Right, but if your name is not Alex T. and you have a reasonable belief that your vote is highly unlikely to change the outcome of the election then why vote? A taste of Levitt/Dubner intro on the subject:
Within the economics departments at certain universities, there is a famous but probably apocryphal story about two world-class economists who run into each other at the voting booth.
“What are you doing here?” one asks.
“My wife made me come,” the other says.
The first economist gives a confirming nod. “The same.”
After a mutually sheepish moment, one of them hatches a plan: “If you promise never to tell anyone you saw me here, I’ll never tell anyone I saw you.” They shake hands, finish their polling business and scurry off.
Equities will almost certainly outperform cash over the next decade, probably by a substantial degree. Those investors who cling now to cash are betting they can efficiently time their move away from it later. In waiting for the comfort of good news, they are ignoring Wayne Gretzky’s advice: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.”
4. Several more drops of Buffett wisdom. This time he talks about the fall of Long-Term Capital Management and how Bill Gates cost him about $3 billion. If LTCM does not ring a bell, check out When Genius Failed
A rock star is not someone who takes the temperature, who gauges the marketplace before he creates his “art”. A rock star is someone who needs to create and is willing to tolerate the haters along with the fans. He’s someone who incites controversy just by existing. That’s what we lost in the dash for cash. Unique voices. I’m not saying we haven’t ended up with some pleasant music, but it just hasn’t hit you in the gut, it’s the aural equivalent of Splenda, it might do the trick, but it’s not the real thing. The real thing grabs your attention, drives down deep into your heart and lodges itself there. A rock star doesn’t follow conventions, doesn’t go disco or add drum machines just because everybody else does. A rock star exists in his own unique space, and if you met him you probably wouldn’t like him. Because he tends to be self-focused to the point of being narcissistic. Because he cares. He needs to get his message out.
While reading it I could not help but think about Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil and Roger Waters’ The Wall. There is no contemporary rock star or band that can fill the shoes of Rolling Stones or Pink Floyd. The music industry is essentially an oligopoly. One has to please a big label to get his songs out to the mainstream audience. So, the responsibility for stopping potential rock stars from making it goes to the big four music companies that are in control of the supply chain for new artists. I have no sympathy for them.
As of this writing, only the Nobel Prize in economics has not been announced. The award ceremony is on Monday.
Winning brings not just fame but also a small fortune. Turning on the narcissist in me I cannot help but wonder what it would be like to win the prize. Would I accept Alfred Nobel’s blood money? In a politically correct world getting a peace prize by the creator of dynamite seems more puzzling than reconciling general relativity with quantum theory. Then again, things like this make life interesting.
2. The world’s 23 toughest math questions or so DARPA(real creator of the Internet) says. I want to spice things up a bit for all those who finish a problem early and have nothing else to do; for every solved question you have to think of a new one to fill in its spot on the list. I like 23.
