Learning another language requires so much time and effort that it is almost always an effort misplaced unless the language is English.
Learning a language is a few years of hard work. I have a friend who is an assistant professor in Germany and he's toying with an idea of learning German, but he mentioned to me that he was wondering whether learning a programming language, say C++, wouldn't be a better use of his time. To which my answer was: By expanding the amount of effort required to learn to speak German, you wouldn't be able to just learn C++; the comparable thing would be to go from knowing nothing about programming, to knowing enough to be able to land a job as a Software Engineer in any company in the Silicon Valley.
What a useless point of view. English wont always be the dominant language. What will people like you do then?
Is everything a waste of time unless you can directly make money from it? Learning a language teaches you so many things. Things about your language, gives you insight into other cultures, etc., etc.
You have only this many five-years projects left to complete in this life. If you really prefer learning a foreign language to learning quantum mechanics, or computer programming, or how to play a piano, by all means don't let me stop you.
My understanding is GS is company that wants to "beat the market" meaning someone else in the market is loosing. And Google's goal is to make the worlds information available to everyone and show them ads. Google seems more like a everyone wins company.
The following is from a talk at the New York Public Library.
ERIC SCHMIDT: But in fairness to those people[finance people], had they come to Silicon Valley in 1999 they would have received a far greater payoff during our little bubble. So who are we to criticize the Wall Street folks for having their bubble? It was just a bigger bubble.
WALTER ISAACSON: Do you think though that Google creates something that’s more real than somebody on Wall Street creating a financial instrument?
ERIC SCHMIDT: To be honest, not really. When I walked into the company, I said, “People pay you for this thing, these little ads?”
Eh, I don't see how candidness and an eagerness to question his own model by Schmidt changes the value proposition at all. Almost all of the time, an ad click is creating value (or a fractional expected value) where there wasn't some before, unless you have a 0% conversion rate.
Meanwhile, a huge chunk of Goldman's activity as I understand it is simply taking the "dumb money" on Wall St. Nibbling the edges, taking pieces of trades by less sophisticated investors. That's not necessarily value creation, and much of the time it can be straight extraction from the rest of the economy.
Not that ads won't get there of course - they're well on their way already with various exchanges. But presently, they have to actually be creating other economic value via conversions in order to exist.
Everyone wants to "beat the market." For every dollar McDonalds gets, Burger King is not. For every dollar Microsoft gets, Apple is not. There are no group hugs unless you work for a non-profit (and even then, for every dollar your non-profit gets, some other, equally deserving non-profit is not).
This sounds like a very zero-sum model. Do you know, that dollars don't get destroyed by spending them? (And that this doesn't even matter, because it's wealth creation that matters (supply) and not demand?)
Certainly, but assuming it can't be zero-sum leads to absurdity as well.
What about high frequency trading? Most of it is zero sum, first one to arb the difference wins. The economy doesn't derive any higher value from it if the difference would've been corrected within a couple seconds (or a few minutes) anyways. It's not the same as buying a burger.
The value investor gets an abstraction over the ocean of algos and traders trying to out-game each other. The abstraction is that there's a market price and a book depth. The deeper the book, the more stock the value investor can move around without being gimped by increasingly undesirable prices. The more traders, the deeper the book.
Finance pundits worry about the implications of traders gaming each other. Let them game each other. The value investor sees a market price backed by millions of dollars of offers within pennies of each other. Should his trades move the market, much more liquidity will spring to life. The value investor feels fine.
Hm, I think we're talking past each other although I'd like to hear more exposition on your comment because it doesn't really make sense to me.
I was talking more from the perspective of someone who's generating cash. Burger King pays suppliers for meat and whatever (or raises cows in their own operation) and you pay them for a burger. You get a burger, they get cash, pay people, value creation all around.
In Wall St, on the other hand, theoretically we should see value creation through efficient routing of capital to the right places and the people who make that happen are rewarded for their effort. In practice, I feel, it's often a video game where they manage to nibble a billion little pieces away from the value-based investors who are actually performing an economic function. So in some scenarios, they're a net drain, rather than part of a robust economy. That's where my zero-sum analogy came in. YMMV.
Yes, the difference between theory and practice can be startling in finance. But I am more wary about fleecing the customer than about counter parties in a high frequency trade. [1] And of course there's also always making money by rent-seeking behaviour. E.g. the implicit subsidy banks get in lower borrowing costs on the market once they are to big to fail.
[1] Mutual fund managers or hedge funds who take a lot of fees are probably quite a drain on your their clients returns.
> For every dollar McDonalds gets, Burger King is not. For every dollar Microsoft gets, Apple is not.
I'm pretty sure that's not the case. Apple and Burger King would probably never be what they are today without MSFT or Mac. And perhaps vise versa also.
for every dollar of ads google sells, that's a dollar their competitors don't get. they are as cut throat as anybody else, they just do a better job of making computer people feel good about it. ask their sales department if they're an "everyone wins" company.
If G-mail didn't exist I would use yahoo. G-mail is much better for me though. I win and Google wins. Yahoo looses. If GS gets in front of Citi on a trade by 2 seconds GS wins and Citi looses, no one else is involved. Unless those two seconds of "efficiency" help someone?
Once the board found out their hands were tied. They didn't know exactly what went down, but there was a real possibility of a story coming out implying money for sex.
A bug is classified as Critical based on how much access/damage the an attack could create, not based on how it would affect customers. It is possible to have a critical vulnerability that you can expect very few customers to see.
Did they verify non drinkers are non drinkers? My Doctor friend tells me that she is amazed at how many people when asked if they drink, emphatically say "Never".
Cognitive dissonance is widespread. An old roommate once informed me she had given up drinking, because she switched from vodka crans to wine. It's similar to vegetarians who sometimes eat chicken and people who "don't watch TV" because all the shows they watch are on Hulu.
I'd suspect it's less to do with cognitive dissonance, and more intentional lying to meet social norms or out of fear of future problems.
Anything controversial, highly personal, or with stigmas attached will get biased results from self-reporting. Alcohol, drugs, sexual history, religious views, political views, racial prejudices, etc will almost always be biased towards what the person thinks is the right answer.
I personally don't like the taste, nor the side effects - I wish alcohol was the social grease it's touted as, but for me it's only bad side effects.
Nobody in my family drinks (as in, you won't find a single alcoholic beverage at a Christmas party or weekend barbecue for example), and my current girlfriend was a very casual drinker and has quit since she started dating me.
Many of the surveys I've seen in doctors offices & similar don't distinguish well between "almost never" and "never". I know a fair number of people in my family are in the "almost never" category. They might have a glass of wine at Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner, but that's about it. I don't know what they tell their doctors, but given the usual checkboxes for frequency of alcohol consumption, "never" is probably what I'd select.
It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material
