Depends on how you count "solar wind" vs power generation. If you include photo-electric potential, the solar wind is very strong, power generation wise, and because of the low gravity and turbulence environment, you can make huge structures to capture it very efficiently.
If it bugs you so much, surely you know that most any shop manual published since 1999 is free for the downloading, usually as a.pdf, from the dark corners of the 'net - especially on enthusiast message boards.
Personally, I don't mind paying $99 for the hardcopy version, if it's a car I plan on working on myself.
You know what's better than buying a new car with a low emissions engine?
Not buying a new car. The emissions involved in the manufacture and delivery of a new vehicle are roughly equal to your first 30,000 miles of driving. Fixing your old clunker is far more efficient, both cost and emissions wise.
For even better CO2 reduction and fuel cost savings, don't drive the car you have.
Says the guy who's off for a 2 day business trip via jet plane....
As the decades roll by, the chance that an employer cares at all about a degree earned in ancient history falls to zero.
Besides, the parking fine is non-interest bearing, if, at some point in the future I need a transcript, paying an extra $20 to get it will just be amusing, after the hundreds they obviously spent on collection, well over $50 in postage alone, plus envelopes, people to stuff them, etc.
Better than I would like for paying for theoretical "perfect" security on the banking system.
Besides, everybody knows the cops can catch bank robbers, and those same cops actually protect my home - if they weren't out there getting a rep. with hold up artists, people might be more inclined to B&E on private residences.
No, more like management oversight, design review, and other bureaucratic steps to ensure that the proper locking doorknob is selected and properly installed. Even if the committee selected a $4.95 knob as proper (which, after examining the situation they probably wouldn't), the overhead costs of all that would amount to thousands of dollars per doorknob effectively installed.
I got a BS and MS from a here to be un-named University. A few weeks before graduation, I also got a parking ticket, which I contested. I got an un-official copy of my 6 years of transcripts before the ticket was done with the appeals system. I got my first job without even showing the unofficial transcripts, worked there for 12 years while the Uni sent me probably 100 letters demanding $20 payment for the ticket, informing me that my records are frozen until such time as the ticket is paid.
Next job was with a big corporate place out of state, I showed them the unofficial transcripts, that's all they wanted to see.
Many jobs since then, none have even asked for my paperwork- and, unless the Uni was bluffing, none of them have gone behind my back to get the transcripts, either.
I should also mention that I got one or two "undercounts" during that era... my ATMs were all remotely located from the branches, so reporting wasn't exactly convenient. I figured it all worked out in the end, but I might have come out $20 to $30 ahead, overall.
The swipe your ATM card to checkout at the grocery also failed to process a couple of the earliest transactions (there really was a free lunch, those days...), I waited months and months looking for them to show up on the statements, but they never did. These days I don't keep my receipts or check my statements as closely, not sure if that ever happened after the initial rollout.
Then there was the bank I had a deposit account with in 1991 - their computer made a $20 addition error, in their favor, when summing up my deposits and withdrawals (none of which were for $20) - when I pointed it out to the branch manager he acted like I was being a jerk for bringing it up. I didn't still have that account by 1992.
In the early days of ATMs (1980s) I used to get "overcounts" about 5% of the time at certain machines... that doesn't happen (to me) as much anymore, but I'm mostly plastic based now, so maybe it still does.
You could probably spit out several hundred dollars per "pull" with the phone-hack and not raise suspicion - a really good hack would falsify the expected balance, too, so they don't notice the missing cash, but you'd think the guy changing the cash box would notice the thing stuck in the USB port, eventually.
As I said above, you can get the access and look like a maintenance tech, then button it up and walk away with big bulges in your pockets.
Come back later, looking innocent, and take a few hundred bucks per transaction. It makes machines that are protected by highly public physical location (most ATMs) more vulnerable to attack in plain sight by innocent looking people.
Sure, you could cut out the cash box and haul ass in a big pickup truck, but somebody would probably notice that something isn't right about that picture.
Seems to me that it needn't be a smartphone, any device with the proper digital interface can probably do the trick - but it makes better press to say "Force the ATM to dispense cash using SMS..."
I suppose it might make it easier for the crooks to blend in while they take away the loot - just send the SMS while you act like you are doing a legitimate transaction and then walk away with $400. Come back later and do it again, and again... Get a lot of "theft rush" and exposure to potential arrest for your efforts, not so much cash, but you don't look as suspicious a you would if you tried to stuff $10K in 20 dollar bills into your pockets all at once.
Banks are protected by law enforcement, insurance, etc. They have well established loss rates due to theft, fraud, etc. and they take appropriate measures to address those loss rates.
I, personally, would not want to pay a surcharge on my ATM card or other bank accounts to supplement the current security with "overkill" measures that cost more than they benefit, just for the satisfaction of knowing that crooks can't steal from MY bank.
Life, being about more than just money, leaves choices for the living. I'm glad that we don't all spend every waking hour attempting to optimize our personal returns out of the market, and that leaves room for people who do spend more time to get better performance.
If you could find an honest, hardworking, competent financial adviser to apply "the correct principles" to your investments (significant money, say, 10% of net income), do you think, after his necessary commissions to pay for his time invested in managing your money that the competent advisers' net return for you would out-perform, on average, a basket of index funds? Personally, I don't. But, personally, I've never met an honest, hardworking and competent financial adviser who also claims that they can, with any measurable reliability, out-perform random chance - all they can really do is give advice about risk and liquidity and charge you for it.
I've picked winners and losers over the years, stocks, options, funds, real-estate and a "grow trees in Costa Rica" boondoggle that currently looks like a total loss, or may yet turn out to be my best investment ever - time will tell, and it was money I was willing to put into an extreme risk. Funny thing is, in my experience, the high risk items average out to the same returns as the low risk items, and looking at my accounts over the long term, throwing all of my stocks, options and funds into a pool, my total ROI (10 year timescale) is almost always within +/- 2% of the same money invested into a S&P 500 or Nasdaq index.
It seems to me, un-necessary for investors working with multiple millions of dollars to vastly outstrip the smaller investors in terms of rate of return. Like Warren Buffet paying a lower effective tax percentage rate than his secretary. Small margins don't really matter, but when we're comparing 5% annual ROI to 20%, that's an unhealthily slanted playing field. I like the economy I grew up in, and the more I learn about the banana republics where 99% of the wealth is in 0.1% of the people's hands, the less attractive they are. Just look at Key Biscayne in Miami - it's being overrun by the wealthy from Columbia who are just so relieved that their children can play in the street without fear of kidnapping... the U.S. isn't close to that kind of wealth inequality, but I don't like it dismissed as a non-problem that we're headed in that direction.
And if you actually knew about investment you could profit everyday from the 5% daily swing... AND play a small role in dampening that swing...AND do better than just the base growth rate.
You need to learn Modern Portfolio Theory.
Sure, lots of people buy that book, how many of them make better than market average returns? Less than half.
If Modern Portfolio Theory actually existed (and I don't doubt there's something out there using that name), it will only work as long as it is an inside joke, once the majority of "the money" learns the best way to play the game, that way doesn't work any more. It's the same reason that monkeys painting newspapers and bulls taking dumps in a field consistently out-perform the best and brightest of Wall Street.
What I read you saying above here is that if the market is improving, the swings are getting dampened, but what I see in the historical record (no guarantee of future returns) is that, compared to the period from 1930 to 1970, the more modern "high speed trading" market has sucked balls.
I think the rapid access to quotes and information in general is a good thing, the competition in brokerage and reduced commissions are a great thing, but the high speed trading is costing (everyone who isn't "in" the HFT game) more than any marginal returns attributed to it.
Oh, and to circle back somewhere close to the topic of the thread- I know some "Bitcoin Traders"... these guys are playing at arbitrage, buying from one exchange and selling on another at a profit, and that kind of thing. They're taking big risks that all the players will make good on the contracts, execute in a timely fashion, not abscond with the funds, etc. but when things work as advertised, they're making nice profits.
And, to end the night on another tangent - if you can handle "classic" movies, there's a scene in "Key Largo" (Humphrey Bogart, et. al.) where two people are sitting at a bar, in the early 1900s, chatting about betting on the horse races... the parallels to "investing" in the stock market are astoundingly close.
Miss once, try again... miss twice, keep on shootin' - pulling nails is a waste of time, time is money, professionals aren't paid to save nails.
Actually, "professionals" will miss the stud with 3 of 4 nails that are supposed to hold the sheathing, and "keep on rollin' 'till the day is done." This is why owner-built houses survive hurricanes and the same design built by a contractor doesn't.
Circle back to the French Revolution, if you bothered to pay attention in classes like History.
Big money dumps a whole lot more than 'two shits' on the little people, and sooner or later, the sheer number of little people who are getting dumped on tips the balance against the small number of people who are holding the big money.
If big money can present at least a reasonable illusion of fairness, the backlash can be forestalled. When the masses of people are told "work all you lives, save money in the market where it can grow" and then see how their money shrinks in the market while big money grows...
And, 5% daily swings in a market that only makes an average of 5 to 10% forward progress per year isn't just a gambler's opportunity, it's also a gambler's risk. Invest for 10 years, but, depending on whether or not you got lucky on the day of investment and the day of withdrawal, you might get 11 years worth of planned returns, or 9. I thought that Las Vegas was the place to gamble....
I call B.S. on the efficiency argument. For a reasonably sized purchase, the "inefficiency" of eating up the queue as it stands in a single transaction would often compensate the entire trade commission.
Trading commissions haven't decreased much in the last 10 years, but now, in addition to paying the broker, I also get to pay the sharks.
Same "efficiency tax" now applies on sell orders...
I have been trading since the early 1990s. I may not qualify as a "real trader" because most years, I only execute 5 or 6 "trades" and about half of them are for funds - which execute on a daily basis, not millisecond to millisecond. I have made, and lost, big multiples on options, and I have held individual company shares for anywhere from two days to twenty years.
Trades that execute in less time than it takes to read and comprehend the order confirmation screen are of no additional "marginal value" to the majority of people who have money in the market - they may be of some marginal value to the majority of the money in the market, but is the market there to serve the money, or the people?
If banks still paid interest like they did in the 1960s through 1980s, I probably wouldn't be in the market, but right now, the market is basically the only game available to attempt to preserve savings against inflationary devaluation. The regulations and policies have made the market what it is, and those same regulations should be shaped to serve the people who are more or less forced into the market to stop their savings from shrinking in value as the years go by.
Traders like us may be "ignorant of how the market really works" - but that doesn't mean that the market should be slanted to give "real traders" advantages at every turn. We don't spend our lives learning each new twist and turn of the financial markets, we spend our lives providing the goods and services that make the economy run, and when we save the money we are paid for that work, invest it in the markets as we are all advised to do, we deserve a fair and level playing field.
What I have seen since the advent of HFT is a more volatile and unpredictable market, with unpredictable 5% and larger swings in a single day - overall the growth of the market doesn't seem remarkably improved relative to the increases in the cost of living, even compared to 40 years ago. Volatility is risk, a negative value for the "typical" investor - dropping trade times from one minute to 10 milliseconds doesn't make up for that.
I've traded some "thinly traded" shares in the past - this pretty much describes ALL options today...
Back in the 1990s, and even early 2000s, you could put out a "Bid" for 10,000 shares @ $1.00 per share max and frequently, you'd get a transaction that looked like:
That doesn't happen since HFT - now it's all 10,000 shares @ 1.00 - and since I pay fairly high commissions per transaction, I can't optimize my trade by making a bunch of small ones to match what's showing in the queue - back in the day, you couldn't even look at the queue anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on how you count "solar wind" vs power generation. If you include photo-electric potential, the solar wind is very strong, power generation wise, and because of the low gravity and turbulence environment, you can make huge structures to capture it very efficiently.
Probably out in those places with no electricity....
They tend to fall on the road from above, something that doesn't happen much in states like Florida or Texas.
Actually, titanium puts off some nice hot sparks when it is struck against rocks at high speed....
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2...
If it bugs you so much, surely you know that most any shop manual published since 1999 is free for the downloading, usually as a .pdf, from the dark corners of the 'net - especially on enthusiast message boards.
Personally, I don't mind paying $99 for the hardcopy version, if it's a car I plan on working on myself.
You know what's better than buying a new car with a low emissions engine?
Not buying a new car. The emissions involved in the manufacture and delivery of a new vehicle are roughly equal to your first 30,000 miles of driving. Fixing your old clunker is far more efficient, both cost and emissions wise.
For even better CO2 reduction and fuel cost savings, don't drive the car you have.
Says the guy who's off for a 2 day business trip via jet plane....
As the decades roll by, the chance that an employer cares at all about a degree earned in ancient history falls to zero.
Besides, the parking fine is non-interest bearing, if, at some point in the future I need a transcript, paying an extra $20 to get it will just be amusing, after the hundreds they obviously spent on collection, well over $50 in postage alone, plus envelopes, people to stuff them, etc.
Better than I would like for paying for theoretical "perfect" security on the banking system.
Besides, everybody knows the cops can catch bank robbers, and those same cops actually protect my home - if they weren't out there getting a rep. with hold up artists, people might be more inclined to B&E on private residences.
No, more like management oversight, design review, and other bureaucratic steps to ensure that the proper locking doorknob is selected and properly installed. Even if the committee selected a $4.95 knob as proper (which, after examining the situation they probably wouldn't), the overhead costs of all that would amount to thousands of dollars per doorknob effectively installed.
I'd say, fastest and cheapest:
BSCS - right there on the keyboard, slap those letters on the resume and you're good to go.
Does the degree need to come from an accredited institution?
Most CS employees I know mostly BS their way through everything they do, anyway.
Time is money, actually, when I turned 30, time became more valuable than money.
Easier to make it literal on the paperwork, instead of convincing HR of the equivalency.
I got a BS and MS from a here to be un-named University. A few weeks before graduation, I also got a parking ticket, which I contested. I got an un-official copy of my 6 years of transcripts before the ticket was done with the appeals system. I got my first job without even showing the unofficial transcripts, worked there for 12 years while the Uni sent me probably 100 letters demanding $20 payment for the ticket, informing me that my records are frozen until such time as the ticket is paid.
Next job was with a big corporate place out of state, I showed them the unofficial transcripts, that's all they wanted to see.
Many jobs since then, none have even asked for my paperwork- and, unless the Uni was bluffing, none of them have gone behind my back to get the transcripts, either.
I should also mention that I got one or two "undercounts" during that era... my ATMs were all remotely located from the branches, so reporting wasn't exactly convenient. I figured it all worked out in the end, but I might have come out $20 to $30 ahead, overall.
The swipe your ATM card to checkout at the grocery also failed to process a couple of the earliest transactions (there really was a free lunch, those days...), I waited months and months looking for them to show up on the statements, but they never did. These days I don't keep my receipts or check my statements as closely, not sure if that ever happened after the initial rollout.
Then there was the bank I had a deposit account with in 1991 - their computer made a $20 addition error, in their favor, when summing up my deposits and withdrawals (none of which were for $20) - when I pointed it out to the branch manager he acted like I was being a jerk for bringing it up. I didn't still have that account by 1992.
In the early days of ATMs (1980s) I used to get "overcounts" about 5% of the time at certain machines... that doesn't happen (to me) as much anymore, but I'm mostly plastic based now, so maybe it still does.
You could probably spit out several hundred dollars per "pull" with the phone-hack and not raise suspicion - a really good hack would falsify the expected balance, too, so they don't notice the missing cash, but you'd think the guy changing the cash box would notice the thing stuck in the USB port, eventually.
As I said above, you can get the access and look like a maintenance tech, then button it up and walk away with big bulges in your pockets.
Come back later, looking innocent, and take a few hundred bucks per transaction. It makes machines that are protected by highly public physical location (most ATMs) more vulnerable to attack in plain sight by innocent looking people.
Sure, you could cut out the cash box and haul ass in a big pickup truck, but somebody would probably notice that something isn't right about that picture.
Seems to me that it needn't be a smartphone, any device with the proper digital interface can probably do the trick - but it makes better press to say "Force the ATM to dispense cash using SMS..."
I suppose it might make it easier for the crooks to blend in while they take away the loot - just send the SMS while you act like you are doing a legitimate transaction and then walk away with $400. Come back later and do it again, and again... Get a lot of "theft rush" and exposure to potential arrest for your efforts, not so much cash, but you don't look as suspicious a you would if you tried to stuff $10K in 20 dollar bills into your pockets all at once.
Banks are protected by law enforcement, insurance, etc. They have well established loss rates due to theft, fraud, etc. and they take appropriate measures to address those loss rates.
I, personally, would not want to pay a surcharge on my ATM card or other bank accounts to supplement the current security with "overkill" measures that cost more than they benefit, just for the satisfaction of knowing that crooks can't steal from MY bank.
Life, being about more than just money, leaves choices for the living. I'm glad that we don't all spend every waking hour attempting to optimize our personal returns out of the market, and that leaves room for people who do spend more time to get better performance.
If you could find an honest, hardworking, competent financial adviser to apply "the correct principles" to your investments (significant money, say, 10% of net income), do you think, after his necessary commissions to pay for his time invested in managing your money that the competent advisers' net return for you would out-perform, on average, a basket of index funds? Personally, I don't. But, personally, I've never met an honest, hardworking and competent financial adviser who also claims that they can, with any measurable reliability, out-perform random chance - all they can really do is give advice about risk and liquidity and charge you for it.
I've picked winners and losers over the years, stocks, options, funds, real-estate and a "grow trees in Costa Rica" boondoggle that currently looks like a total loss, or may yet turn out to be my best investment ever - time will tell, and it was money I was willing to put into an extreme risk. Funny thing is, in my experience, the high risk items average out to the same returns as the low risk items, and looking at my accounts over the long term, throwing all of my stocks, options and funds into a pool, my total ROI (10 year timescale) is almost always within +/- 2% of the same money invested into a S&P 500 or Nasdaq index.
It seems to me, un-necessary for investors working with multiple millions of dollars to vastly outstrip the smaller investors in terms of rate of return. Like Warren Buffet paying a lower effective tax percentage rate than his secretary. Small margins don't really matter, but when we're comparing 5% annual ROI to 20%, that's an unhealthily slanted playing field. I like the economy I grew up in, and the more I learn about the banana republics where 99% of the wealth is in 0.1% of the people's hands, the less attractive they are. Just look at Key Biscayne in Miami - it's being overrun by the wealthy from Columbia who are just so relieved that their children can play in the street without fear of kidnapping... the U.S. isn't close to that kind of wealth inequality, but I don't like it dismissed as a non-problem that we're headed in that direction.
And if you actually knew about investment you could profit everyday from the 5% daily swing... AND play a small role in dampening that swing...AND do better than just the base growth rate.
You need to learn Modern Portfolio Theory.
Sure, lots of people buy that book, how many of them make better than market average returns? Less than half.
If Modern Portfolio Theory actually existed (and I don't doubt there's something out there using that name), it will only work as long as it is an inside joke, once the majority of "the money" learns the best way to play the game, that way doesn't work any more. It's the same reason that monkeys painting newspapers and bulls taking dumps in a field consistently out-perform the best and brightest of Wall Street.
What I read you saying above here is that if the market is improving, the swings are getting dampened, but what I see in the historical record (no guarantee of future returns) is that, compared to the period from 1930 to 1970, the more modern "high speed trading" market has sucked balls.
I think the rapid access to quotes and information in general is a good thing, the competition in brokerage and reduced commissions are a great thing, but the high speed trading is costing (everyone who isn't "in" the HFT game) more than any marginal returns attributed to it.
Oh, and to circle back somewhere close to the topic of the thread- I know some "Bitcoin Traders"... these guys are playing at arbitrage, buying from one exchange and selling on another at a profit, and that kind of thing. They're taking big risks that all the players will make good on the contracts, execute in a timely fashion, not abscond with the funds, etc. but when things work as advertised, they're making nice profits.
And, to end the night on another tangent - if you can handle "classic" movies, there's a scene in "Key Largo" (Humphrey Bogart, et. al.) where two people are sitting at a bar, in the early 1900s, chatting about betting on the horse races... the parallels to "investing" in the stock market are astoundingly close.
Miss once, try again... miss twice, keep on shootin' - pulling nails is a waste of time, time is money, professionals aren't paid to save nails.
Actually, "professionals" will miss the stud with 3 of 4 nails that are supposed to hold the sheathing, and "keep on rollin' 'till the day is done." This is why owner-built houses survive hurricanes and the same design built by a contractor doesn't.
Circle back to the French Revolution, if you bothered to pay attention in classes like History.
Big money dumps a whole lot more than 'two shits' on the little people, and sooner or later, the sheer number of little people who are getting dumped on tips the balance against the small number of people who are holding the big money.
If big money can present at least a reasonable illusion of fairness, the backlash can be forestalled. When the masses of people are told "work all you lives, save money in the market where it can grow" and then see how their money shrinks in the market while big money grows...
And, 5% daily swings in a market that only makes an average of 5 to 10% forward progress per year isn't just a gambler's opportunity, it's also a gambler's risk. Invest for 10 years, but, depending on whether or not you got lucky on the day of investment and the day of withdrawal, you might get 11 years worth of planned returns, or 9. I thought that Las Vegas was the place to gamble....
I call B.S. on the efficiency argument. For a reasonably sized purchase, the "inefficiency" of eating up the queue as it stands in a single transaction would often compensate the entire trade commission.
Trading commissions haven't decreased much in the last 10 years, but now, in addition to paying the broker, I also get to pay the sharks.
Same "efficiency tax" now applies on sell orders...
I have been trading since the early 1990s. I may not qualify as a "real trader" because most years, I only execute 5 or 6 "trades" and about half of them are for funds - which execute on a daily basis, not millisecond to millisecond. I have made, and lost, big multiples on options, and I have held individual company shares for anywhere from two days to twenty years.
Trades that execute in less time than it takes to read and comprehend the order confirmation screen are of no additional "marginal value" to the majority of people who have money in the market - they may be of some marginal value to the majority of the money in the market, but is the market there to serve the money, or the people?
If banks still paid interest like they did in the 1960s through 1980s, I probably wouldn't be in the market, but right now, the market is basically the only game available to attempt to preserve savings against inflationary devaluation. The regulations and policies have made the market what it is, and those same regulations should be shaped to serve the people who are more or less forced into the market to stop their savings from shrinking in value as the years go by.
Traders like us may be "ignorant of how the market really works" - but that doesn't mean that the market should be slanted to give "real traders" advantages at every turn. We don't spend our lives learning each new twist and turn of the financial markets, we spend our lives providing the goods and services that make the economy run, and when we save the money we are paid for that work, invest it in the markets as we are all advised to do, we deserve a fair and level playing field.
What I have seen since the advent of HFT is a more volatile and unpredictable market, with unpredictable 5% and larger swings in a single day - overall the growth of the market doesn't seem remarkably improved relative to the increases in the cost of living, even compared to 40 years ago. Volatility is risk, a negative value for the "typical" investor - dropping trade times from one minute to 10 milliseconds doesn't make up for that.
I've traded some "thinly traded" shares in the past - this pretty much describes ALL options today...
Back in the 1990s, and even early 2000s, you could put out a "Bid" for 10,000 shares @ $1.00 per share max and frequently, you'd get a transaction that looked like:
5000 shares @ 0.95
3000 shares @ 0.97
2000 shares @ 1.00
That doesn't happen since HFT - now it's all 10,000 shares @ 1.00 - and since I pay fairly high commissions per transaction, I can't optimize my trade by making a bunch of small ones to match what's showing in the queue - back in the day, you couldn't even look at the queue anyway.