This one is a question of politics and economics. Law of the Sea follows the flag on the ship, flag on the ship goes to the least regulated country. There are cleaner alternatives to bunker fuel, and California mandates use of cleaner ship fuels in California territorial waters. The US could dictate that ships use cleaner fuels in our territorial waters, but outside of that, these ships will continue to use whatever their flag country lets them use.
Sulfur dioxide, however, REVERSES greenhouse effects. If you're afraid of global warming, you should like sulfur emissions.
If I were you, I'd start coming up with lists of questions that only she would know the answers to. Ask her relatives and friends to come up with questions, some silly, some serious. The more specific the questions, the more specific the answers - more general questions to get her to tell long winded stories that will capture her essence. Ask what you'll want to know ten years from now. Have your kids ask questions. Who knows, some of the answers might come in handy during junior high and high school when social problems are so vexing for kids:)
Probably 95% of the records are for compliance and things legal wants saved for CYA purposes. This is more a function of the legal environment, where everyone wants to sue every business that looks at them funny, and how courts expect tons of documents on everything you've ever done. It'd be an interesting analysis to see what the costs of excess records retention are compared to the legal losses, and more importantly, the losses consumers incur because they can't afford to fight well documented machines or what consumers lose because companies are under-documented.
Identifying things that WERE bubbles is easy enough, depending on what you define a bubble to be. Inside a bubble, the intrinsic defining feature of a bubble is that it is NOT observable, or else everyone would make a fortune off those not observing it by predicting it and drive the price down to prevent it from ever actually being a "bubble". If you are capable of observing a bubble, then by definition you are NOT capable of stopping it.
You're right that timing is an often ignored part of predicting - making a bet costs money, and the juice is always running on speculative bets, especially contrarian ones (here's why). The market can always stay "irrational" longer than you can stay solvent.
Grantham's methodology is based on the historical likelihood of a price movement, which is the same methodology that gave subprime mortgage debt AAA credit rating. It's very reliable for a tight range where asset returns approximate well defined statistical distributions. However the problem with rare, extreme events is that they are easy to observe after the fact, but they are rare and by the time you can tell what is going on, they have an extreme effect on your balance sheet.
His "3 sigma" events are inherently things unlikely to occur, but most importantly its based off three things that change daily, exempli gratis: prices, equity, and the average P/E ratio. Companies with P/E ratios that have been more than 3 times the market P/E ratio include those failures like Microsoft, Google, Apple... Any company with rare growth potential should have an "excessive" P/E ratio. Tech stocks as a sector, for example, have high P/E ratios - but they have not "popped" in the long term (.com bubble being a blip in this longer term trend), they have actually increased the long term P/E ratio of the entire market because they have BECOME the market by crowding out slower growing industries. The price of creativity, innovation and technology is risk.
Here's a smart economist saying an economist's saying: 12 out of the last 5 market crashes have been predicted. Half the people in the market (also known as "sellers") think the market is going down, and half the people (also known as "buyers") think the market is going up. Both have monetary incentives to proclaim the forthcoming terror/utopia and every day the economic and business news is full of them. They aren't listened to for a reason.
50% is also known as a completely meaningless prediction. Basically, it says the price could go up or down.
Bubbles are theoretically impossible to predict. If there existed any convincing predictable evidence that an asset price was a bubble, then everyone would sell the asset by the point it crosses that threshold, meaning the price would have gone down, contradicting the predicate that it was a bubble.
"Bubbles" are nothing more than post-hoc descriptions of prices that went up and came down, just like "bargains" are the description of prices that went down before going back up. Prices are very predictable - they go up and down.
Intel probably doesn't think AMD is a viable competitor anymore. AMD's net assets, prior to this deal, were in the neighborhood of negative $1.25 billion (assuming it can't get rid of its minority interests *cough GlobalFoundries cough*, and you believe its intellectual property is only worth $168 mil). So AMD is really getting a much better financial position from this deal, after you include the spinoff, and new technology. Intel is getting quite a bit out of the technology sharing agreement too: namely, their technology that they have experience with will continue to dominate the market.
If AMD were to die, their team might get snatched up by a player with deeper pockets and complementary engineering team, like an IBM, and things could get ugly for Intel. More importantly, the realpolitik at this level is important. Regulators around the world would use it as an excuse to attack a major American company as a monopoly, in order to try to boost their national champions. Every country wants a piece of the semiconductor industry and will use any means to get it. It may not be a coincidence that GlobalFoundries decides to build a plant in New York, and the NY AG comes in threatening big action to force this settlement... and if Cuomo couldn't get the case to stick, Eric Holder lived from birth to JD in NY.
FBI knows how to find these guys, and detain them for as long as possible before filing charges. You can bet there will be (non-torture) interrogations. The FBI has plenty of federal laws they can throw at these guys, can work with your local DA, and ICE, not to mention get the warrants to track who these guys are talking to and who else might be a threat to you.
The United States NEEDS you to report ANY activity of this kind immediately.
The real reason SUVs are popular is because huge vehicles are safe (for those inside). Car accidents are the single leading cause of death and debilitation from ages 1 to 44 in the US (oddly, in 35-44, poisoning barely edges out motor vehicle traffic...), so having a car built like a tank is rational if you're interested in retaining life and limb. Most Americans care more about this than pollution, global warming and Middle East wars, which are statistically much less likely to kill them. A 2008 Jeep Patriot starts at $16,500 MSRP, a Mini One starts at $19,000 but doesn't have enough horsepower for AC, so it isn't sold in the US (MINI Cooper starts $18,500). Both have similar acceleration (11 sec, 0 to 100kmph), Jeep Patriot is safer (19 out of 20 NHTSA Stars vs 17 for AC equipped MINI Cooper), MINI Cooper beats in mpg (28/37 vs 23/28).
The afore mentioned "subsidy" was meant to give US car manufacturers a competitive advantage vis a vis their foreign competitors, and applied to businesses, not consumers. This was not a subsidy per se, but an "accelerated depreciation" tax credit. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, only 100,000 out of 3.6 million SUVs sold in 2002 claimed the tax credit, so people were clearly not choosing the vehicles primarily for the tax credit. And SUVs were popular before this, so hopefully that "cause" is debunked.
Motorcycles get fantastic MPG, but are much, much more likely to kill you. Walking and horses have even better MPG, but are probably also more likely to kill you per mile traveled.
***Use Gaussian if you have an idea of what the parameter probably is but aren't exactly sure, rectangular if you really have no idea. A rectangular distribution says "I have no idea, the parameter could be anywhere within this particular range."
Here you have exactly why the quants got things so wrong. If you have an arbitrary random variable with a finite variance, then a law of large numbers will tell you that it converges to a Guassian under repetition. That's what most educated people know.
The problem is: the odds of an arbitrary distribution with no bounds having a finite variance is zero. In finance and economics, we know this, and we make up so many excuses to use Gaussians instead of more general LLN collection families. Gaussians are so tractable and easy to use, and so consistently used in theory that its second nature for us to use them. And since Gaussians are MLEs with relatively few restrictions, they tend to minimize measures of entropy. And since this is economics, everything ultimately has a bound... somewhere... unless its derivatives.
Not even most economists, financiers, or quants want to have to apply Levy-stable distributions all the time to variables, because working in complex spaces with integrals that never seem to converge when you want them to is a giant mathematical pain in the ass. But that's what real risk management is - your models need to be robust to whether that "variance" number your data indicates is real or bullshit or infinite.
Quants who knew better willfully ignored this, because "risk" (and "volatility" and "variance") makes "return," and they like big paychecks when things are going well. And when things aren't going well, well, who else could understand this stuff? Your average banker with an MBA might fire them, but doesn't have a chance at understanding, so he'll hire the average economist with a PhD who has a small chance, but recommends a mathematician who will say he doesn't understand the interpretation, and will refer you to a quant.
Finance adds a LOT to the economy. The basic idea of finance is deciding where the most "return" is - ie, what investments are the most productive. If you gave money to every entrepreneur who came asking, you'd be out of money by the end of the day.
Money has meaning. There is a limited supply, and that means you have to prioritize who gets it. It has to be in limited supply in order for it to have "meaning." In order to motivate people to do things, we give them money, instead of trying to guess that they want payment in the form of, say, "a two bedroom house in Santa Monica with a 30 yr mortgage, a 2007 Prius Hybrid on a 5 yr lease, Montessori school for the 7 year old..." Using money not only gives people the freedom to choose what they consume, but it removes the guesswork from employers. If you just hand out money to anyone, you have no price stability, and no ability to plan for the future.
Deciding who to give money to on what terms, based solely on their ability to honor the terms of the understood mutual agreement, is essential to the economy operating. Finance is the art of acquiring money from one source, such as bank stockholders or bond holders, and allocating that money to borrowers or investments in such a way that you reduce the idiosyncratic risk (which your investors want to avoid), thus earning compensation and a premium.
How would you feel if you could only buy a house, or a car, or a college education, or whatever you get on credit cards if you could only buy those products after you had all the money to pay for them in full at the time of purchase? Or if you could never get an incentive to save money? If you've ever been a saver or a borrower, the answer is you'd be worse off, by your revealed preference.
The problems only occur when parts of these statements are negated. For example, if banks extend credit to people who can't repay it, or if bank risk managers are idiots, or if the agreements aren't mutually understood and agreed to. Yeah, there's always going to be people who exploit their position to do unethical things, in any field. I think credit card companies are blood suckers, and I think using credit cards is evil. But I sure as hell save and invest in companies I believe have the ability to improve peoples lives and get paid for it.
Don't blame finance, blame the people who use it to do evil.
What could China do with our debt, sue us? We know the serial numbers of every bond theyve ever bought from us, and we could simply declare we are keeping those payments in escrow because China is the worlds biggest human rights violator. As long as they play our game, we keep the interest checks coming.
Not to mention, eating 2-3 bananas over the course of the day would probably correct the problem.
Not quite. 3 bananas might get you a gram of potassium. People should get about 5 grams a day from fruits and vegetables, but the average American gets about 2.5 grams a day. If you're hypokalemic, you need a professional to dose out your potassium. You might need 1 gram, you might need 10 grams, you might need it intravenously, and too much or too little may kill you, depending.
However, if you're hypokalemic and don't want to deal with medical professionals, just: 1) avoid any salty foods, and 2) eat only normal foods that happen to have good potassium.
I keep bananas, almonds, dried apricots, raisins, prunes, dates, etc on hand to snack on when I get hypokalemic symptoms.
Cola is significantly worse than water because: 1) Simple sugars (glucose, fructose) significantly enhance electrolyte absorption and reabsorption. The later is important, because in your kidneys, this means more electrolytes excreted. 2) Caffeine is a diuretic, and increases glomerular filtration rate, leading to more fluid and electrolyte excretion. 3) Cola is very acidic (eg 2.6 pH). This strips out cations (sodium, potassium, calcium) and increased levels of anions (citrate, chloride, carbonate).
The three of these working together simultaneously dramatically increases the amount of electrolytes removed from the body, and does so fairly quickly since they are absorbed quickly (due to the sugars).
"Muscle weakness" is about as dramatic as it gets - when your heart stops beating, you have a problem. The arrythmia, muscular weakness, myalgia, muscle cramps mean your nervous system is losing control of your muscles, because potassium is a key neurotransmitter and necessary for muscle control.
The best part is that when you are hypokalemic, those same neurotransmitters failing means you get confused and have no idea what is going on. So people typically "just don't feel good" without ever knowing whats going on. Then, they drink water and have a heart attack at age 20 and die.
Sure, an EMT or nurse will pick up on it and give you IV fluids, but to the lay person, they don't know what is wrong, so they can't fix it.
Beer is about 5% alcohol by volume, and 4% carbohydrates. Beer is about 85% of alcohol consumed in US by volume, with specific gravity of 1.05 on average. Around 23 billion L of beer are sold in the US per year. Ethanol is 0.789 g/mL at 25 degrees C, with a molar weight of 46 g/mol. 1 molecule of sugar is metabolized into one molecule of ethanol and two of CO2. The ratio of masses of CO2 to ethanol from sugar is 88:46. The sugar comes from barley, which is 73% carbohydrates and 17% dietary fiber by mass. Ethanol is ultimately metabolized into 3H2O+2CO2, and reduces human caloric needs by 7 kcal per gram.
23 billion L of beer means 1.15 b L of alcohol from beer, means 1.35 b L of alcohol total, means 1.07 b kg of alcohol total, means 2.04 b kg of CO2 total, with 23% of carbohydrate CO2 offset by sequestration in dietary fiber (and 137% offset by the plant consuming the CO2 from the atmosphere to grow). When you poop that fiber, it gets broken down by sewerage treatment system though, to produce methane, so I won't count that as true "sequestration." So growing plants to turn them into beer reduces the CO2 in the atmosphere (energy use not factored in here - unless you know how much electricity goes into producing a billion gallons of beer in a large scale brewery).
Since beer costs around $100 per keg (59 L), total energy consumed per L for planting, fertilizing, harvesting, water filtration, heating, refrigerating, processing, waste water treatment, solid waste disposal, packaging, storage and transport costs are significantly less than $1.70/L, or else every brewer would be out of business. If all the cost were from coal electricity (maximum pollution per dollar) at $.08/kWh, that's 21 kWh, and you get.92 kg of CO2/kWh, or an (ultimately useless) upper bound of 20 kg of CO2 per L. For reference, one brewery claims 220 kWh of heat, 80 kWh of electricity, 200 kg of waste, 3 cubic m of waste water, and 4 cubic meters of water purification for 1000 L of beer. So probably more like a tenth of the upper bound.
Further, consumption of alcoholic calories reduces demand for other foods. The average American consumes 2800 calories per day, and wastes 1100 calories on top of that. So the total calories eaten are 1 million per year, with 390 thousand wasted per year. Consuming 1 L of alcohol means 5500 calories, which, unless you're a fatty, you don't eat from other sources.
1 kg of beef production results in 15kg of greenhouse gas equivalent, mainly in methane. 25% of American calories come from meat and dairy (and 38% from "Fats, oils and sweets" which includes butter and lard). The average American eats 44kg of beef, 46kg of chicken, 30kg of pork, 15kg of cheese, 93 kg of milk, 2 kg of butter, 13kg of eggs, 1 kg of lard per year, versus 80kg of beer. 1kg of whole milk (where all dairy calories ultimately come from) is 600 calories, 1 kg of beef is 2800 calories, 1 kg of chicken is 2000 calories, 1 kg of eggs is 520 cal, 1 kg of butter is 7200 cal, 1 kg of cheese is 3800 cal. 1 kg of beer is 410 cal.
So Americans consume around 8.7% of their calories from beef (and 3.9% from milk, and 4% from cheese), so 1 kg of beer reduces calories from other foods by 410, so it reduces beef consumption by 36 calories (and 32 calories of dairy), so it reduces beef consumption by 13 g, or 200 g of CO2 (in addition to the dairy cattle, chickens, pigs, etc that it replaces). Then 23 b L of beer prevents 4.6 b kg of cow fart GHG.
In contrast, 1000 MW of coal power plant running with 100% uptime for one year produces 8.1 b kg of CO2 per year, and there's one in a neighborhood near (read:killing) you.
This tells us: 1) Drinking beer reduces meat consumption and sequesters carbon, reducing GHG 1) Drinking cheap beer reduces the energy costs of overhead, and thus reduces GHG 2) Drinking light beer reduces calories, and thus increases our likelihood to consume meat, and thus increases GHG 3) Drinking beer by the keg further reduces GHG by cutting energy costs 4) Drinking warm beer cuts refrigeration costs, reducing GHG 5) Drinking fresh beer cuts storage costs, reducing GHG
Almost no nukes are designed to be capable of destroying a "major metropolitan area."
Most US nukes are 10kt to 250kt.
Let's say you wanted to "destroy" a "major metropolitan area." "Destroy" I'll take to mean making 50% or more of the buildings severely damaged throughout. So we're talking about around 2 psi of pressure damage. I'll define a "major metropolitan area" as the Census' "metropolitan area," and "major" to mean in the top 50 in the US. So bigger than a Rochester, NY sized metro area.
The Rochester MSA consists of five counties, around 12,600 sq km. Pretend its a circle, so you need a radius of 63 km at 2 PSI. At 100 megatons, you get around a 43 km radius of 2 PSI damage. To get a 63 km radius, you're looking at more like 300 megatons.
Suppose you just wanted to waste the city of Rochester (a city of 200,000). You then only need around 7 km 2 PSI radius, or around 1 MT. The vast majority of the "metropolitan area" would be untouched, but I'm sure this is what you're really thinking of. Even this is unlikely, as most nuclear weapons aren't powerful enough.
A first attempt at a nuclear weapon with a competent research and design team would look like Pakistan's first nuke, around 10 kt. A rogue state with large resources (around $10 billion military budget per year) and several years could probably obtain a nuclear weapon around this yield.
This "first try" power would be enough to get 2 PSI out to maybe 1.5 km. If it were dropped in the center of LAX airport, it wouldn't be able to destroy most of the buildings in the airport, let along damage civilian structures around the edges.
Nukes are designed for specific military targets, because using them to exterminate people is hard. Militarily, they're amazing. It would take a lot of conventional bombs to destroy LAX. But if you want to kill people, building chicken farms with poor sanitation is much cheaper, and influenza is far more deadly.
The reason manhours are so valuable is they can be used not only to extract a resource, or to extract any other resource, but to use it more effciently, invent new ways to use it, invent new ways to not use it, or even to invent new resources.
Tell me with a straight face the hours of your life don't feel finite. I never have enough time.
Slashdot Mirror
$3 bil value? That's a swing in Apple's quarterly profits, not an industry's value.
This one is a question of politics and economics. Law of the Sea follows the flag on the ship, flag on the ship goes to the least regulated country. There are cleaner alternatives to bunker fuel, and California mandates use of cleaner ship fuels in California territorial waters. The US could dictate that ships use cleaner fuels in our territorial waters, but outside of that, these ships will continue to use whatever their flag country lets them use.
Sulfur dioxide, however, REVERSES greenhouse effects. If you're afraid of global warming, you should like sulfur emissions.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4516989
If I were you, I'd start coming up with lists of questions that only she would know the answers to. Ask her relatives and friends to come up with questions, some silly, some serious. The more specific the questions, the more specific the answers - more general questions to get her to tell long winded stories that will capture her essence. Ask what you'll want to know ten years from now. Have your kids ask questions. Who knows, some of the answers might come in handy during junior high and high school when social problems are so vexing for kids :)
Probably 95% of the records are for compliance and things legal wants saved for CYA purposes. This is more a function of the legal environment, where everyone wants to sue every business that looks at them funny, and how courts expect tons of documents on everything you've ever done. It'd be an interesting analysis to see what the costs of excess records retention are compared to the legal losses, and more importantly, the losses consumers incur because they can't afford to fight well documented machines or what consumers lose because companies are under-documented.
Identifying things that WERE bubbles is easy enough, depending on what you define a bubble to be. Inside a bubble, the intrinsic defining feature of a bubble is that it is NOT observable, or else everyone would make a fortune off those not observing it by predicting it and drive the price down to prevent it from ever actually being a "bubble". If you are capable of observing a bubble, then by definition you are NOT capable of stopping it.
You're right that timing is an often ignored part of predicting - making a bet costs money, and the juice is always running on speculative bets, especially contrarian ones (here's why). The market can always stay "irrational" longer than you can stay solvent.
Grantham's methodology is based on the historical likelihood of a price movement, which is the same methodology that gave subprime mortgage debt AAA credit rating. It's very reliable for a tight range where asset returns approximate well defined statistical distributions. However the problem with rare, extreme events is that they are easy to observe after the fact, but they are rare and by the time you can tell what is going on, they have an extreme effect on your balance sheet.
His "3 sigma" events are inherently things unlikely to occur, but most importantly its based off three things that change daily, exempli gratis: prices, equity, and the average P/E ratio. Companies with P/E ratios that have been more than 3 times the market P/E ratio include those failures like Microsoft, Google, Apple... Any company with rare growth potential should have an "excessive" P/E ratio. Tech stocks as a sector, for example, have high P/E ratios - but they have not "popped" in the long term (.com bubble being a blip in this longer term trend), they have actually increased the long term P/E ratio of the entire market because they have BECOME the market by crowding out slower growing industries. The price of creativity, innovation and technology is risk.
"there were smart economists saying..."
Here's a smart economist saying an economist's saying: 12 out of the last 5 market crashes have been predicted. Half the people in the market (also known as "sellers") think the market is going down, and half the people (also known as "buyers") think the market is going up. Both have monetary incentives to proclaim the forthcoming terror/utopia and every day the economic and business news is full of them. They aren't listened to for a reason.
50% is also known as a completely meaningless prediction. Basically, it says the price could go up or down.
Bubbles are theoretically impossible to predict. If there existed any convincing predictable evidence that an asset price was a bubble, then everyone would sell the asset by the point it crosses that threshold, meaning the price would have gone down, contradicting the predicate that it was a bubble.
"Bubbles" are nothing more than post-hoc descriptions of prices that went up and came down, just like "bargains" are the description of prices that went down before going back up. Prices are very predictable - they go up and down.
Intel probably doesn't think AMD is a viable competitor anymore. AMD's net assets, prior to this deal, were in the neighborhood of negative $1.25 billion (assuming it can't get rid of its minority interests *cough GlobalFoundries cough*, and you believe its intellectual property is only worth $168 mil). So AMD is really getting a much better financial position from this deal, after you include the spinoff, and new technology. Intel is getting quite a bit out of the technology sharing agreement too: namely, their technology that they have experience with will continue to dominate the market.
If AMD were to die, their team might get snatched up by a player with deeper pockets and complementary engineering team, like an IBM, and things could get ugly for Intel. More importantly, the realpolitik at this level is important. Regulators around the world would use it as an excuse to attack a major American company as a monopoly, in order to try to boost their national champions. Every country wants a piece of the semiconductor industry and will use any means to get it. It may not be a coincidence that GlobalFoundries decides to build a plant in New York, and the NY AG comes in threatening big action to force this settlement... and if Cuomo couldn't get the case to stick, Eric Holder lived from birth to JD in NY.
60*37 20*9*60
Primetime is still more valuable. Fewer commercials means more expensive commercials - that has been long established.
FBI knows how to find these guys, and detain them for as long as possible before filing charges. You can bet there will be (non-torture) interrogations. The FBI has plenty of federal laws they can throw at these guys, can work with your local DA, and ICE, not to mention get the warrants to track who these guys are talking to and who else might be a threat to you.
The United States NEEDS you to report ANY activity of this kind immediately.
http://www.fbi.gov/contact/fo/fo.htm
The real reason SUVs are popular is because huge vehicles are safe (for those inside). Car accidents are the single leading cause of death and debilitation from ages 1 to 44 in the US (oddly, in 35-44, poisoning barely edges out motor vehicle traffic...), so having a car built like a tank is rational if you're interested in retaining life and limb. Most Americans care more about this than pollution, global warming and Middle East wars, which are statistically much less likely to kill them. A 2008 Jeep Patriot starts at $16,500 MSRP, a Mini One starts at $19,000 but doesn't have enough horsepower for AC, so it isn't sold in the US (MINI Cooper starts $18,500). Both have similar acceleration (11 sec, 0 to 100kmph), Jeep Patriot is safer (19 out of 20 NHTSA Stars vs 17 for AC equipped MINI Cooper), MINI Cooper beats in mpg (28/37 vs 23/28).
The afore mentioned "subsidy" was meant to give US car manufacturers a competitive advantage vis a vis their foreign competitors, and applied to businesses, not consumers. This was not a subsidy per se, but an "accelerated depreciation" tax credit. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, only 100,000 out of 3.6 million SUVs sold in 2002 claimed the tax credit, so people were clearly not choosing the vehicles primarily for the tax credit. And SUVs were popular before this, so hopefully that "cause" is debunked.
Motorcycles get fantastic MPG, but are much, much more likely to kill you. Walking and horses have even better MPG, but are probably also more likely to kill you per mile traveled.
***Use Gaussian if you have an idea of what the parameter probably is but aren't exactly sure, rectangular if you really have no idea. A rectangular distribution says "I have no idea, the parameter could be anywhere within this particular range."
Here you have exactly why the quants got things so wrong. If you have an arbitrary random variable with a finite variance, then a law of large numbers will tell you that it converges to a Guassian under repetition. That's what most educated people know.
The problem is: the odds of an arbitrary distribution with no bounds having a finite variance is zero. In finance and economics, we know this, and we make up so many excuses to use Gaussians instead of more general LLN collection families. Gaussians are so tractable and easy to use, and so consistently used in theory that its second nature for us to use them. And since Gaussians are MLEs with relatively few restrictions, they tend to minimize measures of entropy. And since this is economics, everything ultimately has a bound... somewhere... unless its derivatives.
Not even most economists, financiers, or quants want to have to apply Levy-stable distributions all the time to variables, because working in complex spaces with integrals that never seem to converge when you want them to is a giant mathematical pain in the ass. But that's what real risk management is - your models need to be robust to whether that "variance" number your data indicates is real or bullshit or infinite.
Quants who knew better willfully ignored this, because "risk" (and "volatility" and "variance") makes "return," and they like big paychecks when things are going well. And when things aren't going well, well, who else could understand this stuff? Your average banker with an MBA might fire them, but doesn't have a chance at understanding, so he'll hire the average economist with a PhD who has a small chance, but recommends a mathematician who will say he doesn't understand the interpretation, and will refer you to a quant.
Finance adds a LOT to the economy. The basic idea of finance is deciding where the most "return" is - ie, what investments are the most productive. If you gave money to every entrepreneur who came asking, you'd be out of money by the end of the day.
Money has meaning. There is a limited supply, and that means you have to prioritize who gets it. It has to be in limited supply in order for it to have "meaning." In order to motivate people to do things, we give them money, instead of trying to guess that they want payment in the form of, say, "a two bedroom house in Santa Monica with a 30 yr mortgage, a 2007 Prius Hybrid on a 5 yr lease, Montessori school for the 7 year old..." Using money not only gives people the freedom to choose what they consume, but it removes the guesswork from employers. If you just hand out money to anyone, you have no price stability, and no ability to plan for the future.
Deciding who to give money to on what terms, based solely on their ability to honor the terms of the understood mutual agreement, is essential to the economy operating. Finance is the art of acquiring money from one source, such as bank stockholders or bond holders, and allocating that money to borrowers or investments in such a way that you reduce the idiosyncratic risk (which your investors want to avoid), thus earning compensation and a premium.
How would you feel if you could only buy a house, or a car, or a college education, or whatever you get on credit cards if you could only buy those products after you had all the money to pay for them in full at the time of purchase? Or if you could never get an incentive to save money? If you've ever been a saver or a borrower, the answer is you'd be worse off, by your revealed preference.
The problems only occur when parts of these statements are negated. For example, if banks extend credit to people who can't repay it, or if bank risk managers are idiots, or if the agreements aren't mutually understood and agreed to. Yeah, there's always going to be people who exploit their position to do unethical things, in any field. I think credit card companies are blood suckers, and I think using credit cards is evil. But I sure as hell save and invest in companies I believe have the ability to improve peoples lives and get paid for it.
Don't blame finance, blame the people who use it to do evil.
North Korea isn't above burying 20,000 tons of TNT equivalent high explosives for propaganda purposes.
What could China do with our debt, sue us? We know the serial numbers of every bond theyve ever bought from us, and we could simply declare we are keeping those payments in escrow because China is the worlds biggest human rights violator. As long as they play our game, we keep the interest checks coming.
If you can turn cellulose into a valuable, exportable commodity, say goodbye to every third world ecosystem with trees.
TFA says "The case studies looked at patients whose consumption ranged from two to nine litres of cola a day."
For those of you used to measuring in six packs, six 12 oz cans of cola is 2.1 liters.
Sodium in cola is pretty minimal. Compare:
Pack of ramen: 890mg
12 oz of V8: 885mg
Small fries: 144mg
100 grams of carrots: 69mg
12 oz of Coke: 38mg
Not to mention, eating 2-3 bananas over the course of the day would probably correct the problem.
Not quite. 3 bananas might get you a gram of potassium. People should get about 5 grams a day from fruits and vegetables, but the average American gets about 2.5 grams a day. If you're hypokalemic, you need a professional to dose out your potassium. You might need 1 gram, you might need 10 grams, you might need it intravenously, and too much or too little may kill you, depending.
However, if you're hypokalemic and don't want to deal with medical professionals, just:
1) avoid any salty foods, and
2) eat only normal foods that happen to have good potassium.
I keep bananas, almonds, dried apricots, raisins, prunes, dates, etc on hand to snack on when I get hypokalemic symptoms.
Cola is significantly worse than water because:
1) Simple sugars (glucose, fructose) significantly enhance electrolyte absorption and reabsorption. The later is important, because in your kidneys, this means more electrolytes excreted.
2) Caffeine is a diuretic, and increases glomerular filtration rate, leading to more fluid and electrolyte excretion.
3) Cola is very acidic (eg 2.6 pH). This strips out cations (sodium, potassium, calcium) and increased levels of anions (citrate, chloride, carbonate).
The three of these working together simultaneously dramatically increases the amount of electrolytes removed from the body, and does so fairly quickly since they are absorbed quickly (due to the sugars).
"Muscle weakness" is about as dramatic as it gets - when your heart stops beating, you have a problem. The arrythmia, muscular weakness, myalgia, muscle cramps mean your nervous system is losing control of your muscles, because potassium is a key neurotransmitter and necessary for muscle control.
The best part is that when you are hypokalemic, those same neurotransmitters failing means you get confused and have no idea what is going on. So people typically "just don't feel good" without ever knowing whats going on. Then, they drink water and have a heart attack at age 20 and die.
Sure, an EMT or nurse will pick up on it and give you IV fluids, but to the lay person, they don't know what is wrong, so they can't fix it.
Beer is about 5% alcohol by volume, and 4% carbohydrates. Beer is about 85% of alcohol consumed in US by volume, with specific gravity of 1.05 on average. Around 23 billion L of beer are sold in the US per year. Ethanol is 0.789 g/mL at 25 degrees C, with a molar weight of 46 g/mol. 1 molecule of sugar is metabolized into one molecule of ethanol and two of CO2. The ratio of masses of CO2 to ethanol from sugar is 88:46. The sugar comes from barley, which is 73% carbohydrates and 17% dietary fiber by mass. Ethanol is ultimately metabolized into 3H2O+2CO2, and reduces human caloric needs by 7 kcal per gram.
23 billion L of beer means 1.15 b L of alcohol from beer, means 1.35 b L of alcohol total, means 1.07 b kg of alcohol total, means 2.04 b kg of CO2 total, with 23% of carbohydrate CO2 offset by sequestration in dietary fiber (and 137% offset by the plant consuming the CO2 from the atmosphere to grow). When you poop that fiber, it gets broken down by sewerage treatment system though, to produce methane, so I won't count that as true "sequestration." So growing plants to turn them into beer reduces the CO2 in the atmosphere (energy use not factored in here - unless you know how much electricity goes into producing a billion gallons of beer in a large scale brewery).
Since beer costs around $100 per keg (59 L), total energy consumed per L for planting, fertilizing, harvesting, water filtration, heating, refrigerating, processing, waste water treatment, solid waste disposal, packaging, storage and transport costs are significantly less than $1.70/L, or else every brewer would be out of business. If all the cost were from coal electricity (maximum pollution per dollar) at $.08/kWh, that's 21 kWh, and you get .92 kg of CO2/kWh, or an (ultimately useless) upper bound of 20 kg of CO2 per L. For reference, one brewery claims 220 kWh of heat, 80 kWh of electricity, 200 kg of waste, 3 cubic m of waste water, and 4 cubic meters of water purification for 1000 L of beer. So probably more like a tenth of the upper bound.
Further, consumption of alcoholic calories reduces demand for other foods. The average American consumes 2800 calories per day, and wastes 1100 calories on top of that. So the total calories eaten are 1 million per year, with 390 thousand wasted per year. Consuming 1 L of alcohol means 5500 calories, which, unless you're a fatty, you don't eat from other sources.
1 kg of beef production results in 15kg of greenhouse gas equivalent, mainly in methane. 25% of American calories come from meat and dairy (and 38% from "Fats, oils and sweets" which includes butter and lard). The average American eats 44kg of beef, 46kg of chicken, 30kg of pork, 15kg of cheese, 93 kg of milk, 2 kg of butter, 13kg of eggs, 1 kg of lard per year, versus 80kg of beer. 1kg of whole milk (where all dairy calories ultimately come from) is 600 calories, 1 kg of beef is 2800 calories, 1 kg of chicken is 2000 calories, 1 kg of eggs is 520 cal, 1 kg of butter is 7200 cal, 1 kg of cheese is 3800 cal. 1 kg of beer is 410 cal.
So Americans consume around 8.7% of their calories from beef (and 3.9% from milk, and 4% from cheese), so 1 kg of beer reduces calories from other foods by 410, so it reduces beef consumption by 36 calories (and 32 calories of dairy), so it reduces beef consumption by 13 g, or 200 g of CO2 (in addition to the dairy cattle, chickens, pigs, etc that it replaces). Then 23 b L of beer prevents 4.6 b kg of cow fart GHG.
In contrast, 1000 MW of coal power plant running with 100% uptime for one year produces 8.1 b kg of CO2 per year, and there's one in a neighborhood near (read:killing) you.
This tells us:
1) Drinking beer reduces meat consumption and sequesters carbon, reducing GHG
1) Drinking cheap beer reduces the energy costs of overhead, and thus reduces GHG
2) Drinking light beer reduces calories, and thus increases our likelihood to consume meat, and thus increases GHG
3) Drinking beer by the keg further reduces GHG by cutting energy costs
4) Drinking warm beer cuts refrigeration costs, reducing GHG
5) Drinking fresh beer cuts storage costs, reducing GHG
Yes, I know it was April Fools.
Almost no nukes are designed to be capable of destroying a "major metropolitan area."
Most US nukes are 10kt to 250kt.
Let's say you wanted to "destroy" a "major metropolitan area." "Destroy" I'll take to mean making 50% or more of the buildings severely damaged throughout. So we're talking about around 2 psi of pressure damage. I'll define a "major metropolitan area" as the Census' "metropolitan area," and "major" to mean in the top 50 in the US. So bigger than a Rochester, NY sized metro area.
The Rochester MSA consists of five counties, around 12,600 sq km. Pretend its a circle, so you need a radius of 63 km at 2 PSI. At 100 megatons, you get around a 43 km radius of 2 PSI damage. To get a 63 km radius, you're looking at more like 300 megatons.
Suppose you just wanted to waste the city of Rochester (a city of 200,000). You then only need around 7 km 2 PSI radius, or around 1 MT. The vast majority of the "metropolitan area" would be untouched, but I'm sure this is what you're really thinking of. Even this is unlikely, as most nuclear weapons aren't powerful enough.
A first attempt at a nuclear weapon with a competent research and design team would look like Pakistan's first nuke, around 10 kt. A rogue state with large resources (around $10 billion military budget per year) and several years could probably obtain a nuclear weapon around this yield.
This "first try" power would be enough to get 2 PSI out to maybe 1.5 km. If it were dropped in the center of LAX airport, it wouldn't be able to destroy most of the buildings in the airport, let along damage civilian structures around the edges.
Nukes are designed for specific military targets, because using them to exterminate people is hard. Militarily, they're amazing. It would take a lot of conventional bombs to destroy LAX. But if you want to kill people, building chicken farms with poor sanitation is much cheaper, and influenza is far more deadly.
The reason manhours are so valuable is they can be used not only to extract a resource, or to extract any other resource, but to use it more effciently, invent new ways to use it, invent new ways to not use it, or even to invent new resources.
Tell me with a straight face the hours of your life don't feel finite. I never have enough time.
Instead of calling it "fly ash," we need to start calling it "carbon fallout"