Warren Buffett is not a hedge fund manager. He is an investment company manager and one of Cassandras railing against the hedge funds. He has bet that plain and simple S&P500 index fund can beat hedge funds and is winning it five years into the bet. Read about him.
The fundamental premise of the free market system is, somehow the invisible hand of the market will make these scumbags pay and in the long run the market will reward the non-scumbag wall streeters. But that is theory. In practice, such free market systems work only for very simple commerce where the cost benefit analysis is easy to do, and people make rational choices between value and price, and there are many sellers and many buyers all acting without collusion. So we both should agree that blindly trumpeting "Freedom! Liberty!! Long Live Free markets!!! Down with Communism" is basically fooling the people.
Now would you care to address the silliness of the Republicans opposing single payer healthcare system shouting such patent nonsense? Free market does not work in healthcare. The price signal is obscured. (employers paying insurance companies to pay doctors/hospitals/pharmacies to treat their employees is as obscure as it gets). Even sophisticated players like banks and investment houses can be gamed by the bond rating agencies. People who understand the limits of free market tend to be Democrats. And they get unfairly labeled as big spending big government supporters. Right now the biggest threat to our well being and the free markets is the Republican party.
Managers of large hedge funds are basically lottery winners. All small hedge funds take outsize risk, and most of them see their investments go bad and they go under. By definition, and by sheer probability, some of them must win. Because of the extreme distribution, the survivors are huge lottery winners. But unlike lottery winners who knew they won by luck, these winners think they won because of their skill. And they also create a huge environmental niche for flatterers, hangers on, side kicks whose pay check depends on stroking the egos of these Gordon Geckos. And the media also play along make too much out of them. The MIT guys knew the market is even more chaotic and even more unpredictable than roulette wheels. So they wisely stayed away from this.
Only when we realize there is no correlation between skill and success in Wall Street, we would structure their risk/reward ratios in a more sane manner and bring some kind on sensibility to the market. Think about it. If the market is all knowing and all powerful, then why do companies that go under the market, get bought by private equity and then come back into the market and get valued highly?
Hope the FTC really uses some good internet sleuths and track down these jerks with spoofed caller id numbers who say stuff like, "... if you are not Dimwiti Diot please hang up. By continuing to listen you affirm you are Dimwiti Diot. This is an attempt to collect debt..." blah blah blah. I am not sure it will stand up in court they have actually served notice.
They buy bad loans and expired loans at a few cents per dollar, then resell it to dimwits who fall for "make money from home". These chumps are trained to trawl through the net looking at bulletin boards looking for the names on the loan. They pick on a approximate match, and spam every other poster in that thread assuming they must be somehow connected. One Vijay Krishna has a bad loan. Every one who has ever posted on any thread in any board where anyone named Vijay or Krishna had ever posted become targets of such widespread phone spam. Quite frustrating to deal with. If you ever use the 800 numbers they mention and track down the debt collector, it turns out to be another poor chump who had bought expired worthless loans at 1 cent a dollar.
That is a good start. Now learn to type it from a shell window, and memorize some more obscure strings of letters and discover the amazing things they do. Like ls grep awk diff less more cut join find etc. Then learn about even more obscure symbols like ! & > >> | Then someday you will understand why the unix hacks are so happy and are not so easily impressed by some of the bells and whistles and eye candy of the GUI.
This is the general problem with all humanities "leaders". They go by some vague first principles and do not think it all the way to actual practice. Yes, in theory Science you can question anything. But in scientific debates, we don't give equal time to both sides. The side that has more evidence gets more time.We give more time to the "answerers" than "questinoners". We don't believe the questions must be answered within a certain time limit or the debate should be resolved in a timely manner, If the arguments are inconclusive there is no need to pass a judgement. In fact no one really passes "judgement". All sides present evidence and scientists vote with their feet and work on the side they think is right.
I am arguing all the scientific journals collective form a long scientific debate, each sci entist asking himself/herself asking a question she/he may think as relevant and present evidence. The questions keep fragmenting, they keep presenting evidence and eventually science comes to some kind of consensus without anyone particularly named judge or calling an end to debate.
One of them main things these humanities guys don't get it, though you can question anything, you have to accept and concede when the evidence goes against you. No matter how seriously you believe it, if it is wrong, if it is shown to be wrong, you can not dredge up all old questions all over again. There is no shame in being wrong, or changing one's mind after being persuaded by evidence. There is nothing off the record.
Of course I am generalizing based on long flame wars on creationist / evolution fora. May be I am wrong. Also scientists should also present all evidence against the point they are advocating. Like me admitting that I am generalizing based on a limited self selected subset of humanities people.
Yeah, now FTC is somehow is going to make the search engines distinguish paid-ad from unpaid-search? How? Corporations are people. If A sells, but B pays google in some obfuscated way for the product of A, how can anyone untangle the web?
Way back when the invoice price info about the cars to dealers was not easily obtainable, it had some meaning and was worth sending that 8$ to consumer reports to get it by fax. Now there are tons of sites ( edmunds.com, truecar.com cars.com kbb.com ) give this "invoice" price for free! And lo! and behold! People are getting cars for 100$ over invoice or 200$ under invoice left right and center. And the dealer is laughing all the way to the bank because the "invoice" price goes up, but "volume discounts" "dealer holdbacks" "dealer incentives" "quota meeting bonus or whatever" etc return the money back to the dealer. And we are now left with some worthless info called "invoice" price.
Only thing it has served is to find the really truly babe in the woods who walk into a dealership without knowing even this fictional "invoice" price. You can hear the champagne corks popping when someone starts negotiating from the X below MSRP instead of Y above invoice.
First a confession. Back in the 1990s I ripped text books. All my fellow PIGS (Poor Indian Grad Students) did the same. We were in India, if Eastern Economy Edition is not available, American text books would cost about half a month salary of a gazetted officer. ( 1800 rs a month, 14 Rs/US$). So you give the book to the local Xerox shop and next day you get a bound copy of a poorly xeroxed book. It would reek of some chemical. Letters would undergo some kind Laplace transformation at the center and fade, both the recto and the verso pages would be on one wide page. Lento would be empty!
Well at the time I got admission to PhD program in USA I wanted to bring those ripped books along, naturally. But was deathly afraid the immigration officer would find these books, and mark me a flagrant violator of copyright, a person unworthy of admission to a great American university, and do in his best soup nazi voice, "no visa to you" and send me back. So I shipped them all using surface mail and crossed the border without any contraband.
That is how I got the U S Federal Government, to aid and abet my flagrant and willful violation of copyright and the intellectual property of the text book companies of America. The poor postal worker lugged that entire box a flight of stairs up and deposited the treasure in my doorstep, some four months later! All those books, Aircraft Performance Stability and Control by Perkins and Hage, Hale, McCormick, Atkins, Timoshenko, Nicholai, and so many other goodies are still in the bottom shelf of my office. I recently had to look one up to understand quarternions, to implement some rigid body transformation of coordinate systems!
UC Davis spokesman, Mr Wesp Rays Tudents, clarified that using campus policeman to spray on protesting students sitting on the side walk provoked too many protests and parodies. They believe the urban remote controlled helicopter would be a more humane approach and protect the identity of the policeman doing the spraying.
I am very sure the ambulance chasers and medical malpractice lawyers are lobbying to having every surgery fully recorded and stored so that they can go through it with a fine tooth comb and play Monday morning quarterback in front of jurors. Insurance premia is going to shoot up another 300%.
This highly confidential data is very valuable thing and the most important thing Facebook is selling to its "partners". Leaking this information for free without collecting revenue is highly detrimental to the company. They have since fixed the problem, it is all well and good. You now have to become a "partner" and pay the required fees to Facebook to get such confidential data.
It is not surprising. Nuclear industry is very heavily regulated. These regulations are not updated regularly. The regulations were laid with whatever was the state of art and they never paid any attention to cost, upkeep or updates. It leads to quite ridiculous situations like maintaining old bugs as is. I don't know why or how. But I hear stories about nuclear customers demanding some buggy behavior to be reproduceable after the software update, even if the update was about that very bug. "Give us a setting/env switch to reproduce the old buggy answer!". Same way the Air Force is still flying B-51 bombers that are older than their pilots, older than their commanding officers, now getting to be older than even their commander-in-chief.
All those poor women clad in bright color saris in Rajastan trekking several kilometers each day to fetch two pots of water for all the family needs would be freed of the burden! Some driverless van will just drive by and drop off those pots of water. It aint a delivery van, it is deliverance! And all those Bangaladeshi rag pickers combing through the garbage dump looking for something worth selling don't have to carry their sacks all the way to the scrap dealer. A driverless truck will take it to the scrap guy. I am sure driverless cars and vans will change the lives in million other ways too.
People who take privacy seriously, people who are willing to jump through hoops to protect their privacy, people who are upset about government spying are a small minority. Corporations have been powerful, more powerful than governments for a long time. JPMorgan bailed out the U.S government in the early 20th century. The East India Company ruled entire India till 1856. Now a days the multinational companies pledge or feel no allegiance to any government and they are more powerful than ever.
Still even people who take privacy seriously obsess over government spying and not the corporate spying. People are voluntarily signing over their privacy rights to corporations more powerful than the governments for peanuts. "One bag of peanuts free if you let us eternal access to all your private data" The line will wind around the block in no time.
Problem 1: Most people don't take privacy seriously.
Problem 2: People who do, focus on the less powerful government and ignore the more powerful corporations
Problem 3: There is no profit in helping people keep their data private to balance the profit to be made by exploiting the private data.
At work I am a big fan of Visual SlickEdit. It builds complete tags of all the functions, variables, classes etc into tags. Allows me to find all callers of a particular function, definitions, references etc. In Linux it will work with gdb to do step through debugging. I believe most of the functionality is available in emacs, with its ctags. Though most developers in our company use Microsoft IDE, I build all my sln files using slickedit and edit using slickedit. It has good integration with version management tools too.
So Microsoft is reducing the feature set of its iOS MsOffice products. It is understandable and is quite logical. It has to have some differentiation and some small amount of sand in the gears to justify charging hundreds of dollars for its if "full" version. They want to check off that bullet point "iOS support: done". But at the same time it can not charge full money to the iOS suite, Apple is waiting there, waiting with its butcher knife to cleave its 30% commission. So it is going to give away or charge something minimal for the iOS suite. Doing it and maintaining a large price differential for its "full" product needs such tricks.
Looks like the gamers know what the letter has been in some spot a few milli seconds later. It probably explains why gamers playing real baseball with real bats seem to be hitting where the ball had been a few milliseconds instead of where the ball is now.
It is not a well known, but the fact was magnetic monopoles were quite common before 1890s. Most people would just buy one pole, two was considered a needless luxury or waste. But the Big Magnet did not like it and wanted to double their sales. Their magnets with both the north and the south pole languished on the shelves, unable to, ahem, attract customers. So the lobbied congress, and as usual they added a completely irrelevant rider to Sherman anti-trust legislation and banned monopoles as well as cartels, trusts and collusion. Pretty soon they stopped making them.
Slashdot Mirror
Warren Buffett is not a hedge fund manager. He is an investment company manager and one of Cassandras railing against the hedge funds. He has bet that plain and simple S&P500 index fund can beat hedge funds and is winning it five years into the bet. Read about him.
Now would you care to address the silliness of the Republicans opposing single payer healthcare system shouting such patent nonsense? Free market does not work in healthcare. The price signal is obscured. (employers paying insurance companies to pay doctors/hospitals/pharmacies to treat their employees is as obscure as it gets). Even sophisticated players like banks and investment houses can be gamed by the bond rating agencies. People who understand the limits of free market tend to be Democrats. And they get unfairly labeled as big spending big government supporters. Right now the biggest threat to our well being and the free markets is the Republican party.
Only when we realize there is no correlation between skill and success in Wall Street, we would structure their risk/reward ratios in a more sane manner and bring some kind on sensibility to the market. Think about it. If the market is all knowing and all powerful, then why do companies that go under the market, get bought by private equity and then come back into the market and get valued highly?
They buy bad loans and expired loans at a few cents per dollar, then resell it to dimwits who fall for "make money from home". These chumps are trained to trawl through the net looking at bulletin boards looking for the names on the loan. They pick on a approximate match, and spam every other poster in that thread assuming they must be somehow connected. One Vijay Krishna has a bad loan. Every one who has ever posted on any thread in any board where anyone named Vijay or Krishna had ever posted become targets of such widespread phone spam. Quite frustrating to deal with. If you ever use the 800 numbers they mention and track down the debt collector, it turns out to be another poor chump who had bought expired worthless loans at 1 cent a dollar.
And sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Touche'. Serves me right for not counting the number of digits in your slashdot id.
That is a good start. Now learn to type it from a shell window, and memorize some more obscure strings of letters and discover the amazing things they do. Like ls grep awk diff less more cut join find etc. Then learn about even more obscure symbols like ! & > >> | Then someday you will understand why the unix hacks are so happy and are not so easily impressed by some of the bells and whistles and eye candy of the GUI.
I am arguing all the scientific journals collective form a long scientific debate, each sci entist asking himself/herself asking a question she/he may think as relevant and present evidence. The questions keep fragmenting, they keep presenting evidence and eventually science comes to some kind of consensus without anyone particularly named judge or calling an end to debate.
One of them main things these humanities guys don't get it, though you can question anything, you have to accept and concede when the evidence goes against you. No matter how seriously you believe it, if it is wrong, if it is shown to be wrong, you can not dredge up all old questions all over again. There is no shame in being wrong, or changing one's mind after being persuaded by evidence. There is nothing off the record.
Of course I am generalizing based on long flame wars on creationist / evolution fora. May be I am wrong. Also scientists should also present all evidence against the point they are advocating. Like me admitting that I am generalizing based on a limited self selected subset of humanities people.
Yeah, now FTC is somehow is going to make the search engines distinguish paid-ad from unpaid-search? How? Corporations are people. If A sells, but B pays google in some obfuscated way for the product of A, how can anyone untangle the web?
Only thing it has served is to find the really truly babe in the woods who walk into a dealership without knowing even this fictional "invoice" price. You can hear the champagne corks popping when someone starts negotiating from the X below MSRP instead of Y above invoice.
Well at the time I got admission to PhD program in USA I wanted to bring those ripped books along, naturally. But was deathly afraid the immigration officer would find these books, and mark me a flagrant violator of copyright, a person unworthy of admission to a great American university, and do in his best soup nazi voice, "no visa to you" and send me back. So I shipped them all using surface mail and crossed the border without any contraband.
That is how I got the U S Federal Government, to aid and abet my flagrant and willful violation of copyright and the intellectual property of the text book companies of America. The poor postal worker lugged that entire box a flight of stairs up and deposited the treasure in my doorstep, some four months later! All those books, Aircraft Performance Stability and Control by Perkins and Hage, Hale, McCormick, Atkins, Timoshenko, Nicholai, and so many other goodies are still in the bottom shelf of my office. I recently had to look one up to understand quarternions, to implement some rigid body transformation of coordinate systems!
UC Davis spokesman, Mr Wesp Rays Tudents, clarified that using campus policeman to spray on protesting students sitting on the side walk provoked too many protests and parodies. They believe the urban remote controlled helicopter would be a more humane approach and protect the identity of the policeman doing the spraying.
The exchanges will/should be regulated as banks and other financial institutions.
} else {
The exchanges are retailers of a valuable commodity and pay sales tax on transactions.
}
I am very sure the ambulance chasers and medical malpractice lawyers are lobbying to having every surgery fully recorded and stored so that they can go through it with a fine tooth comb and play Monday morning quarterback in front of jurors. Insurance premia is going to shoot up another 300%.
Luckily, Georgia was able to fend her attacker off by clocking him in the head with a coffee mug.
See? Java skill will always come in handy for the code warriors in every unexpected situation.
You call it sloppy garbage. The all knowing market with its invisible hand thinks it is worth a few billion dollars.
This highly confidential data is very valuable thing and the most important thing Facebook is selling to its "partners". Leaking this information for free without collecting revenue is highly detrimental to the company. They have since fixed the problem, it is all well and good. You now have to become a "partner" and pay the required fees to Facebook to get such confidential data.
. If it weren't for the French, we'd be like Canada or Australia.
You mean, we will have free universal single payer healthcare system? Hooray!
It is not surprising. Nuclear industry is very heavily regulated. These regulations are not updated regularly. The regulations were laid with whatever was the state of art and they never paid any attention to cost, upkeep or updates. It leads to quite ridiculous situations like maintaining old bugs as is. I don't know why or how. But I hear stories about nuclear customers demanding some buggy behavior to be reproduceable after the software update, even if the update was about that very bug. "Give us a setting/env switch to reproduce the old buggy answer!". Same way the Air Force is still flying B-51 bombers that are older than their pilots, older than their commanding officers, now getting to be older than even their commander-in-chief.
All those poor women clad in bright color saris in Rajastan trekking several kilometers each day to fetch two pots of water for all the family needs would be freed of the burden! Some driverless van will just drive by and drop off those pots of water. It aint a delivery van, it is deliverance! And all those Bangaladeshi rag pickers combing through the garbage dump looking for something worth selling don't have to carry their sacks all the way to the scrap dealer. A driverless truck will take it to the scrap guy. I am sure driverless cars and vans will change the lives in million other ways too.
Still even people who take privacy seriously obsess over government spying and not the corporate spying. People are voluntarily signing over their privacy rights to corporations more powerful than the governments for peanuts. "One bag of peanuts free if you let us eternal access to all your private data" The line will wind around the block in no time.
Problem 1: Most people don't take privacy seriously.
Problem 2: People who do, focus on the less powerful government and ignore the more powerful corporations
Problem 3: There is no profit in helping people keep their data private to balance the profit to be made by exploiting the private data.
At work I am a big fan of Visual SlickEdit. It builds complete tags of all the functions, variables, classes etc into tags. Allows me to find all callers of a particular function, definitions, references etc. In Linux it will work with gdb to do step through debugging. I believe most of the functionality is available in emacs, with its ctags. Though most developers in our company use Microsoft IDE, I build all my sln files using slickedit and edit using slickedit. It has good integration with version management tools too.
So Microsoft is reducing the feature set of its iOS MsOffice products. It is understandable and is quite logical. It has to have some differentiation and some small amount of sand in the gears to justify charging hundreds of dollars for its if "full" version. They want to check off that bullet point "iOS support: done". But at the same time it can not charge full money to the iOS suite, Apple is waiting there, waiting with its butcher knife to cleave its 30% commission. So it is going to give away or charge something minimal for the iOS suite. Doing it and maintaining a large price differential for its "full" product needs such tricks.
Looks like the gamers know what the letter has been in some spot a few milli seconds later. It probably explains why gamers playing real baseball with real bats seem to be hitting where the ball had been a few milliseconds instead of where the ball is now.
It is not a well known, but the fact was magnetic monopoles were quite common before 1890s. Most people would just buy one pole, two was considered a needless luxury or waste. But the Big Magnet did not like it and wanted to double their sales. Their magnets with both the north and the south pole languished on the shelves, unable to, ahem, attract customers. So the lobbied congress, and as usual they added a completely irrelevant rider to Sherman anti-trust legislation and banned monopoles as well as cartels, trusts and collusion. Pretty soon they stopped making them.