And just like that multi billion dollar Bear & Stearns fund that had phenomenal returns for several years and then turned out to be worthless... the guys who consistently "beat" the S&P are usually either lying or on a lucky streak that they are assuming to be evidence of their brilliance. Some people can be on a lucky streak for a *very* long time. That's my entire point from the start of this article.
You will feel very smart about your 20 to 60% returns until the year that the rules change- nothing makes sense, and you lose 50% of your position in a hurry -- bringing you back to the averages or below.
A very few people may actually be quite intelligent and (more importantly) in control of their emotions-- for all I know you may be one of them. However 85% of professional managers fail to beat the S&P 500. By the odds, only 50% should fail. And these guys are highly educated and well informed.
You can use technical analysis to play the odds but you never know when some random event isn't going to wipe you out.
If you invested $5k and made a 2000% profit, then you missed your opportunity to have invested $50k and been ready to retire. Some people (wild eyed gamblers) do just that and do get rich.
To some extent, the stock market is a learnable process. I know some very old guys at the local investment program who seem to be able to at least say what sectors are likely to come up next with high accuracy. But they can't say why.
And of course-- if any system can beat the market and becomes well known-- at that instant, that becomes the new base behavior of the market-- so a red queen's race. You have to depend on the eternal things- human greed and fear.
They still don't hold a candle to the "investor" willing to "bet on black" and they win a baker's dozen times in a row. You can turn $10k into a fortune in a single year with big commitment and luck.
If you use money management and position sizing, you also cut the size of your wins. Risk == big change up or down. Less risk == smaller change up or down generally.
I've had two years where I got 35% returns but my goal is.9% per month average return while avoiding 75% of down moves.
Yea. I saw it. I happened to be betting on the other side of it using the "double and add 'X' dollars" strategy. Unfortunately I was betting on red so I washed out about $300 quickly and I was done. Anyone betting with the wheel would have been caught by the table limit too- so you couldn't really win much. Same trip, one of the dozen of us one $300 and then $900 on slots. Also rare.
I also walked into a baseball game with friends, sat down and right then they hit a grand slam about 1/3 of the way through the game. Apparently they are rare also.
Rare things happen randomly all the time. Humans try to assign meaning to them.
I really think you don't get blue laws, the great enlightenment, the communist scare in the 50's, the popularity of slavery, killing people for committing adultery, or sharia islamic law.
We need protection FROM the majority. For some seriously extended periods of history a majority of the population can get really weird. Sometimes only a tiny secret flickering flame of liberty remains.
Yes but the odds that a human being are going to bet on sequences of blacks or reds (or some other pattern) is much greater than that they will bet Red, Black, Black, Red, Black, Red, Red, Black, Red, Red, Red, Black, Red.
So you will lose to a particular human more often on a sequence of some kind than on a random sequence such as your proposed even tho both are equally likely to come up. This matters in Lotto's because while your odds of winning are the same- the odds you will split the win vary dramatically.
So you avoid 1,2,3,4,5,6. You avoid 01-12/01-31 numbers because they come up in dates (birthdays... anniversaries... etc.) more often. You might even consider things like social security numbers among the likely betting populations and the commonality of zip codes.
Put it this way... The sequence of blacks had a large crowd around the table and betting on it by the time it stopped. Equally unlikely random sequences that had been occurring all day gathered no notice at all.
While i agree I also perceive Ron Paul to be unelectable- part of the reason for that is the party controlled media is pushing that view. Meanwhile his contributions and polling keep surprising them.
I listened to him on a local talkshow on KSEV and it consisted of...
The hosts ask him a biased question "when did you stop beating your wife type"... He starts to give a surprisingly straight-forward and honest answer... They cut him off and accuse him of hating the troops... He starts into how we shouldn't be covering the oil companies security costs... They cut him off and start some other angle in a very abusive tone repeat this for 25 minutes. After he signs off they basically call him a loon and accuse him of wanting our troops to die a couple more times. Then invite him to come back on again anytime he wants to "debate" with them.
--- I disagree with at least 40% of Ron Paul's positions. But for god's sake, at least I know where he stands. Almost every other candidate on both sides of the race lie, evade, and have hidden unknown agendas that they will really push for once they get in office (Are huckabee and guilanni really pro-life or pro-choice?... Just how pro-chinese are the Clintons really? Does Thompson really believe much of anything except a couple religious positions? Does Obama really believe much of anything and have the strength to make hard decisions???"
On the other hand, Ron Paul has a long history of principled voting AND working with the rest of congress. Try to break free of the liberal and conservative media trying to manipulate you into dismissing Ron Paul out of hand.
Aye. Down 36%. But see.. the "lucky" guy just happened to have sold last week. The unlucky guy avoided crox entirely but invested in an index of the market right before the decline today.
It's not that he is really lucky or unlucky- he is just the 1/14000 who happened to pick every random roll correctly. For a pool of 14000 people, 1 wins all the time, 1 loses all the time, and the rest distribute out in a nice bell curve. If intelligence really does make a difference, the curve will be skewed.
Likewise- yes any random sequence of 13 blacks and reds is equally random. However, being the person that picks the exact sequence is the variable. It's much more likely you are going see winners hitting the 13 black or reds in a row than you will see someone arbitrarily bet b,b,b,r,b,r,r,r,b,r,b,b,r. They would be equally likely to win either way but more likely to bet with some kind of pattern since humans are pattern engines.
I think soon, the last thing most of the public cameras need to see is a paintball or the business end of a spraycan. Just remember to wear a mask, hat and cloak while doing it- since you are going to be surveilled by multiple cameras as you take them out. For irony, I suggest a "V" mask.
Given the constraint that this media could not be put out in an open format (since then it could be used by non-BBC customers who were not covered by a license) I would have had to do the same thing.
I don't like windows. I'm headed towards linux (most of my apps are now OS agnostic except everquest).
But as a project manager, it would be insane to delay delivery to 95% (they claim 99%) of my customers for several months. It is probably not even profitable to try to service 1% of the customers but as a government entity they have to do a lot of things that are not profitable (like people with no children must pay school taxes).
And equally a reason for leaving the large corp to go work for a contracting house, sell my own services, or a smaller company.
We've lost 27 out of 75 people since this started. It's getting hard to do projects and support there are so many holes in the staff. Meanwhile for contractors; no procedures are enforced on them because they are not employees.
Virus's through Outlook in the last 5 years: over 20 (including 7 PDF's this week) Virus's successfully deployed to my desktop over the last 5 years: 3 (apparently from laptops plugged into the network without being scanned). The PDF's would have deployed if I had been not been suspicous of getting a PDF from a stranger. Virus's through hotmail in the last 7 years: 0 Virus's through gmail in the last 2 years: 0 Virus's through through Yahoo in the last 3 years: 0
--- Documents that were not documents BLOCKED by corporate virus scanners: At least a dozen.
A lot of the earlier adventure games taught non-linear thinking (thinking outside the box, etc.).
Given these random facts, can you think sideways to make the connection and come up with the answer.
Games todays are more linear.
Collect facts 1,2,3,4,5. The logical conclusion is "Blah". It may be hard to come to that conclusion but it is logical.
The early games on the other hand were more zen like. Their logic made sense once you got it, but 1,2,3,4,5 did not lead to "blah" it lead to "bird attacks dragon" which made sense once you got it.
I think you underestimate the amount of analysis that goes into developing strategies for some of the more complicated encounters.
I manage major software releases with staffs of 6 to 24 people. I find managing them trivial compared to some EQ raid encounters.
A successful raiding guild is 50% logistics & politics. 25% analysis of raw data. 25% getting 80 people to successfully execute the plan when some of them are not very clear thinkers.
Project management of 8 month, 12 people projects seems trivial compared to herding 72 cats in the same direction for a painful encounter that you've wiped on 5 times.
Losing key team members constantly as their SO's get upset, they get new jobs, move, or move on to another guild for various reasons.
I do know we are limited to 100mb of mail storage! (which runs out if someone sends you a few emails with pictures). Insane when hotmail and google have 5gb each.
You make the rest sound so easy, that I really doubt you've ever worked for a truly large corporation.
At my current corporation, required procedures have lowered our productivity by 75% since 2002. When I started here in 2000, we were about 1/20th as productive as I had been for 15 years at a tiny company. A "2 hour" change my tiny company (say 10 lines of code, testing and put it into production) took about 40 hours. Now a "2 hour" change takes between 27 and 46 *days* after it is approved which takes 7 to 14 days.
People who work here say Exxon was and is much worse and we have a ways to go before we get as bad as they are there.
Slashdot Mirror
And just like that multi billion dollar Bear & Stearns fund that had phenomenal returns for several years and then turned out to be worthless... the guys who consistently "beat" the S&P are usually either lying or on a lucky streak that they are assuming to be evidence of their brilliance. Some people can be on a lucky streak for a *very* long time. That's my entire point from the start of this article.
You will feel very smart about your 20 to 60% returns until the year that the rules change- nothing makes sense, and you lose 50% of your position in a hurry -- bringing you back to the averages or below.
A very few people may actually be quite intelligent and (more importantly) in control of their emotions-- for all I know you may be one of them. However 85% of professional managers fail to beat the S&P 500. By the odds, only 50% should fail.
And these guys are highly educated and well informed.
You can use technical analysis to play the odds but you never know when some random event isn't going to wipe you out.
If you invested $5k and made a 2000% profit, then you missed your opportunity to have invested $50k and been ready to retire. Some people (wild eyed gamblers) do just that and do get rich.
To some extent, the stock market is a learnable process. I know some very old guys at the local investment program who seem to be able to at least say what sectors are likely to come up next with high accuracy. But they can't say why.
And of course-- if any system can beat the market and becomes well known-- at that instant, that becomes the new base behavior of the market-- so a red queen's race. You have to depend on the eternal things- human greed and fear.
and some lawyer is going to be flushing the money on hot cars and girls or boys.
Here is your $5.99.
By the way.. did we mention our $5.99 price increase on our drives?
They still don't hold a candle to the "investor" willing to "bet on black" and they win a baker's dozen times in a row.
.9% per month average return while avoiding 75% of down moves.
You can turn $10k into a fortune in a single year with big commitment and luck.
If you use money management and position sizing, you also cut the size of your wins. Risk == big change up or down. Less risk == smaller change up or down generally.
I've had two years where I got 35% returns but my goal is
Yea. I saw it. I happened to be betting on the other side of it using the "double and add 'X' dollars" strategy. Unfortunately I was betting on red so I washed out about $300 quickly and I was done. Anyone betting with the wheel would have been caught by the table limit too- so you couldn't really win much. Same trip, one of the dozen of us one $300 and then $900 on slots. Also rare.
I also walked into a baseball game with friends, sat down and right then they hit a grand slam about 1/3 of the way through the game. Apparently they are rare also.
Rare things happen randomly all the time. Humans try to assign meaning to them.
I really think you don't get blue laws, the great enlightenment, the communist scare in the 50's, the popularity of slavery, killing people for committing adultery, or sharia islamic law.
We need protection FROM the majority. For some seriously extended periods of history a majority of the population can get really weird. Sometimes only a tiny secret flickering flame of liberty remains.
Not if the government can monitor it and enforce arbitrary morality and political laws based on it.
Only privacy protects that. Privacy comes with it's own risks and abuses but carries some ability to redress abuses.
Yes but the odds that a human being are going to bet on sequences of blacks or reds (or some other pattern) is much greater than that they will bet Red, Black, Black, Red, Black, Red, Red, Black, Red, Red, Red, Black, Red.
So you will lose to a particular human more often on a sequence of some kind than on a random sequence such as your proposed even tho both are equally likely to come up. This matters in Lotto's because while your odds of winning are the same- the odds you will split the win vary dramatically.
So you avoid 1,2,3,4,5,6. You avoid 01-12/01-31 numbers because they come up in dates (birthdays... anniversaries... etc.) more often. You might even consider things like social security numbers among the likely betting populations and the commonality of zip codes.
Put it this way...
The sequence of blacks had a large crowd around the table and betting on it by the time it stopped. Equally unlikely random sequences that had been occurring all day gathered no notice at all.
While i agree I also perceive Ron Paul to be unelectable- part of the reason for that is the party controlled media is pushing that view. Meanwhile his contributions and polling keep surprising them.
I listened to him on a local talkshow on KSEV and it consisted of...
The hosts ask him a biased question "when did you stop beating your wife type"...
He starts to give a surprisingly straight-forward and honest answer...
They cut him off and accuse him of hating the troops...
He starts into how we shouldn't be covering the oil companies security costs...
They cut him off and start some other angle in a very abusive tone
repeat this for 25 minutes.
After he signs off they basically call him a loon and accuse him of wanting our troops to die a couple more times.
Then invite him to come back on again anytime he wants to "debate" with them.
---
I disagree with at least 40% of Ron Paul's positions. But for god's sake, at least I know where he stands. Almost every other candidate on both sides of the race lie, evade, and have hidden unknown agendas that they will really push for once they get in office (Are huckabee and guilanni really pro-life or pro-choice?... Just how pro-chinese are the Clintons really? Does Thompson really believe much of anything except a couple religious positions? Does Obama really believe much of anything and have the strength to make hard decisions???"
On the other hand, Ron Paul has a long history of principled voting AND working with the rest of congress.
Try to break free of the liberal and conservative media trying to manipulate you into dismissing Ron Paul out of hand.
Sorry you loosed your cool over it.
since missspelled words and incorrect garmmer are so rare on slashdot, I understand.
Aye. Down 36%. But see.. the "lucky" guy just happened to have sold last week. The unlucky guy avoided crox entirely but invested in an index of the market right before the decline today.
It's not that he is really lucky or unlucky- he is just the 1/14000 who happened to pick every random roll correctly. For a pool of 14000 people, 1 wins all the time, 1 loses all the time, and the rest distribute out in a nice bell curve. If intelligence really does make a difference, the curve will be skewed.
Likewise- yes any random sequence of 13 blacks and reds is equally random. However, being the person that picks the exact sequence is the variable. It's much more likely you are going see winners hitting the 13 black or reds in a row than you will see someone arbitrarily bet b,b,b,r,b,r,r,r,b,r,b,b,r. They would be equally likely to win either way but more likely to bet with some kind of pattern since humans are pattern engines.
Exactly, a couple years back at vegas, the roulette wheel spun black 13 times in a row.
Thats like 1/.48^13th.
Random things.. happen.
Randomly- some poor investing sod out there has made every choice correctly and been hammered by random market events.
Likewise- some lucky fool (that thinks he is brilliant) has picked google or tasr or crox on some non-logical basis and won big.
That's why you use Mutual Funds and ETF's. You get average performance. You lose the home runs, but you also lose the strike-outs.
Reduced odds of sharing the win with someone else.
I win $1 every week!
The only ticket's I've ever bought were to give out as party favors.
I think soon, the last thing most of the public cameras need to see is a paintball or the business end of a spraycan. Just remember to wear a mask, hat and cloak while doing it- since you are going to be surveilled by multiple cameras as you take them out. For irony, I suggest a "V" mask.
Oh my.
Bullet-time, swoop around come shots?
Actually, in slow mo- people's bodies look disturbingly ripply.
Then yes, I must admit... 01001001 00100000 01001101 00100000 01000001 00100000 01001110 01100101 01110010 01100100.
A helpful link is here:
01101000 01110100 01110100 01110000 00111010 00101111 00101111 01110111 01110111 01110111 00101110 01110000 01100001 01110101 01101100 01110011 01100011 01101000 01101111 01110101 00101110 01100011 01101111 01101101 00101111 01110100 01101111 01101111 01101100 01110011 00101111 01111000 01101100 01100001 01110100 01100101 00101111
Given the constraint that this media could not be put out in an open format (since then it could be used by non-BBC customers who were not covered by a license) I would have had to do the same thing.
I don't like windows. I'm headed towards linux (most of my apps are now OS agnostic except everquest).
But as a project manager, it would be insane to delay delivery to 95% (they claim 99%) of my customers for several months. It is probably not even profitable to try to service 1% of the customers but as a government entity they have to do a lot of things that are not profitable (like people with no children must pay school taxes).
And equally a reason for leaving the large corp to go work for a contracting house, sell my own services, or a smaller company.
We've lost 27 out of 75 people since this started. It's getting hard to do projects and support there are so many holes in the staff. Meanwhile for contractors; no procedures are enforced on them because they are not employees.
Virus's through Outlook in the last 5 years: over 20 (including 7 PDF's this week)
Virus's successfully deployed to my desktop over the last 5 years: 3 (apparently from laptops plugged into the network without being scanned). The PDF's would have deployed if I had been not been suspicous of getting a PDF from a stranger.
Virus's through hotmail in the last 7 years: 0
Virus's through gmail in the last 2 years: 0
Virus's through through Yahoo in the last 3 years: 0
---
Documents that were not documents BLOCKED by corporate virus scanners: At least a dozen.
by executives to make unrealistic deadlines which they decided without IT input.
Not in my experience at the HAL-PC and HAUG meetings in Houston back in the 1970's and early 1980's.
In the days of 3d0G, it was still pirating software once it was "cracked".
Bootlegging was reserved for copies of video tapes and stolen satellites (with coffee can dishes!).
A lot of the earlier adventure games taught non-linear thinking (thinking outside the box, etc.).
Given these random facts, can you think sideways to make the connection and come up with the answer.
Games todays are more linear.
Collect facts 1,2,3,4,5. The logical conclusion is "Blah". It may be hard to come to that conclusion but it is logical.
The early games on the other hand were more zen like. Their logic made sense once you got it, but 1,2,3,4,5 did not lead to "blah" it lead to "bird attacks dragon" which made sense once you got it.
I think you underestimate the amount of analysis that goes into developing strategies for some of the more complicated encounters.
I manage major software releases with staffs of 6 to 24 people. I find managing them trivial compared to some EQ raid encounters.
A successful raiding guild is 50% logistics & politics. 25% analysis of raw data. 25% getting 80 people to successfully execute the plan when some of them are not very clear thinkers.
Same experience here post EQ guild.
Project management of 8 month, 12 people projects seems trivial compared to herding 72 cats in the same direction for a painful encounter that you've wiped on 5 times.
Losing key team members constantly as their SO's get upset, they get new jobs, move, or move on to another guild for various reasons.
I, for one, welcome our new slashdot XKCD Raptor meme.
I do not know what our cost / gb is.
I do know we are limited to 100mb of mail storage! (which runs out if someone sends you a few emails with pictures). Insane when hotmail and google have 5gb each.
You make the rest sound so easy, that I really doubt you've ever worked for a truly large corporation.
At my current corporation, required procedures have lowered our productivity by 75% since 2002. When I started here in 2000, we were about 1/20th as productive as I had been for 15 years at a tiny company. A "2 hour" change my tiny company (say 10 lines of code, testing and put it into production) took about 40 hours. Now a "2 hour" change takes between 27 and 46 *days* after it is approved which takes 7 to 14 days.
People who work here say Exxon was and is much worse and we have a ways to go before we get as bad as they are there.