Very interesting points, but "We should not be screwing around with dollar devaluation!" what if that is not our choice, but inevitable?
The world will not explode, but find a new equilibrium. And in my simple model, wealth is a result of productivity plus trade. So, in the end, the wealth will be distributed differently, but always present in a society that has productivity (people willing and able to work hard) and trade. So, in the end there will be wealth in the US too, unless the people in the US give up while being depressed that things have changed (which is not likely given the US history).
"The world depends on us."
Right now, but the world may be capable of dealing with change. For example, what if the world simply moves on to another currency, or a mix of currencies as "main reserve currency"?
"you are say random is 100% total unpredicatablity"
Yes, because if a system or signal is only partly unpredictable, then the predictable part is not random and the unpredictable part is random. It's a compound signal of a nonrandom and a random signal.
"A chaotic signal is generated by a mathematical expression that contains some sort of randomness."
I absolutely don't agree with that definition of chaos. Chaos is a system in which small variations of the inputs lead to compounded/magnified differences in the system. In a chaotic system, if an input value is (1.0 + 1e-10) or (1.0 + 1.1e-10) can make a tremendous difference in the long term, but if you know the exact values of the inputs, then you know the exact future state of the system. The author of the quote is probably confused, because chaotic systems usually become apparent and seem to behave like random systems because there is some inaccuracy in the measurement of the inputs, for example, in case of a temperature sensor, thermal noise in the sensor. the 'contains some sort of randomness' is not in the 'mathematical expresssion' generating the sigbnal, but in the measurements of the parameters for the system. Literally, what he is saying is that a chaotic system has a stochastic (random) variable in its model, but that is not true. In a chaotic system, variations in the inputs lead to compounded differences in the future state of the system. A well known example of a chaotic system is the fractal. If you know the input coordinates exactly, then you can reproduce the output value exactly, but a minute difference in the inputs can result in a large difference in the output, which is why you can keep 'zooming in' into a fractal and still see very detailed structures.
"but you got a real uphill battle to convince Finance professors and stock brokers it isn't random!:)"
Which is weird, because if it truly were random, then why would I need a financial advisor? If he is right and the system is random, then whatever he tells me about the future state of the system is as unreliable as my rolling dice predictor(tm) (patent pending)... And at the same time it is very intriguing, because if they as a large group all make the same mistakes in trying to model the system to decide their behaviour in that system, then that may open up some tremendous opportunities...
So you already "Consider your ass retired", and you are going to "Walk the earth"... Meaning that you have "decided to become a bum", but really meaning that you will stay alive while your former colleage gets shot in the face?
(with many references to Pulp Fiction, warning spoiler, oops too late, but who cares: everybody has seen that movie already anyways).
"This is ultimately because our standard of living it too high relative to the rest of the world. This is unsustainable."
"In time, the gap will narrow and we will be less and they will be more than they were previously."
That all depends on how big the total growth of standard of living will be. Maybe the rich countries will be stagnant for a long time while the rest of the world makes a big growth spurt.
Just keep that in mind when you decide on where/how to invest your savings or 401k (as long as you still have any).
"The simplest way to make US wages competitive with foreign wages is to weaken the dollar"
Very good point.
Outsourcing results in a big job loss, and also results in a larger trade deficit (more imports, this time of outsourced labor and services). Large unemployment numbers and a large trade deficit however leads to devaluation of the dollar.
Devaluation of the dollar will make exports from the US grow, because US products will become less expensive world-wide, which will result in more jobs to create&support those exported products.
Devaluation of the dollar will also increase the inflow of foreign cash into the US to invest in new business, also resulting in new jobs.
So, devaluation of the dollar will bring the balance back where more people are employed.
So, I guess tech workers should be happy that outsourcing also affects many other service industry workers such as accountants, radiologists, non-tech customer support, etc. Because if it was just tech that was 'victimized', then the only option would be a career change. Now, there may be some macroeconomic effects to soften the blow a little bit.
Now, there is one thing that can stop devaluation of the dollar, and that is if there is a new industry or export product that develops is the US. If that is the case, then the macroeconomic assumption is that that new industry will replace the jobs lost and keep the economy growing. When macroeconomists talk about that, they usually find their 'proof' by lookin at history, in which such a thing has happened multiple times before. An often used example is the manufacturing industry, where a lot of jobs have been lost (and still are being lost), starting in a time when >50% of the US workers were manufacturing workers. By now, after all those job losses unemployment is not >50% because new jobs came to replace the old lost ones.
So, either the dollar devaluates, or there will be something new to keep people employed in high-paying jobs. Or somewhere in the middle. The question is where exactly? And how long until this stabilizes?
"There are not any laws of Human Behavior (OK, maybe Greed is one)".. "that you can use to predict how a group of investors will react to a given set of data" "That is what makes it Random"
No it does not. You are just calling it random because it is chaotic and you don't have enough data and don't have a good model to make the predictions you're seeking.
Random means full disorder, unpredictable. Any predictability in a system means that the system does not have full entropy, hence is not random. You said it yourself, even the behaviour of the investor is not random, because there is greed involved.
To be random, a system has to be fully unpredictable. Each and every bit of the system must have one bit of entropy. If any of the bits can be predicted from the others, then they don't add to the entropy, hence the system is not random.
If you have found a way to predict the signal in any way such that your prediction results are better than rolling a dice, then you have proven that the signal has a pattern and is not random.
If the stock market were random, you wouldn't need to do _any_ analysis before buying or selling stock, because you could use your dice to make the decisions and make or lose the same amount of money. And if you think that doing more and/or better analysis doesn't improve your odds of making money on the stock market, then you haven't been doing the right kind of analysis.
By your reasoning, a lot of things are random. For example flight arrival times are random by your definitions, because they fluctuate a bit in a way that nobody seems to be capable of predicting. Also, your monthly electricity bill is random by your definition, and so is the profit of Microsoft.
"I also know Chaotic systems can be predicted to some extent by a series of equations often using calculus."
... Chaotic systems can be fully predicted if you have the model (='series of equations') and if you have all data at full precision. Random systems can not be predicted by any model.
The fact that 'a butterfly can cause a hurricane' doesn't make the weather random, it just makes it chaotic because we can't track all butterflies with sufficient precision. Something similar is true for the stock market.
A good MBA person knows when to stop relying on their own birdseye view of things and hire a specialist, such as a mathematician.
"Nope, in the long run it is random, you learn this on Day 1 of any Finance or Investment class."
Hihi. Finance class. Yeah, but when an economist says it's random, then that means he can't figure out how to make money with it. But economists and pure MBA-ers usually are relatively clueless about mathematics (even though on the surface it doesn't seem that way because they use certain mathematical a lot, albeit not always in the right way).
Mathematically, random is a very well defined term. Read up on Stochastics and the Shannon's information theories and you'll learn all about it. Basically, if you find _any_ predictability in a signal, then you have proven that it is not random. The other way around, proving that a measurable signal is random is extremely hard, if not impossible.
Going into detail about your long-term predictions, probably the stock market is chaotic (another well defined mathematical term), but definitely not random. As an example, weather is also chaotic but not random in a similar way. Laymans summary: Chaotic means that there is a system that predicts everything, but you have insufficient data points (measurements), or insufficient precision in your measurements to have sufficient precision for the predictions of the future of the system, because the noise and rounding errors compounds and the signal doesn't.
"The stock,market as a whole has been proven to be random, there IS no pattern or predicatabilty."
I beg to differ. Random is harder to achieve than a pattern, any pattern. The stock market most definitely is not random.
If you, say, predict the value of tomorrow's stock by predicting it will be the same value as today's closing, then you will probably have a much smaller prediction error than if you rolled a dice to predict the stock value. If the stock market were truly random, then both methods would be equally bad at predicting tomorows stock values.
Hence, there is a pattern. Sure, there may be a lot of noise on top of the patterned signal, but the signal is not pure noise.
My guess is that distilling results in cleaner water than a RO filter, but that it will cost a lot more per gallon to make.
I think I've seen countertop distillers too, where basically runs continuously to keep a jug of distilled water full for your use. It looked sort of like a coffee machine.
The RO filter I'm talking about can do about 24 gallons per day using just the water pressure. I'd imagine you'd need a fair amount of heating and cooling to distill that amount of water, making it a lot more expensive to use.
"I find that even britta filtered water from my tap makes my tea taste odd.."
But britta is not particularly a top-end filter... I've had both the bottle filter type and the faucet filter type filters, and they all still leave a aftertaste to the water. However, the reverse osmosis filter doesn't.
Cooking just kills the bacteria, so you'll end up with water that won't give you an infection, but you're still left with water that contains the dead bacteria, and other dissolved substances (chlorine, various dissolved salts) and (small) particles (metals (lead), dirt) that, in addition to possibly making the water less healthy, can (and usually does) make it taste bad. To just kill the bacteria, people sometimes use a UV light filter in their water lines.
The RO filter is the last one after other filters that filter out particles of decreasing size. The RO filter goes down to particles of 1/10000 micron (that is 0.1nm. Compare with a 90nm feature size for the smallest transistors today. So you can probably run the water from an RO filter over an uncoated bare silicon wafer without leaving damaging particles all over it).
Boats sometimes use RO filters to make drinking water from water from the ocean.
If you don't like the 'taste' of water, then you probably never had good clean water.
Get a five stage Reverse Osmosis water filter. They are truly amazing. They are so good they're in a whole different leage than those regular water/icemaker filters. The water from the reverse osmosis filter tastes better than bottled water. No foulness, no bitterness, no aftertastes, no lighheadedness, no smells, no nothing, just absolutely pure and clean water. Everything you make with it tastes better, even coffee or tea itself. About $150 at Samsclub, will last for years.
Im sorry, but "4:1:1" and "4:2:0" are the same thing (both subsample chrominance by 2 both horizontally and vertically), with the only difference the centerpoint of the subsampling filter.
Theranthrope probably already made pretty clear that document structure, text properties, or layout tags are not the same things as processes and procedures, but I'll add that creating xml in particular is not design, but it is data entry.
If it is a duck, then call it a duck. Ducks float on water, but if something is floating on the water, that doesn't always mean it is a duck.
Creating html (and xsl or css for that matter) is design, because it is just like creating a logo, or a brochure, a creative process of design. You can call it art of you like, but not programming. I'm not implying at all that creating html is a lowly job or something like that, it's just not programming. If you are designing a web site and as part of it, a page contains a javascript, or uses php, or a cgi procedure that you wrote, then writing the javascript/php/cgi was a form of programming, but making the layout of the web site and pages was design, and entering the content in the pages was data entry.
Calling creating html 'programming' is dilatation of the word. If people start calling eveything that causes them to touch a keyboard programming, then soon everybody will be programming emails and instant messages...
Now, to be precise, creating html is also partly data entry, and that is just why they split it up in xml and xsl.
Slashdot Mirror
Did anybody else notive the horrible spot for that LCD tv in the kitchen? Or am I the only one who gets the dirt on the wall that high when I cook?
Very interesting points, but "We should not be screwing around with dollar devaluation!" what if that is not our choice, but inevitable?
The world will not explode, but find a new equilibrium. And in my simple model, wealth is a result of productivity plus trade. So, in the end, the wealth will be distributed differently, but always present in a society that has productivity (people willing and able to work hard) and trade. So, in the end there will be wealth in the US too, unless the people in the US give up while being depressed that things have changed (which is not likely given the US history).
"The world depends on us."
Right now, but the world may be capable of dealing with change. For example, what if the world simply moves on to another currency, or a mix of currencies as "main reserve currency"?
"you are say random is 100% total unpredicatablity"
:)"
Yes, because if a system or signal is only partly unpredictable, then the predictable part is not random and the unpredictable part is random. It's a compound signal of a nonrandom and a random signal.
"A chaotic signal is generated by a mathematical expression that contains some sort of randomness."
I absolutely don't agree with that definition of chaos. Chaos is a system in which small variations of the inputs lead to compounded/magnified differences in the system. In a chaotic system, if an input value is (1.0 + 1e-10) or (1.0 + 1.1e-10) can make a tremendous difference in the long term, but if you know the exact values of the inputs, then you know the exact future state of the system. The author of the quote is probably confused, because chaotic systems usually become apparent and seem to behave like random systems because there is some inaccuracy in the measurement of the inputs, for example, in case of a temperature sensor, thermal noise in the sensor. the 'contains some sort of randomness' is not in the 'mathematical expresssion' generating the sigbnal, but in the measurements of the parameters for the system. Literally, what he is saying is that a chaotic system has a stochastic (random) variable in its model, but that is not true. In a chaotic system, variations in the inputs lead to compounded differences in the future state of the system. A well known example of a chaotic system is the fractal. If you know the input coordinates exactly, then you can reproduce the output value exactly, but a minute difference in the inputs can result in a large difference in the output, which is why you can keep 'zooming in' into a fractal and still see very detailed structures.
"but you got a real uphill battle to convince Finance professors and stock brokers it isn't random!
Which is weird, because if it truly were random, then why would I need a financial advisor? If he is right and the system is random, then whatever he tells me about the future state of the system is as unreliable as my rolling dice predictor(tm) (patent pending)... And at the same time it is very intriguing, because if they as a large group all make the same mistakes in trying to model the system to decide their behaviour in that system, then that may open up some tremendous opportunities...
"The affordability of it all is based on foreign trade."
But the existance of them is based on the innovativity in the western world.
The western world has them, and can afford them, because they invented/developed them.
Want more? Need to invent more!
If somebody else invents/develops more, then they will have more...
So you already "Consider your ass retired", and you are going to "Walk the earth"... Meaning that you have "decided to become a bum", but really meaning that you will stay alive while your former colleage gets shot in the face?
(with many references to Pulp Fiction, warning spoiler, oops too late, but who cares: everybody has seen that movie already anyways).
"In time, the gap will narrow and we will be less and they will be more than they were previously."
That all depends on how big the total growth of standard of living will be. Maybe the rich countries will be stagnant for a long time while the rest of the world makes a big growth spurt.
Just keep that in mind when you decide on where/how to invest your savings or 401k (as long as you still have any).
You mean 2500/year plus all the hours spent commuting to work.
"The simplest way to make US wages competitive with foreign wages is to weaken the dollar"
Very good point.
Outsourcing results in a big job loss, and also results in a larger trade deficit (more imports, this time of outsourced labor and services). Large unemployment numbers and a large trade deficit however leads to devaluation of the dollar.
Devaluation of the dollar will make exports from the US grow, because US products will become less expensive world-wide, which will result in more jobs to create&support those exported products.
Devaluation of the dollar will also increase the inflow of foreign cash into the US to invest in new business, also resulting in new jobs.
So, devaluation of the dollar will bring the balance back where more people are employed.
So, I guess tech workers should be happy that outsourcing also affects many other service industry workers such as accountants, radiologists, non-tech customer support, etc. Because if it was just tech that was 'victimized', then the only option would be a career change. Now, there may be some macroeconomic effects to soften the blow a little bit.
Now, there is one thing that can stop devaluation of the dollar, and that is if there is a new industry or export product that develops is the US. If that is the case, then the macroeconomic assumption is that that new industry will replace the jobs lost and keep the economy growing. When macroeconomists talk about that, they usually find their 'proof' by lookin at history, in which such a thing has happened multiple times before. An often used example is the manufacturing industry, where a lot of jobs have been lost (and still are being lost), starting in a time when >50% of the US workers were manufacturing workers. By now, after all those job losses unemployment is not >50% because new jobs came to replace the old lost ones.
So, either the dollar devaluates, or there will be something new to keep people employed in high-paying jobs. Or somewhere in the middle. The question is where exactly? And how long until this stabilizes?
No it does not. You are just calling it random because it is chaotic and you don't have enough data and don't have a good model to make the predictions you're seeking.
Random means full disorder, unpredictable. Any predictability in a system means that the system does not have full entropy, hence is not random. You said it yourself, even the behaviour of the investor is not random, because there is greed involved.
To be random, a system has to be fully unpredictable. Each and every bit of the system must have one bit of entropy. If any of the bits can be predicted from the others, then they don't add to the entropy, hence the system is not random.
If you have found a way to predict the signal in any way such that your prediction results are better than rolling a dice, then you have proven that the signal has a pattern and is not random.
If the stock market were random, you wouldn't need to do _any_ analysis before buying or selling stock, because you could use your dice to make the decisions and make or lose the same amount of money. And if you think that doing more and/or better analysis doesn't improve your odds of making money on the stock market, then you haven't been doing the right kind of analysis.
By your reasoning, a lot of things are random. For example flight arrival times are random by your definitions, because they fluctuate a bit in a way that nobody seems to be capable of predicting. Also, your monthly electricity bill is random by your definition, and so is the profit of Microsoft.
"I also know Chaotic systems can be predicted to some extent by a series of equations often using calculus."
... Chaotic systems can be fully predicted if you have the model (='series of equations') and if you have all data at full precision. Random systems can not be predicted by any model.
The fact that 'a butterfly can cause a hurricane' doesn't make the weather random, it just makes it chaotic because we can't track all butterflies with sufficient precision. Something similar is true for the stock market.
A good MBA person knows when to stop relying on their own birdseye view of things and hire a specialist, such as a mathematician.
"Would it have killed you"
No.
But I didn't want to be partial on this particular subject so I decided to let people read it themselves and make their own conclusions.
In mathematics, the term 'random' is very well defined. No need to talk about it.
The problem is that many people call something random when it either is chaotic, or simply when they don't see a pattern, which is plain wrong.
A wise man once said: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".
People calling things random when they are not random is something similar.
"Nope, in the long run it is random, you learn this on Day 1 of any Finance or Investment class."
Hihi. Finance class. Yeah, but when an economist says it's random, then that means he can't figure out how to make money with it. But economists and pure MBA-ers usually are relatively clueless about mathematics (even though on the surface it doesn't seem that way because they use certain mathematical a lot, albeit not always in the right way).
Mathematically, random is a very well defined term. Read up on Stochastics and the Shannon's information theories and you'll learn all about it. Basically, if you find _any_ predictability in a signal, then you have proven that it is not random. The other way around, proving that a measurable signal is random is extremely hard, if not impossible.
Going into detail about your long-term predictions, probably the stock market is chaotic (another well defined mathematical term), but definitely not random. As an example, weather is also chaotic but not random in a similar way. Laymans summary: Chaotic means that there is a system that predicts everything, but you have insufficient data points (measurements), or insufficient precision in your measurements to have sufficient precision for the predictions of the future of the system, because the noise and rounding errors compounds and the signal doesn't.
"The stock ,market as a whole has been proven to be random, there IS no pattern or predicatabilty."
I beg to differ. Random is harder to achieve than a pattern, any pattern. The stock market most definitely is not random.
If you, say, predict the value of tomorrow's stock by predicting it will be the same value as today's closing, then you will probably have a much smaller prediction error than if you rolled a dice to predict the stock value. If the stock market were truly random, then both methods would be equally bad at predicting tomorows stock values.
Hence, there is a pattern. Sure, there may be a lot of noise on top of the patterned signal, but the signal is not pure noise.
Anwsers here especially this one...
What if the leak is behind a panel, and the condensed air is just building up behind the panel, slowly leaking out instead of being blown out?
But the engineer gets you within a block of your destination two weeks earlier.
My guess is that distilling results in cleaner water than a RO filter, but that it will cost a lot more per gallon to make.
I think I've seen countertop distillers too, where basically runs continuously to keep a jug of distilled water full for your use. It looked sort of like a coffee machine.
The RO filter I'm talking about can do about 24 gallons per day using just the water pressure. I'd imagine you'd need a fair amount of heating and cooling to distill that amount of water, making it a lot more expensive to use.
What you're saying is that you prefer a glass of dissolved calcium over a glass of water. Some people will say the same for sodapop.
I'd like my water just water without any contaminants, I'll add the flavor that I want myself.
"I find that even britta filtered water from my tap makes my tea taste odd.."
But britta is not particularly a top-end filter... I've had both the bottle filter type and the faucet filter type filters, and they all still leave a aftertaste to the water. However, the reverse osmosis filter doesn't.
Cooking just kills the bacteria, so you'll end up with water that won't give you an infection, but you're still left with water that contains the dead bacteria, and other dissolved substances (chlorine, various dissolved salts) and (small) particles (metals (lead), dirt) that, in addition to possibly making the water less healthy, can (and usually does) make it taste bad. To just kill the bacteria, people sometimes use a UV light filter in their water lines.
The RO filter is the last one after other filters that filter out particles of decreasing size. The RO filter goes down to particles of 1/10000 micron (that is 0.1nm. Compare with a 90nm feature size for the smallest transistors today. So you can probably run the water from an RO filter over an uncoated bare silicon wafer without leaving damaging particles all over it).
Boats sometimes use RO filters to make drinking water from water from the ocean.
Water ... "Ah, foul stuff that is."
If you don't like the 'taste' of water, then you probably never had good clean water.
Get a five stage Reverse Osmosis water filter. They are truly amazing. They are so good they're in a whole different leage than those regular water/icemaker filters. The water from the reverse osmosis filter tastes better than bottled water. No foulness, no bitterness, no aftertastes, no lighheadedness, no smells, no nothing, just absolutely pure and clean water. Everything you make with it tastes better, even coffee or tea itself. About $150 at Samsclub, will last for years.
I read that tvtime uses many of the same algorithms that dscaler uses.
Im sorry, but "4:1:1" and "4:2:0" are the same thing (both subsample chrominance by 2 both horizontally and vertically), with the only difference the centerpoint of the subsampling filter.
A phrase that is usually called from a crowd, when?
Theranthrope probably already made pretty clear that document structure, text properties, or layout tags are not the same things as processes and procedures, but I'll add that creating xml in particular is not design, but it is data entry.
If it is a duck, then call it a duck. Ducks float on water, but if something is floating on the water, that doesn't always mean it is a duck.
Creating html (and xsl or css for that matter) is design, because it is just like creating a logo, or a brochure, a creative process of design. You can call it art of you like, but not programming. I'm not implying at all that creating html is a lowly job or something like that, it's just not programming. If you are designing a web site and as part of it, a page contains a javascript, or uses php, or a cgi procedure that you wrote, then writing the javascript/php/cgi was a form of programming, but making the layout of the web site and pages was design, and entering the content in the pages was data entry.
Calling creating html 'programming' is dilatation of the word. If people start calling eveything that causes them to touch a keyboard programming, then soon everybody will be programming emails and instant messages...
Now, to be precise, creating html is also partly data entry, and that is just why they split it up in xml and xsl.