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 Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2008 11:41 am Post subject: |
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Sleeping Murder
The Agatha Christie
Mystery Collection
Hardcover
| Quote: | "I still don't feel it can have been Walter Fane, said Gwenda thoughtfully. "And I'm sure it wasn't Major Erskine. In fact I know it wasn't."
"One's feelings are not always reliable guides," said Miss Marple. "The most unlikely people do things - quite a sensation there was in my own little village when the treasurer of the Christmas club was found to have put every penny of the funds on a horse. He disapproved of horse racing and indeed any kind of betting or gambling. His father had been a turf agent and had treated his mother very badly - so, intellectually speaking, he was quite sincere. But he chanced one day to be motoring near Newmarket and saw some horses training. And then it all came over him - Blood does tell." (From Chapter XIX, Mr. Kimble Speaks, p. 133) |
The last Miss Marple story in a long series of first-rate murder mysteries by the master!
| Quote: | Sleeping Murder
Audio CD
Narrated by British actress Stephanie Cole
Probably the superior recording, but we have yet to lay hands on it. Please check back soon for an updated review. |
| Quote: | Sleeping Murder
BBC Full Cast Dramatization
Audio CD
Although BBC generally lives up to its reputation for quality, these full cast dramatizations are occasionally disappointing - too many competing voices of varying tone or too many musical interludes. We haven't yet heard this one. Please check back soon for our review. |
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| Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 12:05 pm Post subject: |
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The Chess Artist
Genius, Obsession and the World's Oldest Game
Hardcover
By J.C. Hallman
| Quote: | My family had a pool table in the basement when I was a boy. I spent a lot of time down there. I didn't really play pool so much as use the table as a kind of fortune-telling device. If I broke and ran off nine balls in a row, I thought, good things would happen. Much later, in my chess research, I learned that the chance mechanisms of many games - dice, lotteries - had their origin in religious rites. As a boy attempting to participate in my own oracle, I acted out an age-old transition from pagan augury to ancient ritual.
In college, I played pool for money, which approximated another transition of chance mechanisms - from organized religion to gambling. Gambling inaugurated for me a fascination with games that was half indulgence half anthropological investigation. I became competent in poker, gin, bridge, and pool.
It was my interest in games that eventually led me to seek work as a casino dealer - another subculture to investigate, another seamy facet of my personality to indulge. I went to dealer s school, received "degrees" in several gambling games, and started work in Atlantic City. It was fallacy. Whatever hypothesis I had thought to test mutated so badly that it needn't have existed at all. Play was fiction, I came to learn. Play was alternate space. Puppies and children know intuitevely that play matters, and to mature is to simply confuse play with nonplay, to assign seriousness to that which is still whimsical. Casino dealers understood this, I learned. They appeared to be playing but were not. They occupied the same space as players, but were wholly outside the universe of the game. (From Chapter 3, Writing Sonnets in Public, pg.s 25-26) |
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| Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2008 3:06 pm Post subject: |
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Uncle Dynamite
Hardcover
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | 'Your baby? Is this remarkably fine infant yours, madam?'
His bearing was so courteous, his manner so reverent that Mrs Stubbs, who had come in like a lioness, began to envisage the possibility of going out like a lamb.
'Yes, sir,' she said, and went so far as to curtsy. She was not a woman who often curtsied, but there was something about this distinguished-looking elderly gentleman that seemed to call for the tribute. 'It's my little Basil.'
'A sweet name. And a sweet child. A starter I hope?'
'Sir?'
'You have entered him for the Bonny Baby contest at the fete?'
'Oh, yes, sir.'
'Good. Excellent. It would have been madness to hide his light under a bushel. Have you studied this outstanding infant closely, Bill Oakshott? If not, do so now,' said Lord Ickenham, 'for you will never have a better chance of observing a classic yearling. What hocks! And what lungs!' he continued, as George Basil Percival, waking, like Abou ben Adhem, from a deep dream of peace, split the welkin with a sudden howl. 'I always mark heavily for lungs. I should explain, madam, that I am to have the honour of acting as judge at the contest to which I have referred.'
'You are, sir?"
'I am, indeed. Is your husband at home? No? A pity. I would have advised him to pick up a bit of easy money by putting his shirt on this child for the Bonny Baby stakes. Have you a shirt, Mr Potter? Ah, I see you have. Well, slap it on the stable's entry and fear nothing. I have at present, of course, no acquaintance with local form, but I cannot imagine that there will be another competitor of such supreme quality as to nose him out. I see myself at the close of the proceedings raising Basil's hand in the air with the words, "The winnah!" Well, Mrs Stubbs,' said Lord Ickenham, with a polished bow in the direction of his hostess and a kindly
Kitchy-kitchy' to the coming champ, who was staring at him with what a more sensitive man whould have considered offensive curiosity, 'we must be pushing along. We have much to do. Good-bye, Mrs Stubbs. Good-bye, baby. Good-bye, off -' (pgs. 128-129) |
More advice from Pongo's Uncle 'Dynamite' Fred:
| Quote: | As she reached the car, however, her normal gaiety of disposition seemed to assert itself. She broke into a gurgling laugh, and his eyebrows rose again.
'We are amused?'
'Well, it was funny,' said Sally. 'I can't help laughing, though the absolutely rock-bottom worst has happened, Uncle Fred. We really up against it now. You'll never guess.'
'I shan't try. Tell me.'
Sally leaned against the side of the car. Her face had become grave once more.
'I must have a cigarette first.'
'Nerves vibrating?'
'I'm shattered.'
She smoked in silence for a moment.
'Ready?'
'Waiting.'
'Very well, then, here it ocmes. When I got to the house, I found the front door open, which seemed to me about as big a piece of luck as I could want -'
'Always mistrust too much luck at the outset of any enterprise,' said Lord Ickenham judicially. 'It's simply part of Fate's con game. But I mustn't interrupt you. Go on.' (-- p. 100) |
Gosh! I mean to say, what ho and strong stuff and all that.
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| Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2008 2:11 pm Post subject: |
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Loser Takes All
Paperback
By Graham Greene
| Quote: | I discovered that, as on the stock exchange, money bred money. I would now use ten-thousand-franc squares instead of two-hundred-franc tokens, and inevitably at the end of the day I found myself richer by several million. My good fortune became known: casual players would bet on the squares where I had laid my biggest stake, but they had not protected themselves, as I had with my other stakes, and it was seldom that they won. I noted a strange aspect of human nature, that though my system worked and theirs did not, the veterans never lost faith in their own calculations - not one abandoned his elaborate schemes, which led to nothing but loss, to follow my victorious method. The second day, when I had already increased my five million to nine, I heard an old lady say bitterly, 'What deplorable luck,' as though it were my good fortune alone that prevented the wheel revolving to her system.
On the third day I began to attend the Casino for longer hours - I would put in three hours in the morning in the kitchen and the same in the afternoon, and then of course in the evening I settled down to my serious labour in the Salle Privee. Cary had accompanied me on the second day and I had given her a few thousand francs to play with (she invariably lost them), but on the third day I thought it best to ask her to stay away. I found her anxious presence at my elbow distracting, and twice I made amiscalculation because she spoke to me. 'I love you very much, darling,' I said to her, 'but work is work. You go and sunbathe, and we'll see each other for meals.'
'Why do they call it a game of chance?' she said.
'How do you mean?'
'It's not a game. You said it yourself - it's work. You've begun to commute. Breakfast at nine thirty sharp, so as to catch the first table. What a lot of beautiful money you're earning. At what age will you retire?' (Part II, pgs. 71-72) |
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| Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 1:48 pm Post subject: |
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When Nature Calls
Life at a Gulf Island Cottage
Hardcover
By Frostback Funnyman Eric Nicol
| Quote: | The summer cottage. Luxury or necessity? Do you really need a summer place in the utback, or can a person survive year-round in urban condomation without getting into mind-altering drugs or politics?
To the working poor, the concept of owning a summer cottage is pure fancy. They associate the alternate, seasonal residence with the French Riviera villa owned by an Arab prince, or a Hollywood movie star, or a Canadian orthodontist. Their first priority is to get out of the rental and into a mortgage issued by a bank that has temporarily taken leave of its senses.
But I like to think that even the most impoverished denizen of public housing dreams, from time to time, or when delirious with hunger, that one day he or she will win the $6-million lottery that will make owning a summer cottage almost affordable. To believe otherwise would be somehow elitist and could limit the sales of this book.
... The typical cottager is grey-haired. Rarely is he or she bald. Bald people lean to RVs and trailers, according to some studies I intend to make. They wear baseball caps, enjoy gambling and are highly social, travelling thousands of miles in a motor home in order to park cheek by jowl with dozens of other motor homes in an RV park. They are apt to use a cologne, something a cottager would die before doing.
... I promptly bought a lot on Boot Cove for $500. I later bought three more adjacent lots overlooking Boundary Pass - each 90 feet by 180 feet - for $1,000 apiece. Other Province writers also put their money where their hearts were, little dreaming, of course, that we were investing in realty that would, in time, go bananas. Dumb luck is better than no luck. (From Driver, Follow that Dream! and Isles of the Blest, pgs. 9-18) |
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| Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008 2:26 pm Post subject: |
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Ten Thousand Scorpions
The Search for the Queen of Sheba's gold
Hardcover
By Larry Frolick
| Quote: | The man who plays to an inside straight ain't no cardplayer. He's either a fool, or he knows somethin' you don't.
-- Johnny Harrison, gold prospector
(Quotation opening the book) |
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| Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 9:45 am Post subject: |
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New York Times Magazine
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The 7th Annual Year in Ideas
Quitting Can Be Good for You
By Clay Risen
Dec. 9/07
| Quote: | | In a paper published in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science, Gregory Miller of the University of British Columbia and Carsten Wrosch of Concordia University found that teenage girls who are unable to disengage themselves from trying to attain hard-to-reach goals exhibited increased levels of the inflammatory molecule C-reactive protein (C.R.P.), which in adults is linked with diabetes, heart disease and early aging. There's this traditional idea in Western culture and science literature that being persistent is good, that if you work hard, you can achieve antying," says Miller, who has published several papers with Wrosch on the psychology of quitting. "Our take is that persistence is good, but there are times when the most adaptive thing is to say, 'This goal is not going to work out.'" (-- p. 92) |
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| Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 2:20 pm Post subject: |
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Villa Air-Bel
World War II, Escape, and
a House in Marseille
Hardcover
By U of T English Professor Rosemary Sullivan
| Quote: | On the 10th of June, the French government, after announcing that it was leaving Paris in order to save France, began its ramshackle retreat to Tours, where its ministers were scattered among the chateaux in the Loire Valley. Before leaving, they declared Paris an open city - it would not be defended. The Germans could take it without firing a shot.
Hypnotized by the swiftness of the German advance, France had already accepted defeat. When the British prime minister Winston Churchill flew to the Loire Valley to meet Reynaud on June 11 to try to invigorate the French war effort, he spoke dramatically of defending Paris street by street. "The French perceptibly froze," he reported. The thought of mounting a fight in Paris was inconceivable to them.
Ignorant, like everyone else, of the goings-on in the corridors of power, (Victor) Serge also decided to abandon Paris that evening of June 10. With Laurette and his son, Vlady, he set out for the gare de Lyon, but immediately he sensed violence in the air. Restless crowds milled around the outside of the station. There was no more room inside, and in any case there were no more trains. By astonishing luck, he found an empty taxi for himself, Laurette, his son, and a Spanish friend who had joined them. The driver, also fleeing Paris, was willing to take them south, away from the German advance. "That's how salvation comes when it comes," he thought. "Simply." You have to "trust in chance, but with a rational tenacious till." (From The Fall of Paris, p. 135) |
| Quote: | | So far, most ordinary refugees seemed to able to travel without the safe-conduct passes. "The police don't seem to be paying much attention to them and the Gestapo don't seem to have gotten around to them either," (Frank) Bohn continued. "If they have overseas visas, they can get Portuguese and Spanish transit visas and once they have these they can go down to the frontier and cross on foot. Some of the commisaries at the frontier have been known to take pity on refugees without valid exit permits and let them through on the trains. It seems to be a question of luck." (From England is Ursula, France is Heinrich, p. 198) |
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| Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2008 9:13 am Post subject: |
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Vanity Fair
Magazine Subscription
The History Boys
In the twilight of his presidency, George W. Bush and his inner circle have been feeding the press with historical parallels: he is Harry Truman - unpopular, besieged, yet ultimately to be vindicated - while Iraq under Saddam was Europe held by Hitler. To a serious student of the past, that's preposterous. Writing just before his untimely death, David Halberstam asserts that Bush's "history," like his war, is based on wishful thinking, arrogance, and a total disdain for the facts.
August, 2007
| Quote: | ... You don't hear other members of the current administration citing the lessons of Vietnam much, either, especially Cheney and Karl Rove, both of them gifted at working the bureaucracy for short-range political benefits, both highly partisan and manipulative, both unspeakably narrow and largely uninterested in understanding and learning about the larger world. As Joan Didion pointed out in her brilliant essay on Cheney in The New York Review of Books, it was Rumsfeld and Cheney who explained to Henry Kissinger, not usually slow on the draw when it came to the political impact of foreign policy, that Vietnam was likely to create a vast political backlash against the liberal McGovern forces. The two, relatively junior operators back then, were interested less in what had gone wrong in Vietnam than in getting some political benefit out of it. Cheney still speaks of Vietnam as a noble rather than a tragic endeavor, not that he felt at the time - with his five military deferments - that he needed to be part of that nobility.
Still, it is hard for me to believe that anyone who knew anything about Vietnam, or for that matter the Algerian war, which directly followed Indochina for the French, couldn't see that going into Iraq was, in effect, punching our fist into the largest hornet's nest in the world. As in Vietnam, our military superiority is neutralized by political vulnerabilities. The borders are wide open. We operate quite predictably on marginal military intelligence. The adversary knows exactly where we are at all times, as we do not know where he is. Their weaponry fits an asymmetrical war, and they have the capacity to blend into the daily flow of Iraqi life, as we cannot. Our allies - the good Iraqi people the president likes to talk about - appear to be more and more ambivalent about the idea of a Christian, Caucasian liberation, and they do not seem to share many of our geopolitical goals.
The book that brought me to history some 53 years ago, when I was a junior in college, was Cecil Woodham-Smith's wondrous The Reason Why, the story of why the Light Brigade marched into the Valley of Death, to be senselessly slaughtered, in the Crimean War. It is a tale of such folly and incompetence in leadership (then, in the British military, a man could buy the command of a regiment) that it is not just the story of a battle but an indictment of the entire British Empire. It is a story from the past we read again and again, that the most dangerous time for any nation may be that moment in its history when things are going unusually well, because its leaders become carried away with hubris and a sense of entitlement cloaked as rectitude. The arrogance of power, Senator William Fulbright called it during the Vietnam years. (-- pgs. 124, 168) |
| Quote: | The New York Review of Books
Magazine Subscription
Cheney: The Fatal Touch
By Joan Didion
Oct. 5/06
| Quote: | | It was in some ways predictable that the central player in the system of willed errors and reversals that is the Bush administration would turn out to be its vice-president, Richard B. Cheney. Here was a man with considerable practice in the reversal of his own errors. He was never a star. No one ever called him a natural. He reached public life with every reason to believe that he would continue to both court failure and overcome it, take the lemons he seemed determined to pick for himself and make the lemonade, then spill it, let someone else clean up. The son of two New Deal Democrats, his father a federal civil servant with the Soil Conservation Service in Casper, Wyoming, he more or less happened into a full scholarship to Yale: his high school girlfriend and later wife, Lynne Vincent, introduced him to her part-time employer, a Yale donor named Thomas Stroock who, he later told Nicholas Lemann, 'called Yale and told 'em to take this guy.' The beneficiary of the future Lynne Cheney's networking lasted three semesters, took a year off before risking a fourth, and was asked to leave. (Sample paragaph online) |
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| Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 8:34 am Post subject: |
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Harvard Business Review
Magazine Subscription
How Resilience Works
Confronted with life's hardships, some
people snap, and others snap back
By Diane L. Coutu
Sept. 1/02
| Quote: | Prior to Setpember 11, 2001, Morgan Stanley, the famous investment bank, was the largest tenant in the World Trade Center. The company had some 2,700 employees working in the south tower on 22 floors between the 43rd and the 74th. On that horrible day, the first plane hit the north tower at 8:46 a.m., and Morgan Stanley started evacuating just one minute later, at 8:47 a.m. When the second plane crashed into the south tower 15 minutes after that, Morgan Stanley's offices were largely empty. All told, the company lost only seven employees despite receiving an almost direct hit.
Of course, the organization was just plain lucky to be in the second tower. Cantor Fitzgerald, whose offices were hit in the first attack, couldn't have done anything to save its employees. Still, it was Morgan Stanley's hard-nosed realism that enabled the company to benefit from its luck. Soon after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, senior management recognized that working in such a symbolic center of U.S. commercial power made the company vulnerable to attention from terrorists and possible attack.
With this grim realization, Morgan Stanley launched a program of preparedness at the micro level. Few companies take their fire drills seriously. Not so Morgan Stanley, whose VP of security for the Individual Investor Group, Rick Rescorla, brought a military discipline to the job. Rescorla, himself a highly resilient, decorated Vietnam vet, made sure that people were fully drilled about what to do in a catastrophe. When disaster struck on September 11, Rescorla was on a buyllhorn telling Morgan Stanley employees to stay calm and follow their well-practised drill, even though some building supervisors were telling occupants that all was well. Sadly Rescorla himself, whose life story has been widely covered in recent months, was one of the seven who didn't make it out. (-- pgs. 49-50) |
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| Posted: Mon May 12, 2008 1:02 pm Post subject: |
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Planet Earth
Another spectacular BBC effort
Narrated by David Attenborough
Programme Four
Shallow Seas
| Quote: | (On the coast of Western Australia, bottlenose dolphins fish perilously close to shore)
Narration: ... The fish are tantalizingly close but hey're still out of reach, so the dolphins try another technique. Vigorously pumping their tails, they work up some speed and then they hydroplane. Their momentum carries them right through the shallowest waters and onto the fish. Now they're in real danger of being stranded. But fortune favors the brave. |
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| Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2008 1:33 pm Post subject: |
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BC Business
Magazine Subscription
In the genes
Challenging apartheid, abandoning a job at Harvard, studying rare disorders that others ignore - Michael Hayden has never been one to follow the conventional path. And that's precisely what makes him one of the most successful scientists and biotech entrepreneurs working in the province today.
April, 2008
| Quote: | ... Getting into Harvard wasn't something Hayden had dreamed about; he felt he'd lucked into it and, for that reason, wasn't all that committed.
So when UBC came calling, he accepted, shocking his Harvard colleagues, who thought he would be wasting his life in the boonies. In 1983 Hayden began teaching and practicing at UBC Hospital. "I saw there was space for me to do things," he says. "There was an openness, a perspective about building. I just had this feeling you could do great things here. It was not fully formed. It was nascent. Boston was pretty fixed, where Vancouver was really in flux."
Hayden threw himself into research, publishing his results in prestigious journals such as Cell, Nature, the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine. But gradually he grew frustrated with the limitations of being a university scientist. "Many of the discoveries had significant potential for patients, but we were always coming to a place where we had to talk to others," he says. "You never had a chance to be the advocate for your program, to determine the fate of what happened to it."
Even if a drug company wanted to license a discovery, that didn't mean the company would develop it commercially. "It might want the licence to kill it because it didn't want competition in the field," Hayden explains. ...
"For me, this is like a dream," says Hayden. But he's not resting on his laurels - not yet. He'd like to hit a home run with Xenon too. "We're interested in having a thriving company here in Vancouver that becomes a next-generation genetics pharmaceutical company. We have to see whether we can be successful and then resist any advances. My goal would be to maintain a Canadian-run company here." He's optimistic, but cautiously so. "We need a bit of luck, because finally when you make a drug you never know about side effects - not that we have any reason to be worried. Still, you need some blessing, some luck, some feng shui." (-- pgs. 54-57) |
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| Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 4:25 pm Post subject: |
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The Buk on Luck:
The Bukowski/Purdy Letters 1964-1974
A Decade of Dialogue
Paperback
Edited by Seamus Cooney
A small blue paperback dedicated to Canda Post and the U.S. Mail, featuring side-splitting correspondence between one of our favorite Frostbacks, Al Purdy, and Buk, occasionally illustrated with Buk's childlike drawings, which his estate will probably find some way to market posthumously. What we'd like to see is a photo of Buk's basement or wherever it is that his widow, Linda Lee, continues to unearth new seams of his poetry. In the meantime, here is Buk on luck at p. 44 from a letter dated March 2, 1965:
| Quote: | | No, I don't have much luck on trains. Coming up from Del Mar there was this light negress with the gold tooth in the center. She was at the bar and 4 or 5 monkies were buying her drinks and fawning. I could never do much with the horses at Del Mar and it's a long trip down and longer back, dusty cheap train smelling of shit and dead bodies and losers, and nothing to do but drink drink drink, and I walked up to the trainbar and I said, "That'll be all, men, I'm taking over now!" They backed off. I took over. We had 3 or 4 drinks at the bar and then I moved her down to my seat to suck on my pint of scotch, and I [had] been drinking all day, and I am staring at the gold tooth, talking, and laying on my wallet so she can't get it, and next thing I'm out, real amature, I awaken and we're in the station and the gold tooth is gone, and I reach real quick for the wallet, but I'd held onto that, but the pint was gone and the sick lights of L.A. shone in on me thru the flyfucked window. I'm glad you have more luck. Now, wait, why should I be glad you have more luck? That don't dip my cock into any living gash, does it? well. |
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| Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2009 10:12 am Post subject: |
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From Hedge Fund Gamblers:
The New York Times Magazine
Magazine Subscription
Risk Mismanagement
Were the measures used to evaluate Wall Street trades flawed? Or was the mistake ignoring them?
By Joe Nocera
Jan. 4/09
| Quote: | As we approached his car, he (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the best-selling author of The Black Swan) began talking about his own performance in 2008. Although he is no longer a full-time trader, he remains a principal in a hedge fund he helped found, Black Swan Protection Protocol. His fund makes trades that either gain or lose small amounts of money in normal times but can make oversize gains when a black swan appears. Taleb likes to say that, as a trader, he has made money only three times in his life — in the crash of 1987, during the dot-com bust more than a decade later and now. But all three times he has made a killing. With the world crashing around it, his fund was up 65 to 115 percent for the year. Taleb chuckled. “They wouldn’t listen to me,” he said finally. “So I decided, to hell with them, I’ll take their money instead.” ...
... There was so much schadenfreude associated with L.T.C.M. — it had Nobel Prize winners among its partners! — that it was easy for the rest of Wall Street to view its fall as an example of comeuppance. And for a hedge fund that promoted the ingeniousness of its risk measures, it took far greater risks than it ever acknowledged.
For these reasons, other firms took to rationalizing away the fall of L.T.C.M.; they viewed it as a human failure rather than a failure of risk modeling. The collapse only amplified the feeling on Wall Street that firms needed to be able to understand their risks for the entire firm. Only VaR could do that. And finally, there was a belief among some, especially after the crisis abated, that the events that brought down L.T.C.M. were one in a million. We would never see anything like that again in our lifetime.
So instead of diminishing in importance, VaR become a more important part of the financial scene. The Securities and Exchange Commission, for instance, worried about the amount of risk that derivatives posed to the system, mandated that financial firms would have to disclose that risk to investors, and VaR became the de facto measure. If the VaR number increased from year to year in a company’s annual report, it meant the firm was taking more risk. Rather than doing anything to limit the growth of derivatives, the agency concluded that disclosure, via VaR, was sufficient.
That, in turn, meant that even firms that had resisted VaR now succumbed. It meant that chief executives of big banks and investment firms had to have at least a passing familiarity with VaR. It meant that traders all had to understand the VaR consequences of making a big bet or of changing their portfolios. Some firms continued to use VaR as a tool while adding other tools as well, like “stress” or “scenario” tests, to see where the weak links in the portfolio were or what might happen if the market dropped drastically. But others viewed VaR as the primary measure they had to concern themselves with. ...
And yet, instead of dismissing VaR as worthless, most of the experts I talked to defended it. The issue, it seemed to me, was less what VaR did and did not do, but how you thought about it. Taleb says that because VaR didn’t measure the 1 percent, it was worse than useless — it was downright harmful. But most of the risk experts said there was a great deal to be said for being able to manage risk 99 percent of the time, however imperfectly, even though it meant you couldn’t account for the last 1 percent.
“If you say that all risk is unknowable,” Gregg Berman said, “you don’t have the basis of any sort of a bet or a trade. You cannot buy and sell anything unless you have some idea of the expectation of how it will move.” In other words, if you spend all your time thinking about black swans, you’ll be so risk averse you’ll never do a trade. Brown put it this way: “NT” — that is how he refers to Nassim Nicholas Taleb — “says that 1 percent will dominate your outcomes. I think the other 99 percent does matter. There are things you can do to control your risk. To not use VaR is to say that I won’t care about the 99 percent, in which case you won’t have a business. That is true even though you know the fate of the firm is going to be determined by some huge event. When you think about disasters, all you can rely on is the disasters of the past. And yet you know that it will be different in the future. How do you plan for that?” ... (-- pgs. 31-50) |
| Quote: | The Black Swan
The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Hardcover
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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| Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2009 11:40 am Post subject: |
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From Loaded Dice:
Open Veins of Latin America
Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
Hardcover
By Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano
Translated by Cedric Belfrage
| Quote: | ... The United States crisis of 1929 could not but have a fierce impact on so dependent and vulnerable an economy as Cuba's: the price of sugar sank well below $.01 by 1932, and in three years the value of exports fell by 75 percent. At that time the unemployment index would have been hard to match in any other country.
What happened to prices was repeated in volume of exports. The United States lowered export duties on Cuban sugar in exchange for similar privileges for the U.S. exports to Cuba, but such "favors" only consolidated Cuba's dependence. By 1948 Cuba had recovered its quota to the point of supplying one-third of the U.S. sugar market, at prices lower than U.S. producers received but higher and more stable than those in the international market. Sugar production was arbitrarily limited by Washington's needs. The 1925 level of some five million tons remained the average through the 1950s; dictator Fulgencio Batista took power in 1952 on the heels of the biggest harvest in Cuban history - over seven million tons - with the mission of tightening the screws, and in the following year production, obedient to the demand of the north, fell to four million tons.* When Batista fell in 1959, Cuba was selling almost all its sugar to the United States. As Marti said and Che Guevara quoted at the OAS Punta del Este conference in 1961,
"The nation that buys commands, the nation that sells serves; it is necessary to balance trade in order to ensure freedom; the country that wants to die sells only to one country, and the country that wants to survive sells to more than one." ...
... By 1850 the United States was absorbing one-third of all Cuban trade, selling it more and buying more from it than Spain, whose colony it was; the Stars and Stripes fluttered from more than half the ships arriving at the island. A Spanish travelerfournd U.S.-made sewing machines in remote Cuban villages in 1859. The main streets of Havana were paved with New England granite.
At the dawn of the twentieth century one could read in the Louisiana Planter: "Little by little the whole island of Cuba is passing into the hands of U.S. citizens, which is the simplest and safest way to obtain annexation to the United States." (From King Sugar and Other Agricultural Monarchs, pgs. 82-83) |
| Quote: | | * Note: The director of the United States Department of Agriculture's sugar program declared soon after the Revolution: "Since Cuba has left the scene, we cannot count on that country, the world's largest exporter, which always had enough reserves to supply our market when need arose. |
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