The Long Road Out

It's been a few hours now since we expanded our imperialist aggressions back on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Do our "friends" in Islamabad really condone this sort of war-mongering 200 kilometers from their offices?  From a government that doesn't recognize either the Cold War (Tillerson on "this is the low point of US-Russia relations") nor Hitler (Spicer--everything about that dolt)? Ignore that question.   Our government doesn't know where Pakistan is, I'm certain. Meanwhile, a la The Great Game, w e're piling carcasses upon the carcasses of previous generations of western invaders. But one group that loves this scary and dangerous development is Wall Street.   Why is this?  I thought the day 1 lesson on every on-line CFA exam prep course was "risk is the denominator in value." Could it be that they know how much munitions cost and assume using more weapons and bombers will spin money into the Fortune 500 quarterly rep...

We're in the land of Google here, but if you have a WordPress site, you know that you get notifications any time a user does anything.   If you have any user base at all, or any spamming activity, the admin email box gets filled in minutes, and WordPress (I'm in the 4.7 updates) offers no way to shut them off. Web research suggests that you install Disable New User Notification Emails plugins, but the two most downloaded versions haven't been updated past WordPress 4.5, and did not stop emails to the admin (they may have stopped emails to the new users, but that's not the problem I was trying to solve). So, instead, I tried Manage Notification E-mails by Virgial Berveling .  This plug-in allowed me to instantly turn off the new user spam I was receiving as admin--plus a number of other notifications to both the users and me.   No need to try to change the user registration code, which is beyond my pay grade. Installation took 15 seconds, and introduced an addition...

There is no such thing as smart money.   Yet, when was the last time you heard some one described as a "below-average hedge fund manager?" Probably never. Or a "mediocre physicist?" That's because these two professions seem mystical to people who don't stop to question that at least half of the hedge fund managers--and physicists-- graduated in the bottom 50% of their university peer group. Yet look at the HFRI Equity Hedge Index compared to investing in a no-fee indexed S&P fund since 1996--the last 20 years.   (Note:   you've been screwed in either case so don't hold your breath).  Yes, all those wicked smart hedge fund guys (remember their nice suits from back in the late 90's?) rocked along at 13% annual returns from '96 til early '00.   So did the S&P. Since then it's been a negative shithouse for the guys who get their drawn portraits published in the WSJ.   Between ''08 and '13 a dollar invested i...