"What this all takes is patience — more patience, sometimes, than I am good at. I am impatient to know things, and impatient for things to make sense more quickly; and the discipline (ah, that apt term) just doesn’t work that way. A colleague of mine told me that he’s been Only Collecting for over ten years, and can now knock out a 3000 word paper in under two days, simply because all his material is already at hand; it exists in the stuff he’s picked up in his intellectual infancy and adolescence, which at the time he didn’t know how to use, and perhaps didn’t even know was important."

"I recently had a client apply for a credit card. She is a homemaker, with no personal income. The house she lives in is in her husband’s name. She would have asked for a $3,000 credit line, just to pay miscellaneous expenses and to establish some credit on her own. So the computer is told that her household income is $150,000; her mortgage/rent payment is zero. The fact is that her husband’s mortgage payment is $7,000 a month (which he got with a no income verification loan). She had a good credit score, but limited credit since she has only lived in this country for the last three years. The system gave her an approval for a $26,000 line of credit!"

Those consequences, as I have considered them, are astounding.

It starts with saving a million young lives every year (45,000 in the USA) as well as untold injury in suffering.
It saves trillions of dollars wasted over congestion, accidents and time spent driving.
Robocars can solve the battery problem of the electric car, making the electric car attractive and inexpensive. They can do the same for many other alternate fuels, too.
Electric cars are cheap, simple and efficient once you solve the battery/range problems.
Switching most urban driving to electric cars, especially ultralight short-trip vehicles means a dramatic reduction in energy demand and pollution.
It could be enough to wean the USA off of foreign oil, with all the change that entails.
It means rethinking cities and manufacturing.
It means the death of old-style mass transit.

"Obviously, given the 40%+ decline in major indices and close to double that for Financials, if you pick the bottom, you can realize an enormous return on the way back up. Do you think oil's headed back to $100+ when the global economy recovers? Then, ERX is the trade for you! However, picking the bottom is an act of god, so you'll definitely want to inject some caution and pragmatic thinking into your strategy.

There are various pairs/combos you can use for these. For instance, you can go long 3X with puts to create a neat hedge model, or you could use the 3X inverse to hedge the more significant long portion of your portfolio."

"Mumbai is all about dhandha, or transaction. From the street food vendor squatting on a sidewalk, fiercely guarding his little business, to the tycoons and their dreams of acquiring Hollywood, this city understands money and has no guilt about the getting and spending of it. I once asked a Muslim man living in a shack without indoor plumbing what kept him in the city. “Mumbai is a golden songbird,” he said. It flies quick and sly, and you’ll have to work hard to catch it, but if you do, a fabulous fortune will open up for you. The executives who congregated in the Taj Mahal hotel were chasing this golden songbird. The terrorists want to kill the songbird."

"But if McCarthy had been vanquished — he died three years later of cirrhosis from drinking — McCarthyism was only just beginning. McCarthyism is usually considered a virulent form of Red-baiting and character assassination. But it is much more than that. As historian Richard Hofstadter described it in his famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," McCarthyism is a way to build support by playing on the anxieties of Americans, actively convincing them of danger and conspiracy even where these don't exist."

"[…] In the nineteen-thirties, unions had launched a number of health-care plans, many of which cut across individual company and industry lines. In the nineteen-forties, they argued for expanding Social Security. In 1945, when President Truman first proposed national health insurance, they cheered. In 1947, when Ford offered its workers a pension, the union voted it down. The labor movement believed that the safest and most efficient way to provide insurance against ill health or old age was to spread the costs and risks of benefits over the biggest and most diverse group possible. Walter Reuther, as Nelson Lichtenstein argues in his definitive biography, believed that risk ought to be broadly collectivized. Charlie Wilson, on the other hand, felt the way the business leaders of Toledo did: that collectivization was a threat to the free market and to the autonomy of business owners. In his view, companies themselves ought to assume the risks of providing insurance."

"Where the Deep Ones Are"

"I have blocked from my mind much of what I saw, but there are a few details that I cannot purge from my memory. The cursor was a writhing tentacle and the misshapen windows, with non-euclidean geometry, oozed grotesquely across the screen as I dragged them. Instead of a trash can or a recycle bin for disposing of files, the desktop had a blood-stained sacrificial altar. I loaded a presentation program from a suite of applications called OpenOrifice and felt my sanity slip away as the slides in the program flashed before my eyes. It was the Star-spawn's plan for defiling earth, defeating the Nephilim, and subverting humanity."

"So, once again, by popular demand, here is our newest list, The Complete List of Commodity ETFs and ETNs, as of October 20, 2008."

"I think the thesis of the Monetary History has just taken a hit."

"Trace a line from where US special forces battle Taliban fighters in the corner of empty desert where the Afghan, Pakistani and Iranian frontiers meet, follow it through the badlands of the Pakistani North West Frontier and on through the bomb-blasted cities of northern Pakistan and down through Delhi, attacked in September, to shell-shocked Mumbai, and one thing becomes clear: this zone has displaced the Middle East as the new central front in the struggle against Islamic militancy. The southern Punjab falls on the line's centre point. There may be doubt over the identity of the attackers, but there is none that Multan and Bahawalpur and villages such as Faridkot are in the Indians' sights."