In addition to the $5B GS got from Buffet, GS also got $10B from the US Treasury. For the use of the Treasury's money GS paid about 23%. For the use of Buffet's money the cost was around 100%. I don't know what Buffet did, but GS would not have paid four times as much to use Buffet's money unless it truly was a deal they could not refuse.

They absolutely deserved it. I think the executives of all the money center banks should be handed as a group over to ISIS, or better yet, to the average Mom & Pops that got hosed by the mortgage meltdown.

The only reason people don't think Buffet is flashy is that they don't understand flashy. In these days of celebrity bling people think with his money Buffet should be driving a platinum plated bespoke Bentley driven by a staff of nude Swedish supermodels. What people don't understand is that the deal he made with Goldman Sachs for the preferred stock and warrants to bail them out in 2008 is the most ostentatious display of wealth in the history of mankind. He forced the so called Masters of the Universe to accept a deal that must have made the corpses of Marcus Goldman and Samuel Sachs puke in their graves. $5 BILLION in preferred stock with a 10% dividend and warrants to buy another $5B in GS stock at $115 a share. To put this in perspective, there are 12 countries in the world whose GDP is less than the amount GS had to pay Buffet in annual dividends on that preferred stock. The profit on the warrants rank Buffet as the 154th out of 194 biggest economy in the world. He used his wealth to perform the equivalent of anal rape with a spiked baseball bat in front of a live tv audience to the most powerful financial firm in history. It doesn't get flashier than that to those that understand what he did.

My father was an officer in First Cavalry. Casually over breakfast one day I said I was working with an RPG and he nearly sprayed coffee over the table. I learned that day RPG can mean very, very different things to different people.

You've just explained the problems common to the manufacturing business cycle. As an economist, I am always amused when I see criminal enterprises have to start operating like a business because eventually the same issues come into play. Stealing one thing to sell is easy. Trying to make an ongoing living off it becomes real work.

How nice of them to self select their data out of the dataset via the Darwin Process.

Absent evidence to the contrary he got lucky and does not get credit for it.

Just send up a container in advance with a couple Caterpillar P-5000 Work Loaders.

As you go throughout your day, look around you and try to keep track of people in so called "dead end" jobs as a proportion of the people you see. The world in which we live depends on a certain percentage of the population doing those jobs: garbage truck worker, toll booth operator, road maintenance crewmember, janitor, etc. While I certainly hope that my children excel, it is more important to me that they be happy doing whatever it is they are doing. I am reasonably successful and come from a family of very successful people. My father is content to know that me and my siblings were given opportunities and support and that what we ended up doing was much less a measure of our success than our qualities as parents, spouses and members of our community. As long as my kids choose, rather than settle, I can support them in what ever they do.

They say that if you are young and vote Republican you are heartless but if you are older and vote Democrat you are stupid. Not sure which gene controls that...

It also doesn't hurt that they have roughly three times the US population. If everyone there bought 1% more manufactured goods the change in GDP would be greater than the total annual production of some entire countries.

My son (currently 6) is obsessed with a creature called the Terror Bird. Standing ten feet tall they were apex predators in South America. I would be plenty scared of a meat eating bird that big.

While I can see a need for putting together and rehearsing a plan for "after" I would like to see the cost-benefit analysis on hardening the infrastructure. There are a lot of things we *could* do in life, like making planes more protected from missile damage we don't do because the likelihood of the event being protected against is so low relative to the aggregate cost to implement said solution. Are we prepared to build EMP shielding into every electronic device, thereby increasing the cost of life in general to protect against a very unlikely event? (Note I am not advocating one way or the other, simply asking the question.)

So the mnemonic device to remember the names of the planets will be about 60% as long as War & Peace.

The only way this works is if cars remain exactly the same while improving only the engine technology. In 1981, the Honda Accord was 175" long, 64: wide and weighed 2,083 lbs. The 1.8L engine made 75hp. A current Accord is 191" long, 72" wide and weighs 3,287 lbs. Its 2.0L engine makes 154hp. The power-displacement ratio of the engine went up by 84% but the weight went up by more than 50%. As long as people want faster/bigger/more we will eat up any efficiency gains to have more comfort. Only when forced will the average person use efficiency to decrease consumption.