There was a story in puzzle palace about a code that some mobsters were using that had stumped the FBI, they took it over to the NSA as a friendly challenge (the NSA folk weren't supposed to work on domestic stuff). The NSA cryptanalysts cracked it over a single lunch break.
they put a three letter address and three letter tld in the coded message with yyy at the beginning, I don't think they're looking for super sleuths to crack this code. I was surprised they didn't just rot (x) the original.
In Europe the calling party pays for the call (similar to how the US handles (d) long distance on land line phones). If you are receiving the call you generally pay nothing. In the US, the cellular customer pays for the airtime of sent and recieved calls. In both, typically calls to in network lines are provided at a reduced rate. It's generally imposible to find a calling party pays plan in the US or a cell pays airtime plan in Europe. Different markets and different standards of doing business in both places.
I disagree that gambling is illegal, it depends on your location. What about the futures market? That's a pretty important market. There's always room for speculators. I'll concede that the CDS market was an innovation that routed around some restrictions on insurance firms. I'm more than in agreement that they should be traded openly, and depending on what your regulations are would agree with that, but I don't see why you should have to own the underlying.
Markets are a lot like media pirates, trying to limit them usually leads to worse consequences and rarely solves the problem. (CDS got created to avoid rather severe restrictions on insurance companies). If these are too heavily regulated, what ever is next will probably be worse.
However, what killed AIG wasn't that they had to pay out for Lehman (that was a hit but a fairly small payout compared to the size of the firm), it's that their models made no anticipation to the huge numbers of contracts they had written that included terms with increasing collateral on non-defaulting CDS, when AIG's credit rating was downgraded. That was a gigantic hit to their cash reserves, because to use your stereo insurance example, it no longer mattered that your stereo was stored in Fort Knox and hadn't moved, AIG still had to front another 10% of the value of the contract to protect the CDS buyer from a potential AIG default. Creating a loop (the collateral payments would trigger further credit rating downgrades) that would quickly bankrupt the firm (as it happened the first one was more than large enough).
That war resister's number includes a ton of oddities, stuff like 80% of interest on the debt, 80% of homeland security's budget (TSA isn't what most people would call war spending), 50% of NASA's budget (even though the Air Force handles most of the military's space launches), and uses outlays rather than budgets (which is arguably more accurate but isn't comparable to the numbers that most orgs use to describe government spending). Also, they ignore medicare/social security taxes and spending which makes the denominator smaller.
Why is it so bad that you can buy insurance on something you don't own? What if you own something similar that isn't insurable? Say Mazda bonds or car loans that no one is willing to write a CDS against, is it still gambling? The real problem with AIG's writing an insane amount of them was that they failed to consider that the contracts have an important provision to protect buyers from those who don't have one red cent, pledged collateral. AIG didn't correctly consider their risk that because of their own credit rating, they might have to rapidly increase the amount of collateral they must pledge (even if almost none of the defaults ever actually occur, the liquidity event can and did bankrupt them).
Incorporation is mostly about ring fencing assets between personal and business. There's no law that says the corporate owner can't be the only employee, too. Every business (no mater the structure will need to deal with principle agent problems once it begins hiring employees (and they grow in magnitude when all the employees are no longer primary owners of the firm).
Many are developed to not be something that was or is heavily regulated by the government. Commerical paper arose because banks charged high spreads between savers and borrowers mostly because the government put them in a regulated, but market with a raised barrier to entry. Commercial paper side stepped the existitng market to reduce capture that spread (by both borrowers and lenders). Rather than a bank making 3% on a loan, a money market fund manager makes about 0.3% (which is much closer to the actual costs). The major difference between the two was that the government promised to make good on $100,000 of the savers' money which is great for small savers but pretty meaningless when you are a pension fund with $50,000,000 in short term funds.
Short term loans are needed for businesses to invest in long term assets that pay out infrequently but who have cash needs along the way. Think of a farmer. They have a big annual investment (planting) some small cash needs along the way and a bigger future payment. They can get a term loan (with the land as collateral) for the planting, but they'll need something to cover all the fertilizer costs and such in betweeen.
The problem arose when the fed used it's monopoly position to make financing cheap for banks (the Fed monopolistically sets wholesale bank costs) to impact the economy after the dot com collapse. Almost everyone could see that it was cheap to finance a whole lot more of their operation with short term loans because now they could tap into the same market or markets tied to wholesale bank funding costs, and save 60-80% of their financing costs.
They do, the Pontiac GTO and Saturn Atsra are both Foreign cars brought to the US. The issue is because they're sold by GM, they sell at a hefty discount to Japanese brands or the similar car in Europe/Australia. They completely hosed their small car branding in the US with utter crap in the 70s/80s/90s, so now the best thing would be to just shut down those businesses, but because of CAFE laws (rather than a gas tax) they can't do that and sell their trucks/SUVs which made a profit in the US.
Two other big factors are taxes/tariffs and higher rents. In the UK (and most of Europe) prices are quoted inclusive of the VAT which run 10-20% in most of the countries, while in the US they prices don't include taxes. So that's a part of the mark up. Land use is much more heavily restricted in parts of the UK which drives up rents (and correspondingly the retail markup). There is some marking up of companies, recently the dollar has been consistently one of the cheaper currencies globally to buy many goods (the Big Mac index). However, the dollar has moved up some so the discrepancy between US prices and global prices is narrower than it had been.
They sold for half to a quarter of the then normal retail price? Everyone I knew who bought more than one also was a fanatical hunter, so they must have done something right.
I troll the used game bin for this reason, of course Master of Orion and X-Com (and even the Elite series) are the games that get the most playtime on my PC. Why aren't old games for sale at a bargain bin price ($10 bucks or a pack of 5 for $20), more frequently? I'm pretty sure they could even ship with a preset up version of DosBOX.
Why is it nearly impossible to find even recent classics (Fallout/Fallout 2 or Wasteland would have garnered some sales with all the hype over Fallout 3).
It drops like a rock in part because if you the buyer have a shiny new car, why on earth would you sell it immediately after purchase unless it's secretly a giant problem car? This was a bigger issue when auto quality control wasn't up to the same level as it is today.
Eastern State (in Philedelphia) was set up along this system, but it became too expensive to maintain before too long. It's a neat tour if you're in the area.
I agree, I worked at a tiny pension manager and met Street analysts and learned Bloomberg, while my counterpart met several VC/private equity shops. We both worked on real projects (mine saved the firm a fortune and consolidated a data provider his was presented to the board).
I haven't found anything like Washington's voter pamphlet elsewhere in the US. It's something I really miss from there. For those outside the state the secretary of Washington State prints a book sent to every house and available in many other places free, with statements by each person running for every office on the ballot and a pro and con statement as well as rebuttal for each ballot issue. It's really, an excellent product.
http://wei.secstate.wa.gov/osos/en/Pages/OnlineVoterGuideGeneral2008.aspx?ShowAll=True&ElectionID=26
It's online. I was pretty surprised when I found it difficult to find anything about the candidates running for local offices here in Virginia.
I pretty much agree with your opinions, but nothing scares me more than Buffett becoming secretary of the Treasury, I don't think there's anyone more fully controled by avarice than him. His public pronouncements are consistently structured to create public support for using the government to personally benefit him. His stance on taxes, is a good example. He's an insurance company and annuities are tax sheltered savings or envestment products (that pay very large fees to insurance companies), so of course he's for higher taxes on the rich (more of them would have to pay him fees.
His statements on derivatives are as well, the products he's talking about directly compete with businesses he operates in, so of course he'd like to see them regulated out of competing with him, he wasn't arguing that they be operated on the same basis as he is, he wants them banned. He's very bright, and has done an amazing job building a public image, but his business success should be a clue that his financial advice might not be that of a disinterested expert.
Related to your point on energy, the only alternative to petroleum will be nuclear or perhaps solar with a much larger investment (think microwave beaming satellites), I haven't seen nearly enough to suggest that Obama will cross with enough of the powerful in his party to push a heavily nuclear agenda, although, you're probably right that he has potential to do so.
The problem is instead of providing insurance, because of a tax break it was cheaper to bundle routine maintenance into the package. My auto insurance certainly doesn't cover oil changes and gasoline, but my health insurance covers all sorts of similar costs. This had the very negative side effect of selecting most of the population into health insurance tied to work, so the non-workers are a small population. When the small population self selected to choose health insurance, it was more likely likely that they were health "lemons" so insurance companies make them prohibatively expensive.
The price of gas is much more varied than usual across the country. The southeast in particular is still dealing with shortages created when several refineries were "shut in" for hurricane Ike, leaving very little gasoline inventories in those markets.
It is true though, that HUD's goals for Freddie and Fannie provided a huge portion of the demand for securities backed by subprime mortgages. Those goals were passed in the 1992 legislation (the last time one party controlled both congressional houses and the presidency (they didn't have a filibuster proof majority however).
Slashdot Mirror
There was a story in puzzle palace about a code that some mobsters were using that had stumped the FBI, they took it over to the NSA as a friendly challenge (the NSA folk weren't supposed to work on domestic stuff). The NSA cryptanalysts cracked it over a single lunch break.
they put a three letter address and three letter tld in the coded message with yyy at the beginning, I don't think they're looking for super sleuths to crack this code. I was surprised they didn't just rot (x) the original.
A pox on thee and thy house! If the Queen's english hath served thine forefathers soundly, surely it serveth thee to this present day!
The only thing the Model M isn't good at is quiet computing.
In Europe the calling party pays for the call (similar to how the US handles (d) long distance on land line phones). If you are receiving the call you generally pay nothing. In the US, the cellular customer pays for the airtime of sent and recieved calls. In both, typically calls to in network lines are provided at a reduced rate. It's generally imposible to find a calling party pays plan in the US or a cell pays airtime plan in Europe. Different markets and different standards of doing business in both places.
I disagree that gambling is illegal, it depends on your location. What about the futures market? That's a pretty important market. There's always room for speculators. I'll concede that the CDS market was an innovation that routed around some restrictions on insurance firms. I'm more than in agreement that they should be traded openly, and depending on what your regulations are would agree with that, but I don't see why you should have to own the underlying.
Markets are a lot like media pirates, trying to limit them usually leads to worse consequences and rarely solves the problem. (CDS got created to avoid rather severe restrictions on insurance companies). If these are too heavily regulated, what ever is next will probably be worse.
However, what killed AIG wasn't that they had to pay out for Lehman (that was a hit but a fairly small payout compared to the size of the firm), it's that their models made no anticipation to the huge numbers of contracts they had written that included terms with increasing collateral on non-defaulting CDS, when AIG's credit rating was downgraded. That was a gigantic hit to their cash reserves, because to use your stereo insurance example, it no longer mattered that your stereo was stored in Fort Knox and hadn't moved, AIG still had to front another 10% of the value of the contract to protect the CDS buyer from a potential AIG default. Creating a loop (the collateral payments would trigger further credit rating downgrades) that would quickly bankrupt the firm (as it happened the first one was more than large enough).
That war resister's number includes a ton of oddities, stuff like 80% of interest on the debt, 80% of homeland security's budget (TSA isn't what most people would call war spending), 50% of NASA's budget (even though the Air Force handles most of the military's space launches), and uses outlays rather than budgets (which is arguably more accurate but isn't comparable to the numbers that most orgs use to describe government spending). Also, they ignore medicare/social security taxes and spending which makes the denominator smaller.
Why is it so bad that you can buy insurance on something you don't own? What if you own something similar that isn't insurable? Say Mazda bonds or car loans that no one is willing to write a CDS against, is it still gambling? The real problem with AIG's writing an insane amount of them was that they failed to consider that the contracts have an important provision to protect buyers from those who don't have one red cent, pledged collateral. AIG didn't correctly consider their risk that because of their own credit rating, they might have to rapidly increase the amount of collateral they must pledge (even if almost none of the defaults ever actually occur, the liquidity event can and did bankrupt them).
Incorporation is mostly about ring fencing assets between personal and business. There's no law that says the corporate owner can't be the only employee, too. Every business (no mater the structure will need to deal with principle agent problems once it begins hiring employees (and they grow in magnitude when all the employees are no longer primary owners of the firm).
Many are developed to not be something that was or is heavily regulated by the government. Commerical paper arose because banks charged high spreads between savers and borrowers mostly because the government put them in a regulated, but market with a raised barrier to entry. Commercial paper side stepped the existitng market to reduce capture that spread (by both borrowers and lenders). Rather than a bank making 3% on a loan, a money market fund manager makes about 0.3% (which is much closer to the actual costs). The major difference between the two was that the government promised to make good on $100,000 of the savers' money which is great for small savers but pretty meaningless when you are a pension fund with $50,000,000 in short term funds.
Short term loans are needed for businesses to invest in long term assets that pay out infrequently but who have cash needs along the way. Think of a farmer. They have a big annual investment (planting) some small cash needs along the way and a bigger future payment. They can get a term loan (with the land as collateral) for the planting, but they'll need something to cover all the fertilizer costs and such in betweeen. The problem arose when the fed used it's monopoly position to make financing cheap for banks (the Fed monopolistically sets wholesale bank costs) to impact the economy after the dot com collapse. Almost everyone could see that it was cheap to finance a whole lot more of their operation with short term loans because now they could tap into the same market or markets tied to wholesale bank funding costs, and save 60-80% of their financing costs.
They do, the Pontiac GTO and Saturn Atsra are both Foreign cars brought to the US. The issue is because they're sold by GM, they sell at a hefty discount to Japanese brands or the similar car in Europe/Australia. They completely hosed their small car branding in the US with utter crap in the 70s/80s/90s, so now the best thing would be to just shut down those businesses, but because of CAFE laws (rather than a gas tax) they can't do that and sell their trucks/SUVs which made a profit in the US.
Two other big factors are taxes/tariffs and higher rents. In the UK (and most of Europe) prices are quoted inclusive of the VAT which run 10-20% in most of the countries, while in the US they prices don't include taxes. So that's a part of the mark up. Land use is much more heavily restricted in parts of the UK which drives up rents (and correspondingly the retail markup). There is some marking up of companies, recently the dollar has been consistently one of the cheaper currencies globally to buy many goods (the Big Mac index). However, the dollar has moved up some so the discrepancy between US prices and global prices is narrower than it had been.
How many more civillians would have died in an invasion of Japan?
They sold for half to a quarter of the then normal retail price? Everyone I knew who bought more than one also was a fanatical hunter, so they must have done something right.
I troll the used game bin for this reason, of course Master of Orion and X-Com (and even the Elite series) are the games that get the most playtime on my PC. Why aren't old games for sale at a bargain bin price ($10 bucks or a pack of 5 for $20), more frequently? I'm pretty sure they could even ship with a preset up version of DosBOX.
Why is it nearly impossible to find even recent classics (Fallout/Fallout 2 or Wasteland would have garnered some sales with all the hype over Fallout 3).
It drops like a rock in part because if you the buyer have a shiny new car, why on earth would you sell it immediately after purchase unless it's secretly a giant problem car? This was a bigger issue when auto quality control wasn't up to the same level as it is today.
Eastern State (in Philedelphia) was set up along this system, but it became too expensive to maintain before too long. It's a neat tour if you're in the area.
I agree, I worked at a tiny pension manager and met Street analysts and learned Bloomberg, while my counterpart met several VC/private equity shops. We both worked on real projects (mine saved the firm a fortune and consolidated a data provider his was presented to the board).
You would think that visionary folks who comment on lax risk management might be given a little more credibility these days.
Newsflash African Americans vote heavily favors the Democratic candidate since about 1970.
I haven't found anything like Washington's voter pamphlet elsewhere in the US. It's something I really miss from there. For those outside the state the secretary of Washington State prints a book sent to every house and available in many other places free, with statements by each person running for every office on the ballot and a pro and con statement as well as rebuttal for each ballot issue. It's really, an excellent product. http://wei.secstate.wa.gov/osos/en/Pages/OnlineVoterGuideGeneral2008.aspx?ShowAll=True&ElectionID=26 It's online. I was pretty surprised when I found it difficult to find anything about the candidates running for local offices here in Virginia.
I pretty much agree with your opinions, but nothing scares me more than Buffett becoming secretary of the Treasury, I don't think there's anyone more fully controled by avarice than him. His public pronouncements are consistently structured to create public support for using the government to personally benefit him. His stance on taxes, is a good example. He's an insurance company and annuities are tax sheltered savings or envestment products (that pay very large fees to insurance companies), so of course he's for higher taxes on the rich (more of them would have to pay him fees.
His statements on derivatives are as well, the products he's talking about directly compete with businesses he operates in, so of course he'd like to see them regulated out of competing with him, he wasn't arguing that they be operated on the same basis as he is, he wants them banned. He's very bright, and has done an amazing job building a public image, but his business success should be a clue that his financial advice might not be that of a disinterested expert. Related to your point on energy, the only alternative to petroleum will be nuclear or perhaps solar with a much larger investment (think microwave beaming satellites), I haven't seen nearly enough to suggest that Obama will cross with enough of the powerful in his party to push a heavily nuclear agenda, although, you're probably right that he has potential to do so.
The problem is instead of providing insurance, because of a tax break it was cheaper to bundle routine maintenance into the package. My auto insurance certainly doesn't cover oil changes and gasoline, but my health insurance covers all sorts of similar costs. This had the very negative side effect of selecting most of the population into health insurance tied to work, so the non-workers are a small population. When the small population self selected to choose health insurance, it was more likely likely that they were health "lemons" so insurance companies make them prohibatively expensive.
The price of gas is much more varied than usual across the country. The southeast in particular is still dealing with shortages created when several refineries were "shut in" for hurricane Ike, leaving very little gasoline inventories in those markets.
It is true though, that HUD's goals for Freddie and Fannie provided a huge portion of the demand for securities backed by subprime mortgages. Those goals were passed in the 1992 legislation (the last time one party controlled both congressional houses and the presidency (they didn't have a filibuster proof majority however).