champu

my bank provides the capital to start and build companies. have you ever used anything from a public company? additionally we are highly involved in municipal finance. we enable people to have bridges, highways, hospitals, airports, trains etc... sometimes we even provide the capital for gov't to continue to operate, make salaries and pensions payments. i suppose none of those things provide useful functions in your eyes but most people appreciate them. ok, so i got that off my chest. if your are sincerely asking me a question, ill answer. if you are solely insulting me, stop reading here. you can google the mechanics of selling stock short. so ill skip the mechanics. stock fluctuate up and down. in order for a fair and orderly market you need a buyer for every seller. short sellers provide liquidity to the market and additionally the fee they pay to long holders increases their return and provides a hedge for downturns. all a positive for the financial markets. short selling is an attempt to benefit from a downturn in a stock not destroy the value. it is illegal to attempt to affect the price of any stock, up or down. its called manipulation and very easy to detect. the NYT feels Bill A is attempting to do this. i dont agree but its up to FINRA and the SEC to decide. selling short has no more impact on stock price than selling long. also, historically stocks go up so short selling is more risky than a long. additionally, when they buy to cover they provide liquidity on that side too. liquidity is the key to a fair and orderly market, so again a good thing. i welcome short sellers when i need to buy stock. they provide the liquidity so i do not have to take a stock higher. they provide a very usefull function and i do not see how they damage the economy or even stock price. some people believe stocks are going one way, some believe they are going the other. they meet in the middle and everyone is happy. If you purposely try to manipulate stock price. you can be fined, sanctioned and even charged with a crime. i support strong market regulations. i see nothing wrong with short selling and glad they are there to help make a better market. i said all of that with a straight face, fyi. Thank you for the reply. I realize a lot of people you communicate with on this forum have a deep seeded hatred of all things Wall St, but that is not my position. I'm not saying investment firms don't provide useful services / functions, but I am expressing my extreme skepticism towards this one particular practice. Short selling is an attempt to benefit from a downturn in a stock, we agree on that, but so is just buying the stock after a downturn. My problem with short selling is that it does so in such a way where a benefit is realized if the downturn occurs in the future. This both puts your interests in conflict with the short-term health of the security and leaves you indifferent as to mid and long-term health of the security. This is why I said you can't reasonably call this practice "investing." The improvement in liquidity I can see though. Out of curiosity, do the major markets track/report trade volume broken up by short or long sales?

Forgive my ignorance as perhaps I just spend too much time designing things that actually perform useful functions, but... How does shorting borrowed stock to create a situation whereby you directly benefit from future drops in the price of the security without then having to own the security at its devalued price (thus incentivizing you not to completely destroy its value) do anything but promote damage to the economy? That is to ask, how can you call this "investment" with a straight face?

Geek... not that there is anything wrong with that mind you Speakers Corner isn't much good for exchanging thoughts or ideas, but there are many nerdy humor opportunities that present themselves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#Controversy_over_extent_of_contributions

JWST is only going to be able to dump at 28 Mbps... Pitiful really.

They're talking about Ookla speedtest results which means the data set consists only of people who obsess enough about their internet speed to go measure it. People in other countries with slow internet know they have slow internet and don't run speed tests on it. People in the US with slow internet go to speedtest.net every week and then whine about their results on tumblr.

It is not a "crap shoot" and there is a whole spectrum between "keeping at least one loaded handgun on top of every flat surface in a house full of a dozen children" and "live on a deserted tropical island alone with no firearms." It is very similar to skydiving incidents in that you can virtually always point out at least one pretty big mistake that was made and, even more commonly, you can point to a pattern of behavior that is known and understood to be a higher-risk choice and that is much more specific than just "choosing to skydive at all." As winsor often and correctly reminds us, if you shoot someone for defensive reasons, "wants" better not enter into it.

Yore write.

We had to chew bark to make our own fiber Luxury. We used to show up for the test and wait in line all day for the privledge. They'd shout questions at us and we had to write out the answers, in triplicate, using our own blood on the backs of our hands. You still had blood to use? Well, when I say 'blood' it was only the cold black bile left behind from decades of malnutrition and crushing poverty, but it was 'blood' to us!

I don't think there's any ongoing threat to firearm owners from President Obama. He made the one big push* but it fizzled in congress. I think you can expect every democratic president to make that one big push* exactly once during their stay in office. That's just my opinion. At the state level the landscape varies quite a bit. There have been some notable court decisions related to permitting across the country on one hand, and there have been state level bans and expansions of bans on scary black rifles on the other. *I'm referring to the universal background check/registration, ban on assault weapons, and ban on 10+ magazines, because those are the three laws that democrats propose and the laws that democrats propose are those three.

http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/content/view.php?pk_id=0000000722 Note that there have been four petitions filed against the opinion. The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, The Brady Campaign, California Attorney General, and the California Police Chief's association. Conspicuously absent, imo, is the California State Sheriffs Association, which is the organization whose authority to regulate arbitrarily is in dispute. Note also these are not appeals, as none of the above organizations have standing to appeal this case. These are basically open letters to the entire 9th circuit court for some judge to, of their own accord, request that the decision be reviewed by the entirety of the court rather than just the panel. Lawrocket can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think if that is to happen it would have to happen by today, March 6th. Legally speaking I think this is a somewhat similar situation to when Prop 8 was overturned and all the anti-gay groups went on tilt because they had no legal means to appeal the decision.

Would you please stop arguing against what you imagine is an answer I am looking for? There are too many confounding problems with comparing cities head to head. I said it "might be interesting" to compare countries head to head while having a way to account for the fact that they have different overall populations, areas, number of cities, densities of cities, etc. while still aggregating over the whole country.

Not having taken a particular standardized test : being proud of being bad at math :: A) there's a joke here but I'm too tired today...

We had to chew bark to make our own fiber Luxury. We used to show up for the test and wait in line all day for the privledge. They'd shout questions at us and we had to write out the answers, in triplicate, using our own blood on the backs of our hands.

...he said... ...in response to the first 25% of a sentence that went on to explain that comparisons of only a couple cities would not accurately give you a good comparison of two countries... ...sigh...

Why are you stuck on comparing a handful of cities? And Redondo Beach has a similar population density to Toronto, but comparing crime statistics between those two cities doesn't get you any closer to understanding differences in homicide rates or firearm homicide rates between the United States and Canada.

A measure we use in crystallography to determine "clumpiness" of crystal orientations is the (normalized) standard deviation from uniformity. (I take credit for introducing this in 1970) Similar idea. With population density in a country I would be interested to see all the bins though.

A lot of people make that joke but as I've said, it's neither a good argument for not having an AAD if your reserve is loaded higher than 1.3:1 nor is it a good argument to not bother getting as big a reserve as you can just because you can't get below 1.3:1, and that's "not big enough." It's one of those "truthy" jokes that people base stupid decisions on.

See post #4. Even if you bought it when it was $1000 then you'd have to avoid carrying any debts with an interest rate over about 5% (think: skydivers with credit cards) for the next 18 years to make sure you weren't shooting yourself in the foot. At $2500 it's a no brainer not to do it.

You can't just look at a handful of big cities to get a picture of overall density across the country. I'm talking about a bar chart where you, say, normalize the population of the countries to 100,000,000 or whatever, make each bar a bin of population density, and the y-axis log10 of the number of normalized people living in an area with that density. That would give you a very good picture of how spread out people were in a given country and how clumped up people get when they do clump up.

I was back at Illinois for a few days a couple weeks ago. I gave a guest lecture, took resumes, chatted with engineering students for several hours at an expo, and interviewed seven candidates. So many student projects these days are "arduino this" and "arduino that." ...off my lawn! ...okay, actually a few of them were pretty cool...

Maybe, but when you look at a ratio per 100, you find out that isn't the case. What might be interesting to look at (and I very briefly googled but came up short) would be a comparison of population vs. population density for different countries. (i.e. percentage of people in the country that live in an area with population density of 500-999 ppl/sq km, 1000-1499 ppl/sq km, etc.) Obviously it's going to be positively correlated, but it would give you an idea as to the degree of "clumping" that was going on.

I did address the point, but like the typical skygod you didn't like the answer and rejected it. Here, I'll tell you what you want to hear: You are special and all your friends are special. They are not subject to what general statistics show. I am not trying to deminish that you have thought about this and have deemed that the risks are acceptable to you and your family. Good for you. However, like the kid downsizing way to quickly, you dismiss the statistics by saying: this cannot happen to me and my family members. Owning a firearm in and of itself is not comparable to "downsizing too quickly." kelpdiver is the one reading the incidents thread about people downsizing too quickly and thumping in and saying, "Well gee, I've stuck to my 1:1 wingloading and I stay current, I should keep doing that if I want to stay safe." You're acting like a reporter writing about every skydiving accident, "Gun failed to not shoot family member or acquantance. Case closed."

Anyone not see that one coming a mile away?

That's rich.