I was wondering whether techniques of commercial data mining could be applied to environmental problems like emerging disease surveillance.
Well, of course they can. The question is how far is it from practical? I think, pretty far from being as practical as it is in business.
First of all, businesses have a great deal of object model in common: they have common concepts like customers, products, sales, brands etc., which form a common framework in which they can do all kinds of creative thinking, or if not thinking you can even discover relationships using some kind of machine learning.
Secondly, when you are dealing with business data, the most important events tend to be common events. The most important common event is when a customer buys something. When you talk about something like a new disease emerging, or somebody committing a crime like hijacking or bombing, the most important events are exceeding rare, but catastrophic. Therefore the connection between events we do have in abundance and the events we are interested in is tenuous, poorly statistically attested to, and in many cases pure conjecture.
Finally, a lot of what businesses use data mining for is tweaking marginal costs and revenue by shifting dollars that were already going to be spent from one place to another. Offer product A to this web visitor instead of B. Stock more of item X in the store rather than Y. If you really don't know a priori whether X or Y will sell more profitably, you probably aren't going to go too wrong.
In something like environmental monitoring, you create expenses that weren't already there. No, you can't drain this lake because the model predicts a 5% marginal increase in the probability of human cases of hantavirus in the area. To somebody counting on the economic value of draining that lake, that's a brand new cost that wasn't there before.
Same goes, even more so, to deciding somebody is a danger to society.
Now let me say that I have no doubt that data mining will lead to more terrorist being thwarted or captured, compared to doing nothing else. Of course so would a lottery, but I suspect that data mining is a great deal better at identifying good suspects than a lottery. However, it is for reasons I noted above not going to be particularly accurate, certainly not compared to probable cause. Furthermore, the marginal cost of false positives gained seems likely to exceed the marginal value of false negatives lost, if such things could be quantified.
I've been reading DailyKos for several years now, and I'll agree with you -- up to a point. It is not fair to troll through a site with thousands of contributors and cherry pick the one most stupid and offensive post you can find, then pretend it is representative. However, of late the voice of loon has been harder to escape on DailyKos, due, I think, to several things.
The first is a flaw in the discussion model. The site's software is derived from kuro5hin which I've alway felt is relatively flame friendly to begin with, then makes it worse -- especially in the context of an upcoming election. Aside from the front page contributors or guest blogger, most of the kos material consists of diaries. Because of the elections, the volume of diaries is now so large that a new diary disappears in well under and hour most of the time, unless it can make the 'rec list'. Most diaries disappear in the time it takes to read through a diary and its discussion.
Despite this, there are a number of thoughtful and well researched diaries. However, the site's design and volume bias it towards diaries that can (a) grab eyeballs and (b) trigger a reflex to push the recommend button. As a result, the site has increasingly become an echo chamber: there are often two or more diaries on the rec list that are essentially identical, along with one or even two front page articles.
Groupthink is never good and where you have groupthink, bitter division is not far behind.
The second problem is that it is such a Democratic year, many of the contributors, including the front page editors, are in a stage of alternately counting their chickens before they hatch and worrying that the chickens won't hatch at all. Emotions are running high. The contest between advocates of different Democratic candidates was extremely bitter, because people could imagine their guy in the White House. DailyKos was an extremely divisive force among Democrats. As a result the site has become increasingly bitter and intolerant of dissent. It reminds me of nothing more than in Life of Brian where the only thing the People's Front of Judea (PFJ) hate more than the Romans is the Judean People's Front (JPF). And the Popular People's Front of Judea (PPFJ) of course.
Finally, you have to remember that dKos is Markos' personal site, more than Slashdot has Tacos except maybe in the earliest days. It rose to prominence in the 2006 interim elections; congressmen and media stars read and even contribute to it. I think this has gone to Markos' head. He used to be a lot more mild mannered; now he's a lot more brash and imprudent about what he says. His recent reaction to the financial crisis was one of those situations where you feel embarrassed for somebody who doesn't seem to notice he's starting to make an ass of himself by ranting. And things got nasty for anybody who didn't agree.
I'm a liberal Democrat, and I like and admire many of the people I've "met" through DailyKos, but mark my words, the site is no longer a positive force, and not just because it yields ripe quotes for people who'd like to misrepresent what Democrats think. It actually creates divisions -- really stupid divisions between Democrats.
It is NOT supposed to help AMD. It is supposed to help AMD's stockholders.
This often happens with troubled stocks that have a number of different business functions that can be split off. Some of those business functions may represent a great deal of capital investment, but not return much cash. You don't want that capital tied up in idle buildings and equipment, but you probably can't sell those things to your rival who's happy to see you shrivel up and blow away.
So you split the company up. The more profitable divisions can start to appreciate in value or even pay dividends. The less profitable business can stay afloat on business from its former sibling divisions while the stockholders unload their stock in it. It's possible that new management can turn thing around.
The "Republican Operative" was actually a consultant hired by the Republican party. Calling him a "Republican Operative" makes him sound like an employee of the Republican party, whereas he was the owner of a company ("GOP Marketplace") which provided technical services to the Republican party.
The "Confessions" part come from a book he wrote well after he pleaded guilty to a number of felonies. The book itself cannot, therefore, be described as a "confession" in the legal sense.
There. I'm glad we cleared up those important distinctions.
Accountants have been, hands down, the best clients I've ever had. They're not afraid of hard work. They don't treat every issue that takes more than 60 seconds to explain as a personal attack. They know what they need to get their job done, and know what they want from you.
Accountants submit, by far the best bug reports. No, "Something went wrong the other day, I don't remember exactly was, but here are 100 screenshots with every dialog in the application, including the login screen, could you please look through them and tell me what what I was thinking when I thought I noticed something wrong?" Most people, once they've been told that bug reports need detail go through the motions of providing detail, but not up to the point of putting any thought into it. Accountants, on the other hand, understand the value of putting effort into describing a problem precisely, without extraneous detail. If you know your business, you can often go from receiving the bug report to putting your finger on the exact line of code in minutes.
Accountants are a pleasure to work with.
They have their job to do, a demanding, technical job that requires training and exactitude. It's a job that nobody else understands or wants to think about unless there is trouble, in which case they're expected to somehow conjure cash out of ledgers. If they don't, horrible things happen to everybody in the business. If they do, they might get a pat on the back an then it's back to business as normal.
It seems funny that organizations haven't grasped Oracle's business model yet, which is to offer customers scalability in several dimensions but charge just enough so that it's just slightly better to pay Oracle than to do without.
The Oracle licensing programs are amazing; they're almost as elaborate in their features as Oracle's product. It's like a twist on the old MS marketing slogan: "Where do you want to go today? OK, now pay us."
Buyers choose Oracle -- and it's not a bad choice for many situations -- because they think, "we could scale our databases by orders of magnitude in transactions, data, reliability etc.," without considering that the next part is "for a price". I don't think that's unfair on Oracle's part, but unwary buyers can end up biting off more than they can chew.
One of the things they skimp on is administrators. I can't count how many Oracle installations I've seen where they've sent Oracle buckets of dough, but skimped on hiring the expertise or doing the training they need to make it work. I knew one installation where they had a major project to replace 32 bit Oracle with 64 bit Oracle, including a server with only 4GB of RAM. They didn't know the difference between the 32 bit and 64 bit servers, what you needed to take advantage of them, they didn't even know whether the 64 bit server would require an upgrade to 64 bit clients (which for their applications it didn't). Oh yes, and they went Oracle Enterprise rather than Standard, because Enterprise must be better, right?
Oracle is a platform on which ignorance can be very, very expensive.
I negotiated a contract a few years ago in which the company wanted to have any disputes settled by an arbitrator, that they would name at a later date. I told them that I was fine with arbitration, but that I would be the one to name the arbitrator. They balked because that would be buying a pig in a poke, to which I said, "just so, so let's name the arbitrator NOW."
The situation this guy is talking about is ticklish. He needs a good lawyer because this could be extremely costly to him. What he is being asked to do is to forgo the future economic benefit of his knowledge of the project and problem domain. Therefore, his agreement should reflect a difference between him and a similarly skilled developer with no particular expertise in the project. If he gets the same deal as somebody coming out of a different field he is actualy giving up more.
Therefore, the economically rational thing would be for him to sell the difference in some way. If that difference were worth $500,000, then he could offer it for $400,000, and both he and the company hiring would b ahead. That would be fair.
What I'd do is ask for a severance package, to compensate for the lost future income. Otherwise, they could simply offer him the job, fire him under some pretext, and enjoy the competitive benefit of having his expertise removed from the field. I'd say, why don't you give me $50,000 a year for every year you don't want me to compete? If at any time you feel that my non-competition isn't worth it, simply stop paying and I'll be free to get a job using my domain knowledge?
That's perfectly fair. Maybe (it's not his job to suggest this) the package would be pro-rated by the number of years; suppose he'd worked on the project for four years. If they hired him and fired him immediately, they'd pay him $50,000; after one year of employement (1:4) they'd pay him $40,000; after four years of employment, they'd pay him $25,000.
The important thing to remember:he's giving up future income earned through his past investment on this project. It'd be like handing over some of the value in your 401k to your next employer. He's got to get that gift balanced out.
Making a better than normal return on investments has always been about timing. Many a sound plan has failed because it was too early or too late.
In the early part of the dot com era, a lot of money was invested on businesses that could not generate cash until man more people had Internet connections at home. Back in the 70's oil crisis lots of creativity was going into alternative energy and conservation technologies -- just before oil prices started to drop. When everyone knows change is coming, most people will lose money getting the timing wrong, and a few will make a lot of money.
That's just investing.
Now consider: if you had to have heart surgery, would you go to a doctor whose specialty was "ethically responsible surgery"? No. You'd go to a surgeon and expect him to be socially responsible. Maybe you'd want to know what his standards of ethics are and how those ethics are enforce. But you wouldn't put yourself in the hands of somebody who uses ethics as branding.
The problem is we don't need SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE investment funds, we need socially responsible INVESTMENT funds. Social responsibility should be something a well run fund has a philosophy and strategy for, like any other aspect of investment. It shouldn't be left to specialists.
I suspect, also, that "social investment", if I may use that term, is also a matter of timing. No investment is likely to be totally free of ethical issues, but economically driven change always happens at the margins: the next dollar spent or not spent. So if you look at a collection of investments, at any time there will be a small number of them where moving some dollars will have a big effect. Choosing to lose money everywhere means you lose money; choosing to lose money in selected places may actually mean you secure your future, since most socially "irresponsible" business practices are short sighted.
Well, if you are going to put over $100,000 in the bank, you really ought to take the effort to understand what your insurance is.
I think that the insurance caps should be permanent. FDIC insurance has been $100,000 for ages, and it should be adjusted for inflation.
But I think that a temporary extension is still very useful in this situation. It may stop some banks from going under in the next couple of months if there is bad news. It will also make it possible for people to stash cash in the bank safely after a large transaction like selling a major asset like a condo; it may not help with the real estate market in places like San Francisco, but it may help some parts of the economy to keep running smoothly.
I'm against the bailout bill, so I must be some kind of Anti-Bush partisan hack.
No, you are repeating talking points, not specifics, therefore you are some kind of partisan. There are people who are against the bill who make more informed arguments.
As for reading the bill - I actually read the entire 3 pages of the original bill. I read about half of the pork-laden 442 page version that ultimately passed. I couldn't read much more or I might be even more infuriated than I am now.
I wouldn't ask you to read the pork part. Just learn about how the TARP is supposed to run. It's not perfect in my opinion, but it's not a giveaway either.
Fooled you! I'm a registered Republican and made the mistake of voting for Bush once.
No, I figured that out. The Republican part. The Bush part is guaranteed by the Constitution unless you live in Crawford and W runs for dog catcher.
Take your choice of theories. From a monetarist standpoint, I guess, when the Fed loses the ability to adjust the money supply, you've got to get the money out there somehow.
What is the Fed doing when it drops interest rates (in normal times)? It is conjuring more cash into the system. You can think of a dollar loaned by the Fed to a major bank as the creation of a dollar and an anti-dollar (which makes sense since credits and debit have to balance). The anti-dollar sits on the Fed's books and the dollar goes out into the great plumbing system called banking, hopefully to end up at some retail spigot.
The TARP system under this bill is actually much more conventional. We are buying assets. The money those assets generate in the future will come back into the treasury, either by paying a return (as statistically they will do most of the time) or by diluting the dollar value of stock held by stockholders in the company.
Either way, through the Fed or the TARP program, a cash dollar is injected into the economy in return for an anti-dollar being held by the government (in the form of a guaranteed security). The difference is that the TARP program is designed to inject cash into the economy in a way that unclogs the credit plumbing in specific places, rather than pouring more money in at the top and hoping the sheer pressure will unclog things.
OK, I just made one of those analogy arguments I really hate. But the point is, the cash is injected into places where it is most likely to get credit moving, and is secured by liabilities held by the government, as normal.
Well, fiscal conservatism and liberalism are like any other kind of conservative/liberal dichotomy: simplistic.
You can be a fiscal conservative because you believe in balanced budgets. You can be a fiscal conservative because you believe in minimum spending. You can be fiscal conservative because you believe in minimizing government involvement in the economy, other than setting the money supply. You can even be a fiscal conservative who doesn't even believe the government should get involved with the money supply (like Ron Paul, who favors a return to the gold standard).
What's clear here is that most of the people talking about Wall Street being "greedy" don't have believable credentials to any kind of fiscal conservatism. There isn't really a name for them: they're socially conservative, politically authoritarian, and fiscally opportunistic. Mixing them up with "fiscal conservatives" is what makes what they say sound confusing.
Personally, I don't fit any of these definitions of "fiscal conservatism". I think that the budget should be balanced with respect to current expenses, but that capital items that either have real value (like buildings) or clear potential for increasing future revenues (like education and some road projects) can reasonably be funded by borrowing. I don't believe that accumulating debt in the taxpayer's name and giving him a break on this year's tax payment is a tax cut.
From my perspective, Wall Street is supposed to be greedy, and Washington is supposed to draw boundaries which limit greedy acts when they become anti-social. That makes me a liberal in many people's eyes, I guess, because I think the government is supposed to safeguard the common good. But there are plenty of paleoconservatives who agree with me on this, but weigh risks and benefits differently than I do.
First of all, I hate this kind of argument by analogy, although the analogy happens in this case to point in the right direction.
Secondly, not all "carping" is bad. We should be skeptical. This isn't the first time we've heard "wolf" called by this administration.
What is going on is that credit markets are breaking down. Credit hasn't "dried up". It doesn't work that way. Credit can't disappear, any more than the world can run out of oil. What happens to these commodities is that they become too expensive to be useful. That's what is happening now to credit, and upshot is that the Fed is losing control of the money supply, and that is very, very bad because controlling the money supply is the main way we have avoided having economic downturns spiral out of control ever since the Great Depression.
It is a very serious situation, and we need to start fixing it fast, but in any case the fix doesn't have to be accomplished overnight. It can't be. We have a situation that grows graver every day, but not say grave that at bad move today is better than a mediocre one tomorrow. It's all about balancing less than perfect action against diminishing returns.
I think there are better ideas out there than this bill, but getting enough support to put them into action runs up against diminishing returns. On the other hand, the bill sent to us last week was dangerous.
"Carping" improved the TARP component of the bill considerably, putting in place a mechanism by which distressed assets are secured by stock warrants to control taxpayer risk, aligning taxpayer and shareholder interests. I originally though the CEO payout provisions were Democratic red meat, but in this context it is good for shareholders too because it keeps CEOs from stabbing the shareholders and taxpayers alike in the back.
So "carping" got us a much better bill than we had a week ago last Friday. The pork incentives to get those last dozen votes, frankly, sucks, but as Barney Frank pointed out: if you don't want politics in this process, you shouldn't hand it over to 535 politicians.
My father was a chef; my brothers went into the food industry. We were food people before there were foodies. I have tasted many "delicacies" in my time. Delicacies are, by definition special, but they don't have to be good. Good is quite beside the point. If you want good, go for a loaf of bread fresh out of the oven.
Based on my experience, I have to conclude that to be a delicacy a food has to be either hard to get, or a bit revolting at first, or ideally, both.
Actually, this was why Bobby Fischer stopped playing chess.
He may have been as crazy as a bedbug, but that doesn't mean he didn't understand chess. The beauty of chess is its intuitive challenge, but gradually, over the years, an encyclopedic knowledge of past games has come t count for as much as insight.
Towards the end of his life, Fischer developed a variant of chess where the initial positions of the pieces were shuffled, but in a way that preserved all legal chess moves. This eliminates the value of having a vast database of chess openings.
They don't have muscles either, but somehow the wiggle their flagella. Same problem, different scale, different solution, I suppose.
It's funny, but I never thought of this before. Do bacteria just move around randomly, possibly modulating this a bit depending on environmental conditions, until they bump into something? Or do they move in a particular direction in response to some stimuli?
The idea that they can be trained indicates some kind of information processing is going on, and, obviously, that process has read and write access to some kind of memory.
Well, if it is trade secrets, this will make an interesting case.
A trade secret is supposed to be something that gives you an advantage. It's not supposed to be something that keeps you out of trouble.
I have a hard time believing that there any "secret sauce" in these kinds of systems, and if there could be it is well known in computer security that secret methods are actually really bad from a security standpoint, as illustrated by the safety of the gold in Fort Knox and the cash stuffed in grandpa's mattress.
So? Some anti-greens believe we need to use up the environment before the Rapture. Does that mean anything at all? Is this an argument against nukes? Sound policy is not a matter of taking some kind of opinion poll and choosing the option that has a plurality.
Diversity in the green movement means that it is founded around ideas, not ideologies anchored around some charismatic personality.
Here's one thing all greens agree on: the greenest form of power is conservation. If we can generate a unit of GDP with fewer joules, that's absolutely a good thing. In fact, that's a good litmus test to see if somebody is green. If conservation is consistently high on his list of priorities, then he's some kind of green.
With respect to nuclear being the "greenest" source of power, that is ideological thinking: start with a blanket statement and derive the specific facts from there. Rational thinking goes the other way.
Each source of power has advantages and disadvantages. Furthermore scale is a critical element in any environmental problem. It is very sustainable for Inuit hunters to clothe themselves in sealskins they capture and tan themselves. For cold weather clothing for a million people, polyester fleece is more environmentally sound, even though polyester is a petroleum byproduct. The put the entire infrastructure in place needed to produce fleece for a few thousand hunters would be an environmental disaster. It's better than most alternatives when we're talking about clothing millions, especially if the polyester is recycled, which it ought to be.
So, I don't think a crash course to solve all our energy problems with nuclear power would be a good idea, even if you think that nuclear power is relatively safe (which I do) an environmentally benign (which is a matter of scale in my opinion).
Realistically, we're probably going to have to use more nukes, even though we don't know how to handle the decommissioning of the plants. We can probably require a long term bond be posted to cover that cost. If the number of nukes added at one time is modest, then it will be a manageable problem, and the bonds will attract technological development on that problem. A massive spike in the next few years in new plants would mean a massive spike in decommissioning in a few decades, which would be bad.
Overall, I think that we should try for greater energy diversity, which will shield the economy from things like changes in the price of uranium. When uranium is almost all our energy supply, we will not be able to grow the economy if the price of that one commodity rises to high.
The kind of dramatic "quick fix" thinking that says we can fix all our energy problems in a few years by building nuclear power plants is something Americans should learn to be skeptical of. Once you've bought into the idea that the solution to all our problems is within our grasp, it is hard to think reasonably about that solution.
The problem with wind power isn't scaling. The problem with windpower is scaling in a convenient location.
A better long distance grid would help wind power "scale" as a fraction of our energy supply, AND help make nuclear stage a comeback.
It wasn't the anti-nuclear activists that killed nuclear power, it was cheap fossil fuels. However, location will be a problem for new nuclear plants. The US population is concentrated in megalopolises like Boston/NYC/DC, Chicago PIttsburgh. People have sprawled out in the last thirty years, and locating plants is going to be tough. If a new plant could be located in a remote, less populated area, opposition would be less. The local impact on the job market and tax base would be greater, making it more popular where it is situated.
A grid that transmits energy efficiently over long distances increases the geographic size of the energy market. That allows the market to be more diverse, from a farmer with a few wind turbines to a full scale nuclear plant. That diversity is good for national and economic security.
Not putting all our energy eggs in one basket means that the problems of any source are minimized. The nuclear waste issue might be manageable at one level but not at ten times the level. If people object to wind farms for aesthetic reasons, those farms don't have to be built in popular scenic areas.
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I was wondering whether techniques of commercial data mining could be applied to environmental problems like emerging disease surveillance.
Well, of course they can. The question is how far is it from practical? I think, pretty far from being as practical as it is in business.
First of all, businesses have a great deal of object model in common: they have common concepts like customers, products, sales, brands etc., which form a common framework in which they can do all kinds of creative thinking, or if not thinking you can even discover relationships using some kind of machine learning.
Secondly, when you are dealing with business data, the most important events tend to be common events. The most important common event is when a customer buys something. When you talk about something like a new disease emerging, or somebody committing a crime like hijacking or bombing, the most important events are exceeding rare, but catastrophic. Therefore the connection between events we do have in abundance and the events we are interested in is tenuous, poorly statistically attested to, and in many cases pure conjecture.
Finally, a lot of what businesses use data mining for is tweaking marginal costs and revenue by shifting dollars that were already going to be spent from one place to another. Offer product A to this web visitor instead of B. Stock more of item X in the store rather than Y. If you really don't know a priori whether X or Y will sell more profitably, you probably aren't going to go too wrong.
In something like environmental monitoring, you create expenses that weren't already there. No, you can't drain this lake because the model predicts a 5% marginal increase in the probability of human cases of hantavirus in the area. To somebody counting on the economic value of draining that lake, that's a brand new cost that wasn't there before.
Same goes, even more so, to deciding somebody is a danger to society.
Now let me say that I have no doubt that data mining will lead to more terrorist being thwarted or captured, compared to doing nothing else. Of course so would a lottery, but I suspect that data mining is a great deal better at identifying good suspects than a lottery. However, it is for reasons I noted above not going to be particularly accurate, certainly not compared to probable cause. Furthermore, the marginal cost of false positives gained seems likely to exceed the marginal value of false negatives lost, if such things could be quantified.
I've been reading DailyKos for several years now, and I'll agree with you -- up to a point. It is not fair to troll through a site with thousands of contributors and cherry pick the one most stupid and offensive post you can find, then pretend it is representative. However, of late the voice of loon has been harder to escape on DailyKos, due, I think, to several things.
The first is a flaw in the discussion model. The site's software is derived from kuro5hin which I've alway felt is relatively flame friendly to begin with, then makes it worse -- especially in the context of an upcoming election. Aside from the front page contributors or guest blogger, most of the kos material consists of diaries. Because of the elections, the volume of diaries is now so large that a new diary disappears in well under and hour most of the time, unless it can make the 'rec list'. Most diaries disappear in the time it takes to read through a diary and its discussion.
Despite this, there are a number of thoughtful and well researched diaries. However, the site's design and volume bias it towards diaries that can (a) grab eyeballs and (b) trigger a reflex to push the recommend button. As a result, the site has increasingly become an echo chamber: there are often two or more diaries on the rec list that are essentially identical, along with one or even two front page articles.
Groupthink is never good and where you have groupthink, bitter division is not far behind.
The second problem is that it is such a Democratic year, many of the contributors, including the front page editors, are in a stage of alternately counting their chickens before they hatch and worrying that the chickens won't hatch at all. Emotions are running high. The contest between advocates of different Democratic candidates was extremely bitter, because people could imagine their guy in the White House. DailyKos was an extremely divisive force among Democrats. As a result the site has become increasingly bitter and intolerant of dissent. It reminds me of nothing more than in Life of Brian where the only thing the People's Front of Judea (PFJ) hate more than the Romans is the Judean People's Front (JPF). And the Popular People's Front of Judea (PPFJ) of course.
Finally, you have to remember that dKos is Markos' personal site, more than Slashdot has Tacos except maybe in the earliest days. It rose to prominence in the 2006 interim elections; congressmen and media stars read and even contribute to it. I think this has gone to Markos' head. He used to be a lot more mild mannered; now he's a lot more brash and imprudent about what he says. His recent reaction to the financial crisis was one of those situations where you feel embarrassed for somebody who doesn't seem to notice he's starting to make an ass of himself by ranting. And things got nasty for anybody who didn't agree.
I'm a liberal Democrat, and I like and admire many of the people I've "met" through DailyKos, but mark my words, the site is no longer a positive force, and not just because it yields ripe quotes for people who'd like to misrepresent what Democrats think. It actually creates divisions -- really stupid divisions between Democrats.
Usually, big acquisitions are bad news, or at least a sign of a bumpy ride.
It is NOT supposed to help AMD. It is supposed to help AMD's stockholders.
This often happens with troubled stocks that have a number of different business functions that can be split off. Some of those business functions may represent a great deal of capital investment, but not return much cash. You don't want that capital tied up in idle buildings and equipment, but you probably can't sell those things to your rival who's happy to see you shrivel up and blow away.
So you split the company up. The more profitable divisions can start to appreciate in value or even pay dividends. The less profitable business can stay afloat on business from its former sibling divisions while the stockholders unload their stock in it. It's possible that new management can turn thing around.
Well, you have a point.
The "Republican Operative" was actually a consultant hired by the Republican party. Calling him a "Republican Operative" makes him sound like an employee of the Republican party, whereas he was the owner of a company ("GOP Marketplace") which provided technical services to the Republican party.
The "Confessions" part come from a book he wrote well after he pleaded guilty to a number of felonies. The book itself cannot, therefore, be described as a "confession" in the legal sense.
There. I'm glad we cleared up those important distinctions.
Funny how the first step in victimizing people is convincing them they've been victimized.
Accountants have been, hands down, the best clients I've ever had. They're not afraid of hard work. They don't treat every issue that takes more than 60 seconds to explain as a personal attack. They know what they need to get their job done, and know what they want from you.
Accountants submit, by far the best bug reports. No, "Something went wrong the other day, I don't remember exactly was, but here are 100 screenshots with every dialog in the application, including the login screen, could you please look through them and tell me what what I was thinking when I thought I noticed something wrong?" Most people, once they've been told that bug reports need detail go through the motions of providing detail, but not up to the point of putting any thought into it. Accountants, on the other hand, understand the value of putting effort into describing a problem precisely, without extraneous detail. If you know your business, you can often go from receiving the bug report to putting your finger on the exact line of code in minutes.
Accountants are a pleasure to work with.
They have their job to do, a demanding, technical job that requires training and exactitude. It's a job that nobody else understands or wants to think about unless there is trouble, in which case they're expected to somehow conjure cash out of ledgers. If they don't, horrible things happen to everybody in the business. If they do, they might get a pat on the back an then it's back to business as normal.
It seems funny that organizations haven't grasped Oracle's business model yet, which is to offer customers scalability in several dimensions but charge just enough so that it's just slightly better to pay Oracle than to do without.
The Oracle licensing programs are amazing; they're almost as elaborate in their features as Oracle's product. It's like a twist on the old MS marketing slogan: "Where do you want to go today? OK, now pay us."
Buyers choose Oracle -- and it's not a bad choice for many situations -- because they think, "we could scale our databases by orders of magnitude in transactions, data, reliability etc.," without considering that the next part is "for a price". I don't think that's unfair on Oracle's part, but unwary buyers can end up biting off more than they can chew.
One of the things they skimp on is administrators. I can't count how many Oracle installations I've seen where they've sent Oracle buckets of dough, but skimped on hiring the expertise or doing the training they need to make it work. I knew one installation where they had a major project to replace 32 bit Oracle with 64 bit Oracle, including a server with only 4GB of RAM. They didn't know the difference between the 32 bit and 64 bit servers, what you needed to take advantage of them, they didn't even know whether the 64 bit server would require an upgrade to 64 bit clients (which for their applications it didn't). Oh yes, and they went Oracle Enterprise rather than Standard, because Enterprise must be better, right?
Oracle is a platform on which ignorance can be very, very expensive.
That is so true.
I negotiated a contract a few years ago in which the company wanted to have any disputes settled by an arbitrator, that they would name at a later date. I told them that I was fine with arbitration, but that I would be the one to name the arbitrator. They balked because that would be buying a pig in a poke, to which I said, "just so, so let's name the arbitrator NOW."
The situation this guy is talking about is ticklish. He needs a good lawyer because this could be extremely costly to him. What he is being asked to do is to forgo the future economic benefit of his knowledge of the project and problem domain. Therefore, his agreement should reflect a difference between him and a similarly skilled developer with no particular expertise in the project. If he gets the same deal as somebody coming out of a different field he is actualy giving up more.
Therefore, the economically rational thing would be for him to sell the difference in some way. If that difference were worth $500,000, then he could offer it for $400,000, and both he and the company hiring would b ahead. That would be fair.
What I'd do is ask for a severance package, to compensate for the lost future income. Otherwise, they could simply offer him the job, fire him under some pretext, and enjoy the competitive benefit of having his expertise removed from the field. I'd say, why don't you give me $50,000 a year for every year you don't want me to compete? If at any time you feel that my non-competition isn't worth it, simply stop paying and I'll be free to get a job using my domain knowledge?
That's perfectly fair. Maybe (it's not his job to suggest this) the package would be pro-rated by the number of years; suppose he'd worked on the project for four years. If they hired him and fired him immediately, they'd pay him $50,000; after one year of employement (1:4) they'd pay him $40,000; after four years of employment, they'd pay him $25,000.
The important thing to remember:he's giving up future income earned through his past investment on this project. It'd be like handing over some of the value in your 401k to your next employer. He's got to get that gift balanced out.
Making a better than normal return on investments has always been about timing. Many a sound plan has failed because it was too early or too late.
In the early part of the dot com era, a lot of money was invested on businesses that could not generate cash until man more people had Internet connections at home. Back in the 70's oil crisis lots of creativity was going into alternative energy and conservation technologies -- just before oil prices started to drop. When everyone knows change is coming, most people will lose money getting the timing wrong, and a few will make a lot of money.
That's just investing.
Now consider: if you had to have heart surgery, would you go to a doctor whose specialty was "ethically responsible surgery"? No. You'd go to a surgeon and expect him to be socially responsible. Maybe you'd want to know what his standards of ethics are and how those ethics are enforce. But you wouldn't put yourself in the hands of somebody who uses ethics as branding.
The problem is we don't need SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE investment funds, we need socially responsible INVESTMENT funds. Social responsibility should be something a well run fund has a philosophy and strategy for, like any other aspect of investment. It shouldn't be left to specialists.
I suspect, also, that "social investment", if I may use that term, is also a matter of timing. No investment is likely to be totally free of ethical issues, but economically driven change always happens at the margins: the next dollar spent or not spent. So if you look at a collection of investments, at any time there will be a small number of them where moving some dollars will have a big effect. Choosing to lose money everywhere means you lose money; choosing to lose money in selected places may actually mean you secure your future, since most socially "irresponsible" business practices are short sighted.
That's investing too.
Here's a hint: If you look at Spock, you might notice he doesn't have a beard.
Well, if you are going to put over $100,000 in the bank, you really ought to take the effort to understand what your insurance is.
I think that the insurance caps should be permanent. FDIC insurance has been $100,000 for ages, and it should be adjusted for inflation.
But I think that a temporary extension is still very useful in this situation. It may stop some banks from going under in the next couple of months if there is bad news. It will also make it possible for people to stash cash in the bank safely after a large transaction like selling a major asset like a condo; it may not help with the real estate market in places like San Francisco, but it may help some parts of the economy to keep running smoothly.
No, you are repeating talking points, not specifics, therefore you are some kind of partisan. There are people who are against the bill who make more informed arguments.
I wouldn't ask you to read the pork part. Just learn about how the TARP is supposed to run. It's not perfect in my opinion, but it's not a giveaway either.
No, I figured that out. The Republican part. The Bush part is guaranteed by the Constitution unless you live in Crawford and W runs for dog catcher.
Take your choice of theories. From a monetarist standpoint, I guess, when the Fed loses the ability to adjust the money supply, you've got to get the money out there somehow.
What is the Fed doing when it drops interest rates (in normal times)? It is conjuring more cash into the system. You can think of a dollar loaned by the Fed to a major bank as the creation of a dollar and an anti-dollar (which makes sense since credits and debit have to balance). The anti-dollar sits on the Fed's books and the dollar goes out into the great plumbing system called banking, hopefully to end up at some retail spigot.
The TARP system under this bill is actually much more conventional. We are buying assets. The money those assets generate in the future will come back into the treasury, either by paying a return (as statistically they will do most of the time) or by diluting the dollar value of stock held by stockholders in the company.
Either way, through the Fed or the TARP program, a cash dollar is injected into the economy in return for an anti-dollar being held by the government (in the form of a guaranteed security). The difference is that the TARP program is designed to inject cash into the economy in a way that unclogs the credit plumbing in specific places, rather than pouring more money in at the top and hoping the sheer pressure will unclog things.
OK, I just made one of those analogy arguments I really hate. But the point is, the cash is injected into places where it is most likely to get credit moving, and is secured by liabilities held by the government, as normal.
Well, fiscal conservatism and liberalism are like any other kind of conservative/liberal dichotomy: simplistic.
You can be a fiscal conservative because you believe in balanced budgets. You can be a fiscal conservative because you believe in minimum spending. You can be fiscal conservative because you believe in minimizing government involvement in the economy, other than setting the money supply. You can even be a fiscal conservative who doesn't even believe the government should get involved with the money supply (like Ron Paul, who favors a return to the gold standard).
What's clear here is that most of the people talking about Wall Street being "greedy" don't have believable credentials to any kind of fiscal conservatism. There isn't really a name for them: they're socially conservative, politically authoritarian, and fiscally opportunistic. Mixing them up with "fiscal conservatives" is what makes what they say sound confusing.
Personally, I don't fit any of these definitions of "fiscal conservatism". I think that the budget should be balanced with respect to current expenses, but that capital items that either have real value (like buildings) or clear potential for increasing future revenues (like education and some road projects) can reasonably be funded by borrowing. I don't believe that accumulating debt in the taxpayer's name and giving him a break on this year's tax payment is a tax cut.
From my perspective, Wall Street is supposed to be greedy, and Washington is supposed to draw boundaries which limit greedy acts when they become anti-social. That makes me a liberal in many people's eyes, I guess, because I think the government is supposed to safeguard the common good. But there are plenty of paleoconservatives who agree with me on this, but weigh risks and benefits differently than I do.
First of all, I hate this kind of argument by analogy, although the analogy happens in this case to point in the right direction.
Secondly, not all "carping" is bad. We should be skeptical. This isn't the first time we've heard "wolf" called by this administration.
What is going on is that credit markets are breaking down. Credit hasn't "dried up". It doesn't work that way. Credit can't disappear, any more than the world can run out of oil. What happens to these commodities is that they become too expensive to be useful. That's what is happening now to credit, and upshot is that the Fed is losing control of the money supply, and that is very, very bad because controlling the money supply is the main way we have avoided having economic downturns spiral out of control ever since the Great Depression.
It is a very serious situation, and we need to start fixing it fast, but in any case the fix doesn't have to be accomplished overnight. It can't be. We have a situation that grows graver every day, but not say grave that at bad move today is better than a mediocre one tomorrow. It's all about balancing less than perfect action against diminishing returns.
I think there are better ideas out there than this bill, but getting enough support to put them into action runs up against diminishing returns. On the other hand, the bill sent to us last week was dangerous.
"Carping" improved the TARP component of the bill considerably, putting in place a mechanism by which distressed assets are secured by stock warrants to control taxpayer risk, aligning taxpayer and shareholder interests. I originally though the CEO payout provisions were Democratic red meat, but in this context it is good for shareholders too because it keeps CEOs from stabbing the shareholders and taxpayers alike in the back.
So "carping" got us a much better bill than we had a week ago last Friday. The pork incentives to get those last dozen votes, frankly, sucks, but as Barney Frank pointed out: if you don't want politics in this process, you shouldn't hand it over to 535 politicians.
Did you even read a summary of the bill, or are you just handing on opinions?
My father was a chef; my brothers went into the food industry. We were food people before there were foodies. I have tasted many "delicacies" in my time. Delicacies are, by definition special, but they don't have to be good. Good is quite beside the point. If you want good, go for a loaf of bread fresh out of the oven.
Based on my experience, I have to conclude that to be a delicacy a food has to be either hard to get, or a bit revolting at first, or ideally, both.
Sounds like whale meat's a winner.
You miss the point.
Norwegians still have a concept in their culture of a "scandal" that isn't just juicy, salacious news.
Actually, this was why Bobby Fischer stopped playing chess.
He may have been as crazy as a bedbug, but that doesn't mean he didn't understand chess. The beauty of chess is its intuitive challenge, but gradually, over the years, an encyclopedic knowledge of past games has come t count for as much as insight.
Towards the end of his life, Fischer developed a variant of chess where the initial positions of the pieces were shuffled, but in a way that preserved all legal chess moves. This eliminates the value of having a vast database of chess openings.
They don't have muscles either, but somehow the wiggle their flagella. Same problem, different scale, different solution, I suppose.
It's funny, but I never thought of this before. Do bacteria just move around randomly, possibly modulating this a bit depending on environmental conditions, until they bump into something? Or do they move in a particular direction in response to some stimuli?
The idea that they can be trained indicates some kind of information processing is going on, and, obviously, that process has read and write access to some kind of memory.
Well, if it is trade secrets, this will make an interesting case.
A trade secret is supposed to be something that gives you an advantage. It's not supposed to be something that keeps you out of trouble.
I have a hard time believing that there any "secret sauce" in these kinds of systems, and if there could be it is well known in computer security that secret methods are actually really bad from a security standpoint, as illustrated by the safety of the gold in Fort Knox and the cash stuffed in grandpa's mattress.
So? Some anti-greens believe we need to use up the environment before the Rapture. Does that mean anything at all? Is this an argument against nukes? Sound policy is not a matter of taking some kind of opinion poll and choosing the option that has a plurality.
Diversity in the green movement means that it is founded around ideas, not ideologies anchored around some charismatic personality.
Here's one thing all greens agree on: the greenest form of power is conservation. If we can generate a unit of GDP with fewer joules, that's absolutely a good thing. In fact, that's a good litmus test to see if somebody is green. If conservation is consistently high on his list of priorities, then he's some kind of green.
With respect to nuclear being the "greenest" source of power, that is ideological thinking: start with a blanket statement and derive the specific facts from there. Rational thinking goes the other way.
Each source of power has advantages and disadvantages. Furthermore scale is a critical element in any environmental problem. It is very sustainable for Inuit hunters to clothe themselves in sealskins they capture and tan themselves. For cold weather clothing for a million people, polyester fleece is more environmentally sound, even though polyester is a petroleum byproduct. The put the entire infrastructure in place needed to produce fleece for a few thousand hunters would be an environmental disaster. It's better than most alternatives when we're talking about clothing millions, especially if the polyester is recycled, which it ought to be.
So, I don't think a crash course to solve all our energy problems with nuclear power would be a good idea, even if you think that nuclear power is relatively safe (which I do) an environmentally benign (which is a matter of scale in my opinion).
Realistically, we're probably going to have to use more nukes, even though we don't know how to handle the decommissioning of the plants. We can probably require a long term bond be posted to cover that cost. If the number of nukes added at one time is modest, then it will be a manageable problem, and the bonds will attract technological development on that problem. A massive spike in the next few years in new plants would mean a massive spike in decommissioning in a few decades, which would be bad.
Overall, I think that we should try for greater energy diversity, which will shield the economy from things like changes in the price of uranium. When uranium is almost all our energy supply, we will not be able to grow the economy if the price of that one commodity rises to high.
The kind of dramatic "quick fix" thinking that says we can fix all our energy problems in a few years by building nuclear power plants is something Americans should learn to be skeptical of. Once you've bought into the idea that the solution to all our problems is within our grasp, it is hard to think reasonably about that solution.
The problem with wind power isn't scaling. The problem with windpower is scaling in a convenient location.
A better long distance grid would help wind power "scale" as a fraction of our energy supply, AND help make nuclear stage a comeback.
It wasn't the anti-nuclear activists that killed nuclear power, it was cheap fossil fuels. However, location will be a problem for new nuclear plants. The US population is concentrated in megalopolises like Boston/NYC/DC, Chicago PIttsburgh. People have sprawled out in the last thirty years, and locating plants is going to be tough. If a new plant could be located in a remote, less populated area, opposition would be less. The local impact on the job market and tax base would be greater, making it more popular where it is situated.
A grid that transmits energy efficiently over long distances increases the geographic size of the energy market. That allows the market to be more diverse, from a farmer with a few wind turbines to a full scale nuclear plant. That diversity is good for national and economic security.
Not putting all our energy eggs in one basket means that the problems of any source are minimized. The nuclear waste issue might be manageable at one level but not at ten times the level. If people object to wind farms for aesthetic reasons, those farms don't have to be built in popular scenic areas.
Well, pop the case open, remove the x86 CPU from the socket and sell it on ebay. Voila! No legacy.