Lenders are being completely rational from their perspective. They get paid for creating a market for loans. If they don't issue loans, they don't get paid.
They are using Other People's Money by packaging the resulting debt into CDO's and selling them off, so they don't have an incentive to look too closely at how credit-worthy the individual is. It's a bad combination of negative externalities and information asymmetry. It's a market failure that requires government regulation to fix.
> Do you know anything about free market economic theory? The Austrian school? Von Mises?
Other than getting a MBA and spending every spare moment of the past 18 months reading every economics textbook and blog I could get my hands on to see if I wanted to get a Ph.D. in the field, no, I don't know anything about economics...
> After all, Keynesian theory stated that the very concept was impossible. Their models said so.
And Pure Libertarianism must be the answer. *Your* model says so. Note you have the same bias.
I don't hate libertarian philosophy, in fact I lean heavily in that direction. But libertarianism is a *model* of human behaviour, and suffers from edge cases and a range of validity. You don't see physics students running around assuming the world is *really* made of infinite square wells, infinite planes, etc. Those are simplifications to arrive at an approximation to physical behaviour. Such is libertarianism too. It's a good idea but can be taken too far.
Reagan may not have understood the economy, but he understood people. And the world is full of people who think we would be better off if everyone would just use *THEIR* model of how things should work, and shake their fist at reality when it has the audacity to keep on working anyway. Pure Libertarians are no different here.
There are often good relative rules, but few absolute rules, there are almost always exceptions. Every optimization has a trade-off. Life is always going to be a muddle. I stand by that thesis.
Libertarianism is as much an economic philosophy as anything else. You can't separate the ideology of pure self-reliance from economics. And every economic model, be it libertarianism, socialism, communism, is just that, a model. Every model has edge cases and a range of validity, beyond which it breaks down.
Physics *isn't* real life. Take that opinion from someone who's almost done with a Ph.D. in Cosmology. Physics is our mathematical description of the universe, but description doesn't always imply understanding. In a Godel-like sense, I believe there are true facts about the universe that will never be provable, understandable, perhaps even measurable, and thus those facts are forever beyond the power of physics to describe.
"An economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders if it would work in theory."
I like libertarian philiosophy myself, but the nuts in the crowd can't understand that markets/politics is a synthesis of human psychology and behaviors perturbed by random events, and doesn't have some underlying grand unified theory like physics. Real life has, and always will be, a muddle.
This isn't an either/or situation. Eating and exercising are *both* necessary, but for me, most of the weight loss was due to diet and not the exercise. As I pointed out, I ran 30 miles a week for two years, and had 1/2 the weight loss I did in 6 months of eating right and weightlifting twice a week.
Weight loss is a matter of willpower, but it's also a matter of having the right technique. All the willpower in the world won't help you if you're doing the wrong thing. And weight loss isn't about exercise (at least for me), it was about eating right.
I spent two years running 30 miles a week, and eating bad foods. I lost 15 pounds in 2 years (and wore my knees out in the process).
I spent six months eating healthy food and weightlifting 2 days a week. I lost 30 pounds in 6 months.
Notice the difference.
1. Cut out sugar, flour, bread, pasta, rice, potatoes from your diet. They spike your insulin and give you that gnawing hunger. 2. Give yourself 3 skip meals a week where you violate the first rule, but not too much. Only a bit. 3. Eat a portion of white meat two meals a day. It slows your digestion, and keeps your body from starving itself of protein. 4. Eat salads, fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts until you are full (but only after eating your protein.
That's really all there is to it. No secrets. For the first two months, my "exercise" was reading the newspaper in the sauna and I lost 15 lbs in that time. I did start weightlifting after a few months, and have almost doubled my benchpress and legpress weights in only 4 months. My waist has gone from a fat 40" to a loose 34". I feel like a million dollars.
I would dearly love to know if this technique would be suitable for helping people with autoimmune diseases. I have close friends with lupus, scleroderma, myasthenia gravis, and bipolar disorder. This could potentially be a godsend to them.
This is overlooked by too many people. I'm a physicist/computer guy by training, but I decided to broaden my employability a bit. I used my employer's tuition discount to take some business classes at the local community college, enjoyed them, and went on to earn a MBA at Vanderbilt at nights/weekends. I've started taking pre-med classes at the community college partly for fun, but also because Nashville is a major medical town and I suspect it will increase my employability even more.
I get a 70% discount on a 3 hour class. At the local community college, that works out to ~$300 per class including the textbook. That's $900 a year. That's a no-brainer in my book. I've never bought an asset, never owned a stock, never owned a mutual fund, that has a higher rate of return than my brain.
While I don't think my job is going to India anytime soon, you can't be sure about tomorrow, and why wait until tomorrow when you can do something about it *today*. Most people ignore their tuition benefit. I'm sure most people fail to fund their 401K to the company match too; that's not the company's fault. Take control.
...a term sprinkled liberally through grant proposals, business plans, etc to maximize funding and buzz. It's this year's marketing spin on "Grid Computing".
I (Mat) work at Vanderbilt University's supercomputing center. Our university supercomputing center was originally a joint venture between the proteomics and high-energy physics departments, but they decided to make it a independent university-wide initiative to bring HPC tools to all users.
Before we founded the center, there were a lot of groups that required computing on campus, but it was highly inefficient. Their local clusters had lots of free cycles (low return on asset) that they couldn't effectively share with other users, the clusters were down quite often (grad students and postdocs are poor sysadmins, plus they should be doing actual research anyway). Several other problems related to either pooling of resources or pooling of knowledge, you get the idea...
I highly recommend setting up a batch scheduler such as Torque/Maui and opening your cluster to all researchers on campus. You'd be surprised how much demand is out there. We have all the usual math/science/engineering/biomedical users, plus users in more esoteric fields (nursing, accounting, music, psychology). You can always give your group a higher job priority if needed. It gives a higher return on asset and gets lots of goodwill on campus (and, potentially, at funding agencies). You can charge users for support, storage, etc for cost recovery, or even use it as a revenue source if your grants allow.
Having different types of users also allows cross-pollination of ideas. We have a large number of biomedical researchers who are now using a high-energy physics software (geant), biomedial people who are teaching other users how to program in R, etc. These are avenues for research/discovery that didn't exist before.
I actually did this (worked on my Executive MBA, graduate in 10 days). Different strokes for different folks, but I actually enjoyed most of my classes. If you've never had classes in economics, finance, negotiations, entrepreneurship, business law, you might want to take some classes at your local community college and see how you like them. There are "business geeks" the same way there are "computer geeks" and "science geeks"; not all MBA's fit the stereotype. In fact, I would say that they were the minority of our class.
The MBA is nice because it gives you access to entire new types of work, but also simply because it lets you exercise parts of your brain that the technical side of things doesn't. It's made me a lot happier.
I can't help but wonder if they haven't changed since the age of the dinosaurs *because* of their strong immune system. Viruses cause a lot of DNA mutations for natural selection to work with. If your immune system is efficient at killing viruses, that cuts off an entire avenue for helpful mutations to enter the genome. Their source of mutations has been reduced to cosmic rays. Overgeneralized, but I hope you get the idea.
Maybe we should start looking at other dinosaur-era lifeforms and seeing what's in their immune system.
The military has a problem. They need a lot of power for computers, communications, all the conveniences of modern warfare. *But*, they often work far away from any established (or reliable) infrastructure.
Space-based power would be a tremendous gain. Setting up base in a remote corner of Iran to perform Intel? No problem. Spaceman Spiff justs adjusts the microwave transmitter from the orbital solar array, and you get instant power.
I haven't thought through all the implications, but I can see substantial military advantages in something like this.
While everyone is harping about ATI's past sins, I'd like to thank ATI for committing to fixing those problems. We should commend (and purchase from) companies that make our lives easier (I'm looking at you, Broadcom...)
I just love it when tech companies try to rationalize H1B visas. "We can't find enough qualified people" They *ALWAYS* leave out the second half of that sentence: "...at the salary we're willing to pay."
Supply and demand is a bitch sometimes, but it *does* work. If you were to pay, say, $1 million a year, Microsoft would probably have to hire armed guards to keep the horde at bay. If they are having problem finding qualified people at, say, $100k, perhaps they should try $120k, or $150k? But that's crazy talk...
H1B visas function as a corporate subsidy, creating a price-ceiling on domestic wages. It's strange how businesses think market economics is a wonderful thing, unless it happens to be against you. Then they run crying to Washington with a train of lobbyists to ask Uncle Sugar for "help".
There should be a law, that you aren't allowed to pass legislation that doesn't pass the muster of a freshman economics textbook.
We did. Unofficially of course, but we would have come in 2nd place in the bandwidth challenge. And we had less than 24 hours to prepare, so we're really looking forward to next year.
That's not that impressive in the scheme of things (ie Supercomputing 2006). We (Vanderbilt) were there, and we were streaming 35 Gb/sec for hours on end over a parallel filesystem we're developing. And even we weren't the fastest there. Going to Supercomputing is like stepping 3-4 years into the future.
Just from observing here in Tennessee, when I was young (30 years ago) I remember getting 4-5 good snows every winter. Now you're lucky if you see 1 good snow every other winter.
Tennessee is right on the border between "gets a ton of snow" and "no snow at all". So small differences in temperature are exaggerated.
The question is, is global warming man-made, or some sort of natural cycle, ala El Nino or something else we don't know about. I'd lean toward the latter.
This card is meant for the "audiophile gold cable crackpot" market. It offers no real-world benefit, at a very substantial cost.
This sort of card *might* (might!) be of use in a server environment where you're trying to transfer gigabits of data at a whack. In fact, they already have it. It's called TCP Offload Engine (TOE). Unless you are rendering Doom 3 on your Beowulf cluster at 1600x1200 and sending the raw uncompressed data over ethernet, you aren't going to need this sort of card for gaming.
For lower latency, you need to ditch ethernet altogether and use a different switch fabric, like Myrinet or Infiniband. Again, not for video games.
Trading in options, futures, and other derivative instruments should be reserved strictly for Ph.D's with their own Beowulf cluster, or people who aren't losing enough money by day-trading. You can get in more trouble, quicker, than you can imagine.
Don't dis a finance degree. I did grad work in physics and work at a supercomputing center, and I have a large amount of respect for how hard finance can be. I've taken a few finance classes, and it ain't basketweaving. It's *hard*, in the same way physics is hard. If you think you are going to waltz into that field and compete with degreed people, you are either smarter than I am, or delusional.
Stick with stocks and bonds, but spend a year or two practicing. You don't need to trade stocks every minute/hour/day to make good money. Just look at Warren Buffet. Buy a copy of Ben Graham's "Intelligent Investor" and "Securities Analysis", Marcia Stigum's "The Money Market", Annette Thau's "The Bond Book", Robert Hagstrom's "The Warren Buffet Way", and Jim Collins "Good to Great. Read them, several times, and then test your knowledge with your own money before you blow someone else's.
I don't think the government should have to levy fines against violaters. By simply forcing companies to announce security violations, Adam Smith's invisible hand will make poor security a competitive disadvantage to those possesing it.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD Nvidia, please release a AGP version of your cards. Seriously. There's no way I intend to replace a perfectly good motherboard, CPU, memory, etc just to use a PCI-Express card. I would imagine there are a ton of people in the same boat.
Jeez, VL-Bus got better support after PCI than AGP is after PCI-Express.
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Lenders are being completely rational from their perspective. They get paid for creating a market for loans. If they don't issue loans, they don't get paid.
They are using Other People's Money by packaging the resulting debt into CDO's and selling them off, so they don't have an incentive to look too closely at how credit-worthy the individual is. It's a bad combination of negative externalities and information asymmetry. It's a market failure that requires government regulation to fix.
> Do you know anything about free market economic theory? The Austrian school? Von Mises?
Other than getting a MBA and spending every spare moment of the past 18 months reading every economics textbook and blog I could get my hands on to see if I wanted to get a Ph.D. in the field, no, I don't know anything about economics...
> After all, Keynesian theory stated that the very concept was impossible. Their models said so.
And Pure Libertarianism must be the answer. *Your* model says so. Note you have the same bias.
I don't hate libertarian philosophy, in fact I lean heavily in that direction. But libertarianism is a *model* of human behaviour, and suffers from edge cases and a range of validity. You don't see physics students running around assuming the world is *really* made of infinite square wells, infinite planes, etc. Those are simplifications to arrive at an approximation to physical behaviour. Such is libertarianism too. It's a good idea but can be taken too far.
Reagan may not have understood the economy, but he understood people. And the world is full of people who think we would be better off if everyone would just use *THEIR* model of how things should work, and shake their fist at reality when it has the audacity to keep on working anyway. Pure Libertarians are no different here.
There are often good relative rules, but few absolute rules, there are almost always exceptions. Every optimization has a trade-off. Life is always going to be a muddle. I stand by that thesis.
Libertarianism is as much an economic philosophy as anything else. You can't separate the ideology of pure self-reliance from economics. And every economic model, be it libertarianism, socialism, communism, is just that, a model. Every model has edge cases and a range of validity, beyond which it breaks down.
Physics *isn't* real life. Take that opinion from someone who's almost done with a Ph.D. in Cosmology. Physics is our mathematical description of the universe, but description doesn't always imply understanding. In a Godel-like sense, I believe there are true facts about the universe that will never be provable, understandable, perhaps even measurable, and thus those facts are forever beyond the power of physics to describe.
"An economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders if it would work in theory."
I like libertarian philiosophy myself, but the nuts in the crowd can't understand that markets/politics is a synthesis of human psychology and behaviors perturbed by random events, and doesn't have some underlying grand unified theory like physics. Real life has, and always will be, a muddle.
My BP dropped from 130/85 to 112/72 (according to the machine at my local Wal-Mart).
This isn't an either/or situation. Eating and exercising are *both* necessary, but for me, most of the weight loss was due to diet and not the exercise. As I pointed out, I ran 30 miles a week for two years, and had 1/2 the weight loss I did in 6 months of eating right and weightlifting twice a week.
You are what you eat. Seriously.
Weight loss is a matter of willpower, but it's also a matter of having the right technique. All the willpower in the world won't help you if you're doing the wrong thing. And weight loss isn't about exercise (at least for me), it was about eating right.
I spent two years running 30 miles a week, and eating bad foods. I lost 15 pounds in 2 years (and wore my knees out in the process).
I spent six months eating healthy food and weightlifting 2 days a week. I lost 30 pounds in 6 months.
Notice the difference.
1. Cut out sugar, flour, bread, pasta, rice, potatoes from your diet. They spike your insulin and give you that gnawing hunger.
2. Give yourself 3 skip meals a week where you violate the first rule, but not too much. Only a bit.
3. Eat a portion of white meat two meals a day. It slows your digestion, and keeps your body from starving itself of protein.
4. Eat salads, fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts until you are full (but only after eating your protein.
That's really all there is to it. No secrets. For the first two months, my "exercise" was reading the newspaper in the sauna and I lost 15 lbs in that time. I did start weightlifting after a few months, and have almost doubled my benchpress and legpress weights in only 4 months. My waist has gone from a fat 40" to a loose 34". I feel like a million dollars.
"According to LucasArts, these efforts are "just the start of LucasArts' new mission to revitalize its deep portfolio of beloved gaming franchises.""
Come on guys, give us Grim Fandango 2. Seriously, the original is my favorite game of all time.
I would dearly love to know if this technique would be suitable for helping people with autoimmune diseases. I have close friends with lupus, scleroderma, myasthenia gravis, and bipolar disorder. This could potentially be a godsend to them.
This is overlooked by too many people. I'm a physicist/computer guy by training, but I decided to broaden my employability a bit. I used my employer's tuition discount to take some business classes at the local community college, enjoyed them, and went on to earn a MBA at Vanderbilt at nights/weekends. I've started taking pre-med classes at the community college partly for fun, but also because Nashville is a major medical town and I suspect it will increase my employability even more.
I get a 70% discount on a 3 hour class. At the local community college, that works out to ~$300 per class including the textbook. That's $900 a year. That's a no-brainer in my book. I've never bought an asset, never owned a stock, never owned a mutual fund, that has a higher rate of return than my brain.
While I don't think my job is going to India anytime soon, you can't be sure about tomorrow, and why wait until tomorrow when you can do something about it *today*. Most people ignore their tuition benefit. I'm sure most people fail to fund their 401K to the company match too; that's not the company's fault. Take control.
...a term sprinkled liberally through grant proposals, business plans, etc to maximize funding and buzz. It's this year's marketing spin on "Grid Computing".
I (Mat) work at Vanderbilt University's supercomputing center. Our university supercomputing center was originally a joint venture between the proteomics and high-energy physics departments, but they decided to make it a independent university-wide initiative to bring HPC tools to all users.
Before we founded the center, there were a lot of groups that required computing on campus, but it was highly inefficient. Their local clusters had lots of free cycles (low return on asset) that they couldn't effectively share with other users, the clusters were down quite often (grad students and postdocs are poor sysadmins, plus they should be doing actual research anyway). Several other problems related to either pooling of resources or pooling of knowledge, you get the idea...
I highly recommend setting up a batch scheduler such as Torque/Maui and opening your cluster to all researchers on campus. You'd be surprised how much demand is out there. We have all the usual math/science/engineering/biomedical users, plus users in more esoteric fields (nursing, accounting, music, psychology). You can always give your group a higher job priority if needed. It gives a higher return on asset and gets lots of goodwill on campus (and, potentially, at funding agencies). You can charge users for support, storage, etc for cost recovery, or even use it as a revenue source if your grants allow.
Having different types of users also allows cross-pollination of ideas. We have a large number of biomedical researchers who are now using a high-energy physics software (geant), biomedial people who are teaching other users how to program in R, etc. These are avenues for research/discovery that didn't exist before.
I actually did this (worked on my Executive MBA, graduate in 10 days). Different strokes for different folks, but I actually enjoyed most of my classes. If you've never had classes in economics, finance, negotiations, entrepreneurship, business law, you might want to take some classes at your local community college and see how you like them. There are "business geeks" the same way there are "computer geeks" and "science geeks"; not all MBA's fit the stereotype. In fact, I would say that they were the minority of our class.
The MBA is nice because it gives you access to entire new types of work, but also simply because it lets you exercise parts of your brain that the technical side of things doesn't. It's made me a lot happier.
I can't help but wonder if they haven't changed since the age of the dinosaurs *because* of their strong immune system. Viruses cause a lot of DNA mutations for natural selection to work with. If your immune system is efficient at killing viruses, that cuts off an entire avenue for helpful mutations to enter the genome. Their source of mutations has been reduced to cosmic rays. Overgeneralized, but I hope you get the idea.
Maybe we should start looking at other dinosaur-era lifeforms and seeing what's in their immune system.
The military has a problem. They need a lot of power for computers, communications, all the conveniences of modern warfare. *But*, they often work far away from any established (or reliable) infrastructure.
Space-based power would be a tremendous gain. Setting up base in a remote corner of Iran to perform Intel? No problem. Spaceman Spiff justs adjusts the microwave transmitter from the orbital solar array, and you get instant power.
I haven't thought through all the implications, but I can see substantial military advantages in something like this.
While everyone is harping about ATI's past sins, I'd like to thank ATI for committing to fixing those problems. We should commend (and purchase from) companies that make our lives easier (I'm looking at you, Broadcom...)
I just love it when tech companies try to rationalize H1B visas. "We can't find enough qualified people" They *ALWAYS* leave out the second half of that sentence: "...at the salary we're willing to pay."
Supply and demand is a bitch sometimes, but it *does* work. If you were to pay, say, $1 million a year, Microsoft would probably have to hire armed guards to keep the horde at bay. If they are having problem finding qualified people at, say, $100k, perhaps they should try $120k, or $150k? But that's crazy talk...
H1B visas function as a corporate subsidy, creating a price-ceiling on domestic wages. It's strange how businesses think market economics is a wonderful thing, unless it happens to be against you. Then they run crying to Washington with a train of lobbyists to ask Uncle Sugar for "help".
There should be a law, that you aren't allowed to pass legislation that doesn't pass the muster of a freshman economics textbook.
We did. Unofficially of course, but we would have come in 2nd place in the bandwidth challenge. And we had less than 24 hours to prepare, so we're really looking forward to next year.
That's not that impressive in the scheme of things (ie Supercomputing 2006). We (Vanderbilt) were there, and we were streaming 35 Gb/sec for hours on end over a parallel filesystem we're developing. And even we weren't the fastest there. Going to Supercomputing is like stepping 3-4 years into the future.
Just from observing here in Tennessee, when I was young (30 years ago) I remember getting 4-5 good snows every winter. Now you're lucky if you see 1 good snow every other winter.
Tennessee is right on the border between "gets a ton of snow" and "no snow at all". So small differences in temperature are exaggerated.
The question is, is global warming man-made, or some sort of natural cycle, ala El Nino or something else we don't know about. I'd lean toward the latter.
This card is meant for the "audiophile gold cable crackpot" market. It offers no real-world benefit, at a very substantial cost.
This sort of card *might* (might!) be of use in a server environment where you're trying to transfer gigabits of data at a whack. In fact, they already have it. It's called TCP Offload Engine (TOE). Unless you are rendering Doom 3 on your Beowulf cluster at 1600x1200 and sending the raw uncompressed data over ethernet, you aren't going to need this sort of card for gaming.
For lower latency, you need to ditch ethernet altogether and use a different switch fabric, like Myrinet or Infiniband. Again, not for video games.
Trading in options, futures, and other derivative instruments should be reserved strictly for Ph.D's with their own Beowulf cluster, or people who aren't losing enough money by day-trading. You can get in more trouble, quicker, than you can imagine.
Don't dis a finance degree. I did grad work in physics and work at a supercomputing center, and I have a large amount of respect for how hard finance can be. I've taken a few finance classes, and it ain't basketweaving. It's *hard*, in the same way physics is hard. If you think you are going to waltz into that field and compete with degreed people, you are either smarter than I am, or delusional.
Stick with stocks and bonds, but spend a year or two practicing. You don't need to trade stocks every minute/hour/day to make good money. Just look at Warren Buffet. Buy a copy of Ben Graham's "Intelligent Investor" and "Securities Analysis", Marcia Stigum's "The Money Market", Annette Thau's "The Bond Book", Robert Hagstrom's "The Warren Buffet Way", and Jim Collins "Good to Great. Read them, several times, and then test your knowledge with your own money before you blow someone else's.
I don't think the government should have to levy fines against violaters. By simply forcing companies to announce security violations, Adam Smith's invisible hand will make poor security a competitive disadvantage to those possesing it.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD Nvidia, please release a AGP version of your cards. Seriously. There's no way I intend to replace a perfectly good motherboard, CPU, memory, etc just to use a PCI-Express card. I would imagine there are a ton of people in the same boat.
Jeez, VL-Bus got better support after PCI than AGP is after PCI-Express.
Here's an interesting one north of Boston. Not in the database either.
p n=0.090475,0.159645&t=k
http://maps.google.com/?ll=43.114142,-71.191235&s