I find it interesting that the airlines have unbundled services so that they can "lower air fares", yet they still can't seem to make profits the way they used to. This article in the NYT (see link below) points out that while passenger and freight volumes are back up to pre-recession levels, the airlines are still not making pre-recession profits. Another point that I found interesting is that passenger load factors are also significantly higher in the past. So from a cost-accounting perspective, the airlines have reduced or shifted several large factors in their cost bases: underutilized aircraft, "fees" for things that used to cost the airlines extra, and industry consolidation that should also reduce employee costs (two merged airlines don't need as many mechanics, pilots, or flight attendants). A couple more points should also give some food for thought. The aforementioned industry consolidation gives the airlines more power to raise ticket prices because of reduced competition (and fewer routes). Also, oil prices are not nearly what they were in 2008/2009, so that's another large expense that has been reduced.
The point I'm trying to make is that the airline industry has seen major shifts that should in theory increase revenues while decreasing expenses. Something else must be going on and I don't have the whole story, but it makes me wonder if there is some serious mismanagement going on. Or maybe unbundling combined with all the other hassles of air travel are starting to make customers change their behaviors.
My guess is there's actually a positive correlation between pirate activity and a movie's gross revenues. These guys are trying to suggest the opposite.
Think about it. What are you more likely to find on a torrent site? Avatar or BloodRayne? Titanic or some indie art-house film?
There has been video made in the past of shuttle reentry. In fact, there is a lot of video of the failed reentry of Columbia back in 2003. I know there is also video of various satellites that have reentered the atmosphere. All of it pretty much looks like this video, though the Columbia disaster is pretty heartbreaking.
Mr. Plait makes a good point. People tend to have this view of asteroids being solid rocks, probably because the Earth and other large rocky bodies are solid and the meteorites that make it to the Earth's surface are solid. However, that's not a valid assumption to make and recent science is showing this to be the case. Scientists are finding that some asteroids and various satellites of the outer planets are less dense than expected, suggesting that they're somewhat porous (i.e. masses of rubble instead of solid bodies). Science from the Cassini probe is showing that small bodies in orbit around Saturn are constantly being assembled and destroyed.
Personally, this view of asteroids being porous masses of loosely assembled rubble makes sense, especially from a planetary formation perspective. It's only when you get bodies more than a few hundreds of km in diameter that gravity starts to force the rubble to fuse into solid masses. The implication of all this that Mr. Plait points out is that nuking an asteroid will be akin to bombing a cloud. It's not going to move the asteroid at all, only disrupt it, causing not one impact but several. On the other hand, maybe it would make disrupting asteroids easier. Instead of one large impact, you have thousands of smaller bodies that have a greater chance of simply burning up on reentry.
One other thing that isn't touched on, but is of keen interest to the astronomical community is that the meteorites that we have here have spectra that are very different from the spectra of the asteroids we see in space. The current theory is that the surfaces of asteroids undergo some sort of weathering, which changes the spectra. By gaining physical samples of the surface of an asteroid, this theory can be tested by direct chemical analysis. Very exciting, if it was successful.
"Electronics are causing newspapers to die. Consumers need to consume fewer high-margin electronic devices and start consuming more low-margin newspapers."
From a pure economics standpoint, this is completely idiotic as it would tend to depress economic growth (though it would be a relatively minor effect).
Actually, I highly doubt the study group was made up of MBA students. MBA students are busy studying and going to class and probably already have money (I should know, I'm one of them). The study group was probably broke-ass art students who have nothing better to do with their time and desperately need the $20 that are usually offered to take place in studies.
I think the article oversimplifies. The Milky Way doesn't rotate as one single piece. It's made up of billions of stars (duh!) which revolve around the center at different velocities. So, the question is, is the quoted speed the speed at which the Sun revolves around the galactic center or the average speed of the arms (which move much slower than the stars)? Maybe more later if I can find the paper on arxiv.org
Risk, in financial terms, is a measure of the variability of returns, i.e. the standard deviation of the returns. A well-diversified portfolio generally reduces the variability due to the individual risks of investments being uncorrelated. Harry Markowitz, the father of portfolio theory, pointed out that these quants all assumed that a basket of mortgages is highly uncorrelated and thus well diversified. However, in a broad real estate downturn, they all become very highly correlated. Therefore, if your standard deviation WAS 10%, it suddenly becomes 50% or more, which rapidly changes your VaR from a handful of millions to several billion overnight. VaR, being an oversimplification, didn't take that into account and all the big investment firms suddenly had billions of dollars at risk and billions of dollars of losses without realizing it. It's simply a matter of garbage-in, garbage-out, something my Portfolio Analysis prof drilled into our head and hopefully gets drilled into the heads of Wall Street CEOs.
The comment at the end of the post, "On the balance sheets of Coca Cola and many other huge corporations, you find goodwill listed as a major asset." irked me. In accounting terms, goodwill isn't the warm fuzzy feeling that corporations hold for us. Goodwill is simply the difference in the book value of an acquired company and the actual sale price. Since the assets of the acquired company need to be added to the balance sheets of the acquiring company at book value, the difference between book and market price needs to be held as a seperate item to keep the book balanced.
The comment at the end made no sense whatsoever and goodwill doesn't even seem to be in TFA, so can anyone explain why it's in the post?
So, people have established that this is basically an order to log the IP addresses. So what? They could prove that I grabbed a torrent file from TorrentSpy, but they can't really prove that I actually USED that torrent file. I could just leave it on my hard drive and look at it and it's not really infringing content. Or am I misunderstanding how this works?
The author only compares high-end notebooks. On the other hand, who buys high-end notebooks? How much of a market share is that? Most people buy the cheapest, so for most people, PCs are STILL cheaper than Macs.
So what if it's regressive? The advantage of a sales tax over an income tax is choice. If you chose to spend most of your income on things that are taxed, that's your choice. If you chose to NOT spend on taxable items, that is also your choice. As for an income tax, if you want to pay less taxes, your only option is to make less money. Generally, states don't have a sales tax on necessities, like clothing or food, meaning the sales tax becomes much less regressive, so theoretically, one could get away with not paying any sales tax. For instance, a person making $100,000 could only buy clothing and food for a year, thus paying $0 in sales tax. A person making $20,000 could spend half of that on eating out or a big screen TV, paying about $500 in taxes. Is this regressive? Perhaps. Is this fair? Totally.
I realize you're being facetious, but the obligatory response is bullshit. I learned quite well with old-fashioned books and blackboards and managed to get a degree in Physics years before iPods were ever invented. Millions of people have done just as well. It's not lack of iPods that are preventing kids from learning, it's something else (parents, poor teachers, lack of funding, shitty educational standards, take your pick).
I work in the Corporate Trust department of a major bank and I have to deal with OFAC fairly often. Anytime a potential bondholder or company with a foreign address is added to our system, we have to send a form to our Taxes department who verifies the information with OFAC. It's actually a pretty slick system. We get the tax documentation (W-8 or W-9) and Taxes searches OFAC's list for the name or tax ID. Takes about 5 minutes. While you may not be able to get a full listing of potential terrorists or criminals, the information IS public on the Treasury Department's website. For instance, if Ahmad Muhammad or Joe Smythe have addresses in the UK, they are checked out against the list and if the query is negative, we can proceed.
The loophole is that we don't check out people with US addresses. That's covered by our Anti-Money Laundering team who monitors transactions for suspicious activity (money laundering and the like are pretty easy to spot) and report that to OFAC. It's probably not 100% effective, but it's pretty much internal and transaction data are not given wholesale to the government. The burden of verification IS on businesses, but it's pretty easy to do.
It's kinda like those "most expensive drinks in the world" articles. I think it's cheating when they take some fine liquors and then throw in a $100,000 diamond. Screw that. Just give me the $1000 bottle of cognac or 50 year old scotch and we'll call it even.
This appears to be a common theme. I have a good shopping experience at Best Buy (or anywhere) when I walk in, find the stuff I want right away, grab the stuff I want, pay for the stuff I want, and not to talk to anyone (except for maybe flirting with the cute cashier).
Honestly, I think humans have some effect on climate. You can't increase the concentration of an important greenhouse gas like CO2 by nearly 50% and not see SOME effect. On the other hand, to totally dismiss the effect of the sun like the IPCC has is foolish. (By the way, IPCC is hardly unbiased and I tend to discount their opinions on such matters. They are not the ultimate authority on climate change, being just as biased as any oil company shill). In the simplest terms, you've got an equation that determines the surface temperature of a planet. The biggest effects are the output of the sun and the albedo of the planet. Atmospheres are only a second-order term. Granted, the atmosphere raises the temperature by about 50 kelvins and we're concerned with 1 kelvin, but the fact still remains that a 1% change in solar flux or albedo will have more of an effect on temperature than a 1% change in the atmosphere's absorption. Of course, the question still remains as to how much the solar flux and albedo of Earth have changed versus how much more radiation our atmosphere absorbs.
Compliance before argument? What country are you from, 'cause it sure ain't the U.S.? Did the Sons of Liberty comply with the British on the Tea Tax? No, they threw that fucking tea into the ocean. Did Pennsylvania farmers comply with the excise tax in 1794? No, they took up arms and started the Whiskey Rebellion. Did the Native Americans comply with orders to move to reservations? No, they got some guns and started shooting white settlers and the Army. This country has a long history of rebellion rather than compliance. When rights are being taken away, people fight back. It wasn't until we gained a huge amount of prosperity that more and more people (and states) started willingly giving up their rights because there's too much to lose if they resist. You can comply with RealID and argue until you're blue in the face, but the fact is, once it's a reality, it's NOT going to go away. You've just surrendered another small portion of your rights. What happens next time? When you need to show your new ID to get into ANY building, or swipe your ID to get into your car? Or get a tracking chip? Are you going to comply? Or are you going to resist? Somewhere there needs to be a line and the fact that a few states are resisting is heartening, because maybe more can be persuaded to resist this power grab.
The view that the Americas were populated by people carrying Clovis points 11,000 years ago has been steadily losing ground for at least the past decade, if not two. Pre-Clovis archaeological sites were discovered as far back as 30 years ago. Some findings suggest that the populating of the Americas was not one migration event, but many, with some coming along the Bering land bridge, some from along the coast and even some from Europe. This is simply one more nail in the coffin for the old Clovis viewpoint.
To the lower left, you can even see the waste storage containers. If you look closely, you can even see the machine gun nests. Incidentally, I visited this facility as part of a physics trip back in my undergrad years, before 9-11. I don't know if they allow visitors anymore.
Also, the Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant unblurred.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it interesting that the airlines have unbundled services so that they can "lower air fares", yet they still can't seem to make profits the way they used to. This article in the NYT (see link below) points out that while passenger and freight volumes are back up to pre-recession levels, the airlines are still not making pre-recession profits. Another point that I found interesting is that passenger load factors are also significantly higher in the past. So from a cost-accounting perspective, the airlines have reduced or shifted several large factors in their cost bases: underutilized aircraft, "fees" for things that used to cost the airlines extra, and industry consolidation that should also reduce employee costs (two merged airlines don't need as many mechanics, pilots, or flight attendants). A couple more points should also give some food for thought. The aforementioned industry consolidation gives the airlines more power to raise ticket prices because of reduced competition (and fewer routes). Also, oil prices are not nearly what they were in 2008/2009, so that's another large expense that has been reduced.
The point I'm trying to make is that the airline industry has seen major shifts that should in theory increase revenues while decreasing expenses. Something else must be going on and I don't have the whole story, but it makes me wonder if there is some serious mismanagement going on. Or maybe unbundling combined with all the other hassles of air travel are starting to make customers change their behaviors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/business/global/19iht-ravover.html?_r=1&ref=business
My guess is there's actually a positive correlation between pirate activity and a movie's gross revenues. These guys are trying to suggest the opposite.
Think about it. What are you more likely to find on a torrent site? Avatar or BloodRayne? Titanic or some indie art-house film?
There has been video made in the past of shuttle reentry. In fact, there is a lot of video of the failed reentry of Columbia back in 2003. I know there is also video of various satellites that have reentered the atmosphere. All of it pretty much looks like this video, though the Columbia disaster is pretty heartbreaking.
Mr. Plait makes a good point. People tend to have this view of asteroids being solid rocks, probably because the Earth and other large rocky bodies are solid and the meteorites that make it to the Earth's surface are solid. However, that's not a valid assumption to make and recent science is showing this to be the case. Scientists are finding that some asteroids and various satellites of the outer planets are less dense than expected, suggesting that they're somewhat porous (i.e. masses of rubble instead of solid bodies). Science from the Cassini probe is showing that small bodies in orbit around Saturn are constantly being assembled and destroyed.
Personally, this view of asteroids being porous masses of loosely assembled rubble makes sense, especially from a planetary formation perspective. It's only when you get bodies more than a few hundreds of km in diameter that gravity starts to force the rubble to fuse into solid masses. The implication of all this that Mr. Plait points out is that nuking an asteroid will be akin to bombing a cloud. It's not going to move the asteroid at all, only disrupt it, causing not one impact but several. On the other hand, maybe it would make disrupting asteroids easier. Instead of one large impact, you have thousands of smaller bodies that have a greater chance of simply burning up on reentry.
One other thing that isn't touched on, but is of keen interest to the astronomical community is that the meteorites that we have here have spectra that are very different from the spectra of the asteroids we see in space. The current theory is that the surfaces of asteroids undergo some sort of weathering, which changes the spectra. By gaining physical samples of the surface of an asteroid, this theory can be tested by direct chemical analysis. Very exciting, if it was successful.
"Electronics are causing newspapers to die. Consumers need to consume fewer high-margin electronic devices and start consuming more low-margin newspapers."
From a pure economics standpoint, this is completely idiotic as it would tend to depress economic growth (though it would be a relatively minor effect).
Actually, I highly doubt the study group was made up of MBA students. MBA students are busy studying and going to class and probably already have money (I should know, I'm one of them). The study group was probably broke-ass art students who have nothing better to do with their time and desperately need the $20 that are usually offered to take place in studies.
I think the article oversimplifies. The Milky Way doesn't rotate as one single piece. It's made up of billions of stars (duh!) which revolve around the center at different velocities. So, the question is, is the quoted speed the speed at which the Sun revolves around the galactic center or the average speed of the arms (which move much slower than the stars)? Maybe more later if I can find the paper on arxiv.org
Risk, in financial terms, is a measure of the variability of returns, i.e. the standard deviation of the returns. A well-diversified portfolio generally reduces the variability due to the individual risks of investments being uncorrelated. Harry Markowitz, the father of portfolio theory, pointed out that these quants all assumed that a basket of mortgages is highly uncorrelated and thus well diversified. However, in a broad real estate downturn, they all become very highly correlated. Therefore, if your standard deviation WAS 10%, it suddenly becomes 50% or more, which rapidly changes your VaR from a handful of millions to several billion overnight. VaR, being an oversimplification, didn't take that into account and all the big investment firms suddenly had billions of dollars at risk and billions of dollars of losses without realizing it. It's simply a matter of garbage-in, garbage-out, something my Portfolio Analysis prof drilled into our head and hopefully gets drilled into the heads of Wall Street CEOs.
The comment at the end of the post, "On the balance sheets of Coca Cola and many other huge corporations, you find goodwill listed as a major asset." irked me. In accounting terms, goodwill isn't the warm fuzzy feeling that corporations hold for us. Goodwill is simply the difference in the book value of an acquired company and the actual sale price. Since the assets of the acquired company need to be added to the balance sheets of the acquiring company at book value, the difference between book and market price needs to be held as a seperate item to keep the book balanced.
The comment at the end made no sense whatsoever and goodwill doesn't even seem to be in TFA, so can anyone explain why it's in the post?
Elephants on the backs of turtles pre-dates the Discworld series.
After all the censorship, you might get to say two words and show a picture of your socks, assuming they're generic....
Last I heard, the Purple Onion moved a few blocks away into that new condo they built on University Ave.
So, people have established that this is basically an order to log the IP addresses. So what? They could prove that I grabbed a torrent file from TorrentSpy, but they can't really prove that I actually USED that torrent file. I could just leave it on my hard drive and look at it and it's not really infringing content. Or am I misunderstanding how this works?
The author only compares high-end notebooks. On the other hand, who buys high-end notebooks? How much of a market share is that? Most people buy the cheapest, so for most people, PCs are STILL cheaper than Macs.
So what if it's regressive? The advantage of a sales tax over an income tax is choice. If you chose to spend most of your income on things that are taxed, that's your choice. If you chose to NOT spend on taxable items, that is also your choice. As for an income tax, if you want to pay less taxes, your only option is to make less money. Generally, states don't have a sales tax on necessities, like clothing or food, meaning the sales tax becomes much less regressive, so theoretically, one could get away with not paying any sales tax. For instance, a person making $100,000 could only buy clothing and food for a year, thus paying $0 in sales tax. A person making $20,000 could spend half of that on eating out or a big screen TV, paying about $500 in taxes. Is this regressive? Perhaps. Is this fair? Totally.
I realize you're being facetious, but the obligatory response is bullshit. I learned quite well with old-fashioned books and blackboards and managed to get a degree in Physics years before iPods were ever invented. Millions of people have done just as well. It's not lack of iPods that are preventing kids from learning, it's something else (parents, poor teachers, lack of funding, shitty educational standards, take your pick).
I work in the Corporate Trust department of a major bank and I have to deal with OFAC fairly often. Anytime a potential bondholder or company with a foreign address is added to our system, we have to send a form to our Taxes department who verifies the information with OFAC. It's actually a pretty slick system. We get the tax documentation (W-8 or W-9) and Taxes searches OFAC's list for the name or tax ID. Takes about 5 minutes. While you may not be able to get a full listing of potential terrorists or criminals, the information IS public on the Treasury Department's website. For instance, if Ahmad Muhammad or Joe Smythe have addresses in the UK, they are checked out against the list and if the query is negative, we can proceed.
The loophole is that we don't check out people with US addresses. That's covered by our Anti-Money Laundering team who monitors transactions for suspicious activity (money laundering and the like are pretty easy to spot) and report that to OFAC. It's probably not 100% effective, but it's pretty much internal and transaction data are not given wholesale to the government. The burden of verification IS on businesses, but it's pretty easy to do.
It's kinda like those "most expensive drinks in the world" articles. I think it's cheating when they take some fine liquors and then throw in a $100,000 diamond. Screw that. Just give me the $1000 bottle of cognac or 50 year old scotch and we'll call it even.
This appears to be a common theme. I have a good shopping experience at Best Buy (or anywhere) when I walk in, find the stuff I want right away, grab the stuff I want, pay for the stuff I want, and not
to talk to anyone (except for maybe flirting with the cute cashier).
I thought they were an anarcho-fascist commune....
Honestly, I think humans have some effect on climate. You can't increase the concentration of an important greenhouse gas like CO2 by nearly 50% and not see SOME effect. On the other hand, to totally dismiss the effect of the sun like the IPCC has is foolish. (By the way, IPCC is hardly unbiased and I tend to discount their opinions on such matters. They are not the ultimate authority on climate change, being just as biased as any oil company shill).
In the simplest terms, you've got an equation that determines the surface temperature of a planet. The biggest effects are the output of the sun and the albedo of the planet. Atmospheres are only a second-order term. Granted, the atmosphere raises the temperature by about 50 kelvins and we're concerned with 1 kelvin, but the fact still remains that a 1% change in solar flux or albedo will have more of an effect on temperature than a 1% change in the atmosphere's absorption. Of course, the question still remains as to how much the solar flux and albedo of Earth have changed versus how much more radiation our atmosphere absorbs.
Compliance before argument? What country are you from, 'cause it sure ain't the U.S.? Did the Sons of Liberty comply with the British on the Tea Tax? No, they threw that fucking tea into the ocean. Did Pennsylvania farmers comply with the excise tax in 1794? No, they took up arms and started the Whiskey Rebellion. Did the Native Americans comply with orders to move to reservations? No, they got some guns and started shooting white settlers and the Army. This country has a long history of rebellion rather than compliance. When rights are being taken away, people fight back. It wasn't until we gained a huge amount of prosperity that more and more people (and states) started willingly giving up their rights because there's too much to lose if they resist.
You can comply with RealID and argue until you're blue in the face, but the fact is, once it's a reality, it's NOT going to go away. You've just surrendered another small portion of your rights. What happens next time? When you need to show your new ID to get into ANY building, or swipe your ID to get into your car? Or get a tracking chip? Are you going to comply? Or are you going to resist? Somewhere there needs to be a line and the fact that a few states are resisting is heartening, because maybe more can be persuaded to resist this power grab.
The view that the Americas were populated by people carrying Clovis points 11,000 years ago has been steadily losing ground for at least the past decade, if not two. Pre-Clovis archaeological sites were discovered as far back as 30 years ago. Some findings suggest that the populating of the Americas was not one migration event, but many, with some coming along the Bering land bridge, some from along the coast and even some from Europe. This is simply one more nail in the coffin for the old Clovis viewpoint.
Curiously enough, the Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant near Minneapolis is unblurred.
2 1647,-92.636139&spn=0.007361,0.014591&t=k
5 +(S),+Monticello,+MN+55362&ie=UTF8&z=16&ll=45.3324 63,-93.847833&spn=0.007271,0.021629&t=h&om=1
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&om=1&z=16&ll=44.6
To the lower left, you can even see the waste storage containers. If you look closely, you can even see the machine gun nests. Incidentally, I visited this facility as part of a physics trip back in my undergrad years, before 9-11. I don't know if they allow visitors anymore.
Also, the Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant unblurred.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=1899+CR-7
How can Canada be responsible for 50% of piracy? Don't they have, like, 5 people up there?