Week 12
Link
Deutsche Bank will outsource large parts of its wholesale banking IT infrastructure to U.S.-based Hewlett-Packard (HP) in a multibillion-dollar deal [..] Part of the bank's long-standing restructuring efforts have included moving to a more flexible digital platform as pressure rises on the financial sector overall to cut costs, embrace web-based client platforms, and face competitors coming from outside of traditional banking [Feb 24]
Great
DB ATM cards cannot even be used in the Netherlands. Hopefully this gets fixed.
This must be good news for HP tho..
Link
HP share price tumbles as earnings fall far short of analysts’ forecast [Feb 26]
Huh?
After the multibillion $ deal... ?
Link
[There has been a] shak[e up at] the Human Brain Project.
Good news
Question
But basic income was never considered seriously by anyone before.
Incorrect
Richard Nixon almost enacted it into law. From The Second Machine Age,
pg. 429
Basic income is not part of mainstream policy discussions today, but it has a surprisingly long history and came remarkably close to reality in twentieth-century America. One of its early proponents was the English-American political activist Thomas Paine, who advocated in his 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice that everyone should be given a lump sum of money upon reaching adulthood to compensate for the unjust fact that some people were born into landowning families while others were not. Later advocates included philosopher Bertrand Russell and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote in 1967, “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”
Many economists on both the left and the right have agreed with King. Liberals including James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, and John Kenneth Galbraith and conservatives like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek have all advocated income guarantees in one form or another, and in 1968 more than 1,200 economists signed a letter in support of the concept addressed to the U.S. Congress.
The president elected that year, Republican Richard Nixon, tried throughout his first term in office to enact it into law. In a 1969 speech he proposed a Family Assistance Plan that had many features of a basic income program. The plan had support across the ideological spectrum, but it also faced a large and diverse group of opponents. Caseworkers and other administrators of existing welfare programs feared that their jobs would be eliminated under the new regime; some labor leaders thought that it would erode support for minimum wage legislation [..] Minimum wage cannot relied upon to deliver such redistribution, because in US only 44% of people aged 18+ have a job according to Gallup. Plus imposing artificially high minimum wage requirements can hurt a business' competitiveness. Basic income is both the social and free-market oriented solution (hence the support of Friedman and Hayek).
Mercedez-Benz CEO
[Paraphrasing, in response to Apple planning to get into car manufacturing business] A car is much more complicated to build than an iPhone.
Maybe
But as far as complexity goes, these companies also deal with software that are in millions lines of code territory, that is pretty complex. In this day and age, it's all about mixing; Amazon might get into hosting, a search engine into ads (remember Google before the whole ads thing?). So I'd watch out.
Businessinsider
UBS, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley stand out in the global wealth management industry, each responsible for handling more than $1 trillion in investors' assets.
But they're now under siege from well-funded startups that offer a wide array of advisory services at a low cost thanks to broad use of automated functions.
These are the robo-advisors.
We're only in the first inning of the wealth management wars, but this business that has historically been dominated by well-staffed big banks and a network of good-old-boy relationships is seeing its competitive landscape evolve rapidly [..] Betterment, Wealthfront, FutureAdvisor and Personal Capital are among these new firms.
Great
Question
Why not Bush?
Common Turd
Standardizing education will not work as it is an industrial era modern concoction, which is exactly what Common Core is. Conservatives are up in arms about it as they should be.
An economist
[Paraphrasing] In order to spur the economy, in post-modern times, it is better for governments to invest in infrastructure.
True
A public Wifi network that is always on in each part of every city, for example, would be a major boon. Infrastructure spending is good because it helps everyone equally.
Also, nowadays, there is another kind of infrastructure, a human infrastructure, that is a combination of environmental / cultural constructs that promote courage, enterpreneurship, trying something new and failing fast. In order to support this infrastructure, one needs to mitigate its adverse effects, i.e. abject failure, which can occur more often than not. Another motive for basic income.
Link
Want to get paid for shampooing someone's hair? In California, you may need to have at least nine months of experience and pass a licensing test overseen by the state barbering and cosmetology board, whose members include salon professionals.
Do you clean dogs' teeth for pay as part of a grooming service? You might run afoul of the state Veterinary Medical Board, which includes four veterinarians and a veterinary technician among its eight members [..].
[A recent Supreme Court] decision means that "the vast majority of commissions and boards in all 50 states are untenable and illegal," says Robert Fellmeth, a veteran antitrust expert who is executive director of the Center for Public Interest Law at the University of San Diego law school. The court has established, he says, that "the king has been wearing no clothes for the last 72 years."
Good
The behaviour outlined above is second wave specialization: "In both capitalist and socialist industrial states, [...] specialization was accompanied by a rising tide of professionalization. Whenever the opportunity arose for some group of specialists to monopolize esoteric knowledge and keep newcomers out of their field, professions emerged".
In 3W world noone decides who, for example, a professional taxi driver is. Good drivers are rated well in Uber or Lyft and get more demand. Peer-to-peer, decentralized. End of story.
History
In 1978 [the leader of China] Deng Xiaoping was on a state visit in Singapore [..] Deng was curious about what the Singaporeans had done to develop their country so rapidly [.., and] he confesse[d to Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of today's Singapore] that he doubted whether China would ever become as successful as Singapore. Lee reportedly replied, “we, the Singapore Chinese, were the descendants of illiterate landless peasants from Guangdong and Fujian in south China, whereas the scholars, mandarins, and literati had stayed and left their progeny in China. There was nothing that Singapore had done that China could not do, and do better.”
Hah
The story is Xiaoping was so effected by Yew's comments that it became one of the reasons China started to change. But was Yew correct? I believe the real advantage Singapore had was not having too much history; it made them more agile. China, overburdened with history could not do anything different, for a long time.
Link
Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted.
Big waste
George Orwell
It is curious to reflect that out of al the ‘experts’ of all the schools, there was not a single one who was able to foresee so likely an event as the Russo-German Pact of 1939 [..] A few writers of conservative tendency, such as Peter Drucker [emphasis mine] foretold an agreement between Germany and Russia, but they expected an actual alliance or amalgamation which would be permanent. No Marxist or other left-wing writer, of whatever colour, came anywhere near foretelling the Pact.
Nice
Orwell quoting Drucker! It feels like seeing a reference to Macbeth in the Illiad. Probably the reason that feeling is that Orwell, being the influential figure that he is, comes accross as if he should be from an earlier age. Drucker, because he talked a lot about hi-tech, the knowledge economy and management feels like should be younger. But Orwell lived btw 1903-1950, Drucker was born at 1909, and lived until 2005.
The Economist
A recent paper, by Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun and Scott Kominers, suggests that the rise in patent-related litigation has not really helped protect the rights of inventors. The authors collected a comprehensive dataset on non-practicing entities (NPE), relevant patents and lawsuits between NPEs for the period 2001 and 2011. The paper's authors found that rather than acting as benevolent patent enforcers, NPEs simply target the firms with the most cash—however good or bad their argument that a patent has been infringed is. For example, the probability of being sued by NPEs doubles after a firm experiences a sudden increase in its cash balance. Patent trolls are also more likely to go after firms that employ fewer lawyers. And the largest NPEs are the worst offenders.
Economists say that patent trolls can play a useful role by helping to transfer the profit generated by patents from manufacturers to inventors. But the new research finds that inventors only receive 5% of their patent’s value after successful infringement cases. The rest goes to lawyers and NPEs that do not engage in innovation.
In effect, this damages productivity by punishing innovators for their success. The authors find in their data that firms that lost lawsuits against patent trolls or settled out of court spent on average $211m less on research and development than firms that won. This meant that they were also less likely to conduct research that produced new patents in the future. Because economic growth is fuelled by innovative firms boosting their productivity, these disincentives could be holding back the wider economy.
News
This week Google shared details about a Project Ara store through which users will be able to buy snap-on hardware blocks for the customizable smartphone.
Are you kidding me?
Google is doing that too? Is there anything cool that Google is not involved in, that's what I wanna know..
Note: We all remember the Phonebloks video released some time ago. PB and Ara sometimes collaborate apparently, but are seperate entities.
Question
Where does the wave picture of the blog come from?
Here
Link
[G]etting eco-friendly hydrogen is still a bit of a challenge. Right now, a lot of hydrogen is produced through mixing steam and natural gas [but that method is not so green..] A new study published [..] announces the development of a transparent film that uses energy from the sun to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, without some of the dangerous side effects inherent in the process.
Sweet
Clean oxygen through sun energy! Awesome.
Analyst
When [a certain pattern] occurs, we noticed [a certain stock] went up 6 out of 9 times. So there is a 66% chance the next time [the same pattern] occurs the stock will go up. This stock could be invested in, during these times.
Do that and you will lose your shirt
This "analyst" clearly does not know statistics. If u look at the 95% confidence interval of that ratio,
x=6.;n=9.;p=(x+2)/(n+4); z = 1.96
print p + np.array([-1,+1])*z*np.sqrt(p*(1-p)/n)
The result is [0.30 0.93], so the low percentage is 30%. The sound
investment strategy would look at this number, not the higher one, or
the average. If you go by that number, there is no clear connection
between the said pattern and the said "increase".
Link
In November, Tom Loverro of RRE Ventures wrote that “banks are under attack” and showed a few of the major players leading this trend. Inspired by his post [..] we wanted to dig in and see how banks are being unbundled by startups. The graphic [in the article], details companies attacking bank services ranging from robo-advisers wealth management services like Wealthfront and Betterment to small business loan companies like OnDeck Capital and Kabbage to small business service providers like Zenefits and ZenPayroll, and many other areas.
Sweet
Comment
Link
[Repeat item] Want to get paid for shampooing someone's hair? In California, you may need to have at least nine months of experience and pass a licensing test overseen by the state barbering and cosmetology board, whose members include salon professionals. Do you clean dogs' teeth for pay as part of a grooming service? You might run afoul of the state Veterinary Medical Board, which includes four veterinarians and a veterinary technician among its eight members [..].
[The recent Supreme Court] decision means that "the vast majority of commissions and boards in all 50 states are untenable and illegal," says Robert Fellmeth, a veteran antitrust expert who is executive director of the Center for Public Interest Law at the University of San Diego law school. The court has established, he says, that "the king has been wearing no clothes for the last 72 years."
Good
The behaviour described above is second wave specialization: "In both capitalist and socialist industrial states [...] specialization was accompanied by a rising tide of professionalization. Whenever the opportunity arose for some group of specialists to monopolize esoteric knowledge and keep newcomers out of their field, professions emerged".
In 3W world noone decides who, for example, a professional taxi driver is. Good drivers are rated well in Uber or Lyft and get more demand. Peer-to-peer, decentralized.
Jurgen Schmidhuber
[Schmidhuber is an deep learning expert] General purpose quantum computation won’t work (my prediction of 15 years ago is still standing). Related: The universe is deterministic, and the most efficient program that computes its entire history is short and fast, which means there is little room for true randomness, which is very expensive to compute. What looks random must be pseudorandom, like the decimal expansion of Pi, which is computable by a short program. Many physicists disagree, but Einstein was right: no dice.
Interesting
It somewhat ties into this
Link
Andrew Ng builds artificial intelligence systems for a living. He taught AI at Stanford, built AI at Google, and then moved to the Chinese search engine giant, Baidu, to continue his work at the forefront of applying artificial intelligence to real-world problems [..].
“For those of us shipping AI technology, working to build these technologies now,” he told me, wearily, yesterday, “I don’t see any realistic path from the stuff we work on today—which is amazing and creating tons of value— [..] for the software [..] to turn evil.”
The bigger worry, he noted, was the effect that increasingly smart machines might have on the job market, displacing workers in all kinds of fields much faster than even industrialization displaced agricultural workers or automation displaced factory workers.
Fear Roomba, Not The Terminator
Link
The documents reveal that Nissan has set an aggressive schedule for the [self-driving car] project, planning to have prototype cars operating within two years. Google and Uber are both rumored to be pursuing the same goal, so a race for the mythical robo-taxi is on. (A European consortium is in the race too.)
Sweet
Link
Google and Facebook [are racing] to bring the Web to the developing world
Sweet
The race is on, all over the place
Link
The mass media is often [in] the opinion that the US economy has recovered strongly in recent years and many wounds of the 2008 debt crisis are healed. One look at the data is sufficient to see that such stories are pure propaganda [..] The US stock market climbs almost daily to new record highs, many financial professionals interpret this to mean that it is the US economy is dazzling and it will be the engine of growth for the world economy in the coming years [which is unlikely]; The reason is that many Americans [are still kneck-deep in debt].
Yep
George Soros
[The Alchemy of Finance] The large and growing U.S. budget deficit [before 1982] emerged as the unintended consequence of conflicting policy objectives. On the one hand, President Reagan sought to reduce [..] taxes; on the other, he wanted to assume a strong military posture in confronting what considered the Communist menace. These two objectives could not be pursued within the constraints of a balanced budget. To make matters worse, fiscal and monetary policies were dominated by two conflicting schools of thought. Fiscal policy was influenced by "supply-side" economics, whereas monetary policy was guided by the precepts of monetarism [..].
In his first budget [Reagan] cut taxes and increased military spending simultaneously. Although a concerted effort was made to reduce domestic spending, the savings were not large enough to offset the other two items. The path of least resistance led to a large budget deficit.
Since the budget deficit had to be financed within the limits of strict money supply targets, interest rates rose to unprecedented heights. Instead of economic expansion, the conflict between fiscal and monetary policy brought on a severe recession. Unexpectedly high interest rates combined with a recession to precipitate the international debt 'crisis of 1982. People Don't Cause Crisis', Governments Do
.. as none of items described above have anything to do with the free-market philosophy. I am not saying battling the Soviets was not a worthy goal; in that end however some steps were taken whose side-effect was a crisis. Or turning China into world's manufacturing base with the hope they will turn into an innovating economy later on (which they are now), again, can be seen as a worthy goal. As a side effect to that, imbalances build up in the "global" economy, combined with other governmental missteps another crisis happened. Fine. (Or, not). But say that, instead of turning the finger to people trading with eachother and say it was all their fault.
Romanian girl
They say in my country, "Italian women are beautiful. Half of them are from Romania"
Wonder where that saying came from
Some more info on the battle itself from 33 Strategies of War, by R. Greene.
Analysis: If your orders are vague and halfhearted, by the time they reach the field they will be meaningless. Let people work unsupervised [..] they will see in your orders what they want to see [..] Unless you adapt your leadership style to the weaknesses of the people in your group, you will almost certainly end up with a break in the chain of command"
The excerpt above has some interesting side conclusions: First is, even though Galipoli could not be won by the Allies, this did not "change the course of the war". Germany and Ottomans eventually lost. Second, the battle of Galipoli was Britain's to lose. The other side fought well, true, but Brits were planning, attacking, just not at the top of their game. If they were, with the right commander in charge, the war would have been over. They had everything else in place.
If the course of the war did not change, then what did change? The only thing Galipoli achieve was propelling the career of a young officier named Kemal giving him the hero status who successfully fought the British at Suvla. Kemal would later become the founder of Turkland.
Germans chose wrong; they partnered up with Ottomans, a land based power, who could not complement Germany - another land based power. But neither side probably had much choice in the matter given the existing arragement of power around the world and the region. The ultimate good thing coming out WWI obviously is the eventual collapse of the Ottoman Empire which could not be stopped either, as it was several centuries in the making.
When he spoke about his new film, which is set four years after the Battle of Gallipoli, Crowe said that at Gallipoli “Australia invaded a sovereign nation” and it was time to stop celebrating the mythology of Gallipoli. “You know, I think, after 100 years, it’s time to expand that mythology. And I think we should be mature enough as a nation to take into account the story that the other blokes have to tell. You know, um, because we did invade a soveign nation that we’s never had an angry word with".
This is true. The Galipoli loss, for some reason, became part of the Aussie national identity. Brits told them to go there and fight, why the hell else would they be half way around the world near a country they had no quarrel with? Good thing some ppl started to challenge this nationalistic non-sense.
Here is the reason why Oz attaches itself to a naval power's interest, because of strategic need.