You don't have an email address listed - could you ping me at my username at googles popular email service to chat on tools for institutional investing?
Rule 3 is still very much real. Fancy fast algorithms often have other trade-offs. The best algorithm for the job is the one that meets all requirements well... Big-O is one aspect, data is another, determinism of the underlying things that are needed (dynamic memory allocation, etc) can be another.
It is important to remember that the art of sw engineering (like all engineering) lives in a balance between all these different requirements; not just in OPTIMIZE BIG-O.
Sure but the default (and usually correct) assumption when working at google (as an example) is basically "all numbers are big", so you you have to cluey about algorithms and data structures and not default to brute forcing something.
At 99% of shops it should be the other way around .
Even when you are working with large numbers, most numbers are usually small. Most of the code is probably not dealing with the large things, and a large thing may consist of a large number of instances that are individually small.
I've personally found it useful to always have concrete numbers in mind. An algorithm or data structure designed for N will probably be fine for N/10 and 10N, but it will often be inefficient for N/1000 or 1000N.
No, because "the government" isn't one blob. The court system is separate from the administration. And the supreme court justices aren't giving the internal deliberations to someone in the administration, especially when the administration is one of the parties in the case.
.... what? 3 of the justices were nominated by Trump. You think the people appointing them didn't have internal deliberations before they were appointed, including about things Trump had thought about like tariffs? Even FDR knew the 'separation' was a farce, that's how he magically got the court to go along with progressive programs they prior didn't support, after the 'Switch in time that saved nine.'
SCOTUS largely functions as a post-facto legitimization machine for those that appoint them. They do not interpret the constitution so much as serve as god-people in funny costumes that provide the cultural message from god that the actions of their political persuasion were legal (or illegal) even in cases where a historical and literal reading of the constitution would otherwise find you with no way to find them legitimate if not for man in black robe say so.
------ re: "2 of 3" below due to throttling--------
A vote to refund here was not a vote against the admin, it was a vote to simplify the laundering of the tax. It was a vote to put the money straight into the coffers of admin insiders like Lutnick et al financial engineering scheme. Meanhwile it did not invalidate tariffs, as Trump immediately pivoted to a different tariff structure.
As a second note, the profit here was actually not dependent nearly as much on the vote as the insider information. The fact the best any rebuttal can come up with is the vote might have been 'wrong' is basically totally defaulting to the insider trading element which means you are totally yielding the underlying premise.
That is, the only 'vote' against the admin in this case would be one that went against their insider information. Failure to note this is how the justices and admin have swindled you and the public. The very posing of this comment of rayiner et al reveals how they tricked you.
> what? 3 of the justices were nominated by Trump. You think the people appointing them didn't have internal deliberations before they were appointed, including about things Trump had thought about like tariffs?
They were nominated in Trump's first term, which had a very qualitatively different cabinet assembled around Trump, one much less focused on sycophancy and pleasing Trump. I don't think anybody in Trump's cabinet 6 years ago was thinking about the potential powers a president had in being able to change tariffs based on how he felt waking up in the morning, much less interrogation of judicial candidates based on how willing they were to go along with that.
You can blame RBG for one of those. It fascinates me that Biden made the same mistake RBG did, I’ll always wonder how different the would would be if she had stepped down and the democratic party had held a real primary.
I don’t like trump, I think he stinks. The democratic party has a few own-goals in this current game.
I can't blame Ginsurg. She was still capable of performing her duties even at the end. She resisted an overtly political retirement and it wasn't even clear if a compatible replacement would be confirmed even if she did retire early.
It's unfortunate how it went, but I respect her decision.
> I don’t like trump, I think he stinks. The democratic party has a few own-goals in this current game.
You guys should have nominated Amy Klobuchar as VP so you had a credible backup when it became apparent that Biden was too old to run again. That’s a mistake that’s going to continue holding you back, since Biden made South Carolina the first primary state: https://www.masslive.com/politics/2025/06/2028-dem-frontrunn....
As Obama said, “never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”
>.... what? 3 of the justices were nominated by Trump. You think the people appointing them didn't have internal deliberations before they were appointed, including about things Trump had thought about like tariffs?
Given that the 2/3 justices appointed by Trump voted against the tariffs, what's the implication here? That Trump deliberately picked anti-tariff justices just so he can engage in a rube goldberg plan to enact tariffs, buy tariff refunds on the cheap, and then have them revoked?
Trump can profit either way, the key is the insider knowledge to bet for or against them. Admin insiders financially engineered where they profited from refunds.
Any vote towards what the insider information pointed to was a vote 'for' the admin as they had financially engineered their winnings based on that. And meanwhile Trump immediately turned to a new tariff structure. The vote they gave was the strongest vote in favor of the admin insiders they could have given, and meanwhile didn't actually stop Trump from continuing on with the scheme.
> .... what? 3 of the justices were nominated by Trump. You think the people appointing them didn't have internal deliberations before they were appointed, including about things Trump had thought about like tariffs?
Following that logic, it make sense that those 3 voted with the administration.
I don't see how a vote against is a vote against the administration. The whole point here is their corruption machine profited more off the justices voting against the tariff and for refunds. The tariffs were a mechanism to feign a tax for public purpose but then 'refund' them turning it into a tax to private business and Lutnick's financial engineering. Funneling the money straight into corrupt private enterprise via 'refund' is even easier for Trump than having to launder it through public coffers.
The key is whether they had insider information given their association with these justices.
>> SCOTUS largely functions as a post-facto legitimization machine for those that appoint them. They do not interpret the constitution so much as serve as god-people in funny costumes that provide the cultural message from god that the actions of their political persuasion were legal (or illegal) even in cases where a historical and literal reading of the constitution would otherwise find you with no way to find them legitimate if not for man in black robe say so.
(2) Is that SCOTUS functions as a legitimization process
(3) Is that de-legitimizing this particular tariff regime, while trump immediately pivots to a new tariff, is a best case scenario for the admin insiders as it lets them profit immensely from refund corruption while still pivoting immediately to a new tariff. The vote was one in favor of the Trump insiders.
(4) It is hilarious that the best counter your argument et al includes is just glossing over the insider aspect, which means you're just yielding the entire underpinning to this thread to me, which is more than enough to satisfy the premise on its own even if you reject this particular vote as being in the service of the admin insiders.
Of course, if you just smugly quote half of what I said and keep ping ponging one side or the other when I study the other half, citing muh changed argument, then you can play this fraudulent argument that pretends I "changed" what I said. This reveals your argument as a deliberate fraud so I will leave you the last word to lie further to the ether, rest assured I will not read whatever non-sense follows.
This is wrong. It's not insider trading. Lutnick didn't have inside information. His son just had a brain. Anyone who read the case knew which way the court was going, it was the least surprising decision ever. Perhaps the only surprising thing is that the court ever heard it.
He presumably did not have access to the court's opinion before it was released, but he did have access to internal White House legal opinions before the tariffs were announced ("Mr. President this is illegal and very likely to be overturned by the courts"), and he obviously had access to the entire federal legal team during the court cases.
I can't prove that there was any White House advisory memo before the tariffs were announced, but hypothetically, would this not be considered material nonpublic information? It seems the same as a corporate insider dumping stock because a company lawyer privately told them "we're definitely going to lose this case".
>I can't prove that there was any White House advisory memo before the tariffs were announced, but hypothetically, would this not be considered material nonpublic information?
Was the hypothetical "White House advisory memo" produced using any proprietary information? If not, why should it be any different than if I hired a bunch of top lawyers to produce a private report for me?
Because this hypothetical memo was paid for by our tax dollars, not your own private money! That means it belongs to the American people, not individuals for their private gain. Using it for your own gain would be theft from the American public.
In this hypothetical case, of course. There is no evidence that such a memo exists. But if it did...
> That means it belongs to the American people, not individuals for their private gain.
This is a strong case that there ought not to be any such thing as a secret opinion or confidential advice from the White House OLC - and I agree with that opinion if that's what you're saying.
But it doesn't transform the information contained therein to nonpublic.
I'm not saying this whole thing wasn't a total scumbag move - it was - but it's not quite the same crime as insider trading.
> But it doesn't transform the information contained therein to nonpublic.
The legal opinion itself was non public? If they couldn't use that they would first have to put up the money to pay the legal fees to find out how likely their bet was to pay off.
And just to put this in writing too, I would be shocked if we don't find out later that a lot of the volatility was a way for a few people to make a lot of money. You can make a lot of money when there's more volatility. So all the flip flopping on tariffs yes/no might very well be manipulating markets...
Yes, because it was produced by the same people that are going to argue the case in court. You can hire the best lawyers in the world but they will still have to speculate on what arguments the government is going to make, and whether there are confidential communications showing evidence that there was some consistent rational justification for the tariffs and not just the president's public posts that leader X was mean to him on the phone so he imposed a tariff.
Not just a Whitehouse insider, the guy actively doing the policy he was probably being advised was illegal and would be overturned.
And also probably one of the guys most pushing for this policy which was probably advised would likely be overturned.
Tariff policy is ultimately implemented by the Secretary of Commerce. This isn't some random other staffer in the Whitehouse that heard these policies wouldn't go, it was the guy actively doing it likely stands to make significant financial gains for his actions being found to be illegal.
The level of corruption on that is just absolutely mindblowing.
You’re piling speculation on speculation. First of all, there was no such memo saying the tariffs were “very likely to be overturned.” The Supreme Court decision was 7-3, with two Bush appointees voting to uphold the tariffs. The appellate court decision was 7-4, with two Obama appointees and two Bush appointees dissenting. Second of all, there is no evidence that this legal analysis was leaked to Cantor.
Who cares? The Treasury Secretary shouldn't have family profiting off fixing illegal policy the Treasury Secretary enacted. That should never happen. It is wrong, it doesn't explicitly spelled out.
The two answers I'm hearing to my question so far are that either this decision was so obvious that anyone could have predicted it without insider information, or that this was a split decision that the administration could not have predicted ahead of time.
You're right that maybe there never was any internal memo, just thought this was funny.
> but I don't see how we could know there is no such memo.
There was no such memo because OLC isn’t full of dummies. Maybe the talking heads on CNN said the case against the tariffs was a slam dunk, but you don’t get split courts at multiple levels for cases that are slam dunks.
>but he did have access to internal White House legal opinions before the tariffs were announced
yes but the opinion that it was illegal was the received wisdom by everybody with any sort of legal expertise in the subject. It would have been completely insane if the white house staff didn't believe the same. So I guess I'm actually surprised at the white house staff believing what everybody else did?
> yes but the opinion that it was illegal was the received wisdom by everybody with any sort of legal expertise in the subject
That isn’t true and you should really question whatever news source told you that. Putting aside that it was 6-3 in the Supreme Court. It was a 7-4 decision in the en banc Federal Circuit, with two Obama appointees voting in favor of upholding the tariffs. The lower appellate court opinions amounted to 127 pages: https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/25-1812.OPINIO....
You don’t get cross-party splits like that on issues where “everybody with any sort of legal expertise in the subject” agrees. If anyone with legal expertise was telling you that this issue was simple, they’re probably not very good at their job.
I understand your position but I disagree. If I were trying to predict whether the government is going to win in court, I think reading what the government's own lawyers think about the case would be valuable. If it were possible to pay for this I think people would, that's why I think it is material. Some random person's opinion is not relevant information, but the opinion of people directly involved in a case is.
That's fine, to each their own on trying to make predictions. I did try to predict it, did it accurately (along with many others, this wasn't the hardest thing ever), and wouldn't have had any interest in any internal memo.
It's a public arena on things like this. I don't think even the justices themselves have "material inside information" until a little ways through the hearing, and people are trying to predict the outcome well before that. On the surface that might sound absurd, but it isn't.
If you go to a random lawyer in Wyoming and ask them to write "expert opinion" then what you'll get would probably be something standard, written by a junior associate, or maybe even produced by ChatGPT.
If the White House orders "expert opinion" on potential Supreme Court ruling then the chances are that the expert asked to prepare it is someone who plays golf with some of the SCOTUS judges.
So those two "expert opinions" might not bear the same weight.
Is a lawyer working on a case allowed to short the stock of his client?
Why not?
(Hint: it creates a perverse incentive to see your side lose the legal argument for your own personal gain.)
And in this case, it's the actual secretary doing it. Who has significant influence on the outcome of the case (largely in the negative - nothing he can do can make the government more likely to win it, but stuff he did has the capacity to make the government more likely to lose it.)
In the business, even the appearance of impropriety is damaging. People who work in finance aren't allowed to trade the same stocks as their company is trading, whether they have any inside info or not. The assumption is that simply by being close to a source of information, you are compromised. The same restrictions should apply to those close to government. By being family, he is compromised by default.
Wrong. People who work in finance (I spent years there) are allowed to trade stocks their company is trading. There is a process to get approval. The equities division at an IB might be trading every single name in the S&P500. If you sit in the investment banking division and that division isn't doing anything related to a name, you are likely to get approval.
In this case, the idea that Cantor can't do something because the former head is now in a government job is crazy. No one "in the business" thinks Cantor is suddenly hobbled.
> In this case, the idea that Cantor can't do something because the former head is now in a government job is crazy. No one "in the business" thinks Cantor is suddenly hobbled.
That's not the idea, and it almost seems like a straw man to be honest. The actual idea is that the current head of Cantor can't do something because he's a direct relative of a high ranking government official whose powers and job duties present a conflict of interest for this specific set of transactions.
Cantor Fitzgerald is an investment bank. Rather than claim a straw man, think about what they do and how it interacts with the administration. Everything they do is heavily regulated. If they couldn't do anything that gave an appearance of a conflict, they literally couldn't do a single thing that makes up their business and would be hobbled.
I think a lot of people feel like people who have one foot in a heavy regulated industry shouldn't have their other foot in the regulatory body that regulates that industry.
> If they couldn't do anything that gave an appearance of a conflict
This time I won't say maybe - that's a straw man.
I never said Cantor shouldn't be able to do anything that even gives the appearance of a conflict. Or anything even close to that really.
As you said yourself further up the thread, investments of investment bank employees are highly regulated. And not only employees themselves, but also their immediate family members.
Yet that same level of legal regulation doesn't apply to immediate relatives of government officials. We've seen frequently with spouses and children of congressmen, and now we're seeing it with the son of a cabinet member. Yes, this may technically be legal, but legal does not equate to just and desirable. This reads to me like a serious loophole in the law that needs to be closed.
You are just out of your depth in this area. You don't understand what Cantor has done here, you don't understand what Howard can or cannot do in his role.
Howard Lutnick's positions have been directly opposite of what Cantor has bet will happen. Cantor has 10 or 12 thousand employees and is constantly doing all manner of things. Howard has no power over the supreme court. His son is the chairman, he's miles away from being in the weeds on what specific things they do. He isn't going to be comped like crazy as the chairman.
There is no conflict. There is only the appearance of one and it only appears that way to people who don't understand the situation.
Almost all companies issuing stock to employees also ban them and their family members and fellow house residents from trading in the same stock to avoid insider style improprieties and the SEC has frequently prosecuted such cases. Wild that congress and WH staff have zero such restrictions even in 2026!
>People who work in finance aren't allowed to trade the same stocks as their company is trading, whether they have any inside info or not
But the supreme court is a separate branch of government from the executive, so the analogy doesn't really hold. To claim otherwise would require Lutnick playing some 4d chess where he's publicly pro tariffs, but secretly anti-tariffs and was sandbagging the government's legal defense (can he even do that?), all the while not tipping Trump or the MAGA base off for being disloyal.
One might argue it should fall under a different technical label, but whatever label one uses (A) it stinks of corruption and (B) it's only the tip of the iceberg.
People entrusted with government authority to do work for the public shouldn't be personally profiting from how they decide to wield that authority. Imagine a policeman that arrests people while placing bets about how long that person will be jailed, what they'll be charged with, or whether they'll be convicted.
The objection that "it's unfair, they know something other bettors don't" occurs first not because it's the biggest issue, but because it's easier to prove.
The bigger problem is making improper decisions with their work-powers in order to personally profit, a trust and separation which they've already destroyed by placing the bets in the first place.
it doesnt have to be black and white. they knew enough to spin up a business that when it is overturned they could make money... which means they knew the probability was high.
Insurance company deal: if you pay us $X now, and then Y happens, we will make you whole, even though that cost may very well exceed $X.
Lutnick deal: we pay you $X' now, and if Y' happens, we collect everything which will substantively exceed $X'.
This is not insurance, its closer to shorting stocks.
Oh, one other thing: the insurance company has essentially nothing to do with Y at all, in the sense that they have no control over Y and generally speaking no involvement in it (think: accidents, floods, storms, fires). By contrast Lutnick is the Secretary of Commerce of the United States of America.
I have no idea what the point of this is, since it just restates what I wrote, and reinforces the point that the Lutnick deal is nothing like "insurance".
That's not really the comparable here, you need to find a person with vested interest in the outcome of the student loan forgiveness program.* Someone that was working within the agency responsible for the program and actively was in the discussions where the legality was discussed. Then made a scheme to financially get rewarded. Not only that used his son as a way to create the illusion of separation.
* And not just a borrower that wouldn't be anywhere similar to this level of conflict.
This is easy to say in hindsight. There was a non-zero chance the decision could have went the other way. Also, companies aren't stupid. They don't buy insurance against things that are impossible.
And the supreme court doesn't hear cases that are 100% obviously illegal.
Companies don't want to deal with the headache for many things. It's not a given over what time horizon and how much work is involved to get the refund. It's totally sensible to sell the claim for 70 cents on the dollar for example.
The supreme court absolutely hears cases that are obvious. They do it for several reasons - to create clarity, to narrow scope, to set a very clear precedent, and other reasons.
It wasn’t “close to zero.” The Supreme Court split 6-3, with two Trump appointees voting against him. And the Federal Circuit, which is the most boring appellate court and not political at all, split 7-4, with two democratic appointees and two republican appointees voting to uphold the tariffs.
This was a case that split both the liberal and conservative blocs. Obama’s former SG, Neal Katyal, went up there and argued for limiting presidential power over the economy. One of the justices quipped about the irony of Katyal’s major contribution to jurisprudence being revitalization of non-delegation doctrine, which has always been a conservative focus.
Did you read the ruling? Read Clarence Thomas's dissent. It's not clear if he actually thinks what he wrote, or he just voted that way so he could write a dissent and make a strange legal point which probably doesn't carry water but sort of maybe could one day maybe.
If it were close, I think he would have voted the other way. The folks on the court appear extremely inclined to take the other side on things just as a mental exercise, or to be able to write something on the record that they find interesting.
And, surely you understand that many see using the due process clause to make his argument was a stretch. Just saying "his analysis is extremely cogent" doesn't make it so.
I think the issue is that someone working in public office had influence to affect that probability, and their relatives stood to gain from it.
I don’t know enough about the ethics laws to know if it was strictly illegal, but it does create a smell.
Suppose a county engineer has influence on whether oil drilling will be allowed (they don’t make policy but consult those who do), and prior to approval their relatives buy up a lot of land in the area. That engineer may not have been the deciding factor, but it seems like it runs afoul of ethics laws/standards.
They weren't buying insurance. There's no insurance payout for the companies. They got a small amount of money in hand, and lost the chance to reclaim any of the tariff refund. That isn't insurance.
Also, the SCOTUS is not a criminal court, it is a constitutional court. If a case is heard there, both sides have not agreed on "obvious illegality". That is unsuprising since in general one side (in this case, the administrative branch of the US Government) is being accused of illegal behavior - when it comes to constitutional rather than criminal questions, most parties do not just accept their guilt, but push as far as they can towards exoneration.
Frequently, however to everybody else, the case concerns obvious illegality.
> And the supreme court doesn't hear cases that are 100% obviously illegal.
There is an argument in about two months' time as to whether or not the Birthright Citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment actually guarantees birthright citizenship in the US. There is no serious legal argument in favor of the interpretation being advanced by the Trump administration, that it does not. And yet here we are.
What’s happening is that the deal stinks, and people aren’t precisely analyzing exactly why it stinks so they’re just using it to confirm their priors.
The deal stinks because Cantor bet against the administration that its former head is a part of, and against the signature policy of the president its former head serves.
A lot. If you remember all the tariff announcements in the first months of 2025, the stock market tanked and it was an easy buy. The market then reasonably quickly realized many of these tariffs weren't going to persist. The payoff was fast, and the reason you didn't see a massive uptick in the market when the ruling came out was because it was already priced in at that point.
Just because something isn't obvious to you, it doesn't mean it wasn't obvious to a lot of people.
> This is wrong. It's not insider trading. Lutnick didn't have inside information. His son just had a brain. Anyone who read the case knew which way the court was going, it was the least surprising decision ever. Perhaps the only surprising thing is that the court ever heard it.
If this was so obvious, wouldn't there have been more competitors pushing down the value of it?
The people selling the debt thought there was a ~ 20% chance the money would be collected.
Is there any proof he didn't have insider information? With this administration + court, it's rare when some sort of fraud, bribes, or protection money payments aren't at play.
Technically it might not be "insider trading" since most information (we assume) was public knowledge.
But members of the government being able to trade on matters of government policy is exactly how government corruption works. Previous administrations understood this was important to prevent (Carter putting his peanut farm in a blind trust, the Bush's did the same) but now Trump has made clear corruption is just totally fine (why else become president or a government official).
It's not insider trading, but surely it's a conflict of interesting? If you ignore all the specific name calling, isn't it still quite wrong that one minister can financially bet against the administration?
You mean the guy who kept talking about bringing back jobs to US - jobs requiring Americans to screw iPhone parts - wasn't debating in bad faith, like you are doing here? I am shocked, I tell you. I am really shocked.
The mental gymnastics people are performing in order to convince themselves that this isn't the most corrupt administration the US has seen in modern history is staggering.
If a fraction of the level of skepticism these people applied to Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton were applied to Trump and his cronies, they'd be demanding impeachment.
Seriously. These monarchists in this thread contort themselves in every which way to make sure their dear leader is always in the clear.
Shall we forget the shitcoin rugpull Trump has used to launder billions from foreign leaders?
The transparent bribes he's taken to his political org that have resulted in pardons for smuggler, drug lords and murderers?
The $200 million dollar contract Kristi Noem funneled to a company an operative of her for "marketing", formed days before the contract was awarded?
The secretary of labor using funds to throw herself a lavish birthday party and travel around the country?
Kash Patel flying himself and his girlfriend around on an FBI jet with an expensive security detail so they can party?
The fact that insiders are openly insider trading in crypto, the stock market, and these betting markets (both the illegal Venezuela and Iran invasions had huge extremely suspicious bets right before actions were taken).
This barely scratched the surface of this term alone. These fascists are so transparently corrupt.
There is zero, absolutely zero chance of the 50th percentile IQ becoming a world class mathematician. People who say this have no idea exactly how smart these guys are.
It seems like a bit of a pointless and unanswerable argument about semantics, the only bit is the irritating "ohh if it's SOOO EASY" about something that was definitely framed not to be easy.
If your cutoff of "world class mathematician" is a few hundred or thousand people, then no chance. If their cutoff is "earn a comfortable living" and the top 10% of the world is 800,000,000 people most of whom don't study mathematics, then can an average intellect with an obsession for math end up working a job a normal person might call 'mathematician' by working on AutoCAD or 3D rendering game engine or industrial statistics and process control or economics or vehicle aerodynamics and be in the top 10% of the world in mathematical ability? Possibly yes. And you can adjust the numbers and criterion to get a yes or no whichever way you like.
>you can adjust the numbers and criterion to get a yes or no whichever way you like.
Good idea, I'll do that :)
>can an average intellect with an obsession for math end up
>working on AutoCAD or 3D rendering game engine or industrial statistics and process control or economics or vehicle aerodynamics and be in the top 10% of the world in mathematical ability?
I think this does happen quite a bit and the need for strong math in these difficult areas is so great that there will never be enough people as briliant as Tao to fill the positions.
That's so far outside the mainstream anyway, most systems are going to screen the rare person like that out without understanding why.
Now what happens when those having top 10% of ability are very excellent themselves, but cases come up that would yield only to a Tao level of "natural-born" problem-solver?
A mathematician is someone who creates or advances math. Not someone who uses math. If you don't understand how the word is used, that's your problem, not a problem with the statement.
mathematician /măth″ə-mə-tĭsh′ən/
A person skilled or learned in mathematics.
One versed in mathematics.
An expert on mathematics.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition • More at Wordnik
None of the definitions require creating or advancing mathematics.
People in the field would never, ever call someone "versed in mathematics" as being a mathematician.
I don't even buy that regular people call someone who is "versed in mathematics" a "mathematician".
If you met a 30 year old person and asked what they do and they said "I'm an athlete" - do you take the dictionary definition there too? Most people will assume they mean a professional athlete.
> absolutely zero chance of the 50th percentile IQ becoming a world class mathematician.
Good, we don't need billions of them anyway.
I wish modern society would quit focusing on individual intelligence over collective intelligence. We can take something like the microprocessor, for example. The smart group that designed the microprocessor was not the same group that designed the software nor the group the built the parts nor the group the assembled the device. However, every group is equally important.
"Dedication and work ethic" is almost certainly nonsense here. Some people do the activity a lot without having any ethic or dedication - they like it.
>> people generally don't like to listen to stories that suggest that nurture and hard work aren't as important as they presume
Having grown up in australia but living in the us, this attitude is very american. It's quite funny to see when you don't grow up thinking it. I married into a very athletic family and have a child who is a precocious athlete. Many parents ask us what training regime or practice sessions we do. The answer is nothing. People don't react well.
If you work at it you can get better. It's true in both cases. Getting better and getting as good as the very best are two very different things. One is about you. The other is mostly about others.
I'm sure company policy would technically prohibit them from accessing company resources from their personal computer; or if it does allow access to company resources from their personal computer then their corporate tech policy very likely does apply to their personal computing.
If the executive bought it for a personal mac mini for personal use only, with no interaction with company resources, then the person probably wouldn't have told the story.
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