He's also currently ranked 2nd in PER right behind LeBron James who by most metrics is the most dominant player in the NBA. PER is a metric for player efficiency adjusted for pace and time played etc. Pretty nuts.
228 karma · joined June 2, 2010
It is usually used to describe a riskless transaction.
I'm going to be doing an IAMA on Reddit, Monday around 1230pmEST I don't know what IAMA or Reddit are, but I'll be doing that.
awesome bunch of geeky-openness from ck.
I think going back in time and explaining social networking to an audience would be tougher than it sounds.
But originally the loans were passed onto somebody else (and most private label issuance by notional balance was in fact not held by either originator nor the underwriter/ibank). It was a method of breaking out credit risk (the borrower risk was separated from originator risk) and seen as a feature. Really it was the whole point of securitization -- to get bankruptcy remoteness for credit products.
Originate to securatize is now seen as a problem because it does not give the originator an incentive to make good, proper loans (which is already tough to do). We dont know if credit standards and checking would have become so lax without the securtization machine during 1998-2007 but it seems unlikely.
I find it horrible that guilty parties profited/are profiting from their mistakes. But its a complicated problem which is why we are going to go through hell to fix it.
FWIW I this does not excuse govt behavior, which leans far far too much in the way of banker cronyism, which might have been the original point of the article. I am just pointing out that its a complicated situation that is a mess to sort out.
Also I never stated that fre/frn never made bad loans and were not players in this whole debacle. I just stated that they were not the main engine of horrific growth and the "cause" of all of these problems.
also prime mortgages from the bubble years got hammered and of course that hurt them.
they are currently the garbage bilge where junk loans are deposited, but that is by design to protect housing prices.
they were not a huge area of growth when housing overheated, subprime or otherwise.
It is true that subprime products gave politicians something good to speak to poor constituants about but credit standards were never allowed to drop very far for the federal agencies (other than FHA/VA etc) and their marketshare of mortgage bond issuance dropped as a result.
Despite being a highly regulated industry too little govt involvement in key spots was a primary cause of the bubble not too much.
I also am not entirely sure how swapping beer for mortgages makes the situation easier to digest.
Trying to read SICP on the new kindle in PDF format was impossible!
The total direct and indirect cost of CVD and stroke in the United States for 2009 is estimated at $475.3 billion. This figure includes health expenditures (direct costs, which include the cost of physicians and other professionals, hospital and nursing home services, prescribed medications, home health care, and other medical durables) and lost productivity resulting from morbidity and mortality (indirect costs). Total hospital costs (inpatients, outpatients, and emergency department patients) projected forthe year 2009 are estimated to be $150.1 billion. ... CVD costs more than any other diagnostic group.
"The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America's governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. "
Relentlessness will enable them to hold on to their position for longer than other companies would. However, all companies will eventually fall to competitors as t approaches inf.
I agree mostly with what is said above but I think it is important to emphasize that what the public wants to buy is heavily influenced by what they see on TV.
It is VERY easy for me to eat as much swine as I feel like nowadays. If we assume that saturated fat/protein isn't bad for you then the fact that I can, in modern times, acquire the pig with less effort than my ancestors doesn't appear to harm me very much. It is tasty pretty much right out of the farm. I imagine it is difficult to make the margins on livestock very high.
Carbs have brands. They have business moats. They have high margins and great psychological keys that make selling them a great business (helps to be addictive). So they push and we buy.
Anyways my thought was that the obesity epidemic has less to do with how we are more sedentary than before but rather the peddlers of PROFITABLE products just got better at their jobs over time.
It is interesting to see comments on this forum that involve the strategy of reasoning with the public to get them to accept their idea.
Next time you see somebody drinking a soda explain to them what fructose does metabolically to their bodies. Your message is a lot less effective than seeing a polar bear mommy drinking a coke on a wintery day or seeing kobe bryant dunk a basketball and popping open a bottle of sprite.
In 2005 WebTV was still grossing US$150 million per year in revenue with 65% gross margin.
Basically the population grew to a large enough size where the game they were hunting and the berries they were gathering weren't enough (or went extinct) so they had to switch to a agrarian lifestyle, which needed more work and yielded less.
He explains this in his comments: "Again, one common theme here is that because sugar has gotten more or a less free pass from the federal authorities for the past forty years, little meaningful research has been done."
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/well.blogs.nytimes.com...