Recent content by DrChaos

Rich economists who do make money trading introduce themselves, especially to women, as "traders" or "fund managers". Well, what would you do? Robert Rubin was an economist, and wasn't he on the board of Citibank? How about this economist who recently snaked out the options...

It would be nice and really wonderful if it were so, but it doesn't appear to be so. If it were, why wasn't Arafat dumped after he rejected a damn good deal with no counteroffer? Why the intifadah again? The majority voted for Hamas. Many of the Arabs who feel like in the quotation...

What would you say are some up to date ways of modeling nonstationary time series? (This is a serious question, not a troll.)

I knew Lisa Borland who was a speaker at that conference. She is just about the smartest scientist I've ever known, and I've met many.

Why not Madagascar?

Iran, in contrast to Saudi, does believe in 'peak oil' apparently has a policy of not producing too quickly, or with the really highest technology, as that can result in higher output temporarily, but later damage and ultimately lower recovery of oil. Think of things this way. In the...

Saudis complaining about the "lack of advanced refining facilities" is a clever deception around the real problem. The refining facilities have always been what they are now and they haven't been degrading in technology. The difference is that the Saudis, and the world for that matter...

<i>I think it rather more pragmatic to get on their good side (however unreliable their good side might be), rather than on the good side of a few million Zionists.</i> Has there been any evidence that "getting on the good side" of the Muslim world has ever resulted in reciprocal gratitude in...

<i>I honestly no longer see any pevailing moral issue in favor of the existence of Israel. Indeed, the only prevailing moral issue is the immoral imposition of Zionists on the native Arabs.</i> OK, when Israel goes boom, then the West should work on Pakistan, right? Both were created...

<i>It's naive to believe that the science, and scientists, have not been politicized. Academic scientists who don't go along with the PC consensus on numerous issues can be ruined.</i> The only place this is really happening now is with Karl Rove's minions who were (formerly) shadowing people...

The scientific questions on global warming have now generally moved on even from the key question about cause itself, namely the role of human change to atmospheric chemistry and consequent change in greenhouse effect (this is observed fact, not theory any more). It is now undoubtable that...

"You should also mention that many taders are using nothing more then Excel and Mathlab, hehe" Excel may have a poor programming language but often the people with the best ideas are doing it in something like Matlab even though it is quite limited itself. Ideas are what matter. I...

Reading the last posts: do you know what that really means? It means that Toyota management respects engineers and the way engineers think. There is an anti-intellectual and anti-science bias pervading much of US culture---why else are management executives who don't know engineering...

The key problem with 'money supplyism' in setting interest rates (a la Freidman 1980's) is that it's hard to measure, and worse the effect on the economy depends on a nearly impossible to measure "money velocity". So the money velocity can change and thereby the effect of the same money...

True, but in the case of "money nationalization" the best thing is not to have gold, but your money parked offshore already. They can frisk you at the airport, x-ray your luggage and find your gold bars too. Probably they'd incarcerate you "as a terrorist financing suspedt" if you tried to...