. There is an element of gambling to it, but there are also very real financial benefits to having predictable costs. The value of that predictability (and the lesser need for liquid assets) is what makes insurance worth it for many people. The value of this group benefit does decrease a lot as the value of the insurance coverage (the amount it pays out) decreases. Insurance for minor losses has a much smaller impact on liquidity and is much easier to self insure. Cheaper items that have insurance also tend to be high risk items, so the costs tend to be very high relative to the amount of protection. If you are financially able, it may make more sense to self-insure in these cases, particularly if you tend to be more cautious. It may make sense for those who are more prone to accidents with their devices to buy insurance, but this selection bias also drives the cost up further. Generally, the reason to buy insurance on something like a cellphone is because you expect you will break it. You are going to end up paying for an entire additional phone over time anyway and most such policies stop paying out after the first replacement anyway. The reason why people buy the coverage anyway, even when it really isn't in their best interest is due to two factors: being risk averse, as base64 pointed out, and also being generally bad at dealing with large numbers. On the risk averse side, they think of how much they are spending on the item (even if it is less compared to large items like cars or houses) and don't want to lose that. On the bad at dealing with large numbers side, they don't think about the overall cost of the coverage and don't read the fine print as to what they are actually getting coverage for. (This is the same reason that you always see prices one cent under the dollar.)