Re:How are opinions informative?
on
Ask mc chris
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· Score: 1
A little context might help, the lack of hot wiring refers to the fact that [Boba Fett] now owns a Corvette which appears to be his be all end all goal in life, the hunter for hire would be his stock in trade, the other two lines would be your standard rap anthems of tooting ones horn and insulting all other rappers for their inability to measure up to your skill level. It's funny, laugh.
I've always found it a little ironic that the important areas of the tech boom were all located in the most expensive real estate in the country while the premise of the tech bubble was that you would be able to do anything from anywhere.
A great office plant is an orchid. They usually don't require much light which makse them great for windowless offices. They grow really slowly so they won't fill your office with green in a few years. Also when they finally send a flow spike up, everyone will be amazed.
Sort of, as a shareholder (even one share) you have full rights to place anything on the company's agenda as something to vote on at the annual meeting. Usually a vote of no confidence comes at the director rather than the managment level. Typically what happens is one big investor buys a decent sized block (say more than 10% and convinces all the little to medium sized investors) to vote with him for his slate of directors who will gut current managment and the company will follow the investor's ideas. Typically big investors only do this if they see some potential to increase the size of their portfolio (usually by splitting up the company). I've never heard of a hostile takeover that didn't involve at least one big investor coalition (Disney was pretty close, but Roy had the name in that case). If you scare managment enough but don't currently have 50% of the vote sealed up, you can sometimes get managment to buy your shares at an iflated value with an agreement you will go away. The term for that is greenmail, it was more common in the 1980s when disclosure was less available, but it does occasionally occur today.
If you want to learn more about the NSA and you find yourself in the Baltimore-Washington corridor, I whole heartedly reccomend going to check out the national cryptological museum which has several excellent exhibits regarding the history of codes used by countries (they have an enigma or purple and a Cray which is more than I've ever seen in other museums).
They are protecting their business against sites like TravelZoo. They make their money by buying hotels in bulk and reselling them at a profit or by getting airline bookings through them. They accomplish this by offering competitive overall pricing with some loss leaders (cheap hotels to increase air bookings and justify overall low prices) and some profit centers (higher priced hotels that make them the money. Sites like TravelZoo scrape all the travel sites and allow you to quickly compare expedia, orbitz, joebob's travel page etc. Since you don't really get any extra services if you use Expedia or Orbitz consumers are interested in the lowest price, but both companies make their money by making it difficult to quickly compare prices. Deep links make it much easier to compare prices between travel sites and lower margins for the industry.
You know what the biggest companies (and the then thought to be best investments)in the world were 75 years ago? Railroads. They succeeded following a dotcom like boom and bust 100 years before and had become huge, go look at what spun out of railroads or was financed by directly or indirectly a rail road company. 50 years ago it was american autos that were kings of the hill, again go look at all the other businesses and industries they produced. Before railroads it was whale oil companies that were the height of business organization and innovation, 50 years from now some kids will invent an industry and the computer companies will be like Kansas City Southern (which was still widely followed until 1999, because they owned the parent company of Janus mutual funds).
The economist took a look at the oldest comapnies on earth, most were asian and the only one with a brand I could recall was Kikkomen (the soy sauce company). I think it was 400 years old or so. Not so much that anything can die, but that eventually everything does.
I think that's mostly a result of dogs and people being "pack" animals with highly ritualistic and complex social structure, while cats are solitary hunters. It's highly likely that the concept that others would care about their behavior (with the exception to feeding/care for them) is almost totally inconcievible to a cat, assuming you could explain it to them in meows. Cats are the least domesticated of our house pets, as they only began living around us because they knew it was good hunting, and we soon learned that having a cat around meant less spoilage due to rodents. Dogs probably came for the same early reasons, but both of our pack instincts brought the interactions to a much higher level over time. While there are still plenty of cats, we had two, who have about the same relationship as early cats did to early humans (they kept the mice down, and we didn't harass them).
I've no idea what octopuses social structure is like, but I'd be willing to guess that they aren't solitary creatures.
I've thought about it in Montana (our power company caught the.com bug and tried to become a telecom, before they went bankrupt they laid fiber to some pretty podunk towns). I was thinking that you could run heat exchangers (even a nice passive one would work well to minimize your cooling costs in a data center. Also for the 5 cold months your air conditioners would run quite efficiently (as you are pushing heat to cold air). You would have to be careful of the eventually large ice sheet that would form under your heat exchangers, though (or you could rent it out to the local kids to play hockey on). I'm surprised no one has tried it (a few engineers would live like kings with anything aproximating coastal pay in some of the local areas).
You don't have to live off the interest, even with wildly optimistic retirement plans you can expect to reduce your principle over your livespan (say less than 120 years to be exceedingly conservative). If your time span is more than 30 years you can pretty safely invest in equities and plan to sell some of your bonds annually to meet your annual income needs--rebalaincing your equity in good years to make up the shortfall in bonds. Retiring at 30-40 on 500k in NY, Boston, or California is a recipie to the poor house, but investing that money wisely (diversified globally and in several asset classes) for a decade and retiring in a lower cost of living state than California (like Arizona, Idaho, the mid-West or Montana) and you could do quite well off a single idea.
As an economist, I've often wondered why this continues, and all I've come up with is that gamers (or retailers) use full price games as a signal that the game will be up to a certain level of quality and bargain bin games didn't meet that level of quality. Or perhaps it is just that no company has ever tested the razorblade model on MMORPGs.
You can't compare other quarters with December of 2003 as that period had the XBox launch (huge ad blitz and lower gross margin) and the catch up accounting adjustment related to expensing options and equity grants. Sept 03 (and much closer to the trends in March and June 04) had rev of 8.2 billion and net income of $2.6 billion. Which is much closer to sept 04's margin.
My office is known as the jungle around here
on
Plants for Cubicles?
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· Score: 1
I suggest an orchid (the crazy amount of work it takes to get one to grow suits a geek's OCD tendencies). I also have a dwarf orange (might be a valencia orange or something), white ginger (order a root-takes lots of sun), rubber plant (grows nice and slow), aloe (looks cool and good for the occasional office cut), and this crazy hanging plant someone told me is called a charlie.
Thank you for restoring my faith that/. gets almost every problem right if you look down far enough. All the people speculating about pricing and competition would do well to read the parent post and learn something about the economics of software development.
How could some wierd nickname and hearing he....could....go...ALLLL....THE...WAY!, every time you make a more than 20 yard run not improve pretty much any game?
Much of the synthesis in college business is done with games/simulations. Things like the Stanford Bank Game (it's not nearly as fun as it sounds, unless you were a 10 year old capitalist) or the shoe game allow college students to pit their operational skills against each other. They are moderately realistic (at the 10,000 foot level) and teach strategy, basic competition (is capacity growing faster than demand and are we doing the smae thing as all our competitors), and some understanding of how the economy will affect firms.
Re:Interesting, yet discouraging
on
My Life as a Quant
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· Score: 3, Interesting
If you borrowed money to buy a house (or your landlord borrowed money to buy your apartment) you can thank a quant for getting the callable bond market off the ground. Valuing those securities was one of the first applications of this field. Without this work you would probably be paying several percentage points more in interest.
I could easily set you (alone, no pyramid scheme possible) up with a pension that would not only pay you until you died it would continue to pay a real value into perpetuity. The big problem is that you probably wouldn't want to buy it as it would be too expensive. For a perpetuity that grows at the same rate as your income (3% behind risk free bond yields) you would have to pay me about 60% of each year's income. The problem with many pensions in the 20th and 21st centuries is that benefits were promised based on incorrect actuarial assumptions (in the early part of the century they were quite correct but the underlying variables moved in ways no one could have guessed). As a result people who paid into a pension and are retiring now got a very good deal, when corporate America figured out how screwed they were (look at GM, an airline, or a steel company to see just how out of whack the assumptions were) they pushed any additional lifespan risk onto pension beneficiaries through DC plans (or 401ks).
The Economist is also quite good, but not cheap. It seems like they have fewer articles but each leaves you with a decent amount of knowledge about a subject. I also like that on the subjects I know more than the average journalist about, tech and finanacial news, they generally hit the important notes which makes me feel much better when reading an article on Eastern European politics or other topics I know considerably less about.
I drink plenty of coffee (now made by me in a wonderful french press) and Starbucks was never the best cup of coffee that you could get, but they were consistent. Which is nice if your at a place and you don't want to risk getting crappy (or devine) coffee from an independant. Also they seem to hire the hottest baristas (certainly hotter than our gas station employees, but YMMV) which is a factor in many folk's coffee stamd choices.
In the spirit of full disclosure I have one A&F shirt that was a gift. When I get to a town large enough to have a mall, I don't even like going in the stores, I think the sales people can tell I'm not in their target market.
Re:Internal conflict is what I worry about...
on
In the Year 2020
·
· Score: 1
The country is falling apart, slowly now, but unless something major changes (like a real leader someone from the mold of Roosevelt, Lincoln, or Washington) it will continue to accelerate. We are all pretty scared something and its beginning to affect the economy. Perception is crucial to the actual succes of the economy and right now the perception is to be scared so people are hoarding wealth (look at the corporations repaying debt and building cash or the recent increase in commodity prices or housing as examples).
That said I don't think we are anywhere near the point of no return, but we keep moving toward it daily.
Internationally, the world is beginning to see two major changes and beginning to react to them. The first is the Euro currency (it will replace the dollar as the main store of value within our lifetimes and feel free to hold me to that). The second is mentioned in the article and headline, Asia is replacing the US as the exciting place to be. For well over 100 years everything the Americas touched was golden because we had resources, ideas, and lower costs that really helped an idea succeed. In the last decade that momentum has shifted to Asia. While the momentum shift is probably early it certainly isn't wrong, and another thing that you can count on in our lifetimes is that Asia will become the US of the 21st century. If you doubt me go chat up some high school kids. They all plan to be millionares with no real understanding of how to become one.
Excel is probably tip top of the spreadsheet world (not just because the data format is the standard). While open office's calc is good and getting better Excel has more short cuts that I use daily.
Slashdot Mirror
A little context might help, the lack of hot wiring refers to the fact that [Boba Fett] now owns a Corvette which appears to be his be all end all goal in life, the hunter for hire would be his stock in trade, the other two lines would be your standard rap anthems of tooting ones horn and insulting all other rappers for their inability to measure up to your skill level. It's funny, laugh.
I've always found it a little ironic that the important areas of the tech boom were all located in the most expensive real estate in the country while the premise of the tech bubble was that you would be able to do anything from anywhere.
A great office plant is an orchid. They usually don't require much light which makse them great for windowless offices. They grow really slowly so they won't fill your office with green in a few years. Also when they finally send a flow spike up, everyone will be amazed.
Sort of, as a shareholder (even one share) you have full rights to place anything on the company's agenda as something to vote on at the annual meeting. Usually a vote of no confidence comes at the director rather than the managment level. Typically what happens is one big investor buys a decent sized block (say more than 10% and convinces all the little to medium sized investors) to vote with him for his slate of directors who will gut current managment and the company will follow the investor's ideas. Typically big investors only do this if they see some potential to increase the size of their portfolio (usually by splitting up the company). I've never heard of a hostile takeover that didn't involve at least one big investor coalition (Disney was pretty close, but Roy had the name in that case). If you scare managment enough but don't currently have 50% of the vote sealed up, you can sometimes get managment to buy your shares at an iflated value with an agreement you will go away. The term for that is greenmail, it was more common in the 1980s when disclosure was less available, but it does occasionally occur today.
If you want to learn more about the NSA and you find yourself in the Baltimore-Washington corridor, I whole heartedly reccomend going to check out the national cryptological museum which has several excellent exhibits regarding the history of codes used by countries (they have an enigma or purple and a Cray which is more than I've ever seen in other museums).
They are protecting their business against sites like TravelZoo. They make their money by buying hotels in bulk and reselling them at a profit or by getting airline bookings through them. They accomplish this by offering competitive overall pricing with some loss leaders (cheap hotels to increase air bookings and justify overall low prices) and some profit centers (higher priced hotels that make them the money. Sites like TravelZoo scrape all the travel sites and allow you to quickly compare expedia, orbitz, joebob's travel page etc. Since you don't really get any extra services if you use Expedia or Orbitz consumers are interested in the lowest price, but both companies make their money by making it difficult to quickly compare prices. Deep links make it much easier to compare prices between travel sites and lower margins for the industry.
You know what the biggest companies (and the then thought to be best investments)in the world were 75 years ago? Railroads. They succeeded following a dotcom like boom and bust 100 years before and had become huge, go look at what spun out of railroads or was financed by directly or indirectly a rail road company. 50 years ago it was american autos that were kings of the hill, again go look at all the other businesses and industries they produced. Before railroads it was whale oil companies that were the height of business organization and innovation, 50 years from now some kids will invent an industry and the computer companies will be like Kansas City Southern (which was still widely followed until 1999, because they owned the parent company of Janus mutual funds).
The economist took a look at the oldest comapnies on earth, most were asian and the only one with a brand I could recall was Kikkomen (the soy sauce company). I think it was 400 years old or so. Not so much that anything can die, but that eventually everything does.
I think that's mostly a result of dogs and people being "pack" animals with highly ritualistic and complex social structure, while cats are solitary hunters. It's highly likely that the concept that others would care about their behavior (with the exception to feeding/care for them) is almost totally inconcievible to a cat, assuming you could explain it to them in meows. Cats are the least domesticated of our house pets, as they only began living around us because they knew it was good hunting, and we soon learned that having a cat around meant less spoilage due to rodents. Dogs probably came for the same early reasons, but both of our pack instincts brought the interactions to a much higher level over time. While there are still plenty of cats, we had two, who have about the same relationship as early cats did to early humans (they kept the mice down, and we didn't harass them). I've no idea what octopuses social structure is like, but I'd be willing to guess that they aren't solitary creatures.
I've thought about it in Montana (our power company caught the .com bug and tried to become a telecom, before they went bankrupt they laid fiber to some pretty podunk towns). I was thinking that you could run heat exchangers (even a nice passive one would work well to minimize your cooling costs in a data center. Also for the 5 cold months your air conditioners would run quite efficiently (as you are pushing heat to cold air). You would have to be careful of the eventually large ice sheet that would form under your heat exchangers, though (or you could rent it out to the local kids to play hockey on). I'm surprised no one has tried it (a few engineers would live like kings with anything aproximating coastal pay in some of the local areas).
I didn't realize the red light district required such computing power, what do I know.
You don't have to live off the interest, even with wildly optimistic retirement plans you can expect to reduce your principle over your livespan (say less than 120 years to be exceedingly conservative). If your time span is more than 30 years you can pretty safely invest in equities and plan to sell some of your bonds annually to meet your annual income needs--rebalaincing your equity in good years to make up the shortfall in bonds. Retiring at 30-40 on 500k in NY, Boston, or California is a recipie to the poor house, but investing that money wisely (diversified globally and in several asset classes) for a decade and retiring in a lower cost of living state than California (like Arizona, Idaho, the mid-West or Montana) and you could do quite well off a single idea.
As an economist, I've often wondered why this continues, and all I've come up with is that gamers (or retailers) use full price games as a signal that the game will be up to a certain level of quality and bargain bin games didn't meet that level of quality. Or perhaps it is just that no company has ever tested the razorblade model on MMORPGs.
You can't compare other quarters with December of 2003 as that period had the XBox launch (huge ad blitz and lower gross margin) and the catch up accounting adjustment related to expensing options and equity grants. Sept 03 (and much closer to the trends in March and June 04) had rev of 8.2 billion and net income of $2.6 billion. Which is much closer to sept 04's margin.
I suggest an orchid (the crazy amount of work it takes to get one to grow suits a geek's OCD tendencies). I also have a dwarf orange (might be a valencia orange or something), white ginger (order a root-takes lots of sun), rubber plant (grows nice and slow), aloe (looks cool and good for the occasional office cut), and this crazy hanging plant someone told me is called a charlie.
Thank you for restoring my faith that /. gets almost every problem right if you look down far enough. All the people speculating about pricing and competition would do well to read the parent post and learn something about the economics of software development.
How could some wierd nickname and hearing he....could....go...ALLLL....THE...WAY!, every time you make a more than 20 yard run not improve pretty much any game?
/Marketing mode off.
Much of the synthesis in college business is done with games/simulations. Things like the Stanford Bank Game (it's not nearly as fun as it sounds, unless you were a 10 year old capitalist) or the shoe game allow college students to pit their operational skills against each other. They are moderately realistic (at the 10,000 foot level) and teach strategy, basic competition (is capacity growing faster than demand and are we doing the smae thing as all our competitors), and some understanding of how the economy will affect firms.
If you borrowed money to buy a house (or your landlord borrowed money to buy your apartment) you can thank a quant for getting the callable bond market off the ground. Valuing those securities was one of the first applications of this field. Without this work you would probably be paying several percentage points more in interest.
I could easily set you (alone, no pyramid scheme possible) up with a pension that would not only pay you until you died it would continue to pay a real value into perpetuity. The big problem is that you probably wouldn't want to buy it as it would be too expensive. For a perpetuity that grows at the same rate as your income (3% behind risk free bond yields) you would have to pay me about 60% of each year's income. The problem with many pensions in the 20th and 21st centuries is that benefits were promised based on incorrect actuarial assumptions (in the early part of the century they were quite correct but the underlying variables moved in ways no one could have guessed). As a result people who paid into a pension and are retiring now got a very good deal, when corporate America figured out how screwed they were (look at GM, an airline, or a steel company to see just how out of whack the assumptions were) they pushed any additional lifespan risk onto pension beneficiaries through DC plans (or 401ks).
The Economist is also quite good, but not cheap. It seems like they have fewer articles but each leaves you with a decent amount of knowledge about a subject. I also like that on the subjects I know more than the average journalist about, tech and finanacial news, they generally hit the important notes which makes me feel much better when reading an article on Eastern European politics or other topics I know considerably less about.
I drink plenty of coffee (now made by me in a wonderful french press) and Starbucks was never the best cup of coffee that you could get, but they were consistent. Which is nice if your at a place and you don't want to risk getting crappy (or devine) coffee from an independant. Also they seem to hire the hottest baristas (certainly hotter than our gas station employees, but YMMV) which is a factor in many folk's coffee stamd choices.
In the spirit of full disclosure I have one A&F shirt that was a gift. When I get to a town large enough to have a mall, I don't even like going in the stores, I think the sales people can tell I'm not in their target market.
The country is falling apart, slowly now, but unless something major changes (like a real leader someone from the mold of Roosevelt, Lincoln, or Washington) it will continue to accelerate. We are all pretty scared something and its beginning to affect the economy. Perception is crucial to the actual succes of the economy and right now the perception is to be scared so people are hoarding wealth (look at the corporations repaying debt and building cash or the recent increase in commodity prices or housing as examples).
That said I don't think we are anywhere near the point of no return, but we keep moving toward it daily.
Internationally, the world is beginning to see two major changes and beginning to react to them. The first is the Euro currency (it will replace the dollar as the main store of value within our lifetimes and feel free to hold me to that). The second is mentioned in the article and headline, Asia is replacing the US as the exciting place to be. For well over 100 years everything the Americas touched was golden because we had resources, ideas, and lower costs that really helped an idea succeed. In the last decade that momentum has shifted to Asia. While the momentum shift is probably early it certainly isn't wrong, and another thing that you can count on in our lifetimes is that Asia will become the US of the 21st century. If you doubt me go chat up some high school kids. They all plan to be millionares with no real understanding of how to become one.
Crap, I live in a studio (that costs less than 15% of my income) and make 50 and feel like I'm falling behind.
Excel is probably tip top of the spreadsheet world (not just because the data format is the standard). While open office's calc is good and getting better Excel has more short cuts that I use daily.
Why do you think most /.ers would give up food and water first?