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The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

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Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#191

Post by dustingetz »

rbanffy wrote: post #129
jrockway wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends. If you are making $300,000 a year and live like you are making $15,000 a year (and save the rest), then you can retire at 30. Most people aren't willing to be this frugal, however. It seems some people making this much even have trouble "making ends meet", because they buy so much crap that they can't afford. Ah, consumerism. (In the interest of fairness, I am almost as bad -- I love buying stuff. I just sto…

> If you are making $300,000 a year and live like you are making $15,000 a year It's possible if your employer is paying for your relocation. In 2004 (IIRC) I went on training teams for clients of ours continuously for about two months (with a brief stop at home in the middle). Not only I accumulated a respectable mileage, I spent about a third of what I usually spend in my home town (São Paulo, Brazil). I'm 40, marr…

buffet: "don't save sex for old age" http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2009/12/03/warren-buffet...

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#192

Post by CWuestefeld »

Psyonic wrote: post #188
CWuestefeld wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can there exist a free market without the guarantee of the protection of private property? Without that you have anarchy See "anarcho-capitalism": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism In an anarcho-capitalist society, law enforcement, courts, and all other security services would be provided by voluntarily-funded competitors such as private defense agencies rather than through taxation, and money would…

How do you figure that prevents slavery? It doesn't prevent slavery right now... buying a russian sex slave and making her work 12 hour days in a club seems to generate a lot more income than she would as a "consumer".

I could turn the question around and ask you how the government prevents this, as the foundation of your question assumes that it's not doing so.

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#193

Post by adrianwaj »

api wrote: post #124
tomjen3 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it is not that simple, because just doing what others do works very well in most cases and you don't have the time to start questioning _everything_ - why do you shower in the morning? Why eat three times a day? I don't want to defend cargo-cults, but people copy because it works.

No, it's worse than that. I have seen this before. There is an entire portion of the business world that merely goes through the motions of being successful businesses rather than actually being businesses at all. It's really weird. You could look at it as investment fraud with plausible deniability. Take money, hire consultants, look busy. The only thing is, I don't think it's that explicit or intentional. I think t…

Don't forget the cult of personality. Find someone you like more than yourself. Analyse. Imitate. -- prophet-oriented religion in a nutshell.

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#194

Post by Psyonic »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #192
Psyonic wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you figure that prevents slavery? It doesn't prevent slavery right now... buying a russian sex slave and making her work 12 hour days in a club seems to generate a lot more income than she would as a "consumer".

I could turn the question around and ask you how the government prevents this, as the foundation of your question assumes that it's not doing so.

It doesn't. I was just curious why you thought the market was any different.

That said: the government does make an effort to prevent it, which I'm not sure can be said for the free market.

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#196

Post by rbanffy »

dustingetz wrote: post #191
rbanffy wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are making $300,000 a year and live like you are making $15,000 a year It's possible if your employer is paying for your relocation. In 2004 (IIRC) I went on training teams for clients of ours continuously for about two months (with a brief stop at home in the middle). Not only I accumulated a respectable mileage, I spent about a third of what I usually spend in my home town (São Paulo, Brazil). I'm 40, marr…

buffet: "don't save sex for old age" http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2009/12/03/warren-buffet...

You can always get it for free.

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#197

Post by CWuestefeld »

Psyonic wrote: post #194
CWuestefeld wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could turn the question around and ask you how the government prevents this, as the foundation of your question assumes that it's not doing so.

It doesn't. I was just curious why you thought the market was any different. That said: the government does make an effort to prevent it, which I'm not sure can be said for the free market.

Hmmm. I gave this a little thought as I drove home, and I think I've got the answer.

On the whole, both regulation and the free market are able to deal with most of slavery. But at the margin, it becomes cost-ineffective to mop up the very last instance. In both cases, the instance is low enough that most of us will never come face-to-face with slavery. But ferreting out one more evil person costs society more than it would benefit.

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#198

Post by 3pt14159 »

jodrellblank wrote: post #181
3pt14159 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are multiple versions of Solver. To get the free one to do this requires a hack (using some sort of Fourier Transform into a cell or something, I think there are multiple ways). There are paid versions of Solver that are far more powerful, with fully developed APIs. Also, Iron Python can be used with Excel, which makes the whole thing really intense because many Python Libs can be used. Excel truly is Microsoft…

Excel is scriptable by COM and therefore VBSript, Python+PyWin32, and any other COM scripting language. Presumably you mean IronPython integration in a different sense due to it being a .Net library? Got any links with examples of how that looks / what it can do?

You are totally right, it had been a while since I had looked into this. I was confusing (blending together?) pyinex and IronPython. You are right, IronPython (and tons of other languages) all have access to the .Net libs, but pyinex is what I was thinking of. Apparently, though, it is not fully developed yet.

http://code.google.com/p/pyinex/

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#199

Post by gridspy »

gaius wrote: post #147
count wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand - if you've got the Armani suit, the Tag Heuer or Rolex, and drive the Porsche, you can only be 'faking' so much; obviously you've had some financial success.

Not really - the suit and the watch would fit onto a fairly normal credit card, for example. You'd be a fool to go into debt for them, of course, but people do, status symbols, even misguided ones, can be powerful lures. Rolex and TAG in particular are now almost anti-brands for that reason (same with Louis Vuitton luggage, Porsche, Burberry, etc). The guys who signal to each other with these accessories are subtle a…

I like to think that when I am rich and successful I'll wear jeans and T-shirts fulltime.

Re: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

#200

Post by jodrellblank »

3pt14159 wrote: post #198
jodrellblank wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel is scriptable by COM and therefore VBSript, Python+PyWin32, and any other COM scripting language. Presumably you mean IronPython integration in a different sense due to it being a .Net library? Got any links with examples of how that looks / what it can do?

You are totally right, it had been a while since I had looked into this. I was confusing (blending together?) pyinex and IronPython. You are right, IronPython (and tons of other languages) all have access to the .Net libs, but pyinex is what I was thinking of. Apparently, though, it is not fully developed yet. http://code.google.com/p/pyinex/

I was thinking you were going to refer to .Net linking with Office, which seems to be something different from the COM automation, and more complicated than I've ever been interested in.

That, however, looks pretty darn cool. On the odd occasion I've used Python/COM/Excel together, I've really wished for a Python shell inside Excel to do things like:

  for cell in Range('a1:a10'):
      cell.Value = cell.Value.split('-')[0]
or whatever. I don't know if Pyinex will quite do that, but thanks for the link!
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