Hold up, sometimes the 401(k)s have to rebalance and when they do, I'll bet they're pretty darn happy that all those traders make the cost exceedingly low. Without traders you'd be near permanantly stuck with your investments once you purchased them, if they were available at all (go try to invest in just Geico sometime).
Midwest? Are you sure you don't mean Southwest? http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/redbook/atlas/
Arizona and New Mexico are the only two continential states consistently different from the national average in almost all solar data.
70,000 homes is very small scale in the world of energy, and they admit they can't compete with oil/coal unless Congress hands them money. If Solar were a good energy source, these would be springing up without subsidies from congress.
It's not a matter of running out, I doubt we ever will (some oil products are worth many hundreds of dollars/barrel so the price will be very high and rare hydrocarbon based chemicals will still get made as we get close to the limit. Thats true of every non-renewable resources, and is very well established economics. As examples, even though it was one of the earliest exploited fields, there still sits quite a bit of oil in Pennsylvania, but it hasn't been cost effective to extract it (there was some interest when oil was rising to $140/barrel but I'd presume that has died back down).
We're already running toward the end of cheap easy to extract oil. From the dawn of the oil age to the 1960s, new large oil fields were discovered close to the surface that were very inexpensive to extract (culminating in the Saudi Ghawar Field in 1948 which has production costs of well under $10/barrel). Here's the list from Wikipedia. I found discovery dates for the missing Mesopotamian field (1961). Since then discoveries have gotten smaller (only three top 10 fields discovered after 1961 and all were under water, two under deep water, which raises the costs of extraction considerably). There will likely be additional oil finds, probably even major field finds, but I believe it's safe to say that we will never find anything that will be large and cheap like the fields that are currently huge producers.
It would be interesting to see how the results would differ between the rural South where I'd suspect health insurance isn't as common as in the urban North, and if those studies corrected for income, and denomination (if primarily Northern denominations compared with Baptist Southerners).
The earth is far from over populated. You could take everyone on earth and give each a townhome (600 sq foot print and 2x as much open space and still only cover Texas. Most people live in cities where population density is very high so their samples are off. We don't have enough arable land to feed everyone a diet of primarily land based beef, but we're far from out of space.
Organic means made of carbon. Since all life on earth is made of carbon, it's sort of a silly term. Also, everything is a chemical so all food is coated with chemicals and injected with chemicals. From current marketing it seems organic also means from a small family farm, which for the most part isn't true (there are a couple of huge USDA certified organic farms that produce most organic labeled food. It's a lot like natural flavorings and than artificial flavorings. Both are isolated in a very industrial setting. Natural almond flavor comes from peach pits refined to contain mostly the chemical that has an almondy flavor. Artificial almond flavor makes the same chemical from scratch (usually carbon chains and rings found in petroleum products). As a bonus the natural flavor includes trace cyanide which is produced in the pits naturally, the artificial flavor doesn't.
I agree, I always liked the AI in Master of Orion. The AI cheats (bonus resources) but it isn't too blatent. The harder AI does a very good job of probing for weaknesses, and exploiting them so if your defenses work well against small ships it sends bigger ones or vis versa, but each race has hard coded preferences so they'll return with their desired settings soon.
I think his grouping was useful. I pirate some stuff, and buy other very similar media when the cost is well below the extra time and effort required to pirate it (generally pirating isn't free either). For a $5 crappy cell phone game, I'd be very hesitant to buy it (with no demo, especially) for a $1 game that I've enjoyed either demo or an add supported game, it's not worth tracking the torrent down, finding one with seeds, and moving the file to my phone. I've pirated lots of things, that I'd never pay for (and regularly delete after only a small amount of use. I'd guess there's a fairly small population of people who are true lost sales pirating $1 items.
From an economics perspective, demand curves continue increasing as price drops, so there are people who value something at less than a dollar (worth pirating but not worth buying with or without downloading). The question media owners need to be asking is how many pirate downloads were people who valued the media at more than my asking price but found it in a secondary market for less cost.
I think the only explaination that makes sense is that we were listening in on all their troop movements and we were sharing the info or were comprimised. That's the only explaination that makes sense as to why both governments wanted to keep it quiet (US because we didn't want everyone to know how much we could learn in a battle situation or that we were comprimised) and Israel because they thought we were sharing the info (or we'd been penetrated and they wanted the leak stopped quickly--which we didn't want publicized either).
http://www.gtr5.com/evidence/attack_sigint.pdf Here's the intel community's write up.
Re:All this stuff is just made up crap.
on
The Shadow Factory
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· Score: 1
They've had a museum for a while and while not, "here's our project list for the week" it does have quite a bit of information about what they've done in the past (including exhibits on supercomputers and Verona documents). For an agency that's name was considered No Such Agency, I was plesantly surprised.
It's more complicated than that. The government issues a new 10 year bond every few weeks. The most recently issued bond is called on-the-run and all the bonds not issued most recently are called off-the-run. Trading is most liquid in the newest bond and liquidity declines in older bonds, and as a result the price declines (or yield rises for off the run bonds), but only by a very small amount. This remains even when the older bond is 9 years and 48 weeks from maturity so for all intents and purposes it's still a 10 year bond.
LTCM tried to capitalize on that difference (among lots of other activities, but this was their bread and butter), but because the price difference is small you have to borrow heavily to make enough money to be worthwhile. So they did, and it worked well (both before and afterward--the "bailout" made a bunch of money in the end), but unfortunately for them, when Russia defaulted lots of people bought Treasuries, and primarily bought the on the run treasury, so the tiny difference widened and essentially the current value of their liabilities shot way above the current value of their assets (even though at the end of life, both represented exactly the same promise from the Federal government).
Prudent risk management realizes that:
models are useful to give you an idea of what is likely to occur.
finanical markets volatility and correllations are far from stable and both tend to work against you in times of crisis (meaning when volatility rises corellations tend to rise as well).
If your modeling doesn't account for both factors you probably won't last long enough to see a return to profitability, which is why all the long running investment banks were partnerships until just a few years ago. Partners have personal liability for the business losses, so they tend to consider the downside a little longer than corporate executives.
Most of the "anonymous sources or unamed sources" is a game washington plays with the public. Everyone in the room knows who the source was, but he or she will simply be written up as an unamed source for the article. In other contexts they'd be quoted as Undersecretary Jones but in that interview/press conference they'll be anon. In essense the reporter is serving as the credibilty judge (which message boards don't serve the same purpose).
Goodwill in accounting is a very dry joke by accountants. The trade name was blue sky before goodwill became standard. Essentially accounting was developed to help peddlers and traders know how their sales were going. The idea that peddlers would buy and sell other peddler's businesses wasn't really a concept, it was bolted on later. So the way it works is that for every transaction something goes out, and something comes in to the firm. When you buy a company, in the modern stock markets, you almost always pay a premium to the total value of inventory, cash, etc that that business owns. Accounting has nowhere to value that extra (essentially to an accountant a software business is made up of computers, patents, cash, and perhaps a lease). If investors value the firm on potential future developments (which they do) there's a lot of value that isn't there yet. So that value gets called "goodwill".
The Predator is a recon/bomber, air force planes are built like UNIX programs built to do a job and do it well, but not do another job as well. Lots of bombers would bet easily destroyed by a fighter, the limiting factor would be the fighters ammo, but the same value of unmanned fighters would completely destroy a human piloted fighter (slower bigger and more expensive). The biggest impediment won't be technological, it will be that most of the generals in the air force were fighter pilots.
The only reason fighter pilots won't be obsolete in our lifetimes is that the decision makers of the airforce are mostly former figher pilots (always have been, too). A specialized dogfighting UAV would be far more effective (smaller, lighter, less restricted, and cheaper) than a piloted fighter. It will be some time, as dog fighting isn't yet something computers are good at, but if you can throw enough research at the problem, it wouldn't matter (either the cost or the advantages will mean the shift will eventually occur).
He got 17k in tax credits and grants (state and federal). As a tax payer that's our money he's spending, money that looks like it will buy 8400kWh over the next year. That money would save a lot more than 8400 kWh if the same credit went to subsidize the price of CF bulbs. If he pays the entire installation costs, more power to him and for feeling good about what he bought.
Our society is allows members to create contracts with each other that may place limits on those rights. There are lots of contracts that I'd never make, but are made frequently. Restricting others ability to contract, simply because I don't like the terms isn't something I want in a free society. The freedom to contract is an important one, restrictions on that are and should be very carefully considered.
Shouldn't your freedom include the freedom to contract with your neighbors not to take an action that would be detrimental to all? These agreements aren't laws made by the state, they're a mutual contract created by the people who own the homes in the area (and those people have full freedom to remove any restrictions on their behavior that the group wishes to remove). Granted, too frequently the board isn't representative of the neighborhood after a period of time, but that's a flaw in the creation of the group, restricting the freedom to restrict yourself isn't something I'd want the governemnt to do.
Almost every contract places some restrictions on two or more party's actions, and the freedom to create a contract is something I'll always defend.
I have a problem paying $20k ($55,000 was the actual installation cost, his cost was $36,000) for him to feel good and save ~$3,000/yr (so his system will pay off in about the panel life). The 20,000 in taxes would buy a whole lot of CF bulbs and insulation that while not as sexy (no one is writing artiles about their R-35 walls) would save far more power than he generates.
There are flags on each side of the field with a marker for the first down marker, line of scrimage, and line of scrimage when you started that series. The LOS marker shows the down and moves at the end of each play. They look like this. Usually the players can get a pretty good estimate of where the first down is, from the yard marks on the field, as well.
I think English was a German variant until the Normans took over. Then we got just enough of both to completely confuse everyone who's ever tried to speak (or spell) it.
I think the biggest difference is that cars don't attempt to give you error messages using car jargon. They either make a funny noise, smell, or performance or they increasingly throw a single error light reqiring technician's tools to get a diagnosis that has jargon. If your car said once and did not repeat the error, your carburator jets are fouled, mechanics would probably have their share of misused jargon stories.
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Hold up, sometimes the 401(k)s have to rebalance and when they do, I'll bet they're pretty darn happy that all those traders make the cost exceedingly low. Without traders you'd be near permanantly stuck with your investments once you purchased them, if they were available at all (go try to invest in just Geico sometime).
Midwest? Are you sure you don't mean Southwest? http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/redbook/atlas/ Arizona and New Mexico are the only two continential states consistently different from the national average in almost all solar data. 70,000 homes is very small scale in the world of energy, and they admit they can't compete with oil/coal unless Congress hands them money. If Solar were a good energy source, these would be springing up without subsidies from congress.
It's not a matter of running out, I doubt we ever will (some oil products are worth many hundreds of dollars/barrel so the price will be very high and rare hydrocarbon based chemicals will still get made as we get close to the limit. Thats true of every non-renewable resources, and is very well established economics. As examples, even though it was one of the earliest exploited fields, there still sits quite a bit of oil in Pennsylvania, but it hasn't been cost effective to extract it (there was some interest when oil was rising to $140/barrel but I'd presume that has died back down).
We're already running toward the end of cheap easy to extract oil. From the dawn of the oil age to the 1960s, new large oil fields were discovered close to the surface that were very inexpensive to extract (culminating in the Saudi Ghawar Field in 1948 which has production costs of well under $10/barrel). Here's the list from Wikipedia. I found discovery dates for the missing Mesopotamian field (1961). Since then discoveries have gotten smaller (only three top 10 fields discovered after 1961 and all were under water, two under deep water, which raises the costs of extraction considerably). There will likely be additional oil finds, probably even major field finds, but I believe it's safe to say that we will never find anything that will be large and cheap like the fields that are currently huge producers.
It would be interesting to see how the results would differ between the rural South where I'd suspect health insurance isn't as common as in the urban North, and if those studies corrected for income, and denomination (if primarily Northern denominations compared with Baptist Southerners).
The earth is far from over populated. You could take everyone on earth and give each a townhome (600 sq foot print and 2x as much open space and still only cover Texas. Most people live in cities where population density is very high so their samples are off. We don't have enough arable land to feed everyone a diet of primarily land based beef, but we're far from out of space.
Organic means made of carbon. Since all life on earth is made of carbon, it's sort of a silly term. Also, everything is a chemical so all food is coated with chemicals and injected with chemicals. From current marketing it seems organic also means from a small family farm, which for the most part isn't true (there are a couple of huge USDA certified organic farms that produce most organic labeled food.
It's a lot like natural flavorings and than artificial flavorings. Both are isolated in a very industrial setting. Natural almond flavor comes from peach pits refined to contain mostly the chemical that has an almondy flavor. Artificial almond flavor makes the same chemical from scratch (usually carbon chains and rings found in petroleum products). As a bonus the natural flavor includes trace cyanide which is produced in the pits naturally, the artificial flavor doesn't.
I agree, I always liked the AI in Master of Orion. The AI cheats (bonus resources) but it isn't too blatent. The harder AI does a very good job of probing for weaknesses, and exploiting them so if your defenses work well against small ships it sends bigger ones or vis versa, but each race has hard coded preferences so they'll return with their desired settings soon.
So wouldn't that be 700,000 for playing and 100,000 for winning, or was the incentive payment there to make sure he played to the end?
I think his grouping was useful. I pirate some stuff, and buy other very similar media when the cost is well below the extra time and effort required to pirate it (generally pirating isn't free either). For a $5 crappy cell phone game, I'd be very hesitant to buy it (with no demo, especially) for a $1 game that I've enjoyed either demo or an add supported game, it's not worth tracking the torrent down, finding one with seeds, and moving the file to my phone. I've pirated lots of things, that I'd never pay for (and regularly delete after only a small amount of use. I'd guess there's a fairly small population of people who are true lost sales pirating $1 items.
From an economics perspective, demand curves continue increasing as price drops, so there are people who value something at less than a dollar (worth pirating but not worth buying with or without downloading). The question media owners need to be asking is how many pirate downloads were people who valued the media at more than my asking price but found it in a secondary market for less cost.
I think the only explaination that makes sense is that we were listening in on all their troop movements and we were sharing the info or were comprimised. That's the only explaination that makes sense as to why both governments wanted to keep it quiet (US because we didn't want everyone to know how much we could learn in a battle situation or that we were comprimised) and Israel because they thought we were sharing the info (or we'd been penetrated and they wanted the leak stopped quickly--which we didn't want publicized either). http://www.gtr5.com/evidence/attack_sigint.pdf Here's the intel community's write up.
They've had a museum for a while and while not, "here's our project list for the week" it does have quite a bit of information about what they've done in the past (including exhibits on supercomputers and Verona documents). For an agency that's name was considered No Such Agency, I was plesantly surprised.
It's more complicated than that. The government issues a new 10 year bond every few weeks. The most recently issued bond is called on-the-run and all the bonds not issued most recently are called off-the-run. Trading is most liquid in the newest bond and liquidity declines in older bonds, and as a result the price declines (or yield rises for off the run bonds), but only by a very small amount. This remains even when the older bond is 9 years and 48 weeks from maturity so for all intents and purposes it's still a 10 year bond.
LTCM tried to capitalize on that difference (among lots of other activities, but this was their bread and butter), but because the price difference is small you have to borrow heavily to make enough money to be worthwhile. So they did, and it worked well (both before and afterward--the "bailout" made a bunch of money in the end), but unfortunately for them, when Russia defaulted lots of people bought Treasuries, and primarily bought the on the run treasury, so the tiny difference widened and essentially the current value of their liabilities shot way above the current value of their assets (even though at the end of life, both represented exactly the same promise from the Federal government).
Prudent risk management realizes that: models are useful to give you an idea of what is likely to occur. finanical markets volatility and correllations are far from stable and both tend to work against you in times of crisis (meaning when volatility rises corellations tend to rise as well). If your modeling doesn't account for both factors you probably won't last long enough to see a return to profitability, which is why all the long running investment banks were partnerships until just a few years ago. Partners have personal liability for the business losses, so they tend to consider the downside a little longer than corporate executives.
Most of the "anonymous sources or unamed sources" is a game washington plays with the public. Everyone in the room knows who the source was, but he or she will simply be written up as an unamed source for the article. In other contexts they'd be quoted as Undersecretary Jones but in that interview/press conference they'll be anon. In essense the reporter is serving as the credibilty judge (which message boards don't serve the same purpose).
Goodwill in accounting is a very dry joke by accountants. The trade name was blue sky before goodwill became standard. Essentially accounting was developed to help peddlers and traders know how their sales were going. The idea that peddlers would buy and sell other peddler's businesses wasn't really a concept, it was bolted on later. So the way it works is that for every transaction something goes out, and something comes in to the firm. When you buy a company, in the modern stock markets, you almost always pay a premium to the total value of inventory, cash, etc that that business owns. Accounting has nowhere to value that extra (essentially to an accountant a software business is made up of computers, patents, cash, and perhaps a lease). If investors value the firm on potential future developments (which they do) there's a lot of value that isn't there yet. So that value gets called "goodwill".
The Predator is a recon/bomber, air force planes are built like UNIX programs built to do a job and do it well, but not do another job as well. Lots of bombers would bet easily destroyed by a fighter, the limiting factor would be the fighters ammo, but the same value of unmanned fighters would completely destroy a human piloted fighter (slower bigger and more expensive). The biggest impediment won't be technological, it will be that most of the generals in the air force were fighter pilots.
The only reason fighter pilots won't be obsolete in our lifetimes is that the decision makers of the airforce are mostly former figher pilots (always have been, too). A specialized dogfighting UAV would be far more effective (smaller, lighter, less restricted, and cheaper) than a piloted fighter. It will be some time, as dog fighting isn't yet something computers are good at, but if you can throw enough research at the problem, it wouldn't matter (either the cost or the advantages will mean the shift will eventually occur).
He got 17k in tax credits and grants (state and federal). As a tax payer that's our money he's spending, money that looks like it will buy 8400kWh over the next year. That money would save a lot more than 8400 kWh if the same credit went to subsidize the price of CF bulbs. If he pays the entire installation costs, more power to him and for feeling good about what he bought.
Our society is allows members to create contracts with each other that may place limits on those rights. There are lots of contracts that I'd never make, but are made frequently. Restricting others ability to contract, simply because I don't like the terms isn't something I want in a free society. The freedom to contract is an important one, restrictions on that are and should be very carefully considered.
Shouldn't your freedom include the freedom to contract with your neighbors not to take an action that would be detrimental to all? These agreements aren't laws made by the state, they're a mutual contract created by the people who own the homes in the area (and those people have full freedom to remove any restrictions on their behavior that the group wishes to remove). Granted, too frequently the board isn't representative of the neighborhood after a period of time, but that's a flaw in the creation of the group, restricting the freedom to restrict yourself isn't something I'd want the governemnt to do.
Almost every contract places some restrictions on two or more party's actions, and the freedom to create a contract is something I'll always defend.
I have a problem paying $20k ($55,000 was the actual installation cost, his cost was $36,000) for him to feel good and save ~$3,000/yr (so his system will pay off in about the panel life). The 20,000 in taxes would buy a whole lot of CF bulbs and insulation that while not as sexy (no one is writing artiles about their R-35 walls) would save far more power than he generates.
There are flags on each side of the field with a marker for the first down marker, line of scrimage, and line of scrimage when you started that series. The LOS marker shows the down and moves at the end of each play. They look like this. Usually the players can get a pretty good estimate of where the first down is, from the yard marks on the field, as well.
Gooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaallllllllllllllllllie, of course.
The funding for the coupons, ads, and whole program came from the bandwidth auctions, actually.
I think English was a German variant until the Normans took over. Then we got just enough of both to completely confuse everyone who's ever tried to speak (or spell) it.
I think the biggest difference is that cars don't attempt to give you error messages using car jargon. They either make a funny noise, smell, or performance or they increasingly throw a single error light reqiring technician's tools to get a diagnosis that has jargon. If your car said once and did not repeat the error, your carburator jets are fouled, mechanics would probably have their share of misused jargon stories.