81–90 of 93 posts
>Cut to 2008, when Goldman made money off the economic collapse by shorting the housing market. The firm was charged with fraud in 2010. First of all, that's non-sequitur. Second, why is it evil to short the housing market? Washington Post really knows how to cater to its readership...
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Why do people always say this? It's such an thoughtless thing to say. You know what's a real waste of brainpower? 3.5 million truck drivers. People driving cabs. Fast food workers. We can, and should, train more software developers. It's the one job that might be useful in 30 years. At the very least, people will hopefully have enough education to move to another field.
Based on my experiences over the past year, the real shortage seems to be in competent contractors, plumbers, and electricians--at least in areas with growth.
Would you seriously say that our modern electronic indoor water closets - with automatic, tempered, toilet seat, cleaning, back-washing and drying while playing music - have to be repaired by a human ? Not seriously, or ? the "Supermario"-thing... wasn't only an insider gag? confused
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> Second, why is it evil to short the housing market? People don't understand the basic concept that in order to buy something, someone needs to sell something...which is going short.
No. It's only going short when you sell something that you don't have - that is, you sell something borrowed. It's not clear to me how one would do that with houses. You could short homebuilders and mortgage companies, but that's about all.
>Cut to 2008, when Goldman made money off the economic collapse by shorting the housing market. The firm was charged with fraud in 2010. First of all, that's non-sequitur. Second, why is it evil to short the housing market? Washington Post really knows how to cater to its readership...
> Second, why is it evil to short the housing market? People don't understand the basic concept that in order to buy something, someone needs to sell something...which is going short.
http://www.investopedia.com/university/shortselling/shortsel...
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Not going to comment specifically on the judgement (I agree in general terms). However that is a vast mis-understanding of what a lot of the brain power at an investment bank goes towards. It isn't just equities it is fixed-income and economics as well. But beyond that it isn't just about valuation. It is everything from working on how to actually clear transactions, building dark pools and similar platforms, researc…
Right, but all of what they are doing is self-serving. They develop these things to give their client portfolios an edge over other investment firms. They aren't developing these technologies to apply them to healthcare or general science, it's just to give them an edge in the investment business. For a company of their size and wealth, their open source contributions are paltry. A handy way to deal with arrays in Ja…
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No. It's only going short when you sell something that you don't have - that is, you sell something borrowed. It's not clear to me how one would do that with houses. You could short homebuilders and mortgage companies, but that's about all.
Mortgage payments are bundled into securities called RMBS. By shorting these securities, you are not shorting the mortgage company, but the assets themselves (the mortgage receivables).
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Mortgage payments are bundled into securities called RMBS. By shorting these securities, you are not shorting the mortgage company, but the assets themselves (the mortgage receivables).
Can you short those?
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Only anecdotal, but I have observed as much over the past few decades. It's hard to be certain why as there are so many factors at play, but I suspect that a part of it may be due to how we perceive certain jobs. There's a certain stigma with most traditionally "trade" jobs like electricians and plumbers. Many of these type jobs actually make more, especially if you own your own business or have a fee structure that…
I was having this exact discussion with one of my colleagues yesterday and he said almost precisely what you're saying. A lot of schools have moved away from even having shop and, in many circles, there really is this condescending attitude toward "the trades." Most of these jobs are neither especially easy nor the path to great riches. But there's a lot of demand in many places for skilled trades people and the pay…
The AI comparison is a really good one, I like that. I'm in part a trained statistician, at least from the University level. I have gotten into machine learning more recently given my stats background and my previous game development background. This was discussed by other people in other articles, but I sometimes shake my head when the word "intelligence" is used to explain what amounts to applying some basic (or even advanced) stats to an input to produce some hopefully decent output.
Having seen the number of ways that supposedly awesome AIs can easily be confused, I am far from convinced. I don't think we are in danger of being replaced by robots when we can't even secure a web server, email, or now it seems, toasters. If the robots do take over, I know there will be so much sloppy code that we can either hack/backdoor them and shut them down after many long nights in a bunker typing away, or we can wait for them to just crash/segfault/whatever because I trust the creators to write bug-free AI as much as I trust a Lion to go vegetarian. On the flip-side, that all should also make it easy for someone to trigger them all to become self-aware or start the next great cylon purge. I'm ready and don't care about my plans next week anyway.