bob000555

It is quite apparent that you either did not read the rest of the paragraph you quoted, completely ignored it or failed to understand it entirely. People on SFN have tendency to pick a few sentences out of a half page long post and to criticize and completely ignore the rest. Please read and try to understand this entire response before you reply. As I said before one of the uses of derivatives is hedging. Hedging is the process whereby firms offset exposure to risk by taking some opposite position, usually a derivative. A common example amongst private investors is longing a stock and buying a put to limit downside exposure. Institutional investors like Goldman Sachs do the same thing except on a far more complex and far more extensive scale, this is one of the reasons Goldman made a profit in the down market. Had companies had to disclose when they where buying protection it would be paramount to admitting that they held dangerous securities. If a firm admits this other firms would be far less likely to do business with them or give them loans. That last bit is the kiss of death on an industry that requires “over night loans” in order to cover fluctuations in capital. Wall Street firms are far more likely to simply not purchase the protection then to not purchase the risky securities that also involve huge upside potentials. Had firms not purchased at least the levels protection that they did before the mortgage crisis, the collapse would have been much worse and more tax payer money would have been necessary to prevent the total collapse of the financial market. You make the mistake of assuming that third parties would do any better in assessing and managing risk. Third parties are humans too and are just as likely to get caught up in the psychology of a bubble as investment bankers. We saw this in the previous bubble, for example I personally knew senior people at the Federal Housing Administration(which has the responsibility of regulating and stabilizing the mortgage market) who where convinced that the price of housing could never go down, and therefore the price of large mortgage backed securities could never go down. We also saw this in the form of Fanne and Freddie buying up mortgagees with government money. We also saw credit ratings agencies giving irrationally high ratings to derivatives and securities. I can absolutely assure you that in the next bubble, as in all bubbles, virtually everyone will be sucked into the irrational exuberance and this will include your trusted third party regulators. As for the government being better able to handle complex markets let me simply ask you this: who do you think is better suited to handle complexity, people with PhD’s from places like Harvard, Princeton and MIT or people with BA’s from state universities? Now consider that a firm like Goldman Sachs is able to offer compensation that makes a government salary look like a pittance. It becomes no surprise that Goldman’s strategy division is brimming over with brilliant mathematicians, economists and engineers while the government has to few spread to thinly to be able to regulate the market. Well, this one for example: This would entirely foreclose the possibility of hedging. Had this proposal been enacted before the mortgage crisis I can say, with out feeling at all as though I am engaging in hyperbole, that we would have seen the complete collapse of the global financial system when the crisis came. I believe it was a party line vote. I know that the chairwoman cast the tie breaking vote.

I say all the following with the caveat that I am a Goldman Sachs shareholder. Goldman was not charged with designing derivatives to fail nor with failing to disclose that they designed them to fail.( In fact there is evidence that firm money was riding on the deal, that is to say Goldman Sachs invested some of its own money in the instrument. It is unlikely that they would have done this if they suspected that the instrument would fail.) Rather Goldman has been charged with failing to disclose that John Paulson of Paulson and Company was involved in designing the derivative. Paulson and Company later made bets that the instrument would deprecate in value or fail. There is, as far as I am aware, no evidence that Goldman knew Paulson would later short the security and there is even disagreement in the legal community as to whether Goldman would have a duty to disclose even if they did know this. The fact that the commission’s vote to charge the firm was 3 to 2 is rather telling. Usually when the SEC has a slam dunk case the vote is unanimous. Goldman is perhaps the most hated firm on the face of the Earth and there are people trying to make a career of slaying Goliath. People hate Goldman because they are good at what they do; they made money when others were losing money. Making derivatives trades public could have disastrous consequences. One of the responsible uses of derivatives is to hedge risk. This is illustrated by credit default swaps. The purpose of a credit default swap is for a party to protect itself against the default of people and corporations who owe money. During the late 2000’s we saw firms like AIG failing because they were the counterparty in such derivatives but if these derivatives had not existed in the first place then community banks could have failed because they would not have the protection they purchased from AIG. If it became public knowledge when a company purchased protective derivatives there would be a significant incentive not to purchase protection even when it would be the responsible thing to do because it would be viewed as acknowledging that their portfolios consist of bad loans. Expecting firms to purchase protection on their portfolios in public would be akin to asking patients to accept treatments for STDs in front of all the eligible people of opposite sex. As for the dichotomy of Wall Street and Main Street that is fast becoming a cliché: if we learn one thing from the mortgagee debacle it should be that when bad things happen on Wall Street they quickly make it to Main Street. Recent proposals that are along the line of “let’s go burn Wall Street at the stake” seem to forget this premise.

While I despise torture and think torturing people is the most un-American and inhuman act possible, I always thought it was rather unlikely that lawyers would be prosecuted for their advice and if I’m not mistaken this was the virtual consensus of the legal community. So this is really a non-story. There is some possibility the officials who actually signed off on orders could be prosecuted but I would not put any money on anyone ever being held accountable for torture.

Your initial claim was the government produces no income and “proved” this by proving that there would be a problem if everyone worked for the government? You still have yet to provide any evidence for your initial claim and your attempt at support is ridiculous. The same criticism could be levied at almost any organization: if everyone worked for Goldman Sachs from whence would Goldman derive its income? This is flat out ridiculous. Innovations for which you can thank the United States Government include: space travel (NASA, the Apollo project. Operation Paperclip), the internet( DARPA), the sequencing of the human genome (National Institutes of Health), nuclear weapons and nuclear power( Manhattan Project), the particle accelerators and new elements discovered at Lawrence National lab funded by the Department of Energy and countless other innovations in which the government was less involved but would probably have never happened with out government funding. The proper response when you are losing an argument is not to become condescending and vague. Lets here your chain of events where the financial crisis was caused more by government interference then by deregulation. I love to hear alternate versions of history from conservatives. I would also appreciate it if you responded to my post in your thread about the “radio tax.”

One of the most important applications of game theory to politics is the median voter theorem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_voter_theorem Here is a great lecture from Yale on the subject:

Jackson: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+fiscal+conservative Fiscal conservative - one who favors a balanced budget, preferring spending cuts or tax increases to barrowing. Fiscal conservatives often consider deficit and national debt reduction as well as balancing the federal budget to be of paramount importance. Here is a chart of federal spending: And revenue: Raising taxes is going to have to be part of any realistic plan to balance the budget. Even if you cut the entire category marked “other discretionary spending” there would still be a deficit of almost a trillion dollars and that would mean cutting vital services down to nothing. Cutting defense spending significantly while managing healthcare costs to cut Medicare and Medicade would be a start but even then we would have to increase corporate tax rates and take significant steps towards enforcement to have any chance of keeping the budget balanced. When you look at the impending pile-up of entitlements and interest you see that balancing the budget by cutting discretionary spending is absolutely ridiculous. As you can see from this chart the problem is not merely demographic, cost is the problem. Incentives are out of line: those making the choices of what health care to get( retirees in this case) have every incentive to get the most expensive care and pass the bill on to Medicare or private insurance. The only solution is for the government to step in and curb the acceleration of health costs; any other policy WILL eventually lead to the bankruptcy of the Federal Government. As for you allusion to constitutional conservativism: this is one of the most bastardized terms in the American lexicon. It does not mean using a pedestrian knowledge of legal history to point out that at one time the government did not provide the services that it does today, nor does it mean reflexively calling every new piece of Federal spending a violation of the Tenth Amendment. It does not mean worshiping the Second Amendment while ignoring the First and advocating for stricter censorship. It does mean respecting all parts of the constitution, wheatear they are convenient to your narrative or not, including the elastic clause and the Sixteenth Amendment. If you feel some of the programs they justify are unjust that is a perfectly legitimate argument but simply saying that the fact that the program is, in your opinion, a waste of money does not make it a states’ rights issue. True constitutional scholarship involves carefully placing the program on the spectrum between authorized by the elastic clause and forbidden by the tenth amendment with out being biased towards one side by politics.

Heh…this is a common joke amongst computer nerds. Make sure one of your “friends” didn’t enable any macros.

What are you talking about, Jackson? Saying that the government produces no income and depends on the public for its income is rather foolish: taxes ARE INCOME derived from the social contract in exchange for services and protection. All man made institutions rely on people and other institutions for their income. As for your suggestion earlier in the thread that privatization would be the only good way to reduce entitlement spending I must say that is rather ridiculous. Allowing the Social Security Administration and Medicaid to negotiate prices with service and product suppliers in the same manner as the Veterans Administration and private insurers would cut costs significantly. Also because Medicare solvency is dependent on the ratio of working people paying in to the fund to retirees drawing from the fund being high it would make sense the expedite the naturalization of immigrants and perhaps offer amnesty so that immigrant workers can start paying into the trust fund. As long as the number of paying workers grows fast enough to maintain the all important ratio this would be a permanent solution and that ratio would be lowered by cost cutting in medicine. If we learned anything from this financial crisis it should be that privatization and deregulation are far from a panacea and that US public policy needs to evolve beyond the instinctive reaction to solve all problems with the free market. The free market is great at getting organizations to take actions to maximize personal profit but if the actions that maximize profit are not the same as those that maximize social utility then privatization is not a legitimate solution. If you can design an incentive structure wherein organizations would be incentivized to take actions in alignment with maximization of social utility then privatization becomes a legitimate solution but without that incentive structure there is no reason to believe the free market would do any better for the public then social security.

How conservatives like Jackson can get away with complaining about the budget not being balanced while at the same time rejecting every attempt to raise taxes to pay for programs THEY advocated or cut any significant spending is beyond me. They come up with ridiculous proposals like scraping the National Endowment for the Arts to save paltry 200 million dollars and call it fiscal conservatism while demonizing anyone who opposes a 727.3 billion dollar program like Medicare part D. They call democrats irresponsible for leaving tort reform that could save 1-3 billion but they have no problem with preventing Medicare part D from negotiating drug prices even though this could save hundreds of billions of dollars. They call it good fiscal policy to cut taxes in the middle of a war that costs almost three quarters of a billion dollars a day not to mention the war in Afghanistan. They protest cutting f-22 raptor when everyone from the Comptroller General to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says that it is a waste of money. They have perpetuated a myth that taxes in the United States are higher then the rest of the world, even going so far as to claim that we “Have the highest taxes in the world,” when the charts below clearly show that personal income taxes in the United States are on the low end for Western Democracies. They make ridiculous claims about capital gains taxes being oppressively high when they are some of the lowest in the developed world. In short the narrative of the overtaxed American is simply a lie. There are people in this country who want to take the easy way out: low taxes and high spending. They demonize those who want to take responsible actions of rising taxes to pay for programs and cutting defense spending. They know that they can placate the masses of voters who understand nothing but their own wallets, nothing but their own tax rate and nothing of long term disaster. They thing they can deceive the American public into thinking that things will all be ok if the rich don’t pay their part. They engage in Orwellian double speak, calling themselves fiscal conservatives while destroying surpluses with low taxes and high spending. In short, Jackson, you are an insult to true fiscal conservatism.

Aerv has decided to kick me every time I say anything, he has refused to give a reason and he has refused to even let me discuss why he is doing it. I realize that as a channel operator he has the right to do this but if SFN wants to be a place that promotes intellectual honesty and an open discussion I would suggest we move our official chat to a place that isn’t run by people who go off on pointless power binges of kicking and banning people they don’t like for no reason other then the fact that they don’t like them.

Well, since there are rarely actual filibusters anymore and instead the threat of filibustering blocks a bill the chance is rather low.

I’m not a big fan of the Laffer curve either but I have to say in the interests of intellectual honesty that your argument is less then perfect. Proponents of the Laffer curve don’t argue that the same tax rate leads to optimal revenues for all counties, they simply state that there is an optimal tax rate and that taxing more then or less then this rate yields diminishing returns. They argue that if all other variable were kept the same then decreasing tax rates could increase revenues. Pointing out that the Laffer curve doesn’t work when variables besides tax rate could be at play is a bit like “disproving” Boyle’s law by showing that volume and pressure are not inversely proportional but doing it by not keeping temperature constant.

Since the data is for a state and not individuals I rather doubt it has anything to do with individual problem solving ability. Not to mention states that have reputations for being less then genius level intelligence like West Virginia and Mississippi have low crime rates. If I had to guess I would say that because gainful employment is growing more and more dependent on education states with high numbers of uneducated people have droves of desperate people roaming around getting into trouble. It is possible you’re right though.

The Pearson Correlation Coefficient masseurs the strength of the linear relation between two variables. The higher the absolute value of the coefficient the stronger the correlation. A negative number indicates an inverse relation while a positive number indicates a positive relationship. Today I was home sick from school so I calculated a few correlations about crime: Correlation coefficient between high school gradation rates and violent crime rates: [math]-.337[/math] Correlation coefficient between population density and violent crime rates: [math].132[/math] Correlation coefficient between average income and violent crime rates: [math]-.046[/math] (this one surprised me) Correlation between (self reported) gun ownership and violent crime rates: [math]-.134[/math] Correlation between % below poverty line and violent crime rates: [math].107[/math] Graduation rates: http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_baeo.htm Violent crime rates: http://www.census.gov/statab/ranks/rank21.html Population density: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population_density Average income: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_of_the_United_States_of_America_by_income Gun ownership: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/health/interactives/guns/ownership.html Poverty Rate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_poverty_rate The strongest correlation was between high school graduation rates and crime rates. What if anything do you think this data says about US education and crime policy?

The series: [math] X_n = e^{iX_{n-1}}[/math] seems to converge to [math] .576412723 + .3746990207i [/math] no matter what [math] X_0[/math] is. Can anyone explain why this is?

Jackson: The sixth amendment to the Constitution of the United States clearly states There is no exception for when public opinion says they should be tried elsewhere, no exception for when the accused are “really really bad”, there isn’t even an exception if they are “non-state combatants” committing war crimes. The rule of law is the most important thing here, if we panic and let the terrorists change our society, rip apart our constitution, they have won. Btw did you ever admit how fantastically wrong you were in this thread: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=36760&page=2?

What happens when an atom in a molecule undergoes radioactive decay? Say for example you have trisodium-22 citrate, and the sodium decays to neon. What are you left with? Neon gas and a citrate radical? Something else?

What method works? Did you actually solve it?

Did you actually do that and find the solution? If you sit down and try it steps 2 and 3 are nearly imposable. I don't think the law of sines is the way to go. Mooey was trying to solve it with trig for the better part of an hour last night to no avail, and she is a physics major.

Two pieces of wood, both one meter long, are attached with a hinge; the angle formed by the two pieces of wood is termed theta. When theta is pi over two radians a string is stretched attached to the ends of both sticks such that its length is exactly square root of two. A block is used to hold the pieces of wood such that theta remains constant at ninety degrees then the apparatus is hung from the ceiling such that when the block is released the pieces of wood will close together and the string will fall in a perfect arc. The block is removed. As the pieces of wood fall together we imagine the line AB completes the triangle formed by the two sticks and the line CD extends perpendicularly from the midpoint of AB to the apex of the arc formed by the string. Find the equation of the derivative of the length of CD with respect to theta. I have no clue what to do. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedSo far I've done this, using the law of sines [math] \frac{\sin(\theta)}{f(CD)} = \frac{sin( \frac{2\pi-\theta}{2})}{1} [/math] Where [math]f(x)[/math] is a function that takes CD as an input and outputs AB. Does that sound at all right? If so does anyone know what [math] f(x) [/math] is?

In the interests of accountability and intellectual honesty…come on Jackson.

Ok now get the derivative at x = 2 and x = 0 then find the value of the function at x = 2 and x =0 then find b such that y = mx + b remembering that the derivative gives the slope, M the original function gives Y and you already found X. There will be two sepret tangent lines and two seperate b's

Use the quotient rule. Set the derivative equal to -1 to get the x value where the tanget is negative one. Then use y = mx+b to get the tangent line.

Senator Franken is doing a very good job of shutting up people who thought his congressional career would be a joke. Y6kiZIlMFto

At 5:30 in the morning a few days ago a woman and her seven year old son where walking through another person’s yard. While walking through the yard they spotted the naked owner of the property they where trespassing on naked in his own house, making his morning coffee. At this point they did the perfectly logical thing and decided to call the police and report the man for indecent exposure. The Springfield Police department proceeded to come and arrest the man for being naked in his own home claiming that he “wanted to be seen naked.” Does this seem reasonable to anyone? http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/news/local/101909_man_caught_making_coffee_naked_faces_charges Imagine the roles where reversed; if a man was walked through a woman’s yard and spotted her naked in the window you can bet money she wouldn’t be arrested for indecent exposure but he would be arrested for voyeurism. Can he press charges on the women and her kid for trespassing? UPDATE: In a completely logical move the police have decided to put taxpayers’ money to good use by scouring the neighborhood for any person who may have violated by looking into the man’s house while he was naked in the past. http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/news/local/102109_naked_man_arrested_after_making_coffee_update What the hell is going on?