Monday, April 9, 2012

Monday Links

Nassim Taleb: "If schools (colleges) want to resemble real life, they would only care about the subject in which the student has the highest grade and ignore the others, a total drag. In a convex world, the average is of *zero* significance -like an option - since only the upper bound counts. So push the upper bound further."

The End of Retail: "over the course of a year in which the level of economic activity has clearly risen, certain major categories of big box retail have shed jobs."

The USSR's "State Scientific Enterprise on Superdeep Drilling and Complex Investigations in the Earth's Interior" and the Kola Superdeep Borehole.

Hussman: "the Fed has increasingly pursued policies of suppressing interest rates, even driving real interest rates to negative levels after inflation. Combine this with the bursting of two Fed-enabled (if not Fed-induced) bubbles - one in stocks and one in housing, and the over-55 cohort has suffered an assault on its financial security: a difficult trifecta that includes the loss of interest income, the loss of portfolio value, and the loss of home equity. All of these have combined to provoke a delay in retirement plans and a need for these individuals to re-enter the labor force."

Dishwashers and "The Price of Quiet."

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