I found this on Twitter about two minutes after the Red Sox blew their entire season in the ninth inning, when they were up two runs:
“Papelbon entregando a rapadura… eu vou dar muita risada quando nao renovarem o contrato desse filho da puta arrogante.”
I don’t know what it means, and yet I’m fairly sure I agree.
Greenblatt & Goober, Attorneys
September 14, 2009
Dear Baby Alexander,
We are writing on behalf of our client, your father, Jonathan Birge. This is in followup to, and clarification of, the ad hoc verbal contract entered into by you and Dr. Birge during negotiations of the bedtime taking place on the evening of September 12th, 2009. To wit:
You (heretofore LITTLE BABY) agree to make a goodfaith effort to “hush,” including, but not limited to, not saying a word. In return, your father (henceforth ‘DADDY’) has authorized us to release into your possession one (1) live mockingbird.
In the unlikely event said mockingbird should fail to sing, as determined by a third-party arbitration panel, DADDY will purchase, for you, a diamond ring of commensurate retail value.
Should the diamond ring be found of fraudulent origin, limited to composition by brass alloy, a looking glass will be provided. Herein, “looking glass” is understood to be a term of art, not to imply construction of any particular material. Specifically, molded polymer magnifying optics of any kind will be acceptable under the terms of this contract.
If the looking glass should become “broke” due to faulty materials or workmanship, excluding acts of god and/or negligence on your part, you agree to accept from DADDY one (1) billy goat as full payment in-kind.
If the billy goat fails to perform under previously agreed upon provisions terms in the standard goat labor contract, (see “Pulling” in the attached rider), DADDY agrees to provide you with a cart and bull of equal or greater value, as determined by commodity prices published in the prior day’s Wall Street Journal.
No guarantee is provided as to the cart and/or bull’s suitability for any implied or express purpose. Only in the event that the cart and bull should, as a unit, “turn over” (as per the accepted legal definition of a rotation of no less than 90 degrees around the cart-bull axis) will the warrantee terms of this agreement be in effect, and renumeration provided in the form of a dog, to referred to as “Rover” by both parties for the duration of the contract.
In the event the dog named “Rover” is unable, or refuses, to bark audibly, both parties agree to final compensation in the form of a horse and cart, under identical liability terms to the previously mentioned cart and bull. Should the cart and horse fail to maintain appropriate orientation, as defined in the adjoining diagram, the “FALL DOWN” clause of the horse and cart contract will be in effect: DADDY agrees to stipulate for the record that you are “the best baby in town,” with both parties enjoined from further comment on the matter for a period of thirty (30) days.
By falling asleep, you give your full consent and agreement to this contract, and agree to waive all future legal action against your father as it pertains to this or any prior informal mockingbird for sleep agreements.
This Contract shall be interpreted under the laws of the State of Nevada.
This Constract is executed in the City of Cambridge, County of Middlesex, Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Signed,
Steven Greenblatt, Esq.
It was recently revealed by ZD Net that Apple’s new Mac OS X release, dubbed Snow Leopard, would default to a 32-bit kernel despite being largely portrayed by Apple as the final step in the Mac’s journey to being a fully 64-bit OS. The reactions, as with anything Apple-related, were sheer polemic. Just check out the comments on the ZD Net article, and you’ll see what I mean. The Apple apologists played it off as if 64-bit code is pointless in the kernel, despite being indispensable in applications. The Microsoft partisans acted as if Apple had just halved the speed of the entire OS.
So, what’s the truth? I ran a few quick benchmarks to find out. To isolate the effects of the kernel from the benchmark software itself, I used a 32 bit benchmark program, XBench, so that the only thing that would be changing between the two runs was the kernel. (My understanding of Mac internals is not great, so I hope I wasn’t making a poor assumption here.) The results were interesting. As one might expect, neither side is entirely right or wrong.
The biggest difference was in memory allocation, where the difference was almost a factor of two. The next biggest difference was in the thread benchmarks, where the 64-bit kernel had a roughly 30% improvement in time. Finally, the 64-bit kernel had over a 10% improvement in large block disk transfer speed. These results seem plausible, as all involve tasks where the kernel plays a relatively large role. The rest of the benchmarks, mainly graphics and computation, had little or no improvement, as one would also expect.
So, it seems that while it’s true Apple isn’t doing a terrible thing by defaulting to the 32-bit kernel, it’s certainly also the case that you’re leaving some speed on the table. This is especially true for the disk transfer benchmarks, which can have a real effect on the perceived responsiveness of the computer.
The complete results for my are below. The test computer was a 2.53 GHz Mid-2009 MacBook Pro.
64-bit Kernel
Results 127.31 CPU Test 180.05 GCD Loop 285.50 15.05 Mops/sec Floating Point Basic 145.63 3.46 Gflop/sec vecLib FFT 120.72 3.98 Gflop/sec Floating Point Library 280.68 48.88 Mops/sec Thread Test 331.22 Computation 500.00 10.13 Mops/sec, 4 threads Lock Contention 247.63 10.65 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads Memory Test 200.62 System 255.76 Allocate 618.01 2.27 Malloc/sec Fill 185.89 9038.61 MB/sec Copy 211.31 4364.56 MB/sec Stream 165.04 Copy 157.53 3253.68 MB/sec Scale 155.20 3206.42 MB/sec Add 175.03 3728.48 MB/sec Triad 174.48 3732.49 MB/sec Quartz Graphics Test 190.82 OpenGL Graphics Test 86.25 User Interface Test 245.26 Disk Test 48.75 Sequential 101.56 Uncached Write 120.97 74.27 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 119.43 67.57 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 64.63 18.91 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 137.50 69.11 MB/sec [256K blocks] Random 32.07 Uncached Write 11.66 1.23 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 77.18 24.71 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 59.85 0.42 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 107.70 19.98 MB/sec [256K blocks]
32-bit Kernel
Results 122.67 CPU Test 179.50 GCD Loop 295.89 15.60 Mops/sec Floating Point Basic 141.66 3.37 Gflop/sec vecLib FFT 120.19 3.97 Gflop/sec Floating Point Library 283.69 49.40 Mops/sec Thread Test 260.69 Computation 396.28 8.03 Mops/sec, 4 threads Lock Contention 194.23 8.36 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads Memory Test 190.01 System 234.38 Allocate 369.54 1.36 Malloc/sec Fill 186.29 9057.73 MB/sec Copy 211.60 4370.52 MB/sec Stream 159.77 Copy 153.34 3167.08 MB/sec Scale 150.01 3099.22 MB/sec Add 169.51 3610.92 MB/sec Triad 168.11 3596.34 MB/sec Quartz Graphics Test 187.39 OpenGL Graphics Test 87.04 User Interface Test 237.42 Disk Test 46.82 Sequential 90.51 Uncached Write 118.31 72.64 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 79.22 44.82 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 60.05 17.57 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 154.69 77.75 MB/sec [256K blocks] Random 31.58 Uncached Write 11.29 1.20 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 76.69 24.55 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 60.83 0.43 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 116.08 21.54 MB/sec [256K blocks]
With recent advent of Woofer, the Twitter clone that requires the use of 1400 characters, I’d like to add my own entry into the foray.
Introducing Twitless: Twitter for Men. “140 Characters. A month.”
You can use your 140 characters any way you want, but if you use ‘em up early, you’ll just have to wait until next month, chatty Kathy.
Twitless. Because real men only talk when they have something to say.
I wonder if the ludicrous amount of media hype dedicated to the Oh-my-god-it’s-the-swine-flu-come-to-kill-us-all! has anything to do with trying to scare people into accepting healthcare reform. For the record, I’m all for healthcare reform, but I don’t appreciate fear tactics towards any end. The regular old flu is projected to kill more people this flu season than swine flu. Why are we still hearing about swine flu?
Do I have this straight? Democrats just passed a bill that will take $2B of money we don’t have from future ordinary taxpayers, and we will give that money as a reward to people who selfishly bought gas guzzling cars, most of whom are relatively wealthy SUV owners, so that our automotive industry can stay out of their second bankruptcy for a few more months? And the cars that are traded in must all be destroyed, instead of reused? Did I suffer a head injury and forget which party is supposed to screw the little guy and the environment to benefit the rich, or are they both just doing that now?
So, to summarize with an example: there is a shoe salesman in Mississippi whose grandchildren will be paying taxes so that some rich guy in Boston can be rewarded for trading in his Cadillac Escalade. I take this back. As Ken points out, rich people probably don’t keep these cars until their value drops below $4500. And take note, my voting friends, that a measure introduced to limit the cash payouts to only those below a certain income level was voted down by “The Party of the People” by a margin of about 2 to 1.
The crassness of this bill is only exceeded by the utter lack of efficacy. It takes some sort of talent to waste money so quickly and yet do so so impotently. At the end of the day, all of this will only be a drop in the red ink-filled bucket that is our automotive industry. This is the problem with spending government money on bribing consumers to spend on things they don’t need, instead of investing in capital projects. Either it works once or not at all, and in the long run both are about the same.
I just have one request of the small number of you who read this. Next election cycle, I don’t mind if you continue voting for Democrats. The Republicans have become such a joke that I can’t blame you. But please do me favor and quit being so damn smug about being a member of a party that has become nothing but the very slight lesser of two very big, stinking, corrupt evils. This Democratic-controlled congress is nothing which anybody with an ounce of integrity or intelligence should be proud to have elected.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the financial crash, it’s that the efficient market hypothesis is utterly bogus. As a corollary, just as dead is the idea of buy-and-hold investing as a rational way to make money. Stock market results from Japan, and now America and Europe, are making it increasingly clear that the relatively steady returns of the last century were an anomaly begetting complacency.
Moreover, I’d especially be wary of long term investing in an environment with nearly 10% unemployment and an economy entirely propped up by war-level deficit spending when (a) there is no war and (b) we already have more debt* than the entire private wealth of the country. The financial system crashed because we had unsustainable levels of credit being issued, pulling future demand forward in a way that had to end sometime. So, what did we do? We simply pulled demand forward by using a bigger lever, the United States Federal Government. When debt levels became untenable for individuals and corporations, we simply shifted them to the government, an entity with a higher credit rating by dint of its ability to steal with impunity to pay its bills. But that’s the end of the line, folks, and even the US government has its (credit) limits. The day of reckoning is drawing near, as the Chinese have made clear, and it won’t be pretty. I’m not predicting apocalypse, just extended tough times as we finally have to start paying the liquor bill for the long party.
So, if buy-and-hold is out, should you trade the market short term? Well, unless you’re a investment bank like Goldman Sachs, with the ability to access privileged order flow information and front run trades, you’d also have to be insane to try it. At this point, our stock markets are a farce, a rigged game for the benefit of a few elite financial firms. Spreads are huge, and people are getting scalped right and left by manipulation and high frequency computer trading games.
I’ve always looked with skepticism at the stock market. It’s a giant zero-sum game, for the most part, since dividends and stock buybacks have largely disappeared. Despite all the pumping of the market as a way to make wealth, it’s a mathematical fact that the stock market is essentially just a mechanism for transferring money between people and institutions. But lately, it’s also an empirical fact that it’s largely a way for money to be moved into Goldman Sachs’ trading accounts.
The stock market has become a Persian bazaar, and yet another example of the hubris and unchecked greed of Wall Street. It’s time the average person says “enough is enough” and quits playing. The only way Wall Street will get the message is if enough of us decide to quit being patsies, and leave the market. The truth is, your broker doesn’t care if you make money. They don’t offer their stock advice or “trading tools” because they give a damn about helping you. You’re the trading tool. They know, by definition, that their customers will lose money on average by taking their advice (it’s a negative sum game when you factor in commissions, even before considering that it’s a rigged game). They just need you to play the game, because the only way Wall Street stays alive is by skimming from the streams of money flowing through it.
If you haven’t thought about it yet, just ask yourself where money goes when it “goes into the market.” In truth it just goes from one person’s cash account into another’s. There is no such thing as money “in the market” or “on the sidelines.” It would be just as ridiculous to talk about money being tied up “in oranges” when people buy produce. Money is always going from one bank account to another. The market is just a way to transfer money and shares, and rather than money “moving in” from the sidelines it’s really more accurate to say that at any given point, dumb money is moving in or out of the market in the opposite direction of smart money. You have to wonder if you’re on the right side of this transfer, over the long run, if you decide to get into the market at this point.
I know you might miss the fun of trading stocks, but consider taking up gambling on sports, instead. At least it’s a fair game.
(*including government entitlement promises as debt)
