Problem Sets -
http://imo-official.org/problems.aspx
International Math Olympiad
November 2, 2009 by imagineurRoger Warner: Beyond Clint Eastwood – Justice for Hmong tribes
June 10, 2009 by imagineurThe Hmong are a tribe from the mountains of Laos, in Southeast Asia. They fought for the C.I.A. in a little-known sideshow to the Vietnam war. For a people that didn’t even use the wheel in their old country, the Hmong have done phenomenally well as immigrants to America. A solid Hmong-American middle class – soldiers, lawyers, accountants, chicken farmers, store owners and college students – far outnumbers the urban hoodlums. What haunts Hmong-Americans as an ethnic group is that the war they left behind in Laos has never entirely ended. And what frustrates them is that the U.S. government, while occasionally pretending to care, has made the problem worse instead of solving it.
A third of a century after the U.S. armed forces pulled out of Southeast Asia, Laotian soldiers of the old-line communist regime still hunt and kill men, women, and children belonging to the last few Hmong resistance bands. The leaders of the resistance bands were all trained by the C.I.A. when they were young. Most of them are grandfathers now. They have satellite phones, gifts from their American relatives. From remote jungle mountainsides, they call family members in Minnesota, or Wisconsin, or California, and forlornly ask when the U.S. military is going to come back and save them from their enemies.
Roger Warner is a frequent traveler to Southeast Asia, and is the author of Shooting At The Moon: The Story of America’s Clandestine War in Laos, which won the Overseas Press Club’s book of the year award.
Why America is a bank-owned state
June 10, 2009 by imagineurIn 2006, the top one per cent of American households’ share of all disposable income amounted to almost a quarter of all households’ disposable income, according to Robert Hunter Wade, professor of political economy at the London School of Economics.
In crude terms, one per cent of the population have a quarter of all the wealth.
Moreover, Wade found the average income of the bottom 90 per cent of the population remained almost stagnant after 1980, although consumption kept rising thanks to the build-up of private debt.
This means that 90 per cent of the American economy were financing their American dream on debt.
Where were the signs that things were going to end disastrously and, worse still, that the most vulnerable might end up paying the heftiest and most disproportionate price than anyone else?
I believe the status quo was allowed to go unquestioned because banks were benefiting obscenely from the interest on our debt, and governments were in cahoots with these banks.
Let’s not forget that governments conveniently moved away from the provision of affordable healthcare, free university education and affordable housing while the banks entered our lives, aggressively, to fill that void.
In addition, I think that this warped and unjust way of operating was not questioned because the electorate was kept in the dark in the most subtle way possible.
The whole issue was made invisible. It was kept off the radar screens of electoral politics.
The American electorate were made accomplice to this because they were convinced that what was good for Wall Street, was good for America as a whole.
It was a political sleight of hand of the highest order. And this explains the bipartisan agreement to the ill-designed deregulation of the finance sector that we have seen over the years.
America has become a bank-owned state.
– Samah El-Shahat, Al Jazeera’s resident economist
Further Samah points to Roubini’s article that this is a Crisis of Solvency not of Liquidity
Cache Misses – more expensive than Mhz?
June 5, 2009 by imagineurStreet Food in SF
May 26, 2009 by imagineurMichael Lewis: Icelandic tragedy.. Wall Street on the Tundra
March 4, 2009 by imagineurThe world is now pocked with cities that feel as if they are perched on top of bombs. The bombs have yet to explode, but the fuses have been lit, and there’s nothing anyone can do to extinguish them. Walk around Manhattan and you see empty stores, empty streets, and, even when it’s raining, empty taxis: people have fled before the bomb explodes. When I was there Reykjavík had the same feel of incipient doom, but the fuse burned strangely. The government mandates three months’ severance pay, and so the many laid-off bankers were paid until early February, when the government promptly fell. Against a basket of foreign currencies the krona is worth less than a third of its boom-time value. As Iceland imports everything but heat and fish, the price of just about everything is, in mid-December, about to skyrocket. A new friend who works for the government tells me that she went into a store to buy a lamp. The clerk told her he had sold the last of the lamps she was after, but offered to order it for her, from Sweden—at nearly three times the old price.
Wall Street on the tundra
Ultra Short ETFs only good for a day!
February 2, 2009 by imagineur“It’s pretty easy to understand why some investors would be attracted to funds that promise double returns. For example, let’s look at the uninitiated investor that is considering a purchase of the NASDAQ 100, to which investors can easily gain exposure by buying PowerShares (QQQQ).
Here’s the typical (misguided) thought process:
1) I’m convinced that QQQQ will go up 10% a year, so I’d like to own it;
2) But there is a fund, Ultra QQQ ProShares (QLD) that promises 2X the Nasdaq’s return;
3) And 20% is more than 10%;
4) So I’ll just buy the leveraged fund (QLD) and be twice as happy.
Seems like a reasonable conclusion, right? After all, the fund’s literature clearly promises twice the daily return of the index. But the key word is daily. Daily is not monthly, and it’s definitely not annually.”
sf family appreciation day – Jan 11
January 3, 2009 by imagineurFree SF Family (w/ kids) day at 32 museums and other attractions… If only we can find one or two each block?
sfkids link here
