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  1. #441
    What's the purpose of SEI? Tallmo's Avatar
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    The historical Jesus is pretty uninteresting. There has always been prophets and holy men. Some stories have then become mythologized. But after that the original person or his possible existence is irrelevant.
    The decisive thing is not the reality of the object, but the reality of the subjective factor, i.e. the primordial images, which in their totality represent a psychic mirror-world. It is a mirror, however, with the peculiar capacity of representing the present contents of consciousness not in their known and customary form but in a certain sense sub specie aeternitatis, somewhat as a million-year old consciousness might see them.

    (Jung on Si)

  2. #442
    Adam Strange's Avatar
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    snow n... 2.a. Anything resembling snow. b. The white specks on a television screen resulting from weak reception.

    crash v... -infr.. . . 5, To fail suddenly, as a business or an economy. -
    The American Heritage Dictionary

    virus.. . . [L. virus slimy liquid, poison, offensive odour or taste.] 1.
    Venom, such as is emitted by a poisonous animal. 2. Path. a. A morbid
    principle or poisonous substance produced in the body as the result of some
    disease, esp. one capable of being introduced into other persons or animals by
    inoculations or otherwise and of developing the same disease in them.. . . 3.
    fig. A moral or intellectual poison, or poisonous influence. -The Oxford
    English Dictionary

    The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He's got
    esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of
    the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light
    out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren
    hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze
    through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit
    has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of
    telephone books.
    When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in
    cash, but someone might come after him anyway -- might want his car, or his
    cargo. The gun is tiny, acm-styled, lightweight, the kind of gun a fashion
    designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity
    of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it into
    the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity.
    The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once
    in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted
    themselves a delivery, and they didn't want to pay for it. Thought they would
    impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun,
    centered its laser doohickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The
    recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle
    third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating
    in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle
    with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn't get
    nothing but trouble from the Deliverator.
    Since then the Deliverator has kept the gun in the glove compartment and relied,
    instead, on a matched set of samurai swords, which have always been his weapon
    of choice anyhow. The punks in Gila Highlands weren't afraid of the gun, so the
    Deliverator was forced to use it. But swords need no demonstrations.
    The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to
    fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb
    beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming,
    polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.
    You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches,
    talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's
    car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs.
    The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a
    peseta.
    Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role
    model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you
    got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have
    guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the
    worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances
    here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once
    things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in
    Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has
    been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North
    Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has
    taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global
    layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know
    what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else
    music
    movies
    microcode (software)
    high-speed pizza delivery
    The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were
    a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the
    Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs
    to work harder on his cooperation skills."
    So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved -- but no
    cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your
    pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car,
    file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six
    months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a
    pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.

    -Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

  3. #443
    Landlord of the Dog and Duck Subteigh's Avatar
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    AMERICAN STOCKS HAVE PERFORMED WELL, ENRICHING AMERICANS
    One way of boosting returns is to distribute the benefits of equity to a greater and more diverse set of individuals. Since the mid- to late nineteenth century, American stocks have delivered some pretty astonishing returns. It depends on the exact time period under consideration, but by many common measures American equity returns have averaged about 7 percent a year, and that is after adjusting for inflation. To put that in context, a 7 percent annual return means that the value of a portfolio doubles about every ten years. Those same returns may or may not hold over the future, but for the purposes of this discussion let’s focus on what we know, and that is the returns from equity holdings from the historical past.9

    Of course, the 7 percent figure is only an average—most years, stocks bring either more or less than 7 percent. Furthermore, not every American holds a diversified bundle of stocks, and many investors squander some of their gains through excess trading and incurring the associated trading costs. Advisor fraud is a problem too. According to one recent study, 7 percent of active financial advisors have a misconduct conviction or settlement on their record. The median settlement in such misconduct cases is $40,000, only half of advisors involved in such cases are fired, and of those fired, about half find a new job in the financial services sector.10

    Still, over any thirty-year period in American history, the return on stocks is remarkably high, especially compared with the return on bonds. To make that concrete, if you had bought a representative bundle of stocks right before the crash of 1929, thirty years later, relative to what would have been available on Treasury bills, you would have earned over 6 percent a year on your money.11 For a comparable thirty-year period, safe government securities tended to yield only about 1 percent a year, which is much less than one could earn in the stock market. With returns of 1 percent, it takes about seventy years for an investor to double his or her money.

    The United States is, quite simply, one of the countries that encourages its citizens to invest the most in equities. As of 2015, 55 percent of Americans had money invested in stocks. That is a major benefit from the American financial system, and for ordinary American citizens it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Even if you do not personally own many or any equities, there is a good chance your retirement fund or pension fund does. While much of the world has been catching up with the American system in this regard, that global spread of equity ownership is yet another benefit of America’s pioneering efforts.12

    It’s not that all Americans have used these returns to squirrel away wealth. In fact, the United States is known for its consistently low rate of household savings, typically running under 5 percent and sometimes under 4 percent. That is a major problem for the United States, but in fact it reflects too little engagement with financial intermediaries, not too much. In any case, high equity returns allow Americans to engage in more consumption.

    One reason Americans buy so much equity is that U.S. financial markets have made so many financial assets fairly liquid. American equity markets are considered relatively fair and supportive of liquid trading, more or less on demand, with accurate record keeping. That means an investor can opt for higher-yielding assets without sacrificing much in the way of liquidity, and indeed, helping individuals liquefy their wealth is one of the main functions a financial sector should serve. For instance, cash management accounts and money market funds are easy to obtain and charge relatively low fees. It is also possible to hold stocks and have ready access to those funds. The American system performs well in this regard, as there is a dazzling array of investment products at virtually all levels of risk. Furthermore, Americans can borrow against relatively illiquid forms of wealth, such as homes, cars, and other possessions, with relative ease through a variety of competitive lenders. Banks, investment banks, portfolio managers, and other institutions all have helped make equity investing a legitimate strategy, thereby mobilizing funds in that direction.

    When it comes to consumption, arguably the American financial system has succeeded all too well in liquefying wealth. As just mentioned, the American household savings rate is relatively low, compared either with other wealthy countries or America’s historical average, and there is a disturbing new trend of individuals borrowing against their retirement savings. If anything, American finance is too responsive to what people want, in this case a lot of new debt. That criticism may be a case of “blaming the waiter for obesity,” but it remains one of the most significant and mostly correct charges that can be leveled against American business. American business as a whole is better at talking people into spending money than helping them save money.

    Marketers have had a strong influence on American financial markets, mostly for the better. For instance, consider the mutual fund. Its exact history is debated, with examples running back to the seventeenth century or possibly earlier, but it is the American economy that realized the idea on a very broad scale in the 1980s, allowing ordinary investors to invest in diversified stock portfolios at relatively low cost. American financial marketers promoted mutual funds with savvy over the following decades, thereby making Americans feel more comfortable about these largely profitable investments. You could say that Madison Avenue helped Americans boost their wealth. It also seems that the much-maligned marketing activities of professional asset managers increased household participation in equity markets. During the period 1980–2007, the share of household assets in either mutual funds or other marketable securities rose from 45 percent to 66 percent. The percentage of households owning stock rose from 32 percent in 1989 to 51 percent in 2007 and 55 percent in 2015, again with nudging from financial intermediaries along the way.13

    Note also that the costs of equity investing are coming down over time. For instance, from 1980 to 2007, the average fee on equity mutual funds dropped from about 2 percent to about 1 percent. That was driven largely by the greater use of no-load funds, as investors learned—albeit slowly—that higher-load funds do not offer superior performance overall. I expect this learning process to continue and for fees to fall further, due to competition and the general spread of information.14

    If you look at the major criticisms of the American financial system, they are intertwined with some more general features of the American culture, such as a willingness to take risks and an openness to new products and ideas. For instance, the subprime crisis wasn’t just caused by the banks; rather, it stemmed from a more general American culture of the intense marketing of get-rich-quick schemes, going well beyond banking and real estate. That said, these rather open and optimistic cultural tendencies create a corresponding upside, as reflected in the high returns American citizens have received through equity.

    You might think these high equity returns in the United States stem from the performance of American companies and not from American capital markets, but actually it’s both. American equity values have been (generally, not each and every year) high and rising because companies have had relatively high earnings. Still, funds must be mobilized and brought into loan and equity markets and into other channels of funding, such as venture capital. Mutual funds and hedge funds must be willing to take chances, and they need the opportunity to funnel savings into equities and also into relatively new ventures. Pension investors must consider American capital markets to be sufficiently fair and transparent that they are willing to funnel their trillions into American equities.

    One issue is whether those high equity returns for American citizens represent net gains or just a reshuffling within the American economy. It could be, for instance, that American citizens are earning 7 percent on some investments, but this cuts into returns that otherwise would accrue to shareholders inside the businesses themselves. Still, if the American financial system redistributes high equity returns away from insiders and to a broader group of citizens, most of us regard that as good.

    Furthermore, Americans hold a lot of their equity in foreign concerns. Foreign equities were only 2 percent of the portfolios of U.S. residents in 1980, but by 2007 this had risen to 27.2 percent. Part of that change stems from the aggressive marketing of overseas equities by American brokers and fund managers, as well as the more general growth of foreign and emerging markets. This American overseas investment probably represents a significant net gain to the citizens of the United States.15

    One way of thinking about this net gain is to consider that domestic U.S. firms invest a good deal overseas, and at fairly high rates of return. The gains from these investments are sometimes called “dark matter,” because the gains cannot be observed easily and thus their size is the subject of debate. In economics, the “dark matter hypothesis” first became popular in 2005–2006, when the U.S. trade deficit was unusually large but, contrary to many predictions, the dollar showed no signs of collapsing and most of the time was not even falling. How could this be? Some economists, most notably Ricardo Hausmann and Federico Sturzenegger, suggested a new hypothesis: that America’s actual trade deficit might be much lower than measured if we took into account intangible American exports overseas, typically bundled with American investment abroad. To make that more concrete, if there is a McDonald’s franchise in Europe, America is also exporting some brand-name capital, some organizational know-how, and some managerial expertise, but these will bring future rather than current returns, unlike exports narrowly measured. The upshot is that America’s net foreign position is much better than it looks on paper. And that is why the phrase “dark matter” is used, as a hat tip to a hypothesis in physics that says most of the matter in the universe is essentially invisible to our measuring instruments. Of course, this point about economic dark matter is a restatement of the earlier observation that American capital markets help bring higher rates of return to this country.

    I once had a chat with a leading Korean economist, who lamented to me: “We work so much harder than you do to export! But we give it all back by just investing in your T-bills. You Americans earn more by investing in businesses overseas.” That is another way of putting the “dark matter” point, and again it reflects the American willingness, and indeed eagerness, to seek out higher-yielding (and riskier) equity-based investments.

    There is no general agreement on how large this “dark matter” phenomenon might be. Hausmann and Sturzenegger in their original work suggested a figure as high as 5.6 percent of GDP per year, with an accumulated stock of dark matter as high as 40 percent of GDP (a 2006 estimate). If that is true, rather than foreigners having a net claim of $2.5 trillion on the United States in the form of capital assets (a 2005 estimate), the United States has a net claim of $724 billion on foreigners—a big difference in value.16

    A lot of subsequent writers have expressed skepticism that dark matter gains could be so high, and the dark matter hypothesis fell out of favor during the financial crisis, when American investments overseas lost a lot of their value and the chaos made a lot of these values yet harder to measure. Now, though, that value has mostly come back, and even the skeptics admit that American investments earn higher rates of return abroad than do foreign investments in the United States. There is also plenty of independent evidence that American corporations are especially well managed, as I discussed in chapter 3.17

    So how large is the return to the American strategy? One economist, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, estimates that since 1973 the overseas assets chosen by Americans have yielded between 2.0 and 3.8 percent more than what foreigners are holding in the United States. These higher returns, in his view, allow America to run a trade deficit of about 2 percent of GDP a year without losing ground in terms of the country’s net asset position. In other words, that is about 2 percent of GDP each year as a kind of international free lunch—in absolute terms, about $334 billion a year. That is a pretty big gain to reap from the U.S. financial sector.

    In essence, you can think of America as the world’s largest and most successful hedge fund. That involves some risks, but it has made us a much wealthier nation.
    Big Business by Tyler Cowen

  4. #444
    Landlord of the Dog and Duck Subteigh's Avatar
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    But if animal suffering matters, even a fairly small amount, then suddenly, eating chicken is an absolute moral catastrophe. Around 50 billion chickens are raised each year worldwide, the large majority of them for meat. They live on average for seven weeks each, so that’s about 6 billion chicken-years of life a year. Even if you only care about chickens’ suffering-per-hour 1 per cent as much as you care about that of humans (a very conservative figure: Buck Shlegeris, the young Effective Altruist and Rationalist we met earlier, told me he rated it about a quarter, and Peter Singer told me that wasn’t ridiculous), you should care as much about the world’s chickens as you do about the entire population of the United Kingdom. And that’s before you get to the point that chickens very probably have worse lives than the average Briton.
    The AI Does Not Hate You by Tom Chivers

  5. #445
    Adam Strange's Avatar
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    "How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.
    "Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."


    The Sun Also Rises
    -Ernest Hemingway

  6. #446
    FreelancePoliceman's Avatar
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    An ILI's description, and criticism, of an ILE:

    Luckily for Franz, his observant uncle's interest in any object, animated or not, whose distinctive features he had immediately grasped, or thought he had grasped, gloated over and filed away, would wane with its every subsequent reappearance. The bright perception became the habitual abstraction. Natures like his spend enough energy in tackling with all the weapons and vessels of the mind the enforced impressions of existence to be grateful for the neutral film of familiarity that soon forms between the newness and its consumer. It was too boring to think that the object might change of its own accord and assume unforseen characteristics. That would mean having to enjoy it again, and he was no longer young. He had appreciated the poor bloke’s simplicity and vulgarity almost at their first anonymous rendezvous in the train. Thenceforth, from the first moment of actual acquaintance, he had thought of Franz as of an amusing coincidence in human form: the form was that of a timid provincial nephew with a banal mind and limited ambitions. Similarly Martha, for more than seven years now, had remained the same distant, thrifty, frigid wife whose beauty would occasionally come alive and welcome him with the paradisal smile he had first fallen in love with. Neither of these images changed basically; they simply became more compactly filled up with fitting characteristics. Thus an experienced artist sees only that which is in keeping with his initial concept.

    On the other hand, Dreyer would feel a kind of humiliating itching when an object did not immediately yield to his voracious eye, did not assume obediently such a posture as to give him a chance to wrestle with it.
    Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave.

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