My view of the stock market is dead-on, informed by a couple of decades of using it and studying its internals carefully.
Yes, in "big guys" I include banks that are using depositors' money, and mutual funds, though those are themselves not even close to free of grifting.
Your concept of "individuals investing in the stock market invest money in companies or industries they believe in, mid to long term" is just another carrot. They're still buying nothing but a hand in a card game, hoping someone will pay them more for it later. I believe in 4 hearts to a flush when I have the ace wired, and I put my money in it, but I don't pretend it means I own a cardiac care center.
The real investing happened when the shares were created in the IPO that infused money from a syndicate -- a real investor -- into a company to buy equipment and hire employees. When the syndicate turns around and fans the shares out for you to drool over, it's no longer investing. It is speculating. And because the trade in secondary-market shares is not tied in any concrete way to the inflows and outflows to the company, their value is free to fluctuate with any whim of the public, whims that can be controlled by any psychological effect. Many of them believe it has something to do with the value of the company, but that only means anything when it becomes known that someone capable of taking a controlling interest in the company has actually begun to attempt to do so. At that point, the price generally pins to a few nickels short of their bid, and doesn't move until the deal closes, despite all of the information that formerly was whipping the price around like a plastic bag in a swirling wind (if you'll pardon the borrowed imagery).
If you're a gambler and think you can out-guess the psychology of the masses, then play on. If you think you're "investing in America", you're a sucker. If you are a huge investment banker capable of front-running the market by acting as a syndicate to underwrite investments and sell the shares to the secondary market, you're going to beat both the gamblers and the suckers every time.
There isn't enough money in the little guys to even make a market, nor so much that if the little guys were removed from direct contact from it they'd make a difference.
Seriously. The little guys don't even know that they're buying nothing when they enter the market. They get a meaningless portion of the votes of a corporation. They might get a meager dividend, but that's one of the carrots used to lure them in; it's certainly no significant piece of the profits. They get no access to the company. They won't be let into the building. They can't see any proprietary information. They don't get a discount. They don't even get the CEO's phone number. Some "owner" that makes them.
The stock market isn't investing. It's gambling. It's an ornate casino run by people who know full well that there are a million suckers born every day, and each one of them has a lifetime of earning power to be squeezed into the funnel.
And I include China when I talk about the debt cycle as a shift from current projects to new ones. It's a macroeconomic process, and the imaginary lines at the edges of a country don't stop the other side from being part of your economics.
If America paid off its own debt, it would just be the old, retired guy at the end of the block with nothing left to produce. How's his future look?
No, it's what happened to the little guys. The big guys who got caught in it used their clout in Washington to get paid out of an insurance policy that didn't exist until they realized they needed it.
Software is more complex than humans can comprehend, and there will be holes in its behavior relative to your expectation, especially but not exclusively when you were not the one who wrote the requirements for it, but especially again when the people writing it want to leave avenues for future revenue growth.
Fox News is the creation of a powerful existing political scam, the GOP.
Their interests are in the Right Wing, and they work hard to ensure it remains viable in politics.
They see the Tea Party as a useful berzerker. They are under no delusion that the TP can become powerful, but it helps them with their most fundamental strategy, that of painting the GOP as the party of the mainstream and the Democrats as far left of the center, when the opposite is the truth.
The worst thing in the world for a share market is to eliminate the small investor leaving only the whales to thrash about.
Frankly, 99.9% of all people who "invest" in the markets do not have sufficient training in the ways they can be screwed by people who know what they're doing, and are therefore not the sort of reasonable actors that would tend to create rational markets, but are instead cattle to be slaughtered by manipulation. The prices are bogus, nothing more than bait to lure them into the pen where their trading accounts are drained and the bolt stamps a hunk of their skull into their brain.
The best thing for the markets would be to require investors to be certified to put their money there.
But the people running the markets don't want the best thing for the markets, they want the best thing for themselves, and they can afford to buy enough votes in Congress to make sure it stays that way, at least until they make a mistake and show a little of what's behind the curtain, as they did here.
But by holding airlines and aircraft manufacturers accountable to the standards for safety-critical systems engineering, they without question have reduced the number of aircraft accidents that would otherwise have occured.
Anyone who says regulation doesn't work deserves to have his brake lines slit.
3) Don't neglect to mention the qualities that made you a good employee for NASA in the first place on your resume.
For a lot of them, it was "met the degree requirement," "didn't lie on resume' on the things we checked," and "is willing to take goverment pay even though all those Silicon Valley companies are turning secretaries into millionaires."
Not any more than we have to pay down the umpty-trillion dollars in personal debt.
We may have to pay off the bonds we issued 30 years ago, but we can issue more bonds to be paid in 30 years. They're being done for different projects, so the old projects are being paid for and the new ones are just getting started. Similarly, I may have to pay off my house, but my children can borrow to build theirs. There's still debt in the family, and in the banking system, and it gets bigger as time goes on.
And it's crucial to the size of the economy. Think "money multiplier" and you'll understand what I mean.
If we actually did try to pay off the national debt, it could only be by not doing anything new on credit, and insisting on only doing those things we could pay cash for.
Individuals can do that, after they've paid off their houses and stopped driving anywhere, but it implies your life is coming to a close and you have no use for growth. And their children aren't going to have to live under their parents' paid-off roof for their whole lives, as paupers, because they won't have enough cash to buy a house for decades, if they ever do, because once they have kids they'll have to use the savings for the additional expenses.
Same deal for entire nations. The only way you can justify going onto a pay-as-you-go system is to tell the future it doesn't get the right to borrow to create the sort of livable conditions you had.
So no. We never have to pay down the debt. We just have to pay off the old debt and spend the newly borrowed money on things that are good for the country as a whole, instead of on things that make a few people rich to nobody else's benefit.
Future tense. At least you're optimistic about having options.
Lockheed doesn't have the new projects. Boeing and EADS may be screwing their respective pooches, but that's mismanagement. More staffing would just mean more people mismanaged.
What needs done is for those companies to start picking over the NASA peeps' resumes, and do some swap-outs. Toss some deadwood and level-up their staves.
Yes. It's big. But there's next to nothing out there.
Literally. Do the calculations and you find the mass density of the universe to be about a third of a hydrogen atom per cubic meter.
Most of that is collected into about 10^22 stars in about 10^11 galaxies, but, like us and our nearest-neighbor star, Proxima Centauri, and our nearest-neighbor galaxy, Andromeda, the distances between rest stops and attractions are very long.
Good luck solving the travelling-salesman problem for that trip.
There's nobody to make that judgment. The universe certainly doesn't care either way. As evidence, I can use the same judgment in complete opposition to your use of it:
Any species that chooses to stoke the fire and drive its children into it, instead of controlling how many children it has and how hot the fire burns, to the point that it doesn't burn anyone, deserves to die out and be replaced by nothingness.
If that's his attitude, then his robots suck because he failed to specify them properly.
With a robot, he's got time to make decisions about what things to do with the things the survey discovers.
With a human, he's got a much shorter window of opportunity.
And the human won't be making any decisions. Astronauts follow the protocol and the direction of the controllers. They're basically robots made of meat and inefficiency.
Actually, I didn't need this evidence. I already know that the mars robots suck. They're slow, they're made out of tinfoil, their hands are wobbly shovels, and they can die if they get a little dust on them. Seriously, despite the pretty pictures and a few interesting spectographs, the Mars folks have screwed the pooch.
But, because it's a robot, they can screw the pooch for years beyond the scheduled end of the mission, more than doubling the planned science results. Can't do that with a human. Got to bring him home for his parade.
Hell, if you can do without the extra stuff you have to have to get a human there, let him sleep there, feed him there, contain his poop, and get him home, you could send a couple dozen more robots with real hands and burning tools and some serious 4WD.
The only reason we didn't do that in the 60s: we Earthers have big rockets and huge gonads, but our robotics department was practically nonexistent. It's not like that any more.
Unless that's not how they evolve, and instead just become a different strain that doesn't react to the antibiotic at all.
The reason most infections with antibiotic resistant bacteria occur in hospitals is that hospitals are fucking filthy and hospital staff are lackadaisacal about sanitation.
I spent a week in what you'd consider a fairly nice hospital a couple of years ago, and the extent of the cleaning that I observed was one lady who came through with a disinfectant-soaked Swiffer once a day, which she swiped haphazardly around the floor. She then used a rag to wipe down the bathroom fixtures. Then she left. I assume she did the same to the other occupied rooms on the wing. She did nothing in the halls, and didn't touch the doorknobs or the walls or the baseboards or the vents.
And this was just confirmation of the decades of intel I've gathered randomly on this. Go into an ER and try to put your bag on the floor; the nurses will cringe, and maybe warn you that you don't want to put anything there. Check out the walls and the plastic plants; if the place has been there for a couple of years, they'll be caked in grime and dust. And that grime and dust came from the sickest people in town. If the health department looked at hospitals like they look at hot-dog carts, they'd all be shut down.
Hospitals are fucking filthy, just like feedlots, and for exactly the same reason: there's no money in aesthetic upkeep when your business is based on volume traffic of units that don't particularly care about aesthetics, certainly not when the upkeep has to be done to a sanitary standard.
The only thing I've heard of that stops MRSA is hand-washing. A hospital in Florida did a trial of a proximity-detecting device that reminded staff to wash if they approached a patient without having done so. Within a few months, their formerly average rate of MRSA cases dropped to 0. None. Nil. Just because the doctors, nurses, and orderlies weren't delivering the germs from the doorknobs to the buffets.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how many digits my UID would be had I registered back then.
Low six figures. Easy to double-check by looking at posts at the link.
BTW, the froggy thing should have won a regular Nobel, IMO, and an IgNobel.
There's no reason good science can't also be wacky.
Wrong. Tech support for communications systems (including the telegraph) was invented in 1860: http://news.cnet.com/2300-1035_3-10004616.html?tag=mncol
http://nexus404.com/Blog/2010/10/04/new-iphone-privacy-issue-uncovered-by-hacker-the-iphone-is-now-said-to-send-udid-through-apps-serious-privacy-concerned-raised-probably-a-non-issue/
My view of the stock market is dead-on, informed by a couple of decades of using it and studying its internals carefully.
Yes, in "big guys" I include banks that are using depositors' money, and mutual funds, though those are themselves not even close to free of grifting.
Your concept of "individuals investing in the stock market invest money in companies or industries they believe in, mid to long term" is just another carrot. They're still buying nothing but a hand in a card game, hoping someone will pay them more for it later. I believe in 4 hearts to a flush when I have the ace wired, and I put my money in it, but I don't pretend it means I own a cardiac care center.
The real investing happened when the shares were created in the IPO that infused money from a syndicate -- a real investor -- into a company to buy equipment and hire employees. When the syndicate turns around and fans the shares out for you to drool over, it's no longer investing. It is speculating. And because the trade in secondary-market shares is not tied in any concrete way to the inflows and outflows to the company, their value is free to fluctuate with any whim of the public, whims that can be controlled by any psychological effect. Many of them believe it has something to do with the value of the company, but that only means anything when it becomes known that someone capable of taking a controlling interest in the company has actually begun to attempt to do so. At that point, the price generally pins to a few nickels short of their bid, and doesn't move until the deal closes, despite all of the information that formerly was whipping the price around like a plastic bag in a swirling wind (if you'll pardon the borrowed imagery).
If you're a gambler and think you can out-guess the psychology of the masses, then play on. If you think you're "investing in America", you're a sucker. If you are a huge investment banker capable of front-running the market by acting as a syndicate to underwrite investments and sell the shares to the secondary market, you're going to beat both the gamblers and the suckers every time.
As I said, the market is the big guys.
There isn't enough money in the little guys to even make a market, nor so much that if the little guys were removed from direct contact from it they'd make a difference.
Seriously. The little guys don't even know that they're buying nothing when they enter the market. They get a meaningless portion of the votes of a corporation. They might get a meager dividend, but that's one of the carrots used to lure them in; it's certainly no significant piece of the profits. They get no access to the company. They won't be let into the building. They can't see any proprietary information. They don't get a discount. They don't even get the CEO's phone number. Some "owner" that makes them.
The stock market isn't investing. It's gambling. It's an ornate casino run by people who know full well that there are a million suckers born every day, and each one of them has a lifetime of earning power to be squeezed into the funnel.
We have pretty much ended the period of growth
Says who?
And I include China when I talk about the debt cycle as a shift from current projects to new ones. It's a macroeconomic process, and the imaginary lines at the edges of a country don't stop the other side from being part of your economics.
If America paid off its own debt, it would just be the old, retired guy at the end of the block with nothing left to produce. How's his future look?
No, it's what happened to the little guys. The big guys who got caught in it used their clout in Washington to get paid out of an insurance policy that didn't exist until they realized they needed it.
The little guys paid for that, too.
iPhone and Android. Two peas in different pods.
The Internet is not secure.
Your phone company is not your mommy.
Software is more complex than humans can comprehend, and there will be holes in its behavior relative to your expectation, especially but not exclusively when you were not the one who wrote the requirements for it, but especially again when the people writing it want to leave avenues for future revenue growth.
Fox News is the creation of a powerful existing political scam, the GOP.
Their interests are in the Right Wing, and they work hard to ensure it remains viable in politics.
They see the Tea Party as a useful berzerker. They are under no delusion that the TP can become powerful, but it helps them with their most fundamental strategy, that of painting the GOP as the party of the mainstream and the Democrats as far left of the center, when the opposite is the truth.
Oops.
There's the new NASA.
We'll be repeating this thread in a few years when 787 finally shuts down.
The worst thing in the world for a share market is to eliminate the small investor leaving only the whales to thrash about.
Frankly, 99.9% of all people who "invest" in the markets do not have sufficient training in the ways they can be screwed by people who know what they're doing, and are therefore not the sort of reasonable actors that would tend to create rational markets, but are instead cattle to be slaughtered by manipulation. The prices are bogus, nothing more than bait to lure them into the pen where their trading accounts are drained and the bolt stamps a hunk of their skull into their brain.
The best thing for the markets would be to require investors to be certified to put their money there.
But the people running the markets don't want the best thing for the markets, they want the best thing for themselves, and they can afford to buy enough votes in Congress to make sure it stays that way, at least until they make a mistake and show a little of what's behind the curtain, as they did here.
Not directly.
But by holding airlines and aircraft manufacturers accountable to the standards for safety-critical systems engineering, they without question have reduced the number of aircraft accidents that would otherwise have occured.
Anyone who says regulation doesn't work deserves to have his brake lines slit.
3) Don't neglect to mention the qualities that made you a good employee for NASA in the first place on your resume.
For a lot of them, it was "met the degree requirement," "didn't lie on resume' on the things we checked," and "is willing to take goverment pay even though all those Silicon Valley companies are turning secretaries into millionaires."
No we don't.
Not any more than we have to pay down the umpty-trillion dollars in personal debt.
We may have to pay off the bonds we issued 30 years ago, but we can issue more bonds to be paid in 30 years. They're being done for different projects, so the old projects are being paid for and the new ones are just getting started. Similarly, I may have to pay off my house, but my children can borrow to build theirs. There's still debt in the family, and in the banking system, and it gets bigger as time goes on.
And it's crucial to the size of the economy. Think "money multiplier" and you'll understand what I mean.
If we actually did try to pay off the national debt, it could only be by not doing anything new on credit, and insisting on only doing those things we could pay cash for.
Individuals can do that, after they've paid off their houses and stopped driving anywhere, but it implies your life is coming to a close and you have no use for growth. And their children aren't going to have to live under their parents' paid-off roof for their whole lives, as paupers, because they won't have enough cash to buy a house for decades, if they ever do, because once they have kids they'll have to use the savings for the additional expenses.
Same deal for entire nations. The only way you can justify going onto a pay-as-you-go system is to tell the future it doesn't get the right to borrow to create the sort of livable conditions you had.
So no. We never have to pay down the debt. We just have to pay off the old debt and spend the newly borrowed money on things that are good for the country as a whole, instead of on things that make a few people rich to nobody else's benefit.
Why is this marked "Flamebait"
Because some of the people he's mocking will have /. accounts and mod points.
20,000 nerds; it's inevitable.
I'd make a lousy businessman.
Future tense. At least you're optimistic about having options.
Lockheed doesn't have the new projects. Boeing and EADS may be screwing their respective pooches, but that's mismanagement. More staffing would just mean more people mismanaged.
What needs done is for those companies to start picking over the NASA peeps' resumes, and do some swap-outs. Toss some deadwood and level-up their staves.
Yes. It's big. But there's next to nothing out there.
Literally. Do the calculations and you find the mass density of the universe to be about a third of a hydrogen atom per cubic meter.
Most of that is collected into about 10^22 stars in about 10^11 galaxies, but, like us and our nearest-neighbor star, Proxima Centauri, and our nearest-neighbor galaxy, Andromeda, the distances between rest stops and attractions are very long.
Good luck solving the travelling-salesman problem for that trip.
I didn't say you couldn't do it.
I said it was vain.
The problem with antarctica is that there's no food there.
It is outer space, for all environmental purposes.
Go there, then go 100 feet down into the ocean? WTF? Where are you going to put the ten billion acres of wheat?
deserves
There's nobody to make that judgment. The universe certainly doesn't care either way. As evidence, I can use the same judgment in complete opposition to your use of it:
Any species that chooses to stoke the fire and drive its children into it, instead of controlling how many children it has and how hot the fire burns, to the point that it doesn't burn anyone, deserves to die out and be replaced by nothingness.
Evolution doesn't give a damn one way or the other.
Who's still evolving?
Not me.
I learned how it works, and how to stop it.
Cave-man had no clue, so it just kept happening to him. And I'm glad it did, because I'm here now to stop it.
If that's his attitude, then his robots suck because he failed to specify them properly.
With a robot, he's got time to make decisions about what things to do with the things the survey discovers.
With a human, he's got a much shorter window of opportunity.
And the human won't be making any decisions. Astronauts follow the protocol and the direction of the controllers. They're basically robots made of meat and inefficiency.
Actually, I didn't need this evidence. I already know that the mars robots suck. They're slow, they're made out of tinfoil, their hands are wobbly shovels, and they can die if they get a little dust on them. Seriously, despite the pretty pictures and a few interesting spectographs, the Mars folks have screwed the pooch.
But, because it's a robot, they can screw the pooch for years beyond the scheduled end of the mission, more than doubling the planned science results. Can't do that with a human. Got to bring him home for his parade.
Hell, if you can do without the extra stuff you have to have to get a human there, let him sleep there, feed him there, contain his poop, and get him home, you could send a couple dozen more robots with real hands and burning tools and some serious 4WD.
The only reason we didn't do that in the 60s: we Earthers have big rockets and huge gonads, but our robotics department was practically nonexistent. It's not like that any more.
Until they mutate. Which is where they came from in the first place.
Not that I'm saying it's worse than the alternative, just that the absolutism of the lack of a risk is inept.
Unless that's not how they evolve, and instead just become a different strain that doesn't react to the antibiotic at all.
The reason most infections with antibiotic resistant bacteria occur in hospitals is that hospitals are fucking filthy and hospital staff are lackadaisacal about sanitation.
I spent a week in what you'd consider a fairly nice hospital a couple of years ago, and the extent of the cleaning that I observed was one lady who came through with a disinfectant-soaked Swiffer once a day, which she swiped haphazardly around the floor. She then used a rag to wipe down the bathroom fixtures. Then she left. I assume she did the same to the other occupied rooms on the wing. She did nothing in the halls, and didn't touch the doorknobs or the walls or the baseboards or the vents.
And this was just confirmation of the decades of intel I've gathered randomly on this. Go into an ER and try to put your bag on the floor; the nurses will cringe, and maybe warn you that you don't want to put anything there. Check out the walls and the plastic plants; if the place has been there for a couple of years, they'll be caked in grime and dust. And that grime and dust came from the sickest people in town. If the health department looked at hospitals like they look at hot-dog carts, they'd all be shut down.
Hospitals are fucking filthy, just like feedlots, and for exactly the same reason: there's no money in aesthetic upkeep when your business is based on volume traffic of units that don't particularly care about aesthetics, certainly not when the upkeep has to be done to a sanitary standard.
The only thing I've heard of that stops MRSA is hand-washing. A hospital in Florida did a trial of a proximity-detecting device that reminded staff to wash if they approached a patient without having done so. Within a few months, their formerly average rate of MRSA cases dropped to 0. None. Nil. Just because the doctors, nurses, and orderlies weren't delivering the germs from the doorknobs to the buffets.
Mod parent up until people get it.