cratuki

"is a society that sends so many of its brightest college graduates into a capital markets monkey pit maximizing welfare?"

It's not "Society" that is sending people into jobs in banks, it's individuals making individual decisions to accept individual contracts. That's their right, as it should be and there is no act of theft involved.

I don't understand why this chap feels that he should object to that. Nobody's forcing him to do it.

The paragraph that begins "It helps that investment banking has a low barrier to entry" doesn't make a point, nor does the one following.

As with most of the west, the quoted opinions misunderstand the core strengths of western style of government. The issue of giving people a greater say in their society is of little consequence. If it was critical then the most successful nations would have something like the Athenian model of democracy. The strength of the parliamentary dictatorship models we like to think of as democracies draw their strength from a structure which plays powerful personalities against one another in a model that is non-violent and relatively cheap compared to known alternatives [1]; it gives these personalities motivation to find fault with one another rather than collude [2]; and it providers a resent mechanism for the situation that develops when the ruling grouping begin to take things for granted.

That evolution of the Westminster system is a narrative example I particularly like because it is one of the main models. The story is dominated by reforms aimed to prevent concentrations of power. Magna Carta, church separation (a change of convenience the the ruler of the time but - ultimately beneficial thanks to further developments under Elizabeth I that cemented religious freedom - retained), The Republic (a deliberate but failed attempt at beneficial reform - discarded), evolution of the bicameral parliament to add impediments to overbearing governments left in control of the lower house, evolution of the doctrine of separation of powers.

Novelties such as policy elections do nothing to supply the necessary mechanisms. And they don't give particularly good outcomes - you only need to see the sorts of rubbish that people in the street consider to be important when they vote for someone to see that mainstream people are ill-equipped to make well informed decisions about complex policy arrangements. It is heresy to say this.

[1] The state in Australia with no upper house is the one that is most notorious for corruption and general shonkiness; it has a department to prevent corruption that costs twice what an upper house would.

[2] One of the disadvantages of this is that both sides have an interest in increasing the size of government. Ron Pauls are thin on the ground everywhere.

> "Banking industry" is an insult to those who actually > produce goods.

What do you think should be a use of industry? Is it OK to say "transport industry" despite the fact that what they do is a service?

Banks produce value through strategic use of risk calculation. They take in $100 and then lend out $90 for further wealth creation, and keep $10 on hand as liquidity so that if any of the owners of the $100 want any back they can get it. Thus, you have $190 of value passing around from a base of $100. You've just got to be careful not to loan too much out or you run out of liquidity and then the system stalls.

> which is frequently, unfortunately

Frequently by what measure?

I suspect Gates doesn't really understand what capitalism is. All of his fortune has been built on the back of legislative protection. And - specific to charity - I have several times noticed Microsoft gaining positive media for the 'charity' of giving away free software that costs it nothing to give, and which only has value in that form due to an arbitrary ruling from the relevant government.

Here are some good starting points for helping the world's poor:

1) End the practice of propping up corrupt foreign governments with aid

2) Stop subsidising first world farmers and thereby killing the markets for the second and third world (including flow-on effects coming from ludicrous things like ethanol subsidy)

3) Governments cease support for rent-seeking measures like copyright and patents.

4) Abolish government-enforced wage floors which subsidise the low income earners at the expense of the genuinely poor by preventing business from finding employment for them.

5) Don't make environmental policy until recorded facts genuinely point to a need for it.

Everywhere around us the invisible hand of the state is interfering in our lives through pork-barrelling schemes that benefit those close to power at the expense of the rest. The big lie is in the claim that we have now is capitalism. Even in the United States, what we first world countries have now is better referred to as 'mixed economies'. They have elements of capitalism but are some distance from actual capitalism.

I'm a coder non-economist also, but have been look at this for a few months and will take a shot at explaining it.

The way the fed aim to control interest rates is via the amount of money that they issue into circulation. The problem is that when the government puts more money into circulation it waters down the value of the money already in circulation, thereby encouraging consumption and some types of investment, and punishes saving by putting money in the bank. You buy goods so that you have physicals and not money which is losing value. Thus, it's quite controversial when a government institution participates in this way in that it is effectively directing the market.

"Austrians School" economists get particularly upset by this sort of practice where a government manipulates the market in order to steer to an outcome because one of the tenants of that way of looking at the world is that free markets lead to better outcomes than when governments try to manage economies. Frederick Hayek labelled the confidence of being able to second guess the market and manage it towards a desirable outcome "the fatal conceit" and there's a great book about it. Hence the way that Ron Paul (also an Austrian) gets stuck into the federal reserve at each opportunity, particularly over stuff like rate rises.

The other aspect, and the reason that the current instability is unsettling and that governments and institutions are doing a lot more than usual to prop things up is structural.

First - let's look at an example of a crash that isn't structural. Back when the dot come crash happened it was pretty simple: a whole lot of people had invested in stock, the market changed its confidence in that stock, a whole lot of people lost money. The banks took money in and paid it out and everything was fine. The market functioned. September 11 was the same even though trading floors had been taken out. None of these things changed the nature of market dynamics.

Now one that has been structural: Friedman blames the depression on the US Federal Reserve for failing to honour its responsibility to supply liquidity to banks who were short of it (as the UK government have recently done to try and get Northern Rock through).

The problem with the sub-prime situation though is that the rot is to do with the core responsibility of banks: managing risk. Banks take money in and loan it out, and make judgements about repayment risk to make sure that they make a net profit. But the change to banking culture that led to the sub-prime crisis was this: it became popular to package debts in certain combinations and sell them off to a far greater extent than had ever been done before. So you could buy certain packages of debt that had been guaranteed to fit a certain level of exposure. Basically this represents large scale outsourcing of bank's core business. (That's a nasty way to put it though, because in fact when you loan money in any sense you're outsourcing risk to some extent and this has always happened, just not to the same extent.)

The sub-prime crisis over the last year has given everyone in the banks the jitters because they've lost some confidence in the risk assessments made by banks they have previously exchanged risk with. Worse, they're not so sure about how much other banks know about their own risk and whether they're being entirely square with the market about it. Thus they start getting very more edgy than usual about short-term loans because the other party might not know what its position is or it might become susceptible to slight changes in the economy. And now the US (where most of the bad exposure was) is slipping into recession... meaning more people will fail on their home loans...

The real problem from subprime is that if the banks stop dealing with one another, you can be certain that economic activity will decline further. This will cause less people will be able to pay their mortgages. This will cause banks who are currently on the edge to slip. In other words - ouch. If there is a crash resulting from lack of confidence it will eclipse the actual value of money lost due to dodgy loans.

Thus, from a certain perspective there is some sense in 'the people' via their elected institutions throwing money at this problem, because even though we're not individually responsible for causing it, it's possible we may be able to buy our way out of it and come out ahead of where we'd be if we had to suffer the consequences of a banking collapse. The problem is - if it is inevitable, then we will have spent a whole lot of money for no good cause.

I can't help but think that monetarists have become too clever by half, and that it would be preferable if we were to all just resign ourselves to having ten year economic cycles. Things are much more highly geared now as a result of a prolonged period of good times and if it gets really nasty there will be a lasting effect in people's psyches that actually limits our ability to get out of it (much as there was in the depression where people saved money even when it was in their interest to participate in some consumption). But time will tell. :)

Should they need to? They should be free to scrape and represent, and ycom should be free to block them if they choose. When you pursue anti-rights relating to the ownership of information distribution you come to disgusting solutions like current copyright models.

It's always exciting to hear someone eager starting out. The only secret is to keep being interested and not give up on yourself. If you're looking for a fun problem to solve, try writing a brute-force sudoku solver. That could be fun in the context of a webapp. I'd also recommend getting a solid grounding in SQL and designing schemas. You can do a lot of this by brainstorming applications and then working out how you'd design the schema. You don't actually have to write it, and the process can be a good way to get a feel for whether an application will be simple or hard.

Looks cool but sample code doesn't work as marked on the page:

    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "c:/temp/chart.py", line 6, in <module>
        chart.download('hello.png')
    AttributeError: 'SimpleLineChart' object has no attribute 'download'

Try 'download_graph' instead.

Still doesn't work for me, but that might be because we have a web proxy in place. Any suggestions? When I paste link into the browser it seems to work.

I've written a long response, http://cowoh.org/~craig/perfect_project_management_app.txt.

> Women studies are not among the "real" humanities

It can be, it just depends whether you base conclusions on a respectable level of evidence or non-falsifiable mumbo-jumbo. There's lots of bad work done in more established humanities as well. I'm often entertained by suggestions of such things as "modern techniques in history".

I have a macbook. It's solid but I'd avoid it for linux (which I've decided I prefer to osx) - the single-button trackpad alone makes it a bad choice for linux. If I were getting a new laptop now I'd get a high-end thinkpad with lots of RAM so I could use vmware effectively. I have a friend who has just done this and raves about it - he runs Ubuntu.

Some people can get X11 configured to do wacky things with the keyboard so you can run linux. I figure - why bother?

I got x=25. I didn't draw any new lines.. I just worked out all the angles I could within the diagram, and then played x and y (other unknown angle within small triangle containing x) off against one another using dead-simple algebra.

Along the way I got:

y+x=130

x=y-80

Another hint - you know that point E has three angles - 30, x, (180-30-x). Similar logic works on the other side too.

> Never had ANY issues with it so far.

It requires far more HDD space than not using it because it doesn't seem to clean up after itself for a while. And if you get low on hard disk space your system grinds to a halt.

Is there some sort of free software filesystem where you basically automatically sync it with a silo somewhere remote? I've got a new clean hosted instance, and was thinking it would be neat to be able to use mercurial for source control on my laptop, and know that it was constantly duplicated on my leased hosting.

Any advice?

1. Get lots of users

2. ???

3. Profit!

I'm wondering how dangerous the police state aspects of it are. The fact that I've willingly told somebody "who all my friends are".

The Michelle Bach situation is interesting. Assuming the facts are true, she in fact arranged an interesting although slightly unreliable option for herself here. Had the price gone down, she could have tried to divest her holding to the customer and made them wear it.

Wohoo! Someone who gets the idea of a state machine framework. Check out my effort at building one of these - datamagi.org. This is quite interesting actually - if you look through the change history at the top of the page you can see I've been using one of Fowler's books as a reference. Previous to seeing this article I had not known of any prior work in this area.

My startup is focussed on this industry. I have a profit model, and the system is compatible with copyright law but does not leverage copyright. I've taken much longer to get it off the ground than it should have because I work far more effectively in a team and haven't located the right partner yet. If anyone wants to talk and has residency in London or Australia then get in touch.

Hey - if you are looking for FX trading API or STP people at any point, please get in touch :) (My contract is likely to be up at end of the year)

I'm working on an online music startup in my spare time, based in Islington.

I think the attractions of object databases are: - It's easier to restructure than a relational schema in isolation - ORMs can be painful if you want to work like that.

But I think they're inherently slower for things like reporting.

The first item can be overcome with effective scripting (rather than trying to avoid the change necessary to restructure apps and schemas using relational databases instead embrace it and make schema changes easy) environment. And there are some OOs around that do a pretty good job of the second item (cayenne but I'm looking for one . I have had great experiences with using business logic layers around cayenne and have been able to rapidly refactor to achieve major schema changes like this.

Having said that - the allegro graph stuff looks like it might be a good alternative.

I'm currently interested in the idea of using couchdb while getting an app set up and then switching to postgresql later. Can anyone see any benefits or problems with this approach?

Lions too.

> designing software and working for hedge funds

liquidity.

> So, if anyone here has any ideas to save lives > or make a massive improvement in the world, give > me a shout.

Find a way to destroy copyright and other attempts to allow people to own ideas. These laws are both bad for the economy and directly damage the ability of people in third world countries to get a leg up.

Allegro-cache looks interesting although I haven't tried it: http://franz.com/products/allegrocache/index.lhtml I like the idea of having a powerful datastore within the same process as the application because you don't have the IPC overhead. Although, if you're using prolog you're probably going to be less likely to want to do complex things in memory as you sometimes are with SQL.

Some considerations that come to mind: 1) Relational databases bring a form of 'automatic' documentation to a project in that somebody who hasn't touched it before can expect to make a reasonable start on understanding it by using known tools to look at the schema. 2) You get powerful hot-patching tools with a relational database (sqlplus, psql, or similar) that have the safety of things like foreign key constraints. 3) Major version upgrades. As you're developing you can track db changes by writing change scripts. Then when you do your upgrade you can 'pull the lever'. There's nothing stopping you from doing this with any other structure, it's just something to think about.