There is no mystery here. If your asset base consist of two cows worth around $200 and the price fall to $4, your are in bad shape regardless of how you structured it.

There's a substantial difference between having a net worth of $4 and having a net worth of ($84).

This is pure drivel.

I am highly amused by how the first two comments on the page are, at the time of writing, "This is pure drivel," and "Brilliant writing," respectively.

any sufficiently brilliant idea is indistinguishable from drivel?

After reading the article, I'm thinking I have that backwards.

The Yale courseware is much better. Look at this Game theory lecture series that I recently "took" http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/game-theory/contents/downloads

You get the videos or mp3 , transcript of the talk, pdf of the blackboard. The tests and the answers to the test. This is just excellent.

This is fantastic, thank you!

Edit: http://oyc.yale.edu/classics/introduction-to-ancient-greek-h...

wow!

"Chairman of the Federal Reserve had heard of Objectivism!"

FYI Greenspan was a friend of Ayn Rand and was part of her inner circles.

http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/bio/greenspan-time.html

He knows that; that's the joke.

I kind of suspected that but not sure plus most of the HN readers unlikely to know this somewhat obscure piece of information. Hence the comment.

Um, the rest of that paragraph is sarcastic, too, FYI...

Greenspan turned his back on Objectivism during the 70s.

He did? In what way? (Genuinely curious.)

My understanding is that, despite some of his views being at odds with her own, Rand was happy to have him in her inner circle anyway.

Before: http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north204.html

After: Central banker

That's the gist of the argument. I'm not going to pretend to know where the line between Objectivism's general ideals and economic ideals lies.

He's always defended his involvement as being a necessary compromise. An unusual stance for an Objectivist, but an Objectivist nonetheless.

he expanded the money supply in 1995 and again in 2000 in order to create growth. Since you can't create growth out of thin air these bubbles eventually burst. This is blatant Keynesian economics, the opposite of the free-market.

Guess WWII never happened.

war is the broken window fallacy writ large.

Yes, I think that was intended to be part of the irony.

Yes, if the ThinkTank mostly outsources its efforts. Meaning build a network of domain expertize that it could bring to bear on the problem. This probably should include an initial assessment of the problem itself by experts in various aspects of the problem as defined. Problem definition is often the weak link in the chain toward creating something new.

That service alone might be valuable.

We use Blinksale http://www.blinksale.com/home for invoices and TikTrac http://tiktrac.com/ for time sheets. Very cheap and easy to work with. You can try both for free.

"Linux isn't working out" Why do you say that. Linux has the highest share of this market than any other place. More than 50% and Ubuntu is making a special Vendor only distribution just for Netbooks. Only recently is XP being offered and this as a direct response to Linux.

Well Linux had the first mover advantage. But it seems to be losing ground. I was in two chain retailers recently & neither carried any linux netbooks (but 3-4 windows each). I've seen a couple of these recently:http://www.itwire.com/content/view/22362/53/

And Windows is gaining this ground with a 7 year old product that isn't suitable for this job. All the while cursing every sale they make. They're not exactly gung-ho excited about making brilliant netbooks. But they're still taking over.

If no one challenges & the demand persists, MS may eventually actually come out with some Windows that is suited to the job.

The number 1 as in 1 percent is the least suspicious number, so Benford's law is unlikely to help.

You can still work with the rest of the digits in the percentage (eg 1.1% should be more likely than 1.9%), I imagine the problem isn't the numbers themselves but the lack of a decent sized sample. You only get 12 numbers for a year and that's plenty of time to lose your shirt to a con man who has your money!

If they average around 1%, that would mean as many .7s as .3s -- very suspicious!

Please disregard this comment, which was idiotic.

Same here. If I am stuck on something I hop on my bike and ride for a while. I have a nature path less than 1 mile away. I try deliberately not to commit anything to memory while I think. I find that if I try to remember stuff too hard it stops the flow. Sometime I have problems "recreating" what I came up with but on balance I have found this way of solving problems best.

I can't read the article. Did you pay?