Oh sure, it's completely solvable. In fact some companies have solved it, but most lack the expertise. E-mail me (address in profile) if you have any further questions.
There's lots of issues here. One is simply that people don't submit jobs during non-working hours, and most jobs don't take more than 4-8 hours, so unless you have a pile-up of jobs during working hours, the grid tends to sit idle overnight and on weekends. Another problem is that you plan your grid capacity for peak periods (and add a margin for future growth), so it will generally be underutilized. Another issue is that corporations create redundant grids for business continuation purposes, so often you'll have full grids that are hardly utilized at all.
Variable annuities generally have guarantees, which are essentially just embedded options. To price and analyze these options you have to run large-scale Monte Carlo simulations. Many shops have >100K policies and are running 30 year Monte Carlo projections. You can imagine the computational power required, and the inherent parallelism of the solution.
I think the big thing at the finance companies I've been at is that corporate IT was created to enable people to use Microsoft Office applications. There is no real provision for how to deal with developers writing code, and forget about hardware.
Confirmed. I'm in insurance too - variable annuities specifically - and it's the most perfect problem for parallelization. In practice everyone maintains their own in-house grid (which is massively expensive and idle 90% of the time), and the technical staff lacks any serious chops to tackle GPUs. In practice the only way we've found to solve this is to go around corporate IT, so we do things like buying GPU cards and jamming them into boxes ourselves.
I've never met a quant trader trading for their own account. It requires some infrastructure that would be hard to justify unless you have lots of money to invest, and you're really good at it.
Amtrak as a whole might be unprofitable, but Amtrak in the Northeast does okay. The problem is that the Senator from Utah, or Nevada or wherever wants Amtrak is in his or her state, so we have long, nonsensical lines that are expensive to maintain and have near-zero ridership.
It's hard because McDonald's has negative brand equity in a lot of people's eyes (certainly in mine). It would almost be better if they were starting from scratch.
Maybe let's put it a different way: if you and I are partners in a business, and I decide to take out a second mortgage and buy you out, is that a bad thing? What if I have to sell a slice of the business to pay off that mortgage? I dunno, this all seems reasonable, and if it's reasonable for one person, then I think it's reasonable for a corporation.
This is a deeply strange article. Why are stock buybacks manipulating? If there are 100 shares of a $1M company, each share is worth $10K. If I own 800 shares and you own 200, and the company has some cash lying around, maybe it will buy your shares. Now there are 800 shares outstanding, and if the company is still worth $1M, each share is now worth $12,500. Did I manipulate the share price? What's the point of calling it that, besides to make it sound nefarious, when it's just an everyday business practice?
We just rented a place for a month on AirBnb only to find out that the owner kept two cats there (undisclosed); my wife has severe cat allergies. Now we're having to fight tooth and nail to get our money back, and the property owner is saying that her policy is no refunds, period. So yeah, I kinda get why people can cozy up to the idea of regulation.
I wonder if there will come a day when you can still drive your car, but you'll have to pay exorbitant insurance rates. That seems like a reasonable midpoint.
I bought a bunch of New Balance Minimus on sale for around $70 each. Many of them have >1000 miles on them, and they're going strong. I have yet to retire a pair. And the upside to running clothes is that they're all synthetics so they last forever. I still have pretty much all of the running clothes I've ever bought. Not quite free, but awfully cheap.
Running. It's free, fun, you can do it anywhere, and it's a great way to get to know places. My favorite thing to do when I get to a new city is a long run: you get a great sense of the city and you can find the parts you want to go back to. I also love that it forces me out of doors in the long New Jersey winters. It happens to be good for you too, I hear.
My Great-Uncle (~89) has a Windows laptop. He virtually never uses it. One time I decided to start it up, and it literally had about ten updates that each required a restart. It was a disaster for me, and I do this for a living. I just can't imagine how they expect someone like him to use it.
Sadly I think it's disappeared into the ether. I also tried to find the Faroe Islands News Service blog that my friend put together, but it seems to be dead as well.
A friend of mine once played an elaborate prank where I got a Wikipedia page. He made me a Faroese cricketer. It was pretty great, but eventually things spiraled out of control when I spontaneously combusted.
Crimes are what we decide they are! Criminalizing this sort of behavior is something that most Americans don't want [1]. Expecting someone to be ashamed for violating a law that isn't particularly popular seems silly. Should Uber be ashamed for violating taxi regulations, when those regulations are hated by consumers?
The derivatives market IS NOT valued at over $700T. That represents the gross notional of all derivatives, but most of those trades have equivalent offsetting positions. Gross notionals are virtually meaningless.
You're eliding two very dissimilar things. I'm not saying you can't group people and say quantitative things about them (like GDP). That would be stupid.
I'm saying I have no idea what a statement like "the Chinese value hard work" means. It is not testable or quantifiable, and it's genuinely meaningless. Now maybe you could publish some survey data that shows Chinese people more value hard work. That might add something to the conversation.
I once had a friend say something about how the Chinese valued hard work. Then I asked him what cultures don't value hard work. He squirmed as he started ticking off a list of countries whose populations are predominantly black/Latino...