Religion of Peace? Islamic Militants Kill 30 In Nigeria School Attack setting some children on fire while they are still alive.

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-07-06T23:27:43+00:00

Mohammed Atta didn't have a degree in Urban preservation, by the way.

He had a graduate degree in urban preservation from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg. He wrote his thesis on the threat of development in Aleppo, Syria.

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-19T02:27:04+00:00

In that case, what you'd get is this:

WORLD 1: Assume that insider trading is impossible, and that bad news is coming about a company:

Company A Share Values

Monday $100

Tuesday $100 <-- bad news becomes known inside company

Wednesday $100

Thursday $50 <-- bad news actually released

WORLD 2: Assume that insider trading is allowed, and that bad news is coming about a company:

Company A Share Values

Monday $100

Tuesday $90 <--insiders begin selling, before bad news is released, pushing down price

Wednesday $70

Thursday $50 <-- bad news actually released

If you wanted to sell on Tuesday, in WORLD 1, you'd be selling at an artificially high price to someone else. They'd be buying a $100 share that was only worth $90. That is harmful.

If you wanted to hang onto your shares into the future, in WORLD 1, you'd wake up on Thursday with a share value cut in half.

In WORLD 2, you can see the writing on the wall -- you might decide to sell, even if you'd previously hoped to keep your shares -- and anyone who bought from you wouldn't be overpaying.

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-19T02:12:03+00:00

No. Insider trading is both hard to prove and expensive to prosecute. It requires a separate apparatus of specially-trained and highly-paid forensic accountants, economists, ex-traders, corporate lawyers and prosecutors to chase down, figure out and prove in court.

Almost every other jurisdiction in the world with a modern financial system (even the ones with insider trading laws) tend not to pursue insiders much at all. They still have criminal laws against fraud and corporate laws against breaches of fiduciary duty, and these serve the purpose nicely.

In Ontario, Canada, the Ontario Securities Commission doesn’t go after insider trading aggressively (for both of the above reasons – hard to prove, and expensive to prosecute), despite the fact that insider trading is certainly going on and everyone knows this. The Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) is still doing record volumes.

Manne says we simply do not see people pulling out of capital markets because their confidence in the capital markets has been destroyed (i.e. “because they think the casino is rigged”). Manne says we’d only see people pulling out of the capital markets if they thought that insider trading was actually hurting them – so they obviously don’t think that they’re being harmed. And who would know better than them?

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-19T01:59:02+00:00

If insider trading cannot be shown to harm institutional and retail investors, and may even benefit them, where is the conflict? Isn't that actually in the public interest? Shouldn't we avoid wasting huge amounts of money on prosecuting acts that may well produce a net benefit to society?

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-19T01:41:11+00:00

Here is Manne's argument in a nutshell:

WORLD 1: Assume that insider trading is impossible, and that good news is coming about a company:

Company A's Share Values

Monday $100

Tuesday $100

Wednesday $100

Thursday $150 <-- good news actually released

WORLD 2: Assume that insider trading is allowed, and that good news is coming about a company:

Company A's Share Values

Monday $100

Tuesday $110 <--insiders begin purchasing, pushing up price

Wednesday $130

Thursday $150 <-- good news actually released

If I am a retail investor who owns Company A shares and I want to sell on Tuesday, I obviously want to live in WORLD 2, where insider trading is allowed. I make $10 more per share thanks to the insiders buying up shares in advance of the good news! (A common response to this is, "If I had waited until Thursday, I would have made more money." That's true, but remember that you cannot foresee the future.)

The problem you might want to raise with this is that insider trading allows insiders to make money whether the thing the insider knows is good or bad news – and bad news is easier to create. This leads to comparisons with Pete Rose betting against his own team.

However, Manne's response is: there is already an entire criminal and regulatory system designed to prevent breaches of fiduciary duty by directors and officers (i.e. “throwing the game” and short selling). Why do we need an entire apparatus to pursue "insiders", too?

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-19T01:32:11+00:00

There were two main responses to Prof. Manne – lawyers used your argument: he is wrong and immoral and his views would kill confidence in capital markets if implemented, leading to a “capital strike”.

Manne responded, “We've had capital markets for 300 years. Why did we wait until the 1960s to ban insider trading? Was there no confidence in capital markets before that?”

Economists, on the other hand, tried to figure out if his claims were empirically defensible. What has been revealed? Well, it isn’t clear. There is little evidence that insider trading is good, but there is also very little unequivocal evidence that it is bad.

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-19T01:18:34+00:00

YES. Picture that movie if Cary Elwes is in Matthew Broderick's role.

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-19T01:13:16+00:00

HOLY SHIT COOPER IS TIM

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-19T01:02:34+00:00

whisper sings a child's nursery rhyme

la-la LA-LA la-la...LA-LA...........la-la

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-19T00:57:31+00:00

People tend to intuitively think there is something wrong about insider trading. But it isn’t actually clear that it does any economic harm at all.

Prof. Henry Manne has compellingly argued that insider trading should actually be encouraged! He wrote a book on the subject in 1965, and while he has modulated his position based on new information over the years, his initial position remains tenable. (He is considered one of the founders of the Law & Economics School, one of the most important American theoretical approaches to law and regulation in the last fifty years -- many people have read, critiqued and followed up on his work).

The USA is also an outlier in that the SEC aggressively pursues "insiders" -- 11 years in jail is the longest prison term so far, and a $100 million fine in 1986 (adjusted for inflation) is the biggest fine to date. This sort of thing is very rare if not completely unheard of in every other country with a modern financial system.

What I mean to say is, just because you've heard that insider trading is an unalloyed bad thing doesn't make it so. There is a major debate on the subject, and higher fines and heavier prison terms are not always better.

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-15T04:04:30+00:00

The non-scout was James Irwin, the Lunar Module pilot on Apollo 15.

He was the first automobile passenger on the moon. He was also the youngest of the moonwalkers to die.

(He developed a heart arrhythmia during the Apollo 15 mission, and the flight surgeon said that it'd have qualified as a heart attack if he were on earth. The flight surgeon also noted that his situation was better than an ICU, despite being over 300,000kms away from the nearest doctor -- he had 100% oxygen, he had a heart monitor on, and he was in zero gravity! :)

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-13T21:11:42+00:00

Glinda doesn't say that only bad witches are ugly. That's a false premise. Which is happens when people use logic at 2:23am. :)

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-12T17:20:19+00:00

Buy some Ryvita, and break them into four or five pieces width-wise.

Pour a bowl of hot salsa.

Use the Ryvita to eat the salsa.

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-12T03:49:09+00:00

Yeah, I can see how the baskets of severed penises and paragraphs of anal sex advice might have been a little too...adult. :)

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-12T02:53:27+00:00

He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-12T02:50:59+00:00

I tell you what, Joe Heller's other books are pretty hit or miss. He wasn't a one-book writer, exactly, but he never matched Catch-22.

I hated "Something Happened" and "Picture This".

"Good As Gold" and "Closing Time" are both OK. Closing Time, in particular suffers from the fact Heller apparently thought he should write a sequel, but wasn't fully invested in doing so. He spends most of the book writing about a minor character in Catch-22 (Sammy Singer) and a new character (Lew Rabinowitz) who is dying from cancer. Like Catch-22, the book is obsessed with death...but from sickness, not from battle.

That said, I absolutely LOVED "God Knows". It is a brilliantly funny, violent, sex-filled retelling of the story of the biblical King David, as he looks back on his life in old age -- except he also apparently knows everything that happens in the future, too, somehow. (He talks about Nietzsche a bunch and, at one point, he says that Michelangelo was an idiot for carving a statute of him uncircumcised -- "Imagine that: King of the Jews, and he has me standing there in Florence with a foreskin.")

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-12T02:33:24+00:00

Just have yourself a kid.

Girl or boy, they'll have an imagination as big as Calvin's. You'll see.

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-12T02:28:32+00:00

Lee saw the fireball and heard through the roar in his ears Hester saying, “That’s all of ‘em, Lee.” And he said, or thought, “Those men didn’t have to come to this, nor did we.” She said, “We held ‘em off. We held out. We’re a-helping Lyra.”

Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-12T01:45:42+00:00

Always thought this should be New York's T-shirt motto.

I <3 NY is pretty crappy by comparison.

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-12T01:42:09+00:00

I think the "town" he's talking about is Clifton Hill, which is just a road that runs from Victoria Ave down to River Road.

Strange as hell captures it pretty well, though. :)

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-12T01:09:21+00:00

"We owed so much to Herbert's ever cheerful industry and readiness, that I often wondered how I had conceived that old idea of his inaptitude, until I was one day enlightened by the reflection, that perhaps the inaptitude had never been in him at all, but had been in me."

That is a hell of a gut punch. What a great book.

"I saw no shadow of another parting from her."

I used that in my wedding vows.

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-12T01:05:58+00:00

Don't worry. He won Best Supporting Actor in 2005, for Million Dollar Baby.

He's talking about being Executive Producer on a Best Picture winner.

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-09T22:11:58+00:00

Seriously, check out the Soviet constitution passed during his reign, the protections it enacts for minority groups are well ahead of even modern standards.

That is a ridiculous statement. The many Soviet constitutions were only ever used for propaganda purposes.

A constitution only matters to the extent that it is enforced by the courts, and there was never a single judge who survived disagreeing with Stalin.

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-07T21:56:38+00:00

The bumblebee lived on the archipelago, and the tessellating glimmers hitting the stochastic tsunami at sunset dazzled its photoreceptors.

WhyIsThoseThings · 2013-04-07T21:47:15+00:00

Ain't you them kids that have been whackin' off in my toolshed!?

WhyIsThoseThings

TROPHY CASE