Tell that to the thousands of Chinese immigrants who come to the U.S. each year (be it legally, or illegally in the cargo holds of boats).
If the U.S. is so goddamn unsavory, how come we have such a huge influx of immigration? Maybe because at this point, the U.S. is the closest thing to paradise the world has?
On an interesting note, it appears the the FBI considers TAIWAN a priority in counter-intelligence activities, and a hostile intelligence threat to the United States. Reno calls Taiwan an intelligence threat
Thats the dorkiest thing I have ever heard. Ya might as well place Canada and Mexico up there. Clinton is so pro-China it disgusts me. Taiwan is the country whose democracy is being threatened by a war-hawkish China (who by the way has recently threatened to engage in ***NUCLEAR WARFARE*** with the U.S.) and Taiwan is the one on the list. Dumbasses....
And as for the US they have no grounds to get on a moral high horse as their regularly use social, economic and military pressure to impose their will on the world
If not us, then who? I think we can pretty much agree that running protesting students over with tanks is a bad thing, yes? How about the blatant censoring of material that it displeasing to the Communist Party? The jailing and oppression of political dissenters and non-standard religions?
You're argument is a variation on the ad hominem fallacy. If a person who says, "It is wrong to murder", is himself a murderer, does it make his statement any less true?
Luddites Unite! We can't have technological advancements if it means a few people will be out of work!
We should all go back to an agrarian society where everyone needed to wake up early to milk the cows and tend the fields. Never mind that technology creates new efficiencies and allows people to devote more of their time(a valuable resource) to tasks like *researching cures for diseases*.
That's like a webmaster saying: "If Dreamweaver gets any more advanced, I'll be out of a job, starving and homeless".
If all you can do is one thing, then you should consider yourself just a more expensive robot.
Having a robot do the repetitive, menial tasks lets humans, as a whole, focus on things that require more intelligence, versatility and creativity. This is a good thing.
What about Ancient Roman artifacts? They did lotsa bad shit in their time, including feeding slaves and Christians to the Lions. They killed plenty of Jews, hell they killed the most famous Jew of all, Jesus Christs, for his-sakes. Thats pretty durn bad. I think we should ban sales of all Roman art and architecture.
Freedom is a great thing. Americans are more sensitive to the issues of freedom because we have been raised on the basis of personal liberties outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Hence we will usually deride those who don't believe in these liberties with the same fervor as we do.
The Lone Gunmen are my least favorite characters on the show. They just sort of babble on in the X-Files equivalent of marketspeak -- "You mean they downloaded the virus into the defense mastrix and how the system is overloaded and can't be rebooted? What about the carrier tones"....
Well thats a product of poor writing. I enjoy the premise of the Lone Gunmen however. They were pretty cool in the introductory episode where they first run into Mulder (the scene where they are playing D&D in a backroom was classic), and the whole "white-hat", "black-hat" thing. With some better writing and dialogue, I think it would be an enjoyable show to watch. You have to remember that William Gibson wrote the FPS episode, and from what I hear, he is kind of out of touch with what the "reality" of gaming and technology is currently.
Besides, everytime they come on the plot ends up being "we need to save our friends!" like in that lameass FPS episode.
Well, they're hackers, not federal agents, so some situations that involve high-level espionage and physical violence and gunplay, are somewhat out of their realm. But from what I've seen, in most of their appearances, the Gunmen are crucial to the solving of cases, like when stuff needs to be hacked into, or codes need to be cracked. I also enjoy the geeky environment that the Gunmen exist in. There's just nothing like it, outside of X-Files.
The show is so over-the-hill. They are totally running out of ideas, and it seems like all the interesting premises have already been visited.
The only thing that makes this show halfway interesting is the banter between Mulder and Scully, and the appearance by the Lone Gunmen. I also enjoy the romantic tension between the two agents, especially because Mulder is such an introverted geek (like me).
But otherwise, the show has become so blase, and once The Sopranos comes back on, I'm not even going to think twice about switching to HBO.
I've used it on a Solaris. Had nothing but problems. The server restarted itself every 20 minutes, always spit back all kinds of semaphore errors. Support sucked.
I particularly enjoyed how they had to program a Windows Registry Emulator that needs to be run alongside the server on Solaris. I was cracking my ass up when I saw that.
Except he has to use his new equity and revenue to cover his shorts... cutting into his profit, netting him $0, or worse. Doesn't sound like a winning proposition to me. Unless you have a crystal ball beowulf cluster, you're better off not investing at all.
Of course the doctor's not going to hedge himself at full parity with shorts. Then it becomes a zero-sum position! (In fact, less than zero if you include transaction fees).
Ideally, the doctor would short a certain percentage of his property values and revenues in order to offset a percentage of his losses -- should a loss occur. In this way, he has put a limit on how much money he can lose, but he has also put a cap on how much he can make if his property goes up.
The moral of the story is that he has sacrificed reward in order to decrease his risk. Each person has a different threshold on how much risk they can take, and some people (however hard it may be to believe) are willing to forgo soaring profits, in order to prevent devastating losses.
I can't imagine shorting something unless there were a reason to expect it to decrease in value, because I expect every worthwhile investment to increase in value in the long term. The risk in shorting an investment is infinite, the risk in going long equals the initial investment; the benefits of the two are inverse.
Who do you think you are anyway, Karnak? How do you know that every worthwhile investment is going to increase in value in the long term? Uncertainty is inherent in every security.
Yes. Technically a short sale has infinite downside. But a long position has infinite upside and they cancel each other out quite nicely, thus removing a great deal of uncertainty.
Besides, I haven't seen many stock prices hit infinity lately, have you?
Well, it's not quite as simple as all that. If he's forced to cover his short position, he's just lost his insurance, at the most crucial point (when the market may be close to its peak).
Substitute short sales with puts. Conceptually the same, just different instruments. Gradate the expiration dates of the puts so when one expires, the next one takes over.
Downside is also finite.
Now we're really in the soup. At this point, something that's supposed to blunt (negative feedback) the harmful effects of a catastrophe is no longer doing so. In fact, the mass claims from this one systemic catastrophe weaken the insurance companies' ability to pay off unrelated claims, which causes ripple effects through the rest of the economy.
Yes, and if the world blew up, insurance companies would be screwed too.
Unfortunately, the market consists of networks and channels than span both horizontally and vertically. If Microsoft were to suddenly go under, we should expect so would the exclusive Microsoft product reseller, as well as the software company that specializes in developing Microsoft applications. You can't grow the crop, if the soil ain't fertile.
Since we don't get major global economic meltdowns too often, I would argue that, overall, insurance and insurance companies work to decrease risk more than they increase risk.
I have real trouble figuring out who would issue such a security.
Ginnie Mae, Fannie Mae, and Sallie Mae, just to name a few. The "Mortgage-backed securites", "Asset-backed securities", "Collateralized Mortgage Obligations", and "Real Estate Investment Trust" markets are what is driving the real estate market nowadays.
By bundling up and issuing partial ownership on assets and returns, you are dividing and distributing the same total amount of risk as before, but to a much larger number of people. Securities markets work on this very principle.
And what's up with the post itself? My sarcasm tags must not be working because it seems like he's saying "look at the gradual curve on the charts, it's not very steep". Of course not, it's a logrithmic chart.
Well, sparky, I think Cally's trying to point out that we're currently experiencing a correction as we speak.
Remember, the book was published 3/2000, before the last correction! -maybe it really did have a big impact on Wall Street, kind of a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Naaah. There have been bears yelling that the market was overvalued and that the bubble would burst when the Dow was at 5000 in 1996. Its been four years and the Dow has more than doubled in value since then, suddenly the market corrects, and we consider these bears to be "market gurus"? I don't think so.
When you flip a coin, 50% of the time, you are going to be right.
Next, banks have all sorts of regulations which limits how much they can "bet" on the stock market. Unfortunately ( and at no worse possible time ), many of these restrictions are being lifted so that the poor banks can compete in this very same "Irrationally Exuberant" market.
If you're referring to the Glass-Steagall Act, it was repealed because it was obsolete, and it didn't work. The U.S. was the only nation with a law restricting banks from engaging in investment activities, while countries like Germany, U.K. and Japan set their banks loose to do whatever business they wanted. It hobbled the U.S. banks' ability to compete in its own country against foreign banks. The Glass-Steagal Act was part of a knee-jerk, reactionary reform, that really didn't need to be implemented. Besides, banks have been finding loopholes in the Act (like creating holding companies) and have been exploiting them for decades.
There would, of course be the serious drying up investment funds, but even though this will reduce the total amount of money ( mainly M3+ ), it will not immediately mean the loss of revenue ( unlike a bank failure ); merely the loss of earing assets and expansionary policy. Growth will probably become negative for a while, but I don't necessarily see massive amounts of firm failures. Just the growth dependant ones ( such as new firms still in debt, still waiting for a profitable quarter ).
I for one am glad that I own foreign stock. The globalization of markets is a stabilizing force, and I think fund managers that are sufficiently diversified will be able to weather any major downturns.
Personally, I look on the possibility of a serious correction in the markets as a buying opportunity. The secret is to find the companies that are fundamentally strong.
If people are going to use history as an indication of future performance (which is what this guy Schiller is doing), then you will see that the long-term trend of the stock market is BULLISH.
Unless the planet suddenly regresses back to the Middle Ages, technological advances will always provide greater levels of production, output and efficiencies that will drive businesses upward.
Despite all the crashes, recessions and busts for whatever reasons, the market has continued to climb higher and higher, and chances are, it will continue this trend. If you put your money in a properly diversified portfolio that includes the top companies of several different industries, (such as the S&P500 index stock) you should be good for the long-term - and thats all it boils down to.
2) Even if he shorted, the price of these securities would continue to rise in the short term, squeezing him (forcing him to cover his short position by buying the securities at a loss).
The net effect is that our hypothetical doctor is more exposed, not less exposed, to risk.
I disagree. By short-selling Des Moines properties, and Medicine incomes, he is buying insurance, therefore he is decreasing the variance of his portfolio and hence his overall risk.
If he gets squeezed out of his shorts, its cool, because his property and revenue will have gone up. If his property and revenue go down, its cool, because his shorts will have made money.
The largest difference here is that I'm NOT saying I personally met with, and spoke to God - who then spoke back, in English no less, to tell me what to do.
What then, happened to you to make you believe that God was directly involving Himself with your life? At least if you heard God's voice and had a conversation, you would have a good basis for hypothesizing it might be God, himself.
You must realize that if scientists could prove things just through "gut feelings", science as we know it would be much different than it is now. Scientific method requires conclusive evidence.
Thank you.
Re:Please take a "philosophy of science" class
on
Thus Spake Stallman
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· Score: 1
So what PROOF can you offer that induction (which all of science is based on) is a valid method for the acquisition of new knowledge? What PROOF can you offer that your senses aren't being manipulated by Descarte's "evil genius"? None, because these things aren't provable.
Ummm... It's been awhile since I had to read any of Descartes' works (I admit the stuff makes me cross-eyed), but wasn't the "evil genius" proposition a little bit of solipsism he used to present his cogito ergo sum argument? I think its generally accepted that solipsism is impossible to prove or disprove so its a philosophical dead-end. Likewise, isn't it kind of redundant and a bit circular to ask for a "proof of proof" or the "reasoning behind reason"?
Slashdot Mirror
If the U.S. is so goddamn unsavory, how come we have such a huge influx of immigration? Maybe because at this point, the U.S. is the closest thing to paradise the world has?
Thats the dorkiest thing I have ever heard. Ya might as well place Canada and Mexico up there. Clinton is so pro-China it disgusts me. Taiwan is the country whose democracy is being threatened by a war-hawkish China (who by the way has recently threatened to engage in ***NUCLEAR WARFARE*** with the U.S.) and Taiwan is the one on the list. Dumbasses....
If not us, then who? I think we can pretty much agree that running protesting students over with tanks is a bad thing, yes? How about the blatant censoring of material that it displeasing to the Communist Party? The jailing and oppression of political dissenters and non-standard religions?
You're argument is a variation on the ad hominem fallacy. If a person who says, "It is wrong to murder", is himself a murderer, does it make his statement any less true?
China has 1.4 billion people. Thats 1.4 billions mouths to feed hamburgers and 2.8 billion pairs of feet to put shoes on.
The government is a single entity. Businesses are composed of thousands of seperate, entities, each with its own self-interests.
We should all go back to an agrarian society where everyone needed to wake up early to milk the cows and tend the fields. Never mind that technology creates new efficiencies and allows people to devote more of their time(a valuable resource) to tasks like *researching cures for diseases*.
Nasty, brutish and short. Thats the life for me!
If all you can do is one thing, then you should consider yourself just a more expensive robot.
Having a robot do the repetitive, menial tasks lets humans, as a whole, focus on things that require more intelligence, versatility and creativity. This is a good thing.
Its not ok for *ANY* country to censor things. Nobody here is supporting the whole Jon Johansen case, especially the Americans.
What about Ancient Roman artifacts? They did lotsa bad shit in their time, including feeding slaves and Christians to the Lions. They killed plenty of Jews, hell they killed the most famous Jew of all, Jesus Christs, for his-sakes. Thats pretty durn bad. I think we should ban sales of all Roman art and architecture.
Hence we will usually deride those who don't believe in these liberties with the same fervor as we do.
Well thats a product of poor writing. I enjoy the premise of the Lone Gunmen however. They were pretty cool in the introductory episode where they first run into Mulder (the scene where they are playing D&D in a backroom was classic), and the whole "white-hat", "black-hat" thing. With some better writing and dialogue, I think it would be an enjoyable show to watch. You have to remember that William Gibson wrote the FPS episode, and from what I hear, he is kind of out of touch with what the "reality" of gaming and technology is currently.
Besides, everytime they come on the plot ends up being "we need to save our friends!" like in that lameass FPS episode.
Well, they're hackers, not federal agents, so some situations that involve high-level espionage and physical violence and gunplay, are somewhat out of their realm. But from what I've seen, in most of their appearances, the Gunmen are crucial to the solving of cases, like when stuff needs to be hacked into, or codes need to be cracked. I also enjoy the geeky environment that the Gunmen exist in. There's just nothing like it, outside of X-Files.
The only thing that makes this show halfway interesting is the banter between Mulder and Scully, and the appearance by the Lone Gunmen. I also enjoy the romantic tension between the two agents, especially because Mulder is such an introverted geek (like me).
But otherwise, the show has become so blase, and once The Sopranos comes back on, I'm not even going to think twice about switching to HBO.
The Lone Gunmen RULE!
I particularly enjoyed how they had to program a Windows Registry Emulator that needs to be run alongside the server on Solaris. I was cracking my ass up when I saw that.
He was being sarcastic.
I can point to a certain "romantic" worm that has made its way through the internet recently that will pointedly refute that statement.
Yahoo. I can finally run NEdit, my one and only Motif application, on the original libraries. Yippee.
Of course the doctor's not going to hedge himself at full parity with shorts. Then it becomes a zero-sum position! (In fact, less than zero if you include transaction fees).
Ideally, the doctor would short a certain percentage of his property values and revenues in order to offset a percentage of his losses -- should a loss occur. In this way, he has put a limit on how much money he can lose, but he has also put a cap on how much he can make if his property goes up.
The moral of the story is that he has sacrificed reward in order to decrease his risk. Each person has a different threshold on how much risk they can take, and some people (however hard it may be to believe) are willing to forgo soaring profits, in order to prevent devastating losses.
I can't imagine shorting something unless there were a reason to expect it to decrease in value, because I expect every worthwhile investment to increase in value in the long term. The risk in shorting an investment is infinite, the risk in going long equals the initial investment; the benefits of the two are inverse.
Who do you think you are anyway, Karnak? How do you know that every worthwhile investment is going to increase in value in the long term? Uncertainty is inherent in every security.
Yes. Technically a short sale has infinite downside. But a long position has infinite upside and they cancel each other out quite nicely, thus removing a great deal of uncertainty.
Besides, I haven't seen many stock prices hit infinity lately, have you?
Substitute short sales with puts. Conceptually the same, just different instruments. Gradate the expiration dates of the puts so when one expires, the next one takes over.
Downside is also finite.
Now we're really in the soup. At this point, something that's supposed to blunt (negative feedback) the harmful effects of a catastrophe is no longer doing so. In fact, the mass claims from this one systemic catastrophe weaken the insurance companies' ability to pay off unrelated claims, which causes ripple effects through the rest of the economy.
Yes, and if the world blew up, insurance companies would be screwed too.
Unfortunately, the market consists of networks and channels than span both horizontally and vertically. If Microsoft were to suddenly go under, we should expect so would the exclusive Microsoft product reseller, as well as the software company that specializes in developing Microsoft applications. You can't grow the crop, if the soil ain't fertile.
Since we don't get major global economic meltdowns too often, I would argue that, overall, insurance and insurance companies work to decrease risk more than they increase risk.
I have real trouble figuring out who would issue such a security.
Ginnie Mae, Fannie Mae, and Sallie Mae, just to name a few. The "Mortgage-backed securites", "Asset-backed securities", "Collateralized Mortgage Obligations", and "Real Estate Investment Trust" markets are what is driving the real estate market nowadays.
By bundling up and issuing partial ownership on assets and returns, you are dividing and distributing the same total amount of risk as before, but to a much larger number of people.
Securities markets work on this very principle.
With enough money, you can make "arrested" and "detained" mean any number of things. (I'm being serious.)
Well, sparky, I think Cally's trying to point out that we're currently experiencing a correction as we speak.
Remember, the book was published 3/2000, before the last correction! -maybe it really did have a big impact on Wall Street, kind of a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Naaah. There have been bears yelling that the market was overvalued and that the bubble would burst when the Dow was at 5000 in 1996. Its been four years and the Dow has more than doubled in value since then, suddenly the market corrects, and we consider these bears to be "market gurus"? I don't think so.
When you flip a coin, 50% of the time, you are going to be right.
If you're referring to the Glass-Steagall Act, it was repealed because it was obsolete, and it didn't work. The U.S. was the only nation with a law restricting banks from engaging in investment activities, while countries like Germany, U.K. and Japan set their banks loose to do whatever business they wanted. It hobbled the U.S. banks' ability to compete in its own country against foreign banks. The Glass-Steagal Act was part of a knee-jerk, reactionary reform, that really didn't need to be implemented. Besides, banks have been finding loopholes in the Act (like creating holding companies) and have been exploiting them for decades.
There would, of course be the serious drying up investment funds, but even though this will reduce the total amount of money ( mainly M3+ ), it will not immediately mean the loss of revenue ( unlike a bank failure ); merely the loss of earing assets and expansionary policy. Growth will probably become negative for a while, but I don't necessarily see massive amounts of firm failures. Just the growth dependant ones ( such as new firms still in debt, still waiting for a profitable quarter ).
I for one am glad that I own foreign stock. The globalization of markets is a stabilizing force, and I think fund managers that are sufficiently diversified will be able to weather any major downturns.
If people are going to use history as an indication of future performance (which is what this guy Schiller is doing), then you will see that the long-term trend of the stock market is BULLISH.
Unless the planet suddenly regresses back to the Middle Ages, technological advances will always provide greater levels of production, output and efficiencies that will drive businesses upward.
Despite all the crashes, recessions and busts for whatever reasons, the market has continued to climb higher and higher, and chances are, it will continue this trend. If you put your money in a properly diversified portfolio that includes the top companies of several different industries, (such as the S&P500 index stock) you should be good for the long-term - and thats all it boils down to.
Everything else is a crapshoot.
The net effect is that our hypothetical doctor is more exposed, not less exposed, to risk.
I disagree. By short-selling Des Moines properties, and Medicine incomes, he is buying insurance, therefore he is decreasing the variance of his portfolio and hence his overall risk.
If he gets squeezed out of his shorts, its cool, because his property and revenue will have gone up. If his property and revenue go down, its cool, because his shorts will have made money.
Its really quite simple.
What then, happened to you to make you believe that God was directly involving Himself with your life? At least if you heard God's voice and had a conversation, you would have a good basis for hypothesizing it might be God, himself.
You must realize that if scientists could prove things just through "gut feelings", science as we know it would be much different than it is now. Scientific method requires conclusive evidence.
Thank you.
Ummm... It's been awhile since I had to read any of Descartes' works (I admit the stuff makes me cross-eyed), but wasn't the "evil genius" proposition a little bit of solipsism he used to present his cogito ergo sum argument? I think its generally accepted that solipsism is impossible to prove or disprove so its a philosophical dead-end. Likewise, isn't it kind of redundant and a bit circular to ask for a "proof of proof" or the "reasoning behind reason"?
Just thoughts from a philosophy neophyte