Tuesday, November 04, 2008

c",)

to add to my friend's post below, here's a situation that adds perspective on how number crunching on two different situations can end up to very, very different results.

NASA engineers of the Voyager Program, using mostly slide rules and primitive computers (the fastest microprocessors at the time run at less than 10 megahertz), launched a spacecraft that accomplished with perfect precision it's fly-by on all four outer planets billions of kilometers away, ending with Neptune 12 years later.

while my friend just gave an example of how even with a cadre of analysts of every stripe and millions of sophisticated risk models a day, most of the prediction output of our financial gurus are similar to what a monkey could accomplish flipping a coin blindfolded.
With all their computers, and PhDs, and cumulative knowledge in finance, economics, and statistical analysis, they were all dreaming of retiring rich early less than a year before the meltdown of the century.

Most of them were then laid-off after the less-than-perfect precision of their models flopped.

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Random thoughts on politics, social issues, money, finance, sex, humor, stupidity, or just about anything, of a hatemonger, an obsessive-compulsive, and a schizophrenic forced to live in a cramped and humid apartment.