Sorry mate, but you sound insane. You're busy analysing the wording in a quote that has been paraphrased by the journalist. Would you care to analyse the line "Mr. Edwards’s head had been wrapped in plastic, and his throat appeared to have been slashed." Is that the kind of civil liberty you are so keen to protect?
If you don't like it, why? I like my life, where people who commit crimes are actually tracked down by the state and held. You might not believe it, but the police can actually gain access to your house if they can show evidence that you committed a crime. If you say something to your neighbour about how your wife won't be coming back again, ever, he can be sure of that, they can actually use his testimony in court - almost like they have recording devices everywhere. Police can ask you hard questions, try to trip you up, even lie to you to make you incriminate yourself. If any of these methods were invented today, would you allow them? Tech is cool and all, but somehow I don't think automatic reg plate recognition would have made things a great deal easier for Adolf.
"What is YOUR point? That the original poster was wrong because of one incorrect example?"
seems like a fair point to me. List of 18 countries that it's banned in, 3 are non-dictatorships, which is supposed to make some kind of point, except one of those is actually... a dictatorship.
I don't think financial engineering really comes into CDOs, except in that financial engineering was something the banks could do that the ratings agencies couldn't do very well. The ratings agencies were using monte-carlo models to work out the risk in the structures, which were not exactly state of the art. The best people at the ratings agencies were being hired by the banks to reverse engineer the ratings. Generally I also don't see the difference between "productive gambling" and "crime" under your definition - it seems CDOs were a crime, because you could lose too much. I don't see where to draw the line between this and short selling stocks (where your potential loss is unlimited) or fx trading (where you are always short one currency). The thing about banks is that they take these kind of risks all the time - that is what lending is all about. The problem here was that the ratings allowed them to say there was no risk, and the other problem is that we rely on these institutions to make payments, buy houses, and keep our savings safe. Financial engineering would not have justified any of the long CDO positions at major banks, without credit ratings.
The answer is, mostly, neither. Finance is a gambling game played by dreamers. I think Fred Schwed had it right when he said "We expect a child to grow up in time, and learn what is reality, as opposed to what are only his hopes. This however is too much for the romantic Wall Streeter - and they are all romantics, whether they be villains or philanthropists. Else they would never have chosen this business, which is a business of dreams. They continue to dream of conquests, coups and power, for themselves or for the people they advise." Aaron brown of AQR holds the same view. Essentially, people love to gamble, so people play the markets. Then afterwards when people need to explain why it's done, professors come up with reasons like "efficient allocation of capital" - to some extent, this is an effect of finance, and probably the reason it isn't as restricted as gambling is. But the reason people do it is to get rich quick - by gambling.
I spent some time studying the credit crunch too. I believe the effect of CDOs was to allow banks to avoid holding sufficient reserves. They could take their loan books, get an AAA rating on them by packaging them as CDOs, and then take up more debt. This then created an old-fashioned banking crisis like the ones in 1907 and the late 19th century, before reserving was enforced. The mathematical models were largely irrelevant detail - these deals were marked to the market price for correlation, which was supported by the AAA credit ratings. But it's worth bearing in mind that the banking collapse was really just a trigger, the bigger problem was the huge, unsustainable level of debt held by American consumers, and the bad investing decisions they made in housing. The banking collapse caused a tightening of credit, which made things hard for business, which caused redundancies for overstretched consumers, which caused Americans to suddenly start saving, which caused a reduction of demand, which made things harder for business. The problem is in a modern, free market democracy, individuals need to take some responsibility for their financial continence. Either that or we need a revival of strong moral leadership across corporate and political America - but I don't think the system is set up for this to happen.
It seems about as strange as vi competing with emacs, or gnome with KDE. I think it's great that there will be a whole bunch of wikileaks organisations, it should scare the hell out of our corrrupt and self-serving bureacrats. Or as Obi-Wan put it, "You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
Ecuador recently unilaterally defaulted on their own debt. It's one of the crazy club with cuba, venezuela and argentina. They might offer Assange asylum and then make an offer to the Americans to lock him up - either when the government changes, or before.
Explanation 1) Assange is clearly damaged goods. It looks like the girls he's been having sex with are also damaged goods, it's hardly surprising for a couple of them to get together and start boiling his bunny. And I'm sure the CIA will be happy to lend them a few kroner to hire a top lawyer. Hilary Clinton has $100k she made "trading commodities", perhaps she could lend them some money.
Explanation 2) He did actually rape them, the lawyer is doing it for free or they are rich.
Explanation 3) The CIA persuaded them to lie and raise a case, or they are CIA operatives.
Most people agree that the legal system exists to protect society (among other things). If setting an example discourages others from committing crimes, then by setting an example the legal system is doing it's job. In this case, I think they should not pursue Manning, but that's not relevant.
Perhaps drones are a good thing compared to the Taliban - I don't recall them being great friends of women, they tended to aim their ordinance at them rather than hit them by accident. I do like wikileaks, I think it makes the free west stronger, but it doesn't seem to be possible to leak much information out of regimes like Venezuela, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, North Korea or Iran which I think in some people's minds reinforces a prejudice that somehow America is the biggest villain in the world. America is a great country and wikileaks is built on American (actually - whisper it - DoD) technology. Reading their website, I get the impression wikileaks might agree with me.
This is bullshit. There are 4 causes of climate change - manufacturing, heating/cooling, cars, and planes. As long as people keep flying, driving and buying stuff they don't need we'll keep heading down the abyss. Blaming the oil industry is like blaming Hitler's chef for WWII, they may provide the chemical energy, but we are the ones that fuck up the environment with it. Biofuels won't make a significant difference to the environment - about 6% of our current energy use could be made up with them, according to this expert.
I agree BG is a nicer guy than Jobs - wouldn't surprise me if Ballmer was too. I just don't think these guys are any different than us. I don't particularly care about Apple's staff, I'm sure they don't care much about me. If I had to run Apple, I'd probably try my best for a while, but I'd doubtless mess up. I agree it's a terrible shame what Ellison is doing to Sun, but I don't think he's any more evil than my old sports teacher. His punishment will be the damage he will do to his (and Oracle's) reputation. From fighting MS to being considered more evil than them in 10 years, isn't bad going.
So it seems you are saying that the powerful are more abusive than normal people? But I don't yet understand how this works - how can Gates and Ellison get into these positions of monopoly power if they are constantly abusing people, given that they started with so little power? Is it a master-slave sadomasochistic relationship between the normal people (masochists) and the powerful (sadists), where the normal slaves deliberately elevate sadists like Gates to positions of power? Or is it that by becoming powerful a normal person begins to become sadistic?
Imagine what would have happened if the bomb had been armed with its fissile capsule, and it had blown up at the intersection of the Hayward and San Andreas faults - it could have sunk the entire eastern seaboard!
We know that health insurance can never be an efficient market due to factors like adverse selection, and their being 'no price' on our individual lives.
Adverse selection applies to all insurance. What do you think is so special about health insurance? And I don't see how a government is better set up to pay "no price" than an insurance company - instead of paying a premium to a company, you pay it in tax. The only advantages I can see of moving insurance to the public sector is that you force everyone to pay for insurance, and you can apply progression to the premiums - i.e. you can charge the rich a higher premium solely because they are rich. And there is nothing wrong with that, but it's nice to cut to the nub of the argument.
Sorry for picking on your comment - but I wanted to say - I feel the same way as this PC Mag guy. He's not a troll. I've seen a huge migration of users (like 30%) from XP to windows 7, completely bypassing linux which has not gained any market share above its 1% level. I had hoped that we would see linux overtake Mac - on the desktop PC. I know linux will win out on the tablet, smartphone etc, that a mac is BSD anyway - but I hoped to see linux get a decent marketshare on the desktop too. I think a lot of people who matter (IT people) must still be using windows, which bewilders me. Anyway...
This article seems like total bullshit to me. If Helium is going to be valuable, stop complaining and buy the stuff up. Just like these idiot oil pundits who say oil is going to be really valuable in the future. If you really believe your story, buy it and sit on it. If you don't believe your story, why do you expect me to? This is especially ridiculous since the original article was published in New Zealand. Is NZ governed by the US now?
I hear what you're saying, and I say "bum cheeks". In ten years time government won't exist. Like John said, "imagine there's no countries".
BS aside, it's an interesting point. I can't stand government, but I work for a big company, and I find them just as awful and bureaucratic as my visions of the civil service. I always hoped the future would be small companies, a kind of world of startups, but when you look at supermarkets, banks, commodities firms and so and so - big seems to be the only way to be. Which is sort of disappointing.
Great a 3 kdawson-story day. What next? Ouija boards cause cancer in mice? Perhaps we could have an article on the risks posed by heavy electricity, or homeopathic remedies for Autism (One lady in wisconsin swears that her little jimmy is much better after his injections). Perhaps we should change the slogan for Slashdot from "News for Nerds" to "Alternative Health monthly", or "News for Arts Graduates who like Apple Products", or "Anti-Globalisation Discussion Group". As someone with a science degree and a basic grasp of statistics, general science and economics I'd rather eat my own excreta, thanks. Faraday cage. Pathetic.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry mate, but you sound insane. You're busy analysing the wording in a quote that has been paraphrased by the journalist. Would you care to analyse the line "Mr. Edwards’s head had been wrapped in plastic, and his throat appeared to have been slashed." Is that the kind of civil liberty you are so keen to protect?
If you don't like it, why? I like my life, where people who commit crimes are actually tracked down by the state and held. You might not believe it, but the police can actually gain access to your house if they can show evidence that you committed a crime. If you say something to your neighbour about how your wife won't be coming back again, ever, he can be sure of that, they can actually use his testimony in court - almost like they have recording devices everywhere. Police can ask you hard questions, try to trip you up, even lie to you to make you incriminate yourself. If any of these methods were invented today, would you allow them? Tech is cool and all, but somehow I don't think automatic reg plate recognition would have made things a great deal easier for Adolf.
"What is YOUR point? That the original poster was wrong because of one incorrect example?"
seems like a fair point to me. List of 18 countries that it's banned in, 3 are non-dictatorships, which is supposed to make some kind of point, except one of those is actually ... a dictatorship.
This is not proof, just evidence.
I don't think financial engineering really comes into CDOs, except in that financial engineering was something the banks could do that the ratings agencies couldn't do very well. The ratings agencies were using monte-carlo models to work out the risk in the structures, which were not exactly state of the art. The best people at the ratings agencies were being hired by the banks to reverse engineer the ratings. Generally I also don't see the difference between "productive gambling" and "crime" under your definition - it seems CDOs were a crime, because you could lose too much. I don't see where to draw the line between this and short selling stocks (where your potential loss is unlimited) or fx trading (where you are always short one currency). The thing about banks is that they take these kind of risks all the time - that is what lending is all about. The problem here was that the ratings allowed them to say there was no risk, and the other problem is that we rely on these institutions to make payments, buy houses, and keep our savings safe. Financial engineering would not have justified any of the long CDO positions at major banks, without credit ratings.
The answer is, mostly, neither. Finance is a gambling game played by dreamers. I think Fred Schwed had it right when he said "We expect a child to grow up in time, and learn what is reality, as opposed to what are only his hopes. This however is too much for the romantic Wall Streeter - and they are all romantics, whether they be villains or philanthropists. Else they would never have chosen this business, which is a business of dreams. They continue to dream of conquests, coups and power, for themselves or for the people they advise." Aaron brown of AQR holds the same view. Essentially, people love to gamble, so people play the markets. Then afterwards when people need to explain why it's done, professors come up with reasons like "efficient allocation of capital" - to some extent, this is an effect of finance, and probably the reason it isn't as restricted as gambling is. But the reason people do it is to get rich quick - by gambling.
I spent some time studying the credit crunch too. I believe the effect of CDOs was to allow banks to avoid holding sufficient reserves. They could take their loan books, get an AAA rating on them by packaging them as CDOs, and then take up more debt. This then created an old-fashioned banking crisis like the ones in 1907 and the late 19th century, before reserving was enforced. The mathematical models were largely irrelevant detail - these deals were marked to the market price for correlation, which was supported by the AAA credit ratings. But it's worth bearing in mind that the banking collapse was really just a trigger, the bigger problem was the huge, unsustainable level of debt held by American consumers, and the bad investing decisions they made in housing. The banking collapse caused a tightening of credit, which made things hard for business, which caused redundancies for overstretched consumers, which caused Americans to suddenly start saving, which caused a reduction of demand, which made things harder for business. The problem is in a modern, free market democracy, individuals need to take some responsibility for their financial continence. Either that or we need a revival of strong moral leadership across corporate and political America - but I don't think the system is set up for this to happen.
No such thing as bad publicity - cf. Charlie Sheen.
It seems about as strange as vi competing with emacs, or gnome with KDE. I think it's great that there will be a whole bunch of wikileaks organisations, it should scare the hell out of our corrrupt and self-serving bureacrats. Or as Obi-Wan put it, "You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
Ecuador recently unilaterally defaulted on their own debt. It's one of the crazy club with cuba, venezuela and argentina. They might offer Assange asylum and then make an offer to the Americans to lock him up - either when the government changes, or before.
Yes. Or if you poured mercury on yourself while using it, you might electrocute yourself.
Explanation 1) Assange is clearly damaged goods. It looks like the girls he's been having sex with are also damaged goods, it's hardly surprising for a couple of them to get together and start boiling his bunny. And I'm sure the CIA will be happy to lend them a few kroner to hire a top lawyer. Hilary Clinton has $100k she made "trading commodities", perhaps she could lend them some money.
Explanation 2) He did actually rape them, the lawyer is doing it for free or they are rich.
Explanation 3) The CIA persuaded them to lie and raise a case, or they are CIA operatives.
Most people agree that the legal system exists to protect society (among other things). If setting an example discourages others from committing crimes, then by setting an example the legal system is doing it's job. In this case, I think they should not pursue Manning, but that's not relevant.
Perhaps drones are a good thing compared to the Taliban - I don't recall them being great friends of women, they tended to aim their ordinance at them rather than hit them by accident. I do like wikileaks, I think it makes the free west stronger, but it doesn't seem to be possible to leak much information out of regimes like Venezuela, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, North Korea or Iran which I think in some people's minds reinforces a prejudice that somehow America is the biggest villain in the world. America is a great country and wikileaks is built on American (actually - whisper it - DoD) technology. Reading their website, I get the impression wikileaks might agree with me.
This is bullshit. There are 4 causes of climate change - manufacturing, heating/cooling, cars, and planes. As long as people keep flying, driving and buying stuff they don't need we'll keep heading down the abyss. Blaming the oil industry is like blaming Hitler's chef for WWII, they may provide the chemical energy, but we are the ones that fuck up the environment with it. Biofuels won't make a significant difference to the environment - about 6% of our current energy use could be made up with them, according to this expert.
I agree BG is a nicer guy than Jobs - wouldn't surprise me if Ballmer was too. I just don't think these guys are any different than us. I don't particularly care about Apple's staff, I'm sure they don't care much about me. If I had to run Apple, I'd probably try my best for a while, but I'd doubtless mess up. I agree it's a terrible shame what Ellison is doing to Sun, but I don't think he's any more evil than my old sports teacher. His punishment will be the damage he will do to his (and Oracle's) reputation. From fighting MS to being considered more evil than them in 10 years, isn't bad going.
Abusiveness is just a hobby for them.
So it seems you are saying that the powerful are more abusive than normal people? But I don't yet understand how this works - how can Gates and Ellison get into these positions of monopoly power if they are constantly abusing people, given that they started with so little power? Is it a master-slave sadomasochistic relationship between the normal people (masochists) and the powerful (sadists), where the normal slaves deliberately elevate sadists like Gates to positions of power? Or is it that by becoming powerful a normal person begins to become sadistic?
Imagine what would have happened if the bomb had been armed with its fissile capsule, and it had blown up at the intersection of the Hayward and San Andreas faults - it could have sunk the entire eastern seaboard!
Aw don't ruin the fun. This is a kdawson story - the whole point is that the government is trying to kill you.
We know that health insurance can never be an efficient market due to factors like adverse selection, and their being 'no price' on our individual lives.
Adverse selection applies to all insurance. What do you think is so special about health insurance? And I don't see how a government is better set up to pay "no price" than an insurance company - instead of paying a premium to a company, you pay it in tax. The only advantages I can see of moving insurance to the public sector is that you force everyone to pay for insurance, and you can apply progression to the premiums - i.e. you can charge the rich a higher premium solely because they are rich. And there is nothing wrong with that, but it's nice to cut to the nub of the argument.
Sorry for picking on your comment - but I wanted to say - I feel the same way as this PC Mag guy. He's not a troll. I've seen a huge migration of users (like 30%) from XP to windows 7, completely bypassing linux which has not gained any market share above its 1% level. I had hoped that we would see linux overtake Mac - on the desktop PC. I know linux will win out on the tablet, smartphone etc, that a mac is BSD anyway - but I hoped to see linux get a decent marketshare on the desktop too. I think a lot of people who matter (IT people) must still be using windows, which bewilders me. Anyway...
so kind of apple to let me know what is and what is not optimal.
This article seems like total bullshit to me. If Helium is going to be valuable, stop complaining and buy the stuff up. Just like these idiot oil pundits who say oil is going to be really valuable in the future. If you really believe your story, buy it and sit on it. If you don't believe your story, why do you expect me to? This is especially ridiculous since the original article was published in New Zealand. Is NZ governed by the US now?
He's an ageing journalist. He doesn't understand the internet, but he does understand publicity. We've been trolled folks.
I hear what you're saying, and I say "bum cheeks". In ten years time government won't exist. Like John said, "imagine there's no countries".
BS aside, it's an interesting point. I can't stand government, but I work for a big company, and I find them just as awful and bureaucratic as my visions of the civil service. I always hoped the future would be small companies, a kind of world of startups, but when you look at supermarkets, banks, commodities firms and so and so - big seems to be the only way to be. Which is sort of disappointing.
Apart from U and E.
Great a 3 kdawson-story day. What next? Ouija boards cause cancer in mice? Perhaps we could have an article on the risks posed by heavy electricity, or homeopathic remedies for Autism (One lady in wisconsin swears that her little jimmy is much better after his injections). Perhaps we should change the slogan for Slashdot from "News for Nerds" to "Alternative Health monthly", or "News for Arts Graduates who like Apple Products", or "Anti-Globalisation Discussion Group". As someone with a science degree and a basic grasp of statistics, general science and economics I'd rather eat my own excreta, thanks. Faraday cage. Pathetic.