Gyroscopic Investing

MachineGhost wrote: I am encouraged by this article:

Cat and dog lovers are a relatively new breed in China. Up until the 1980s, keeping pet dogs was illegal in Beijing, because pets were considered to be a bourgeois affectation. Restrictions were loosened in the 1990s and early 2000s. (A height limit on dogs is still in place.) By 2012 the city had more than 1 million registered pet dogs, now served by more than 300 pet hospitals, according to the Beijing Small Animal Veterinary Association. China has become the third-largest pet market in the world, after the U.S. and Brazil, according to Euromonitor International, and is home to 27 million dogs and 11 million cats.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/20 ... population

Libertarian666 wrote:

MachineGhost wrote: I am encouraged by this article:

Cat and dog lovers are a relatively new breed in China. Up until the 1980s, keeping pet dogs was illegal in Beijing, because pets were considered to be a bourgeois affectation. Restrictions were loosened in the 1990s and early 2000s. (A height limit on dogs is still in place.) By 2012 the city had more than 1 million registered pet dogs, now served by more than 300 pet hospitals, according to the Beijing Small Animal Veterinary Association. China has become the third-largest pet market in the world, after the U.S. and Brazil, according to Euromonitor International, and is home to 27 million dogs and 11 million cats.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/20 ... population

So you're thinking that the immense waste of resources implied by millions of pets in China will keep them from overtaking us in world dominance?

Animals Asia's campaign asking the Vietnamese Prime Minister to step in and save 23 bears from the Cau Trang Bear Farm in Halong Bay has received phenomenal international support.

Moon bear hero Lesley Nicol has added her name to the campaign. Thank you Lesley and the 83,000 who have signed and shared, including celebrities such as Stephen Fry, Dame Judi Dench, Ricky Gervais, Brian May, Olivia Newton-John, Ali MacGraw and Peter Egan. The response has been incredible and is beginning to be felt.

Kriegsspiel wrote:Why America Can’t Rebuild Without China

I had always thought that things happen for reasons. My parents taught me that good people get rewarded while evil gets punished. My teachers at school taught me that if you work hard, you will succeed, and if you never try, you will surely fail. When I picked up the book, I was studying math at Cambridge University and, as I looked back at the standardized tests and intense study that had defined my life until then, I could see no uncertainty.

But since reading Rubin’s book, I have come to see the world differently. Robert Rubin never intended to become the senior partner of Goldman Sachs: a few years into his career, he even handed in his resignation. Just as in Rubin’s career, I find that maybe randomness is not merely the noise but the dominant factor. And those reasons we assign to historical events are often just ex post rationalizations. As rising generations are taught the rationalizations, they conclude that things always happen for a reason.

I studied economics at Cambridge, a field which has become more and more mathematical since the 1970s. The goal is always to use a mathematical model to find a closed-form solution to a real-world problem. Looking back, I’m not sure why my professors were so focused on these models. I have since found that the mistake of blindly relying on models is quite widespread in both trading and investing—often with disastrous results, such as the infamous collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management. Years later, I discovered the teaching of Warren Buffett: it is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong. But our professors taught us to think of the real world as a math problem.

I began working as a trader at Goldman in 2007. Goldman’s unofficial motto is “be long-term greedy.” I found that my Goldman colleagues were very smart and competitive. However, I actually didn’t see much of the “long-term” part of the “long-term greedy” culture. Goldman Sachs, even with its reputation as the top investment bank, has been involved in scandals in mortgage products, trades with the Greek government, its links with Malaysia’s corrupt 1MDB, and so on. Maybe this is due to the fact that Goldman is now a public company with a quarterly earnings call. Maybe it is because the position of the trading desk where I worked was marked to market in real time. When you see the number change in front of you from second to second—and especially when that number is not going in the right direction—even one day can feel like eternity. That tells you how long-term oriented traders are in general.

One class was about strategy. It focused on how corporate mottos and logos could inspire employees. Many of the students had worked for nonprofits or health care or tech companies, all of which had mottos about changing the world, saving lives, saving the planet, etc. The professor seemed to like these mottos. I told him that at Goldman our motto was “be long-term greedy.” The professor couldn’t understand this motto or why it was inspiring. I explained to him that everyone else in the market was short-term greedy and, as a result, we took all their money. Since traders like money, this was inspiring. He asked if perhaps there was another motto or logo that my other classmates might connect with. I told him about the black swan I kept on my desk as a reminder that low probability events happen with high frequency. He didn’t like that motto either and decided to call on another student, who had worked at Pfizer. Their motto was “all people deserve to live healthy lives.” The professor thought this was much better. I didn’t understand how it would motivate employees, but this was exactly why I had come to Stanford: to learn the key lessons of interpersonal communication and leadership.

My favorite class was called “Interpersonal Dynamics” or, as students referred to it, “Touchy Feely.” In “Touchy Feely,” students get very candid feedback on how their words and actions affect others in a small group that meets several hours per week for a whole quarter.

We talked about microaggressions and feelings and empathy and listening. Sometimes in class the professor would say things to me like “Puzhong, when Mary said that, I could see you were really feeling something,” or “Puzhong, I could see in your eyes that Peter’s story affected you.” And I would tell them I didn’t feel anything. I was quite confused.

One of the papers we studied mentioned that subjects are often not conscious of their own feelings when fully immersed in a situation. But body indicators such as heart rate would show whether the person is experiencing strong emotions. I thought that I generally didn’t have a lot of emotions and decided that this might be a good way for me to discover my hidden emotions that the professor kept asking about.

So I bought a heart rate monitor and checked my resting heart rate. Right around 78. And when the professor said to me in class “Puzhong, I can see that story brought up some emotions in you,” I rolled up my sleeve and checked my heart rate. It was about 77. And so I said, “nope, no emotion.” The experiment seemed to confirm my prior belief: my heart rate hardly moved, even when I was criticized, though it did jump when I became excited or laughed.

This didn’t land well on some of my classmates. They felt I was not treating these matters with the seriousness that they deserved. The professor was very angry. My takeaway was that my interpersonal skills were so bad that I could easily offend people unintentionally, so I concluded that after graduation I should do something that involved as little human interaction as possible.

boglerdude wrote:I coulda sworn I saw the video where Trump says he would run as a republican because they'll believe anything.

Now I'm getting gaslighted lol
https://www.reddit.com/r/politicalfactc ... _did_this/

In any event, we can never know what politicians actually believe

“My advice is that unless you can go to Ivy League schools or good universities in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, don’t bother to come to the US because it’s just a waste of money,” he said.

“The reality is that I am going to a university that is not as good as the one I could have gone to in China, and our family is out 2 million yuan ($302,000).”

Hang Wei graduated with a bachelor’s degree in media from Purdue University two years ago but regrets it.

Kriegsspiel wrote:‘IT’S JUST A WASTE OF MONEY’: CHINESE STUDENTS REGRET ENROLLING IN US UNIVERSITIES

“My advice is that unless you can go to Ivy League schools or good universities in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, don’t bother to come to the US because it’s just a waste of money,” he said.

“The reality is that I am going to a university that is not as good as the one I could have gone to in China, and our family is out 2 million yuan ($302,000).”

Hang Wei graduated with a bachelor’s degree in media from Purdue University two years ago but regrets it.

Heh.

For anyone who knows what China was before Deng Xiaoping took over in 1978, after Mao made his greatest contribution to his country–he died–the growth of prosperity astounds. Many criticisms may be made of the Chinese government, some of them valid, but no other government has lifted so many people out of poverty so fast.

dualstow wrote: ↑Thu Nov 16, 2017 2:50 pm

Kriegsspiel wrote:Why America Can’t Rebuild Without China

Interesting piece.

Kbg wrote: ↑Wed Nov 14, 2018 6:08 pm

dualstow wrote: ↑Thu Nov 16, 2017 2:50 pm

Kriegsspiel wrote:Why America Can’t Rebuild Without China

Interesting piece.

Not really. It shows gross ignorance about how a modern monetary system works. Macro money does NOT work like our money.

At the end of the day, China is sending us tangible things. They are getting US dollars in return which can be inflated, deflated or held stationary.

Kbg wrote: ↑Wed Nov 14, 2018 10:27 pm I may have read the article too quickly...if I did, apologies!

dualstow wrote: ↑Thu Nov 15, 2018 9:02 am

Kbg wrote: ↑Wed Nov 14, 2018 10:27 pm I may have read the article too quickly...if I did, apologies!

Well, to be fair you’ve only had a year to read it.

Life as one of China’s industrial worker ants did not suit Liu Xu: waking up early in factory accommodation, working for 11 hours operating a machine in the tool-making factory, eating all his meals in the factory canteen and going to bed, only to wake up and do it again.

His parents spent most of their lives in deadening jobs — his father on construction sites and his mother in factories — but 23-year-old Liu Xu lasted just a year in a factory in the southern China city of Dongguan. Half of that was the time his company invested in training him to work the machine before he up and quit.

Like Liu, a generation of young Chinese is turning its back on the factory jobs that once fueled China’s growth — and they are helping to transform the economy by doing it.

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