It is. I work in a similar vein of the industry as Taleb (derivatives trading, but at a bank). he is the guy who says we are undervaluing the chance of a crash every day of every year and once in a while, he strikes it big. he is the guy who plays the same strategy every day and says "told ya so" when it finally pays off. he's not a fool, but it's a self fulfilling prophecy if you believe in a cyclical market so it's hard to put much weight behind him.
But, it's a cheap strategy to do in derivatives. You don't require much cash and since you are buying optionality, margin calls have a hard limit so it's less uncertain(to the downside) than other strategies.
But he is right about VAR. it's not something that is hard for anyone to tell you who has worked at a bank. I can remember 2 distinct times where my main job was to find out how to reduce our var without reducing our actual market risks (in order to free up risk capital so we could take bigger bets) and it will be my job again in a few days as everyone starts repositioning for the new year.
We have to do it in earnest because management always looks to the recent past to guess at your exposure to the future and generally, the models that VAR uses are far weaker than any modern pricing models or risk models because they are much harder to implement. the volatility of the last 18 months will cause/ is causing everyone's VAR to spike (even when carrying far less real risk) therefore adding to the massive de-leveraging management is requiring of everyone. this means over the next few months, one of the primary jobs of every trader will be obscuring the risks his portfolio is taking in order to take bigger risks (yeah, those incentives are still the same).
now you may call me a pariah but after working in this industry for a relatively short period of time, I've come to realize that is all there is in it. this is how business is done, how it was done, and how it will be done. As shareholders continue to keep their boards in place, we are obviously doing exactly what a majority of our shareholders expect of us and that is our overarching mandate (and yes, I am not an investor in any of the banks anymore, even my own, because I realize to be a successful banker you are paid by shareholders to screw shareholders).
Re:Does it always produce true responses?
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witch hunts are irrelevant. the purpose is different when you are looking for a confession. It seems everyone loves using it but it is completely irrelevant because of the set up.
you had two options: 1. say you were a witch and get killed 2. continue to die and still get killed
you know this before being arrested and accused and are reminded of this over and over.
I'll leave it to you to figure out how the current situation is completely different (the key being one looks or a confession while hte other is looking for information about events outside of the prisoner)
Re:Does it always produce true responses?
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but your context isn't relevant to my question while it may be an appropriate response to a comment about the premises for torture or the morality of it. my question was based around the common claim that torturing someone does not yield accurate information because the person will say anything to get you to stop.
I only want to know if anyone has anything but very rare anecdotal evidence to support this claim. Is it a valid line of argument to refute torture? I don't know. that was my question. There are lots of other lines of arguments to refute the use of torture though. I am not implying that the answer to this question implies anything about how you should view torture; I was simply looking for information to answer a personal, empirical question of mine.
I am only wondering if it is effective in garnering the information you seek in particular instances(in this case, accurate intel about some subject). not about the various negative consequences of torture both for the person and the country committing this act (all of which are very important in making your decision as to if you are ok with it).
reacting with such harsh emotions (not just you, but a majority of the replies I have seen) is like talking about the evils of regressive taxes when someone simply asks for data pointing to which elicits more revenue, a sales tax or a capital gains tax.
Re:Does it always produce true responses?
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so far I have received a grand total of 3, 1 of which is a personal story that I cannot independently verify.
These would be Al-Libi and Nguyen(sp?). I am not ignoring, I am pointing out that there is very very little data about it in EITHER direction. 2 examples is not repeated and I have addressed why the witch trials are not relevant and why Al-Libi is similar due to the mindset of the Bush Administration(the CIA did not believe a word he said, it was a judgment by Cheney that had the adm using his evidence).
What ever your feelings about torture, my question was not about whether it was ok to do or not. I merely wanted to know if it produced reliable results or not (and preferably, the results compared to non-violent methods).
I do not believe I am correct. As I said, I doubt these methods are as ineffective as many people try to portray them as and am simply wondering if there is some study/body of evidence consisting of more than disparate examples that prove things one way or the other.
Re:Does it always produce true responses?
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god. people like you refuse to read a comment and just feel like making emotionally driven responses that are completely unrelated.
My question was if there is proof of torture yielding less reliable, actionable evidence. if the vast majority of the names your grandfather and his brother gave were accurate to their knowledge, then the methods were very effective.
that you seem to think this point (a fact, not opinion) means I condone what is being done, then you are just looking for a mount to give your sermon.
my question is not about the emotional scars of your family or the physical scars they may have lived with. it's also not about whether you feel democracy is good or evil or if I feel torture is morally acceptable. It's not even a question that could possibly hint at me being republican/ bush supporter/ evangelical/ torture supporter. in fact, making any of those connections makes you about as good at analyzing evidence as the bush administration was.
I will take the small bit of your response that was germane to say "I know of two cases in which torture, after an extended period of time, gave highly accurate, actionable evidence but some details could have been incorrect due to the extreme conditions questioning took place in".
Re:Does it always produce true responses?
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a good example of the failure of harsh interrogation methods. but he was exactly like hte witch trials. the bush administration had shown it would go to any ends to make a case for war with iraq, regardless of what intelligence officials put in front of them.
given the fact that the administration wanted to hear one thing from him ("I"m Al Qaeda and we were being trained by the Iraq govt in bomb making"), he capitulated and gave them that information. as his interrogators(as in Cheney and Bush) did not care about the truth but rather, making the evidence support their conclusion, it's a good example of how any evidence can fail you (remember the aluminum tubes, buying of uranium from Niger, etc. all instances of false information being propagated for these purposes).
Re:Does it always produce true responses?
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not germane. this is not actionable evidence. this is torture committed with the purpose of making someone say "xyz". that is completely different than torturing for actionable information.
inevitably, the only data people can point to is similar situations where a confession was garnered. That is what torture is about wehn a police officer is trying to get a confession (hence it's uselessness) but isn't what torture is about when dealing with Al Qaeda. We don't torture to find out if the person is a member of Al Qaeda or if he likes Bin Laden (as useless as someone saying they are a witch)
Re:Does it always produce true responses?
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do you have any evidence to back these assumptions? I'm not talking about another talking head saying the same thing, but I mean evidence pointing to several instances where a prisoner gave details that were expected and they turned out to be false.
I Personally doubt these methods are as ineffective as everyone likes to portray them.
of course, the article completely ignores that he has won several others economics awards including the Clark Medal and states that he was a very well respected economist (and continues to be) during the time he did the work he got the medal for (the same work he got the clark medal for).
of course, it also leaves out any example of other economists who are "far more deserving".
I don't agree with most of his political views but he has done some great work in economics and has long been considered a possible Nobel candidate. Given his past accomplishments in the field, it's easy to tag this article as conservative whining and complaining when they try to diminish the past accomplishments of someone simply because they disagree (the Nobel prize is almost never given for recent work, it's always work done 10, 20, or even 50 years before).
The choice of Al Gore was... surprising to say the least... as I don't agree he has done anything the peace medal has historically gone towards but Jimmy Carter has done a great deal of work and definitely fell in the long term category of candidates for the prize.
this was one of the most uninformed broadcasts I've ever seen (full disclosure, I'm a trader in fixed income derivatives, I work around this stuff all day and some nights). it doesn't give any real color as to what a mortgage backed security is, how CDO's work, what the tranches are and how you can get a AA security out of a bunch of non-AA underlyings, what mark to market accounting vs. hold to maturity accounting are and how they play into why banks have problems now but had amazing returns for the last several years, etc. It just gives a stereotypical view of what could have gone on in a limited way that perpetuates falsehoods.
I can understand if you've never studied these products why you would think this is a useful broadcast. it does attempt to give a small picture of what was going on. but fails to highlight or give any information on the derivatives (those financial weapons of mass destruction "the sage" was talking about) or how they are structured.
But to give you an idea that everyone seems to have no problem with, take a nice conservative bank. They are giving out loans to lots of people (none of whom are AA rated). Yet, they can turn around and sell bonds to finance their business at a AA rating. How do they do this? well, it's pretty similar to how CDOs work: you havea set of equity (in the CDO case, toxic waste or the unrated tranche; in the bank case, investor equity) that will absorb the first losses from a business (or a pool of credit assets). A bank with enough equity support can continue to sell bonds at a AA rating simply because that layer of protection shields debt holders from a certain amount of losses.
It's why people will stop extending credit to a bank that lets it's equity decrease to below reasonable levels and why banks must recapitalize in order to continue operating: they can't finance themselves in the debt markets and will go bankrupt quickly without it (this is what brought both Bear and Lehmans down and what could have brought down Merrill).
now, I'm not going to extol myself as an expert, but these are just a few of the many facets of this problem that people ought to get informed about so that they don't sound.... just stupid. keep in mind, I'm not trying to defend many of the practices that happened in the mortgage lending market (a lot of it disgusts me when I found out from a friend who did mortgage brokering for a short while before leaving in disgust). And I'm not trying to defend banks that over extended themselves or got caught on the wrong side of a very big trade but there are several reasons why only some banks have gone under while others are doing just fine (or seeming to do just fine).
really understanding it would take weeks, if not months, of actually working on this stuff. So I'm not trying to fault you either. But I'm just telling you from someone who deals with this stuff every day, this is the equivalent of saying "and malpractice occurs when a surgeon slips and cuts something he isn't supposed to." This is a "duh" statement to most people, but completely glosses over a new(fictitious) issue in surgical medicine in which an unexpected mistake is creeping up due to a relatively new method of performing surgery using a new type of knife.
what good things, exactly, have steel worker unions done for the US in general, or their members?
unions are one of the reasons foreign countries have been able to take all of america's manufacturing base. Falsely keeping a group of people's wages high doesn't do them any good in the long run. steel workers are uneducated labor that enjoyed high wages simply because most other countries lacked the infrastructure to support the job.
how many people in the rust belt didn't try in school because they thought the Union would provide them good jobs? you actually think this is good by any stretch? now we have a section of the populace that was bred to think unskilled work can be paid similar to skilled work and they are left unemployed and undereducated.
I think you should watch more sports. there is a MASSIVE shortage of highly skilled athletes in most sports (simply because in pro sports, the bar is set so friggin high).
take the NFL: according to the players union, the average player only lasts for 3.5 years. But every player whose name I can remember lasted for 7+ years. So how does the average drop to 3.5 years? it's because a vast, vast majority of all football players that make it into the NFL don't even last for 3 years (Many don't make it past 1 year).
With that kind of roll over in the pool of active players, it's easy to see why high profile salaries are so high. It's due to the fact that those high profile players are extremely rare and literally are the top 1 or 2 % of the top thousandth of a percent of all people who touch a football in their lives. Now, the minimum wage of the NFL protects the bottom most players from getting nothing or we would see a very steep payout in the NFL.
now take the structure of all competitive sports: you can earn more in TV deals , ticket revenue, and merchandise sales if you are relatively better in the league. So the competition for fan dollars (which is limited) causes owners to try and buy the best possible team while keeping the franchise profitable. since there is a very limited supply of the best players, competition for their services drives up their price.
now I am (or at least, was) a huge sports fan. I'm not sure what you define as world sporting events, but again, payouts seem to be linked ot how profitable the fan base is. Soccer players get paid huge sums of money, as do the best tennis players and golfers. Olympic salaries are reflected 100% in the advertising dollars they can bring in and we see again, that the best of the best get paid huge sums while those athletes in low profile sports get paid very very little to nothing at all.
you make it sound like they did something bad. if it wasn't for them, we'd be stuck paying for browsers and netscape would be a monopoly. good job MS, running a profiteering company into the ground so a better product and lower prices can make it to the consumer.
I"m not sure why you are complaining. you applaud google and apple and mozilla for competing and providing a "commodity" product but hate the company that started the revolution of commodity web browsers. can you believe you used to pay for something equivalent to a better JS engine over the "freer, slower" version? w/o MS few could imagine a world where companies expended tons of resources to give away a product to increase it's footprint.
I'm glad they drove that waste of space netscape into the ground. it may have stagnated browser development for a few years, but it created the environment for a far more robust browser market than ever before (and it's all FREE).
completely OT but: try www.bikely.com or www.mapmyrun.com
both are intended for cyclists to my knowledge and I use them a lot for my rides because they give detailed elevation, maps, and an easy way to map rides that are on roads.
if you a trail runner, I guess you have to use gps.
wow. so in other words, you decided to buy at the top and you are sour? can I blame democrats for the internet bubble then (it cost me a good clip of money)? In fact, the low interest rates brought about by the internet bubble crash (which we can now blame on clinton) caused the run up in housing prices and led to you being pissed off about buying a house at the top. So really, that is who you should be pissed off at.
sub prime loans were only a small portion of what caused the huge run up in housing prices(roughly 1 in 8 mortgages). In fact, lower interest rates that made it possible for lots of people to buy more expensive houses in the first place caused a vast majority of that run up.
Also, most of the deregulation that caused the lending crisis occurred under Clinton. In fact, under his administration can be directly linked to the spread of the subprime crisis into the retail banking sector. Banks had been pushing for this deregulation since 1980 but neither Reagan nor Bush gave them it.
I'm also not sure what regulation you think would have helped in trading of MBS (subprime or not). what do you want, government imposed limits on the size of the market? government limits on the frequency of trading (it's a thin market, it doesn't trade very much anyway). Limits on the amount of issuance?
just to warn you, most are NOT available to American citizens and the US does not reciprocate such offers. For example, Japanese citizens have about 10 countries they can choose to take a working holiday in but the US isn't one of them.
or he could mean: people who go out on a limb to start a business, small town surgeons who work their butts off to serve under-served communities,encourage companies like toyota to not locate their production plants in the US, encourage VC's and private equity groups to focus on investing in companies outside the US because the returns are better suited to the risk of helping people try adn achieve their dreams....
there are lots of productive members of society that don't like the idea of working 100 hours a week to get somewhere and then have all that money taxed to pay for some high school drop outs on welfare or pay for the state to be a parent to those people's children.
btw, most likely, your investments are worth MORE today than they were 7 years ago (and by going back to before 9/11 I've giving you a huge break), your house is worth almost 2x as much as it was in 2000 (median home prices in the US stand at 215k vs. 118k at the end of 2000). Yes your gas and food cost more but isn't this the website where people have been predicting that for years?
yeah, the dollar is down, but this means local companies can compete with imports on more favorable grounds.
as to gas and food, even if you lived in a country with higher taxes, you'd still have more expensive gas and food. I'm not sure what lines in the sand you are drawing to connect those two, but I'd like to hear the logic. I'd say obama's big support for ethanol has driven up food prices faster than lowering taxes (and the logic is much more straight forward).
btw, I like obama. he is currently my favorite in the race. but people seem to credit his ideas as the solution to the recent economic troubles (and consequently blame the bush administration) but I haven't seen either a link between Bush policies or a comprehensive plan put forward by Obama.
There are lots of non-specious things to credit Obama with and things to blame Bush for, can't we at least stick to those?
though I have to say (completely OT), I don't understand why people always use the line cruel and unusual to describe actions they find appauling. There is nothing unusual about rape, fights, beatings, etc what-so-ever. I'm not arguing the cruel part, but if you are going to use "and", it doesn't make sense to me how you can argue that.
it's just like I don't understand why a firing squad is cruel and unusual. it may be cruel, but it isn't very unusual.
just wondering, but how are republicans running the US into the ground? I mean honestly, republican pushed through policies. I in fact, did not vote for Bush because he is an evangelical candidate, not a republican (kind of like most NE democrats wouldn't vote for a blue dog democrat) but when people feel like blaming all the country's problems on the particular party in power, I'd like to know what they are talking about.
and obviously, I'd wonder how do those particular situations differ compared to say, clinton's presidency.
racing is part of culture. so is the food and drink we enjoy. part of southern culture is budweiser and racing. what's your point? I find a tailgate outside of a stock car race far , far more interesting than MOMA. so I will financially support one and not the other.
you are taking the massively arrogant position that your value judgment is somehow superior to another; so much so you want those people to fund what you find good.
or at the very least, address the basic point. why should someone who has absolutely no interest in something, be forced to fund it simply because you value it? and of course, how is such a system any different from what we have had for all of time?
Art ought not to be held hostage to the whims of what's popular.
why not? if everyone out there is saying it sucks, who are you to say public funding should go towards it? if no one likes or wants it, then why fund it? you may use some esoteric example of an old composer who people like now, but they were obviously funded more than enough to compose or else you wouldn't have any knowledge of them.
I see no reason why I should fund something you like (and I'm not asking for you to fund something for my personal enjoyment). if gamers don't want to pay to support the development of games, it's only their loss. if you are going to give some excuse about doing it for future generations, I say let those who value it support it. if you value it, open up your pocket book but don't ask others to because you define something as art but don't want to fund it.
why should I, a non-game player, have to have my taxes diverted to something I care nothing about because gamers aren't willing to just pay for the game?
what you are advocating is making others pay for your (not you in particular) gaming experience. If it was a fund that gamers who wanted the right to play would contribute to then great, but unless it is some subscription model with very tight DRM (like steam) then it is back to the situation we are currently in but with less freedom and variety in the gaming market.
I like the current system because people who want to play a game take part in funding it's creation, after the fact. it means developers have to take huge risk (failure can mean bankruptcy) but success means profit. the reason I like the model is unlike public funded arts, museums, etc. my money goes to where I think it should go.
btw, I don't like publicly funded arts either because they are an equal waste of my money. art that I like I will spend money on to support, otherwise I don't want my money wasted to support someone else's desire to see that kind of "art".
um... just make sure what you are talking about actually applies to the community at large. it's funny how slashdot readers read one solitary article by one japanese person and think he represents the nation. I live and owrk in Japan and every Japanese person I know thinks it's awesome to be able to do this. at work, we stopped for about an hour when we found out they had tokyo in it and we were all looking at each others houses and neighborhoods.
it was also a lot of fun to look at various places and is incredibly useful for giving directions.
before you think a corporation is trampling on a culture, be sure it's actually the culture of hte population at large.
oh, and a lot of the old people outside without clothing/ looking like bums are actually homeless. there are tons around where I live. this may be the equivalent of the japanese : "don't show our homeless because it embarrasses us". I've heard that one before; that there aren't homeless or poor in japan even when you show them to people. many japanese people don't want to admit someone who is japanese could be homeless or not have a job.
go is no where near as complex as chess, it just happens to have a very big board with almost no limitations on rules. this isn't complexity! this is called a very large tree of possible moves. large tree =! complex. playing a game of poker with 20 decks greatly increases the possible hands that are dealt, but this doesn't inherently make poker more complex. take any game and increase the game board size and simplify the rules and you get a bigger tree.
go is more difficult to program because it doesn't lend itself to an obvious heuristic solution. I can't value a particular stone higher than another obviously (like I value my queen over an 8th file pawn) meaning understanding why one stone is more valuable than another requires a different approach. of course, given waht I've read about this program, put it in roadrunner and it will blow this ninth dan champ out of the water (or give him one hell of a run for his money). adn in 10 years, put it on the latest supercomputer and no human will stand a chance. but with a more efficient algorithm and a better understanding how positions evolve and interact, such a level could be reached much much sooner.
of course, another reason chess players fell so long before go players is because the chess problem has been worked on for far longer.
not true, you have to distinguish between different methods that can play at the same level.
the tricky party is that any computational program, generally no matter how bad, is improved with increased computational strength. so how to distinguish? for example, could this algo have even come close to winning if you reduced it from 800 to 600 processors? as it scales quite linearly, it probably loses a massive amount of "skill". on the other hand, if they had used the fastest supercomputer in the world, it very well could have won without a handicap.
so the question is always for a given level of computational time, which algorithm is the most skilled.
if we use this same method on stronger hardware to beat this grandmaster without a handicap, do we have a better go method? of course not. the method is exactly the same.
Slashdot Mirror
It is. I work in a similar vein of the industry as Taleb (derivatives trading, but at a bank). he is the guy who says we are undervaluing the chance of a crash every day of every year and once in a while, he strikes it big. he is the guy who plays the same strategy every day and says "told ya so" when it finally pays off. he's not a fool, but it's a self fulfilling prophecy if you believe in a cyclical market so it's hard to put much weight behind him.
But, it's a cheap strategy to do in derivatives. You don't require much cash and since you are buying optionality, margin calls have a hard limit so it's less uncertain(to the downside) than other strategies.
But he is right about VAR. it's not something that is hard for anyone to tell you who has worked at a bank. I can remember 2 distinct times where my main job was to find out how to reduce our var without reducing our actual market risks (in order to free up risk capital so we could take bigger bets) and it will be my job again in a few days as everyone starts repositioning for the new year.
We have to do it in earnest because management always looks to the recent past to guess at your exposure to the future and generally, the models that VAR uses are far weaker than any modern pricing models or risk models because they are much harder to implement. the volatility of the last 18 months will cause/ is causing everyone's VAR to spike (even when carrying far less real risk) therefore adding to the massive de-leveraging management is requiring of everyone. this means over the next few months, one of the primary jobs of every trader will be obscuring the risks his portfolio is taking in order to take bigger risks (yeah, those incentives are still the same).
now you may call me a pariah but after working in this industry for a relatively short period of time, I've come to realize that is all there is in it. this is how business is done, how it was done, and how it will be done. As shareholders continue to keep their boards in place, we are obviously doing exactly what a majority of our shareholders expect of us and that is our overarching mandate (and yes, I am not an investor in any of the banks anymore, even my own, because I realize to be a successful banker you are paid by shareholders to screw shareholders).
witch hunts are irrelevant. the purpose is different when you are looking for a confession. It seems everyone loves using it but it is completely irrelevant because of the set up.
you had two options:
1. say you were a witch and get killed
2. continue to die and still get killed
you know this before being arrested and accused and are reminded of this over and over.
I'll leave it to you to figure out how the current situation is completely different (the key being one looks or a confession while hte other is looking for information about events outside of the prisoner)
but your context isn't relevant to my question while it may be an appropriate response to a comment about the premises for torture or the morality of it. my question was based around the common claim that torturing someone does not yield accurate information because the person will say anything to get you to stop.
I only want to know if anyone has anything but very rare anecdotal evidence to support this claim. Is it a valid line of argument to refute torture? I don't know. that was my question. There are lots of other lines of arguments to refute the use of torture though. I am not implying that the answer to this question implies anything about how you should view torture; I was simply looking for information to answer a personal, empirical question of mine.
I am only wondering if it is effective in garnering the information you seek in particular instances(in this case, accurate intel about some subject). not about the various negative consequences of torture both for the person and the country committing this act (all of which are very important in making your decision as to if you are ok with it).
reacting with such harsh emotions (not just you, but a majority of the replies I have seen) is like talking about the evils of regressive taxes when someone simply asks for data pointing to which elicits more revenue, a sales tax or a capital gains tax.
so far I have received a grand total of 3, 1 of which is a personal story that I cannot independently verify.
These would be Al-Libi and Nguyen(sp?). I am not ignoring, I am pointing out that there is very very little data about it in EITHER direction. 2 examples is not repeated and I have addressed why the witch trials are not relevant and why Al-Libi is similar due to the mindset of the Bush Administration(the CIA did not believe a word he said, it was a judgment by Cheney that had the adm using his evidence).
What ever your feelings about torture, my question was not about whether it was ok to do or not. I merely wanted to know if it produced reliable results or not (and preferably, the results compared to non-violent methods).
I do not believe I am correct. As I said, I doubt these methods are as ineffective as many people try to portray them as and am simply wondering if there is some study/body of evidence consisting of more than disparate examples that prove things one way or the other.
god. people like you refuse to read a comment and just feel like making emotionally driven responses that are completely unrelated.
My question was if there is proof of torture yielding less reliable, actionable evidence. if the vast majority of the names your grandfather and his brother gave were accurate to their knowledge, then the methods were very effective.
that you seem to think this point (a fact, not opinion) means I condone what is being done, then you are just looking for a mount to give your sermon.
my question is not about the emotional scars of your family or the physical scars they may have lived with. it's also not about whether you feel democracy is good or evil or if I feel torture is morally acceptable. It's not even a question that could possibly hint at me being republican/ bush supporter/ evangelical/ torture supporter. in fact, making any of those connections makes you about as good at analyzing evidence as the bush administration was.
I will take the small bit of your response that was germane to say "I know of two cases in which torture, after an extended period of time, gave highly accurate, actionable evidence but some details could have been incorrect due to the extreme conditions questioning took place in".
a good example of the failure of harsh interrogation methods. but he was exactly like hte witch trials. the bush administration had shown it would go to any ends to make a case for war with iraq, regardless of what intelligence officials put in front of them.
given the fact that the administration wanted to hear one thing from him ("I"m Al Qaeda and we were being trained by the Iraq govt in bomb making"), he capitulated and gave them that information. as his interrogators(as in Cheney and Bush) did not care about the truth but rather, making the evidence support their conclusion, it's a good example of how any evidence can fail you (remember the aluminum tubes, buying of uranium from Niger, etc. all instances of false information being propagated for these purposes).
not germane. this is not actionable evidence. this is torture committed with the purpose of making someone say "xyz". that is completely different than torturing for actionable information.
inevitably, the only data people can point to is similar situations where a confession was garnered. That is what torture is about wehn a police officer is trying to get a confession (hence it's uselessness) but isn't what torture is about when dealing with Al Qaeda. We don't torture to find out if the person is a member of Al Qaeda or if he likes Bin Laden (as useless as someone saying they are a witch)
do you have any evidence to back these assumptions? I'm not talking about another talking head saying the same thing, but I mean evidence pointing to several instances where a prisoner gave details that were expected and they turned out to be false.
I Personally doubt these methods are as ineffective as everyone likes to portray them.
of course, the article completely ignores that he has won several others economics awards including the Clark Medal and states that he was a very well respected economist (and continues to be) during the time he did the work he got the medal for (the same work he got the clark medal for).
of course, it also leaves out any example of other economists who are "far more deserving".
I don't agree with most of his political views but he has done some great work in economics and has long been considered a possible Nobel candidate. Given his past accomplishments in the field, it's easy to tag this article as conservative whining and complaining when they try to diminish the past accomplishments of someone simply because they disagree (the Nobel prize is almost never given for recent work, it's always work done 10, 20, or even 50 years before).
The choice of Al Gore was... surprising to say the least... as I don't agree he has done anything the peace medal has historically gone towards but Jimmy Carter has done a great deal of work and definitely fell in the long term category of candidates for the prize.
this was one of the most uninformed broadcasts I've ever seen (full disclosure, I'm a trader in fixed income derivatives, I work around this stuff all day and some nights). it doesn't give any real color as to what a mortgage backed security is, how CDO's work, what the tranches are and how you can get a AA security out of a bunch of non-AA underlyings, what mark to market accounting vs. hold to maturity accounting are and how they play into why banks have problems now but had amazing returns for the last several years, etc. It just gives a stereotypical view of what could have gone on in a limited way that perpetuates falsehoods.
I can understand if you've never studied these products why you would think this is a useful broadcast. it does attempt to give a small picture of what was going on. but fails to highlight or give any information on the derivatives (those financial weapons of mass destruction "the sage" was talking about) or how they are structured.
But to give you an idea that everyone seems to have no problem with, take a nice conservative bank. They are giving out loans to lots of people (none of whom are AA rated). Yet, they can turn around and sell bonds to finance their business at a AA rating. How do they do this? well, it's pretty similar to how CDOs work: you havea set of equity (in the CDO case, toxic waste or the unrated tranche; in the bank case, investor equity) that will absorb the first losses from a business (or a pool of credit assets). A bank with enough equity support can continue to sell bonds at a AA rating simply because that layer of protection shields debt holders from a certain amount of losses.
It's why people will stop extending credit to a bank that lets it's equity decrease to below reasonable levels and why banks must recapitalize in order to continue operating: they can't finance themselves in the debt markets and will go bankrupt quickly without it (this is what brought both Bear and Lehmans down and what could have brought down Merrill).
now, I'm not going to extol myself as an expert, but these are just a few of the many facets of this problem that people ought to get informed about so that they don't sound.... just stupid. keep in mind, I'm not trying to defend many of the practices that happened in the mortgage lending market (a lot of it disgusts me when I found out from a friend who did mortgage brokering for a short while before leaving in disgust). And I'm not trying to defend banks that over extended themselves or got caught on the wrong side of a very big trade but there are several reasons why only some banks have gone under while others are doing just fine (or seeming to do just fine).
really understanding it would take weeks, if not months, of actually working on this stuff. So I'm not trying to fault you either. But I'm just telling you from someone who deals with this stuff every day, this is the equivalent of saying "and malpractice occurs when a surgeon slips and cuts something he isn't supposed to." This is a "duh" statement to most people, but completely glosses over a new(fictitious) issue in surgical medicine in which an unexpected mistake is creeping up due to a relatively new method of performing surgery using a new type of knife.
what good things, exactly, have steel worker unions done for the US in general, or their members?
unions are one of the reasons foreign countries have been able to take all of america's manufacturing base. Falsely keeping a group of people's wages high doesn't do them any good in the long run. steel workers are uneducated labor that enjoyed high wages simply because most other countries lacked the infrastructure to support the job.
how many people in the rust belt didn't try in school because they thought the Union would provide them good jobs? you actually think this is good by any stretch? now we have a section of the populace that was bred to think unskilled work can be paid similar to skilled work and they are left unemployed and undereducated.
I think you should watch more sports. there is a MASSIVE shortage of highly skilled athletes in most sports (simply because in pro sports, the bar is set so friggin high).
take the NFL: according to the players union, the average player only lasts for 3.5 years. But every player whose name I can remember lasted for 7+ years. So how does the average drop to 3.5 years? it's because a vast, vast majority of all football players that make it into the NFL don't even last for 3 years (Many don't make it past 1 year).
With that kind of roll over in the pool of active players, it's easy to see why high profile salaries are so high. It's due to the fact that those high profile players are extremely rare and literally are the top 1 or 2 % of the top thousandth of a percent of all people who touch a football in their lives. Now, the minimum wage of the NFL protects the bottom most players from getting nothing or we would see a very steep payout in the NFL.
now take the structure of all competitive sports: you can earn more in TV deals , ticket revenue, and merchandise sales if you are relatively better in the league. So the competition for fan dollars (which is limited) causes owners to try and buy the best possible team while keeping the franchise profitable. since there is a very limited supply of the best players, competition for their services drives up their price.
now I am (or at least, was) a huge sports fan. I'm not sure what you define as world sporting events, but again, payouts seem to be linked ot how profitable the fan base is. Soccer players get paid huge sums of money, as do the best tennis players and golfers. Olympic salaries are reflected 100% in the advertising dollars they can bring in and we see again, that the best of the best get paid huge sums while those athletes in low profile sports get paid very very little to nothing at all.
so in other words, thank god for MS??
you make it sound like they did something bad. if it wasn't for them, we'd be stuck paying for browsers and netscape would be a monopoly. good job MS, running a profiteering company into the ground so a better product and lower prices can make it to the consumer.
I"m not sure why you are complaining. you applaud google and apple and mozilla for competing and providing a "commodity" product but hate the company that started the revolution of commodity web browsers. can you believe you used to pay for something equivalent to a better JS engine over the "freer, slower" version? w/o MS few could imagine a world where companies expended tons of resources to give away a product to increase it's footprint.
I'm glad they drove that waste of space netscape into the ground. it may have stagnated browser development for a few years, but it created the environment for a far more robust browser market than ever before (and it's all FREE).
completely OT but:
try www.bikely.com
or
www.mapmyrun.com
both are intended for cyclists to my knowledge and I use them a lot for my rides because they give detailed elevation, maps, and an easy way to map rides that are on roads.
if you a trail runner, I guess you have to use gps.
wow. so in other words, you decided to buy at the top and you are sour? can I blame democrats for the internet bubble then (it cost me a good clip of money)? In fact, the low interest rates brought about by the internet bubble crash (which we can now blame on clinton) caused the run up in housing prices and led to you being pissed off about buying a house at the top. So really, that is who you should be pissed off at.
sub prime loans were only a small portion of what caused the huge run up in housing prices(roughly 1 in 8 mortgages). In fact, lower interest rates that made it possible for lots of people to buy more expensive houses in the first place caused a vast majority of that run up.
Also, most of the deregulation that caused the lending crisis occurred under Clinton. In fact, under his administration can be directly linked to the spread of the subprime crisis into the retail banking sector. Banks had been pushing for this deregulation since 1980 but neither Reagan nor Bush gave them it.
I'm also not sure what regulation you think would have helped in trading of MBS (subprime or not). what do you want, government imposed limits on the size of the market? government limits on the frequency of trading (it's a thin market, it doesn't trade very much anyway). Limits on the amount of issuance?
just to warn you, most are NOT available to American citizens and the US does not reciprocate such offers. For example, Japanese citizens have about 10 countries they can choose to take a working holiday in but the US isn't one of them.
or he could mean:
people who go out on a limb to start a business, small town surgeons who work their butts off to serve under-served communities,encourage companies like toyota to not locate their production plants in the US, encourage VC's and private equity groups to focus on investing in companies outside the US because the returns are better suited to the risk of helping people try adn achieve their dreams....
there are lots of productive members of society that don't like the idea of working 100 hours a week to get somewhere and then have all that money taxed to pay for some high school drop outs on welfare or pay for the state to be a parent to those people's children.
btw, most likely, your investments are worth MORE today than they were 7 years ago (and by going back to before 9/11 I've giving you a huge break), your house is worth almost 2x as much as it was in 2000 (median home prices in the US stand at 215k vs. 118k at the end of 2000). Yes your gas and food cost more but isn't this the website where people have been predicting that for years?
yeah, the dollar is down, but this means local companies can compete with imports on more favorable grounds.
as to gas and food, even if you lived in a country with higher taxes, you'd still have more expensive gas and food. I'm not sure what lines in the sand you are drawing to connect those two, but I'd like to hear the logic. I'd say obama's big support for ethanol has driven up food prices faster than lowering taxes (and the logic is much more straight forward).
btw, I like obama. he is currently my favorite in the race. but people seem to credit his ideas as the solution to the recent economic troubles (and consequently blame the bush administration) but I haven't seen either a link between Bush policies or a comprehensive plan put forward by Obama.
There are lots of non-specious things to credit Obama with and things to blame Bush for, can't we at least stick to those?
though I have to say (completely OT), I don't understand why people always use the line cruel and unusual to describe actions they find appauling. There is nothing unusual about rape, fights, beatings, etc what-so-ever. I'm not arguing the cruel part, but if you are going to use "and", it doesn't make sense to me how you can argue that.
it's just like I don't understand why a firing squad is cruel and unusual. it may be cruel, but it isn't very unusual.
how is this interesting and not flamebait ;-)
just wondering, but how are republicans running the US into the ground? I mean honestly, republican pushed through policies. I in fact, did not vote for Bush because he is an evangelical candidate, not a republican (kind of like most NE democrats wouldn't vote for a blue dog democrat) but when people feel like blaming all the country's problems on the particular party in power, I'd like to know what they are talking about.
and obviously, I'd wonder how do those particular situations differ compared to say, clinton's presidency.
racing is part of culture. so is the food and drink we enjoy. part of southern culture is budweiser and racing. what's your point? I find a tailgate outside of a stock car race far , far more interesting than MOMA. so I will financially support one and not the other.
you are taking the massively arrogant position that your value judgment is somehow superior to another; so much so you want those people to fund what you find good.
or at the very least, address the basic point. why should someone who has absolutely no interest in something, be forced to fund it simply because you value it? and of course, how is such a system any different from what we have had for all of time?
Art ought not to be held hostage to the whims of what's popular.
why not? if everyone out there is saying it sucks, who are you to say public funding should go towards it? if no one likes or wants it, then why fund it? you may use some esoteric example of an old composer who people like now, but they were obviously funded more than enough to compose or else you wouldn't have any knowledge of them.
I see no reason why I should fund something you like (and I'm not asking for you to fund something for my personal enjoyment). if gamers don't want to pay to support the development of games, it's only their loss. if you are going to give some excuse about doing it for future generations, I say let those who value it support it. if you value it, open up your pocket book but don't ask others to because you define something as art but don't want to fund it.
why should I, a non-game player, have to have my taxes diverted to something I care nothing about because gamers aren't willing to just pay for the game?
what you are advocating is making others pay for your (not you in particular) gaming experience. If it was a fund that gamers who wanted the right to play would contribute to then great, but unless it is some subscription model with very tight DRM (like steam) then it is back to the situation we are currently in but with less freedom and variety in the gaming market.
I like the current system because people who want to play a game take part in funding it's creation, after the fact. it means developers have to take huge risk (failure can mean bankruptcy) but success means profit. the reason I like the model is unlike public funded arts, museums, etc. my money goes to where I think it should go.
btw, I don't like publicly funded arts either because they are an equal waste of my money. art that I like I will spend money on to support, otherwise I don't want my money wasted to support someone else's desire to see that kind of "art".
um... just make sure what you are talking about actually applies to the community at large. it's funny how slashdot readers read one solitary article by one japanese person and think he represents the nation. I live and owrk in Japan and every Japanese person I know thinks it's awesome to be able to do this. at work, we stopped for about an hour when we found out they had tokyo in it and we were all looking at each others houses and neighborhoods.
it was also a lot of fun to look at various places and is incredibly useful for giving directions.
before you think a corporation is trampling on a culture, be sure it's actually the culture of hte population at large.
oh, and a lot of the old people outside without clothing/ looking like bums are actually homeless. there are tons around where I live. this may be the equivalent of the japanese : "don't show our homeless because it embarrasses us". I've heard that one before; that there aren't homeless or poor in japan even when you show them to people. many japanese people don't want to admit someone who is japanese could be homeless or not have a job.
go is no where near as complex as chess, it just happens to have a very big board with almost no limitations on rules. this isn't complexity! this is called a very large tree of possible moves. large tree =! complex. playing a game of poker with 20 decks greatly increases the possible hands that are dealt, but this doesn't inherently make poker more complex. take any game and increase the game board size and simplify the rules and you get a bigger tree.
go is more difficult to program because it doesn't lend itself to an obvious heuristic solution. I can't value a particular stone higher than another obviously (like I value my queen over an 8th file pawn) meaning understanding why one stone is more valuable than another requires a different approach. of course, given waht I've read about this program, put it in roadrunner and it will blow this ninth dan champ out of the water (or give him one hell of a run for his money). adn in 10 years, put it on the latest supercomputer and no human will stand a chance. but with a more efficient algorithm and a better understanding how positions evolve and interact, such a level could be reached much much sooner.
of course, another reason chess players fell so long before go players is because the chess problem has been worked on for far longer.
not true, you have to distinguish between different methods that can play at the same level.
the tricky party is that any computational program, generally no matter how bad, is improved with increased computational strength. so how to distinguish? for example, could this algo have even come close to winning if you reduced it from 800 to 600 processors? as it scales quite linearly, it probably loses a massive amount of "skill". on the other hand, if they had used the fastest supercomputer in the world, it very well could have won without a handicap.
so the question is always for a given level of computational time, which algorithm is the most skilled.
if we use this same method on stronger hardware to beat this grandmaster without a handicap, do we have a better go method? of course not. the method is exactly the same.