Two Conspiracy Theories
dilbert.com
dilbert.com
This is absolutely certain to be true, also goes for mutual funds, and it happens in the plain sight of almost every investor.
Hedge funds typically get two and twenty: two percent of your investment per year. Twenty percent of all gains. Apply this incentive structure to any sufficiently large pot of money and you make out like a bandit. Investors, not so much. Thankfully, if you have enough money to invest in a hedge fund you have enough money to pay someone who knows this to explain it to you.
Actively managed mutual funds charge a management fee, typically in the neighborhood of 1.5 ~ 2% a year. (These are, thankfully, coming down.) This compares to 0.2% a year for index funds. Since actively managed mutual funds do not add value -- another secret in plain sight -- this will, over time, result in approximately half of the investors' gains accruing to the money manager. Most investors just pick whatever their broker recommends (brokers shudder) or pick the default choice for their retirement plan, which is generally set via splitting that huge fee with whomever is tasked to do the recommendation.
Buy cheap index funds (or, if that strikes you as complicated, open an account with Vanguard and get one of their targeted retirement date options -- they'll work out the math for you).
Hedge funds charge high fees, but a subset of them provide a product you can't get anywhere else: returns orthogonal to other investments. Sophisticated investors pay happily for it. What's being stolen?
What does the interest accrue in instead of money? Complex money with real part 0?
The dirty secret is that hedge funds do not work long term. The stock market goes up on average over time. A hedge fund that does not correlate with the stock market has no guarantee or even reasonable expectation of doing so. The stock market rises over time because its constituent companies create wealth, by building or manufacturing things. Hedge funds have no such underlying creator of wealth. The only way a hedge fund makes money is to find a bigger fool. For every highly-leveraged gain, somebody else lost the same amount by possessing or acting on less information.
Some hedge funds actually do achieve consistent gains by technical means, as the original article touches on. They can have the fastest computers closest to the exchange trading centers, that can beat other investors to attractive offers by fractions of seconds and/or pennies. There's no secret cabal conspiracy there though. Profit is the only motive; any apparent manipulation is just the result of everybody acting in self interest.
Take his first example of a small group of rich people secretly running the world. Have people in the past conspired to influence outcomes at a local town or city wide level? Certainly. How about a larger scale than this, such as at a state or country level? Again, in many places, most certainly. Could that scale be increased even larger? Are there super wealthy people with power and influence? Certainly. When viewing things this way this "unlikely" theory becomes a lot more feasible, and the truth is probably somewhere between zero intentional conspiring, and one evil mastermind with an underground hundred-monitor supercomputer.
What about aliens abducting people? I don't know about implanting chips in people's necks, which Mr. Adams seems to have thrown in to conveniently push this theory into the complete nonsense pile. I've always heard simply about alien abductions. Now, most credible sane scientists will tell you that it's more likely than not there is alien life in the universe. If we've now established alien life likely exists, we can also reason that it's possible that some alien life is further evolved and advanced than humans. In my opinion, the first place the abduction theory breaks down is the likelihood of any actual contact with aliens in existence (the universe is a really, really big place). I would say that's unlikely enough to effectively kill the abduction theory completely. However, if one lets the mind wander and play then maybe sufficiently advanced life forms could have discovered a way to leap through spacetime akin to the Starship Enterprise's warp speed ability. Sure, that's still a huge stretch, but it does give a bit more entertaining feasibility to this abduction theory Mr. Adams has so completely dismissed.
To me that's how a true fan of conspiracy theories entertains them. ;)
Minor point about the aliens: if aliens had FTL interstellar travel, they would have built a galactic civilization before they found us. Such a civilization would be visible from Earth. See http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html for more details on these speculations. So, there may be more avenues to the abduction theory, but this one is closed.
How can you possibly know this? We don't know how big the universe is. Maybe they're on "the other side"?
Sounds like a Deeply Wise Curiosity Stopper. OK, it's all speculation, but it's still reasonable to expect visible changes, like Dyson spheres.
And the barnacle certainly would detect us. We changed the weather. We use planes all over the place. At the very least, it would detect Iridium Flashes, which are hardly natural. (OK, that would take a scientist sentient barnacle, but humanity does science anyway.)
No. A Dyson sphere would just emit a lot less radiation in the region that we happen to perceive as "visible". This is a special case of "Stealth is (close to) impossible in Space"
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewardetect.php
http://scienceblogs.com/builtonfacts/2010/03/while_doing_som...
http://scienceblogs.com/builtonfacts/2010/03/stealth_in_spac...
But how are those wild stories engineered? By collecting all facts and half-truths that seem to fit. (... and often by inventing additional "facts" as appropriate.)
So of course those stories are partly based on observations.
> This definition goes against the whole reason for including the word "theory" which is supposed to suggest underlying assumptions are at least in part based on observations.
For the reasons above, I think that your definition is almost equivalent to the definition of Mr. Adams.
Really? I would have thought that no credible scientist would try to extrapolate from a single data point. I think the current consensus in the scientific community is "we don't know".
1. US pressuring Germany not to pursue criminal investigation of US agents' kidnapping and torture of German national (who happened to be innocent, but that's not especially relevant)
http://harpers.org/archive/2010/11/hbc-90007831
2. US allegedly obstructing Spanish investigations of torture of Spanish subjects at Gitmo and use of Spanish facilities for extraordinary rendition program.
http://harpers.org/archive/2010/12/hbc-90007836
3. US diplomats spying on foreign diplomats, including the UN Sec. Gen., (although some do seem to think this is all de rigueur).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/28/us-embassy-cable...
Number 2 is pretty much more of the same. Number 3 is pretty much de rigueur.
Re: 2. According to Harpers, and its reading of El Pais and Público, what's newly revealed by the released cables is "a large-scale, closely coordinated effort by the State Department to obstruct ... criminal investigations"
Re: 3. Espionage may be expected, even accepted. What is or should be embarrassing for the US is its employment of State Dept. diplomats for the purpose of espionage.
Take, for example, the cable about nuclear weapons in the Netherlands. We always suspected those were there, but neither or government or the US government confirmed it. A lot of Dutch citizens are rightfully enraged now, we deserve to be told those things. We had to help the US find those WMDs in Iraq in their 'war for freedom', but it seems we're sitting on WMDs ourselves without knowing it. This is serious, not just some gossip!
And the allegations toward Russia and North Korea are even worse.
It is really really unlikely they released this on purpose. I could see a more limited leak used in this way, but the 'big fish' better be really big to warrant releasing all of this.
I have seen this "US Government is behind cable leak" theory a good deal in the past few days and I do not believe that it holds any water. I think that it's reaching, to be quite frank.
Conspiracy theory is an overloaded term, though, it doesn't have to be outlandish. Any group of people can conspire to achieve something.
But Stuxnet was detected... viruses are not magic.
#1 Analysts explain it away by saying, for example,
"The market was hoping for even better news than the
good news they got." A simpler explanation is that the
market is being manipulated.
#2 The lack of bombshells in the Wikileak materials
looks mighty suspicious to me
In addition I offer the following word: Diebold
As for the recent underwhelmingly US diplomatic memo leaks, that has an easy and logical explanation. These memos were merely secret information, about on the level of a ... memo inside any corporation. That is why security was so lax on them to allow so many of them to be accessible to low rank personnel. More important information is kept more secret with a tighter reign on who has access and how many people have access.
Theory #4 - vice-versa!