vox
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Another sign that bitcoin values are driven by speculation: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bitcoin-asia-idUSKBN18T0K2
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That's quite impressive that you were able to live off of $8,000 in the US in 2014, the poverty threshold for a family of one is around $12,000.
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Financial services assume you spend roughly 85% of your income. That's why the retirement "number" is so huge. Yes, the more you have, the more they collect in fees. If you don't spend 85% of your income, your number can be lower - substantially so. For instance, before I got married, I made a decent income in a low cost of living area. I lived on roughly $8,000 a year. I was socking away roughly 90%+ of my income. If you can get an above average income in a low cost of area place to live, I think that is a much better option.
How long ago was this that you were living off $8,000 a year and were you spending <10% of your pre-tax or after-tax income?
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Price/sales
(Late '98 and '99)
@Home 158x
eBay 117x
Yahoo 111x
Priceline 52x
Cnet 40x
AOL 33x
Lycos 28x
Amazon 23x
Etrade 23x
Microsoft 23x
Cisco 16x
Netscape 14x
(Today)
Facebook 15x
Nvidia 10x
Netflix 8x
Alphabet 7x
Zillow 7x
Grubhub 6x
Tesla 6x
Box 5x
Twitter 4x
Yelp 4x
Square 4x
Amazon 3x
I'm not making the case that today's valuations are at or near the highs from the peak of the tech bubble, but this is an unfair comparison. Whereas the m.o. back in the day was to IPO as soon as possible, today's tech companies have access to a wealth of VC funding and have the capacity and desire to stay private for much longer. SNAP is currently trading at 67x ltm sales and a number of private companies have mind boggling valuations: https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/sales-multiples-30-unicorns/
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There's a surprising level of callousness on display from a group of people that pride themselves on intellectual curiosity.
Yes, for some people the joke was simply an amusing restatement of their personal experience in dating. But is it really so difficult to understand why others might take offense at it?
The experience of being sexually assaulted or subject to unwanted sexual advances is a common one for women in modern day society, and certainly one that you wouldn't wish on your mother, wife, or daughter. I am not suggesting that Warren Buffett was condoning such behavior, but the joke reinforces a mentality and creates a permission structure for men to not respect the will of women. Perhaps it encourages frat boys to believe and vocalize that "no means yes, yes means anal." http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2010/10/15/dke-apologizes-for-pledge-chants/
So while you are emotionally well-adjusted and can interpret the difference between someone saying no and someone playing coy, maybe that's not true of everybody, and maybe we shouldn't encourage people to assume consent and encourage guys to harass women.
I must have missed something ..... how is callousness related to intelligence?
We all know we are above average intelligence but who says intelligent people are less callous?
Nobody was posting porn or talking about rape.... what I learned but the last US election is that PC can drive people to the edge....... don't let PC rule this forum.....
Intellectual curiosity is not intelligence, it is the desire to learn more about a person, place, or thing. One way we do that is by appreciating different perspectives from people with different backgrounds and experiences. I made no argument about a relationship between intelligence and callousness.
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There's a surprising level of callousness on display from a group of people that pride themselves on intellectual curiosity.
Yes, for some people the joke was simply an amusing restatement of their personal experience in dating. But is it really so difficult to understand why others might take offense at it?
The experience of being sexually assaulted or subject to unwanted sexual advances is a common one for women in modern day society, and certainly one that you wouldn't wish on your mother, wife, or daughter. I am not suggesting that Warren Buffett was condoning such behavior, but the joke reinforces a mentality and creates a permission structure for men to not respect the will of women. Perhaps it encourages frat boys to believe and vocalize that "no means yes, yes means anal." http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2010/10/15/dke-apologizes-for-pledge-chants/
So while you are emotionally well-adjusted and can interpret the difference between someone saying no and someone playing coy, maybe that's not true of everybody, and maybe we shouldn't encourage people to assume consent and encourage guys to harass women.
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Some excerpts are available here:
http://www.businessinsider.com/bauposts-seth-klarman-investor-letter-on-donald-trump-markets-2017-2
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Matt Levine's latest missive is worth reading:
"I think sometimes about how Anthony Scaramucci compared the Department of Labor's fiduciary rule to Dred Scott, the 1857 U.S. Supreme Court decision protecting slavery and ruling that African-Americans can't be citizens. "The left-leaning Department of Labor has made a decision to discriminate against a class of people who they deem to be adding no value,” said Scaramucci, a fund-of-funds marketer who was also an adviser and spokesman for Donald Trump's campaign. And he said that, if Trump were elected, he'd repeal the fiduciary rule.
Trump, meanwhile, never said that. Instead he promised to ban Muslims from traveling to the United States. Scaramucci tried not to think about this: "I’ll make a prediction right now that he will not put a ban on Muslims coming into America," he once told Gawker. Did he believe that? Or did he think that the Department of Labor rule requiring financial advisers to put their customers' interests ahead of their own is the great moral evil of our time, comparable to slavery, and that a ban on Muslim immigration was an acceptable trade-off to end that evil?
Now Trump has his Muslim ban, sort of. On Friday -- Holocaust Remembrance Day -- Trump issued an executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries from traveling to the U.S. The ban covered U.S. lawful permanent residents who have spent years following the law and building lives here, interpreters who heroically helped the U.S. military, children of U.S. citizens, dissidents who fought hostile regimes, scientific researchers, Syrian Christians, British Olympians, and endangered refugee children who were carefully vetted to be allowed into the U.S.
But you know what Trump hasn't done yet? Repeal the fiduciary rule! Or even talk about it. Its future remains uncertain, and while there is a good chance that it will eventually be repealed, big brokerages are moving to implement its changes now anyway.
This is a widespread pattern. Many people in the business and financial and technology communities listened to what Trump said, and cheerily assumed he'd do something completely different. Sure he talked about restricting trade and banning Muslim immigrants, but what they heard was that he'd enact "sensible immigration policy" and pro-growth trade agreements, reduce taxes, cut back regulation and generally improve conditions for business. As I said in November:
Peter Thiel and others said that Trump should be taken "seriously but not literally." Taking Trump literally means believing that he'll do what he says. Taking him seriously means believing that he'll do what you want.
And what has happened so far? Immigration bans (with more to come), abandoned trade agreements, "alternative facts," unprompted promises to bring back torture. And what has not happened so far? Tax policy is a complete mystery, with an unclear and walked-back promise to impose a border tax. Health-care policy is even more mysterious. Trump has made vague promises to cut regulations by 75 percent, but his specific regulatory focus seems to be on increasing penalties on companies that move operations abroad. Everything Trump literally said is coming literally true; everything the serious people heard remains an unserious hope. Businesses may eventually get the tax and regulatory reform they wanted, but it's not a priority. The technology industry, and some others, are beginning to figure this out:
Trump has "had this extraordinary honeymoon where Wall Street has kind of discounted all the negative aspects," Richard Fenning, the CEO of consultancy Control Risks, told Bloomberg Television. As companies react to the migrant ban, "perhaps that honeymoon is starting to be over," he said.
More than that, though. One upshot of Trump's executive order is that United States lawful permanent residents, who have jumped through years of hoops to comply with the intricate immigration rules enshrined in U.S. law, are no longer protected by that law. They can be deported at the whim of the President, or his advisers, or a Border Patrol agent. (The order originally barred lawful permanent residents, though after some confusion, now it will not, unless the Secretary of Homeland Security wants it to. On the other hand, soon it may apply to citizens.) The nation of laws that they immigrated to is gone, replaced by a nation of arbitrary rule.
If the president can, without consulting the courts or Congress, banish U.S. lawful permanent residents, then he can do anything. If there is no rule of law for some people, there is no rule of law for anyone. The reason the U.S. is a good place to do business is that, for the last 228 years, it has built a firm foundation on the rule of law. It almost undid that in a weekend. That's bad for business."
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-30/immigration-orders-and-odd-tenders
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Objectives. We examined the relationship between levels of household firearm ownership, as measured directly and by a proxy—the percentage of suicides committed with a firearm—and age-adjusted firearm homicide rates at the state level.
Methods. We conducted a negative binomial regression analysis of panel data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting Systems database on gun ownership and firearm homicide rates across all 50 states during 1981 to 2010. We determined fixed effects for year, accounted for clustering within states with generalized estimating equations, and controlled for potential state-level confounders.
Results. Gun ownership was a significant predictor of firearm homicide rates (incidence rate ratio = 1.009; 95% confidence interval = 1.004, 1.014). This model indicated that for each percentage point increase in gun ownership, the firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9%.
Conclusions. We observed a robust correlation between higher levels of gun ownership and higher firearm homicide rates. Although we could not determine causation, we found that states with higher rates of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.
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Thanks a ton!
Any suggestions on getting an entry level job with someone who'd sponsor me for the 7?
I'd be happy to pay all my own fees, etc., but if I understand correctly, an applicant for the 7 needs a sponsor/employer?
I was thinking maybe bank teller or office receptionist since I have no creds (other than a 1600/3000 ton Oceans Masters license which would be worthless in finance unless someone wanted hire me to transport a boat load of money...)
Here's the list of FINRA regulated companies: https://www.finra.org/about/firms-we-regulate
You should look for a position where you get a chance to talk to customers or clients beyond a secretarial or administrative role.
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Actually, "rich only" isn't really a fair description. Just people with something to lose voting. Tens of millions of Americans would fall into the category I described. And many younger people who don't now, will later in their lives.
Unless there was a way for those already wealthy and in power to institute policies that restrict economic mobility... ::)
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A few thousand people can make a difference in a national election. Trump won by narrow majority in MI & WI.
As to not seeing anything "weird" going on at the polling place in NYC...who knows...maybe people were inside & did not see out a window...perhaps a bus left people a 1/2 or 1 block away? Maybe they didn't take a bus? Maybe they rode in a van, subway?
Also, NYC probably went very, very heavily for Hillary & against Trump, heck, there were districts in OH & PA where 100% or 99.9% of the votes went Democrat, maybe there was not a Trump poll watcher at all districts?
What is not in contention is what the election commissioner said. Of course, maybe he was just making all that stuff up.
If you also think that a political machine that will "rig" local and state election is suddenly NOT going to do anything in a NATIONAL election, I've got bad news for you.
Do you have a count for the total number of ballots cast in the OH & PA districts that you claim went 99.9% or 100% for Clinton?
Do you honestly believe that the Democratic party is organized enough to charter vans or buses, get drivers to load them up with hundreds or thousands of volunteers or paid actors and travel from polling site to polling site without being detected or arousing suspicion? That people are surreptitiously let off a block away and trickle in a few people at a time to hoodwink election officials (including Republicans) with false voter registration information for every new location? That they are so good at this that despite happening en masse, no one has ever caught a picture or video of this or interacted with those fraudulent voters or organizers in an age where everyone has a smartphone in their pocket? Is this really easier for you to believe than large scale voter fraud not existing in the US?
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From a leftist guy, I totally agree with Cardboard here! An ID should be an absolute requirement to vote, I don't see why there should be a debate about this!
I think that this is an idea that is fine in theory, but has to be implemented properly, something that's often not the case. Just as how voter education laws make sense (making sure that people have a clear understanding of who and what they are voting for), but have historically been used to discriminate against certain groups. See: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_rights_and_the_supreme_court_the_impossible_literacy_test_louisiana.html
The voter ID laws crafted by Republican state legislatures disproportionately affect poor and minority voters. https://www.thenation.com/article/wisconsin-is-systematically-failing-to-provide-the-photo-ids-required-to-vote-in-november/
In Canada, it is not complicated, you show a driver licence or something and they check your name on the list, that's it. Is it bulletproof? No, but is way better than nothing IMO.
In my state, you are assigned a polling location. When you arrive, you give the election official your name and address and that is matched to your voter registration information. If you were to impersonate someone that has already voted or is not registered for that location, presumably you would get caught and not be allowed to cast a ballot.
Many non citizens get assistance. The only ID that is only given to citizens is a US Passport, so why not require one to vote?
I've said this before, but democracy would work better (still not perfect, but better) if it allowed only stakeholders in society to vote. Maybe require $100K equity in a property or $100K ownership in a business, plus a US passport. Maybe allow someone to get around the $100k ownership rule if they are willing to pay a $500 voting fee for every election they wish to vote in.
Not all citizens have passports. My friend did not get one until last year when she was 30 years old. If you want to waive passport fees and give them at birth or age 18, that's fine. Why do you think that social policy should be set exclusively by the rich? Are they just more enlightened than everybody else?
As Alexis de Tocqueville correctly observed "The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money". That would be less likely to happen if the taxpayers voted and the tax receivers didn't. I'd also prohibit anyone currently holding political office or working for any level of government from voting (along with their immediate family members). Also the 100k ownership in a business is not valid if that business gets any subsidies from any level of government or makes any sales to any government department or agency. The moment you take a direct payment of even one cent from government you should lose your right to vote.
Government does more than reallocate taxes and fees. Why should a public school teacher have no say on civil rights issues?
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From a leftist guy, I totally agree with Cardboard here! An ID should be an absolute requirement to vote, I don't see why there should be a debate about this!
I think that this is an idea that is fine in theory, but has to be implemented properly, something that's often not the case. Just as how voter education laws make sense (making sure that people have a clear understanding of who and what they are voting for), but have historically been used to discriminate against certain groups. See: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_rights_and_the_supreme_court_the_impossible_literacy_test_louisiana.html
The voter ID laws crafted by Republican state legislatures disproportionately affect poor and minority voters. https://www.thenation.com/article/wisconsin-is-systematically-failing-to-provide-the-photo-ids-required-to-vote-in-november/
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Maybe Okeefe has engaged in shady things, perhaps that is true. If so, he should be held to higher scrutiny. HOWEVER, if you watch that video of the NYC election commissioner, he let the cat out of the bag. The video is about 4 minutes. There is NO WAY that thing has been taken out of context or misrepresented. The only way is if they somehow tricked him into reading que cards OR were holding a gun to his head.
At the end of the video, he discusses that ALL SORTS of fraud is going on with the state issued ID's. It is not limited to voter fraud...
I watched the video, here's where I see camera cuts: 0:08, 0:26, 0:58, 1:13, 1:23, 1:38, 1:57, 2:39, 2:50, 3:01, 3:09, 3:37. They should release the full video in addition to this edited version. That said, most of his comments are opinion or conjecture, not an admission or fact. The context of busing voters seems to very clearly relate to NYS assembly primary candidates. The full fraud quote is "You can see a lot of fraud. Not just voter fraud, all kinds of fraud" and the response was "what a waste of taxpayer money," his comment is not specific to state issued IDs. Given O'Keefe's track record, I see no reason to give him any benefit of the doubt that this conclusively proves vast voter fraud.
I will concede that it might not be VAST voter fraud, BUT that is certainly evidence that things are going on in NYC. If buses of people are being moved around in local elections, might that not be going on in national elections? This coming from one of the guys in charge of voting!
What he is saying could be termed "an admission against interest"...
If you don't think that video is alarming, I guess we just see things differently.
It seems pretty clear that the difference between local elections and state/national elections are that a few people can make a difference in the prior, whereas it takes tens or hundreds of thousands to make a difference in the latter. The Trump campaign asked its supporters to be poll watchers on election day, how come none of them were able to spot massive irregularities - like the busing of thousands of people across different polling places?
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Many non citizens get assistance. The only ID that is only given to citizens is a US Passport, so why not require one to vote?
I've said this before, but democracy would work better (still not perfect, but better) if it allowed only stakeholders in society to vote. Maybe require $100K equity in a property or $100K ownership in a business, plus a US passport. Maybe allow someone to get around the $100k ownership rule if they are willing to pay a $500 voting fee for every election they wish to vote in.
Not all citizens have passports. My friend did not get one until last year when she was 30 years old. If you want to waive passport fees and give them at birth or age 18, that's fine. Why do you think that social policy should be set exclusively by the rich? Are they just more enlightened than everybody else?
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Maybe Okeefe has engaged in shady things, perhaps that is true. If so, he should be held to higher scrutiny. HOWEVER, if you watch that video of the NYC election commissioner, he let the cat out of the bag. The video is about 4 minutes. There is NO WAY that thing has been taken out of context or misrepresented. The only way is if they somehow tricked him into reading que cards OR were holding a gun to his head.
At the end of the video, he discusses that ALL SORTS of fraud is going on with the state issued ID's. It is not limited to voter fraud...
I watched the video, here's where I see camera cuts: 0:08, 0:26, 0:58, 1:13, 1:23, 1:38, 1:57, 2:39, 2:50, 3:01, 3:09, 3:37. They should release the full video in addition to this edited version. That said, most of his comments are opinion or conjecture, not an admission or fact. The context of busing voters seems to very clearly relate to NYS assembly primary candidates. The full fraud quote is "You can see a lot of fraud. Not just voter fraud, all kinds of fraud" and the response was "what a waste of taxpayer money," his comment is not specific to state issued IDs. Given O'Keefe's track record, I see no reason to give him any benefit of the doubt that this conclusively proves vast voter fraud.
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Taxpayer funds paying for wall construction and resources spent on "voter fraud" in an election he won
I don't think there is any question that voter fraud is occurring. The question is HOW MUCH of it is going on.
How is that?
A). A "bigwig" (Alan Schulkin, Commissioner of Board of Elections NYC) is caught on tape discussing how they bus people into certain districts to vote, he also goes on to discuss other types of fraud and that massive fraud is going on: http://www.dailywire.com/news/9876/watch-nyc-dem-election-official-caught-video-there-amanda-prestigiacomo
Why did this not get more attention? Absolutely shocking....
B). Here in Michigan almost half of the voting districts in Detroit did not have their votes recounted as there were problems with the ballot box (being unlocked), the number of people showing up to vote didn't match the number of ballots cast, and on & on. Mind you, not all of this is due to voter fraud. Sometimes there was 1 more ballot cast than recorded, so that is more likely a clerical error than a scam going on....but there certainly were goofy things going on. Simply the fact that there is so much sloppiness & error is a scandal in of itself.
C). Many, many states are embroiled in litigation in regards to voter ID. I have to show ID to enter federal buildings, courts, libraries, casinos, etc. How do so many people go through life without any ID? Are poor minority people of such destitution that they can't afford the $5 to get a state ID? How do they drive? They can't figure this out? Just pondering this out loud.
Q: Why would you NOT want ID's to be checked when voting?
A: In order to enable wide scale voter fraud.
D). When I was living in Houston Texas, there were millions of illegal immigrants. Most of them were hard working, decent people. HOWEVER, you can't tell me that some of them aren't voting. Is it 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, more? Nobody really knows.
E). In the last election, there were districts in OH & PA where Mitt Romney (and others) received 0,1,2 votes. These were almost all in minority districts. No doubt, Obama was going to win these districts and win them heavily....but the Republican wouldn't get 1% of the vote? The Green party wouldn't get 1%? Obama got 100% or 99.9%? This wasn't 1 or 2 districts...this went on in many districts. If that happened in more than 1 or 2 districts, I would think alone would be evidence of fraud going on...
This is just what I can think of off the top of my head. I am sure that there are other things going on. So yes, there is voter fraud going on, just a question of how much, and how much an effect it has on the outcome.
There seems to be an incredible disconnect among those blasting a 'biased media' while at the same time advocating sources like James O'Keefe's Project Veritas to be factual. He's been criticized extensively for deceptive editing and framing by the Columbia Journalism Review and the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting organization.
The signature O’Keefe method is to try to entrap his subjects into breaking the law.In January, 2010, the F.B.I. arrested O’Keefe and three accomplices, two of whom had disguised themselves as telephone repairmen in order to enter the New Orleans office of Mary Landrieu, then a Democratic senator for Louisiana. (O’Keefe says he had hoped to disprove Landrieu’s claim that her phone lines were too clogged to answer the many angry calls coming from Tea Party activists.) O’Keefe was sentenced to three years of probation and a hundred hours of community service; he also paid a fifteen-hundred-dollar fine.
In 2011, O’Keefe embarrassed National Public Radio when two accomplices, pretending to represent a radical Muslim group, proposed to donate five million dollars to the network in exchange for favorable programming about Islam. After O’Keefe released videos depicting two NPR employees chatting with the undercover operatives about the need to put Muslim voices on the air, and criticizing the Republican Party as “not just Islamophobic but really xenophobic,” two top NPR officials, including its chief executive, Vivian Schiller, resigned.
Many O’Keefe operations, however, have fallen flat, including his repeated efforts to prove that voter-identity fraud is pervasive. “It seems like most of the fraud O’Keefe uncovers he commits himself,” Richard Hasen, a professor of election law at the University of California, Irvine, says. A sting aimed at Hillary Clinton last year was considered especially feeble. Veritas operatives persuaded a staffer at a rally to accept a Canadian citizen’s money in exchange for a Hillary T-shirt—a petty violation of the ban on foreign political contributions. Brian Fallon, the communications director for the Clinton campaign, says, “Project Veritas has been repeatedly caught trying to commit fraud, falsify identities, and break campaign-finance law. It is not surprising, given that their founder has already been convicted for efforts like this.”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/james-okeefe-accidentally-stings-himself
Part of the problem with the voter ID laws is that states have restricted them such that only certain forms of ID are acceptable. For example, in North Carolina government issued public assistance cards (with photos) were not permissible as valid forms of ID. It's not a coincidence that those with the public assistance cards were disproportionately minorities.
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ADP and other payroll processors have enormous floats.
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The 2013 run-up in Altisource Asset Management Corp (AAMC) is confounding to me.
Coufounding how? They had a residual-like (high multiple) revenue model based on Ocwen's portfolio, which was growing like crazy at the time as they bought the MSRs from all the banks post-2009. I can see how it became valuable over time if you assumed (as most did) that Ocwen/Erby were just good, salt-of-the-earth, capitalists.
Confounding in the way that any stock is that returns in excess of 1,000% in the year after its IPO. The company's market cap almost doubled in Q4 with no news or discernible change in the forecast. If you have a spreadsheet or valuation write-up that justified a price in excess of $500 per share, I'd love to see it.
There used to be a write up here: https://glennchan.wordpress.com/
but i think the site is down. otherwise i would go back to the ocwen thread as i think it was discussed quite a bit back then, if my memory serves
My comment was on AAMC, not ASPS.
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The 2013 run-up in Altisource Asset Management Corp (AAMC) is confounding to me.
Coufounding how? They had a residual-like (high multiple) revenue model based on Ocwen's portfolio, which was growing like crazy at the time as they bought the MSRs from all the banks post-2009. I can see how it became valuable over time if you assumed (as most did) that Ocwen/Erby were just good, salt-of-the-earth, capitalists.
Confounding in the way that any stock is that returns in excess of 1,000% in the year after its IPO. The company's market cap almost doubled in Q4 with no news or discernible change in the forecast. If you have a spreadsheet or valuation write-up that justified a price in excess of $500 per share, I'd love to see it.
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The 2013 run-up in Altisource Asset Management Corp (AAMC) is confounding to me.
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Nobody goes to the grocery store and buys spoiled food just because it's half price.
Spoiled food has no value, other than as fertilizer. There are stores that will sell 'misfit' food that have cosmetic defects for a discount.
Regarding Daryl Morey and the Houston Rockets, is there any evidence that they have drafted more efficiently than other NBA teams given their draft slots? Or that NBA teams are overall better at drafting players than they were a decade ago? The Morey era Rockets don't immediately come to mind among teams that have the best recent draft records (Jazz, Warriors, Thunder, Spurs, Bucks), they are more known for their statistically optimal offensive game plan.
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She took down the post saying, "I think I took it too far... There are many things I agree with Whitney on, and I wish my tone had been less heated."
I traded mortgages and mortgage derivatives before, during and after the GFC
in General Discussion
Posted
Thanks for providing your perspective.
What is the mortgage derivatives market like today?