I am a proponent of free markets for the things that markets are good at. Markets are great at pricing things whose future attributes are relatively predictable by the market players, and that don’t require a decision-making time horizon greater than the market trade horizon. For example, markets are great at pricing stocks, because companies [...]
Meetings! I just love meetings … no, I don’t. I hate meetings. But perhaps that’s just because I’m no good at running them.
According to an MSNBC article today, Bush met with the leaders of 20 countries Saturday night. To quote the article:
“After the almost 40-minute meeting and his six-minute statement, the president left the White [...]
According to a New York Times article about Greenspan and his policies today, Greenspan is defending his stance on derivatives (he was pro-derivatives) by saying the whole imploding economy is because of people acting in bad faith in the markets, but the deregulated derivatives approach was somehow still “right.”
Mr. Greenspan is apparently living in a [...]
I’ve been watching the election with bated breath. Well, ok, I’ve been watching it mainly with a feeling of disgust. There’s been hour after hour of talking heads evaluating the horse race and ignoring issues. Or at best, they whine about how the media is ignoring issues… while they—also the media—ignore all issues except whether [...]
I was reading Steve Salerno’s “anti-SHAM” blog as he was commenting on Hillary’s speech at the DNC last night. He didn’t think much of her story. She told a story of her success, he said, that may have been a tad… biased.
That got me thinking about how much our own stories do and don’t have [...]
I grew up in the era of the Apollo moon launches. One of my earliest memories is traveling to Cape Canaveral and watching from the beach as one of the missions was launched towards the moon. It was pretty incredible.
Despite frequent moves and attending six schools between elementary school and college, science was in the [...]
We’re spending a billion dollars a day on the Iraq war. Elsewhere in the world, we’re having food riots, because poor people can’t get enough to eat. The U.N.’s World Food Programme estimates the food gap at $500 million. That’s half a day’s worth of the Iraq War to keep millions of people from starving [...]
It’s almost April 15th, that wonderful time of the year when we pay taxes.
And I say this time of year sucks!! It doesn’t suck because of taxes; they’re inevitable. It sucks because of all the whining people do about taxes.
People complain about taxes all the time. We’re pretty ungrateful, here in America. We have among [...]
It’s amazing. I always found it odd when applying for a mortgage that banks considered income, but not asset base. If I have a bunch of money and invest in an investment that’s growing in value by 33% per year but not throwing off income, they won’t consider that in deciding to grant a mortgage. [...]
The New York Times reported today that a system has been developed that would let us avoid vote fraud by engaging the populace in double-checking the vote. It’s a very elegant system, developed at MIT. Interestingly, it was developed by Ron Rivest, who also developed some of the very popular private key cryptography that underlies [...]
