Interesting trivia thought, but what would happen if Amazon and Ebay combined? It would add together the largest online retailer with the largest online auction market. Market cap based on today's value would be about $205 Billion. This would launch both businesses into the stratosphere where only a few large companies currently reside.

It will never happen.

DarJones

[QUOTE=Fusion_power;348969]Interesting trivia thought, but what would happen if Amazon and Ebay combined? It would add together the largest online retailer with the largest online auction market. Market cap based on today's value would be about $205 Billion. This would launch both businesses into the stratosphere where only a few large companies currently reside.

It will never happen.

DarJones[/QUOTE]
Talk about a complete feature set. Ebay owns PayPal too.

This one speaks for itself.

[url]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/the-incredible-con-the-ba_b_3768208.html[/url]

Too bad he is not treasury secretary or federal reserve chair.

That's a long article. What point did you want to make?

[QUOTE=ewmayer;349850]LOL! ...said the fellow who's been pestering folks to raad his longwinded pet monograph on "alternative steady-state cosmologies", which is facilely shown to begin with a set of wildly illogical axioms and unproven/implausible hypothesis, and which thus cannot possible "get better" with the addition of 30-odd pages of added details.

Thanks, Dave, for saving me the effort of having to come up with my own "Friday Humor" section this week.[/QUOTE]

'Fraid your sarcasm is based on two errors.

The two paragraphs you saw were near the end, not the start.
It is not long-winded, it's rather concise.

And your failure to even read it is telling.

[QUOTE]And your failure to even read it is telling. [/QUOTE]

et tu Bruto.

Ok.

If so, it were a grievous fault.

No more.

If nothing else, I don't call a projected 130 mph "high speed." Amtrak crews have told me that their current equipment could do 120 mph on decent rails and roadbeds that weren't beat to shit (and obstructed) by freight trains.

[QUOTE=ewmayer;349961]Now, don't let me keep you from your one-man scientific revolution. Time to crack open the differential geometry texts and try to figure out what is this mysterious "stress-energy tensor" of which Paul speaks over in the "A theism" thread.[/QUOTE]I heartily recommend Misner, Thorne & Wheeler's [i]Gravitation[/i] which was first published 40 years ago and has been in print ever since. It may not cover recent work, such as attempts to find a quantum field theory, but for classical GR it's unsurpassed IMO. There are two tracks through the book, each being indicated by a different annotation on the corner of the page; the fast track is very accessible and presumes only a relatively basic undergraduate student knowledge of special relativity, vector calculus and Maxwellian electrodynamics. The other track is really aimed at graduate students and researchers who are not (yet) GR specialists.

The Late Great Student Loan Bubble
 

My daughter is struggling with student loans. Fortunately, not a lot, $16k so she can work her way out. I contributed about $30,000 toward her expenses over 4 years and she worked at a minimum wage job the entire time she was in class. Still, she had to take out some loans to make the tuition and cost of books. So for me, this article strikes pretty close to home.

[URL]http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/ripping-off-young-america-the-college-loan-scandal-20130815[/URL]

The most telling part of the article is that students have no way to go to college without taking out student loans, have no way to pay them back once they graduate because the job market is so futzed, have no way to relieve the debt through bankruptcy, and can't get a decent job without a college degree. Full circle.


On the stress tensor and gravity subject, isn't anyone going to discuss this paper? [URL]http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9909087[/URL]

DarJones

Debt peonage at its finest! Get 'em while they're young! They have time to pay LOTS of interest before they die. Better still, unlike debtors' prison, they have to pay their own upkeep. Bonus!:yucky:

Taibbi is probably the best commentator on and investigator of the cesspit of banking and investment. :sick: