The perception of many is that financial markets are parasitic institutions that feed off the blood, sweat, and tears of the rest of us. The reality is far different. This book breaks free of traditional ideological arguments of the Right and Left and points to a new way of understanding and spreading the extraordinary wealth-generating capabilities of capitalism.
They suggest that the government should give green cards to all foreigners who come to America to study science, technology, engineering or maths. Some are more innovative. Exchange-traded investment funds, which have gone from nothing 10 years ago to a trillion-$ industry today, leave promising new companies vulnerable to the fickleness of high-frequency traders: so why not let them exclude themselves from such funds’ baskets of shares? SOX is reducing the supply of new companies in the name of protecting investors: so why not let smaller firms opt out of SOX so long as shareholders are duly warned? The authors also argue that university technology offices should lose their monopolies, giving professors more freedom to exploit their innovations.
Virtual worlds have exploded out of online game culture and now capture the attention of millions of ordinary people: husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, workers, retirees. Devoting dozens of hours each week to massively multiplayer virtual reality environments (like World of Warcraft and Second Life), these millions are the start of an exodus into the refuge of fantasy, where they experience life under a new social, political, and economic order built around fun. Given the choice between a fantasy world and the real world, how many of us would choose reality? Exodus to the Virtual World explains the growing migration into virtual reality, and how it will change the way we live–both in fantasy worlds and in the real one.
Interesting read. Argues that as more people experience virtual worlds, they will demand the apt policy design in games to be applied to the real world. Result: a fun maximizing society.
Spanning centuries, the book includes transcendent math, alternate realities, corporate dystopias, traveling carnivals, post-singularity godlike AIs, geoengineering, and mechanical hobos, each integral to the plot.
Mind Over Ship returns to the awesomely weird and exciting Marusek future, where humanity trembles on the verge of transcendence, splintering into people, clones, avatars, AIs, temporary and permanent models (some made without the model’s consent) and a 1000 other fragments. Each of these factions battles for the best deal it can get — even as the individual members of each clade fight for their own personal best interests.
A what-if of the aftermath of a high power EMP blast in the stratosphere.
Suppose, one fine spring day, with no warning or evident cause, the power went out. After a while, when it didn’t come back on, you might try to telephone the power company, only to discover the phone completely dead. You pull out your mobile phone, and it too is kaput. Nothing happens at all when you try to turn it on. You get the battery powered radio you keep in the basement in case of storms, and it too is dead; you swap in the batteries from the flashlight (which works) but that doesn’t fix the radio. So, you decide to drive into town and see if anybody there knows what’s going on. The car doesn’t start. You set out on foot, only to discover when you get to the point along the lane where you can see the highway that it’s full of immobile vehicles with their drivers wandering around on foot as in a daze.
In 1934, André Weil and Henri Cartan, both young professors of mathematics at the University of Strasbourg, would frequently, when discussing the calculus courses, they were teaching, deplore the textbooks available, all of which they considered antiquated and inadequate. Weil eventually suggested getting in touch with several of their fellow alumni of the École Normale Supérieure who were teaching similar courses in provincial universities around France, inviting them to collaborate on a new analysis textbook. The complete work was expected to total 1000 to 1200 pages, with the first volumes ready about 6 months after the project began. Thus began 1 of the most flabbergasting examples of “mission creep” in human intellectual history, which set the style for much of mathematics publication and education in subsequent decades. Working collectively and publishing under the pseudonym “Nicolas Bourbaki” (after the French general in the Franco-Prussian War Charles Denis Bourbaki), the “analysis textbook” to be assembled by a small group over a few years grew into a project spanning more than 60 years and 10 books, most of multiple volumes, totaling more than 7000 pages, systematizing the core of mathematics in a relentlessly abstract and austere axiomatic form. Although Bourbaki introduced new terminology, some of which has become commonplace, there is no new mathematics in the work: it is a presentation of pre-existing mathematical work as a pedagogical tool and toolbox for research mathematicians. (This is not to say that the participants in the Bourbaki project did not do original work—in fact, they were among the leaders in mathematical research in their respective generations. But their work on the Bourbaki opus was a codification and grand unification of the disparate branches of mathematics into a coherent whole. In fact, so important was the idea that mathematics was a unified tree rooted in set theory that the Bourbaki group always used the word mathématique, not mathématiques.)
Where the usual geographical analysis treats the distribution of genes as an effect of history, in their view, the genes themselves are a cause: 2 variants in the same gene do not necessarily have the same effect, and the relative selective advantages and disadvantages of them will influence the movements of genes through populations over both space and time.
Maybe we should let banks fail. Clearly they are not any good at this money thing either.
But one man found success by tweaking the formula, prosecutors say: Rather than trying to dupe an account holder into giving up information, he duped the bank. And instead of swindling a person, he tried to rob a country of $27m. The man worked with others to create official-looking documents that instructed Citibank to wire the money in 24 transactions to accounts that he controlled around the world. The money came from a Citibank account in New York held by the National Bank of Ethiopia, that country’s central bank. The conspirators, contacted by Citibank to verify the transactions, posed as Ethiopian bank officials and approved the transfers.
If the world’s biggest pop star only made $25m a year in total, something’s very, very wrong. That’s the big problem behind the zombieconomy. We don’t reward people for creating, growing, nurturing, or even remixing assets. We just reward them for allocating the same old assets.
That banking involves constant reminders of money also may weaken “the pull of morality,” perhaps making some bankers more inclined to be unethical. Banker identity itself encourages dishonesty. In an experiment involving employees of a large international bank, the experimenters found evidence that when “their professional identities as bank employees [was] rendered salient to them” (they were asked questions about their professional background in the banking industry), more of them [became] dishonest, cheating in reporting the results of coin tosses so as to increase their monetary payoffs than was the case with people from various other professions — making those other professional identities salient did not increase dishonesty. The experimenters also found that bankers whose banker identity had been made salient to them — and bankers most likely to have cheated — were more apt to agree that social status was “primarily determined by financial success.”
2015-08-15: 4 ka Banksters
Not sure whether I should feel ecstatic how much we knew 4 ka ago, or depressed that we haven’t moved past: banksters are still a thing.
“But during one 30-year period — between 1890 and 1860 BC — for one community in the town of Kanesh, we know a great deal. Through a series of incredibly unlikely events, archaeologists have uncovered the comprehensive written archive of a few 100 traders who left their hometown Assur, in what is now Iraq, to set up importing businesses in Kanesh, which sat at the center of present-day Turkey and functioned as the hub of a massive global trading system that stretched from Central Asia to Europe. Kanesh’s traders sent letters back and forth with their business partners, carefully written on clay tablets and stored at home in special vaults. 10Ks of these records remain. One economist would love to have as much candid information about businesses today as we have about the dealings — and in particular, about the trading practices — of this 4000-year-old community.
“The picture that emerged of economic life is staggeringly advanced. The traders of Kanesh used financial tools that were remarkably similar to checks, bonds and joint-stock companies. They had something like venture-capital firms that created diversified portfolios of risky trades. And they even had structured financial products: People would buy outstanding debt, sell it to others and use it as collateral to finance new businesses. The 30 years for which we have records appear to have been a time of remarkable financial innovation.
“It’s impossible not to see parallels with our own recent past. Over the 30 years covered by the archive, we see an economy built on trade in actual goods — silver, tin, textiles — transform into an economy built on financial speculation, fueling a bubble that then pops. After the financial collapse, there is a period of incessant lawsuits, as a central government in Assur desperately tries to come up with new regulations and ways of holding wrongdoers accountable (though there never seems to be agreement on who the wrongdoers are, exactly). The entire trading system enters a deep recession lasting more than 10 years. The traders eventually adopt simpler, more stringent rules, and trade grows again.”
It took Navinder Singh Sarao a long time to accept that he might have been scammed out of $50M. Stuck in London’s Wandsworth prison, wracked with anxiety and unable to sleep, the realization dawned on the man dubbed the “Flash Crash Trader” as slowly as spring turned to summer outside the barred window of his jail cell.
The trauma of the past few weeks had been difficult to process. On April 20, 2015, the slight, doe-eyed 36-year-old had dozed off peacefully in the same suburban bedroom he’d slept in since he was a boy. The next day he was arrested and taken to a police station, where he was charged with 22 counts of fraud and market manipulation carrying a maximum sentence of 380 years.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 