Here you have exactly why the quants got things so wrong. If you have an arbitrary random variable with a finite variance, then a law of large numbers will tell you that it converges to a Guassian under repetition. That's what most educated people know.

The problem is: the odds of an arbitrary distribution with no bounds having a finite variance is zero. In finance and economics, we know this, and we make up so many excuses to use Gaussians instead of more general LLN collection families. Gaussians are so tractable and easy to use, and so consistently used in theory that its second nature for us to use them. And since Gaussians are MLEs with relatively few restrictions, they tend to minimize measures of entropy. And since this is economics, everything ultimately has a bound... somewhere... unless its derivatives.

Not even most economists, financiers, or quants want to have to apply Levy-stable distributions all the time to variables, because working in complex spaces with integrals that never seem to converge when you want them to is a giant mathematical pain in the ass. But that's what real risk management is - your models need to be robust to whether that "variance" number your data indicates is real or bullshit or infinite.

Quants who knew better willfully ignored this, because "risk" (and "volatility" and "variance") makes "return," and they like big paychecks when things are going well. And when things aren't going well, well, who else could understand this stuff? Your average banker with an MBA might fire them, but doesn't have a chance at understanding, so he'll hire the average economist with a PhD who has a small chance, but recommends a mathematician who will say he doesn't understand the interpretation, and will refer you to a quant.

Finance adds a LOT to the economy. The basic idea of finance is deciding where the most "return" is - ie, what investments are the most productive. If you gave money to every entrepreneur who came asking, you'd be out of money by the end of the day.

Money has meaning. There is a limited supply, and that means you have to prioritize who gets it. It has to be in limited supply in order for it to have "meaning." In order to motivate people to do things, we give them money, instead of trying to guess that they want payment in the form of, say, "a two bedroom house in Santa Monica with a 30 yr mortgage, a 2007 Prius Hybrid on a 5 yr lease, Montessori school for the 7 year old..." Using money not only gives people the freedom to choose what they consume, but it removes the guesswork from employers. If you just hand out money to anyone, you have no price stability, and no ability to plan for the future.

Deciding who to give money to on what terms, based solely on their ability to honor the terms of the understood mutual agreement, is essential to the economy operating. Finance is the art of acquiring money from one source, such as bank stockholders or bond holders, and allocating that money to borrowers or investments in such a way that you reduce the idiosyncratic risk (which your investors want to avoid), thus earning compensation and a premium.

How would you feel if you could only buy a house, or a car, or a college education, or whatever you get on credit cards if you could only buy those products after you had all the money to pay for them in full at the time of purchase? Or if you could never get an incentive to save money? If you've ever been a saver or a borrower, the answer is you'd be worse off, by your revealed preference.

The problems only occur when parts of these statements are negated. For example, if banks extend credit to people who can't repay it, or if bank risk managers are idiots, or if the agreements aren't mutually understood and agreed to. Yeah, there's always going to be people who exploit their position to do unethical things, in any field. I think credit card companies are blood suckers, and I think using credit cards is evil. But I sure as hell save and invest in companies I believe have the ability to improve peoples lives and get paid for it.

Don't blame finance, blame the people who use it to do evil.

North Korea isn't above burying 20,000 tons of TNT equivalent high explosives for propaganda purposes.

What could China do with our debt, sue us? We know the serial numbers of every bond theyve ever bought from us, and we could simply declare we are keeping those payments in escrow because China is the worlds biggest human rights violator. As long as they play our game, we keep the interest checks coming.

If you can turn cellulose into a valuable, exportable commodity, say goodbye to every third world ecosystem with trees.

TFA says "The case studies looked at patients whose consumption ranged from two to nine litres of cola a day."

For those of you used to measuring in six packs, six 12 oz cans of cola is 2.1 liters.

Sodium in cola is pretty minimal. Compare:

Pack of ramen: 890mg
12 oz of V8: 885mg
Small fries: 144mg
100 grams of carrots: 69mg
12 oz of Coke: 38mg

Not quite. 3 bananas might get you a gram of potassium. People should get about 5 grams a day from fruits and vegetables, but the average American gets about 2.5 grams a day. If you're hypokalemic, you need a professional to dose out your potassium. You might need 1 gram, you might need 10 grams, you might need it intravenously, and too much or too little may kill you, depending.

However, if you're hypokalemic and don't want to deal with medical professionals, just:
1) avoid any salty foods, and
2) eat only normal foods that happen to have good potassium.

I keep bananas, almonds, dried apricots, raisins, prunes, dates, etc on hand to snack on when I get hypokalemic symptoms.

Cola is significantly worse than water because:
1) Simple sugars (glucose, fructose) significantly enhance electrolyte absorption and reabsorption. The later is important, because in your kidneys, this means more electrolytes excreted.
2) Caffeine is a diuretic, and increases glomerular filtration rate, leading to more fluid and electrolyte excretion.
3) Cola is very acidic (eg 2.6 pH). This strips out cations (sodium, potassium, calcium) and increased levels of anions (citrate, chloride, carbonate).

The three of these working together simultaneously dramatically increases the amount of electrolytes removed from the body, and does so fairly quickly since they are absorbed quickly (due to the sugars).

"Muscle weakness" is about as dramatic as it gets - when your heart stops beating, you have a problem. The arrythmia, muscular weakness, myalgia, muscle cramps mean your nervous system is losing control of your muscles, because potassium is a key neurotransmitter and necessary for muscle control.

The best part is that when you are hypokalemic, those same neurotransmitters failing means you get confused and have no idea what is going on. So people typically "just don't feel good" without ever knowing whats going on. Then, they drink water and have a heart attack at age 20 and die.

Sure, an EMT or nurse will pick up on it and give you IV fluids, but to the lay person, they don't know what is wrong, so they can't fix it.

Beer is about 5% alcohol by volume, and 4% carbohydrates. Beer is about 85% of alcohol consumed in US by volume, with specific gravity of 1.05 on average. Around 23 billion L of beer are sold in the US per year. Ethanol is 0.789 g/mL at 25 degrees C, with a molar weight of 46 g/mol. 1 molecule of sugar is metabolized into one molecule of ethanol and two of CO2. The ratio of masses of CO2 to ethanol from sugar is 88:46. The sugar comes from barley, which is 73% carbohydrates and 17% dietary fiber by mass. Ethanol is ultimately metabolized into 3H2O+2CO2, and reduces human caloric needs by 7 kcal per gram.

23 billion L of beer means 1.15 b L of alcohol from beer, means 1.35 b L of alcohol total, means 1.07 b kg of alcohol total, means 2.04 b kg of CO2 total, with 23% of carbohydrate CO2 offset by sequestration in dietary fiber (and 137% offset by the plant consuming the CO2 from the atmosphere to grow). When you poop that fiber, it gets broken down by sewerage treatment system though, to produce methane, so I won't count that as true "sequestration." So growing plants to turn them into beer reduces the CO2 in the atmosphere (energy use not factored in here - unless you know how much electricity goes into producing a billion gallons of beer in a large scale brewery).

Since beer costs around $100 per keg (59 L), total energy consumed per L for planting, fertilizing, harvesting, water filtration, heating, refrigerating, processing, waste water treatment, solid waste disposal, packaging, storage and transport costs are significantly less than $1.70/L, or else every brewer would be out of business. If all the cost were from coal electricity (maximum pollution per dollar) at $.08/kWh, that's 21 kWh, and you get .92 kg of CO2/kWh, or an (ultimately useless) upper bound of 20 kg of CO2 per L. For reference, one brewery claims 220 kWh of heat, 80 kWh of electricity, 200 kg of waste, 3 cubic m of waste water, and 4 cubic meters of water purification for 1000 L of beer. So probably more like a tenth of the upper bound.

Further, consumption of alcoholic calories reduces demand for other foods. The average American consumes 2800 calories per day, and wastes 1100 calories on top of that. So the total calories eaten are 1 million per year, with 390 thousand wasted per year. Consuming 1 L of alcohol means 5500 calories, which, unless you're a fatty, you don't eat from other sources.

1 kg of beef production results in 15kg of greenhouse gas equivalent, mainly in methane. 25% of American calories come from meat and dairy (and 38% from "Fats, oils and sweets" which includes butter and lard). The average American eats 44kg of beef, 46kg of chicken, 30kg of pork, 15kg of cheese, 93 kg of milk, 2 kg of butter, 13kg of eggs, 1 kg of lard per year, versus 80kg of beer. 1kg of whole milk (where all dairy calories ultimately come from) is 600 calories, 1 kg of beef is 2800 calories, 1 kg of chicken is 2000 calories, 1 kg of eggs is 520 cal, 1 kg of butter is 7200 cal, 1 kg of cheese is 3800 cal. 1 kg of beer is 410 cal.

So Americans consume around 8.7% of their calories from beef (and 3.9% from milk, and 4% from cheese), so 1 kg of beer reduces calories from other foods by 410, so it reduces beef consumption by 36 calories (and 32 calories of dairy), so it reduces beef consumption by 13 g, or 200 g of CO2 (in addition to the dairy cattle, chickens, pigs, etc that it replaces). Then 23 b L of beer prevents 4.6 b kg of cow fart GHG.

In contrast, 1000 MW of coal power plant running with 100% uptime for one year produces 8.1 b kg of CO2 per year, and there's one in a neighborhood near (read:killing) you.

This tells us:
1) Drinking beer reduces meat consumption and sequesters carbon, reducing GHG
1) Drinking cheap beer reduces the energy costs of overhead, and thus reduces GHG
2) Drinking light beer reduces calories, and thus increases our likelihood to consume meat, and thus increases GHG
3) Drinking beer by the keg further reduces GHG by cutting energy costs
4) Drinking warm beer cuts refrigeration costs, reducing GHG
5) Drinking fresh beer cuts storage costs, reducing GHG

Yes, I know it was April Fools.

Almost no nukes are designed to be capable of destroying a "major metropolitan area."

Most US nukes are 10kt to 250kt.

Let's say you wanted to "destroy" a "major metropolitan area." "Destroy" I'll take to mean making 50% or more of the buildings severely damaged throughout. So we're talking about around 2 psi of pressure damage. I'll define a "major metropolitan area" as the Census' "metropolitan area," and "major" to mean in the top 50 in the US. So bigger than a Rochester, NY sized metro area.

The Rochester MSA consists of five counties, around 12,600 sq km. Pretend its a circle, so you need a radius of 63 km at 2 PSI. At 100 megatons, you get around a 43 km radius of 2 PSI damage. To get a 63 km radius, you're looking at more like 300 megatons.

Suppose you just wanted to waste the city of Rochester (a city of 200,000). You then only need around 7 km 2 PSI radius, or around 1 MT. The vast majority of the "metropolitan area" would be untouched, but I'm sure this is what you're really thinking of. Even this is unlikely, as most nuclear weapons aren't powerful enough.

A first attempt at a nuclear weapon with a competent research and design team would look like Pakistan's first nuke, around 10 kt. A rogue state with large resources (around $10 billion military budget per year) and several years could probably obtain a nuclear weapon around this yield.

This "first try" power would be enough to get 2 PSI out to maybe 1.5 km. If it were dropped in the center of LAX airport, it wouldn't be able to destroy most of the buildings in the airport, let along damage civilian structures around the edges.

Nukes are designed for specific military targets, because using them to exterminate people is hard. Militarily, they're amazing. It would take a lot of conventional bombs to destroy LAX. But if you want to kill people, building chicken farms with poor sanitation is much cheaper, and influenza is far more deadly.

The reason manhours are so valuable is they can be used not only to extract a resource, or to extract any other resource, but to use it more effciently, invent new ways to use it, invent new ways to not use it, or even to invent new resources.

Tell me with a straight face the hours of your life don't feel finite. I never have enough time.