How it works in Australia is that a certain percentage of your pay goes into a superannuation fund. This is arranged by the employer. The fund has to be approved, which in practice means that there are a few superannuation funds which all companies use. If you are self-employed, you don't have to do this; this is only for salary earners.
As I understand it, you don't have to do this. The incentive is that you get huge tax breaks (e.g. no income tax, no capital gains tax) if you invest your money in an approved fund.
You can also invest it yourself by setting up your own superannuation fund, but it's usually not worth it unless you earn more than about $250k (that's about US$150k) per year.
So while this scheme is not fully privatised, it's pretty damn close. It's probably about as "privatised" you can get while still ensuring that most wage earners have actually saved money and hence won't be a drain on the welfare system when they retire.
Let's say I've got my own law degree and I think I can handle the case myself, what other costs are there?
The overwhelming majority of the money in legal cases is spent on peoples' salaries. Have you been keeping up with the SCO vs IBM case, BTW?
So you're going to gather evidence, demand documents, fly to other cities to take depositions, do background legal research, draft, redraft and re-redraft legal documents... all by yourself. Even assuming there were enough hours in a day for one person to do this (which there are not), you wouldn't be earning any money in the mean time. How do you expect to eat?
Moreover, while you're doing this, there is nobody to checking your work. No "code reviews", if you like. The other side has people checking their work before you or the judge sees is. It necessarily follows that if you are only one person, they (as a team) will have spotted something that you haven't. You will therefore likely lose on some technicality which you didn't spot early enough.
Can you give an example where a radio play was converted to a record, to a series of books, to a TV series, all of which are different and contradictory, which, when converted to a movie, was no worse than the radio play, record, books and TV series?
How exactly do you define an object moving backwards through time? What do you use as a referance?
An excellent question.
Dirac's theory of the electron shows that an electron travelling backwards through time is mathematically indistinguishable from a positively-charged "hole" into which an electron can fall (releasing energy, since the "hole" is a lower-energy state). Alternatively, it's also indistinguishable from an opposite-charged particle, with the same mass, which is destroyed on meeting an electron (along with the electron!), releasing energy.
The last point gives rise to the theory of anti-matter (or, at least, anti-electrons). An electron-positron pair being created and subsequently destroyed is indistinguishable (and the Feynmann diagram notation makes it explicit) from an electron "chasing its own tail" through a loop in time.
So you might as well ask how exactly you decide what is matter and what is anti-matter? Which one is which? Answer that question, and a Nobel Prize is yours.
Bingo, though I'd lay off the specifics on "priests".
The overwhelming majority of child abusers are known to the child and in a position of authority. This has always been the case, and will always be the case. The reason why the Internet is big news is precisely because the small minority of predators who don't know their victims are finally easier to catch. The increased awareness is also a good thing.
But thanks to the paranoia over sexual abuse, you won't see any coverage of emotional abuse, which is far more common, harder to spot, arguably harder to recover from and usually perpetrated by mothers.
And therefore know that nothing can travel afaster then the speed of light.
Mathematically, there's no problem with something travelling faster than the speed of light so long as it was created faster-than-light. What you can't do is take something that was travelling slower than light and accellerate it up to a faster-than-light speed.
Similarly, there's no problem with something travelling backwards in time so long as it was created that way.
Who says you have to compete with the rich person?
Believe me, I have to. Not in the stock market specifically. Even as an open source developer, I am running the risk of stepping on someone's frivolous software patent. They think I'm competing with them, even if I don't think so.
If I work for someone else, my job may exist merely because the financial markets are favourable. Someone, somewhere, possibly as a group, completely unconnected with my business, may act irrationally and stupidly, tipping my business into insolvency. I am competing with the rich person whether I want to or not, because their actions affect whether or not I keep my job.
Honestly, if your main point is that you don't want to believe in supply and demand, I can't stop you.
Either I'm being unclear or you're misinterpreting me. Probably both.
The fact remains that reasonable businesses have a legitimate demand for instruments like options and futures, primarily for the mitigation of risk.
Similarly, reasonable nations have a legitimate demand for nuclear weapons. It's like the Prisoner's Dilemma: You're better off with them, but everyone would be better off if nobody had them.
Is their continued solvency a wrong priority?
It's wrong when businesses have to be paranoid enough about their own solvency that they need them. What concerns me is not that the system is clearly unstable, and large amounts of money is being spent on keeping your head above water in a volatile environment. This should not need to happen. Money spent on options and futures is money that is effectively being spent as insurance to protect yourself from the greed and/or stupidity of other people.
We're not talking about businesses who sell things that people don't want to buy. We're not talking about businesses which are run incompetently. We're not talking about excessive regulation.
Something is deeply wrong with this picture.
I'm not suggesting that it's the rules or the system that are to blame. All I'm saying is that the people out there, who I don't know, who I don't do business with, who act irrationally and stupidly, which negatively affects my business, have their priorities wrong.
The only reason that oil prices go up and down at all is that those who produce oil get together and decide what price it will be. It's not because there's less of it to go around (though even if there is, most economists would agree that there is no rational reason for the price to go up). It's not because oil is more useful, or better quality, than it once was.
The reason is because the world has its priorities wrong. The reason why quants are employed is not because they help you deliver a better service or produce a better product. It's more like an arms race: If the other guys have them, you must have them too, otherwise you'll get screwed. Nobody wins an arms race.
Please call up Southwest Airlines and tell them that they're doing nothing but gambling.
Since they're flying planes as well as gambling, no I won't.
When I say that the market is highly artificial, I mean it, and when I say that we have our priorities wrong, I mean it. The fact that oil prices go up in anticipation of scarcity, let alone because of scarcity, is completely irrational and artificial. The fact that you can change the interest rate on someone's loan on a whim is artificial. The fact that a business can sink because of these artifical external forces, is irrational, and playing the artificial system is gambling.
Anyhow, if you pursue to the end the argument that jobs that deal with such intangibles are 'artificial' and not 'real',
...which I did not even pursue from the beginning.
Take a waiter, for example. There is nothing artificial about eating. Similarly, for a lawyer, there is nothing artificial about being a powerful advocate in a tricky situation. An IT specialist maintains tools. OTOH, there is something very, very artificial about trading in derivatives.
How much does it cost to compete with a rich person who has a few quants?
Re:Interesting, yet discouraging
on
My Life as a Quant
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Non-productive? Derivatives can be used for gambling, but they can also be used for transferring risk and creating greater efficiency in the marketplace.
i.e. calculating the odds for gambling and more efficiently gambling, respectively.:-)
I admit to being a bit tongue-in-cheek, but let's face it: "the marketplace" is so unbelievably artificial, you start to wonder if you occupy the same universe that it does. Not only are we buying and selling things, we're now buying and selling first derivatives of things. By my reckoning, that's about two steps removed from actually making and doing things.
So your idea of "productive" work is creating a unified field theory? If such a theory were found tomorrow, how would it improve anyone's life?
I don't know offhand, but unifying electricity and magnetism gave us radio communications, and similar discoveries since then have given us lasers, semiconductors, MRI scanners and superconductors. Who knows what a unified theory would give us. Practical fusion power? Anti-gravity (if such a thing were possible)?
I have a PhD in theoretical physics and I've worked as a quant. Life as a quant beats the hell out of physics any day.
That says a lot for the way that we treat our physicists. Like I said, we have our priorities wrong.
Interesting, yet discouraging
on
My Life as a Quant
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Does anyone else find it discouraging that a very smart theoretical physicist ended up being paid huge amounts of money for what is, essentially, non-productive work? This guy could have found a unified field theory by now. Instead, he's helping rich people to transfer money between each other in what is effectively a complex form of gambling.
An improvement over ray-tracing is "cone-tracing", as that allows you to handle direct reflections that have some element of diffusion. (Which is most of them.) Cone-tracing programs exist, but I don't know of any really good ones.
Cone tracing is a nice idea at first, but it doesn't actually fit well with the demands of a modern high-end renderer:
The mathematics of tracing objects other than simple ones (e.g. procedurally displaced surfaces) is difficult and usually involves splitting the cone. Once you've split the cone, a few levels, you're effectively ray tracing anyway (more or less).
It more or less solves the problem of integrating in four dimensions (two screen-space dimensions and two lens-space dimensions), but does nothing to help the problem of the other two interesting dimensions that you tend to sample stochastically (i.e. time, for implementing motion blur, and continuous level of detail). The problem is even worse in a full-spectrum renderer, where wavelength is also sampled stochastically.
The "best" (from a graphics point of view) would be to use wave-tracing, as this allows you to handle not only any type of reflection, but also diffraction.
Unfortunately, aqsis is not a raytracer, just a scanline renderer, but according to their faq they plan on adding raytracing and global illumination next.
If it helps, Aqsis is about at the stage where Pixar's Photorealistic RenderMan was at about the time of Toy Story. So while it is unfortunate (and we know how we're going to do it), don't think of this as a limitation.:-)
There is a huge base of professionally written
and supported apps for SVR4/Solaris/UnixWare/...
Correct, kind of. There are arguably more commercially supported apps for Unix or Solaris than for Linux, and generally speaking, more money is involved. (That is, the apps in question are serious ones that companies rely on; if the software fails, the company goes south.)
Having said that, there are probably more "professionally written" apps for Linux, it's just that most of them aren't as commercial or mission-critical.
The GNU compiler and toolchain, while useable,
perhaps even good, is inferior to the offerings
from Sun, IBM, HP, and the commercial vendors.
That depends what metric you use. If the only measure that you use is the performance of generated code, then I will concede that you're probably right. On the other hand, the GNU compiler tends to be much more standards-compliant than its commercial competitors. The GNU toolchain is ported to more architectures and platforms than any other. Moreover, the open source suite has more "off the shelf" than any other (e.g. valgrind, though it's not ported to anything other than IA32), where on the Sun or IBM systems you'd need to buy something extra (e.g. Purify). One notable exception is the Sun ONE Studio performance collector/analyzer; I haven't seen anything like it for Linux.
The same can be said for nearly, if not every, category of GNU/Linux/Open-Source software.
Strongly disagree. In the desktop arena, open source is way ahead of commercial Unix.
Commercial Unix definitely has the upper hand here because they can use the best of open source as well as the best of proprietary. So, for example, you can run Apache on your Solaris machine and get the best of both worlds, so to speak.
Linux may in fact have more "stuff" available
for it but when you weed out the crap, it isn't
that impressive.
That's a false dichotomy, and Sturgeon's Law applies here. There's a lot of crap in Linux, but that's because there's a lot of stuff, and 90% of everything is crap. The 10% left over is equally impressive, but it tends to do different things than the 10% of commercial offerings which aren't crap.
Open source doesn't have a "Verilog-killer", but commercial Unix doesn't have an "Apache-killer".
What's his issue with concurrency under linux anyway?
I didn't get that either. I had some (very serious) issues with concurrency in Linux, but they've all been fixed in 2.6/NPTL.
One thing I did like was his comment that the distinction between desktops and servers is mostly one of marketing. I thought that was quite insightful, if not entirely original.
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Sturgeon's Law states that 90% of the stuff written in C and C++ would still be crap if translated to another language.
Just as a quick note...
How it works in Australia is that a certain percentage of your pay goes into a superannuation fund. This is arranged by the employer. The fund has to be approved, which in practice means that there are a few superannuation funds which all companies use. If you are self-employed, you don't have to do this; this is only for salary earners.
As I understand it, you don't have to do this. The incentive is that you get huge tax breaks (e.g. no income tax, no capital gains tax) if you invest your money in an approved fund.
You can also invest it yourself by setting up your own superannuation fund, but it's usually not worth it unless you earn more than about $250k (that's about US$150k) per year.
So while this scheme is not fully privatised, it's pretty damn close. It's probably about as "privatised" you can get while still ensuring that most wage earners have actually saved money and hence won't be a drain on the welfare system when they retire.
If you're not paying anyone to help you, the money goes in damages when you lose the case.
If you are paying people to help you, then you may actually have a chance of winning.
The overwhelming majority of the money in legal cases is spent on peoples' salaries. Have you been keeping up with the SCO vs IBM case, BTW?
So you're going to gather evidence, demand documents, fly to other cities to take depositions, do background legal research, draft, redraft and re-redraft legal documents... all by yourself. Even assuming there were enough hours in a day for one person to do this (which there are not), you wouldn't be earning any money in the mean time. How do you expect to eat?
Moreover, while you're doing this, there is nobody to checking your work. No "code reviews", if you like. The other side has people checking their work before you or the judge sees is. It necessarily follows that if you are only one person, they (as a team) will have spotted something that you haven't. You will therefore likely lose on some technicality which you didn't spot early enough.
Can you give an example where a radio play was converted to a record, to a series of books, to a TV series, all of which are different and contradictory, which, when converted to a movie, was no worse than the radio play, record, books and TV series?
Isn't software the only thing that can be protected by both copyright and patent, making one of them redundant?
An excellent question.
Dirac's theory of the electron shows that an electron travelling backwards through time is mathematically indistinguishable from a positively-charged "hole" into which an electron can fall (releasing energy, since the "hole" is a lower-energy state). Alternatively, it's also indistinguishable from an opposite-charged particle, with the same mass, which is destroyed on meeting an electron (along with the electron!), releasing energy.
The last point gives rise to the theory of anti-matter (or, at least, anti-electrons). An electron-positron pair being created and subsequently destroyed is indistinguishable (and the Feynmann diagram notation makes it explicit) from an electron "chasing its own tail" through a loop in time.
So you might as well ask how exactly you decide what is matter and what is anti-matter? Which one is which? Answer that question, and a Nobel Prize is yours.
Bingo, though I'd lay off the specifics on "priests".
The overwhelming majority of child abusers are known to the child and in a position of authority. This has always been the case, and will always be the case. The reason why the Internet is big news is precisely because the small minority of predators who don't know their victims are finally easier to catch. The increased awareness is also a good thing.
But thanks to the paranoia over sexual abuse, you won't see any coverage of emotional abuse, which is far more common, harder to spot, arguably harder to recover from and usually perpetrated by mothers.
Mathematically, there's no problem with something travelling faster than the speed of light so long as it was created faster-than-light. What you can't do is take something that was travelling slower than light and accellerate it up to a faster-than-light speed.
Similarly, there's no problem with something travelling backwards in time so long as it was created that way.
I guess I'll leave the final word up to you:
Couldn't have said it better myself. :-)
Believe me, I have to. Not in the stock market specifically. Even as an open source developer, I am running the risk of stepping on someone's frivolous software patent. They think I'm competing with them, even if I don't think so.
If I work for someone else, my job may exist merely because the financial markets are favourable. Someone, somewhere, possibly as a group, completely unconnected with my business, may act irrationally and stupidly, tipping my business into insolvency. I am competing with the rich person whether I want to or not, because their actions affect whether or not I keep my job.
Either I'm being unclear or you're misinterpreting me. Probably both.
Similarly, reasonable nations have a legitimate demand for nuclear weapons. It's like the Prisoner's Dilemma: You're better off with them, but everyone would be better off if nobody had them.
It's wrong when businesses have to be paranoid enough about their own solvency that they need them. What concerns me is not that the system is clearly unstable, and large amounts of money is being spent on keeping your head above water in a volatile environment. This should not need to happen. Money spent on options and futures is money that is effectively being spent as insurance to protect yourself from the greed and/or stupidity of other people.
We're not talking about businesses who sell things that people don't want to buy. We're not talking about businesses which are run incompetently. We're not talking about excessive regulation.
Something is deeply wrong with this picture.
I'm not suggesting that it's the rules or the system that are to blame. All I'm saying is that the people out there, who I don't know, who I don't do business with, who act irrationally and stupidly, which negatively affects my business, have their priorities wrong.
I think that you're missing my main point.
The only reason that oil prices go up and down at all is that those who produce oil get together and decide what price it will be. It's not because there's less of it to go around (though even if there is, most economists would agree that there is no rational reason for the price to go up). It's not because oil is more useful, or better quality, than it once was.
The reason is because the world has its priorities wrong. The reason why quants are employed is not because they help you deliver a better service or produce a better product. It's more like an arms race: If the other guys have them, you must have them too, otherwise you'll get screwed. Nobody wins an arms race.
Since they're flying planes as well as gambling, no I won't.
When I say that the market is highly artificial, I mean it, and when I say that we have our priorities wrong, I mean it. The fact that oil prices go up in anticipation of scarcity, let alone because of scarcity, is completely irrational and artificial. The fact that you can change the interest rate on someone's loan on a whim is artificial. The fact that a business can sink because of these artifical external forces, is irrational, and playing the artificial system is gambling.
...which I did not even pursue from the beginning.
Take a waiter, for example. There is nothing artificial about eating. Similarly, for a lawyer, there is nothing artificial about being a powerful advocate in a tricky situation. An IT specialist maintains tools. OTOH, there is something very, very artificial about trading in derivatives.
How much does it cost to compete with a rich person who has a few quants?
i.e. calculating the odds for gambling and more efficiently gambling, respectively. :-)
I admit to being a bit tongue-in-cheek, but let's face it: "the marketplace" is so unbelievably artificial, you start to wonder if you occupy the same universe that it does. Not only are we buying and selling things, we're now buying and selling first derivatives of things. By my reckoning, that's about two steps removed from actually making and doing things.
I don't know offhand, but unifying electricity and magnetism gave us radio communications, and similar discoveries since then have given us lasers, semiconductors, MRI scanners and superconductors. Who knows what a unified theory would give us. Practical fusion power? Anti-gravity (if such a thing were possible)?
That says a lot for the way that we treat our physicists. Like I said, we have our priorities wrong.
I dunno, but try this link.
Does anyone else find it discouraging that a very smart theoretical physicist ended up being paid huge amounts of money for what is, essentially, non-productive work? This guy could have found a unified field theory by now. Instead, he's helping rich people to transfer money between each other in what is effectively a complex form of gambling.
We have our priorities all wrong.
Cone tracing is a nice idea at first, but it doesn't actually fit well with the demands of a modern high-end renderer:
Not polarisation, though. Well, not yet, anyway.
BMRT was a radiosity raytracer from the start. It never supported scanline rendering.
If it helps, Aqsis is about at the stage where Pixar's Photorealistic RenderMan was at about the time of Toy Story. So while it is unfortunate (and we know how we're going to do it), don't think of this as a limitation. :-)
Unlike BMRT, it's available. :-)
Not that we're aware of.
Here, have a few goats...
Correct, kind of. There are arguably more commercially supported apps for Unix or Solaris than for Linux, and generally speaking, more money is involved. (That is, the apps in question are serious ones that companies rely on; if the software fails, the company goes south.)
Having said that, there are probably more "professionally written" apps for Linux, it's just that most of them aren't as commercial or mission-critical.
That depends what metric you use. If the only measure that you use is the performance of generated code, then I will concede that you're probably right. On the other hand, the GNU compiler tends to be much more standards-compliant than its commercial competitors. The GNU toolchain is ported to more architectures and platforms than any other. Moreover, the open source suite has more "off the shelf" than any other (e.g. valgrind, though it's not ported to anything other than IA32), where on the Sun or IBM systems you'd need to buy something extra (e.g. Purify). One notable exception is the Sun ONE Studio performance collector/analyzer; I haven't seen anything like it for Linux.
Strongly disagree. In the desktop arena, open source is way ahead of commercial Unix.
Commercial Unix definitely has the upper hand here because they can use the best of open source as well as the best of proprietary. So, for example, you can run Apache on your Solaris machine and get the best of both worlds, so to speak.
That's a false dichotomy, and Sturgeon's Law applies here. There's a lot of crap in Linux, but that's because there's a lot of stuff, and 90% of everything is crap. The 10% left over is equally impressive, but it tends to do different things than the 10% of commercial offerings which aren't crap.
Open source doesn't have a "Verilog-killer", but commercial Unix doesn't have an "Apache-killer".
I didn't get that either. I had some (very serious) issues with concurrency in Linux, but they've all been fixed in 2.6/NPTL.
One thing I did like was his comment that the distinction between desktops and servers is mostly one of marketing. I thought that was quite insightful, if not entirely original.