Week 20
Question
Who is your favorite evil twin?
Garth Knight
Hands down.. He had the evil twin car, the friggin cane... Evil Twin perfection.
The Guardian
The 25 best-paid hedge fund managers pocketed $13bn in 2015, and most of the big winners relied on programs, not contacts, for their big wins.
Nice
Yep - multitude of styles, different markets... Currency market, futures market, both of which are larger than the equity market. There are trend-followers, value investors, macro investors, and now algorithmic traders who utilize all of these concepts in an algorithmic fashion.
Do what you are good at [I am guessing he is being contrarian against the advice "do what you are passionate about"]
Depends
Every personality is different; can we drop these one-size-fits-all adages pah-lease? This (successful) actor making the comment is shaped by two attributes, Less Perfect, and I Am CRM; the former gives the native great expressive power, but must abstain from seeking perfection. The latter's weakness is always trying to be right, these people need to move away from constantly trying to be right and listen to others (and not listen to their gut, approach things through theoretical foundations, etc. etc). So a combination of these would push this actor to work with others, express himself, etc. This person, then, is at an optimal place given his profile attributes, one could say this is what he likes to do. Passion, as in "that burning desire on a subject matter that pushes a person do whatever", might not be there for him, but he is still doing what likes to do.
Kevin Costner, on the other hand, said once that he so wanted to be involved in movies that "he could even be a garbage man, but the garbage he picked up had to be movie garbage". Costner's profile carries hints of expressive power as well, but for this type the native feels a need to express. His profile gives him passion, or liking a subject and his job in a way that is compatible with his profile.
In general I would not shoot down passion too early, in whichever form it might manifest itself. It will get you through a lot of setbacks, hardships while creating. That's what the 3W economy expects us to do right - be creative, create stuff, in tech, in human relations, in art?
Comment
So listening or not listening to your gut also depends on a person's profile
Exactly
Just like we can't give one-liner advices on "be selfish", or "don't be selfish", or any other jackass adages you might think of, we cannot tell people to listen or not to listen to their gut either. Some people absolutely should not.
Report
Before the [basic income] pilot program [in Namibia], 42 percent of children in the village were malnourished. Now the proportion of malnourished children has dropped significantly, to 10 percent.
The village school reported higher attendance rates and that the children were better fed and more attentive. Police statistics showed a 36.5 percent drop in crime since the introduction of the grants. Poverty rates declined from 86 percent to 68 percent (97 percent to 43 percent when controlled for migration). Unemployment dropped as well, from 60 percent to 45 percent, and there was a 29 percent increase in average earned income, excluding the basic income grant. These results indicate that basic income grants can not only alleviate poverty in purely economic terms, but may also jolt the poor out of the poverty cycle, helping them find work, start their own businesses, and attend school.
Nice
Comment
If you want to set off and develop some new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refigrator, a cheap PC to work on and the dedication to go through with it.
Right
Comment
[Adding on the comment above] Harder truth: If you want to develop some new thing, you need the privilege of enough wealth to live without income.
Right Also
News
Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
Yep
News
Woman takes #2 on her boss' desk after winning the lottery
Ouch
News
Kim Jong-un bans all weddings, funerals and freedom of movement in North Korea
TARFU
This guy finally lost it - I profiled him and he is on the negative in all aspects, an indication things in this country will go from bad to worse, from TARFU to FUBAR. The Chinese will have to invade, one way or another, and put this guy out of his misery.
Pork is banned in some religions. Is it good or bad?
Not healthy
I don't mean to sour anyone's bacon and egg experience, but according to the Blood Type Diet, there are only a few food items that are unhealthy for all blood types, and pork is one of them.
The others are black pepper, carbonated water (soda), blue cheese, corn oil, american cheese.
Question
If we abolish centralized, fiat money, there will be no interest payments for any kind of debt.
Unlikely
Interest collected on debt reflects risk perception on that loan. A risky business / person will get a higher rate, lower one a lower rate. Market forces will / need to do their thing, so there would be interest on debt even if we were using a cybercurrency like Bitcoin.
We see this risk pricing at country level all the time; sometimes entire countries can fall out of favor with creditors, then can become favorites again depending on the policy changes. For example Argentina was ruled badly for a long time (by a nationalist / populist / nativist ideology, take your pick), it fell out of favor with creditors. There was a change of power recently, now they are back in the bond market. They have been out for a long time, they need money, so they need to offer better (higher) rates to creditors. On the other side because of the current easy money / QE environment, investors are hungry for yield, so I bet they jumped on those Argentinian bonds the moment they became available. It's beautiful how it all works.
Article
This [bad] treatment of moneylenders is unjust but not new. For millennia they have been the primary scapegoats for practically every economic problem. They have been derided by philosophers and condemned to hell by religious authorities; their property has been confiscated to compensate their “victims”; they have been humiliated, framed, jailed, and butchered. From Jewish pogroms where the main purpose was to destroy the records of debt, to the vilification of the House of Rothschild, to the jailing of American financiers—moneylenders have been targets of philosophers, theologians, journalists, economists, playwrights, legislators, and the masses [..]
Today, anti-globalization demonstrators carry signs that read “abolish usury” or “abolish interest.” Although these protestors are typically leftists—opponents of capitalism and anything associated with it—their contempt for moneylending is shared by others, including radical Christians and Muslims who regard charging interest on loans as a violation of God’s law and thus as immoral.
Moneylending has been and is condemned by practically everyone. But what exactly is being condemned here? What is moneylending or usury? And what are its consequences? [..]
The borrower is able to use money that he would otherwise not be able to use, in exchange for paying the lender an agreed-upon premium in addition to the principal amount of the loan. Not only do both interested parties benefit from such an exchange; countless people who are not involved in the trade often benefit too—by means of access to the goods and services made possible by the exchange.
[Loaning] enables levels of life-serving commerce and industry that otherwise would be impossible. Consider a few historical examples. Moneylenders funded grain shipments in ancient Athens and the first trade between the Christians in Europe and the Saracens of the East. They backed the new merchants of Italy and, later, of Holland and England. They supported Spain’s exploration of the New World, and funded gold and silver mining operations. They made possible the successful colonization of America. They fueled the Industrial Revolution, supplying the necessary capital to the new entrepreneurs in England, the United States, and Europe. And, in the late 20th century, moneylenders provided billions of dollars to finance the computer, telecommunications, and biotechnology industries.
By taking risks and investing their capital in what they thought would make them the most money, moneylenders and other financiers made possible whole industries—such as those of steel, railroads, automobiles, air travel, air conditioning, and medical devices. Without capital, often provided through usury, such life-enhancing industries would not exist—and homeownership would be impossible to all but the wealthiest people.
Moneylending is the lifeblood of industrial-technological society. When the practice and its practitioners are condemned, they are condemned for furthering and enhancing man’s life on earth.
True
It's interesting that we cheer enterpreneurs as individuals who take risks to create a business, but we usually forget about people who loaned them money that made their business possible, who took a risk on them.
One of the main differences between Protestants and the Catholic Church revolved around the issue of debt interest - Calvinist made it legal, and my guess is Protestans owe much of their success and world-wide expansion to this new reinterpretation - because without pricing of risk, you have no loan, without loan, no business, no expansion.
Question
But many religions ban interest charged on loans, including Islam.
Incorrect
Islam bans usury which means "excessive interest", not interest of any kind. There are even seperate words for this in Arabic, interest is fa'eda, usury is reba.
[Paraphrasing] Poor people on food stamp programs should not eat steak.
Ummmm-Yeah
This comment was totally not cool - but that's besides the point.
The real point is no government official should be in a position to micromanage these things. High bonuses for non-deserving CEO's suck, but gov should not intrude in that. If there are too many highly-paid executives, tax their ass. If poor people need help, give the money to them. But don't micromanage payrolls, or micromanage whether people eat steak, bread, or beaten eggs.
Comment
All traders, speculators are gamblers.
Not True
Traders gamble with the market the way sailors gamble with the wind. They don't.
(At least good ones do not). Sailboats are able to move in the direction they want no matter which way the wind blows - in some cases they might go faster, sometimes slower, but they don't go backward. Sailboats can do this by using the proper design for their sail. Hell, with some sail designs, a sailboat can move into the wind, while the wind is blowing from the opposite direction! Same approach is true while preparing a portfolio, picking a winning strategy; it's all about engineering, and the approach is no different than any other branch of engineering. Gambling? The game of poker was beaten by a game-theoretic approach recently. This is mathematics all the way.
Comment
But this is still not as important as curing cancer.
YES IT IS
Straddle Bus
#quesedilla #chicana
That's awesome news right there. Go EU!
Open Access Rules!
"In what European science chief Carlos Moedas calls a "life-changing" move, European Union member states today agreed on an ambitious new open access (OA) target. All scientific papers should be freely available by 2020, the Competitiveness Council—a gathering of ministers of science, innovation, trade, and industry—concluded after a 2-day meeting in Brussels[..]
The OA goal is part of a broader set of recommendations in support of Open Science, a concept which also includes improved storage of and access to research data. The Dutch government, which currently holds the rotating E.U. presidency, had lobbied hard for Europe-wide support for Open Science, as had Carlos Moedas, the European Commissioner for Research and Innovation"
The resemblance is uncanny. That orange orangutan looks just like him. The New Rule segment.
#maher
A little geek for Friday. (For non-techies, in the last box he just made a reference to a ready-made package).
coke
