bdkoepke

If you have a perksatwork account, you can get a thinkpad with those specs for about $1.2k. During national holidays it goes for under $1k.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadp/le...

External dedicated GPU enclosure. Turns a Thunderbolt-3 laptop into a workstation for CAD & AI workflows.

The cash sweep program at ibkr is FDIC insured up to $2.5M, plus $250k SIPC.

ICS and CDARS cash sweep is FDIC insured across 2000 banks.

Also consider direct buying treasuries with a segregated custodial account.

PSA: Outside of stat arb and heavily leveraged market making with teams of PhDs, 60% annualized CAGR doesn't exist. In the real world, anything above 10% over the long-term (in-sample over 50 years), is extremely likely to be spurious and won't repeat.

None of the retail brokers (including ibkr) do this correctly, although ibkr is probably the best for retail. Their cross-margining for futures options doesn't work (since the options are treated as "securities" and the futures are treated as "commodities", they treat them as segregated accounts).

They do handle multi-legged options trading, and implement SPAN correctly within the futures space. Portfolio Margining is not always correct (they don't implement customer portfolio margin baskets right), and be aware that margin can *and does* change drastically, particularly during financial crisis.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/an-empirical-ana... (p38-45).

Sure, equal weight split between SPY, EFA, EEM, VNQ.

7.7% real return with 17.7% vol vs 7.1% real return with 17.1% vol.

Sharpe for equal weight: 0.435; Sharpe for SPY: 0.415

True for strong-form EMH but not for semi-strong or weak.

Not necessarily true; if you got a mark on copper futures in Europe then you would expect the best American copper futures bid/ask to change fast. Updating bid/ask doesn't require trading.

Emerging and international developed markets performed extremely well last year. Part of the under-performance this year is from the US dollar rising.

On an enterprise value basis the US looks more expensive than both international and emerging markets[1].

[1] https://allocatesmartly.com/asset-allocation-roundup-2/?aff=...

Title is misleading, "Animal spirits" is a phrase used by John Maynard Keynes to refer to exuberance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_spirits_(Keynes)

The issue is Amazon stock is very expensive when compared with other companies.

Walmart's market cap is ~250B, whereas Amazon is $350B.

Amazon had $100B sales last year, Walmart had $500B.

If Amazon can generate profit at the same rate as Walmart then Amazon needs to get to $700B in sales for that valuation to make sense...

If Amazon double's in value again it would have to have sales representing 10% of US GDP at the same profitability level as Walmart.

Smells like a speculative bubble to me.

I agree with you completely.

I said "I believe the science is still out on this" because I personally haven't found anything conclusive myself. Until I find evidence one way or the other I'm not inclined to take a strong opinion on it. So far the best argument for sit-stand desks seems to be "sitting is 'going to kill you faster than smoking' so standing must be better". Correlation != causation... I'm much more inclined to believe this is just a spurious correlation...

Sit-stand desk is probably the best with the information we currently have.

http://healthland.time.com/2011/04/13/the-dangers-of-sitting... http://vuir.vu.edu.au/21403/1/Van_Uffelen_Occupational_sitti...

Like everything in life, moderation is the key. If you are getting up and down from your desk regularly anyway then the health benefits wouldn't be very large. Standing all day isn't particularly good for you either.

I believe the science is still out on this. My main issue with the current studies is that the occupations are different. For instance, what is the difference in stress between a GP and an accountant? As far as I'm aware, there haven't been any studies that compare mortality that control for the 'same occupation'. The studies thus-far have only shown that people who have occupations that require standing tend to have lower all-cause mortality than those whose occupations usually involve sitting. If there is such a study then I’m interested in reading it.

How are you controlling for survivor bias?

Unless these investors are highly leveraged, have insider information, or are simply 'lucky' (or a combination of all three) I would assume survivor bias... The best proprietary firms in the world don't make 50% per year...

The direct-download url is also from lenovo.

http://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/thinkvantage_en/metroapps/...

I think the version in f-droid is 13.1.2. If you enable the guardian repository in f-droid that should have the 14.0.9 client which is considerably nicer. You can disable all otr if you want, or set it so you need to explicitly enable it when you are chatting with someone. The latest version has adopted the Android L theme as well so it is very well integrated. (I did have the same issue as you with the version in the f-droid repository).

I personally don't use iOS so I'm not sure whether that is still an issue. They released an update for the iOS client fairly recently so you could give that a shot? The new iOS client seems like it is very nice: https://chatsecure.org.

I don't know why ChatSecure by the guardian project never comes up in these discussions: https://guardianproject.info/apps/chatsecure/

It uses Otr for encrypted chat, so you can use any otr client for the other side of the chat. I personally use pidgin on my laptop and ChatSecure on my cell. It currently supports at least iOS and Android, which encompasses most people that I know.

I use http://camelcamelcamel.com for amazon price tracking. Does anyone know of any other websites like this with price tracking?

For instance, Artificial intelligence a modern approach is $135 right now, but using this site I can see that it was <$90 in January of this year and it hit $100 in September: http://camelcamelcamel.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Modern-Ap...

Same story with Introduction to Algorithms, except it is now $80 and the lowest it hit was $44 in October: http://camelcamelcamel.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Edition-T...

Perhaps encouraging narcissism would be a better way to phrase that. Our society seems to be increasingly encouraging this type of behaviour...

Ah, I had forgotten about Manufacturing Consent. That is an excellent documentary as well. I have the book but I haven't yet read it.

Brave New World is already here to some extent largely due to the work of Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays. The excellent documentary "The Century of the Self" explains this better than I ever could: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self.

Overview from Wikipedia: "This series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy." —Adam Curtis'

Edward Bernays also wrote a book titled Propaganda and he invented the term Public Relations.

From wikipedia:

Edward Louis Bernays was an Austrian-American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations". He combined the ideas of Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter on crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud. He felt this manipulation was necessary in society, which he regarded as irrational and dangerous as a result of the "herd instinct" that Trotter had described.

In Propaganda he wrote:

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind."

You don't need to look far to see how hedonism, particularly through television programs like American Idol and ESPN*, have supplanted the laymans need for government involvement. I see no better example of hedonism than the fact that the word 'Selfie' was awarded 'Word of the Year' by the Oxford dictionary last year: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-24992393. I work at Disney and when I look to the television monitors I see ‘inspirational’ quotes that tell me that selfishness is desirable. In particular, I have learned that ’mephobia’ is defined as the 'Fear of becoming so awesome that the human race can't handle it and everyone dies.' Disgusting…

Hmm, perhaps it is just Canada then. I thought there was stricter regulation around commodities trading in the US as well. In Canada we do have some regulation around this though (at least in some provinces: http://www.e-laws.gov.on.ca/html/statutes/english/elaws_stat...) The manager from BP was very adamant about the fact that little communication was allowed between the traders and anyone else at BP.

Part of the issue is that BP also sells futures, and they have the ability to influence the futures price. (That is relating to your comment about economies of scale, storage capacity, etc).

I wasn't arguing about whether what BP is doing is legal or not. I was commenting on the initial post which implied that some traders are capable of making commodities trades based on some form of "skill". I was saying that they outperform the market because they have non-public information that gives them an advantage. (i.e. I was trying to dissuade laymen from thinking that they can make a quick buck off of commodities).

Thank you for those articles though. The second one in particular seems very interesting.

That isn't completely true, there are some insider trading laws that apply to commodities, in the US anyway. That is besides the point though, the fact that it is legal doesn't mean that it isn't insider trading.

I was commenting on "And there are definitely many traders in these spaces who consistently post outsized returns, which is why they get paid so much."

They outperform the market because they have superior market information...

And of course I realize that BP is going to sell their own commodity for as much as they can. It is just that there are actually pretty strict rules around how much information the trading branch is allowed to receive from the parent company.

We had a manager at BP come and present at my University a few years ago on commodity trading.

When he as discussing how BP consistently outperformed the market he didn't call it insider trading directly. If I recall his words were "BP leverages our superior market knowledge to outperform the market". In other words they had significant non-public information due to the fact that BP owns a significant amount of the commodities market. Supposedly the trading branch works at arms reach, but they still have access to production information that isn't available to the public...

One of my favourite university professors invited him to come and speak after the BP Canada Trading Competition: http://people.ucalgary.ca/~sick, http://haskayne.ucalgary.ca/bp-canada-trading-competition-de...

In response to your request for a "real food soylent",

There is another company called mealsquares that is planning on doing just that. I was going to sign up for the beta test but it currently isn't available in Canada.

http://www.mealsquares.com/

Depends on the kind of data you are storing. Hierarchical Data Format is a scientific data format developed by the national center for supercomputing. It is specifically designed to store and organize large amounts of numeric data (including timeseries). It supports flat arrays for large data sets, but also supports B-Trees for more relational style data as well. You can also easily tag the array data.

If your format is cast in stone you may also be able to get away with using flat-files. If you implement the List interface or something similar it would be very easy to integrate into your application. (Normally I wouldn't recommend flat-files for anything, but for time series it can be not a bad option, as much as that makes me cringe).

Android Auto: http://www.android.com/auto/

Yeah your probably right, the halo effect probably plays a roll as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect.

I was commenting more on the way that the journalist portrayed the research than the research itself.

Another example: "But, however powerful the economic and social forces behind the disappearing neighbour—and however positive many of its results—according to reams of new research, the transformation is also poisoning our politics and, quite literally, killing us."

These are the kinds of articles that cause people to have an anti-science attitude. "One week coffee is good for me and the next week it causes cancer". It also makes it very difficult to address these kinds of problems because you have one side where people are running around like chicken little and another side that may actually agree that the issues is a problem but they have much more moderate solutions than the majority.