Ahh denial, that strongest and most basic of instinctual coping mechanisms. Please explain the new-found strengths in the Swiss Franc and the Japanese Yen for me if the US is in such great shape?
Americans and Europeans are not allowed to own any part of China. Any corporation created by foreign devils sorry allowed to operate in China must meet specific requirements, like having majority shareholders who are Chinese nationals. Have you actually BEEN to China - apart from the designated tourist areas I mean? Have you gotten the necessary government permits and been assigned the mandatory government interpreter/guide who will make sure you visit ONLY the areas you were allowed to visit? China has made progress but don't think you can just move there and open up a McDonald's in some small town of your choosing.
2% is anemic growth. It's no growth when you take into account inflation. And what's more I don't believe the Fed anymore. Farm prices are up 30% YEAR OVER YEAR and 68% since 2008 according to the August farm report, but the Fed is claiming 2% inflation. Go ahead and believe whoever you want to believe but the truth is that the jobs aren't coming back, the housing market is still depressed, and credit is still tight. The Fed thinks it's printing (sorry easing no sorry the new word is accommodating) its way out of recession when in fact it's just destroying the US dollar. Don't believe me? Look at gold and silver.
Yes I agree. Germany is pretty much the only one that is growing. However if you consider Europe as a whole, German growth is counterbalanced by the PIIGS for a start... also they had a downside surprise last quarter.
Health choices are always personal. The most important thing is feeling good about yourself. I find it cute however how this "Vitamin C cold remedy" phenomenon has worked in an almost Darwinian fashion. Why? Because NON-Vitamin C containing cold remedies simply won't sell. Therefore any pharmaceutical company MUST include Vitamin C in their new product - despite its clinical irrelevance. I guess it's cheaper to do this than actually educate patients. But then again pharmacy was never about the patient - it was about making money.
It's only a zero sum game if you look at one single trade. If you look at the aggregate of all trades you will find that money is entering and exiting the market all the time at different and varying rates. Therefore it is NOT a zero sum game.
liquidity [li-kwid-i-tee] noun
1.a liquid state or quality.
2.the ability or ease with which assets can be converted into cash.
I'd say liquidity is pretty valuable. Try doing a transaction in an illiquid market. Next you are going to try to convince me that short sellers are the ones who push stock prices down (hint, short selling is not allowed in Asia, and Asian markets have had some pretty spectacular crashes despite this).
When will people understand that liquidity is a GOOD thing? How would you like to be in the situation 100 years ago where you want to sell your stock but no one is around to buy it? What happens to the price then? Or how about when you really want to buy a stock, and no one is selling? Traders who roll over huge volumes of stock are acting as middle-men but they are not "leeches", they are risking capital time and time again and doing you a favor by making stock available or willing to buy stock from you much closer to your desired price. This allows you to get out of a trade quickly and let me tell you that you literally can lose all your money in a matter of hours in a rough market - on days like that you are grateful that there's someone around willing to trade with you. Or you could wait 3 years to get your money back, minus inflation/opportunity cost.
Nah it all balances out because it's all fine and dandy to be the first one to execute a trade. But this also means that you are the first one to assume the risk associated with that trade - the risk of being on the wrong side of it and taking a loss, or the risk of closing your position too early and losing potential profit. The underlying factor is still the algorithm behind the trade decision and not the velocity of trading. The market really doesn't care who bought what. It makes a difference to you if you are first in line all the time - but sometimes being last in line is a good thing.
Even better - there are no lean years anymore. They just have to pick up the phone and the Fed will lend them billions at NO INTEREST. And if they manage to squander those in bad investments (for example Italian sports cars are really bad investments that are easy to hide inside other, larger bad investments) the worst that can happen is that the government will bail them out. Yeah the CEO might have to take his golden multi-hundred million dollar parachute but the company will be just fine. Then he can get elected to the board of directors of companies owned by his other buddies, or even run for public office. Ahh life at the top is so easy nowadays. What's that, you've been unemployed for how many months?
This already happens. Except the tax is more on the order of 3 cents, and the "deserving charities" are called NYSE, NASDAQ, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and a few others.
Only if you assume the underlying economy doesn't grow
Cue in the real world. The only growing economies are NOT the US and Europe. Thus we have fiscal, monetary and government policies that require growth to succeed, except there is no growth. Classic "can't see the wood for the trees" situation. Every year that the US and Europe fail to put their house in order, China grows another 10% and Latin America grows another 5. Who cares? Well for a start it means that the US and Europe are facing ever tougher competition for scarce, exhaustable resources like oil. It will suck to turn out to be the little guy when it's time to fight for the last drops of oil.
Ingested vitamin C cannot exceed a certain level in the blood stream
Of course not, it's water soluble and filtered out in the glomerulus along with all the other water-soluble stuff in your blood which includes every other vitamin except A,D,E, and K which are fat soluble. Then the kidney reabsorbs the water soluble stuff it needs, like glucose, vitamin C, etc through sodium dependent transporters. However like all enzymes, these reabsorbtion mechanisms are saturable. So no matter how concentrated the Vitamin C in the ultrafiltrate, there is a limit to the rate of re-absorbtion.
The blood level doesn't change.
[citation needed]
If the blood level of Vitamin C is fixed and never changes, explain scurvy. Oh, so what did you mean by "it never changes" then? You mean it's possible to go from near zero to a maximum limit? OK yeah I'll grant you that. The maximum plasma concentration is set by the kidney, like I described previously. You could inject yourself with as much vitamin C as you like and, assuming you survived, you would just piss it all out. The rate of glomerular filtration is quite impressive when you count it in liters/hour.
merely that he succeeded in producing a proof of the total lack of toxicity amongst healthy cells
You are confusing cells in a Petri dish with a living, breathing multicellular organism.
While Pauling might have had his brilliant moments and certainly contributed to science, this does not mean that everything coming out of his mouth is a golden nugget of wisdom granted by the gods. The whole Vitamin C thing is quackery and there is no evidence that it does anything to help with common colds or influenza. It's involved primarily in collagen synthesis which might be useful for the burns patient, but not really in the influenza patient - unless you consider pulmonary fibrosis a successful outcome.
Oh, by the way I happen to know a little about how the human body works, did you notice? Go ahead, keep arguing. "I have studied it and you have not" - Isaac Newton.
Yep, every cold product in the world contains Vitamin C. That shit really works! Except people still get colds and feel like crap at exactly the same rate as before despite taking all these Vitamin C containing products... But stopping and thinking for a moment is too hard.
There's a fair bit of evidence that human doctors are not very good at actually making diagnoses.
Like for example the decline in infant and maternal mortality rates and the increase in life expectancy in the Western world over the past 60 years? I'd say there is a fair bit of evidence that human doctors are actually quite good at making diagnoses. What you want is perfect doctors. Since doctors are human, that just won't happen. I've never understood why people are so eager to trust a machine - designed by a human. But they do. This magical lab machine. That magical therapy machine. Much better than old Dr. Smith with his eyes, hands, ears and brain.
Yeah - "helping oncologists diagnose and treat cancer" my ass. More like: This patient has a very high probability of having cancer - drop his coverage, quick! Oh and after we cancel his insurance, tell him to get checked for cancer.
Thanks for the laugh. The first sentence of your reply is simply putting words in my mouth. I pointed out that making money is supposed to be hard and that "real people" work even harder for less. From there you assume it to mean (insert your fabricated argument here), and then assume a whole range of inferences about me, my professional and my personal life. Quite a feat since you don't even know me. It's also clear that you completely miss the point of something called an "analogy". Do you actually believe that I really think I should be paid royalties for sutures?
Since you say that nurses can suture, I could point out that parrots can sing and there are videos on Youtube of cats and dogs playing piano. Your continued attempts to insult my intelligence are perhaps (careful - another analogy coming up) equivalent to a child attempting to insult a professional weight lifter by telling him how weak he is. I actually DO hope you practice law in the US, and I hope you are hired by anyone who opposes me in any legal issues.
You also seem to have a chip on your shoulder against entertainers and it seems you feel they've perpetrated some kind of hoax on ordinary people.
Well yeah - those sutures I put in you 20 years ago? I own the copyright on them. See it took my unique skill and talent to decide exactly where to put them, exactly what thread to use, and how many to do. So I want you to continue paying me every year because after all you're still benefiting from MY work and MY skill. Or maybe on the other hand I charge you once and do something called "retirement planning" to look after myself in the future, instead of convincing the government that I and my children deserve a special class of government protected welfare system, tying up law enforcement, courts and even jails because someone turned on a radio in a store which constituted an "unauthorized public performance".
Your counter-argument merely consists of name calling, which speaks for itself really.
they stop being our pet entertainment slaves, and that is just intolerable.
It would get rid of all the idiots churning out crap who are just in it for the money and then maybe they could find more productive work instead of encouraging teenagers to walk around with their asses hanging out of their pants. You know Vivaldi died a pauper right? Yet people still listen to Vivaldi 300 years later. How many people are going to be listening to the latest bling-wearing cocaine-infested rapper in say, 10 years? Suck it up, get a day job and charge people money for, I don't know, concerts and stuff. Not "here I wrote a catchy tune buy this CD that will rootkit your computer and by the way you owe me a jillion dollars forever because hey cocaine and whores are expensive".
Do you think it's easy making money in the music business?
No. Making money is not easy in any business.
Do you think it doesn't involve hard work?
Come work call with me at my hospital and I will show you hard work. Stay up until 4am because you're coming down off your high and can't get the song right or because the drugs just don't inspire any more. Be a little tired. Make a mistake and the song sucks. OK come with me and stand here for 11 hours trying to repair some kid's esophagus and liver, when you can't even see straight anymore because you've been working the past 30 hours and remember that if you screw up you're looking at being fired at best and being thrown in jail for manslaughter at worst. Don't talk to me about hard work, ok? Entertainers have somehow convinced people that they belong at the top of the food chain. Real people sometimes do much more important work, and work a hell of a lot harder for their dollar.
And you're even better, because you complain about people who complain about things. Bend over and stay quiet, your free government hasn't finished fucking you in the ass yet. Nah we're just getting started.
Emphasis mine. But this should be your first clue. What's taking them so long to roll over and die? Desktops are moving into a very real niche market. The guy who needs a server but not a rack. The guy who crunches a lot of numbers. The guy who needs lots of hard drives in a RAID array. The scientist who needs to plug in custom hardware. The gamer who needs to keep up with the video card upgrade cycle (which is much faster than the CPU cycle). Becoming niche is not the same as dying.
Compare a pick up truck to a subcompact car. Yeah. Pick up trucks are so ugly, they guzzle gas, and when they have a back seat it's uncomfortable as hell. I predict the end of pick up trucks!
Desktops are here to stay. What's more, cases are getting bigger and bigger, for better air flow. I'm writing this on a water-cooled i7 at almost 4GHz with 12GB of RAM, while running 5 simultaneous EVE Online clients on 4 monitors with 3 graphics cards. My CPU load is at 25%. Yeah, do that on your little tablet.
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Ahh denial, that strongest and most basic of instinctual coping mechanisms. Please explain the new-found strengths in the Swiss Franc and the Japanese Yen for me if the US is in such great shape?
Americans and Europeans are not allowed to own any part of China. Any corporation created by foreign devils sorry allowed to operate in China must meet specific requirements, like having majority shareholders who are Chinese nationals. Have you actually BEEN to China - apart from the designated tourist areas I mean? Have you gotten the necessary government permits and been assigned the mandatory government interpreter/guide who will make sure you visit ONLY the areas you were allowed to visit? China has made progress but don't think you can just move there and open up a McDonald's in some small town of your choosing.
2% is anemic growth. It's no growth when you take into account inflation. And what's more I don't believe the Fed anymore. Farm prices are up 30% YEAR OVER YEAR and 68% since 2008 according to the August farm report, but the Fed is claiming 2% inflation. Go ahead and believe whoever you want to believe but the truth is that the jobs aren't coming back, the housing market is still depressed, and credit is still tight. The Fed thinks it's printing (sorry easing no sorry the new word is accommodating) its way out of recession when in fact it's just destroying the US dollar. Don't believe me? Look at gold and silver.
Yes I agree. Germany is pretty much the only one that is growing. However if you consider Europe as a whole, German growth is counterbalanced by the PIIGS for a start... also they had a downside surprise last quarter.
Health choices are always personal. The most important thing is feeling good about yourself. I find it cute however how this "Vitamin C cold remedy" phenomenon has worked in an almost Darwinian fashion. Why? Because NON-Vitamin C containing cold remedies simply won't sell. Therefore any pharmaceutical company MUST include Vitamin C in their new product - despite its clinical irrelevance. I guess it's cheaper to do this than actually educate patients. But then again pharmacy was never about the patient - it was about making money.
It's only a zero sum game if you look at one single trade. If you look at the aggregate of all trades you will find that money is entering and exiting the market all the time at different and varying rates. Therefore it is NOT a zero sum game.
while not contributing any value whatsoever!
liquidity [li-kwid-i-tee] noun 1.a liquid state or quality. 2.the ability or ease with which assets can be converted into cash.
I'd say liquidity is pretty valuable. Try doing a transaction in an illiquid market. Next you are going to try to convince me that short sellers are the ones who push stock prices down (hint, short selling is not allowed in Asia, and Asian markets have had some pretty spectacular crashes despite this).
When will people understand that liquidity is a GOOD thing? How would you like to be in the situation 100 years ago where you want to sell your stock but no one is around to buy it? What happens to the price then? Or how about when you really want to buy a stock, and no one is selling? Traders who roll over huge volumes of stock are acting as middle-men but they are not "leeches", they are risking capital time and time again and doing you a favor by making stock available or willing to buy stock from you much closer to your desired price. This allows you to get out of a trade quickly and let me tell you that you literally can lose all your money in a matter of hours in a rough market - on days like that you are grateful that there's someone around willing to trade with you. Or you could wait 3 years to get your money back, minus inflation/opportunity cost.
Nah it all balances out because it's all fine and dandy to be the first one to execute a trade. But this also means that you are the first one to assume the risk associated with that trade - the risk of being on the wrong side of it and taking a loss, or the risk of closing your position too early and losing potential profit. The underlying factor is still the algorithm behind the trade decision and not the velocity of trading. The market really doesn't care who bought what. It makes a difference to you if you are first in line all the time - but sometimes being last in line is a good thing.
Even better - there are no lean years anymore. They just have to pick up the phone and the Fed will lend them billions at NO INTEREST. And if they manage to squander those in bad investments (for example Italian sports cars are really bad investments that are easy to hide inside other, larger bad investments) the worst that can happen is that the government will bail them out. Yeah the CEO might have to take his golden multi-hundred million dollar parachute but the company will be just fine. Then he can get elected to the board of directors of companies owned by his other buddies, or even run for public office. Ahh life at the top is so easy nowadays. What's that, you've been unemployed for how many months?
This already happens. Except the tax is more on the order of 3 cents, and the "deserving charities" are called NYSE, NASDAQ, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and a few others.
Only if you assume the underlying economy doesn't grow
Cue in the real world. The only growing economies are NOT the US and Europe. Thus we have fiscal, monetary and government policies that require growth to succeed, except there is no growth. Classic "can't see the wood for the trees" situation. Every year that the US and Europe fail to put their house in order, China grows another 10% and Latin America grows another 5. Who cares? Well for a start it means that the US and Europe are facing ever tougher competition for scarce, exhaustable resources like oil. It will suck to turn out to be the little guy when it's time to fight for the last drops of oil.
Ingested vitamin C cannot exceed a certain level in the blood stream
Of course not, it's water soluble and filtered out in the glomerulus along with all the other water-soluble stuff in your blood which includes every other vitamin except A,D,E, and K which are fat soluble. Then the kidney reabsorbs the water soluble stuff it needs, like glucose, vitamin C, etc through sodium dependent transporters. However like all enzymes, these reabsorbtion mechanisms are saturable. So no matter how concentrated the Vitamin C in the ultrafiltrate, there is a limit to the rate of re-absorbtion.
The blood level doesn't change.
[citation needed] If the blood level of Vitamin C is fixed and never changes, explain scurvy. Oh, so what did you mean by "it never changes" then? You mean it's possible to go from near zero to a maximum limit? OK yeah I'll grant you that. The maximum plasma concentration is set by the kidney, like I described previously. You could inject yourself with as much vitamin C as you like and, assuming you survived, you would just piss it all out. The rate of glomerular filtration is quite impressive when you count it in liters/hour.
merely that he succeeded in producing a proof of the total lack of toxicity amongst healthy cells
You are confusing cells in a Petri dish with a living, breathing multicellular organism.
While Pauling might have had his brilliant moments and certainly contributed to science, this does not mean that everything coming out of his mouth is a golden nugget of wisdom granted by the gods. The whole Vitamin C thing is quackery and there is no evidence that it does anything to help with common colds or influenza. It's involved primarily in collagen synthesis which might be useful for the burns patient, but not really in the influenza patient - unless you consider pulmonary fibrosis a successful outcome.
Oh, by the way I happen to know a little about how the human body works, did you notice? Go ahead, keep arguing. "I have studied it and you have not" - Isaac Newton.
Yep, every cold product in the world contains Vitamin C. That shit really works! Except people still get colds and feel like crap at exactly the same rate as before despite taking all these Vitamin C containing products... But stopping and thinking for a moment is too hard.
It seems you have a severe case of being a little pussy, I am prescribing that you man the fuck up.
Doctor: But Watson, the patient is a 5-year old girl!
Not after all that testosterone she won't be.
There's a fair bit of evidence that human doctors are not very good at actually making diagnoses.
Like for example the decline in infant and maternal mortality rates and the increase in life expectancy in the Western world over the past 60 years? I'd say there is a fair bit of evidence that human doctors are actually quite good at making diagnoses. What you want is perfect doctors. Since doctors are human, that just won't happen. I've never understood why people are so eager to trust a machine - designed by a human. But they do. This magical lab machine. That magical therapy machine. Much better than old Dr. Smith with his eyes, hands, ears and brain.
Yeah - "helping oncologists diagnose and treat cancer" my ass. More like: This patient has a very high probability of having cancer - drop his coverage, quick! Oh and after we cancel his insurance, tell him to get checked for cancer.
Thanks for the laugh. The first sentence of your reply is simply putting words in my mouth. I pointed out that making money is supposed to be hard and that "real people" work even harder for less. From there you assume it to mean (insert your fabricated argument here), and then assume a whole range of inferences about me, my professional and my personal life. Quite a feat since you don't even know me. It's also clear that you completely miss the point of something called an "analogy". Do you actually believe that I really think I should be paid royalties for sutures?
Since you say that nurses can suture, I could point out that parrots can sing and there are videos on Youtube of cats and dogs playing piano. Your continued attempts to insult my intelligence are perhaps (careful - another analogy coming up) equivalent to a child attempting to insult a professional weight lifter by telling him how weak he is. I actually DO hope you practice law in the US, and I hope you are hired by anyone who opposes me in any legal issues.
Love, Dunbal
You also seem to have a chip on your shoulder against entertainers and it seems you feel they've perpetrated some kind of hoax on ordinary people.
Well yeah - those sutures I put in you 20 years ago? I own the copyright on them. See it took my unique skill and talent to decide exactly where to put them, exactly what thread to use, and how many to do. So I want you to continue paying me every year because after all you're still benefiting from MY work and MY skill. Or maybe on the other hand I charge you once and do something called "retirement planning" to look after myself in the future, instead of convincing the government that I and my children deserve a special class of government protected welfare system, tying up law enforcement, courts and even jails because someone turned on a radio in a store which constituted an "unauthorized public performance".
Your counter-argument merely consists of name calling, which speaks for itself really.
they stop being our pet entertainment slaves, and that is just intolerable.
It would get rid of all the idiots churning out crap who are just in it for the money and then maybe they could find more productive work instead of encouraging teenagers to walk around with their asses hanging out of their pants. You know Vivaldi died a pauper right? Yet people still listen to Vivaldi 300 years later. How many people are going to be listening to the latest bling-wearing cocaine-infested rapper in say, 10 years? Suck it up, get a day job and charge people money for, I don't know, concerts and stuff. Not "here I wrote a catchy tune buy this CD that will rootkit your computer and by the way you owe me a jillion dollars forever because hey cocaine and whores are expensive".
Do you think it's easy making money in the music business?
No. Making money is not easy in any business.
Do you think it doesn't involve hard work?
Come work call with me at my hospital and I will show you hard work. Stay up until 4am because you're coming down off your high and can't get the song right or because the drugs just don't inspire any more. Be a little tired. Make a mistake and the song sucks. OK come with me and stand here for 11 hours trying to repair some kid's esophagus and liver, when you can't even see straight anymore because you've been working the past 30 hours and remember that if you screw up you're looking at being fired at best and being thrown in jail for manslaughter at worst. Don't talk to me about hard work, ok? Entertainers have somehow convinced people that they belong at the top of the food chain. Real people sometimes do much more important work, and work a hell of a lot harder for their dollar.
"The right to offend is more important than the right to not be offended" - Rowan Atkinson
I believe that for the last couple decades John Lennon has not been composing any new songs. In fact I hear a rumor that he's actually de-composing.
And you're even better, because you complain about people who complain about things. Bend over and stay quiet, your free government hasn't finished fucking you in the ass yet. Nah we're just getting started.
The desktop IS dying, and has been for years.
Emphasis mine. But this should be your first clue. What's taking them so long to roll over and die? Desktops are moving into a very real niche market. The guy who needs a server but not a rack. The guy who crunches a lot of numbers. The guy who needs lots of hard drives in a RAID array. The scientist who needs to plug in custom hardware. The gamer who needs to keep up with the video card upgrade cycle (which is much faster than the CPU cycle). Becoming niche is not the same as dying.
The desktop PC Is a dying platform.
Compare a pick up truck to a subcompact car. Yeah. Pick up trucks are so ugly, they guzzle gas, and when they have a back seat it's uncomfortable as hell. I predict the end of pick up trucks!
Desktops are here to stay. What's more, cases are getting bigger and bigger, for better air flow. I'm writing this on a water-cooled i7 at almost 4GHz with 12GB of RAM, while running 5 simultaneous EVE Online clients on 4 monitors with 3 graphics cards. My CPU load is at 25%. Yeah, do that on your little tablet.