College crimes are often posted online. I've heard about crimes at colleges in OTHER states. That sort of journalism has been kicking around for some time, but everyone being able to sit around and watch/read it (instead of being busy working at a farm, in a factory, etc.) is relatively new.
Only within the last century. They used to read about crime in the newspaper. Then they used to hear about it on the TV. Now they read about it on the internet. I don't see the "relatively new" change that supposedly raises the visibility of college crime, especially petty crime like stealing bikes, laptops, etc.
Eh, at $1.5 billion, there's a hell of a lot of cost from somewhere other than launch and operations. It sounds to me like in the ballpark of building an MSL from scratch, to be honest.
If current technology allows them to include suitable test equipment right ON the rovers themselves, it seems silly to work around a premise of collecting samples with one missions device, and then working out a means of sending a SECOND device to not only be able to escape Mars' gravity well but also re-enter the earths atmosphere, land, get collected, and be secured by the mission planners to THEN do tests on. OR only slightly better, send a secondary lab rover designed to retrieve the samples and be able to perform tests on them there with the potential of failure of either device pooching the entirety of both mission segments.
I would call the idea of two probes, one to collect samples and one to ship them to Earth, a brilliant, well-thought division of labor. Testing Mars samples on Earth will be a huge advance in science and worth the complexity and risk of this mission. Please keep in mind that one can make multiple copies of both sorts of probes and resend either one, if it fails.
No, it's not. Those highly specialized pieces of equipment have high development costs. Making just two of them means you have half the development cost per unit.
It's more cost effective if they make it to their destination. Keep in mind we are still at the "will it explode?" and "if it doesn't explode, will it avoid crashing?" and "if it doesn't crash, will it keep working?" part of the technology. So if the Mars rover works out, that's great, and in fact is a valuable enough confirmation to justify trying to do something similar again.
An observation which supports the original posters observations about economies of scale. A second MSL mission would have far less program risk than a new design precisely because these issues have been worked on.
It's also worth noting that NASA really is launching a second MSL here. They're reusing the chassis, landing system, etc. They're being forced by budget cuts to use these economies of scale which they have repeatedly ignored in the past.
But it's really better right now to have each rover be a stepping stone to the next. The sort of answers Curiosity gives us will tell us the sort of questions we want to design the next rover to resolve.
Please keep in mind that people don't live forever. As it stands, there will be a nine year delay between the first MSL and the following mission using that platform. That's something like 20-25% of a research scientists' professional lifetime.
They could have already built a second MSL for launch during the 2014 window. They could have built a number of MERs for the cost of the MSL mission and had those on the ground by 2008. The glacially slow, "stepping stone" approach means that a considerable amount of Earth-side talent is being grossly underused.
So why do all the people advocating cuts to spending myopically focus on social programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Because those two programs are more than 40% of all spending. And unlike defense spending (which is roughly another 20%), they don't serve an existential need.
So then explain the fact that crime has gone DOWN?
I don't buy that. What's the basis for your claim? In my defense, I've frequently run across people who have continual problems now with crime yet didn't decades ago.
People started locking their doors when they started watching the news and HEARING about more crimes.
No, that's not right either.
People had cheaper things stolen and the whole state didn't hear about it.
The whole state doesn't hear about college crimes now either (unless it happens to push a hot button). And "yellow journalism" (the kind that hypes crime and such) has been kicking around since the beginning of the 20th Century.
There never was a Mayberry and people were just as dishonest then as they are now
I have to disagree at least for the US. Over the past half century a lot of rural places have changed from not locking one's doors to widespread theft of agricultural equipment and various manifestations of the drug war, such as marijuana growing and meth labs.
Another place is college. Try leaving a laptop or bicycle unlocked and unattended. Fifty years ago you could have gotten away with it except for perhaps the most urbanized colleges.
It is worth noting that just as there is the myth of Mayberry, there's also the myth of the Children of the Corn, namely, that small towns have "dark secrets". My view is that small towns were more honest because that is what it takes for a small, isolated society where everyone knows everyone, to survive. It also becomes much harder for dishonesty to profit. You have a small set of possible targets, and they'll figure it out eventually.
When you get large urban societies or a massive, flat society like the internet, potential con artists can easily move from one mark to the next as well as filter through large numbers of potential targets for a mark. Thieves have a sea of targets to choose from. The payoff for dishonesty and theft is much better.
So I agree that the people haven't really changed. But the payoffs for various sorts of dishonesty have changed.
There are people who actually sell pork bellies and other products closely tied to pork bellies that are trying to reduce risks associated with making and selling a physical product. Of course there risks and potential adverse effects associated with the outcomes of an election, but how concrete are the prediction of those effects compared to those of what happens to say a pork and bean maker that can't get cheap enough pork? And do these prediction markets actually amount to any useful hedging?
While we don't fully know what a future president is going to do, we generally have a really good idea at some point in the future, who is going to be that future president. That is the concrete event which one would compare to your price of pork at a given time.
Second, it does matter to many people who gets elected US president. There are winners and losers. So there's the angle by which hedging can be done.
Finally, there is the implicit "hedging is good gambling, speculation is bad gambling" belief lurking back there. For some reason, you want us to rationalize market trading on the basis of hedging alone. But it's worth remembering that there is considerable value in the speculation side as well.
For example, once again, Intrade has turned out to be accurately predict from many months in advance who the next president of the US would be. I have used that information productively, for example, to debate people who claimed Romney had a lock on the US presidency ("If Romney is so likely to win, then why does Intrade buy Obama at 55%?").
Speculation does have adverse effects, but it's primary benefit is simply the accurate estimate of prices on markets. It also provides considerable liquidity to markets (as someone noted, over two-thirds of oil futures trading apparently is speculation-driven).
I think a lot of the confusion comes from calling this a "market".
Given that it is a market, there is no confusion.
In a market you place "bets" on pork bellies, the S&P 500, the future value of the yen, whatever. Placing bets on the outcome of an indeterminate event (as opposed to the future price of an asset) is simple gambling, pure and simple.
There's no distinction between placing bets on the future price of a generic securitized asset and the future price of a particular sort of asset which happens to be valued based solely on which candidate wins the US Presidency in 2012.
I have no problem with gambling, but stop trying to pretend it's something different by calling it a "prediction market."
It's a market which trades in predictions. No pretense.
I find it bizarre that one can claim that a market on pork bellies futures and a betting market on the US Presidency are somehow very different. You just aren't understanding. They're both betting markets with securities whose value is solely based on concrete future events.
This strikes me as another discussion suggesting mob rule is a good substitute for fundamental truth. For decades people in financial markets have suggested mob rule is the best method of predicting prices based on supply & demand theory. Yet time and time again we see "irrational" financial bubbles, which have nothing to do with real surpluses or shortages, grow and bust. Future market prices are set by mobs, but future supply & demand changes are not known.
Show us something better. Markets work amazingly well. Even those bubbles and bursts cull traders who follow the herd. What else is so effective at that? Fundamental truth is at best, an ideal. IMHO, markets do a better job of approaching that ideal than anything, including the scientific method, for evaluating the value of financial securities.
Well, that's how hedging works and the bigwig would be using the market as most people think it should be used (speculation gets a bad rap here). The bribery still has risk since the candidate need not actually do what the bigwig wants. If you're giving money to a campaign and expecting more in return, then that's incentive for the politician to shake you down for more. You also might have some other bigwig with conflicting interests and bigger campaign donations.
The problem is not a problem in the sense you are thinking of it. If you have a small market and a large one, then the small market is going to have network effect problems (similar to Metcalfe's Law). It can still provide value if something about the smaller market (the traders or the sort of claims covered) is different enough. The Iowa Election Market (IEM) has an interesting trading group with a bunch of US and academic traders (and US traders no longer can trade on Intrade at present). It also has some rather unique markets.
So as you're thinking of it, it's not a real problem. The big market will push the small market, but most people trading on the small market would want that since it gives them a more accurate price and maybe a bit of liquidity from the arbitragers.
Second, uncapped markets have the potential for considerable moral hazard as the market capitalization grows. If there's a trillion dollars on who becomes the next US President, you can bet a lot of people with a lot of money are going to have some ideas, both legal and illegal, about how they can improve the odds in their favor. That's why real life markets of this sort (such as futures markets) have caps.
That's completely out of proportion to how sexually attractive that 47-years old career politician was
I have to disagree. Speechwise, he didn't have that much going for him except he wasn't Dubya and had an eager audience. The real effectiveness was in the images and slogans.
If he weren't decent eye candy (say he looked like McCain instead), the imagery just wouldn't have sold, I think. We like our messiahs pretty.
But in fundamentalist societies like Iran and some of the southern US states
Merely having fundamentalists (who aren't at all equivalent) in your society isn't the same as having a fundamentalist society. Having someone in the neighborhood who occasionally advocates prayer in school or creationism isn't the same as official organs of the state executing people for sponsoring pornography and rigidly holding to blatantly religious law.
When I say there is nothing Kodak could have done, I don't mean they could not have come out a with a product. What I mean is the model was based on selling consumables at a huge profit, then pissing that profit away. There was no way for them to make those profits on the cheap cameras they sold. They have not, for a long time,like Nikon or Canon with a tradition or selling $10,000 cameras. Kodaks innovation was the Advantix.
In other words, there was plenty that Kodak could have done to survive and even expand its business. But not while preserving a broken business model that never really worked well.
I agree with sjames. Everyone already knows the stock price is going to zero. And as long as the business hasn't completely divested of everything (or permanently obtained more liabilities than it has assets), there will continue to be future income and hence, reason to value the stock at a small positive value.
Slashdot Mirror
You have the wrong time scale. The "leave it to Beaver" era predates the high crime periods of the 70s and 80s by a couple of decades.
College crimes are often posted online. I've heard about crimes at colleges in OTHER states. That sort of journalism has been kicking around for some time, but everyone being able to sit around and watch/read it (instead of being busy working at a farm, in a factory, etc.) is relatively new.
Only within the last century. They used to read about crime in the newspaper. Then they used to hear about it on the TV. Now they read about it on the internet. I don't see the "relatively new" change that supposedly raises the visibility of college crime, especially petty crime like stealing bikes, laptops, etc.
Eh, at $1.5 billion, there's a hell of a lot of cost from somewhere other than launch and operations. It sounds to me like in the ballpark of building an MSL from scratch, to be honest.
If current technology allows them to include suitable test equipment right ON the rovers themselves, it seems silly to work around a premise of collecting samples with one missions device, and then working out a means of sending a SECOND device to not only be able to escape Mars' gravity well but also re-enter the earths atmosphere, land, get collected, and be secured by the mission planners to THEN do tests on. OR only slightly better, send a secondary lab rover designed to retrieve the samples and be able to perform tests on them there with the potential of failure of either device pooching the entirety of both mission segments.
I would call the idea of two probes, one to collect samples and one to ship them to Earth, a brilliant, well-thought division of labor. Testing Mars samples on Earth will be a huge advance in science and worth the complexity and risk of this mission. Please keep in mind that one can make multiple copies of both sorts of probes and resend either one, if it fails.
It's deadly fucking dull and repetitive. It barely makes for decent writing and doesn't make decent TV at all.
Which is why the space scientist is the cheapest part of a space science mission. People really love that deadly dullness and work cheap to get it.
No, it's not. Those highly specialized pieces of equipment have high development costs. Making just two of them means you have half the development cost per unit.
It's more cost effective if they make it to their destination. Keep in mind we are still at the "will it explode?" and "if it doesn't explode, will it avoid crashing?" and "if it doesn't crash, will it keep working?" part of the technology. So if the Mars rover works out, that's great, and in fact is a valuable enough confirmation to justify trying to do something similar again.
An observation which supports the original posters observations about economies of scale. A second MSL mission would have far less program risk than a new design precisely because these issues have been worked on.
It's also worth noting that NASA really is launching a second MSL here. They're reusing the chassis, landing system, etc. They're being forced by budget cuts to use these economies of scale which they have repeatedly ignored in the past.
But it's really better right now to have each rover be a stepping stone to the next. The sort of answers Curiosity gives us will tell us the sort of questions we want to design the next rover to resolve.
Please keep in mind that people don't live forever. As it stands, there will be a nine year delay between the first MSL and the following mission using that platform. That's something like 20-25% of a research scientists' professional lifetime.
They could have already built a second MSL for launch during the 2014 window. They could have built a number of MERs for the cost of the MSL mission and had those on the ground by 2008. The glacially slow, "stepping stone" approach means that a considerable amount of Earth-side talent is being grossly underused.
So why do all the people advocating cuts to spending myopically focus on social programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Because those two programs are more than 40% of all spending. And unlike defense spending (which is roughly another 20%), they don't serve an existential need.
So then explain the fact that crime has gone DOWN?
I don't buy that. What's the basis for your claim? In my defense, I've frequently run across people who have continual problems now with crime yet didn't decades ago.
People started locking their doors when they started watching the news and HEARING about more crimes.
No, that's not right either.
People had cheaper things stolen and the whole state didn't hear about it.
The whole state doesn't hear about college crimes now either (unless it happens to push a hot button). And "yellow journalism" (the kind that hypes crime and such) has been kicking around since the beginning of the 20th Century.
And you could have earned even more than that in the time it took you to learn all the stuff that allows you to make $100 in that amount of time.
In that much time, AC could have filled the universe with copies of AC. I wouldn't point out what he could have done with the time. It's not prudent.
There never was a Mayberry and people were just as dishonest then as they are now
I have to disagree at least for the US. Over the past half century a lot of rural places have changed from not locking one's doors to widespread theft of agricultural equipment and various manifestations of the drug war, such as marijuana growing and meth labs.
Another place is college. Try leaving a laptop or bicycle unlocked and unattended. Fifty years ago you could have gotten away with it except for perhaps the most urbanized colleges.
It is worth noting that just as there is the myth of Mayberry, there's also the myth of the Children of the Corn, namely, that small towns have "dark secrets". My view is that small towns were more honest because that is what it takes for a small, isolated society where everyone knows everyone, to survive. It also becomes much harder for dishonesty to profit. You have a small set of possible targets, and they'll figure it out eventually.
When you get large urban societies or a massive, flat society like the internet, potential con artists can easily move from one mark to the next as well as filter through large numbers of potential targets for a mark. Thieves have a sea of targets to choose from. The payoff for dishonesty and theft is much better.
So I agree that the people haven't really changed. But the payoffs for various sorts of dishonesty have changed.
There are people who actually sell pork bellies and other products closely tied to pork bellies that are trying to reduce risks associated with making and selling a physical product. Of course there risks and potential adverse effects associated with the outcomes of an election, but how concrete are the prediction of those effects compared to those of what happens to say a pork and bean maker that can't get cheap enough pork? And do these prediction markets actually amount to any useful hedging?
While we don't fully know what a future president is going to do, we generally have a really good idea at some point in the future, who is going to be that future president. That is the concrete event which one would compare to your price of pork at a given time.
Second, it does matter to many people who gets elected US president. There are winners and losers. So there's the angle by which hedging can be done.
Finally, there is the implicit "hedging is good gambling, speculation is bad gambling" belief lurking back there. For some reason, you want us to rationalize market trading on the basis of hedging alone. But it's worth remembering that there is considerable value in the speculation side as well.
For example, once again, Intrade has turned out to be accurately predict from many months in advance who the next president of the US would be. I have used that information productively, for example, to debate people who claimed Romney had a lock on the US presidency ("If Romney is so likely to win, then why does Intrade buy Obama at 55%?").
Speculation does have adverse effects, but it's primary benefit is simply the accurate estimate of prices on markets. It also provides considerable liquidity to markets (as someone noted, over two-thirds of oil futures trading apparently is speculation-driven).
I found a problem in your calculation. You use the word, "if".
We always want their water!
I think a lot of the confusion comes from calling this a "market".
Given that it is a market, there is no confusion.
In a market you place "bets" on pork bellies, the S&P 500, the future value of the yen, whatever. Placing bets on the outcome of an indeterminate event (as opposed to the future price of an asset) is simple gambling, pure and simple.
There's no distinction between placing bets on the future price of a generic securitized asset and the future price of a particular sort of asset which happens to be valued based solely on which candidate wins the US Presidency in 2012.
I have no problem with gambling, but stop trying to pretend it's something different by calling it a "prediction market."
It's a market which trades in predictions. No pretense.
I find it bizarre that one can claim that a market on pork bellies futures and a betting market on the US Presidency are somehow very different. You just aren't understanding. They're both betting markets with securities whose value is solely based on concrete future events.
This strikes me as another discussion suggesting mob rule is a good substitute for fundamental truth. For decades people in financial markets have suggested mob rule is the best method of predicting prices based on supply & demand theory. Yet time and time again we see "irrational" financial bubbles, which have nothing to do with real surpluses or shortages, grow and bust. Future market prices are set by mobs, but future supply & demand changes are not known.
Show us something better. Markets work amazingly well. Even those bubbles and bursts cull traders who follow the herd. What else is so effective at that? Fundamental truth is at best, an ideal. IMHO, markets do a better job of approaching that ideal than anything, including the scientific method, for evaluating the value of financial securities.
I have a solution then. Make vote fraud extremely costly, so that merely having a bet on it isn't enough incentive to engage in it.
Well, that's how hedging works and the bigwig would be using the market as most people think it should be used (speculation gets a bad rap here). The bribery still has risk since the candidate need not actually do what the bigwig wants. If you're giving money to a campaign and expecting more in return, then that's incentive for the politician to shake you down for more. You also might have some other bigwig with conflicting interests and bigger campaign donations.
The problem is not a problem in the sense you are thinking of it. If you have a small market and a large one, then the small market is going to have network effect problems (similar to Metcalfe's Law). It can still provide value if something about the smaller market (the traders or the sort of claims covered) is different enough. The Iowa Election Market (IEM) has an interesting trading group with a bunch of US and academic traders (and US traders no longer can trade on Intrade at present). It also has some rather unique markets.
So as you're thinking of it, it's not a real problem. The big market will push the small market, but most people trading on the small market would want that since it gives them a more accurate price and maybe a bit of liquidity from the arbitragers.
Second, uncapped markets have the potential for considerable moral hazard as the market capitalization grows. If there's a trillion dollars on who becomes the next US President, you can bet a lot of people with a lot of money are going to have some ideas, both legal and illegal, about how they can improve the odds in their favor. That's why real life markets of this sort (such as futures markets) have caps.
If she did run she'd be admitting second string to him (something I don't think her ego will allow her to do).
She would be running for US President. That's a huge consolation prize for an ego no matter how big.
So the US is imperfect? Imagine that.
That's completely out of proportion to how sexually attractive that 47-years old career politician was
I have to disagree. Speechwise, he didn't have that much going for him except he wasn't Dubya and had an eager audience. The real effectiveness was in the images and slogans.
If he weren't decent eye candy (say he looked like McCain instead), the imagery just wouldn't have sold, I think. We like our messiahs pretty.
But in fundamentalist societies like Iran and some of the southern US states
Merely having fundamentalists (who aren't at all equivalent) in your society isn't the same as having a fundamentalist society. Having someone in the neighborhood who occasionally advocates prayer in school or creationism isn't the same as official organs of the state executing people for sponsoring pornography and rigidly holding to blatantly religious law.
When I say there is nothing Kodak could have done, I don't mean they could not have come out a with a product. What I mean is the model was based on selling consumables at a huge profit, then pissing that profit away. There was no way for them to make those profits on the cheap cameras they sold. They have not, for a long time,like Nikon or Canon with a tradition or selling $10,000 cameras. Kodaks innovation was the Advantix.
In other words, there was plenty that Kodak could have done to survive and even expand its business. But not while preserving a broken business model that never really worked well.
I agree with sjames. Everyone already knows the stock price is going to zero. And as long as the business hasn't completely divested of everything (or permanently obtained more liabilities than it has assets), there will continue to be future income and hence, reason to value the stock at a small positive value.