portent

The same can be true of dollar bills. A bag full of dollar bills from a drug deal is fungible with a bag full of dollars from your salary. But you can be arrested for the former, and not the latter. Dollars are fungible with dollars ($1+$1=2$), NFTs are not fungible with NFTs (1NFT+1NFT=1NFT+1NFT).

re: surprisingly they don't say infinity

I'm not sure it's that surprising, the expectation is only infinity if you think the person making the payout has the capacity to pay an infinite amount. The second you think this amount is finite (which must always be the case in reality), then the expectation becomes finite and probably quite small.

I agree in the more general point, expectation is not always the best tool for extremely rare / extremely significant scenarios.

I think the UK government realised its mistake, and is trying to unwind it as safely as possible.

"From 3 December to 9 December, which will be known as the ‘student travel window’, students will be allowed to travel home on staggered departure dates set by universities, who will work with other institutions in the region to manage pressure on transport infrastructure.

The student travel window will mean students can travel having just completed the four-week period of national restrictions, reducing the risk of transmission to family and friends at home.

Universities should move learning online by 9 December so students can continue their education while also having the option to return home to study from there."

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/christmasguidance-set-out...

The poster is using an interview technique of creating an imaginary scenario, e.g. "deal with a work colleague who is advocating a sub-optimal position". This seems entirely reasonable.

It seems to me that you've jumped to a very strong conclusion, based on a brief conversation that you have interpreted in the least charitable way possible.

Traders typically provide two prices - the price they will buy at and the price they will sell at. Their profit comes from the spread between. A good trader does not care if the market moves up or down, they make their money on the spread, a trader typically wants as little inventory as possible.

The people who cause markets to move are not the traders, they are the people who buy from and sell to the traders.

You might then be interested to know that the Federal Reserve bank has its own dedicated police force/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Police

I'm sure technically you are right on the written wording of the law, but you can be technically right on many subjects and make the wrong business calls. Avoiding a vanishingly small regulatory risk by making real damage to your company seems like a bad call.

You could totally eliminate the risk of meteorite impact on your business by relocating down a mineshaft...

Many regulated industries need to store data for multiple years, often in a secure format e.g. WORM storage

That's a great and informative answer, only minor comment that I think OP said the project was 2 years but the database portion was 1 month of that 2 years.

Still I agree better not to roll your own stuff unless it is absolutely critical.

A good option can be to use your own data center for base load, and on top of that use AWS for traffic spikes. That way you still have the flexibility to adapt quickly but at a lower cost, once you reach a certain scale.

Here you describe a good reason why people need USD - indeed another currency or asset class cannot be used to pay US taxes. But its not clear to me why this means valuing currencies on future expectations is a fallacy? It just means that US taxpayers will need US dollars at tax payment time.

I agree with you where you say that currencies are worth only what peoples' expectations of its future valuation will be, but that is basically a mechanism for valuing anything - not a description of a pyramid scheme.

A pyramid scheme is one where there is a continued and ongoing transfer of wealth from new scheme joiners to earlier scheme joiners, which works great until the supply of new joiners dries up - then the thing collapses.

A new currency could work (in theory) absolutely fine with no further issuance, and no new joiners beyond the first round of adopters - not at all the same as a pyramid scheme.

The "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act" applies to the US. What if the hacker lives somewhere else? Then that law does not apply to him, and the action was not illegal.

I have been to the NY Federal Reserve Building and seen much of the gold - from the outside of the open door of the vault. This is the highlight of the public tour of the FRB in lower Manhattan. There are many different cages inside the vault - some containing just a handful of bars, and some with gold stacked near to the roof. But we are not told which cage corresponds to which country - that information is secret.

All the bars look identical, to me anyway - there are no stacks of coins or goblets etc. that I could see. (Not all the cages are visible from the vault entrance).

The Fed states in the tour that sovereign nations can keep their gold in the vault, virtually free of charge. And take it back at any time. This is basically a service to the world that the US has provided since the second world war, when much of Europe wanted - for obvious reasons - to move their gold to a safe haven.

As the Federal Reserve is a very secure place, and great value for money, I think most nations have been fine to use that - much cheaper and easier than building a facility that is equally secure.

So personally I'm not sure about the conspiracy theories saying that the Fed refuses to release the gold; to me that is easy for any nation to test - just ask for it, it could be done publicly except that you signal to any thief the date/time of when to attack :-)

OK so in specific case of apple story is complicated by the onshore/offshore tax situation, but it could well be that they have more cash than they know what to do with - in which case returning it to shareholders makes sense instead of using it badly. But it is really not an obvious statement that buying back shares actually returns any value to shareholders.

In my view you really should qualify your earlier statement that "Buy-backs are more tax efficient because they increase stock price" as it is really not a generally true statement. If it was, I would be in the business of buying companies, then making them use any free cash to buy back some shares from me (my remaining shares then somehow go up in value), then selling the remainder back to the market. Free money, it would be great!

Sure - if a stock is undervalued, then anyone buying it should get a good deal.

But that's bit different from saying that a stock buyback will always increase share price.

On the point about taxation, if you have a choice between dividends or share appreciation, I agree with you that share value appreciation gives more flexibility to better manage tax liabilities.

But you answered as a fact that a share buyback increases share price, and sorry but I don't agree with that point - as demonstrated, for an asset holding company it is not the case.

And for a company with cash generation capabilities there is still a subtle point about whether the company can create more value with the cash than the shareholders; if the company can create more value than shareholders, then removing cash from the company via a share buyback should reduce share price. If it cannot, then removing cash from the company should increase the share price.

I think it's much more subtle point than buy-backs increase share price, otherwise it opens up some basic arbitrages. The point is, the share price already incorporates the value of the assets used for the buy-back, so buying back shares increases earnings per share but reduces asset values (and future earnings from leveraging those assets) and the two effects offset.

Simple example:

company A has 100 shares outstanding and only 1 asset: $100

The value of each share is $1.

It then decides a share buy-back is a good strategy, and buys back 50 shares for $50.

It now has 50 shares outstanding and $50 of assets.

The value of each share is still $1.

The buy-back has no effect on share price.

Yeah but if you transfer an asset (cash) out of the company, all other things being equal, the value of the shares must go down.

This McKinsey article is old but explores the topic in some detail.

http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corp...

--

"Sending signals

The market responds to announcements of buybacks because they offer new information, often called a signal, about a company’s future and hence its share price.

One well-known positive signal in a buyback is that management seems to believe that the stock is undervalued. Executives can enhance this effect by personally purchasing significant numbers of shares, since market participants see them as de facto insiders with privileged information about future earnings and growth prospects. A second positive signal is management’s confidence that the company doesn’t need the cash to cover future commitments such as interest payments and capital expenditures.

But there is a third, negative, signal with a buyback: that the management team sees few investment opportunities ahead, suggesting to investors that they could do better by putting their money elsewhere. Some managers are reluctant to launch buyback programs for this reason, but the capital market’s mostly positive reaction to such announcements indicates that this signal isn’t an issue in most cases. In fact, the strength of the market’s reaction implies that shareholders often realize that a company has more cash than it can invest long before its management does.

Therefore, the overall positive response to a buyback may well result from investors being relieved that managers aren’t going to spend a company’s cash on inadvisable mergers and acquisitions or on projects with a negative net present value. In many cases, a company seems to be undervalued just before it announces a buyback, reflecting an uncertainty among investors about what management will do with excess funds.

Such shareholder skepticism would be well founded. In many industries, management teams have historically allocated cash reserves poorly. The oil industry since 1964 is one example (Exhibit 4): a huge price umbrella for much of this period, courtesy of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), provided oil companies with relatively high margins. Nevertheless, for almost three decades the spread between ROIC and cost of capital for the industry as a whole was negative. Convinced that on a sustained basis the petroleum industry could not deliver a balanced source of income, many companies committed their excess cash to what turned out to be value-destroying acquisitions or other diversification strategies. For example, in the 1970s, Mobil bought retailer Montgomery Ward; Atlantic Richfield purchased Anaconda, a metal and mining company; and Exxon bought a majority stake in Vydec, a company specializing in office automation. All of these cash (or mostly cash) acquisitions resulted in significant losses."

Here you are confusing the secondary market for shares (an existing shareholder selling to someone else) with the primary market (new issuance of shares).

The primary market for shares absolutely benefits companies by giving them large amounts of cash now, in return for a claim on future earnings. This can allow a company to create more value than it otherwise would be able to do.

The secondary market is mainly a benefit to shareholders, not companies; but without a liquid secondary market, there would be fewer people willing to invest in the primary market.

Personally I don't understand why a buy-back should increase stock price.

Sure, there are fewer shares - but the value of the company has gone down (it has less free cash, i.e. fewer assets) and the two effects should exactly offset each other.

This article by Ben Horowitz seems relevant - he mentions his history of managing teams by metrics. I like this quote:

"Management purely by numbers is sort of like painting by numbers—it’s strictly for amateurs."

http://a16z.com/2011/07/19/when-employees-misinterpret-manag...

> Revenue is absolute. Money either came in or it didn't.

Sadly nothing is that absolute. Plenty of revenue scandals out there.

A typical example of this: a large supermarket hasn't made enough money for the year, and asks its suppliers to book future sales that (very likely) will come next year as real sales now. The suppliers do this, and actually pay up, because they want to stay on good terms with the big supermarket. So the supermarket has the "absolute revenue" now, but has a hidden liability behind it.

It's not theoretical:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37536538

"Auditors found that the inflated profit figure was the result of Tesco booking payments from suppliers before the company had been due the money."

Anyone who wants more revenue can get it. Just sell something at a loss.

It happens more often than you think! That's why - in the long run - profits matters more than revenue.

Of course in a land-grab situation the normal rules of gravity may not apply, but most businesses are not operating in a land-grab.

my point is that even running the code doesn't help you answer the question. It runs for a year and doesn't halt... so will it ever halt?

Well... the compiled assembly doesn't give you any more information than the code snippet.

The issue is not so much how this code is translated from higher abstraction level to lower abstraction level... the issue is, that this code represents a simple chaotic function (the logistic map). As such, for a simple few lines of code the behaviour is very complex and virtually impossible to predict; for certain values of the controlling number it will (1) halt relatively quickly, (2) never halt, or (3) halt after a very long time... but good luck in distinguishing between cases 2 and 3!

What you are saying sounds intuitively true, but the mathematics of Chaos Theory showed that it is not actually the case.

What my code snippet is doing is running a sample of a particular chaotic function that was originally inspired by biology (a simple predator/prey model). Ultimately, what happens is that you just cannot predict how the function will behave - it is chaotic.

Ultimately most complex systems start to show some chaotic behaviour, which basically means that the behaviour of the system cannot be predicted in detail, even if virtually everything is known about the system in advance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map

OK, well we can always say that the heat-death of the universe renders all problems irrelevent, but it's a bit of a cheat in my opinion.

The original poster seems to imply that knowing the code means that you can know the behaviour of the system; I do not think that is the case, and my simple (chaotic) example tries to demonstrate this.

code can be very simple, and we don't always know what it will do.

Simple example: can you tell me if this snippet of (python) code will ever terminate or not?

x=0.5

while x<0.6 or x>0.7:

  x=3.59*x*(1-x)

  print x

... and what if the 3.59 was replaced by a different number - maybe 3.60 ? or 3.84 ?

Terrorists do threaten national security, but very rarely provide an existential threat. It's hard to imagine a terrorist group causing the collapse of the USA.