DavidTC: Erm, this is the cattle future market. Last I checked, the fees there were pretty damn low for heavy investors.
A thousand dollars isn't a "heavy investor". The minimum amount you were supposed to have was $12k.
DavidTC: His *return* doesn’t have anything to do with what *percentage* of his trades are profitable. 100% of his trades might be 17% profitable, or 99.999% of them might be slightly unprofitable and that last single trade is 100000% profitable.
Absolutely right. If you want apples to apples he has a return of 17% and she had 6000%.
DavidTC: Oh, so it’s not even two-thirds.
Absolutely perfect, with no loses ever, would be 100%, she's scary close to the theoretical perfect.
DavidTC: And, not to be too blunt about it, but people didn’t understand probability. I don’t trust anyone who quotes odds without actually seeing the math. People *talking about* a model I can’t even see the results of, on data I have no access to?
People don't understand probability? The fluff newspapers were her backers, the stats you're ragging on were by economists from the University of North Florida and Auburn University published in the Journal of Economics and Finance. That's over and above the editor of the Journal of Futures Markets who said something similar without the stats (he compared what she did to buying a pair of ice skates and then winning the olympics the next day).
The people who are in the trade understand numbers like these are simply impossible. You're trying to justify a 6000% profit and claim somehow that it's "normal" or not unusual.
If that paper is off by 5 orders of magnitude, then we're looking at a politician's wife literally winning the lottery (how often has that happened), when the lottery was being run by someone actively being helped by her husband. If they're not wrong about the odds then it's more like she's winning the lottery consistently.
DavidTC: For example, it’s not the least bit unlikely for someone to win the lottery, despite what you seem to think. People win the lottery literally every day.
If the lottery were consistently won by the wife of the guy running it, it'd be a problem. This was a business who was actively being helped by her husband, and the broker's office is now known for this sort of thing.
Further, these are *scary* risks she was taking. The expected result was not only the loss of her money, but that she'd actually owe multiple years worth of income. If she'd lost $100k, how would she have paid it back and what would that have done to her and her husband's careers?
Imagine the governor declaring bankruptcy because his wife was betting on the cattle futures market. Is that really a good risk for a pair of really smart people?
DavidTC: No, meaning if you held anything long enough, and managed to sell it at the right place, it will eventually make you money.
That is the trick. If it were easy I'd still be doing it. 3/4 of the people who do what she did lose money. The odds are *that* bad.
DavidTC: I find this a weird discussion. I mean, you’re the one asserting that she *did* that, and it was mysterious. Why am I having to explain it actually happens? It clearly does happen, or, uh, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
So you're good with a politician's wife pulling in a 6000% profit under conditions multiple experts claim are somewhere between shockingly unlikely and impossible, while dealing with someone being helped by her husband?
DavidTC: ignoring the fact the market dropped pretty seriously from the start of May 1979
Let's just post what came up in court when that brokerage was investigated in a other matter (wiki).
Two brokers at Springdale, Bill McCurdy and Steven Johns, testifying about another trader's case, said they participated in a cover-up of block trading on a day in June 1979 that happens to coincide with the opening of what would become Rodham's single most profitable trade.[8]
I might buy that if we were just talking about homicides, but that’s part of a larger pattern and perception that black folks have of being unfairly hassled, roughed up, etc by the cops.
The police functioning to raise money for city hall is a serious problem. This is an example of the police 'creating' problems.
But a lot of that perception is simply the result of other problems. I'm not sure what, short of ending the war on drugs, we should do. The carnage that is Black on Black crime suggests a much higher level of police involvement just as a matter of course.
We could certainly reduce police involvement in Black areas... say, impose quotes for who they can arrest, but that would quickly become something like investigating a black's murder only if we've recently investigated a white's murder (and yes, imho this is just as insane as it sounds).
Besides, how many unjustified and unpunished shootings of innocent civilians by cops is too many? As with wrongful criminal convictions, even a quite small number still ought to be a cause for serious concern.
If you want to get it down to zero, then we probably need to get rid of the police and live with it being "Lord of the Flies".
There are other models we could try, perhaps even on a 'one city' level. Say moving to the medical 'review what happened without punishment' idea.
Let’s come back to this. The DOJ report had no eyewitness accounts of how the conflict escalated from (a) two kids walking in the street to (b) struggle in the car and gun goes off – the most important component of the case; they have conflicting accounts of whether Brown was surrendering, bowing, or advancing and no forensic evidence to support either;
1)kids? Two high-on-drugs criminals who had just pulled a robbery and then engaged in behavior which drew the attention of the police. Brown was 290lbs.
2) The forensic evidence says Brown was advancing, as do the witnesses who agree with each other. The ones who dispute that all disagree with both the physical evidence and each other.
When you break down the witness testimony into details it gets very one sided. Disputing witnesses admit they weren't there, disputing witnesses change their story several times, give conflicting stories, etc. The ones who support what the cop said also agree with each other. The wiki shows some of them, I've seen others.
If our system started with a presumption of guilt and required proof of innocence, the cop would have easily proved himself innocent.
Having said that, yes, absolutely, the police were functioning as a revenue generating service by giving out tickets; this was a much bigger problem for the poor than the rich for multiple reasons. And there's a strong argument that that led to the community simply not believing that it'd been a good shooting.
Some things do more harm to the underlying social order than their pure body count would indicate, and wrongful use of force by armed agents of the law that is essentially never punished certainly qualifies.
I think the numbers suggest the "perception" of wrongful use of force by gov's armed agents is greater than the reality.
Yes, there are problems, and we should deal with them... but the mismatch between perception and reality is a problem in itself.
Actually, yeah. We should be using more than *one* day for the police (who at a handwave are getting 10 million encounters a day).
I can't tell how many people were in your unit nor how long you were there (if you've posted that somewhere else I'm sorry I haven't caught that yet).
But assume you have 10 encounters per person per day and there are 10 people in your unit. That's 36,500 encounters a year so every 30 years of your time is 1 day of the police.
I'd like a years worth of data for the police, so you'd need 10,000 years to balance that.
Yes, I know, much hand waving and massive assumptions (for starters I don't think the police, or the military for that matter, do a good job of reporting 'never' events).
I was an infantryman. I deployed to an actual war zone. We questioned people. We pointed guns at people. We searched people’s home without asking for permission. We drove around like assholes who thought we owned the road. I’m not proud of any of this, but I bring it up to make the point that we someone how managed to never shoot anyone who wasn’t trying to shoot at us (at least not my unit).
You don't judge how easy it is to win the lottery by looking at the winner. We're looking at extreme, and extremely rare, events in large groups, i.e. "never events".
My expectation is if you'd done your thing for enough time to get a decent statistical average (say, 10,000 years) we'd see numbers which said that your unit was a lot more dangerous than the the police.
For that matter we could get larger data if we looked at every unit over the course of the entire war (I'm reasonably sure there were friendly fire incidents and civilians accidentally killed).
Ah, so it's adjusted for percentage of arrestees, thank you.
Which, put together, suggests that the biggest racial disparity is not in police tendency to violence once they have crossed the threshold of arresting someone – it’s in their choice of whom to stop or arrest in the first place
Interesting... I'm not sure what to make of this. Given the wide racial disparity in all the other crime stats, this might be expected.
Intuitively I still think ending the war on drugs would be the most effective in terms of dealing with racial disparities in violence/crime, but I don't think this study has the granularity to support that.
It is difficult to hide a corpse. The total number of people killed by the police in 2015 was 1186. http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/12/28/3735190/killed-by-police-2015/
The number of police who died on the job in 2015 was 42 (google, npr).
The number of blacks in the US is 39 million.
The number of hispanics is 38 million.
The number of cops is roughly 1 million.
We have the mentally ill and the drug war inflating the dead-by-police numbers.
Roughly half the kill-by-police are mentally ill
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/half-people-killed-police-suffer-mental-disability-report-n538371
These numbers don't scream that "death by racism" is a serious problem.
We're probably going to reform the police this election cycle. They'll have body cams, perhaps we'll get real reform and they won't be used as revenue collectors. These are good things, but I seriously doubt police reform will change the number of corpses on the streets.
Jaybird: Maybe not “fire everyone involved” but “fire at least one of the people, jeez louise” or, I suppose, avoid the “give the doctor who did the amputation a freaking medal”.
Punishment is the current police model, and what (predictably) happens is everyone points to the dead guy and says it was his fault.
DavidTC: These results are quite remarkable. Two-thirds of her trades showed a profit by the end of the day she made them and 80 percent were ultimately profitable.
Wow, that is weird! Wait, no it’s not.
Half of all trades ‘show a profit’ on the end of the day they’re made, by definition. (Minus the ones that end up exactly even, I guess.)
Saying ‘two-third made a profit’ is saying she did 16% better than random chance!
You're ignoring transaction costs (beginners' mistake).
Every trade is a loss the moment you make it.
Further subtract losers from winners to get a feel for this. 50%-50% would be zero, a 55%/45% split would be 10% (and very, very good). Warren Buffet's return is 17% (yes, I know I'm assuming all trades are equal which clearly isn't true).
Hillary's is 60% (80%-20%). That's Jesus-walking-on-water. I've done things like this professionally and her numbers are way beyond crazy great, and there's multiple other eye-watering details.
When this story first broke there was a big deal about her 6.5x first-days profit because nothing moved like that that day. The answer was easy, she had a swarm of trades which all managed to capture the jump or fall of that stocks' bounce.
DavidTC: These results are quite remarkable. Two-thirds of her trades showed a profit by the end of the day she made them and 80 percent were ultimately profitable.
Likewise, you can’t talk about 80% are ‘ultimately profitable’ when your entire premise is that she was being assigned the best trades of the day? How does them *ultimately* being profitable have to do with anything?
Trading at the top/bottom of the day's market is also an absurdly powerful walking-on-water thing. Get out of something during the best minute of the day and a loss magically becomes profit.
DavidTC:
Incidentally, on average, pretty much *all* investment is ‘ultimately profitable’, because markets generally go up, barring some sort of crash. I just own index funds, but literally *100%* of them have been ‘ultimately profitable’ if I were to choose to exit the market right now.
Meaning that if you reversed your buys and sells (i.e. did shorts) NONE of them would have been profitable.
DavidTC:
Incidentally, fun fact: You keep saying Clinton made money shorting the market…but there is not any evidence of that in anything you have linked to that I have seen.
Financial writer Edward Chancellor noted in 1999 that Clinton made her money by betting "on the short side at a time when cattle prices doubled."[15] Bloomberg News columnist Caroline Baum and hedge fund manager Victor Niederhoffer published a detailed 1995 analysis in National Review that found typical patterns and behaviors in commodities trading not met and concluded that her explanations for her results were highly implausible.[16] Possibilities were raised that broker actions such as front running of trades, or a long straddle with the winning positions thereof assigned to a favored client, had taken place.[13][16]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_cattle_futures_controversy#Likelihood_of_results
trizzlor: “based on the video, eyewitness accounts, and statements from the police this violates the fundamental principles of policing we strive to bla bla bla … none of which should be interpreted as a guilty verdict”.
So we're not going to rush to judgement but here is our rush to judgement? At this point in Ferguson we'd be saying that Mike Brown should never have been shot in the back while surrendering and there's no excuse for that.
trizzlor:
the response protocol is (1) apologize for event; (2) report the event; (3) perform a root cause analysis; (4) waive costs / assess damages. Do you see how apologize for event is the VERY FIRST THING on that list? If the root cause analysis finds the victim to be complicit in the event, then … you’ll have the apparently incomprehensible task of taking back an apology … because you said right in the statement that it was based on first impressions. Seriously, why is this even under debate?
First, IMHO there's a LOT to be said for treating this by the medical paradigm. Assess what went wrong, have special investigations which try less to assess blame and more to prevent future problems.
However we don't do that. We mostly want to treat this as a criminal matter, so putting the police in prison is on the table. Ergo we have the adversarial setup right from the start, and everyone behaves that way.
I don't think the police can apologize and admit guilt without admitting guilt (although I'm not a lawyer).
trizzlor:
Moreover, atypical events can provide clarity on how the overall system functions. Are there a lot of prominent police spokespeople getting out in front and criticizing the actions of the officers here? Can you find even one? If not, does this highly atypical event tell us something about police accountability?
Why should they "criticize his actions" right now? For that matter, why should we?
Let's replay Ferguson:
There's a police shooting. 20 witnesses say it was unjustified. The dead guy's friend says he was there and it was in the back after he surrendered. The dead guy's family says he was going to college and wouldn't hurt a fly.
Except after lots of investigations, including by Eric Holder's FBI, the almost 300 lb, high on drugs criminal who had *just* pulled a robbery attacked the cop and made him kill him. None of the 20 witnesses don't agree with each other or with the physical evidence. The 8 witnesses who support the cop's story do agree with each other and with the physical evidence. The dead guy's friend was his partner in crime and has a criminal history of lying.
Or how about the Orlando shootings? The FBI thinks the shooter wasn't gay, or confused about his sexuality, or even homophobic. It's still an ongoing investigation, so there's time to change, but as far as they can tell he never used gay dating apps, and they've got his computer so it either has gay porn on it or it doesn't.
We don't know anything yet. The press is going to talk to whoever will talk and what we think we know is probably wrong.
dragonfrog:
Not to mention, that there appears to be some statistical skew in cutaneous melanin density between the victims of those tragic mistakes, and the nation as a whole.
We just had a statistical analysis done by some left leaning black Harvard economist find the opposite.
One assumes he adjusted his stats for either encounters with the police or crime in general. I tried reading the raw report but it was going to take too long to get my head into. The racial breakdown of the shootings is a reflection of society, not a creation of the police.
Oscar Gordon: What I suspect will be typical is the department (under the influence of the police union) doing everything it can to keep that cop on the job and out of trouble. It’ll be called an accident, no charges filed, he’ll get counseling & training, and we’ll all ignore the fact that if a civilian had done this, he’d be facing charges.
We don't insist that civilians point guns at people as part of their job.
I don't know the details of this incident, but the moment you're pointing a gun at someone, the stakes are raised seriously high, and accidents are going to happen and people are going to die.
The issue then becomes what happens next. Do we ask the question, 'is this officer salvable?' Should we?
There are lines which society needs to draw for police behavior, but we're not going to insist they can't point guns at people and we shouldn't insist on perfection.
I think it's fair to insist on basic competence, and maybe this steps over that line, but the press has screwed up so many of these that I think we need to wait.
Jaybird: Do cops have “never events”? Should they? If the answer to one or the other of those is “yes”, how in the flying heck this not one of them?
That's a wonderful comparison, and yes, I fully agree this sort of thing should never happen.
So then let's follow the logic. How often do "never events" actually happen in a hospital where the surgeons have total control, lots of time to plan, and a team of helpers?
50 million surgeries a year (Google).
5000 (link below) of which leave stuff (normally sponges) inside the patient (leaving a sponge in is mind-numbingly bad btw).
At those rates, the police should be seeing "never events" a thousand times a day.
Further, as far as I can tell, the result of a never event isn't "fire everyone involved". Now maybe surgeons are harder to replace than police so that's not what we want to do, but it should be thought provoking.
Oscar Gordon:
Double down, hexadecimal all the way!
Weirdly enough, there are some applications where you *want* hexadecimal. For example if you're down there on the bare metal of a computer chip and you're looking for patterns.
I simply don't care about "plagiarism" in a politician (much less his super-model wife who speaks English as a 2nd language).
A job of a politician is to steal other people's ideas, repackage them so they're politically practicable, and make them into laws. You judge him by whether he's stealing good ideas, and doing a good job on the repackaging.
By that standard he gets a total pass on this. He can repeat Lincoln's (or Obama's) entire speech as far as I care. I also could care less about the whole lack-of-dignity he brings to anything he touches. I don't like it, but whatever.
However another of his jobs is effective personal management and crisis management. By those standards this was bad. Arguably Trump has to be an effective manager because of his empire so it's probably more a short term than long term thing but whatever.
My problem with him is he's trying to repackage bad ideas. He's running on a lot of things which are economic poison and/or totally unworkable.
tl;dr – If someone wanted to bribe Hillary Clinton from 2013-2015, the correct way to do it would be to say ‘I am giving this *entirely legal* giant bag of money to you, Hillary Clinton, because I want you to like me.’, and she would say ‘No, please, give that *entirely legal* giant bag of money to my daughter instead, I don’t want it showing up on my released tax returns when I run for president.’.
That would be the daughter who has a net worth of $15 million dollars (google)? The Clinton Foundation reportedly pays her *nothing*, NBC paid her $600k/year during her less than 3 years there.
So working off the assumption that Clinton had “NO EXPERIENCE” and showing all sorts of mathematical models for how an inexperienced trader would fare is just straight bullshit.
"Experience" goes to her being there at all. The impossible part comes from making silly amounts of money off of shorts in market that doubled in value in a year (and yes, I realize part of me thinking this is totally outrageous is I have a lot more experience in this sort of thing than most).
That's over and above her first day where she got a 6.5x increase in a flat market where nothing increased by that amount. If I recall the reporting of this correctly, she had to make a dozen or so carefully timed trades to capture various options bouncing around in the market.
Those numbers they're tossing around in wiki claiming what she did was a LOT harder than winning the lottery? They match up really well with her win/loss ratio and various other stats they've got up in there.
People playing by the rules can't do this sort of thing.
Experienced people playing by the rules aren't going to try.
Of course... the cattle futures stuff was heavily investigated by incredibly partisan teams and despite the tin-foil brigade screaming about how obvious it was, nothing was ever found — despite money being poured out like water to find something.
There were no official investigations of the trading and Clinton was never charged with any wrongdoing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_cattle_futures_controversy
Morat20:
God, I love the smell of conspiracy theories in the morning. I also love someone trying to pretend you can calculate the odds of futures trading retroactively. That’s fun. Trillions to one that you’d make 60 grand trading futures while heavily leveraged. Someone should tell the futures market it shouldn’t exist.
"Highly leveraged", would make sense if she had just a few trades and made a lot on them, but that's not what happened. She showed that she can consistently beat the market, and not only that, time the market. Note "highly leveraged" also isn't normally isn't allowed for people who don't have adequate depth, if her $1000 "investment" had turned into a $100k loss then that would have been a problem for her broker. Except this very obviously wasn't a normal situation or relationship.
Hillary Rodham Clinton was allowed to order 10 cattle futures contracts, normally a $12,000 investment, in her first commodity trade in 1978 although she had only $1,000 in her account at the time, according to trade records the White House released yesterday.
The computerized records of her trades, which the White House obtained from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, show for the first time how she was able to turn her initial investment into $6,300 overnight.
Her trades don't make any sense. She claims she studied the market a great deal, but her trades (betting short) in a rising market. That's nuts.
Financial writer Edward Chancellor noted in 1999 that Clinton made her money by betting "on the short side at a time when cattle prices doubled."
These results are quite remarkable. Two-thirds of her trades showed a profit by the end of the day she made them and 80 percent were ultimately profitable. Many of her trades took place at or near the best prices of the day. Only four explanations can account for these remarkable results. Blair may have been an exceptionally good trader. Hillary Clinton may have been exceptionally lucky. Blair may have been front-running other orders. Or Blair may have arranged to have a broker fraudulently assign trades to benefit Clinton's account.[17]
"At or near the best prices of the day" means she's simply being given the best trades after the fact. Her broker made a ton of trades, she got the best.
Morat20:
The conspiracy theory mongering about the Clinton Foundation is particular telling, though. From neutral sources, it’s a bog-standard charitable foundation. The only thing even vaguely different about it is it’s not a pass-through charity — they don’t collect funds and then give them to other charities, but do the bulk of the charitable work “in-house”.
I particularly like the sneering implications it’s some sort of bribery machine, because clearly charities are never audited, don’t have to report their spending, and can be used as a personal piggy bank by the Clinton’s without the board even knowing or the spending being tracked. Because unlike every other charity in the United States, the IRS and various watchdogs are totally unaware the CF even exists.
The list of people giving money to CF is very strange, Blackwater (the merc group), the Saudis, and so on (so, yes, it includes people Hillary deals with professionally as SoS).
The Structure of CF is very strange.
When she was Secretary of State, Hillary was getting 700 emails a month from CF (this may explain why she was so adamant that she needed a private server).
The IRS (etc) have to deal with their various publicly filed documents (I put their 2013 tax returns at the bottom to show the level of detail), and yes, they don't have entries for "bribes and kickbacks".
However these sorts of financial oddities and conflicts of interests seem to follow the Clintons around, and yes, they don't normally rise to the level where they can be arrested (the Statue of Limitations had elapsed for the Cattle thing before The NYT went with it).
But notice that the "appearance of impropriety" isn't even an issue (the Sec of State collecting money for her charity from people she's dealing with as Sec State stinks to high heaven), the issue is whether or not they can be arrested, and the answer is clearly 'no'.
They seem willing to go right up to the edge of what's provable, as opposed to what's legal, much less what looks bad.
You're reversing things. It was Hillary herself who repeatedly claimed she managed her own account, from her own "research", and it was only later that this was shown to be a bald face lie.
Further if you saw her whitewater testimony, her statements on this thing were amazingly weaselly worded. If memory serves, she was asked if she managed her own account and she replied something like she doesn't remember not managing it.
She and her husband still have student loans, she has NO experience in this at all, Cattle Futures was a game where 3/4ths of the "investors" lose money, her initial investment was a lot of money for her at the time, and these trades were heavily on the margin (meaning it was FAR more likely that she'd lose tens of thousands of dollars than gain it).
She and Bill are both intelligent, it makes NO sense to expose themselves to this kind of a financial risk. This is up there with reading a book on juggling and then getting started with chainsaws. Further it also makes no sense for a broker to let her trade an account this thin on the margin this deeply, or for that matter to even HAVE an account at all.
And yes, the market was indeed booming... which actually makes the situation worse since she made money SHORTING it.
without anyone explaining WHO bribed her, HOW they managed to do it through a futures market, or WHY they bribed her — or what she did in return.
HOW is easy. Her dealer was a guy who made lots and lots of trades, at the end of the day he just retroactively gave the best ones to her.
WHY is easy. She's the wife of the newly elected governor. The spouse which is out of power makes mysterious money on behalf of the one who is in power.
WHO is interesting. James Blair (the broker) was another lawyer and the outside counsel to Arkansas' largest employer (Tyson Foods).
So, shock, she's benefiting from someone who represents people who do business in front of her husband. And, also shock, Tyson Foods was treated rather well during this time period by the Clinton Governorship.
The Times also reported, “During Mr. Clinton's tenure in Arkansas, Tyson benefited from a variety of state actions, including $9 million in government loans, the placement of company executives on important state boards and favorable decisions on environmental issues.”
Tyson appears to have obtained these results for what looks like a bribe delivered though Hillary Clinton’s commodities account. To quote the company’s former chairman: politics is “a series of unsentimental transactions between those who need votes and those who have money.”
And none of this is hard proof of any crimes or precise exchange of money for favors. Which doesn't change that her behavior (and very much the math) makes no sense if everything was legal.
Dark Matter: Hillary is openly corrupt and totally without morals or ethic Mike Schilling: Also, Obama is a secret Muslim..
By all means, if it's easy and obvious, please explain the hundreds of millions of dollars that she's acquired (Billions if we count what has gone through the Clinton Foundation and we should). My assumption is that she's worth the money... but what is it that she's does, and for whom?
And while you're at it, please explain her vast abilities (even as a total raw beginner) with Cattle Futures which was roughly equiv to consistently winning the lottery.
Odds of what she did: 1 : 31 Trillion (this is at *best* and gives her the benefit of the doubt, link)
Odds of winning Powerball: 1 : 180 Million (Source: Google, included for perspective);
My expectation is "The Clinton Foundation" is just the modern update of "Cattle". As corrupt and dishonest as she is, imho she'd make a better President than Donald. But IMHO it's a problem when politicians "mysteriously" acquire large amounts of money.
It's a much larger problem when the press and their supporters turn a blind eye to this sort of thing.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Morning Ed: Politics {2016.07.19.T}”
DavidTC: Erm, this is the cattle future market. Last I checked, the fees there were pretty damn low for heavy investors.
A thousand dollars isn't a "heavy investor". The minimum amount you were supposed to have was $12k.
DavidTC: His *return* doesn’t have anything to do with what *percentage* of his trades are profitable. 100% of his trades might be 17% profitable, or 99.999% of them might be slightly unprofitable and that last single trade is 100000% profitable.
Absolutely right. If you want apples to apples he has a return of 17% and she had 6000%.
DavidTC: Oh, so it’s not even two-thirds.
Absolutely perfect, with no loses ever, would be 100%, she's scary close to the theoretical perfect.
DavidTC: And, not to be too blunt about it, but people didn’t understand probability. I don’t trust anyone who quotes odds without actually seeing the math. People *talking about* a model I can’t even see the results of, on data I have no access to?
People don't understand probability? The fluff newspapers were her backers, the stats you're ragging on were by economists from the University of North Florida and Auburn University published in the Journal of Economics and Finance. That's over and above the editor of the Journal of Futures Markets who said something similar without the stats (he compared what she did to buying a pair of ice skates and then winning the olympics the next day).
The people who are in the trade understand numbers like these are simply impossible. You're trying to justify a 6000% profit and claim somehow that it's "normal" or not unusual.
If that paper is off by 5 orders of magnitude, then we're looking at a politician's wife literally winning the lottery (how often has that happened), when the lottery was being run by someone actively being helped by her husband. If they're not wrong about the odds then it's more like she's winning the lottery consistently.
DavidTC: For example, it’s not the least bit unlikely for someone to win the lottery, despite what you seem to think. People win the lottery literally every day.
If the lottery were consistently won by the wife of the guy running it, it'd be a problem. This was a business who was actively being helped by her husband, and the broker's office is now known for this sort of thing.
Further, these are *scary* risks she was taking. The expected result was not only the loss of her money, but that she'd actually owe multiple years worth of income. If she'd lost $100k, how would she have paid it back and what would that have done to her and her husband's careers?
Imagine the governor declaring bankruptcy because his wife was betting on the cattle futures market. Is that really a good risk for a pair of really smart people?
DavidTC: No, meaning if you held anything long enough, and managed to sell it at the right place, it will eventually make you money.
That is the trick. If it were easy I'd still be doing it. 3/4 of the people who do what she did lose money. The odds are *that* bad.
DavidTC: I find this a weird discussion. I mean, you’re the one asserting that she *did* that, and it was mysterious. Why am I having to explain it actually happens? It clearly does happen, or, uh, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
So you're good with a politician's wife pulling in a 6000% profit under conditions multiple experts claim are somewhere between shockingly unlikely and impossible, while dealing with someone being helped by her husband?
DavidTC: ignoring the fact the market dropped pretty seriously from the start of May 1979
Let's just post what came up in court when that brokerage was investigated in a other matter (wiki).
Two brokers at Springdale, Bill McCurdy and Steven Johns, testifying about another trader's case, said they participated in a cover-up of block trading on a day in June 1979 that happens to coincide with the opening of what would become Rodham's single most profitable trade.[8]
On “CNN: Man shot by cops while lying down with hands up, lawyer says [+Video]”
The police functioning to raise money for city hall is a serious problem. This is an example of the police 'creating' problems.
But a lot of that perception is simply the result of other problems. I'm not sure what, short of ending the war on drugs, we should do. The carnage that is Black on Black crime suggests a much higher level of police involvement just as a matter of course.
We could certainly reduce police involvement in Black areas... say, impose quotes for who they can arrest, but that would quickly become something like investigating a black's murder only if we've recently investigated a white's murder (and yes, imho this is just as insane as it sounds).
If you want to get it down to zero, then we probably need to get rid of the police and live with it being "Lord of the Flies".
There are other models we could try, perhaps even on a 'one city' level. Say moving to the medical 'review what happened without punishment' idea.
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1)kids? Two high-on-drugs criminals who had just pulled a robbery and then engaged in behavior which drew the attention of the police. Brown was 290lbs.
2) The forensic evidence says Brown was advancing, as do the witnesses who agree with each other. The ones who dispute that all disagree with both the physical evidence and each other.
When you break down the witness testimony into details it gets very one sided. Disputing witnesses admit they weren't there, disputing witnesses change their story several times, give conflicting stories, etc. The ones who support what the cop said also agree with each other. The wiki shows some of them, I've seen others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Michael_Brown#Shooting_scene_evidence
http://i.imgur.com/eNdviOl.png
If our system started with a presumption of guilt and required proof of innocence, the cop would have easily proved himself innocent.
Having said that, yes, absolutely, the police were functioning as a revenue generating service by giving out tickets; this was a much bigger problem for the poor than the rich for multiple reasons. And there's a strong argument that that led to the community simply not believing that it'd been a good shooting.
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I think the numbers suggest the "perception" of wrongful use of force by gov's armed agents is greater than the reality.
Yes, there are problems, and we should deal with them... but the mismatch between perception and reality is a problem in itself.
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Actually, yeah. We should be using more than *one* day for the police (who at a handwave are getting 10 million encounters a day).
I can't tell how many people were in your unit nor how long you were there (if you've posted that somewhere else I'm sorry I haven't caught that yet).
But assume you have 10 encounters per person per day and there are 10 people in your unit. That's 36,500 encounters a year so every 30 years of your time is 1 day of the police.
I'd like a years worth of data for the police, so you'd need 10,000 years to balance that.
Yes, I know, much hand waving and massive assumptions (for starters I don't think the police, or the military for that matter, do a good job of reporting 'never' events).
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You don't judge how easy it is to win the lottery by looking at the winner. We're looking at extreme, and extremely rare, events in large groups, i.e. "never events".
My expectation is if you'd done your thing for enough time to get a decent statistical average (say, 10,000 years) we'd see numbers which said that your unit was a lot more dangerous than the the police.
For that matter we could get larger data if we looked at every unit over the course of the entire war (I'm reasonably sure there were friendly fire incidents and civilians accidentally killed).
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Ah, so it's adjusted for percentage of arrestees, thank you.
Interesting... I'm not sure what to make of this. Given the wide racial disparity in all the other crime stats, this might be expected.
Intuitively I still think ending the war on drugs would be the most effective in terms of dealing with racial disparities in violence/crime, but I don't think this study has the granularity to support that.
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It is difficult to hide a corpse. The total number of people killed by the police in 2015 was 1186. http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/12/28/3735190/killed-by-police-2015/
The number of police who died on the job in 2015 was 42 (google, npr).
The number of blacks in the US is 39 million.
The number of hispanics is 38 million.
The number of cops is roughly 1 million.
We have the mentally ill and the drug war inflating the dead-by-police numbers.
Roughly half the kill-by-police are mentally ill
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/half-people-killed-police-suffer-mental-disability-report-n538371
These numbers don't scream that "death by racism" is a serious problem.
We're probably going to reform the police this election cycle. They'll have body cams, perhaps we'll get real reform and they won't be used as revenue collectors. These are good things, but I seriously doubt police reform will change the number of corpses on the streets.
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Punishment is the current police model, and what (predictably) happens is everyone points to the dead guy and says it was his fault.
On “Morning Ed: Politics {2016.07.19.T}”
You're ignoring transaction costs (beginners' mistake).
Every trade is a loss the moment you make it.
Further subtract losers from winners to get a feel for this. 50%-50% would be zero, a 55%/45% split would be 10% (and very, very good). Warren Buffet's return is 17% (yes, I know I'm assuming all trades are equal which clearly isn't true).
Hillary's is 60% (80%-20%). That's Jesus-walking-on-water. I've done things like this professionally and her numbers are way beyond crazy great, and there's multiple other eye-watering details.
When this story first broke there was a big deal about her 6.5x first-days profit because nothing moved like that that day. The answer was easy, she had a swarm of trades which all managed to capture the jump or fall of that stocks' bounce.
Trading at the top/bottom of the day's market is also an absurdly powerful walking-on-water thing. Get out of something during the best minute of the day and a loss magically becomes profit.
Meaning that if you reversed your buys and sells (i.e. did shorts) NONE of them would have been profitable.
Financial writer Edward Chancellor noted in 1999 that Clinton made her money by betting "on the short side at a time when cattle prices doubled."[15] Bloomberg News columnist Caroline Baum and hedge fund manager Victor Niederhoffer published a detailed 1995 analysis in National Review that found typical patterns and behaviors in commodities trading not met and concluded that her explanations for her results were highly implausible.[16] Possibilities were raised that broker actions such as front running of trades, or a long straddle with the winning positions thereof assigned to a favored client, had taken place.[13][16]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_cattle_futures_controversy#Likelihood_of_results
On “CNN: Man shot by cops while lying down with hands up, lawyer says [+Video]”
So we're not going to rush to judgement but here is our rush to judgement? At this point in Ferguson we'd be saying that Mike Brown should never have been shot in the back while surrendering and there's no excuse for that.
First, IMHO there's a LOT to be said for treating this by the medical paradigm. Assess what went wrong, have special investigations which try less to assess blame and more to prevent future problems.
However we don't do that. We mostly want to treat this as a criminal matter, so putting the police in prison is on the table. Ergo we have the adversarial setup right from the start, and everyone behaves that way.
I don't think the police can apologize and admit guilt without admitting guilt (although I'm not a lawyer).
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Why should they "criticize his actions" right now? For that matter, why should we?
Let's replay Ferguson:
There's a police shooting. 20 witnesses say it was unjustified. The dead guy's friend says he was there and it was in the back after he surrendered. The dead guy's family says he was going to college and wouldn't hurt a fly.
Except after lots of investigations, including by Eric Holder's FBI, the almost 300 lb, high on drugs criminal who had *just* pulled a robbery attacked the cop and made him kill him. None of the 20 witnesses don't agree with each other or with the physical evidence. The 8 witnesses who support the cop's story do agree with each other and with the physical evidence. The dead guy's friend was his partner in crime and has a criminal history of lying.
Or how about the Orlando shootings? The FBI thinks the shooter wasn't gay, or confused about his sexuality, or even homophobic. It's still an ongoing investigation, so there's time to change, but as far as they can tell he never used gay dating apps, and they've got his computer so it either has gay porn on it or it doesn't.
We don't know anything yet. The press is going to talk to whoever will talk and what we think we know is probably wrong.
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We just had a statistical analysis done by some left leaning black Harvard economist find the opposite.
One assumes he adjusted his stats for either encounters with the police or crime in general. I tried reading the raw report but it was going to take too long to get my head into. The racial breakdown of the shootings is a reflection of society, not a creation of the police.
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/07/13/black-harvard-economist-finds-no-bias-against-blacks-in-police-shootings/
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We don't insist that civilians point guns at people as part of their job.
I don't know the details of this incident, but the moment you're pointing a gun at someone, the stakes are raised seriously high, and accidents are going to happen and people are going to die.
The issue then becomes what happens next. Do we ask the question, 'is this officer salvable?' Should we?
There are lines which society needs to draw for police behavior, but we're not going to insist they can't point guns at people and we shouldn't insist on perfection.
I think it's fair to insist on basic competence, and maybe this steps over that line, but the press has screwed up so many of these that I think we need to wait.
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That's a wonderful comparison, and yes, I fully agree this sort of thing should never happen.
So then let's follow the logic. How often do "never events" actually happen in a hospital where the surgeons have total control, lots of time to plan, and a team of helpers?
50 million surgeries a year (Google).
5000 (link below) of which leave stuff (normally sponges) inside the patient (leaving a sponge in is mind-numbingly bad btw).
At those rates, the police should be seeing "never events" a thousand times a day.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/08/surgery-sponges-lost-supplies-patients-fatal-risk/1969603/
Further, as far as I can tell, the result of a never event isn't "fire everyone involved". Now maybe surgeons are harder to replace than police so that's not what we want to do, but it should be thought provoking.
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A million cops. Probably 10 million encounters with the police per day.
So this was the worst one in the nation for this day.
That doesn't make it right, or not grim, but I expect this isn't "typical".
On “Will the Chavistas Please Stand Up?”
Weirdly enough, there are some applications where you *want* hexadecimal. For example if you're down there on the bare metal of a computer chip and you're looking for patterns.
On “When is a Speech More Than Just a Speech?”
I simply don't care about "plagiarism" in a politician (much less his super-model wife who speaks English as a 2nd language).
A job of a politician is to steal other people's ideas, repackage them so they're politically practicable, and make them into laws. You judge him by whether he's stealing good ideas, and doing a good job on the repackaging.
By that standard he gets a total pass on this. He can repeat Lincoln's (or Obama's) entire speech as far as I care. I also could care less about the whole lack-of-dignity he brings to anything he touches. I don't like it, but whatever.
However another of his jobs is effective personal management and crisis management. By those standards this was bad. Arguably Trump has to be an effective manager because of his empire so it's probably more a short term than long term thing but whatever.
My problem with him is he's trying to repackage bad ideas. He's running on a lot of things which are economic poison and/or totally unworkable.
On “Morning Ed: Politics {2016.07.19.T}”
That would be the daughter who has a net worth of $15 million dollars (google)? The Clinton Foundation reportedly pays her *nothing*, NBC paid her $600k/year during her less than 3 years there.
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"Experience" goes to her being there at all. The impossible part comes from making silly amounts of money off of shorts in market that doubled in value in a year (and yes, I realize part of me thinking this is totally outrageous is I have a lot more experience in this sort of thing than most).
That's over and above her first day where she got a 6.5x increase in a flat market where nothing increased by that amount. If I recall the reporting of this correctly, she had to make a dozen or so carefully timed trades to capture various options bouncing around in the market.
Those numbers they're tossing around in wiki claiming what she did was a LOT harder than winning the lottery? They match up really well with her win/loss ratio and various other stats they've got up in there.
People playing by the rules can't do this sort of thing.
Experienced people playing by the rules aren't going to try.
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There were no official investigations of the trading and Clinton was never charged with any wrongdoing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_cattle_futures_controversy
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"Highly leveraged", would make sense if she had just a few trades and made a lot on them, but that's not what happened. She showed that she can consistently beat the market, and not only that, time the market. Note "highly leveraged" also isn't normally isn't allowed for people who don't have adequate depth, if her $1000 "investment" had turned into a $100k loss then that would have been a problem for her broker. Except this very obviously wasn't a normal situation or relationship.
Hillary Rodham Clinton was allowed to order 10 cattle futures contracts, normally a $12,000 investment, in her first commodity trade in 1978 although she had only $1,000 in her account at the time, according to trade records the White House released yesterday.
The computerized records of her trades, which the White House obtained from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, show for the first time how she was able to turn her initial investment into $6,300 overnight.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/whitewater/stories/wwtr940527.htm
Her trades don't make any sense. She claims she studied the market a great deal, but her trades (betting short) in a rising market. That's nuts.
Financial writer Edward Chancellor noted in 1999 that Clinton made her money by betting "on the short side at a time when cattle prices doubled."
These results are quite remarkable. Two-thirds of her trades showed a profit by the end of the day she made them and 80 percent were ultimately profitable. Many of her trades took place at or near the best prices of the day. Only four explanations can account for these remarkable results. Blair may have been an exceptionally good trader. Hillary Clinton may have been exceptionally lucky. Blair may have been front-running other orders. Or Blair may have arranged to have a broker fraudulently assign trades to benefit Clinton's account.[17]
"At or near the best prices of the day" means she's simply being given the best trades after the fact. Her broker made a ton of trades, she got the best.
The list of people giving money to CF is very strange, Blackwater (the merc group), the Saudis, and so on (so, yes, it includes people Hillary deals with professionally as SoS).
The Structure of CF is very strange.
When she was Secretary of State, Hillary was getting 700 emails a month from CF (this may explain why she was so adamant that she needed a private server).
The IRS (etc) have to deal with their various publicly filed documents (I put their 2013 tax returns at the bottom to show the level of detail), and yes, they don't have entries for "bribes and kickbacks".
However these sorts of financial oddities and conflicts of interests seem to follow the Clintons around, and yes, they don't normally rise to the level where they can be arrested (the Statue of Limitations had elapsed for the Cattle thing before The NYT went with it).
But notice that the "appearance of impropriety" isn't even an issue (the Sec of State collecting money for her charity from people she's dealing with as Sec State stinks to high heaven), the issue is whether or not they can be arrested, and the answer is clearly 'no'.
They seem willing to go right up to the edge of what's provable, as opposed to what's legal, much less what looks bad.
https://www.clintonfoundation.org/sites/default/files/clinton_foundation_report_public_11-19-14.pdf
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You're reversing things. It was Hillary herself who repeatedly claimed she managed her own account, from her own "research", and it was only later that this was shown to be a bald face lie.
Further if you saw her whitewater testimony, her statements on this thing were amazingly weaselly worded. If memory serves, she was asked if she managed her own account and she replied something like she doesn't remember not managing it.
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She and her husband still have student loans, she has NO experience in this at all, Cattle Futures was a game where 3/4ths of the "investors" lose money, her initial investment was a lot of money for her at the time, and these trades were heavily on the margin (meaning it was FAR more likely that she'd lose tens of thousands of dollars than gain it).
She and Bill are both intelligent, it makes NO sense to expose themselves to this kind of a financial risk. This is up there with reading a book on juggling and then getting started with chainsaws. Further it also makes no sense for a broker to let her trade an account this thin on the margin this deeply, or for that matter to even HAVE an account at all.
And yes, the market was indeed booming... which actually makes the situation worse since she made money SHORTING it.
HOW is easy. Her dealer was a guy who made lots and lots of trades, at the end of the day he just retroactively gave the best ones to her.
WHY is easy. She's the wife of the newly elected governor. The spouse which is out of power makes mysterious money on behalf of the one who is in power.
WHO is interesting. James Blair (the broker) was another lawyer and the outside counsel to Arkansas' largest employer (Tyson Foods).
So, shock, she's benefiting from someone who represents people who do business in front of her husband. And, also shock, Tyson Foods was treated rather well during this time period by the Clinton Governorship.
The Times also reported, “During Mr. Clinton's tenure in Arkansas, Tyson benefited from a variety of state actions, including $9 million in government loans, the placement of company executives on important state boards and favorable decisions on environmental issues.”
Tyson appears to have obtained these results for what looks like a bribe delivered though Hillary Clinton’s commodities account. To quote the company’s former chairman: politics is “a series of unsentimental transactions between those who need votes and those who have money.”
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2016/02/02/Why-37-Year-Old-Clinton-Financial-Scandal-Still-Relevant
And none of this is hard proof of any crimes or precise exchange of money for favors. Which doesn't change that her behavior (and very much the math) makes no sense if everything was legal.
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By all means, if it's easy and obvious, please explain the hundreds of millions of dollars that she's acquired (Billions if we count what has gone through the Clinton Foundation and we should). My assumption is that she's worth the money... but what is it that she's does, and for whom?
And while you're at it, please explain her vast abilities (even as a total raw beginner) with Cattle Futures which was roughly equiv to consistently winning the lottery.
Odds of what she did: 1 : 31 Trillion (this is at *best* and gives her the benefit of the doubt, link)
Odds of winning Powerball: 1 : 180 Million (Source: Google, included for perspective);
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_cattle_futures_controversy
My expectation is "The Clinton Foundation" is just the modern update of "Cattle". As corrupt and dishonest as she is, imho she'd make a better President than Donald. But IMHO it's a problem when politicians "mysteriously" acquire large amounts of money.
It's a much larger problem when the press and their supporters turn a blind eye to this sort of thing.
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