We have no idea how far we are from simulating a brain. Because we have no idea how exactly computation is performed in a brain. Neither in a locust's brain, nor in a human brain.
On the other hand, we have already built systems (ANN based) which can do non-trivial things: play Atari games, tell a cat from a dog, convert speech to text, translate from one language to another, etc.
This points to the strong possibility that all that biological complexity in neurons is completely irrelevant to the principles of intelligence, just like the fact that a modern transistor needs 500 parameters and a ton of complicated equations to describe its physical operation is irrelevant to its main function - a simple ON/OFF switch.
If we want to simulate a computer, using more complicated transistor models gains us nothing.
There are tens of thousands of extremely skilled hackers selling exploits on the order of $10K to $100K. I'm fairly certain someone has been exploiting it. Not everyone is a good guy in the world.
If you're taking advantage of the law of large numbers, then it's only fair to use it in reverse: There's literally tens of thousands of iphones used by security researchers. One of them would have received a version if this if it was used on such a wide scale..
That's absolutely not true, your certainty is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of exploits and the amount of time and energy required to find them.
I don't see what's "not true" about it. A worm vector of this scale is certainly worth the R&D investment to find exploits, and it is indeed correct to assume that the vulnerability has been found before.
Whether it has actually been used, given the value of the bug, is a different story. But it should absolutely be treated as "in active use" already, especially by state or state-sanctioned actors (like Hacking Team).
What's not true is that this isn't in the wild. Period. You can make all the points about urgency you want and I will agree completely, but this is not currently in the wild, as far as anyone knows. Saying it actually is being actively used would be factually inaccurate based on the information known right now.
But that's the point: as far as anyone knows - more specifically, as far as anyone has admitted.
We do not have a 100% reliable way to determine whether an exploit is known by others (and likely never will have), and as such there is only one reasonable assumption left to make: assume that it is out in the wild and known by others.
This isn't a new concept - threat modelling requires that you assume every worst-case possibility is reality, so that you can guard against it. This was formalized in the 19th century as Kerckhoff's Principle[1], and undoubtedly existed before that in military circles. This applies equally to software security.
So given that we simply don't and can't know whether it is out in the wild, the most 'correct' assumption is that it is - because that lets us protect ourselves against that worst-case scenario, which may or may not be the case.
If you think I'm arguing against the idea of treating the vulnerability like it's in the wild, then you are mistaken. I'm simply stating the fact that no one has any evidence that this is being actively used in the wild.
Are you refuting that fact, or are you not refuting that fact?
I know you're trying to make a point, but it's poorly done.
Domestic energy use is in no way comparable to industrial use which comprises the vast majority of the contribution to global warming, specifically factory farming, heavy industry and transportation.
The point is not that you should stop using your laptop, rather that you should not have bought it in the first place to avoid encouraging the practices you dislike. If you keep buying and using your laptop, that means you're ok with everything that went into the process of building and transporting it to you, as you're helping financing the very process you denounce. It's like buying and eating meat of protected species and saying "hey, I didn't kill the poor thing".
Mowing 50% of lawns in the US means nothing if you still net a loss. When do people stop basing valuations based on the hope Amazon will make a profit? Hint
If the only reason you're operating at a loss is that you're spending everything you make on gaining new customers, then you just stop reinvesting and are immediately hugely profitable.
There is only one thing being valued by a rational investor: net present value of future cash flows.
Edit:
The only point I'm trying to make is that an investor, when they exchange money for a stock, is placing a bet on a single outcome: future cash flows. Of course there are plenty of ways to get those cash flows, but I find that most people get caught up in details like employee headcount and fail to grasp the single most important factor: compound growth.
Sure, but there are many ways to get future cash flows. A significant difference in the valuation of the two companies is that with Wal-mart, the expectation of future cash flows (and therefore present value) comes primarily from its present size, the cash flows that brings, and its expected ability to continue bringing in such flows. Whereas with Amazon, which has much lower current market share and cash flow, the market is "saying that Amazon's growth prospects outweigh it relatively smaller size". Hence the proportion of expected future cash flows that investors expect to come in the form of future growth is significantly higher with Amazon than with Wal-Mart. Therefore you would expect Amazon to have a lower current size and current headcount per unit present valuation, even if there were no differences in productivity.
What I was criticizing was just using the ratio of present market cap and present headcount as a meaningful metric, when comparing companies with very different growth expectations. That effectively becomes a restatement of the different growth expectations: Amazon has the same market cap as Wal-Mart but its present size is smaller in almost any way you could count present size (sales, headcount, etc.).
What I meant was that much investment is speculative, and that speculative investing is not solely, or even mostly, based on a purely rational model e.g. one that is based on a prediction of future cash flows.
It is usually based on betting on the the future price of the asset, independent of fundamentals. Some of these approaches are more justifiable than others: market momentum, qualatiative prediction of the company's valuation trajectory, trendy but questionable financial metrics, sophist technical analysis etc.
> There is only one thing being valued by a rational investor: net present value of future cash flows.
This only holds under the assumption of rational expectations.
Under the more reasonable assumption of heterogeneous expectations, it becomes necessary to think about what the market on average expects (or, possibly, other functionals of the agent population if the assumption of competitive markets is violated); the more so the shorter your investment horizon.
See for example
[1] F. Allen, S. Morris, and H. S. Shin. Beauty contests and iterated expectations in asset markets. Review of Financial Studies, 19(3):161–177, 2006.
which shows the failure of the law of iterated expectations (which is used to establish your original assertion) for the average expectations operator.
You then have
[2] P. Bacchetta and E. Van Wincoop. Higher order expectations in asset pricing. Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, 40(5):837–866, 2008.
who derive a gap between price and fundamental value (understood as the NPV formula that would prevail without the interference of higher-order beliefs) in the presence of heterogeneous expectations.
And last but not least,
[3] M. Kurz and M. Motolese. Diverse beliefs and time variability of risk premia. Economic Theory, 47(2-3):293–335, 2011.
who generalize this from the asymmetric information frameworks used above, where expectations are coordinated by the public signal, to a symmetric information setting where it is the correlation of beliefs that coordinates expectations.
In the end, this is all building on Keynes's original intuition that if agents hold diverse
beliefs about the future "the energies and skill of the professional investor and speculator are […] concerned, not with what an investment is really worth to a man who buys it ‘for keeps’, but with what the market will value it at."
So no, it is not necessarily the best strategy to only focus on NPV of cash flows. The shorter your time horizon, the more you depend on what "other people" expect too, whether you think them foolish or not.
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PS: Of course, if you believe that you have no predictive power w.r.t. what "Mr. Market" thinks (to borrow from Ben Graham's exasperated simile), then by all means your optimal strategy becomes to lengthen your horizon as far out as possible and concentrate only on NPV of cash flows, just as you said, in the spirit of value investing. I'm only pointing out that the optimality of this strategy hinges on both your investment horizon and your belief about your relative predictive powers w.r.t. "Mr. Market" and the fundamentals (leaving aside positive feedback loops or what Soros called "reflexivity" between price and fundamentals for now).
Rational expectations and heterogeneous expectations don't conflict with each other. Rational expectations only assumes that the aggregate expectation of the economy is an unbiased predictor.
Individual agents are free to be irrational, biased, and heterogeneous. In fact, heterogeneity is required in nearly any model, otherwise no trades will occur.
> Rational expectations and heterogeneous expectations don't conflict with each other.
Good point, although I didn't say they did. One can indeed view RE as a special case of heterogeneous expectations, and in fact that is essentially what I argue in a paper I am working on: That efficient markets are a region in the parameter space of more general market models, and that by traversing that parameter space one can generate different market outcomes. By way of illustration, take the public signal out of the above cited paper [1]. Without the coordination provided by the public signal the law of iterated expectations works again for the average expectations operator!
Regarding the source of heterogeneity, I don't agree with your citation of irrationality or biases. I am not an expert on behavioral economics but from what I understand, behavioral models seem very fragile to the insertion or presence of even a few rational agents, hence the need to erect "limits of arbitrage" by adding frictions, constraints, etc. It is possible to motivate heterogeneous expectations in a more robust way, see my reference [3] above and further references therein, for example. The basic idea is to generalize the economic system from ergodicity or even stationarity, so that heterogeneity is motivated epistemologically, rather than psychologically.
A rational investor knows how others value something and acts accordingly. What you described is one way to value something. If it was just you and me buying stocks, I would know how you act and get in front of your behavior to profit from it.
In finance you don't have to be the smartest person in the room to succeed, you just need to know the most about what everyone else is thinking.
No he did not do the wrong thing. Reporting them is completely wrong. When we report the people who protect us, well this sounds like a plot to a movie. PS: in movies usually a lot of people suffer before the resolution
These people did the exact opposite. They put others in potentially mortal danger.
They could have killed someone's daughter, son, mom or dad.
Stop and think about that for 10 minutes before you continue posting with this unreasonable point of view. Would your mom, dad or siblings life be worth this test? Imagine they collided with this car and died. Close your eyes and imagine that for a moment. Imagine receiving that call. Going to the hospital. Seeing the, all torn-up and suffering befor they die due to the injuries.
And then you find out it was due to two fuckers who thought it'd be funny/interesting/whatever to disable a car remotely.
To be fair, a good proportion of the blame -- and a very good proportion of my subsequent lawsuit -- would be directed at the car company whose negligent engineering made the wreck possible in the first place.
Although I do agree with you, I modded you down and the GP up in this case because appeals to emotion aren't the answer. Your post is a form of the "If it saves just one child" thought-ending pattern.
