Tarun

Cheap Chindian Cars and High Priced Oil Don't Mix

"@jduke
Doesn't matter if it's 2000 or 20000 miles no reasonable person can believe that fuel consumption will continue to rise in Chindia at over $4 a gallon when salaries are so low.
I visited Mumbai back when it was still Bombay."

The switch occured in 1995 (CIA Factbook, Wikipedia), before the major companies began offshoring (go look at ISP pervasiveness figures). I've gone to India once a year, every year in my life and like d_sat said, India's Middle Class (which is defined by various metrics depending on who you talk too) is very widespread. The Americanized view of the world believes that a middle class must exist under the exact same conditions that are found in America; however, in India, you can find an auto driver, a store clerk and a store owner who all will tell you they are in the middle class - yet the Auto Driver makes $2,000, the Clerk makes $10,000 and the Store Owner makes $50,000. The reason for this (I suspect) is the rather large aristocracy that India has; similar to Russia (and of late, China), India has an enormous amount of wealth poured into it's (relatively) large upper class...so much so that it severely (in an uneasily correlative way) skews any simple metrics on a continuous real probability space (i.e. the statistics you are using). You'd need some better weighted figures to account for this huge discrepancy; think of it as using modern American class standards on pre-WWI Europe...it just wouldn't work because of the cultural/class differences. Unlike America, where we have a rather uniform (and normal) distribution of income, India has a very uninterpretable income distribution due to society and cultural differences. Your analysis was a good try (I'm sure many other culturally-unaware people would easily agree with your analysis), but it disregards some of the cultural aspects of India that really make it a different economy than America.

Houston to Obama: Smell the Oil

There's no competition in the drilling space? Are you retarded? Let's list a few drillers and their market caps, shall we?
- Transocean (RIG): 42.77B
- Diamond Offshore Drilling (DO): 16.64B
- Noble (NE): 13.53B
- Nabors (NBR): 9.64B
- Pride International (PDE): 6.64B
- Helmerich Payne (HP): 5.96B
- Patterson-UTI Energy: 4.15B
- Atwater Oceanics (ATW): 2.84B
- Hercules Offshore (HERO): 2.02B
- Grey Wolf (GW): 1.52B
Source: Yahoo! Finance

Yes, RIG might be the largest of the offshore drillers, but saying that they have no competition is downright idiotic. Your argument is almost equivalent to the argument that Exxon has no competition, because it is the largest integrated oil company in the space. You need to be defenestrated from Seeking Alpha for such moronic comments.

Satellite Radio: Wall Street Isn't Seeing the Full Picture

SIRI now needs to make a Cell Phone Client (i.e. for iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia N-series; 3G can easily support audio streams up to 128kbit)...they might lose out on some device sales, but the increase in customers will far out weigh any marginal decline in co-branded products

Let's Get Greedy with Mechel Steel

Very nice summary article for those who have little exposure to the Russian markets (I got into MTL at $17.40)

I do have some good news though:
"Medvedev Tells Authorities to Stop Scaring Business" - Bloomberg
www.bloomberg.com/apps...

"Medvedev Adviser Criticizes Putin Over Russia Stock Market Rout "
www.bloomberg.com/apps...

Amazon Outsources Its Checkout Cart

I wonder what this will do for the Amazon Prime model? The subscription-based Prime may have some problems coexisting with this service as buyers will be weary of paying two fees (one for the monthly Amazon Prime service and another to the financing service). Perhaps we'll start seeing discounting that is similar to PayPal's $20 off if you use PayPal for selected purchases. Now this may be successful, because Amazon's resellers (sites like 6ave.com, Toys R Us and Borders that sell through Amazon on Amazon.com) are considered to be more reliable and at times cheaper than sellers on eBay. Granted, like the poster above said, the lack of fraud protection might be a problem in enticing sellers to move to Amazon or use this service.

Although I do think that we can look at this "outsourcing" as an internal operation, since they are simply providing end-user (buyers and sellers) services, as opposed to creating an extensible API for software developers. Perhaps this has the appeal of the African Mobile Money service (Sorry, I forget the name)?

Another American Money Pit: Infrastructure

You must also take into consideration average family size when comparing broadband numbers. Europeans tend to have smaller families than Americans

Mechel Should Bounce on Russian Deputy P.M.'s Comments

Nah, not today. Mechel had a mining accident today.

Mechel Drops 20% on Putin's Comments

Damn good call on Mechel, Mark

Apple Releases 3G iPhone Friday: This One Has Greater Mass Appeal

Jailbroken doesn't mean unlocked. Jailbroken simply implies that you have gotten root and/or (at a bare minimum) write access to various parts of the MBR and the hard drive that were previously restricted. Unlocking refers to manipulating the software that controls the SIM (System Information Module; found on all GSM phones) so that the SIM reader will accept and read any SIM (i.e. from another network) that the user puts in the phone.

There's a huge difference as the unlocking community is for-profit and the jailbreaking community is a non-profit, open source group.

More on Technical Analysis

Would you count Black-Scholes as technical analysis? Some might and they would most likely dispute your last point ("Meanwhile, the technical-analysis crew seems to think that they're dealing with immutable, permanent, semi-scientific probabilistic laws. In the markets, there's no such thing."). That's not completely true; we know for sure (i.e. via mathematical proof) that implied volatility is dependent on various characteristics of options trading (assuming the existence of: 1. the ability to short sell 2. no better arbitrage opportunities 3. Continuous trading, which in and of itself is a very unrealistic idea, since there must be some discrete time in which a trade is made and has an effect on option chain pricing 4. No taxes 5. 0% Interest Rate 6. No Dividend 7. Fractional Shares). Surely, Brownian motion (found within most Stochastic models) can be disproved as an always valid methodology (a Universal-Existential proof); however we do know that Ito calculus holds and that there are set scientific rules for technical (option) analysis. Therefore, you may want to be a little more specific in your definition of technical analysis and it's "voodoo" like qualities...because there is some serious mathematical philosophy (this is not experimental proof...this is logical proof which always must hold using the basic axioms of various forms of logic) behind options modelling.

More on Technical Analysis

What about Black-Scholes? Many an options trader would die without Black-Scholes (even though most of them are too full of themselves to bother understanding the math behind it). Technical Analysis may encompass options trading as well (I am referring to stock options), depending on your definition. Thus, your last sentence ("Meanwhile, the technical-analysis crew seems to think that they're dealing with immutable, permanent, semi-scientific probabilistic laws. In the markets, there's no such thing") is unfounded. The Black-Scholes standard option pricing model mathematically proves the existence of volatility (defined in terms of Ito Calculus as sigma; related to the rate of change of the value of a stock in terms of the Wiener process) and is a quantitative, technical probabilistic law that is mathematically proven (thus it has full logical proofs written that are existential-universal and relies on NO empirical evidence). Granted, Black-Scholes in the real world is often misused because traders simply don't understand the limitations of the model (the 7 assumptions: 1. Either no dividend or continuous dividends 2. Continuous trade of the underlying security 3. no taxes/costs for transactions 4. No Arbitrage 5. Short Selling is possible 6. Fractional securities 7. Risk-Free/0% Interest). However, that doesn't mean that ALL technical analysis doesn't have a solid logical foundation.