May 2013
73 posts
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Cecil Graham: What is a cynic?
Lord Darlington: A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Cecil Graham: And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.
— Oscar Wilde - Lady Windermere's Fan, act III
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10 Perspectives Into The Slow, Agonizing Death Of... →
usagia:
The middle class American worker is in danger of becoming an endangered species. The politicians are not telling you the truth, and the mainstream media is certainly not telling you the truth, but the reality is that there is nothing but bad news on the horizon for workers in the United States. The American people inherited the greatest economic machine in the history of the world, and...
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10 most common jobs →
lejacquelope:
The poverty level for 2012 was set at $23,050 (total yearly income)
Of the 10 most common private sector jobs in America, 7 are BARELY above the poverty line. 9 out of 10 are less than twice the poverty line.
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No, the federal government does not profit off... →
yostivanich:
Worse, it’s hard to say what the actual market price of these loans would be, because unlike the federal government, private lenders actually ask basic questions of borrowers. The federal student loan program requires shockingly little in the way of information on the part of borrowers. “If you walked into a bank and said ‘I’d like a loan’ and then they asked for your credit score,...
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Eunuchs of the Universe →
parislemon:
25 years after The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe returns to Wall Street for Newsweek. It’s a very different world than when he last explored it. The testosterone trader has been replaced by the quiet quant.
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“Nigeria’s commercial nerve center, Lagos is set to become the continent’s 13th...”
– Lagos to be Africa’s 13 biggest economy by 2014, similar to the size of Ghana says Renaissance Capital
You know it’s serious when they start comparing a city to countries. And we manage all this without stable electricity, easy access to basic resources, and the necessary infrastructure to...
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“That the Obama administration is now repeatedly declaring that the ‘war on...”
– Washington gets explicit: its ‘war on terror’ is permanent | Glenn Greenwald (via theamericanbear)
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We have met the enemy and he is PowerPoint
connected-marketing:
The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch. This can lead to catastrophes like the 2003 NASA Columbia disaster. According to the NASA Investigation Board, this accident resulted from “the endemic use of PowerPoint substituted for rigorous technical analysis”.
PowerPoint has...
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Elie Ayache's synopsis of The Blank Swan
I guess my whole point about probability is that it is a contingent concept and hence can be replaced (it is historically dated). Its main weakness is the identification and delimitation of states of the world to which the probability distribution applies. In case of roulette, or dice, or marbles in a jar, this is not a problem as the possible states (or draws) are clearly defined. In...
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35 Statistics About The Working Poor In America...
virtualanarchy:
by Michael Snyder
In America tonight, tens of millions of men and women will struggle to get to sleep because they are stressed out about not making enough money even though they are working as hard as they possibly can. They are called “the working poor”, and their numbers are absolutely exploding. As a recent Gallup poll showed, Americans are more concerned about the economy...
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Shadow Accounting: A Look Inside Hedge Funds
datavisualizations:
This visual offers a primer on alternative assets (hedge funds) and the role that shadow accounting plays in the industry.
Shadow accounting isn’t as shady as it sounds. Fortisbank’s definition is:
According to IFRS 4 an insurer is permitted, but not required, to change its accounting policies so that a recognised but unrealised gain or loss on an asset...
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“The techniques of DNA computing were developed in the mid-1990s by Leonard...”
– Thacker and Galloway, The Exploit (pp. 51-2).
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“Countless hordes of Bitcoin prospectors are now using their computers to “mine”...”
– The Bitcoin network outperforms the top 500 supercomputers combined | ExtremeTech
All these people are idiots. The electricity required to mine a bitcoin costs more than the bitcoin is worth. This was not always the case (even though bitcoins used to be 1/100th their current price) because the...
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Colleges Soak Poor Students to Funnel Aid to Rich →
infoneer-pulse:
U.S. colleges such as Boston University are using financial aid to lure rich students while shortchanging the poor, forcing those most in need to take on heavy debt, a report found.
Almost two-thirds of private institutions require students from families making $30,000 or less annually to pay more than $15,000 a year, according to the report released today by the...
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Everything Is Worse Than You Could Ever Imagine
vulgartrader:
Guess who has been living high on the hog as education cost (one of the chief forms of debt for this generation) goes through the roof?
Huffington Post reports:
University endowments and teachers’ pension funds are among big investors in Sallie Mae, the private lender that has been generating enormous profits thanks to soaring student debt and the climbing cost of education…
...
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“The fastest fiber-optic route between New Jersey and Chicago is approximately 16...”
– Kjøsen, A.M. - “Logistics II,” p. 7
The relevant citations are:
Dorminey, Bruce. “Neutrinos to give high-frequency traders the millisecond edge”. Forbes ,April 30. 2012. Web....
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The Algorithmic Flash Crash of 2010
An integral accident could have happened with the flash financial crash of 2010. At 2:40pm on May 6th , 2010 the overall prices of US shares, and of index futures contracts that bet on those prices, fell by a staggering 6 percent in just five minutes. A fall of 1-2 percent a day is normal. Overall prices recovered quickly, but some very peculiar price fluctuations happened with some individual...
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Watchwhitember:
Or watch it HERE
Ghost Exchange by Arbitrage Pictures
1:30 – 1:35 (Prof. James Angel)
“Until we have regulators who really know what they’re doing, chances are they’ll do more harm than good.”
1:35 – 2:00 (Harvey Pitt)
“When God wanted to tell the human race how to behave, it was sufficient to come out with ten commandments. When Congress wanted to...
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“The market, therefore, is the conversion of the image of thought. I should add...”
– Elie Ayache - “The Blank Swan” (7city Media lecture), pt. 2, conclusion
He goes on:
And according to me, the schema of thought whereby we identify and recognize states of the world abides by the same logic of debt—the logic of recognition. Debt is perverse because it longs for the...
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“You know what regime switching is: it’s like a superposition of regimes. When...”
– Elie Ayache - “The Blank Swan” (7city Media lecture), pt. 3, ⅔ in.
He writes in “Elie Ayache on Option Trading and Modeling,” in Haug, E. (2007). Derivatives: Models on Models. West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, p. 262:
The key observation regarding the regime-switching model is...
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A High Frequency Map of the Market | Cris... →
Given the ability of high frequency trading to operate at extremely high speeds with a large amount of orders spread throughout the market, we can safely conclude the following three things: 1) HFT can be used to create a high resolution map of the market in real-time, 2) HFT can influence or manipulate the market for gain, and 3) HFT puts the market at systemic risk.
The latter two points have...
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Multiplier effects of tech jobs
misunderstoodeconmajor:
Multiplier Effects: Connecting the Innovation and Opportunity Agendas
Mark Muro, August 23, 2012 12:00am
My colleague Jonathan Rothwell already reviewed economist Enrico Moretti’s wonderful book, “The New Geography of Jobs,” but I wanted to jump in to highlight one particularly important point among the many Moretti makes. This concerns the matter of why...
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Online Sales Tax Bill Passes Senate →
jovan1984:
WASHINGTON — The Senate sided with traditional retailers and financially strapped state and local governments Monday by passing a bill that would widely subject online shopping – for many a largely tax-free frontier – to state sales taxes. The Senate passed the bill by a vote of 69 to 27, getting support from Republicans and Democrats alike.
Know the crippling shipping and handling...
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“As Americans, you have that naïve assumption that people all over the world are...”
– 10 Things Most Americans Don’t Know About America (via curlycherie)
There are two areas where the USA is way out in front of the rest of the world: war and prison. The technology of killing is the main investment of US national energy, and of course the semi-public semi-private incarceration...
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The Water Rich Versus The Water Poor →
visualoop:
Via
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