Intel probably doesn't think AMD is a viable competitor anymore. AMD's net assets, prior to this deal, were in the neighborhood of negative $1.25 billion (assuming it can't get rid of its minority interests *cough GlobalFoundries cough*, and you believe its intellectual property is only worth $168 mil). So AMD is really getting a much better financial position from this deal, after you include the spinoff, and new technology. Intel is getting quite a bit out of the technology sharing agreement too: namely, their technology that they have experience with will continue to dominate the market.

If AMD were to die, their team might get snatched up by a player with deeper pockets and complementary engineering team, like an IBM, and things could get ugly for Intel. More importantly, the realpolitik at this level is important. Regulators around the world would use it as an excuse to attack a major American company as a monopoly, in order to try to boost their national champions. Every country wants a piece of the semiconductor industry and will use any means to get it. It may not be a coincidence that GlobalFoundries decides to build a plant in New York, and the NY AG comes in threatening big action to force this settlement... and if Cuomo couldn't get the case to stick, Eric Holder lived from birth to JD in NY.

60*37 20*9*60
Primetime is still more valuable. Fewer commercials means more expensive commercials - that has been long established.

FBI knows how to find these guys, and detain them for as long as possible before filing charges. You can bet there will be (non-torture) interrogations. The FBI has plenty of federal laws they can throw at these guys, can work with your local DA, and ICE, not to mention get the warrants to track who these guys are talking to and who else might be a threat to you.

The United States NEEDS you to report ANY activity of this kind immediately.

http://www.fbi.gov/contact/fo/fo.htm

The real reason SUVs are popular is because huge vehicles are safe (for those inside). Car accidents are the single leading cause of death and debilitation from ages 1 to 44 in the US (oddly, in 35-44, poisoning barely edges out motor vehicle traffic...), so having a car built like a tank is rational if you're interested in retaining life and limb. Most Americans care more about this than pollution, global warming and Middle East wars, which are statistically much less likely to kill them. A 2008 Jeep Patriot starts at $16,500 MSRP, a Mini One starts at $19,000 but doesn't have enough horsepower for AC, so it isn't sold in the US (MINI Cooper starts $18,500). Both have similar acceleration (11 sec, 0 to 100kmph), Jeep Patriot is safer (19 out of 20 NHTSA Stars vs 17 for AC equipped MINI Cooper), MINI Cooper beats in mpg (28/37 vs 23/28).

The afore mentioned "subsidy" was meant to give US car manufacturers a competitive advantage vis a vis their foreign competitors, and applied to businesses, not consumers. This was not a subsidy per se, but an "accelerated depreciation" tax credit. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, only 100,000 out of 3.6 million SUVs sold in 2002 claimed the tax credit, so people were clearly not choosing the vehicles primarily for the tax credit. And SUVs were popular before this, so hopefully that "cause" is debunked.

Motorcycles get fantastic MPG, but are much, much more likely to kill you. Walking and horses have even better MPG, but are probably also more likely to kill you per mile traveled.

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.