1 karma · joined February 6, 2024
In US and UK there are explicit regulations forbidding secretly building a stake in a company. This 'hack' is illegal here just like insider trading is.
Check http://www.redmine.org . It's the same as Trac, only with multiple projects and multiple teams/roles per project.
Unfortunately, even former World Bank economists could have dismal understanding of modern finance. But everybody nowadays likes to sing a populist tune.
A financial transaction is simply passing of legal title of a real asset from one person to another. Think of a pension fund who wants to makes sure it will be able to pay future pensions to the widows and orphans and buys a corporate bond portfolio.
Of course, a pension fund will not want to manage each corporation in its portfolio. So it will buy securities rather than do direct lending, sit on company boards etc. The fund will try to diversify its risk among many bonds. This is the first step of separation of 'real wealth' from 'financial assets'.
When you have many pension funds doing the same thing -- buying corporate bonds diversified enough and be representative of US economy -- they are likely to outsource this task to a specialist. An 'index fund' will be creating a 'collection of corporate bonds' with desired characteristics (credit quality, size etc.), and all other investors will buy a piece of this index fund as large as they want.
Now we have removed 'financial assets' two steps from the 'real business'. Buying a share in an index fund is obviously not the same as making a direct loan to the corporation and a having dinner with the CEO. It is much cheaper, so more money is left for widows and orphans.
Here comes the last step. When large players (pension funds) buy or sell these baskets of securities, they don't want their brokers (investment banks) to get rich from all those commission on trading individual securities in it. So they pass the ownership to each other through so called swaps. A swap between two funds would look like this: 'Fund A to Fund B (current owner of the portfolio): I will take the risk of owning these bonds for a year. If they drop in price comparing to today, I'll pay you the difference. If they rise - you'll pay me. It's as good as if I owned the thing for a year. But you'll remain the formal owner'.
And these two would record the transaction based on the total value of the bonds, even though they are only risking the price difference between two set dates. And then the swap buyer may change his mind in a week's time and enter in another swap with another fund. So value of the swaps outstanding will grow larger and larger until it looks really scary to journalists and other clueless people. There has been $596 trillion of derivatives outstanding (as of December 2007). So what? It's a backlog of the transactions, more or less. If you off-set them against each other, you'll arrive back to underlying securities' value, and eventually trace it all back to the balance sheet of individual companies.
So there is no such thing as 'financial assets'. Each title associated with a financial paper can be traced back to a 'real thing', a real asset somewhere.
One should not forget that derivatives (financial assets etc. whatever) have made capital transaction costs very low. Low costs have led to more efficient allocation of capital and to great benefits to the society.
That's why a backlash against financial innovation is dangerous. I don't think we'll be better off by destroying the financial markets and moving back to barter.
Finally, if you want to find a real Ponzi scheme mastermind, this is Mr Greenspan and the US government in general. They were trying to prevent a bit of an economic pain -- a post 2000 dot-com slowdown -- by artificially lowering interest rates which had led to unrealistic pricing of capital everywhere, not only in the US. Which has led to property bubble growing and bursting (soon to be followed by US government debt bubble) and now we all face much bigger pain. But this should not be blamed on derivatives and financial markets. The easier it is to pass an ownership title on a real asset to another person - the better.
Be careful of using emotionally-charged labels such as "denialists/deniers". You will be destroying your credibility regardless of your arguements.
Mimetex is a web-based program that generates LaTeX images (math) on the fly, if you use it like this: <img src="http://www.forkosh.dreamhost.com/mimetex.cgi?c=\sqrt{a^2+b^2... alt="" border=0 align=middle>.
To do a plugin that does [tex]\sqrt{a^2+b^2}[\tex] is simple (PHP).
$text = preg_replace('/\[tex\](.*?)\[\/tex\]/ie',
"'<img src=\"/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?'.rawurlencode('$1').'\"
align=\"middle\" />'", $text);
Mimetex is great beause A) you don't need to have a full TeX installation on your server, the program generates it internally B) you don't need to worry about scalability - mimetex can be compiled with caching enables, which makes it the same as static images
a) A directory tree b) a list of source files in the current directory c) a list of functions/classes/methods/… in the current file, (ECB uses the Semantic Bovinator, or Imenu, or etags, for getting this list so all languages supported by any of these tools are automatically supported by ECB too) d) a history of recently visited files, e) the Speedbar (directory hierarchy) and f) output from compilation (the “compilation” window) and other modes like help, grep etc. or whatever a user defines to be displayed in this window.
In the investment industry the most bullish articles on a sector/asset class appear exactly near the top of the market. Often these articles are pushed by fund managers who have taken positions earlier and now need enthusiastic public to 'buy them out'.
Do you think a word 'corrupt' could also be used?
You can create a blog with two commands in webby:
$ webby-gen blog "My Blog"
...
$ webby blog:post "Nice weather today"
[13:27:47] INFO: creating content/blog/2008/index.txt
[13:27:47] INFO: creating content/blog/2008/12/index.txt
[13:27:47] INFO: creating content/blog/2008/12/28/nice-weather-today.txt
My guess security of GitHub Pages is the reason for using Liquid in Jekyll. For generating static pages on your desktop before uploading Liquid is simply not needed.
I am a bit surprised jekyll is so heavily promoted as a static site tool(saw it twice on HN front page already) while an elegant and seemingly more powerful ruby application (webby) already exists for this purpose.
The article author should look at existing ruby/rake based static website generator http://webby.rubyforge.org. It offers a choice of templating languages (ERB, Textile, Markdown, HAML, SASS).
Another killer feature is webby's ability to process LaTeX snippets and generate formula images for the web page.
So more templating choices and webby-like custom text processing filters (LaTeX, graphviz, tidy, coderay etc) are my feature requests for Jekyll.
They have email gateway and a very flexible user rights management features. You could set up customers to email you issues which will automatically become tickets in your development project (which is accessible only for developers). You can also set up a wiki available only for customers.
Since you are (hopefully) already running issue tracker/version control environment for developers, you can thus avoid creating a redundant extra layer of 'support ticket' database and 'customer knowledge base' altogether.
Another meritless product wrapped in buzzwords competing for attention in the space that others have created.
He has acted as an entrepreneurial spammer.
The whole raison d'être of a large organizational pyramid is cost of processing and transmitting information and handling the associated noise. Middle layers of management filtering and processing information for the upper decision-makers. Keeping the noise down by designing company 'policies', 'strategies' and 'missions' that can be easily communicated to every employee.
A manager who designs the most efficient and scalable organization structure wins over the competition or conquers a new market.
Here comes the internet with zero cost of communication. Here come high level languages that make it cheap to describe the most efficient processes.
Any large organization can in principle be substituted by a code because the organization itself IS a code written in job description language.
That is exactly the case. America would not have succeeded economically without certain traits, relative immunity to corruption being one of them.
In game theory a player may have two strategies - to 'cooperate' or to 'defect' (law-abiding behaviour vs corruption). It has been demonstrated that in absence of punishment the defection (corruption) may be the best strategy for an individual, even though it may be harmful for the society as a whole.
Americans have developed a virtuous cycle where certainty of punishment (the society and the legal system there as a whole are relatively not corrupt) stimulates intolerance towards corruption among individuals. Remaining non-corrupt and rooting out corruption is profitable in the USA. But in an already corrupt society it may impossible for the individual to remain honest.
(from the article)
It features support for LaTex, markdown, textile filters, autobuild, publishing only changed pages etc. Very small and clean.
'gem install webby' is all needed to get you started.
For the founders and VCs that was excellent IPO timing. IPO investors may think otherwise.
However, I am puzzled what was problematic with that story apart from that it challenged certain consensus scientific views (which was the reason for submitting it on Hackers News).
The discussion was interesting thanks for your thoughts.
But I'm disgusted to take part in a forum where an editor can shut you up if you touch his religious beliefs. So much for hacker/scientist spirit. What a joke.
Why to kill a front page thread with a lively discussion?
should have been the title. Sorry, my fault.
should have been the title. Sorry, my fault.