Balta1701

QUOTE (JPN366 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 04:11 PM) Torres released, traded, not re-signed? Can't look at Twitter at work. Granted his release with the intention of pitching in Asia, apparently.

QUOTE (bigruss22 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 03:43 PM) Why trade the one good, young bat that you have ready to be in the majors now? You have to think of this like KW. "To get a better bat that can help me more right now".

Link

In the history of the postseason, there have been 8 "10+ strikeout, 0 walk" games. Cliff Lee has 4.

QUOTE (SnB @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 02:35 PM) except it's going to be January. Better than January in Chicago.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 02:27 PM) Seriously? I'm done. Well, clearly we're not making any headway on this issue, I'll leave it at that as well.

Don't you see? Someone else would be posting X at the same time and I'd naturally come in second.

Bollocks!

As usual, I stink.

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 01:50 PM) <!--quoteo(post=2277683:date=Oct 26, 2010 -> 07:41 AM:name=Balta1701)-->QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 07:41 AM) <!--quotec-->Xiphopagus conjoined twin was finally removed the same day. You talking about these guys? http://bit.ly/9YdeCO Zopissa might be useful in sticking those things together withotu surgery.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 01:24 PM) First, look AGAIN at what I said that you felt the need to go after. I was railing on this author's false premise that financial engineers are not real engineers, and that they are not productive. Clearly, they are both. If one sector grows while others shrink, that clearly means the growing one is productive at the least. Second, no, the bubbles are NOT key to this, as again, you are trying to drag the argument in another direction. Do you really think that these people wouldn't be growing in number of they weren't productive? Do you really think that the bubbles were created by software programmers? A virus grows in number and still kills the host. I won't say what you want me to say to invalidate my point...which is that the bubbles were "Only" created by financial engineering. However...I think it's entirely reasonable to say that if there hadn't been these horrendous models used up and down the line, the bubbles wouldn't have happened. They were only possible because the decision-makers could convince themselves that they'd appropriately factored in the risk in their decisions, when in reality, their models were totally off kilter. You say that same thing a lot in engineering problems. It wasn't "Only" the SRB flaw that caused the Challenger to blow up...but if that flaw never existed, then the disaster never happens.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 01:26 PM) You must hate Michael Jordan. I never said I hated him for that reason, only that it's a reason people would use.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 01:05 PM) Dude, you yourself said earlier that if it was more productive, we should have more of them. Now you are saying having more of them doesn't mean more productivity? Which is it? And again, would you please stop with the "Oh we should just ignore the various bubbles" sarcastic crap? NO ONE IS SAYING THAT. At all. It might actually be possible to have a real discussion on this, if you didn't spend your time inaccurately re-stating (actually manipulating) other people's points before tearing into said fake points as if anyone said them. You can have more productivity in one sector of the economy and as a consequence wind up with less productivity in another. I don't know why that's hard to understand. If I have a more productive health care sector in the sense that as a whole the economy produces more spending on health care, that might or might not be a good thing for the economy as a whole. The Health Care sector continues strong growth as we speak, but as it's doing to, it's in general a drag on every other sector of the economy because every other sector is paying higher health care costs and as such is winding up with less job creation, lower wages, and less spending. Hell, if we got rid of the government backstop, wouldn't the financial sector basically no longer exist? The bubbles are 100% key to all of this. My entire point is that if you want me to believe that increasing financial "innovation" has been a good thing and has increased productivity overall, then it has to have done so to the extent that it overwhelms the damage done by the bursting of the bubbles. If it can't do that, then it has been a negative on the whole. The bubbles are absolutely key, and if you want to prove to me that financial engineering of the last 30 years has been a great boon, you need to prove that productivity as a whole (not just in the banks) has been increased to the point that the bursting bubbles didn't completely wipe it out.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 12:49 PM) I fail to see how specific numbers could show how any type of engineer had done this, in the broad sense except for one - how many of them are employed. They are employed if they provide some sort of value to the firms that hire them. And given the huge increases in numbers of financial engineers and other financial technologists in recent years, and the fact that those areas are even now one of the few where job growth is still occurring... I'd say that's pretty convincing evidence. Not necessarily, because that could simply mean that the growth in that sector is being accomplished at the expense of another sector. If, for example, the financial sector was growing while the manufacturing sector was shrinking, you could just be offsetting overall productivity shifts. And...the real rub comes in the fact that a large financial sector appears to introduce significant instability and increased risk into the full economy. If resource allocation and risk assessment have actually improved, and have done so to such an extent that I should just ignore the $2 trillion and $8 trillion bubbles that have popped within the last decade, then there ought to be obvious increases in productivity somewhere in the economy. Otherwise, I'm just transferring growth from one sector to another. And when I look at the productivity growth data...there doesn't seem to be an obvious trend to me. (This graph runs through 2005...Productivity drops during the peak of the expansion and the bursting and I believe it has climbed back the other way as businesses have gotten more out of their workforce during the Great Recession).

QUOTE (Brian @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 11:44 AM) I don't get the Wade hate personally. He re-signed with the team that drafted him. Have you paid much attention to his personal life?

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 10:00 AM) As for productivity, financial engineering has create immense amounts of wealth, jobs and yes, positive impacts on society. If you refuse to see that, then you might as well write off every field there is as being non-productive. Ok, could you provide some specific data showing how we're more effectively assessing risk or allocating financial resources right now than we were 30 years ago? The example I'd give as a counter-point is that I had a bunch of engineers come up with a way of cutting bridge costs by 50%, leading to a massive building boom. 5 years later though, 30% of the bridges collapse because it turns out they'd assumed that concrete had an infinite strength. Yeah, it might have massively increased road building, and yeah the engineers didn't actually personally green-light the projects, but the projects wouldn't have happened had there been an effective model.

I don't know if it's the same system or not, but it feels like we're going to get whalloped here today. We had a powerful line move through yesterday morning, and since then the temperature's been sitting in the low 80's, with 30 mph wind gusts and high humidity.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 09:43 AM) Go back and read how this started. The article stated, ridiculously, that somehow financial engineers are not productive members of society. Its a laughable premise. That's what I was getting at, and its still true. Then you tried to make out what a financial engineer is, and I am telling you from a dozen years of experience working IN FINANCIAL TECHNOLOGY, that your understanding is wrong. And even now, you are looking at one particular variety of engineer, and you are completely ignoring the way this actually works. Financial engineers do not create instruments, nor do they even decide (usually) what to model or why. They take data, and requirements from a business person who is looking for something, they work the data, hand over the results, and say, "here is what the model(s) say". They are ENGINEERS. They have as much blame, and credit, and productivity as, say, aerospace engineers. Both have done things that resulted in catastrophe, but the idea that either entire field if professionals is not "productive" is ridiculous. As you said, going back to the orignal text. This is the only usage of the phrase "Financial Engineers" in that column. You still need to argue a much higher standard than you're actually arguing. If financial engineers are significantly productive to society...they're helping produce something that has substantially improved society. You're shifting as much of the blame for the collapse as possible away from the people who built the models, but trying to say that clearly those models have substantially improved society. My counter is that first, you can't simply split blame for the collapse onto the people who signed the contracts and away from the people who developed the models...but even if you could, then what good has it done being able to produce better models of risk if it doesn't let you better model risk? How productive have all these financial models been if the end result is an $8 trillion housing implosion? I'm right back to my initial point here. If you want to argue that taking more and more computer scientists and engineers and pulling them into the financial industry to develop ever more complex models has been a good thing, then somehow the financial industry had better have become more efficient at allocating resources than it was beforehand...and I think it's way too easy to say "absolutely not".

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 09:31 AM) Search for job listings for Financial Engineer. They are not the ones who create instruments. They create models that give data which suggests what might work, but they do not securitize. That is other people. You may consider that a semantic difference, but I do not. There is a long walk from the engineer's desk to the people who actually sign the contracts. A computer model cannot create an instrument - that is not possible. It doesn't work that way. A security instrument is a contract, often exchange-traded, but even if its OTC, there still has to be a legally reviewed and founded contract in place. But now that I've gotten you to go ahead and say that they are the ones who create the models, you've now directly linked them to the global collapse and the housing bubble, because the assumptions underlying those models (housing prices don't go down, the price of one house doesn't affect the price of nearby neighbors) played into their failure. The engineers aren't the only people worth ripping here, but they're certainly not blameless, and we have every right to ask whether the kind of funds being dumped into financial engineering are effective uses of talent compared with other industries. Edit: Oh, I should also ad that "Financial Engineering" quite accurately seems to describe the computerized mortgage processing company thing that appeared in the late 90's and helped process mortgages regardless of whether the paperwork was accurate.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 09:08 AM) I'm actually pretty sure he means what the entire financial industry means, when they say "financial engineers" - which is what I described. What you are describing, no one in finance calls engineers. Here's the page from the International Association of Financial Engineers and here's the Journal of Financial Engineering. Here's the ad for the Chicago Financial Engineering and Risk Management workshop. In all those cases, the discussion seems to be creating computer models and complex instruments to manage risk and move funds around appropriately; the same verbiage I'm using.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 08:59 AM) the "guys" you are describing are not financial engineers - those are people who work in securitization and analysis, they are business side, not usually technical. Financial engineers are the people who write the software for financial systems of all kinds. That is not at all what the original author meant by that phrase. Are the guys who write software for G.S. paid more than software writers for anywhere else? Or is the big money in being one of the guys at some sort of trading desk? He talks about the big money for the financial engineers. That's who he's referring to. We use that word "engineers" to describe the guys on the business side because they're the ones planning and creating those complex financial instrument/tricks.

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Oct 25, 2010 -> 05:39 PM) Status for Sunday uncertain? Who the hell can play with fractured ankles? A guy who's personal performance and streak has long been more important than his team.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 25, 2010 -> 08:25 PM) When it happened, I was 17. Xiphopagus conjoined twin was finally removed the same day.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Oct 25, 2010 -> 09:55 PM) You have somehow mangled financial engineers in a blazing wreck with the entire financial industry, and then threw in the housing bubble for good measure. What do you mean by financial engineers then? Every usage I hear of it is referring to the guys at places like AIG, GS, the other big banks, and the ratings agencies who came up with the brilliant models that said housing prices would never go down and then sliced and diced mortgages a hundred different ways to disguise what was actually in them.