andrew j

The Problem with Smart Bankers

wow, this is great! it's all the smart peoples fault! Those darn brainiacs! If they hadn't been smarter than their managers, none of this would have happened!


c'mon, really? This is anti-intellectualism with a really thin veneer. Bosses rarely understand the actual nuts & bolts and yet it's still their responsibility when the machine breaks. Yes, there are some incredibly arrogant people (who were also a little clever) who get put in charge sometimes (ex. LTCM) -- but how "smart" could they be if they blew up the system? i.e., they had nice math but that's only half of "smart."

it's the managers JOB to be smart about what their employees do. It's called management. The idea that the manager should be "the dumbest guy in the room" is one of the most damaging bullshitisms i've ever heard. if you're a manager you need to know and understand how your business works, bottom to top. not "kind of", not "i know we do stuff with math to make it so it has these effects" -- you need to know the details.

The Risks of Consolidation

a maximum size of $300 billion what?

Taxing the $5 Million-a-Year Brigade

Felix,

Have you considered the historical context for your arguments? Over at five-thirty-eight.com there are some interesting graphs of the top marginal tax rate and the top marginal tax threshold going back to 1913

www.fivethirtyeight.co...

Notice that the top marginal rate used to be as high as 80% for a 5M salary in the 1940s-50s, and that not only was this quite accepted, but many of these captains-of-industry felt downright patriotic about paying it. Can't rightly say that the economic growth was anything like depressed, given that the 40s and 50s were some of the most productive times in the states.

Once upon a time, the idea was that if you so much money that it "starts to lose all meaning," then you wouldn't really mind giving a fair chunk of that back to your country, by god. It was patriotic & culturally accepted as part of a man's duty to society.

Now the "normal" idea is that these individuals owe nothing to the country that sheltered them or made their opportunities possible, and they deserve to keep every cent they earned, as if it were earned in some nationless bubble. See fireballs comment.

A little historical context puts some of these "oh god the Galts will all move!" hysterics in the proper perspective.

(And incidentally, its really a very substantial portion of the gov't income tax revenues come from the highest tax brackets -- changes there can *really* affect the gov't top line.)

Why Do People Make Market Forecasts?

Great, games aren't work, and they don't produce wealth. Thanks -- now we can stop paying millions for people to push paper around in this happy little "game", and we can dispense with the pretense that these people are valuable to society. I'm glad we've cleared that up.

I suppose it's a nice game to play -- if you have enough money to be wrong. tell the people whose retirements are bankrupted that its a game, and that their losses were outweighed by the enjoyment they should've been having in it. The people who try to sell the market as a vehicle to save for retirement should take it as seriously as that is.

Like they say, it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Wow! i sound just like my mom, etc. etc., what a jerk am i! Total killjoy -- that's me! But your flip attitude suggests you probably don't have a parent or grandparent who's flipping burgers now.

As for why we make forecasts, well, i'm with Salmon that its the process, the attempt at understanding, that makes the (usually useless) result worth it.

Fixing CNBC

<i>Oh boy. Neither CNBC nor Jim Cramer are responsible for the credit crisis. If you think they are, then you don’t understand the crisis.</i>

You've got a nice little self-righteousness thing going here, and i hate to spoil it. But i don't see anywhere on the site or in your quote them saying that CNBC or Cramer were responsible -- complicit, maybe, but hardly responsible.

More to the point, you're missing the forest for the trees here. The objections stewart et al have with CNBC is the blending of financial advice with entertainment and shock news, in addition to having some clear conflicts of interests that they rarely disclose.

I'm with Nick Gogerty, but i don't think they'll die -- they already have too many big-pocketed institutions happy with the low cost PR & free softball interviews they already provide. Whether anyone watches or not, well, that's a different question.

WaMu Buyout: JPM's Analysis Helps Treasury Projections

for a souvenir. That's all they'd be good for...

On Being Rich

Thank you, Mr. Salmon. Sometimes people need to be beat upside the head with perspective, and i hope this does it.

OracleofOmaha, i have no sympathy for you. You have money -- plenty of it -- you're just spending it wrong. "extremely high housing costs" -- maybe you should ask yourself what is necessary, not what is frivolous. Your "few, if any, tangible economic benefits from the federal government" are probably discounting the single largest benefit you got: The good fortune of being born in the U.S.A. Your "tangible economic benefits" are so invisible you can't see them -- kind of like a fish not knowing what "water" is. I assure you, a child born in any nation in Africa would be happy to pay your taxes for a similar shot. Suck it up.

"The essence of civilization consists not of the multiplication of wants, but in their deliberate and voluntary renunciation." -- Gandhi.

Get civilized!

What Election 2008 Will Do For Our Economy, and Your Tax Bill

"But the money to pay for Obama’s ambitious agenda has to come from somewhere - $75 million in tax cuts"

Hey dude, i don't know if you noticed this, but McCain's plan is for a decrease in payments from EVERY SINGLE income bracket. That's the money that's gotta come from "somewhere." I also notice you don't include the total cost of McCain's tax cuts. Hmm.

That "status quo" approach to governance you mention -- is that the status quo of George W. Bush, the one that has ballooned government spending to the largest size EVER, and the federal deficit to $800Bn? Just curious. Republicans are NOT fiscally responsible, and haven't been in years.

Might want to take those blinders off.

The End Run Around the Operating System Is Under Way

"i don't think that means what you think it means."

If by "operating system," you mean Linux, Windows, or whatever you're calling the Mac OS built on Unix, then great. But if you actually mean is "the huge suite of usability tools and applications that get packaged with an OS.", then say that, instead.

Let's check wikipedia: "An operating system ... is the software component of a computer system that is responsible for the management and coordination of activities and the sharing of the resources of the computer." The nice diagram showing an interaction chain goes from User <=> Application <=> OS <=> Hardware. As long as your applications need to use hardware, there will be OS's. Whether or not it will need to come with a media player, a movie maker, or even a solitaire program, is a different question entirely.

Also, even if users get rid of their client side apps and move to server side things like GMail -- well, what the hell is going to manage the resources on the servers?

But as long as there are resources to manage, there is an OS layer.
Dell's laptop that lets you check your e-mail, calendar, etc, "without booting the OS!" actually means it is booting a very thin, but equally important operating system on top, one that probably sets up and manages a network connection, graphics resources, etc. (in fact, it's a very thin, embedded flavor of linux: blog.internetnews.com/... )

"toss in virtualization" -- what is the virtualization running on top of, i'd like to know? pixie dust?

So when you talk about the "future of the OS" -- you actually mean the future of the big, bundled bloatware that comes with them, right? Cuz that's a pretty different question.

Is Amazon’s Kindle Success Sustainable?

as a Kindle owner, naturally i'm biased, but let me share some impressions:

1) most people who ask me about it already know what it is, "is that a kindle?" So device recognition is fairly good.

2) this is usually followed by some variant of "i need to see it in person before i'll know." This is due to a general lack of understanding of the display technology. When they realize its paper, not a screen, they invariably make up their mind -- this is doubled when people accost me outside and see it in the sunlight. While people could implicitly trust the iPod to make faithful reproductions of sound, people are (rightly) skeptical of the ability to reproduce text on paper -- which is the whole of the Kindle's sensory experience.

Your two 'stumbling blocks' -- visibility and mobility -- don't really exist. Just because "you've never seen one" doesn't actually mean they aren't there. White earbuds (a stroke of genius, btw) were easy to spot. A kindle in its case is not.

Likewise, my Kindle does fit in larger pockets without much difficulty, but mobility or not, it has quickly become such an indispensable item that it is always with me. Also, the leaked reports of the second generation Kindles suggest a slightly smaller version and a larger version are both in the works.

Reports of people not reading anymore are greatly exaggerated.

Could Google Buy The New York Times?

Wow, i love the assumption that the NYT is liberal, and the ensuing dripping contempt. Damn, got some on my shoe...

The only thing more intellectually bankrupt would be the idea that it is somehow offset by Fox news, that two prejudiced news sources somehow balance each other and provide Truth.

Amazon: New Kindle To Tap $5.5 Billion Textbook Market?

Wow, "the only reason to publish a large-screen version" ?

PDF's are a fixed-layout format: the content is not easily separated from the presentation, (as opposed to html, for example). Having an 8.5"x11" version lets them support PDF's with much more fidelity. That's the big win. Electronic textbooks, probably distributed in PDFs, are definitely more possible, but bottom line is that this would make the device practically orders of magnitude more useful than it is.

(and i'm a very happy kindle owner already! :)

What We Can Do To Reverse the Oil Crisis

It's amazing how much criticism he's getting for conclusions that are basically based on the numbers. I haven't heard one trash-talker actually refute any of his points -- the additional cost of oil IS diverting an incredible amount of american wealth to smoke. the nymex forward contracts ARE a giant joke.

i've been reading phil for almost two years now: he hasn't gotten political except recently, when people have been losing their frickin minds.

there may be more vituperative, pissant commenters here on SA than on the political blogs i read. I bet they all just lost money...