finance-geek's comments

Dont end up like this unfortunate boy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Mohamed_clock_incident

To take this a level higher -- managers are often rewarded on quarterly or annual targets, not long-term targets. When it managed a large software team, it was very difficult to budget time/money for quality -- if I did, peers would swoop in and try to take my position under the guise of "he's overspending for the task." It takes good, strategic prioritization all the way up the management chain to build quality.

It would mean that any poor country could simply become wealthy by allowing unlimited immigration...Most poor countries are nicer relative to some worse-off country, so certainly there would not be a shortage of immigrants wanting to migrate.

“Across the country, wages are flat. Americans get paid less today than 10 years ago”

His solution has been to advocate increased immigration. Yep, wages are flat, lets bring more people so more people can compete for fewer jobs.

They are saying that teachers/counselors are viewing it from their baked-in perspective formed 30 years ago...back when you could graduate with a bachelor's degree, end up in a school job that gave you a life-long pension and healthcare.

I think it is difficult for someone from my parent's generation, who had so many benefits (no offshore competition, defined benefits pensions, lifetime pensions, etc) to understand how tough life is now. You hear about it, but until you struggle with it it is difficult to know.

I am not a lawyer, but not showing up is not a good idea, you could then be fired for cause and lose your stock. Being fired is different from being laid off.

Easy -- for an "imperfect hedge", find a comparable company and sell an opposite instrument. If you are holding illiquid stock in VenMo for example, buy puts on either a the NASDAQ or PAYPAL. As the value of one goes up, the value of the other generally goes down, you are generally even.

For a "perfect hedge", find a counterparty willing to bet on the price of what you own (perhaps they have an opposite exposure) and have them take the opposite side of a forward or swap for your illiquid stock.

With high-frequency and algorithmic market-makers, there is no such thing as low liquidity. Bid-ask spreads are at all-time lows as algo market makers try to one-up each other to squeeze spreads and provide liquidity.

At a primary level, you are correct. But the effects of passive investment are more subtle. 1. More investment dollars chasing big companies allows those companies to issue more stock without having to worry about pushing prices down (since there is this extra upward pressure of increased flow.) 2. Increased stock prices from increased flow gives the company more stock value for acquisitions 3. If money keeps flowing into particular stocks, it encourages companies to be lax about dividend growth, since the prices rise regardless.

>> People convicted in part based on flawed science are not obviously innocent.

People convicted in part based on flawed science are also not obviously guilty. It is difficult to impossible to weigh how the jury weighed the evidence. So at the least they should be afforded another trial excluding the flawed evidence.

How sure how closely it compares to large companies, but with most of the [large] companies i've been at, the metric for promotion was how many people you could hire under you. Not code quality, size of system, not impact, not money saved, not business enabled....just the size of your org chart. Not sure why HR devolves into such a silly metric for non-revenue generating departments, but i've seen it at 5 separate organizations. Is it any wonder employees then behave in the ways they do and build empires?

The car would not need to be "stupid" or "stupid enough" to cause a crash, sometimes a crash is unfortunately inevitable given the situation other cats put you into.

And yes, some people sometimes have to make the difficult decision between hitting another smaller car, hitting a truck, and hitting a person. I suspect these days, most people react irrationally in split seconds. However, with self-driving cars, all the data would be available and a real decision could be made...but what would be the constraints and what would you maximize? that is the scary question.

@Gibbon1 this is a pretty insightful comment. Luckily for Moody's, they made themselves part of an intricate industrial structure where their ratings drive large parts of the industry (e.g., investment guidelines, lending, etc.)

I was thinking the same, but it is earnings season in a down market...

Probably not, but seems like a good way to turn a bad business into a worse one, but one you can claim is "Mobile" and attract more VC cash!

I'm not comparing Theranos to a ponzi scheme (e.g., Madoff) but the path may be the same -- they tell a small lie, then another lie to cover it up, then a bigger lie. Pretty soon there is great press, they are in too deep to backtrack and have to keep exaggerating just to keep up the baseline.

Depends on which inflation figure you count. When I think of inflation, I think of the largest costs first -- housing, which can easily be 30 to 50% of your earnings for most people. Check out the Housing Price Index -- does that look flat to you? http://us.spindices.com/indices/real-estate/sp-case-shiller-...

@sama - since so many people here are in The Bay Area, i'll give the obvious answer for the region -- high density housing. I'm from NYC and we support a lot more housing in a much smaller area. This is accomplished by stacking upwards towards the sky. I appreciate there are earthquake concerns, but I also understand that many of the barriers for high density housing are political and social.

I'll bet many problems in the Bay Area would be resolved with high density housing. A selfish list: shorter commutes (--> more time with family), lower rents (--> more people willing to move here --> fewer developer "shortages"), less cars on the road, less pollution.

I find it really amusing that you noted "then credit default swaps were stopped in their tracks before they destroyed the economy" as one of the critical junctures in the US economy. It was, and most people dont realize that. CDS allowed large parts of the CDOs to become AAA and enabled all manners of craziness in 2002-2007.

Sadly, it often gets blamed on Clinton/Gore given the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 signed weeks before their term ended. The reality was all about how it was implemented/regulated/enforced, which was all during Bush's term. You note correctly, things would have been very different under Gore. For one thing, courageous individuals like Brooksley Born would have been allowed into the discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooksley_Born#Born_and_the_OT...

Too funny.