NorthSideSox72

QUOTE (balfanman @ Oct 27, 2010 -> 12:33 PM) Isn't there some kind of rule among the owners that you cannot spend wildly without the revenue coming in? In other words the franchise has to be at least close to breaking even. The Yankees, for example, spend lots of money, but they also have a lot coming in. I don't know of such a rule, and I doubt that would be enforceable due to contracts on the books. In the case of DET for example, if they see a big drop in revenue, they still have expensive contracts on the books. Nothing can really be done about that.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 27, 2010 -> 12:04 PM) The question is gonna be how they define tons of money. They could legitimately cull $30 million from their payroll next year and still make winning offers on Crawford, Lee, and enough filler to round out a roster. I'd be shocked if they add the $45M in payroll you are suggesting. I could be wrong, we'll see in April.

QUOTE (3E8 @ Oct 27, 2010 -> 09:14 AM) Mike Ilitch is one of the richest Americans, worth nearly 2 billion. The Tigers have the ammo if they choose to use it, they do not have "far less" to spend than the White Sox QUOTE (SoxFan1 @ Oct 27, 2010 -> 09:19 AM) Exactly. Illitch will spend as much as his heart desires, he always has. The only question is will his recent purchase of the Pistons affect his spending. I say probably not. People here tend to think that a person's high net worth means that they can, or will, spend a ton of money. First of all, a big part of Illitch's net worth is tied up in corporations - and therefore not highly liquid, or even usable in the way you describe. Second, if you read articles the past year or two, the Tigers have made clear they are losing more and more money on the Tigers and won't be spending tons of money. Being rich doesn't mean you have a ton of money to spend, and even if you do, you may not want to.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 27, 2010 -> 07:46 AM) I can see how it might be the case that they have far less money to spend than the Sox do...but I can also argue the reverse. Detroit's salary has been well above that of the Sox the last couple seasons, and they have enormous bad contracts coming off the books this season (Ordonez, Bonderman, Willis). If Detroit goes into next season at the same salary level they started this season with, they'll be competing with the Yankees for both Lee and Crawford. I don't know how you keep a $130 million payroll in Detroit these days...but they've averaged over $125 the last 3 years. They might well have a fortune to spend. Its been made clear for the past couple years, Detroit's season ticket holder base has collapsed in an epic way, and they are cutting, cutting, cutting. They aren't spending that kind of money for 2011, I'll bet the farm on that.

Detroit a force? I really doubt it. They have been heading downhill, they have far less money to spend than the Sox do, and I don't see them turning things around yet. Them and Cleveland are falling down, not coming up.

Regardless of how or why, its stupid. You are telling me that contact lens solution is covered, but OTC meds that some people need like Aspirin or Prilosec, isn't?

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 04:24 PM) http://www.newbernsj.com/articles/machine-...reen-voter.html Holy f**cking s***. We can put a man on the damn moon, but they can't get a voting machine to work right? Like I said in an earlier thread, this needs to be addressed. Plus, even if it shows you the right ones, you don't know what the software is then doing before putting the data onto that cartridge. There needs to be two paper receipts printed from those machines, one for the voter, the other for audit purposes later, and there then needs to be auditing done randomly across machine types and geography, to check electronic accounts versus paper.

Thornton extension was announced weeks ago, I posted it here. The others are news though, and both make sense.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 12:33 PM) A virus grows in number and still kills the host. Seriously? I'm done.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 12:18 PM) 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. 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?

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 11:57 AM) 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). 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.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 11:18 AM) 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 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.

The storm line came through, it was windy and rainy, but not the worst I've seen by any stretch. I guess the big winds aren't here yet.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 08:51 AM) 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". The quote is perfect - financial engineers versus "actual" engineers. What a joke. It seems clear to me the author knows little about financial engineering or even just plain engineering. And you keep putting words in my mouth - I specifically said, as an engineer, they deserve credit, blame, etc. I'm just going to say, again, that my original point was quite simple, and self-explanatory. This author, and you, did two things here. One, you misunderstood what a financial engineer is. Two, you seem to think that because certain people in finance (including some engineers) did bad things, that the entire field of people are unproductive in society. Should I say that you do nothing positive for society because some other geologist caused a false panic about some catastrophic event? Should I say all aerospace engineers are bad because planes crash? The housing bubble was not created by engineers, it was for the most part created by a combination of poor decision-making by home buyers, developers/flippers, and loaning agencies and banks. And yeah, there were some engineers in there. 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.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 08:36 AM) 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. 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.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 08:17 AM) They still write the analytical software and come up with the mathematical models for it. The big banks recruited heavily from U of I's engineering program. This is more accurate. However, remember too, that is one very narrow particular role for financial engineers. If you walk up to someone who actually works in finance, and you say financial engineer, you will get a wide swath of answers from different people whose only commonality is that they write software and play with data to suggest or perform market actions, or improve or create systems for financial companies. That includes a lot of people.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 08:17 AM) 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. 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.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 08:00 AM) 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. 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.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 26, 2010 -> 07:38 AM) 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. 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.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 25, 2010 -> 02:17 PM) I lived through 2008. I think that's more than an accurate description. And that has to do with being productive in the sense that if we're giving financial engineers credit for enhancing productivity through all their wonderful new ways of moving around risk or whatever you want to call it...we have to take credit away when those financial instruments implode. Edit: one simple thought to sum up my feelings on the matter. If "Financial Engineers" have done anything productive at all, then we should be doing a better job at allocating capital to desirable projects now than we were 20-30 years ago, because we've had an explosion in "Financial engineering" (and in the share of our economy going to financial engineering) over the past 30 years. I for one don't think we have suddenly gotten better on that measure, and if you think we have, I have an $8 trillion housing bubble to sell you. 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.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 25, 2010 -> 11:58 AM) I can't think of any electrical engineers who have nearly destroyed the world economy. What does that have to do with being "productive"? And by the way, there are zillions of enginner-caused disasters, all the time. I started college as an engineering major, and we had to take a P/F class where they covered in great details some major disasters caused by engineering problems. Furthermore, financial engineers have not "nearly destroyed the world ecomony". Not sure where you are getting that.

QUOTE (whitesoxfan101 @ Oct 24, 2010 -> 11:45 PM) I'm so glad that both the Phillies and Yankees are gone. I know the ratings for this series will probably suck, but I'll be tuned in because as a die hard baseball fan, I think it's going to be great. As for the series itself, home field hasn't really been a huge factor for the most part since the All Star Game deciding it nonsense started in 2003. However, I think it will be big this year, even with the fact that Texas has been awesome on the road this postseason. I'll say Giants in 7, but this series is a complete tossup IMO. Completely agree with the bolded. TEX in 6.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 24, 2010 -> 01:15 PM) Best dozen -word description of this season I've read anywhere. I have to LOL at the idea that financial engineers are somehow "less productive" than any other engineers. Not sure if the author noticed, but it's not 1970 anymore.

QUOTE (bmags @ Oct 22, 2010 -> 05:21 PM) it was the whole point of the thread, that it's nastier than ever. Exactly. I specifically said, not new. Just worse. Did you read what I posted?

QUOTE (bmags @ Oct 22, 2010 -> 03:10 PM) i also remember the nineties...this isn't new No one said it was.