What is important is that by the time you graduate, you understand both why there are so many different world views for "big picture" things like the responsibilities of citizens, the rights of individuals vs. the rights of the collective or state, etc. as well as why there are different views on "details" like different coding standards and different standards of business ethics.
By knowing many of these views and by understanding why different people have different views, you will be better prepared to know why you adopt the views you adopt, and be able to explain your reasons to others. You will also be better equipped to understand why your boss or coworker may have a different view, and whether that difference is a reason for you to re-evaluate your views, agree to disagree, or circulate your resume.
If you need formal education for that - let alone higher education - God help you. Where I come from, that sort of thing was generally considered "not being an asshole", not a complicated subject that required in-depth study.
What if this person really wants to purchase a drug that he thinks will enlarge him? Who gives the researchers the right to decide what other people should spend their money on? Under several legal interpretations, forcing a person not to buy something perceived as harmful is not legal: denying to sell cigarettes to a person of legal age may be illegal, under discrimination laws.
In this case, the sale would be illegal since we're talking about "drugs" that aren't FDA approved being sold without a prescription. So I think the analogy of stopping sales of cigarettes to minors would be more apt; it's guaranteed that a crime is being interrupted.
As far as a good part of the rest of the world...we don't think you elected a messiah. We're just glad you didn't elect the 3rd incarnation of the fucking antichrist.
Dumbest thing I've read today and that applies double for whoever modded that informative/insightful. I didn't vote for McCain. I don't think he'd make as good an executive as he does a Senator, and if I'm being honest, I don't think he's as sharp mentally as he used to be.
But his record is really that of a centrist, who works with people across party lines. He's done a lot to reform campaign finance (which ironically didn't help him, since his opponent decided rules are for other people). Relating McCain to the "antichrist" somehow is representative of the blind, untargeted ultra-liberal rage that seems to have consumed quite a few people these days. Yes, Bush is a terrible president. But to assume that he and McCain are the same man, let alone to come to the conclusion that he's representative of Satan himself, requires one to be drinking directly from the Obama campaign Kool-Aid tap.
In other words, stop letting other people write your cue cards for you, think for yourself.
What about the assholes who think TV is for everyone, and need to force their choice upon others?
You mean the assholes who break into your home, install a TV, tie you up, and force you to watch it? Because that's pretty much the only valid example I can think of.
If you mean proprietors who have TVs on in their establishments - no one's forcing you to be there. Leave or quitcherbitchin.
Low rates do not, themselves, motivate banks to write bad paper on behalf of the risky blokes who suddenly think they can afford a house...Low rates accellerated the process, but cannot indepedently cause this problem
The lower the rates affect far more than just the process of the bank making the loan. That's part of it. And actually, low rates will in fact cause a bank to take a greater risk for a certain return based on supply and demand. But you're right, that's just part of it.
Another part is when investment funds leverage their assets based on easy credit, allowing to amplify their bets many times. Leverage rates should go up with cheap credit. One more step is overspeculation, also due to cheap credit, in which a feedback loop initiates with higher prices drawing more people to invest in something - though it should be the opposite on a value basis.
One cause specific to this mess (which I alluded to in a different response) is that the balloon ARM (and negative amortization loans, even worse) allowed them to put people in houses they couldn't afford, but give them the time to sell off the loan asset before it blew up. That was clever, on their behalf, and was a clear warning sign that the bubble wasn't sustainable. Clever schemes like that are a good sign that the bubble is a-coming.
and the ratings agencies performed whatever evil was necessary to keep the music playing. Whether they too were strongarmed, or simply cashing in on banks' willingness to pay annual "maintenance fees" for AAA ratings, is not yet known.
To me, blaming the ratings agencies for this seems weak, simply because when you have the fox guarding the henhouse, what do you expect? Do you blame the fox for being who he is? It's like when Andersen was "auditing" Enron. Who was trusting these ratings at a time when the housing situation was clearly way overspeculated? It just seems insane to me. This is what happens when you choose mathematical models based on faulty assumptions over common sense.
I'm a student of history, so I go back and look at what people do in response to different macroeconomic conditions. And in the case of interest rates, keeping them too low for too long creates overspeculation. Because why *wouldn't* you speculate when the Fed is practically giving you house money to play with?
That's not to say that rates being extremely high is good, by the way. But rates too low for too long will create an asset bubble, because speculation and running with the herd is simply human nature. Psychology trumps math.
You almost said it yourself in your first sentence, before tripping over your own politics and blaming Greenspan.
He was the chairman of the Fed under which the rate policies I'm criticizing were enacted, correct? I'm not seeing the political ad hominem attack on what I said, seeing as how he served under presidents of both parties. I don't think he's a mean guy. But I think he's a high-profile member of the "easy credit, free markets, and risk diversification solve everything" crowd. Because he set the factors that caused this mess, I think he shares a massive amount of the blame.
That seems to be an oversimplification. The most reasonable thing I've seen is that we deregulated the credit derivatives market, and told the crooks to "regulate themselves."
I don't necessarily disagree with your analysis above, but quite honestly it IS simple. The reason for this clusterf**k doesn't require a PhD in finance to figure out, that's what kills me. Basic supply-and-demand analysis suggests there will be a problem. The issues you raise are absolutely important, but to me they just determined how big the problem would be, not whether there would be one.
I would look at it this way - the deregulated derivatives and swaps (and other not-so-transparent assets) made it easier to hide the problem for longer, but credit that was just too easy to get was the fuel for the fire.
I'm looking it from a pure supply-and-demand standpoint - historically, whenever credit is too easy to get and stays that way for too long, Bad Shit happens. Funds get greedy, overleverage, and make insane bets. Then, when the bad assets start getting sold off, their leverage screws them because they have to sell good assets to pay off depreciating leveraged debt. If too many people are too leveraged, you get a chain reaction where selling depreciates even good assets, which cascades and leads to a market crash because you don't have any buyers. It would be one thing if this were the first time that cycle has happened, but it happens frequently. 1929, a smaller one I believe after WWII, 1987, 1998, 2002, and now. The degree varies, but all owed a lot to overspeculation, which depends in large part on credit that's too easy to get.
If full disclosure was part of that market by law, then we simply wouldn't be where we are today. Originating lenders would be unable to sell bad loans, and when they started suffering the consequences, the game would have ended early and not been nearly as bad.
That's not a bad start, but Wall Street will always find an angle. Your approach, while necessary, is sort of like how we beefed up airline screening after 9/11, even though the next attack will be different. Preventing the last problem isn't bad, but it won't solve the next problem. Same on Wall Street - the next financial crisis will have a different cause, be it foreign currency speculation, bond speculation, housing speculation, venture capital overspeculation, whatever. Note we've had minor to major crashes due to all *five* of those just in the last 20 years, a couple of them multiple times. What's next? I don't know, neither does anybody, and that's the point. Bottom line, you can't legislate away all the holes because you can't out-think the cleverest schemers on Wall Street - but you can eliminate the easy credit that lets the morons do it.
As an example - so why housing this time? Mortgage securitization was the flavor of the month for the "can't fail" risk diversification crowd. As I've said, it's just one in a chain. The pet theory of risk diversification suggested that, based on woefully limited data, that mortgages across different socioeconomic backgrounds and different regions won't all go south simultaneously. That worked until easy credit and a clever scheme let mortgage brokers and investment banks game the system. Here's the game: while everybody knew banks were giving houses to people who couldn't afford them, and that it was happening everywhere, the mortgages were built so they didn't implode immediately. How? The balloon ARM. Everybody with a functioning brain knew these balloon ARMs that were sold to get people in houses were ticking time bombs. But the fuse on that bomb was a couple years long, by which point the people who packaged those securities had sold them. Just like the dot-bomb economy, when the vulture capitalist clowns backed IPOs that anyone knew were retarded, but they made their money up front. Some other sucker would find out later these companies had no business model.
Bottom line, this had nothing to do with bad data. It was Greenspan's blindness to the consequences of easy monetary policy would have that caused much of the problems today.
Absolutely. Wait, rollercoaster interest rates are a bad idea? Really? And it took a genius to figure this out?
It's so easy to understand. Low credit and the push for home ownership at any cost led to insane price increases and speculation that it wasn't hard to see had to come to a crash stop. I had this figured out as of 2004 when I talked to a realtor who told me I needed to buy NOW with nothing down and use the guaranteed 2%/month price increase to refinance in a year. I can recognize a bubble when I see it.
That's why it pisses me off when Greenspan points the fingers elsewhere. He's the one who set the rates. He's the one who jacked them up, then down, waiting too long and overcorrecting to account for it. And he refuses to take the blame.
The funny thing is, this isn't the first time things have gotten sideways thanks to overspeculation. During the (mercifully) brief meltdown in 1998 due to the currency markets, he basically told the banks to do what they do, the government will help out if things go bad. The overcorrection to that mini-crisis and the post-9/11 slowdown sowed the seeds for what we have now. Gee, thanks Alan.
So now he blames bad data. Really, Alan, you're surprised that people selling certain securities said things about them that was overly rosy? Give me a break. At some point, you have to have some damned sense, and actually look at the securities without the computer models. When things defy common sense to that degree, something's wrong.
The funny thing is, it seems every crisis comes about because risk diversification models fail. Happened in 1929, happened in 1998, happened now. Investing houses have this theory that a lot of big risks can be less risky in totality, because the risks aren't correlated. Problem is, when the shit hits the fan, a lot of things become correlated that didn't use to be. Partly it's because everything's sitting on top of the same increasingly global economy. Part of it is that funds that are overly leveraged have to sell whatever they have to meet margin calls. The people who create the models study the risk correlation and assume things based on it that simply aren't valid in the real world. The book "When Genius Failed" has a good case study on this, where an investment house run by brilliant guys including Nobel Prize winners crashed and burned because they didn't understand that common sense trumps mathematical models.
To disclose, I actually see great value in statistical predictive models - indeed, that's what I do for a living. I design and implement mathematical models. But because of that, I also know what mathematical models can't do. Too much hubris by too many people, and we all suffer.
Um, yeah. Regulations hurt people and take away their freedom. That shouldn't be done, in general.
That sounds far too much like ideology that has little connection to the real world. Counterexamples you your argument: the current economic crisis caused by banking regulations, the Great Depression caused by types of speculation that aren't allowed anymore, Enron and the energy crisis a while ago, monopolies in general.
On the whole, you seem to have anarchy and freedom dangerously confused. Having a "free" (as in anarchy) society in which nobody wants to live isn't a win.
Something besides "I want to" or "hurting them and taking away their freedom will personally benefit me".
OK. How about "hurting their ability to screw the entire population will benefit absolutely everybody"? That works for me.
On the other hand, if you don't have a problem with hurting people and taking away their freedom for your personal gain, then nevermind. There's probably some unlocked cars in your neighborhood you can steal some nice stuff from. Why not go have a look? The cops don't even investigate that stuff.
When did "truly free markets" come to mean anything other than "each individual is free to do whatever he or she wants provided his or her actions cause no direct harm to others"?
You have "freedom" and "anarchy" confused. A "free" market is one in which prices are set by the dynamic of supply and demand. Here's a decent reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_equilibrium
So-called "barriers to entry", the number of "players", the existence of (unattainable) equilibrium -- these are all irrelevant. The market is free if and only if there is no systemic aggression (initiation of coercion; violation of others' property rights, including personal rights, or threats thereof).
According to whom? The who idea/definition behind a free market is that, when there is demand, a supply will meet it. If artificial conditions are preventing a supply from meeting a demand, then a free market simply does not exist. A free market explicitly assumes, by its very definition, that an equilibrium state can be met in a reasonably timely fashion. Factors that prevent market equilibrium, by definition, prevent a freely flowing market.
For what it's worth, anti-trust law doesn't even fit into your picture either, since it causes no "direct harm" to others, and leveraging of monopolies to freeze the market and facilitate aribtrary, non-equilibrium pricing is the exact opposite of a free market.
The libertarian stance isn't really about the market at all; it's about aggression, and the correct response to it.
This is one of those things where theory gets in the way of reality. I'm libertarian with a small "l", in that I believe generally in leaving people alone assuming they're not causing problems. However, in this case, I would argue that massive donation from the telecoms to bribe politicians to voting against the will of their constituents (allowing overconsolidation) certainly constitutes a form of aggression in my book.
In a libertarian society -- one which adheres to the Non-Aggression Principle and thus does not endorse or tolerate the initiation of force or fraud -- the free market is a natural byproduct.
In this case, reality proves ideals wrong. This is one of those things that people believe if they don't have a good foundation on how real economies work. Those principles function only when there are lots of buyers of something, and lots of sellers. They completely break down in cases like these when, in most of the country, you have about two market participants, government protected monopolies/oligopolies, and a massive barrier to market entry. In cases like that, there can be a massive demand for something by consumers that will go unmet simply because the existing market participants don't want it to happen.
There are lots of examples of how markets break down when too much market consolidation happens. If you believe in market anarchy, that's one thing, but there's a difference between a free market and an anarchic one.
Given the relatively frivolous "consumers' needs" in question, you seem to be selling out your libertarian ideals for a discount.
I don't "consider myself a libertarian" in the same way. But I'm for freedom for these companies unless it causes a huge problem. All the Internet whining doesn't rise to the level of a "huge problem" yet.
That's the always bogus argument against regulation. Back in the day, that same analysis was used against the Standard Oil breakup. It doesn't have to be life-or-death to matter to the market. Your analysis requires there be an arbiter who decides what's important or not, and that would be the biggest regulation of all. So no thanks.
I personally am on the fence on this issue. As a libertarian, I am against government regulation and pro-free market and net neutrality seems to me to be a regulation against the telecom providers to do what they want with their lines.
I condider myself a libertarian, and am against regulation where truly free markets (or close approximations thereto) exist. However, in many cases, they don't, and this is an example. What you have is a very small number of players with a very high barrier to entry to the market. In that case, the equilibrium required for the operation of a free market simply doesn't exist. Because of the barrier to market entry, the actors can create a situation where a free market would demand competition to meet consumers' needs, but that no one can fill that need in any efficient manner because of the market barrier. In cases where such huge barriers exist and the actors seems to be colluding (explicitly or implicitly), I do think regulation is needed.
All sorts of species evolve in spite of any particular start or length of reproductive capacity. Since the vast majority of what diversity between members of a population happens during conception, the evolutionary engine is largely fueled at that point.
I agree, either there's something big I'm missing or this guy's a moron. On face, this fails even basic math. If DNA gets mutations at X/year, and the reproductive cycle is Y years, then the total number of mutations per generation is XY. At that level, it looks like he's right, since as Y goes down with younger males reproducing, the total number of mutations per generation goes down. Except he forgot that as reproductive age goes down, *you get more generations per unit time*. Since there are (1/Y) reproductive cycles per year, you multiply that back through and you get (X/year)*Y*(1/Y) = X mutations/year, which is exactly where you started. Duh.
You might even be able to argue that, assuming a constant number of mutations/year in a gene pool, having shorter generations allows for more opportunities to roll the genetic dice, and actually speed up evolution. I'd defer to an actual geneticist on that, though.
I'm going to have to disagree. I know this sounds trollish, but I'm really not trying to start a flamewar, and I ask that you keep it civil in telling me how wrong I am. Here goes:
I'm just jumping in here, sorry to crash the party. And I'm only being civil because you're a basketball fan (not really, but nice username anyway).
Is it going too far to count his unscientific theory against his previous successes? No. Scientific committees need to consider not just the immediate, but also the long-term consequences of giving their endorsement to individuals. While they should give out degrees to people who like to hold unscientific beliefs in their spare time, they should not hold them out as shining examples of "someone doing it right".
By that reasoning, you'd be stripping Einstein of his prize as well. Had the Prize been around, Isaac Newton would have been excluded with extreme prejudice. Indeed, that line of reasoning would be tantamount to restricting the Prize to athiests.
There are many scientists who happen to be religious, and it causes many a brilliant scientist degrees of consternation in attempting to reconcile his religion's creation story with his own science. Penrose's attempts seem no different than Einstein's rejection of quantum mechanics because "God does not play dice with the universe".
While I agree with your analysis of why the null state for any hypothesis should be rejected rather than accepted, I don't think that's sufficient reason to ban Penrose or anyone else from consideration for the Prize. Indeed, I would say that all creeping politicization of the Prize should cease, as it has been all too prevalent lately (assuming it ever was otherwise). In this case, while I personally believe in maintaining a barrier between religion and science, I think the pendulum has swung too far against religion in general - indeed, the anti-religious sentiment is so common in the sciences to pretty much amount to bigotry. I've seen it firsthand, and it's disgusting coming from people who claim to be open-minded. So long as your opinion matches theirs, presumably.
In other words, let's accept Penrose's religious choices and not hold it against him with regard to his scientific contributions. Anything else would smack of extreme religious intolerance that is not in keeping with the overall ideals of Prize in advancing humanity.
I do respect your opinion and the civil way in which you've presented it, but I'd strongly urge you to reconsider what you're advocating.
Iterating over a set of data isn't done with loops, it's done with applying formulas over a range of cells. And if you turn on iteration for the spreadsheet, it *is* possible to build flow-controlling state machines without using the scripting engine. Not particularly natural for most imperative programmers, but definitely possible.
You could go to all that trouble...or use the most appropriate tool for the job. Yes, if you kludge the living shit out if it, you can get Excel to do a whole lot of things that could be accomplished more simply and easier with something else. For instance, sure, you *could* implement a neural network somehow in Excel. But it won't be pretty.
Also add the fact that scientific toolkits built for the purpose have very useful toolkits that simply aren't found in Excel. And they're pre-compiled so they're fast as hell.
Excel has its place, certainly, but I think people who get into heavier applications would appreciate one of the tools I mentioned earlier.
Why isn't it a good idea, and does this apply equally to OpenOffice?
It's OK for simple stuff, but trying to do something like implementing a loop in a spreadsheet. And yes, the criticism applies to OO as well.
There are very good packages out there - some open source - for doing scientific analysis. I'd recommend R or Octave (a matlab clone), personally. Also, Python + NumPy + SciPy + Pylab is great for doing Matlab-like things, and it's all free as well.
Actually, many deaf people enjoy music. They experience vibrations from loud music in a way that you cannot,
I'd say that anyone who's lived in an apartment has experienced that particular phenomenon. It's not all that fun. Of course, that could be because my neighbors have usually had shitty taste in music.
if it's just down to detecting the frequency of the light emitted, couldn't some sort of photovoltaic or photoelectric sensor be designed so that you wouldn't have to chemically engineer receptors for different kinds of surfaces, but rather just program the software to identify the surface material?
Yes, what you're describing is effectively using a vector of many pieces of information to distinguish between various samples as opposed to relying on a binary receptor. Many detection mechanisms work that way; in fact, I did my graduate work on sensors that work in that manner. While it can work, there's still a lot of trickery in the way of algorithms used in the software. There's also a matter of sensitivity/selectivity: given a pair of samples and their measurements, can the difference in signatures be detected outside the noise?
In general, with systems like these, the more things you're trying to mutually distinguish, the more pieces of information you need, and the more sensitive you need the measurements to be. That's tough since they're claiming it can (in theory) sense *everything*. Unfortunately, simply detecting something is useless - the interesting part would be how many things they can recognize while distinguishing them from false alarms.
Methinks we have some folks that understand the physics, but aren't as far along when it comes to the algorithms. I've been down this road, and it's nowhere near as simple as they seem to think.
I know you're kidding, but I want to make one point. *any* code is unmanageable if you don't comment - especially java if you use lots of objects and polymorphism. Please please please, leave comments so others can figure out what the fuck your logic was without diagramming logic on a whiteboard for 3 days...
Yep. And in case altruism isn't your thing, just remember that with all the code you'll be writing, "others" in the parent's statement can be replaced by "you in 6 months". I - as well as probably everyone here - have cursed some damned rat's nest of code only to discover I wrote it. More than once.
Not only is commenting important, though, but use clear design. I took over a project where the previous guy loved layers of abstraction - think about taking multiple class member functions, getting pointers to them, then passing those function pointers into a non-class standalone function. The only way you can trace that back is with grep, and three days with a whiteboard like parent mentioned. Don't do that.
Poor Republicans are having to face up to the brutal reality that their beloved "free market" doesn't always work so fucking well. They've been selling it for so long as the solution to every problem that they're way out of their element when it fails miserably.
Right, because socialism never had any unintended effects like the complete implosion of the second largest country in the world or anything. Sorry to inject facts into that black/white, partisan view of the world.
The problem wasn't the free market so much; the problem was the government manipulation of available capital via the Federal Reserve. You drop interest rates to basically nothing and keep them there for years, because of unintended consequences like what we are seeing now. Low interest rates == overspeculation.
This problem was caused specifically because Alan Greenspan decided that the best way to create a stable economy was with rollercoaster interest rates. Didn't work well.
Ugh... This has nothing to do with free speech. The 1st amendment ONLY applies to the government infringing on your rights.
Correct, contract law rules in this situation. But since they're instituting this change now, then presumably no one will have signed an NDA containing that language, meaning there's nothing to abridge the aforementioned first amendment rights.
Seems to me, only question is whether they signed an open-ended NDA that says all communications between the devs and Apple are confidential. But I'm pretty sure I can't send you a letter and say "These contents are under non-disclosure" unless you agree. I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure unilateral contracts aren't enforcable. Otherwise, I'm sending you a letter that says "Your house belongs to me".
So in the end, minus a signed, enforceable NDA, 1st Amendment rules in this case.
Slashdot Mirror
A masterful troll, sir. I salute you.
What is important is that by the time you graduate, you understand both why there are so many different world views for "big picture" things like the responsibilities of citizens, the rights of individuals vs. the rights of the collective or state, etc. as well as why there are different views on "details" like different coding standards and different standards of business ethics. By knowing many of these views and by understanding why different people have different views, you will be better prepared to know why you adopt the views you adopt, and be able to explain your reasons to others. You will also be better equipped to understand why your boss or coworker may have a different view, and whether that difference is a reason for you to re-evaluate your views, agree to disagree, or circulate your resume.
If you need formal education for that - let alone higher education - God help you. Where I come from, that sort of thing was generally considered "not being an asshole", not a complicated subject that required in-depth study.
What if this person really wants to purchase a drug that he thinks will enlarge him? Who gives the researchers the right to decide what other people should spend their money on? Under several legal interpretations, forcing a person not to buy something perceived as harmful is not legal: denying to sell cigarettes to a person of legal age may be illegal, under discrimination laws.
In this case, the sale would be illegal since we're talking about "drugs" that aren't FDA approved being sold without a prescription. So I think the analogy of stopping sales of cigarettes to minors would be more apt; it's guaranteed that a crime is being interrupted.
You already know the answer. I'll give you a hint: What does the "title" say at the top of your browser?
Whoooosh...
As far as a good part of the rest of the world...we don't think you elected a messiah. We're just glad you didn't elect the 3rd incarnation of the fucking antichrist.
Dumbest thing I've read today and that applies double for whoever modded that informative/insightful. I didn't vote for McCain. I don't think he'd make as good an executive as he does a Senator, and if I'm being honest, I don't think he's as sharp mentally as he used to be.
But his record is really that of a centrist, who works with people across party lines. He's done a lot to reform campaign finance (which ironically didn't help him, since his opponent decided rules are for other people). Relating McCain to the "antichrist" somehow is representative of the blind, untargeted ultra-liberal rage that seems to have consumed quite a few people these days. Yes, Bush is a terrible president. But to assume that he and McCain are the same man, let alone to come to the conclusion that he's representative of Satan himself, requires one to be drinking directly from the Obama campaign Kool-Aid tap.
In other words, stop letting other people write your cue cards for you, think for yourself.
NONE of the DOS-based Windows (1,2,3,95,98/me) were stable. They were kludges sitting on top of an ancient DOS, trying to be a Mac-like environment.
Wait, are you talking about MS Windows or X Windows?
What about the assholes who think TV is for everyone, and need to force their choice upon others?
You mean the assholes who break into your home, install a TV, tie you up, and force you to watch it? Because that's pretty much the only valid example I can think of.
If you mean proprietors who have TVs on in their establishments - no one's forcing you to be there. Leave or quitcherbitchin.
So, other than creating a public nuisance almost certain to result in getting your face punched, what EXACTLY is the point of this device?
It's for sanctimonious, condescending assholes who think TV is beneath them, and who need to force their choice upon others.
In other words, it's for getting your face punched. ;)
Low rates do not, themselves, motivate banks to write bad paper on behalf of the risky blokes who suddenly think they can afford a house...Low rates accellerated the process, but cannot indepedently cause this problem
The lower the rates affect far more than just the process of the bank making the loan. That's part of it. And actually, low rates will in fact cause a bank to take a greater risk for a certain return based on supply and demand. But you're right, that's just part of it.
Another part is when investment funds leverage their assets based on easy credit, allowing to amplify their bets many times. Leverage rates should go up with cheap credit. One more step is overspeculation, also due to cheap credit, in which a feedback loop initiates with higher prices drawing more people to invest in something - though it should be the opposite on a value basis.
One cause specific to this mess (which I alluded to in a different response) is that the balloon ARM (and negative amortization loans, even worse) allowed them to put people in houses they couldn't afford, but give them the time to sell off the loan asset before it blew up. That was clever, on their behalf, and was a clear warning sign that the bubble wasn't sustainable. Clever schemes like that are a good sign that the bubble is a-coming.
and the ratings agencies performed whatever evil was necessary to keep the music playing. Whether they too were strongarmed, or simply cashing in on banks' willingness to pay annual "maintenance fees" for AAA ratings, is not yet known.
To me, blaming the ratings agencies for this seems weak, simply because when you have the fox guarding the henhouse, what do you expect? Do you blame the fox for being who he is? It's like when Andersen was "auditing" Enron. Who was trusting these ratings at a time when the housing situation was clearly way overspeculated? It just seems insane to me. This is what happens when you choose mathematical models based on faulty assumptions over common sense.
I'm a student of history, so I go back and look at what people do in response to different macroeconomic conditions. And in the case of interest rates, keeping them too low for too long creates overspeculation. Because why *wouldn't* you speculate when the Fed is practically giving you house money to play with?
That's not to say that rates being extremely high is good, by the way. But rates too low for too long will create an asset bubble, because speculation and running with the herd is simply human nature. Psychology trumps math.
You almost said it yourself in your first sentence, before tripping over your own politics and blaming Greenspan.
He was the chairman of the Fed under which the rate policies I'm criticizing were enacted, correct? I'm not seeing the political ad hominem attack on what I said, seeing as how he served under presidents of both parties. I don't think he's a mean guy. But I think he's a high-profile member of the "easy credit, free markets, and risk diversification solve everything" crowd. Because he set the factors that caused this mess, I think he shares a massive amount of the blame.
That seems to be an oversimplification. The most reasonable thing I've seen is that we deregulated the credit derivatives market, and told the crooks to "regulate themselves."
I don't necessarily disagree with your analysis above, but quite honestly it IS simple. The reason for this clusterf**k doesn't require a PhD in finance to figure out, that's what kills me. Basic supply-and-demand analysis suggests there will be a problem. The issues you raise are absolutely important, but to me they just determined how big the problem would be, not whether there would be one.
I would look at it this way - the deregulated derivatives and swaps (and other not-so-transparent assets) made it easier to hide the problem for longer, but credit that was just too easy to get was the fuel for the fire.
I'm looking it from a pure supply-and-demand standpoint - historically, whenever credit is too easy to get and stays that way for too long, Bad Shit happens. Funds get greedy, overleverage, and make insane bets. Then, when the bad assets start getting sold off, their leverage screws them because they have to sell good assets to pay off depreciating leveraged debt. If too many people are too leveraged, you get a chain reaction where selling depreciates even good assets, which cascades and leads to a market crash because you don't have any buyers. It would be one thing if this were the first time that cycle has happened, but it happens frequently. 1929, a smaller one I believe after WWII, 1987, 1998, 2002, and now. The degree varies, but all owed a lot to overspeculation, which depends in large part on credit that's too easy to get.
If full disclosure was part of that market by law, then we simply wouldn't be where we are today. Originating lenders would be unable to sell bad loans, and when they started suffering the consequences, the game would have ended early and not been nearly as bad.
That's not a bad start, but Wall Street will always find an angle. Your approach, while necessary, is sort of like how we beefed up airline screening after 9/11, even though the next attack will be different. Preventing the last problem isn't bad, but it won't solve the next problem. Same on Wall Street - the next financial crisis will have a different cause, be it foreign currency speculation, bond speculation, housing speculation, venture capital overspeculation, whatever. Note we've had minor to major crashes due to all *five* of those just in the last 20 years, a couple of them multiple times. What's next? I don't know, neither does anybody, and that's the point. Bottom line, you can't legislate away all the holes because you can't out-think the cleverest schemers on Wall Street - but you can eliminate the easy credit that lets the morons do it.
As an example - so why housing this time? Mortgage securitization was the flavor of the month for the "can't fail" risk diversification crowd. As I've said, it's just one in a chain. The pet theory of risk diversification suggested that, based on woefully limited data, that mortgages across different socioeconomic backgrounds and different regions won't all go south simultaneously. That worked until easy credit and a clever scheme let mortgage brokers and investment banks game the system. Here's the game: while everybody knew banks were giving houses to people who couldn't afford them, and that it was happening everywhere, the mortgages were built so they didn't implode immediately. How? The balloon ARM. Everybody with a functioning brain knew these balloon ARMs that were sold to get people in houses were ticking time bombs. But the fuse on that bomb was a couple years long, by which point the people who packaged those securities had sold them. Just like the dot-bomb economy, when the vulture capitalist clowns backed IPOs that anyone knew were retarded, but they made their money up front. Some other sucker would find out later these companies had no business model.
One of the of the downsides of free markets
Bottom line, this had nothing to do with bad data. It was Greenspan's blindness to the consequences of easy monetary policy would have that caused much of the problems today.
Absolutely. Wait, rollercoaster interest rates are a bad idea? Really? And it took a genius to figure this out?
It's so easy to understand. Low credit and the push for home ownership at any cost led to insane price increases and speculation that it wasn't hard to see had to come to a crash stop. I had this figured out as of 2004 when I talked to a realtor who told me I needed to buy NOW with nothing down and use the guaranteed 2%/month price increase to refinance in a year. I can recognize a bubble when I see it.
That's why it pisses me off when Greenspan points the fingers elsewhere. He's the one who set the rates. He's the one who jacked them up, then down, waiting too long and overcorrecting to account for it. And he refuses to take the blame.
The funny thing is, this isn't the first time things have gotten sideways thanks to overspeculation. During the (mercifully) brief meltdown in 1998 due to the currency markets, he basically told the banks to do what they do, the government will help out if things go bad. The overcorrection to that mini-crisis and the post-9/11 slowdown sowed the seeds for what we have now. Gee, thanks Alan.
So now he blames bad data. Really, Alan, you're surprised that people selling certain securities said things about them that was overly rosy? Give me a break. At some point, you have to have some damned sense, and actually look at the securities without the computer models. When things defy common sense to that degree, something's wrong.
The funny thing is, it seems every crisis comes about because risk diversification models fail. Happened in 1929, happened in 1998, happened now. Investing houses have this theory that a lot of big risks can be less risky in totality, because the risks aren't correlated. Problem is, when the shit hits the fan, a lot of things become correlated that didn't use to be. Partly it's because everything's sitting on top of the same increasingly global economy. Part of it is that funds that are overly leveraged have to sell whatever they have to meet margin calls. The people who create the models study the risk correlation and assume things based on it that simply aren't valid in the real world. The book "When Genius Failed" has a good case study on this, where an investment house run by brilliant guys including Nobel Prize winners crashed and burned because they didn't understand that common sense trumps mathematical models.
To disclose, I actually see great value in statistical predictive models - indeed, that's what I do for a living. I design and implement mathematical models. But because of that, I also know what mathematical models can't do. Too much hubris by too many people, and we all suffer.
Um, yeah. Regulations hurt people and take away their freedom. That shouldn't be done, in general.
That sounds far too much like ideology that has little connection to the real world. Counterexamples you your argument: the current economic crisis caused by banking regulations, the Great Depression caused by types of speculation that aren't allowed anymore, Enron and the energy crisis a while ago, monopolies in general.
On the whole, you seem to have anarchy and freedom dangerously confused. Having a "free" (as in anarchy) society in which nobody wants to live isn't a win.
Something besides "I want to" or "hurting them and taking away their freedom will personally benefit me".
OK. How about "hurting their ability to screw the entire population will benefit absolutely everybody"? That works for me.
On the other hand, if you don't have a problem with hurting people and taking away their freedom for your personal gain, then nevermind. There's probably some unlocked cars in your neighborhood you can steal some nice stuff from. Why not go have a look? The cops don't even investigate that stuff.
You fail because of:
(X) Logical Inconsistencies
(X) Melodrama
( ) Godwin's Law
( ) Violates Laws of Physics
(X) Passive Aggressive
( ) Slashdot Car Analogy
(X) Strawman
( ) Ad hominem attack
( ) Appeal to authority
When did "truly free markets" come to mean anything other than "each individual is free to do whatever he or she wants provided his or her actions cause no direct harm to others"?
You have "freedom" and "anarchy" confused. A "free" market is one in which prices are set by the dynamic of supply and demand. Here's a decent reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_equilibrium
So-called "barriers to entry", the number of "players", the existence of (unattainable) equilibrium -- these are all irrelevant. The market is free if and only if there is no systemic aggression (initiation of coercion; violation of others' property rights, including personal rights, or threats thereof).
According to whom? The who idea/definition behind a free market is that, when there is demand, a supply will meet it. If artificial conditions are preventing a supply from meeting a demand, then a free market simply does not exist. A free market explicitly assumes, by its very definition, that an equilibrium state can be met in a reasonably timely fashion. Factors that prevent market equilibrium, by definition, prevent a freely flowing market.
For what it's worth, anti-trust law doesn't even fit into your picture either, since it causes no "direct harm" to others, and leveraging of monopolies to freeze the market and facilitate aribtrary, non-equilibrium pricing is the exact opposite of a free market.
The libertarian stance isn't really about the market at all; it's about aggression, and the correct response to it.
This is one of those things where theory gets in the way of reality. I'm libertarian with a small "l", in that I believe generally in leaving people alone assuming they're not causing problems. However, in this case, I would argue that massive donation from the telecoms to bribe politicians to voting against the will of their constituents (allowing overconsolidation) certainly constitutes a form of aggression in my book.
In a libertarian society -- one which adheres to the Non-Aggression Principle and thus does not endorse or tolerate the initiation of force or fraud -- the free market is a natural byproduct.
In this case, reality proves ideals wrong. This is one of those things that people believe if they don't have a good foundation on how real economies work. Those principles function only when there are lots of buyers of something, and lots of sellers. They completely break down in cases like these when, in most of the country, you have about two market participants, government protected monopolies/oligopolies, and a massive barrier to market entry. In cases like that, there can be a massive demand for something by consumers that will go unmet simply because the existing market participants don't want it to happen.
There are lots of examples of how markets break down when too much market consolidation happens. If you believe in market anarchy, that's one thing, but there's a difference between a free market and an anarchic one.
Given the relatively frivolous "consumers' needs" in question, you seem to be selling out your libertarian ideals for a discount. I don't "consider myself a libertarian" in the same way. But I'm for freedom for these companies unless it causes a huge problem. All the Internet whining doesn't rise to the level of a "huge problem" yet.
That's the always bogus argument against regulation. Back in the day, that same analysis was used against the Standard Oil breakup. It doesn't have to be life-or-death to matter to the market. Your analysis requires there be an arbiter who decides what's important or not, and that would be the biggest regulation of all. So no thanks.
I personally am on the fence on this issue. As a libertarian, I am against government regulation and pro-free market and net neutrality seems to me to be a regulation against the telecom providers to do what they want with their lines.
I condider myself a libertarian, and am against regulation where truly free markets (or close approximations thereto) exist. However, in many cases, they don't, and this is an example. What you have is a very small number of players with a very high barrier to entry to the market. In that case, the equilibrium required for the operation of a free market simply doesn't exist. Because of the barrier to market entry, the actors can create a situation where a free market would demand competition to meet consumers' needs, but that no one can fill that need in any efficient manner because of the market barrier. In cases where such huge barriers exist and the actors seems to be colluding (explicitly or implicitly), I do think regulation is needed.
All sorts of species evolve in spite of any particular start or length of reproductive capacity. Since the vast majority of what diversity between members of a population happens during conception, the evolutionary engine is largely fueled at that point.
I agree, either there's something big I'm missing or this guy's a moron. On face, this fails even basic math. If DNA gets mutations at X/year, and the reproductive cycle is Y years, then the total number of mutations per generation is XY. At that level, it looks like he's right, since as Y goes down with younger males reproducing, the total number of mutations per generation goes down. Except he forgot that as reproductive age goes down, *you get more generations per unit time*. Since there are (1/Y) reproductive cycles per year, you multiply that back through and you get (X/year)*Y*(1/Y) = X mutations/year, which is exactly where you started. Duh.
You might even be able to argue that, assuming a constant number of mutations/year in a gene pool, having shorter generations allows for more opportunities to roll the genetic dice, and actually speed up evolution. I'd defer to an actual geneticist on that, though.
I'm going to have to disagree. I know this sounds trollish, but I'm really not trying to start a flamewar, and I ask that you keep it civil in telling me how wrong I am. Here goes:
I'm just jumping in here, sorry to crash the party. And I'm only being civil because you're a basketball fan (not really, but nice username anyway).
Is it going too far to count his unscientific theory against his previous successes? No. Scientific committees need to consider not just the immediate, but also the long-term consequences of giving their endorsement to individuals. While they should give out degrees to people who like to hold unscientific beliefs in their spare time, they should not hold them out as shining examples of "someone doing it right".
By that reasoning, you'd be stripping Einstein of his prize as well. Had the Prize been around, Isaac Newton would have been excluded with extreme prejudice. Indeed, that line of reasoning would be tantamount to restricting the Prize to athiests.
There are many scientists who happen to be religious, and it causes many a brilliant scientist degrees of consternation in attempting to reconcile his religion's creation story with his own science. Penrose's attempts seem no different than Einstein's rejection of quantum mechanics because "God does not play dice with the universe".
While I agree with your analysis of why the null state for any hypothesis should be rejected rather than accepted, I don't think that's sufficient reason to ban Penrose or anyone else from consideration for the Prize. Indeed, I would say that all creeping politicization of the Prize should cease, as it has been all too prevalent lately (assuming it ever was otherwise). In this case, while I personally believe in maintaining a barrier between religion and science, I think the pendulum has swung too far against religion in general - indeed, the anti-religious sentiment is so common in the sciences to pretty much amount to bigotry. I've seen it firsthand, and it's disgusting coming from people who claim to be open-minded. So long as your opinion matches theirs, presumably.
In other words, let's accept Penrose's religious choices and not hold it against him with regard to his scientific contributions. Anything else would smack of extreme religious intolerance that is not in keeping with the overall ideals of Prize in advancing humanity.
I do respect your opinion and the civil way in which you've presented it, but I'd strongly urge you to reconsider what you're advocating.
I doubt 409ers could come from anywhere but africa. 409 is a reference to the Nigeria criminal code.
And that would be 419. 409 is a cleaner or a Beach Boys song.;)
The term '419' has become generalized since the orignal scams were so heavily located in Nigeria, but people use the term fairly generally.
Iterating over a set of data isn't done with loops, it's done with applying formulas over a range of cells. And if you turn on iteration for the spreadsheet, it *is* possible to build flow-controlling state machines without using the scripting engine. Not particularly natural for most imperative programmers, but definitely possible.
You could go to all that trouble...or use the most appropriate tool for the job. Yes, if you kludge the living shit out if it, you can get Excel to do a whole lot of things that could be accomplished more simply and easier with something else. For instance, sure, you *could* implement a neural network somehow in Excel. But it won't be pretty.
Also add the fact that scientific toolkits built for the purpose have very useful toolkits that simply aren't found in Excel. And they're pre-compiled so they're fast as hell.
Excel has its place, certainly, but I think people who get into heavier applications would appreciate one of the tools I mentioned earlier.
Why isn't it a good idea, and does this apply equally to OpenOffice?
It's OK for simple stuff, but trying to do something like implementing a loop in a spreadsheet. And yes, the criticism applies to OO as well.
There are very good packages out there - some open source - for doing scientific analysis. I'd recommend R or Octave (a matlab clone), personally. Also, Python + NumPy + SciPy + Pylab is great for doing Matlab-like things, and it's all free as well.
Actually, many deaf people enjoy music. They experience vibrations from loud music in a way that you cannot,
I'd say that anyone who's lived in an apartment has experienced that particular phenomenon. It's not all that fun. Of course, that could be because my neighbors have usually had shitty taste in music.
if it's just down to detecting the frequency of the light emitted, couldn't some sort of photovoltaic or photoelectric sensor be designed so that you wouldn't have to chemically engineer receptors for different kinds of surfaces, but rather just program the software to identify the surface material?
Yes, what you're describing is effectively using a vector of many pieces of information to distinguish between various samples as opposed to relying on a binary receptor. Many detection mechanisms work that way; in fact, I did my graduate work on sensors that work in that manner. While it can work, there's still a lot of trickery in the way of algorithms used in the software. There's also a matter of sensitivity/selectivity: given a pair of samples and their measurements, can the difference in signatures be detected outside the noise?
In general, with systems like these, the more things you're trying to mutually distinguish, the more pieces of information you need, and the more sensitive you need the measurements to be. That's tough since they're claiming it can (in theory) sense *everything*. Unfortunately, simply detecting something is useless - the interesting part would be how many things they can recognize while distinguishing them from false alarms.
Methinks we have some folks that understand the physics, but aren't as far along when it comes to the algorithms. I've been down this road, and it's nowhere near as simple as they seem to think.
I know you're kidding, but I want to make one point. *any* code is unmanageable if you don't comment - especially java if you use lots of objects and polymorphism. Please please please, leave comments so others can figure out what the fuck your logic was without diagramming logic on a whiteboard for 3 days...
Yep. And in case altruism isn't your thing, just remember that with all the code you'll be writing, "others" in the parent's statement can be replaced by "you in 6 months". I - as well as probably everyone here - have cursed some damned rat's nest of code only to discover I wrote it. More than once.
Not only is commenting important, though, but use clear design. I took over a project where the previous guy loved layers of abstraction - think about taking multiple class member functions, getting pointers to them, then passing those function pointers into a non-class standalone function. The only way you can trace that back is with grep, and three days with a whiteboard like parent mentioned. Don't do that.
Poor Republicans are having to face up to the brutal reality that their beloved "free market" doesn't always work so fucking well. They've been selling it for so long as the solution to every problem that they're way out of their element when it fails miserably.
Right, because socialism never had any unintended effects like the complete implosion of the second largest country in the world or anything. Sorry to inject facts into that black/white, partisan view of the world.
The problem wasn't the free market so much; the problem was the government manipulation of available capital via the Federal Reserve. You drop interest rates to basically nothing and keep them there for years, because of unintended consequences like what we are seeing now. Low interest rates == overspeculation.
This problem was caused specifically because Alan Greenspan decided that the best way to create a stable economy was with rollercoaster interest rates. Didn't work well.
Ugh... This has nothing to do with free speech. The 1st amendment ONLY applies to the government infringing on your rights.
Correct, contract law rules in this situation. But since they're instituting this change now, then presumably no one will have signed an NDA containing that language, meaning there's nothing to abridge the aforementioned first amendment rights.
Seems to me, only question is whether they signed an open-ended NDA that says all communications between the devs and Apple are confidential. But I'm pretty sure I can't send you a letter and say "These contents are under non-disclosure" unless you agree. I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure unilateral contracts aren't enforcable. Otherwise, I'm sending you a letter that says "Your house belongs to me".
So in the end, minus a signed, enforceable NDA, 1st Amendment rules in this case.