(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best biography & history books

>The question is whether middle men who use guns and force customers to pay for the services creates a better system than one where customers voluntarily get to judge for themselves the value a service offers before giving them money, and which lets them stop paying whenever the service fails to offer superior value for their money.

This is only true when you ignore the fact that we have a peaceful exchange of power between administrations every couple of years. If we don't like someone, we, as a nation, can vote someone new in. (Granted there's still a loooong way to go, but trying to make it sound like we live in a fascist police state is silly.) And another great aspect of a peaceful democracy, there's no one holding a gun to your head to stay here. If you really wanted to leave, you would. There are plenty of tax havens in the world.

>Govt funding of roads leads to rarely used roads being subsidized by everyone, while roads in high-traffic areas don't get as much for maintenance.

So you're suggesting that those on the fringe should be completely ignored? How far does this extend? Do you feel the same about the helping the poor? And in what universe are the most commonly traveled roads the less maintained? I'm gonna say you completely pulled that out of your ass. We have an economic incentive to make sure the roads most travelled are maintained. The interstate highway system is one of the most effective roadways in the world. You're far more likely to see greater variation in at the state and local level as different localities prioritize different things.

>A free market allocates resources far more efficiently, through the daily "voting" of its customers, vs. voting every thousand or so days for 1 of 2 people who generally don't really change much. REAL democracy is free market voting with your dollars.

A truly free market has one endstate: monopoly. A monopoly is antithetical to a democracy and only results in an oligarchy/plutocracy. We need government to prevent the formation of monopolies so that there can still be competition. Free market efficiency (which is only a hypothesis at best) refers to efficiency at making profit. This isn't the only metric we should judge a civilisation by. What about human suffering? Income inequality? Equal opportunity? Civil liberties? Free markets don't give a damn about any of those. The only way a free market might result in any of those is with transparency and easily accessible information about the products -- something that no business has any financial incentive to supply and only government can force.

Btw, the internet is another invention that would never have existed without the government.

> Government is a monopoly service provider who uses guns to force customers to pay a premium for an inferior product, while businesses have to give better value than they charge, or else nobody would buy from them.

Your point about inferior products is sometimes true. Just as it's sometimes a superior product that we get out of it. When I mean sometimes, I mean a hell of a lot of the time. And when I say superior, I mean products that would have never existed without government. There's a reason the government had to build the interstate highway system. It was the single largest civil works program since the Pyramids. No company could ever have afforded to build it. No company thinks on that timescale and is willing to wait on an ROI. And the US would not be the economic powerhouse it is without it.

And if government hadn't allowed certain monopolies to form, we wouldn't have gotten a completely interconnected country (in the form of telephone connections). We wouldn't have gotten radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the UNIX operating system, the C programming language and the C++ programming language, photovoltaic cells, undersea cables, satellites, and cell phone technology. (Read this book if you'd like to know how deep and important the public-private partnership was and how much the world owes to Bell Labs. It's also a great case study of the pros and cons of government-sanctioned monopolies and a great book overall.)

Those are just two examples. You could literally write a handful of doctoral theses on all the great products, services, and knowledge that only exist because of government.

In a completely free market, no company has a financial incentive to fund basic science research or build infrastructure without having the average citizen pay out the nose. Government is required to maintain competition and keep prices low and fight price fixing.

> Services done by the "private" sector that are currently more expensive than they should are all heavily regulated by government more than customers, such as health care.

Of course, if you want to mention healthcare, I hope you remembered that out of all the OECD countries, we're the only ones without universal healthcare. We also have the most expensive per capita healthcare, and the largest source of individual bankruptcy is from medical bills. And in your magical land of free markets and no regulation, insurance companies are only beholden to making profit for shareholders, so people with pre-existing conditions will be laughed out the door and into the funeral home. And the same for anyone who simply can't afford insurance. But at least there'll be huge profits!

> Services like smartphone production don't have much regulation, WE are the regulators and the trend of increasing quality at lower prices is the result.

Smartphones wouldn't even exist in a free market. The technologies they were based on would never have been developed. And without government regulation, there would be companies clashing over who uses what frequencies.

No one who knows anything about the history of science and innovation or civil rights or education or a host of other areas would argue that a free market would be better for the world. The answer to bad government isn't no government (nor even smaller nor bigger). It's better government (where better means more effective, more efficient, and more responsible and accountable).

I got you covered dude. My company lives for this and provides books on the regular, but the ones below are pretty much the industry standard, and top companies all over the world recommend that every one read these. I have to admit, they've helped me:

• "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" This will also have an impact on your personal life, but most importantly, it prevented me from being a little shit in the office, and helps teach you to focus on your work and behavior with other people by offering simple logic and examples.
  
  
• "Winning" This is the manifesto of how to dominate the corporate world by the legendary Jack Welch (Former long time CEO of GE). It's extremely simple and a very easy read, but this is the corporate mentality. Of all the books I list, if you only read one, make it this one. Easily a favorite among everyone in my office.
  
  
• "Good to Great" This isn't so much about how to be an effective individual, its more about what makes an effective company, but still important as you will want to recognize the effectiveness of your own organization is it grows and changes while you are there. Additionally, "Great by Choice" and "Built to Last" are also written by the same author, Jim Collins, and should also be on your list, but prioritize them for later.
  
  
• "Drive" by Dan Pink. This will help you understand a little bit more of what physically can motivate you, beyond money. Good way to sit down and assess your values as to why you show up everyday. I would also add "A Whole New Mind" which discusses creativity and "To Sell is Human" both by Dan Pink and prioritize them for later
  
  Those are the quick ones I can think of. If I come up with more I'll add them to the list. Also, welcome to the corporate world - good luck in your career!
  
  Edit: Holy shit, gold? This is my first time receiving so thank you for being gentle!
  

Your in a position that many would love to be in and many more would never be able to get to.

Your marketing campaign,
Get the following books (quick easy and enjoyable reads):
The Brand Gap ,
22 laws of marketing

• Offer cloud services and support to startups for free for three months, they apply via your website, pick the most promising ones. They must have your logo/link on their website somewhere e.g. "Hosting provided by" etc.
  
• Sponser hackertons or hacker meet up related activities.
  
• Offer free services to blogs you like.
  
  Your company,
  Rebrand your company within 2 months. Top notch website+server control panel UI. Get Blogging.
  
  Your Services,
  
  
• Focus on something, cloud hosting or dedicated servers. Which ever you feel your best at.
  
• Provide Cloud Hosting Images pre-installed with apache, mysql, php, webmin, vhosts, mail etc. Make it easier for new customers to setup a ready to go server quick as possible knowing all the configuations are correct.
  
  Your Sanity,
  Discuss with your best respected staff.

Kindly fuck off with the ad hominem attacks. I'm interested in discussing the subject, not in name-calling.

I disagree with your base premise - you are correlating corporate efficiency with benefit to the country at large. Back it up. A company (ideally) turns improved efficiency into profit, which is then either given to shareholders as dividends, or used for other business activity - how does that help the rest of the country? What if the buying company isn't American (which is often the case) - are you arguing that corporate efficiency is the answer for all global economic woes?

There are arguments that efficiency is required to effectively compete with foreign companies (e.g. Japanese car manufacturers) - but that in turn means that a buy-out and selling off of assets can only be good if the buying companies are not foreign (or all of the money they make stays within the country). So buy-outs are not universally beneficial for the country.

Incidentally - since you reference Buffet. What does he have to say about improving technological efficiency? It isn't always a good thing, especially in a competitive market - improved efficiency allows you to reduce costs and pass that on to customers in order to be more competitive. Then all of your competitors introduce the same technology, match your efficiency and match your price. Net result - you're no better off than before, but you've spent a ton of money on updating infrastructure. This is not beneficial for the corporation.

Reducing an argument to absurdities doesn't dismiss the argument - three companies make cookies, and each employs 10,000 people. One company buys out the other two, and due to economies of scale can produce the same amount of product using 20,000 people. Your assumption is that the 10,000 now out of work can pursue other activities. Looking at historic and recent workforce disasters in the car industry, this is patently false. I agree that the solution is not to stifle advancement, but I don't agree that this increase in unemployment is beneficial for the country. You're assuming an infinite supply of opportunity for these workers (if this was true, we would have zero unemployment).

Finally - you cannot state what I am insinuating. You're inferring something from my words that isn't present - you're choosing to use black and white for something that is far more complex. If it was simple, we wouldn't be dealing with the huge issues around unemployment and the economy. We also wouldn't have introduced a suck-ton of legislation to prevent what was happening in the 80s. This is a great read: http://www.amazon.com/Barbarians-Gate-Fall-RJR-Nabisco/dp/0061655554/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1342630908&sr=1-1&keywords=barbarians+at+the+gate

Anyway - there are too many different points in this discussion to track at once. Maybe we could narrow it to discussion of your main point that corporate success/profit/efficiency universally correlates to public benefit?

• The idea that "startups" and "startup founders" are in a continuous state is bullshit. So some of the time you may be in a learning stage, trying to devour all the content available about a topic, and sometimes you may be in an executing stage, where your focus is on getting things done. I think it is OK to go with this flow and enjoy it. E.g. sometimes I read 3 books in a week, sometimes zero. Yes I am sure people read more /r/iamverysmart
  
  
• Creating interesting and successful businesses requires intelligence. In general, intelligent founders will be attracted to books, because [in whatever form] they still contain the bulk of our civilization's intelligence. Yes, more photos are uploaded to Facebook every microsecond (or whatever) than the data in the entire Library of Congress, but really, the knowledge that has stood the test of time is that which is still contained within books.
  
  
• Reading news and business publications creates an emphasis on "the latest cool thing" or "the latest opposite thing". Open plan offices are bad. Open plan offices are the future! In the grand march of time, this opinion and argument is trash. One of the reasons Bill Gates always recommends Business Adventures is that the lessons are timeless, and repeat themselves every cycle. This kind of information is mainly contained in books. There is something about the "pay-to-read" format (currently) that still holds.
  
  
• Obviously, reading-with-an-intent-to-learn specifically about your chosen subject area is very close to "work", and while that's not "bad", it does mean you are not "switching off" or allowing your brain to branch out, be creative, relax, be inspired, take a few hours off-duty. So there is plenty of value in reading things that are completely unrelated. E.g. You may get more inspiration and value and love from Moby Dick than From Zero to One.

Please provide an example where there is no net neutrality and everything is fine? Please also include the number of average providers any given customer has. Because even in a place like the Netherlands, which has extremely robust competition for broadband in most major cities (access to as many as 6 providers) they have even stronger net neutrality laws than the US does. on the other hand, there's the image from MEI, a Portuguese Mobile ISP that has packages based on the website access you want. Portugal does not have Net Neutrality.

As for your rebuttal, I didn't call you stupid, I said you didn't know anything about the history of the technology. Those are two very different things. I've done a great deal of reading on the history of the internet and am extremely interested in it. I would rather have an extremely strong market place that allow massive amounts of competition. Title II NN is a band-aid to address a policy regime issue started through lobby at the state and municipal level by companies like Comcast.

Market forces are driving industry consolidation within the ISP space and across markets. Which is the reason why Comcast moved from solely being an ISP to being a content creator with purchases of things like NBC and Universal (and looking to acquire more). So, the market behavior indicates market failure rather than a free market. With these pushes by the FCC it indicates regulatory capture and looking at the fully policy landscape there are anti-consumer measures across the spectrum, which indicates federal intervention is required to increase competition.

If the desire is to allow these monopolies to exist, then they need to require them to behave better than how they have been behaving. Breaking them up isn't always good. After the break up of AT&T prices rose. But, AT&T always knew that there was a risk of break up, which is why they intentionally invested so heavily in Bell Labs which essentially resulted in the internet.

> If your gripe is with the non-enforcement, then why would new laws change anything? Since by that logic, the law won't be enforced anyway?

New Laws provide legal teeth for organizations like the EFF to sue when the law has been broken and to provide amicus briefs to support the cases that do go before courts. It also provides a stronger footing for when suits are brought to the court.

Here's a list of some good General Books on beer.

I'm fond of Tasting Beer by Randy Mosher. It does a great job of introducing the history of beer, the different styles, and other great info. I recommend it to everybody who wants to learn about beer. http://www.amazon.com/Tasting-Beer-Insiders-Worlds-Greatest/dp/1603420894

If you're interested in the history of American beer, Ambitious Brew is a great read. It's limited in scope to just the history of American beer, but that proves to be a rich subject. http://www.amazon.com/Ambitious-Brew-Story-American-Beer/dp/0156033593

Beer is Proof That God Loves Us, It's not the greatest book, but for free on Kindle, it's worth checking out. The guy knows his beer, he just is a big time Macro brewing apologist, and his constant praise for the big brewers, and his disdain for hops make it not my favorite book. There are some good anecdotes, and history of beer. http://www.amazon.com/Beer-Is-Proof-God-Loves/dp/0137065078

And I've heard good things about the Oxford Companion to Beer, though I haven't read it myself. http://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Companion-Beer-Garrett-Oliver/dp/0195367138/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_z

There's a lot of generally good information in there, both about investing and life. When i read them i tend to skip past the more boring number stuff and look for his folksy knowledge -- back in 2006 I was in my final year of college, and an Econ class had us compare Warren's "weapons of mass financial destruction" in 2003 to Alan Greenspan's "Frothy markets" --

the difference helped me decide to sell the condo my parents had bought in 2004 (i was paying them rent, but they said they'd split any profit with me or i could assume the mortgage and eventually pay them back) -- we made a small profit and were lucky to sell near the top. I then later saw the FED was pumping money into the market with QE; and also, Warren's advice from (i believe 2010 letters) "if there were a way i could buy several hundred thousand homes and cheaply manage them, it would be the best investment i could make" -- the $170K condo i bought is now worth about $300k 6 years later.

more generally - he's a contrarian who pushes to be cautious when others are greedy, and greedy when others are cautious. his frame of mind greatly influenced my mom's investing style and mine, and she went from not graduating college to being a multi-millionare through both cheapness and a lazy portfolio that managed to beat the market. I'm a bit more active than her but have been doing well myself, i've got the real estate bets doing well and also, am an early-ish bitcoin investor. and macro-economically, after the markets crashed in 2008 i knew to get fully invested and ignore any fear till the markets went back to where they were before (based on what i saw the FED doing). -- so since markets re-aligned in ~2014, my stock market returns have been just in line with the market instead of outperforming, but if you look at my portfolio as a whole i've been killing it.

here's a good books that (imo) works well to replace the older shareholder letters -- http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118503252,subjectCd-FI00.html

or, another book i just read that Gates calls the best book on business; warren also likes -- https://www.amazon.com/Business-Adventures-Twelve-Classic-Street-ebook/dp/B00L1TPCKW

many similar points of timeless advice that work. I would say though, try to get through his more recent letters, or if it's too dry, they are heavily covered by media and it's worth reviewing what you can. also, Charlie Munger seems to be the more "high IQ" person, he's worth reading anything you can find on. I'd start with page 39 here, it's pretty readable -- http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2014ltr.pdf

Let me know if there's anything else I can help with!

Your last line is the point. I'm not saying we shouldn't innovate our payment systems. ApplePay, the new chip technology in debit/credit cards, the ability to just tap my card against a reader, paypal, all those cool things that don't try to fundamentally change our monetary system are great! Innovation!

Going to a defaltionary system is a step back.

Don't buy the stupid YEN book. I'm reading that for fun and I've got a weird definition of fun.

http://www.amazon.ca/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke-World/dp/0143116800

Lords of Finance is a fantastic book! It won the damn Pulitzer! It does a good job of explaining the difficulties of our pre-bretton woods system. I highly advise you read that. It's also pretty entertaining. It completely destroyed any thought in my head about reverting back to the gold standard. Convinced me thoroughly that the gold standard would be a serious step backwards.

I think all people who want to change our monetary system should know about the history of it first.

Great store. Very polished appearance. Definitely have a niche. You have Google Analytics installed - good.

 

One thing I did notice that perhaps may help with conversions: Having a compelling "why" statement at the top of the store and also in the SEO metadata. The cover photo doesn't really convey what the store is about.

 

Simon Sinek's Ted Talk is great advice
https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action

 

Also, The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier I've found to be amazing
https://www.amazon.com/Brand-Gap-Distance-Business-Strategy/dp/0321348109

Answer these three questions:

• who are you?
  
• what do you do?
  
• why does it matter?
  
   
  
  The answer to the third question is the most difficult. It should be more compelling and visceral than "because we have products for people with autism."
  
   
  
  also, you may want to look into https instead of http as Google factors website security when indexing sites.
  
   
  
  hope this helps

• Read The Money Game, by Adam Smith. At least read the first sentence, and internalize it.
  
  
• Read Where Are All The Customers Yachts?, by Fred Schweb
  
  
• Read Liar's Poker, by Michael Lewis
  
  
• Read When Genius Failed, by Roger Lowenstein
  
  
• Read Fooled By Randomness, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  
  Then:
  
  
• Continually educate/train yourself to acquire/maintain the skills and knowledge necessary to survive and thrive in the 21st century economy.
  
  
• Buy a house you can life in the rest of your life if you have to. And in general, never buy a house as an investment; always buy it with the thought that you might end up living there for much, much longer than planned.
  
  
• Insure yourself against disaster. Among other things, this means various types of insurance and readily accessible cash. People have mentioned 3 - 6 months. That's a good start. I have three years worth of staggered CDs, and I feel pretty comfortable. Consider that a target worth aiming for.
  
  
• Find a really, really good, stand-up person to marry. If you make the right choice he/she will be invaluable in hard times; if you make the wrong choice, he/she will be the hard times.
  
  
• If you plan on having kids, remember this: there will always be ways to get them through college without gutting your nest egg. Don't put them through college at the expense of risking having them need to take care of you in old age.
  
  
• Stay healthy. Exercise. Eat good foods. Get regular check ups.
  
  
• Be thrifty. Study thrift. Make it a game (although don't be a bore about it). Learning to be a good cook, for instance, is a great investment in more than one way.
  
  Finally, always remember the first line in The Money Game.
  
  Good luck!

The Idea Writers - Tons of Case Studies, but they're all told excellently.

It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be - Inspiration not to settl and to do great work.

Baked In - A lot like an updated Purple Cow. All about integrating product, management, and marketing.

Blink or Tipping Point - About the little things that cause shifts in culture to happen.

Also, some Seth Godin action never hurts. Definitely recommend his blog.

If you want more "How to make ads" type stuff there are more down that path, too. Just let me know.

This is my full list of books from /r/homebrewing but it includes pro level books:

New Brewers:

• How to Brew - John Palmer
  
• Brewing classic styles- Jamil Zainasheff
  
• Designing Great Beers - Ray Daniels
  
• The Complete Joy of Homebrewing - Charlie Papazian
  
  Continued Learning:
  
  
• Water - Palmer and Kaminsky
  
• Yeast - Zainicheff and White
  
• Malt - Mallet
  
• Hops - Hieronymous
  
• Experimental Brewing - Drew Beechum and Denny Conn
  
• Radical Brewing - Randy Mosher
  
• Brewing Better Beer - Gordon Strong
  
  Specialty/Advanced/Other:
  
  
• American Sour Beers - Michael Tonsmeire (/u/oldsock)
  
• Brewing with Wheat - Stan Hieronymus
  
• IPA: Brewing Techniques - Mitch Steele
  
• Farmhouse Ales - Phil Markowski
  
• Brew Like a Monk - Stan Hieronymus
  
• New Brewing Lager Beers - Gregory J. Noonan
  
• Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers- Stephen Harrod Buhner
  
• Drink: a cultural history of alcohol - Iain gately
  
• Principals of Brewing Science - George Fix
  
  Business Books:
  
  
• Brewing Up a Business - Sam Calagione
  
• Brewers association Guide to Starting Your Own Brewery - Cantwell, among others
  
• SO you want to start a brewery - Tony magee
  
• Beyond the Pale: The Story of Sierra Nevada Brewing Co - Ken Grossman
  
• Beer School: Bottling Success at the Brooklyn Brewery Paperback –Steve Hindy & Tom Potter
  
  Technical Readings (Textbooks might be expensive):
  
  
• Brewery Operations Manual - Tom Hennessy
  
• Beer Packaging - Master Brewers Association
  
• Technology Brewing and Malting - W. Kunze, 5th Edition
  
• Malting and Brewing Science, Volume 1 - Many Authors
  
• Malting and Brewing Science, Volume 2 - Many Authors
  
• Brewing yeast and fermentation - Boulton and Quain

I'm not a shill, but I'm going to plug a book recommendation here.

I'm reading a book called Double Entry - How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance and I highly recommend it. Accounting systems developed around Renaissance Italy, with the help of Muslim scholars, who brought to the west Hindu numbers. It's like the entire world came together all at once perfectly at exactly the right time to develop modern accounting as we know it. Luca Pacioli is heavily featured in the book, and it surveys all of number theory, logical philosophy, math, history, banking, finance, and accounting through the ages.

I highly recommend this read, A+

While this is sort of correct it isn't completely right. Compared to others of that time he wasn't actually that rich at all. Rockefeller and Carnegie for example, had extreme amounts of money that dwarfed Morgans fortune. What Morgan had was power. He is said to be the most powerful banker that has ever lived. He had many rich friends that had much influence in finance. He was able to convince them to help stop the panic.

Just to show my point a bit further, Morgan was estimated to have about the equivalent of around $50 billion in today's money. Carnegie and Rockefeller both had around the $300-350 ish billion mark. That's not to say he wasn't rich, I just wanted to point out the fact that he alone couldn't solve the panic. It was his influence and power that helped him. I thought I would just expand a bit more on your comment.

If anyone thinks this kind of stuff is interesting Lords of Finance is a great read on the most powerful bankers in the world around this time period. It's a bit long and can get a little drawn out in some parts, but overall its very fascinating and I would recommend it to anyone interested in this sort of stuff.

> Hi--I am considering law school and want to focus my studies on LLCs, Corporations, wealth and liability protection, etc...

You are an undergrad? If you want to be a lawyer, study an actual applied topic, now, while you can - and that means not government or english. Economics, computer science, any natural science, most social sciences, history, anthropology. Law is a tool set that without historical context, knowledge of the world at large, horse sense and business savvy is almost completely useless. So unless you are learning actual things, law school isn't going to teach them to you. If you are already out of college, it is not too late. You just have to teach yourself.

I'm exceedingly lucky to have the job I have. And I would not recommend entering this law job market. And one of the primary reasons I actually got this position is before even entering law school I had pretty deep knowledge about the types of business I cared about - I had a background in software and a very high level of financial sophistication for an early twenty something.

If you really want to go to law school, I have to say, it is not a very good investment unless you get in to a t14, get offered a near complete scholarship, have a very unique angle into an industry that you have a pre-existing matching skill set for and the passion to match, or a combination of all of the above. If you are lacking all three of the above, your money and time is far, far, far better spent doing other things.

And if you really want to learn about:

> Corporations, wealth and liability protection, etc...

You won't learn a damn lick of it in law school. You will learn the casebook method. And you will learn all about regulations, formalities, and a whole bunch of shit. But if you are interested in business strategy, which is what it sounds like you are, you can start learning about that now. Start by reading non-fiction business books. And I don't mean bullshit strategy, management or advice books. Use those for kindling. I mean read books about actual businesses, written by serious investigative journalists and businessmen. Here's a short list to get you started:

• Business Adventures. Bill Gates' favorite business book. 'Nuff said.
  
  
• Liar's Poker, The Big Short and Flash Boys, by Michael Lewis. You will get a real crash course in wall street.
  
  
• When Genius Failed. The story of Long Term Capital Management, the first catastrophic failure of a major hedge fund, that nearly imperiled the world economy.
  
  
• Conspiracy of Fools / The Smartest Guys in the Room. About Enron. Insane. Completely fucking insane. Learn what they did. Learn why it was wrong. Don't do it.
  
  
• Black Swan. About the most recent crash. If between Taleb and Lewis you have any faith left in the wisdom of wall street, I have a bridge to sell you.
  
  Just get started, and keep reading. Read about real world businesses - don't read guidebooks about how to do X. See what is in the world and go read it. Are there publicly traded companies that you find interesting? Log on to Edgar and read their public filings. They tell you every goddamn detail of how the business is run, the strategy, the risks they face and how they choose to mitigate them.
  
  Once you get started on this stuff, you will be drawn in and be able to keep up your own research paths. Follow the people on twitter that you find interesting - a lot of VCs are very vocal. Many publish reading lists. Look them up.
  
  But for the love of god, don't think law school will teach you any of this. Corporate law, securities law and corporate finance will teach you the technicalities of all sorts of bullshit you will likely never apply, and, if you do, you will be as good at it as you would be at basketball after having spent three years studying the rules without ever having touched a ball.
  
  Good luck, dotcomrade.

Some thoughts came to my head while reading this... Make your name a reference from something you really like, or an important date, mix an important date with a word that refers to something important in you or in your design career, use "random word generator" and mix something, there are lots of ways.

On the other hand, I don't see the name itself as the most important thing. There is this company verynice, Casey Neistat started a new company some weeks ago and the name is 368. The most important thing is everything that your brand represents to anyone, the experience your brand can bring to any client. The feel they get when they see what your brand can do and the feel they get after working with you.

Some people just create a fake name. For example (you maybe laugh) my name is Matias Lapolla and Lapolla in Spain is a mix of 'La' + 'Polla'. That being said, 'La' stands for 'The' and Polla stands for 'Penis' or 'D*ck/C*ck'. So I wouldn't ever use my name that way but, Matias Lo for example is not bad for me if I want to use my name. I hope I could help you. A book about brands I always recommend is The Brand Gap.

I'm sure there are some good books on the matter, and hopefully someone else in this sub will have some recommendations for you as well.

Politics and economics make terrible bedfellows, but if you would like to know about policy making some historical books would probably be in order.

Lords of Finance

Piketty's Capital

Sorkin's Too Big to Fail

And most readers of this sub know that nearly anything by Michael Lewis is good, if a bit dramatized.


Really though, economic policy making is done mostly by politicians, or politically motivated economists. The politicians don't have a clue about economics, and the economists tend to be picked by the politicians for saying what the politicians like to hear.

This is more a political question than a finance question. The guys in finance don't really care who's in office as long as regulatory capture is still around.

I loved reading Ten Drugs by Thomas Hager. It's basically a history (very eloquently told) of the most important medications ever developed: https://www.amazon.com/Ten-Drugs-Powders-History-Medicine/dp/1419734407

Also, if you are interested in the process of drug development , you'll enjoy The Billion Dollar Molecule by Barry Werth. Fascinating read about a start up that became Vertex ($45BN market cap). https://www.amazon.com/Billion-Dollar-Molecule-Companys-Perfect/dp/0671510576

I have been reading Good to Great. It's a really interesting book about what common traits companies have that made the leap from being historically good, to some of the best businesses in the US. I really like this book because unlike Malcolm Gladwell books, it seems to be much less sensationalist and doesn't seem to be trying to prove a point. It just takes in all the facts and talks about them.

I dont understand what verbal diarrhea is. I used complete sentences.

boring mil search What I had to use on my 11 year old dell inspirion as a piece of meat intern working on navy projects. Treasure trove of documents if you want to actually understand what I mean by testing procedure.

You can also use everyspec.com, which is a lot less disgusting-looking.

A lot of it is redundant and poorly specified, but in the few years I worked under master gunsmiths and factory armorers, industry just did not have that daily level of rigor. There is no reason for them to change, except for the ISO cert requirements.

This fairly recent book Is where I learned a lot about Gaston, and it also reaffirmed my cynicism for the firearms industry. It is ironic, because the fanboy tunnel vision that he smashed through and flipped on his head is the same thing that keeps Glock's marketing on point. Its also just a really good read for so many reasons. I seriously recommend it.

You are better served getting a real technical viewpoint from a real old armor/gunsmith who has a good experience with handguns. But the book still gives a lot of deep information into the evolution of the first handguns in the early 80's to today.

Gen 1's are rare as hell, and outside of a museum or wealthy collector, the next best place is a gunsmith shop.

For anyone who would like to know, the following books I've read are my favorite and I'd really recommend them to anyone: The Martian by Andy Weir, Gerald's Game by Stephen King, The Panther by Nelson DeMille, Unflinching by Jodi Mitic, American Sniper by Chris Kyle, and Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

EDIT: Oh, and Blackwater - The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill.

EDDIT 2: Oh, and Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card which is so much better than the movie. The movie does not do this novel justice. And Killing Lincoln by Bill O'Reilly.

Another interesting anecdote from that story, if your read so you want to start a brewery by Tony Magee, the founder of Lagunitas, he goes on to explain that they basically let him pick the days they would be shut down in relation to the pot thing. So they chose the 30 days or so when they were installing a new packaging line.

Tony then left the meeting, got into his car, smoked a joint in the parking lot, took a nap, then drove back to Petaluma.

I had this confirmed to me by a relative of Tony's when I was at the Chicago brewery on business.

The book is a great read, even if you are not looking to start a brewery at all. Great read into the beer biz and entrepreneurship.

Late to the party, but...

The story of the man who wrote the text commonly attributed to popularizing Indo-Arabic numerals (and zero) to the west is a part of the excellent book doubly entry, which is specifically about the history of accounting.

Also a much more interesting story than you might think.

Love the story behind this beer.

The FBI tried to get employees at the brewery to sell them weed for weeks but they kept on sharing it for free.

Finally the FBI shut them down for allowing smoking of weed on the brewery grounds. Only shut for a little while and when reopened continued to smoke, just off the property.

https://www.amazon.com/You-Want-Start-Brewery-Lagunitas/dp/1556525621

Good books:

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions | Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths

Brand Perrimon 1993

Fire Mello 1998

Beautiful essay

Behave by Robert Sapolsky

https://www.amazon.com/Billion-Dollar-Molecule-Companys-Perfect/dp/0671510576

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

​

Science fiction:

Asimmov:

I robot

The foundation trilogy

Dune | Hibbert

Flatworld

​

Self help:

​

​

Online resources:

bitesizebio.com

​

​

Great articles:

http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm

https://blog.regehr.org/archives/743

Have you read Business is Fun? It's got tons of fascinating behind the scenes information about Atari as a company. It's a great read for anyone who is really interested in Atari.

> which is justified considering the U.S. is on another continent and was still feeling the effects of the Great Depression

Regarding the Crash of '29, the Great Depression had a profound effect on the entire world. A phenomenal book on the subject is Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed. Ahamed's discussion is a breakdown of the events leading to the Crash of '29, largely focusing on the Paris Peace Conferences, the Treaty of Versailles (Article 232 dictated war reparations would be paid by the Central Powers to the Entente and its affiliates), the Dawes Plan, and the adherence to the Gold Standard.

This book very correctly notes the cyclical nature of the war reparations Germany was paying to England and France. In short, after Germany paid England and France, the two nations had to repay the Americans who had backed wartime trade with them. Finally, the Americans began backing the German reparations beginning in 1924. Now, that piece of debt backing was a part of the Dawes Plan, which was aimed at solving two major crises.

First: relieve the German industry. The Ruhr industrial valley was occupied by the Entente in '23 because the Germans defaulted on their industrial production in the area, so the Entente sought to occupy the industry and get things rolling. In fact, the occupation caused more harm to the economy than it did good.^1 The Dawes Plan had the Ruhr area returned to the Germans so they could work. Second: the US would back a portion of the debts to alleviate the strain on the Weimar Republic (Germany).

All of that said, no western nation survived the Crash of '29 considering the economic state of the world's major economic players (I'm avoiding the USSR in that one since the book doesn't go into their economic development under Stalin... let alone a crash). The first nation to really recover from the Great Depression was Nazi Germany under Hitler's direction (read: cabinet).

> only joining when the war came to them via Pearl Harbor.

Politically speaking, FDR was very supportive of the British and was concerned about German aggression. In August of 1941, he signed the Atlantic Charter which was directly aimed at assisting the UK, France, and other nations attacked by the Nazi government and its allies. While it wasn't a declaration of war, it was in fact a declaration of intent. This was highly coupled with the lend-lease agreements between the US and The Allies^2 which were started in March that same year. For the Axis powers, these two acts were signs that the United States might break its neutrality; These acts, coupled with the oil and trade embargoes, led the Japanese government to believe war with the United States was inevitable. That culminated in the attack at Pearl and the subsequent attacks on British, French, and Dutch colonies in the Pacific.^3

edit: struckthrough because the OP noted the lend-lease was important.

Yeah, the bit about the Lords of Finance and the depression wasn't the core, but I felt it's important for context.

> I've been told that England (Alongside Canada) and Russia won Europe single-handed, while the U.S. "didn't do much in Europe, nuked Japan and proclaimed themselves the greatest victors".

> Also, very clearly the Lend Lease act supported the Allies greatly and can possibly be considered more than enough of a contribution, but I desire to learn about the effective military aide the U.S. provided in Europe. How much of the Allied war machine was made up of U.S. soldiers during the invasions of Sicily, Italy and Normandy and the liberation of Europe?

Well, that first part is mostly wrong when it's observed superficially and very wrong when you get into it. I'll start with an adage: "The war was won with Soviet Blood and Allied (largely American) mass production." Where am I going with all of this? - the Americans had a very vital part in the economic survival of the United Kingdom (see Lend-Lease trade above). And they assisted the Soviets in production and supplies; Stalin did manage to get the production facilities deeeep into the USSR, so they could make weapons, tanks, planes, and supplies independently, but the US did send supplies and weapons - sometimes loved like the P-39 Airacobra, sometimes hated like the M3 Lee, and often needed logistics vehicles. The definitive read on the subject is Hubert Van Tuyll's Feeding the Bear: American Aid to the Soviet Union, 1941-1945. That's a great read on the contributions the US and UK gave to the Soviets after Operation Barbarossa's start in '41 because it largely focuses on the logistics and military supplies sent to Uncle Joe to help stave off the desperate situation in the USSR (I'll get to the situation in a moment).

Now, for the military contributions of the Americans and the Allies. Before I go on, I need to fix my adage: "the war was won with Soviet Blood, Allied mass production, and George Patton." For those about to crucify me for being a Patton fanatic (read: fanboy), hold your horses and get my meaning:

The Western Allies had the commanders, the time, and the luxury to prepare against Rommel's fortress Europe, Kesselring's defense of Italy, Rommel's Afrika Korp, and all the rest the Axis could throw at them in any invasion. Meanwhile, Uncle Joe and the Red Army fought tooth and nail against the veteran commanders of Army Groups North, Center, and South under Wilhelm von Leeb, Fedor von Bock, and Gerd von Rundstedt respectively - Heinz Gudarian's pioneer work in armored warfare also drove Soviet commanders against the wall. The professionally trained and deadly Wehrmacht made the Soviets pay a deadly price, hence, "Soviet blood." A great book on the military history of the Ostfront is Stolfi's Hitler's Panzers East: World War II Reinterpreted. The book discusses at length the strengths and flaws of the German Army in the USSR after his analysis on the political standpoint Hitler took regarding the security of Germany's borders: Hitler saw the war as a giant siege against Germany, so while the Army was on the march to Moscow, Hitler kept ordering Army Group Center into resource rich areas to secure them. But, if he had let the planners March onward, they might have taken Moscow and that could have ended the war right there. That's the situation in the USSR in '41. And here is a list of production statistics for light reading.

Consumer Companies
----

• In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Live
  
  Google
  
  On Amazon
  
  
• Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco
  
  RJR Nabisco
  
  On Amazon
  
  
• Dethroning the King: The Hostile Takeover of Anheuser-Busch, an American Icon
  
  Anheuser-Busch
  
  On Amazon
  
  .
  
  
  Investment companies
  -------
  
  
• King of Capital: The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone
  
  Blackstone Group
  
  On Amazon
  
  
• Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World
  
  Goldman Sachs
  
  On Amazon
  
  
• The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance
  
  Morgan Stanley
  
  On Amazon
  
  All of these are 4+ stars and absolutely excellent reads. I recommend any of them depending on what you want to read about. Let me know if you want some more.
  

I just bought it on Kindle. https://www.amazon.com/Business-Adventures-Twelve-Classic-Street-ebook/dp/B00L1TPCKW

On Amazon it says “Business Adventures remains the best business book I’ve ever read.” —Bill Gates, The Wall Street Journal

That is not an affiliate link lol -.-;

Yes. There's a great book you should read if you're interested in this subject. So You Want to Start a Brewery?: The Lagunitas Story https://www.amazon.com/dp/1556525621/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_SeLVBbAVPR13R

Absolutely! Here's a short list of non-magic books that I commonly see recommended to magicians.

Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud

Purple Cow - Seth Godin

Delft Design Guide - multiple authors

An Acrobat of the Heart - Stephen Wangh (shouts out to u/mustardandpancakes for the recommendation)

In Pursuit of Elegance - Guy Kawasaki

The Backstage Handbook - Paul Carter, illustrated by George Chiang

Verbal Judo - George Thompson and Jerry Jenkins

Be Our Guest - Ted Kinni and The Disney Institute

Start With Why - Simon Sinek

Lots of common themes even on such a short list. What would you add to the list? What would you take away?

RJR Nabisco, one of the biggest LBO's at the time. I believe there's been bigger ones since then, but I'm not an expert. However, I'd highly recommend reading Barbarians at the Gate, which is a fantastic read on the topic.

There are already some great ones posted so I'll just go with a couple more... non traditional ones that are surprisingly helpful.

Purple Cow

Start With Why

A great read about Bell Labs is The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.

Interesting. The modern world was pretty much created by a monopoly. AT&T needed to automate their telephone system. So they (Bell Labs) invented electronic switching (and the transistor) and in the process the entire purification of materials industry that lead to the computer world. Cool book The Idea Factory

By the late 1800s anyway, St. Louis and Milwaukee, and to a lesser extent Chicago and Cincinnati, had become major brewing centers. Phillip Best (brewery later taken over by his son in law, F. Pabst) in Milwaukee and Adolphus Busch (who also inherited his brewery from his father-in-law) in St. L were competing to become #1 and also to expand the reach of their beers as "national brands". They tackled shipping and bottling as a way to get their beer far and wide. Anywhere the railroad went, their beer would soon follow.
I would recommend Maureen Ogle's book on these breweries and early distribution of the emerging national brands:
https://www.amazon.com/Ambitious-Brew-Story-American-Beer/dp/0156033593

Wow thanks for the gold and the sticky, glad to see other people find this interesting too. Not gonna lie I'm also pretty excited about getting tweeted by MachinePlanet.

It's easy to draw parallels between any 2 things, but the volume of similarities here goes beyond that. I reread Bad Blood recently and didn't see nearly this much overlap. The main takeaway is that both Enron and Tesla started out with good intentions but their arrogance wouldn't allow them to admit when things needed to change.

Anyone interested in this type of thing should definitely check out The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron. Here's a few other recommendations that cover business failures. And of course if you haven't read Bad Blood yet do that as soon as possible, can't recommend it highly enough.

​

Billion Dollar Whale: How an opportunist stole 2 billion dollars from Malaysia's government and blew the money on parties with Leo DiCaprio

https://www.amazon.com/Billion-Dollar-Whale-Fooled-Hollywood/dp/1478947993

​

House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street: The rise and fall of Bear Stearns

https://www.amazon.com/House-Cards-Hubris-Wretched-Excess/dp/0767930894

​

When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management: How a hedge fund run by geniuses, including 2 Nobel prize winners, lost 4 billion of capital in just a few years.

https://www.amazon.com/When-Genius-Failed-Long-Term-Management/dp/0375758259

​

Fatal Risk: A Cautionary Tale of AIG's Corporate Suicide: How AIG ended up needing an $85 billion bailout during the housing crisis

https://www.amazon.com/Fatal-Risk-Cautionary-Corporate-Suicide/dp/0470889802

Quantitative Finance major here.

High Frequency Trading is insane. Everyone fights to shave off nanoseconds by putting their servers in the room as exchanges, orders are instantaneously cancelled in order to confuse other traders, companies have blasted through mountains in order to get perfectly straight fiber optic cables between point A and B. Order types complicated and predatory towards other traders. Goldman Sachs called the FBI on their own employee because he was suspected of stealing HFT code. On top of it all - the exchanges love HFT. More orders = more money. The exchange you trade on might pay you, or you might pay them but before your trade even gets there - a hedge fund or proprietary trading group might be paying to look at the order before anyone else.

If you're interested in the story, I highly recommend reading Flash Boys, When Genius Failed, and The Quants.

If you're interested in stopping whatever you're doing to learn how to develop machine learning algorithms and work on the street, PM me.

> Is it reasonably possible?

Yes.

> What languages should I learn?

C# or java.

> What contacts should I make?

Recruiters.

> What is the best course of action?

Familiarize yourself w/ finance. Here's a reading list to get you started: After the Trade Is Made, The Essays of Warren Buffett, Too Big to Fail, When Genius Failed.

The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill wrote a good book on Blackwater.

Here's a good Primer video, and yes, it's literally sponsored by Call of Duty.

Think it depends on what applications you use. But this will add a decent amount of latency that you do not have if stay on the ground.

If older you might remember the days where we had phone calls sometimes routed over satellite and how aggravating. Today they all go under the ocean and for a reason. These satellites are lower but still are adding latency that does not exist when stay on the ground.

Here is an excellent book that is all about latency. It is a very interesting read.

https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Wall-Street-Revolt-ebook/dp/B00HVJB4VM

Interesting scene. My kind of crowd.

> The money was then passed to the phones of other people around the table once they had set up wallets. Anyone could have run off with Wences’s $250,000, but that wasn’t a risk with this particular crowd.

But what about AML?

I have to finish reading that book. Digital Gold.

Double Entry

Great read about how accounting came to be and the important people behind it. Including Luca Pacioli (who tutored Leonardo Da Vinci) and his enormous contributions and developments. It's a nice history lesson which helped me connect more dots about accounting.

I really enjoyed the following. Essentially a chronological collection of biographies on some of the historical hedge fund all-stars, so you are introduced to contextual history of the industry, their different philosophical approaches to trading, etc.

More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite (Council on Foreign Relations Books (Penguin Press)) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143119419/ref=cm_sw_r_awd_Bktbub1E58ATW

For something much more technical (i.e. If you are interested because you are considering a fund of your own):

Taxation of U.S. Investment Partnerships and Hedge Funds: Accounting Policies, Tax Allocations, and Performance Presentation https://www.amazon.com/dp/0470605758/ref=cm_sw_r_awd_Tntbub0Q4ZTYN

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World is a pretty good book about the global fincial industry post-WWI. I would definitely recommend it.

I'm not only pretty impressed with its specs and features on paper (will have to wait to see how it actually performs) but I'm honestly fine with the price: you're paying for the engineering, guys, very very little of what you pay for a gun goes into the cost of the materials for it so no, it doesn't really matter that it uses much less material than a G17 as regards the price, no that shouldn't really make a difference.

I mean do you really think that even a decent portion of what you pay for a G17, for example, goes towards the polymer and metal used to make it? Come on. I think I recall reading somewhere (believe it was that book on Glock by Paul Barrett) that the cost of materials to make a Glock 17 was around $70. When you buy a G17 you're getting about 70 bucks worth of plastic and steel, that's it...and about $500 worth of superb engineering to make sure it goes bang every time including and especially when it's your ass on the line, so quit bitching...

The only problem is that I've got a Kahr PM9 that has been just absolutely fantastic so I'm really going to have to work hard to find an excuse to buy this thing, though I probably will eventually.

Blackwater by Jeremy Scahill is a great look into OIF which is the most significant event to happen in the region in the 21st century.

His book Dirty Wars is also excellent.

Also, Legacy of Ashes

This is all super American centric, but there's a reason for that.

While its not exactly a singular person in the story, the book "From Good to Great" by Jim Collins analyzes companies over a span of 20-30 years that were considered the underdog in their field to becoming the flagship for their market.

https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Companies-Leap-Others-ebook/dp/B0058DRUV6

This is one of the ways the founder of Sam Adams sold beer in the early days. He'd sell a keg to a bar in the morning, then return at night when the bar was busy. He'd order a Sam Adams and then loudly exclaim it was the best beer he'd ever tried and get the attention of others.

Source: Ambitious Brew
https://www.amazon.com/Ambitious-Brew-Story-American-Beer/dp/0156033593

This is pretty good: Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance
https://www.amazon.com/Double-Entry-Merchants-Created-Finance/dp/0393346595

There are several good books.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1439164991/ <- the best. also

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0812975219/

http://www.amazon.com/dp/081297381X/

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0273731963/

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0375758259/

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0470393750/

Read their CEO's book Delivering Happiness. It's a pretty amazing story.

Zappos has the best customer service. I highly recommend Tony Hsieh's book "Delivering Happiness". http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048

Digital Gold is the best one re: the history of Bitcoin and the characters in it . Highly recommend it.

Good to Great

7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Good for IT, business, and life in general.

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt -- a great book on the issue if you're interested.

Consider giving this book a read OP. It won't give you the kind of part number or dimension details you're looking for, but it's a great history of the Glock pistol

https://www.amazon.com/Glock-Americas-Paul-M-Barrett/dp/0307719952

Not at all. Video Games are just as worthy of history as other subjects, and the video game industry is full of notable topics. Chronojam created these notes based off of newsclippings and backing up various posts in his free time.

Now, if you consider the work of Curt Vendel and Marty Goldberg, which was greatly influenced quite frankly out of internet drama on the atari games forum, you get a wonderful piece of history like this after 8 years of compilation and research: http://smile.amazon.com/Atari-Inc-Mr-Curt-Vendel/dp/0985597402/ref=smi_www_rcolv2_go_smi?_encoding=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0

And that digs into all the drama from the perspective of many employees working at Atari over the years. That project was kickstarted, naturally. MWO is not on the level that Atari once was, but you never know how things will turn out...

>I really like learning about cases like Enron.

Check out the book: Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

Not a how-to, but Flash Boys by Michael Lewis is a great.

Hmmmm idk, I've read so many. I personally enjoy reading about marketing/sociology etc. I find no one book is epic all the way thru -- so I read them, skip the bad/boring parts etc, and move on to the next. I read this short one as a kid and really liked it, but it's very general lol: https://www.amazon.com/Purple-Cow-New-Transform-Remarkable/dp/1591843170

Read the creature from jekel Island to redpill yourself. Gold standard has issues in particular the limited amount of Gold (After WWII the US had almost all the world's gold read the Lords of Finance for argumesnts against Gold standard). However almost anything would be better than the current system in which bankers effectively own the world and are always the hidden power behind the throne due to their ability to create money.

One of the major issues was that they wouldn't revalue the price of Gold as they were printing money (Gold was always $70 and they could have created a new standard pricing Gold at $400). So old way was not ideal but it could be made to work. (Don't ask me how) Current system also tends to favour boom and bust cycles and not stability.

I am happy he has brought it up as the current financial system needs complete overhaul.

FWIW, he's the author of the book Digital Gold, one of the best accounts of the early days of Bitcoin I've read:

http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Gold-Bitcoin-Millionaires-Reinvent/dp/0062362496

I thought the article captured the essence of the issue as well as any piece written for a general audience could. Especially given the subject was Mike Hearn.

Billion Dollar Molecule- more about pharma than biotech but a lovely read

Don't know if it's what your looking for, but the Idea Factory is about Bell Labs, which (apart from being an amazing laboratory) had a major WWII effort.

Not exactly manufacturing, but The Tizard mission, talks about the magnetron and radar development in WWII.

More Money Than God is one that comes to mind though it is more of a narrative than a technical guide. It may be more useful to just skim through different books by managers who have written them, Alchemy of Finance, Stock Market Technique, The Intelligent Investor... etc etc

Atari, Inc. Business Is Fun

It's written by two of the best second generation era gaming historians.

Videogames: In the Beginning

By Ralph H. Baer

Opening the Xbox

The article missed huge points as to why American Pilsners are popular, and frankly its just not very good.

I suggest reading Ambitious Brew, it gives a far more complete picture.

https://www.amazon.com/Ambitious-Brew-Story-American-Beer/dp/0156033593

I will address your last question (the other one is too big for right now, and this is my last answer! For now anyway)

It takes a long, long time. Most folks outside of science and engineering don't have a good feel for this, so I am glad you asked. For reference, I suggest reading The Idea Factory, by Gertner, about Bell Labs (http://www.amazon.com/The-Idea-Factory-American-Innovation/dp/1594203288).

To go from an idea for something physically new, to implementation commercially, it usually takes a low number of decades. The Manhattan Project and the Apollo Missions are exceptions, but in my view there are two variables: time and effort (effort = money + person-years). In these cases, the Effort variable was WAY larger in the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Missions than for typical science and technology projects.

The reason we fool ourselves into thinking it only takes a short time is because of the rapid evolution of technology once the basis is there. An example is the advance in personal computing (up to and including smart phones) through the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. But, it took decades to understand and perfect the microchip before this series of rapid advances. (Remember, all integrated circuits are silicon, so advances have been incrementally based on this one material.) In batteries, we are trying to go to a completely different set of materials. We incorporate industry in our research to try to compress this long time scale.

After reading this: http://www.amazon.com/When-Genius-Failed-Long-Term-Management/dp/0375758259

I realized that it's all just a crapshoot because you can't accurately model EVERYTHING that will affect market conditions, and that hedge funds are incentivezed to make risky decisions in order to get higher gains.

You're not really gaining anything by investing in a hedge fund like that because you're just trading risk for gains -- just like a normal investor could do.

I would add:

The Greatest Trade Ever: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of How John Paulson Defied Wall Street and Made Financial History by Gregory Zuckerman

More Money Than God Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite by Sebastian Mallaby

You can read more about this in The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner.

Wow there is way too much flawed in there... where to start?

Maybe the beginning. There's no proportionality in loses, no agreement of "for every dollar you lose, we lose 0.60). That's an absurd claim. They have more to lose too. The country may get a bail out but it's the IMF that's funding this non sense. The IMF isn't in the same "all in" predicament as greece is. In such, it can lose more (because it has more) without talking bails. Strictly loss.

Next, money paid on the interest of loans isn't money lost. Loans in theory should be only taken when their net benefit, that is, the interest is calculated to be less than the value you are getting from the loan. That's econ 101.

The comparison of Greece and Germany arn't about circumstances of a war, but the similarity is absolutely there. Germany borrowed insane money (like greece has done) to fund infrastructure they didn't need (there's alot of examples of them approaching a bank for a small loan and being convinced to take our 1 for 10x as much). The Germans printed money to service debt and they fought the austerity measures places on them by Europe (I'm sure you learned about the Dawes plan and reparations measures in school, though probably not in depth... I know we only scratched the surface of it). Germany wasn't at all about the destruction of infrastructure...

If you're interested, http://www.amazon.ca/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke-World/dp/0143116800
Is a great book.

Better pull that latex off son, you're shooting blanks.

Sounds like they've grown too fast, and their processes can't keep up.

Which if they were selling cat food, meh, I'll cut them some slack. Guns & ammo? Nope. Needs to be perfect every time. They should read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048/

Much of this has been detailed in the book titled Glock - The Rise of America's Gun. It was a decent read and interesting look into Gaston's personal life. I had expected the book to highlight Gaston as a stand up man. My view of his firearms is far different than his character.

http://www.amazon.com/Glock-The-Rise-Americas-Gun/dp/0307719952

It is very interesting having read the book to see Helga Glock's lawsuit updated in the news.

I listened to the author's interview on the podcast The Ether Review. It was interesting as hell and I will be reading this book this summer.

Here is the interview: https://soundcloud.com/arthurfalls/the-ether-review-27-blockchain

Another great book I recommend that got me into cryptocurrency and bitcoin history was [Digital Gold] (https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Gold-Bitcoin-Millionaires-Reinvent/dp/0062362496?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0).

For those of you old enough to remember (like me), Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco is an excellent account of what happened during the leveraged buy out of RJR Nabisco.

For those of you that haven't already, check out the book Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper on the backstory of Bitcoin. Started reading it yesterday and will be finished tonight. Excellent read.

Get her two books by Marty Neumeier: The Brand Gap and Zag. They're about branding and give very clear insights. These books changed my whole outlook on design and they're great reads. I'm easily bored with reading but these are written in informal language and illustrated, and the chapters are bite-sized chunks. Every graphic designer should read them. Here's the brand gap: http://www.amazon.com/The-Brand-Gap-Distance-Business/dp/0321348109 and here's zag: http://www.amazon.com/Zag-Number-Strategy-High-Performance-Brands/dp/0321426770/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1348675026&sr=1-1&keywords=zag

If someone wants to know what this is about, check out Marty Neumeier's slideshow from The Brand Gap: http://www.slideshare.net/coolstuff/the-brand-gap

they aren't moderating prices, they are manipulating them. They have faster connections than standard users, their algorithms can anticipate and then execute from the time you request your order to the time it fulfills, hopping in the middle of your order and making a very small amount of money in the process.

The Book "Flash Boys" is a great read about it.

I would be careful about what you say about her. Someone might come and talk to you. Her brother founded Blackwater, the largest private army in the world. They murder with impunity, and are above the law. Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Revised and Updated] https://www.amazon.com/dp/156858394X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_yFgqyb73WAW7R

Edit: I'm not really concerned about your safety, but my point is with the rise of tyranny on American soil (and I'm not singling out trump here) your government increasingly becomes something to fear.

The educational aspects, of this emerging tyrannical phenomena of American governance, facilitates freedom of the government to use/abuse non-constitutionally granted authority/power. Because the public keeps the government in check. Unless they're too stupid to accomplish that function.

Well, since you can not reason someone out of a position they have so clearly failed to reason themselves into I won't waste any time explaining on just how many levels you are so deeply mistaken.

Suffice to say that your grandfather didn't fight alongside mine or anyone else's so an Australian media mogul could set the news agenda upon a paranoid far right conspiracy theory as opposed to the facts.

If that is what they were fighting for, they certainly weren't doing it in my name or the name of the vast majority of my fellow British Europeans—who consider it a travesty on a grand scale that a once proud nation such as the United States should have slipped so far behind in education that opinions such as yours are even tolerated, much less aired without shame.

Here's some non-fiction for your otherwise barren bookshelf:

http://www.amazon.com/Blackwater-Powerful-Mercenary-Revised-Updated/dp/156858394X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255395691&sr=8-1

I read the chapter and enjoyed it, just bought the Kindle version. Can't wait to dive in.

Here's the link for the Kindle version for anyone that's interested

yes, but they didnt steal money. theres a world of difference, and if you had even a passing knowledge of why LTCM blew up, it had very little to do with scholes' option pricing model, or even how they were pricing bonds, but because they drifted far away from their core strategy (https://www.amazon.com/When-Genius-Failed-Long-Term-Management/dp/0375758259) is a great proxy.

to think that a criminal is in the same class as them is laughable.

Check out "The Idea Factory"

http://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-American-Innovation-ebook/dp/B005GSZIWG/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1375270560&sr=8-1&keywords=the+idea+factory+bell+labs+and+the+great+age+of+american+innovation

A very good read on the history of Bell Labs

Scahill's book Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army is really good. It's several years old but goes into depth about Prince and his merc fetish.

I really liked this book on double entry bookkeeping. I found it suggested on this sub

Heres a good book on the rise of Glock in America.

https://www.amazon.com/Glock-Americas-Paul-M-Barrett/dp/0307719952

The Gun by C.J. Chivers is another one I will always recommend.

Glock was good. The book, not the dude.

Some good ones:

• The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing
  
• Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market
  
• Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

Part finance, part economics, I highly recommend Lords of Finance (https://www.amazon.com/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke-World/dp/0143116800). It discusses the actions of several key people and subsequent events in the banking sector leading up to the Great Depression. Largely shaped our world today.

The situations you mention were all fairly different. No short explanation will give a good sense of what happened. I don't know that much about Amarath, but there are good books written about the other two.

There's an excellent book about the rise and fall of LTCM.

I don't think the definitive book on the mortgage crisis has been written yet, but Michael Lewis wrote one I thought was pretty informative.

This is a great book and you should read it if you get the chance.

NO tried to sue Glock in the 90s, blaming them for a surge in shootings in the city. Glock said that if they did they would bring up in court the one-for-one program and point at how most of the shootings were being done with Police trade-in .38s, and what did the NOPD think Glock was going to do with them? Sell for scrap value?

Guys, do yourselves a favor and read Zappos's CEO book. It really changed my life.

For those interested in this, Michael Lewis' "Flash Boys" deals with this topic exclusively. It's sickening...

http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Michael-Lewis-ebook/dp/B00HVJB4VM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409330355&sr=8-1&keywords=flash+boys

http://www.amazon.com/Barbarians-Gate-Fall-RJR-Nabisco/dp/0061655554/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1406316997&sr=1-1&keywords=rjr+nabisco

Have Wikipedia/Google by your side and research anything you come across that doesn't make complete sense or you'd like to delve into further.

Based on the description, I don't think this is it but maybe the OP had a fundamental misunderstanding of it.

https://www.amazon.com/When-Genius-Failed-Long-Term-Management/dp/0375758259

But that's my best guess. Or The Quants, but that doesn't really line up with the comment either. Idk.

When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein

Really interesting read about LTCM's blowup in 1998, especially in hindsight as much of the issues they faced relate to the 2008 financial crisis (dependence on complex derivatives, high leverage, and overconfidence).

The Quants: How a New of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It by Scott Patterson

Ties in well with the book above because it is about guys doing a lot of the same stuff and many of them getting burned doing it.

Monkey Business: Swinging through the Wall Street Jungle by John Rolfe and Peter Troob

This book is one of the main reasons I was turned off from pursuing a career in investment banking. It's a fascinating glimpse into the industry though.

Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts by Julian Rubinstein

This book has nothing to do with business, but it is one of the craziest true stories I have ever read, and I feel that I need to recommend it to others.

> Glock isn't known to work quickly.

Yes, but they can work pretty fast when they have to. Consider what happened when Smith & Wesson introduced .40 S&W ammunition, as retold by Paul M. Barrett in Glock: The Rise of America's Gun:

> With bureaucratic sluggishness, the FBI had been deliberating for several years over which pistol and ammunition would replace the six-shot Smith & Wesson. The agency at first decided to leapfrog existing gun models and ammo to equip its forces with a hard-hitting ten-millimeter pistol. “The Ten” would be a real “man-stopper,” FBI ballistics experts believed. Word of this inclination, which seeped out from Washington in 1988 and 1989, stimulated gun and ammunition makers to go large. Glock had readied the ten-millimeter Glock 20 for introduction at the SHOT Show, under the assumption that the FBI’s choice would influence tastes in wider law enforcement and commercial circles. By then, however, the FBI had discovered that conventional ten-millimeter ammunition—fired from a pistol about the same size as the traditional Colt .45 model that the military was phasing out—produced too much recoil for many agents to shoot accurately. The agency was beginning to recruit female personnel, and the women had even more trouble with the ten-millimeter. As an alternative, S&W collaborated with Winchester to design a new, shorter cartridge of the same bore diameter, which could be fired from a slightly altered version of the nine-millimeter pistol. To distinguish the new product, and give the FBI its own distinctive load, the manufacturers called the ammunition the “.40 S&W.” (Forty-caliber rounds are the same diameter as ten-millimeter rounds.)

> Glock, with its ten-millimeter, seemed to have missed a subtle twist in handgun tastes. Obviously, Smith & Wesson would come out with a pistol to match the .40 S&W ammunition. With the FBI’s imprimatur, that combination would become the hot new handgun—or that, at least, was what everyone in the industry assumed.

> Gaston Glock traveled from Vienna to Las Vegas to attend the SHOT Show that year. American wholesalers and retailers, to whom Karl Walter, the company’s top executive in the United States, introduced Glock, treated the Austrian engineer with respect bordering on awe. He was the hero of the plastic pistol controversy, the champion of greater police firepower.

> For all his stature at the SHOT Show company booth, however, Gaston Glock wasn’t yet known on sight by most executives and marketing men in the American gun industry. He could stroll the exhibition floor without being noticed. Walter had told him about the .40 S&W round. Glock decided to take a look for himself. He walked over to the Smith & Wesson display area, scooped up samples of the .40 ammo, and put them in his pocket. Later he took measurements and made an important discovery. “Mr. Glock realized,” said Walter, “that with only very minor changes to the Glock 17, we could introduce a pistol to fire .40-caliber rounds, and we could steal this opportunity from Smith & Wesson.”

> Before S&W could get its distribution wheels turning and put a .40 model on gun store shelves, Glock began shipping its own version: the .40-caliber Glock 22. By mid-1990, the new Glock pistol, which, to the layman’s eye, appeared virtually identical to the original Glock 17, was headed toward being a big hit in its own right.

> “Oh, my God, what an embarrassment,” recalled Smith & Wesson’s Sherry Collins. “We’re beaten to market on the gun for our own ammo, the round we’ve made especially for the FBI. And some Austrian gets there first!” Swirling a midday cocktail, Collins added: “The technical industry term for that kind of experience is ‘getting your ass kicked.’ ”

This really is a wonderful book, and anyone who owns, carries or enjoys talking about Glocks should have it.

Going to the gold standard has many issues. A good book that covers some of the problems with it is Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

Amazing how some folks did not look at history and just aim to relearn the same lessons again.

Amazon is offering the republished version in late 2014. It can be pre-ordered now! Amazon Link

The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations

Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance

Not exactly technical stuff but they defnitely give more color and depth to this thing of ours (accounting)

Yup, there's never any fraud on Wall St.

There is a great book about that called "When Genius Failed"
http://www.amazon.com/When-Genius-Failed-Long-Term-Management/dp/0375758259

If he can't finish his degree at least tell him to go read "When Genius Failed". Those guys were really sure they knew the system, they also had multiple Phds and years and years of experience. They also lost a massive amount of money in a short period of time, they had it all worked out -- the computer models, the math, everything.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143119419/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_AFYHAbT10A48S

Here ya go.

Barbarians at the Gate

The Box

And obviously The Big Short

Read: The Brand Gap: How to Bridge the Distance Between Business Strategy and Design https://www.amazon.com/dp/0321348109/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_ifeuDb6DNBN1V

I posted this else where but I am going to go back and delete it-- take a look at the CEO of Zappos's book: http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048

Here's a book the CEO have written about customer service:

http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048

Here is the desktop version of your link

https://www.amazon.com/Billion-Dollar-Molecule-Companys-Perfect/dp/0671510576

Something of an origin story of a lot of common-day drug discovery.

yah, it was Lowenstein - http://www.amazon.com/When-Genius-Failed-Long-Term-Management/dp/0375758259

There is also a book about Blackwater (published in 2008). https://www.amazon.com/Blackwater-Powerful-Mercenary-Revised-Updated/dp/156858394X/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1486529706&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=blackkwater

Michael Lewis knocks it out of the park. Again.

The cover reminds me of Jane Gleeson White's Double Entry

It is. Read Flash Boys.

https://www.amazon.ca/Flash-Boys-Wall-Street-Revolt-ebook/dp/B00HVJB4VM/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1497381150&sr=1-1&keywords=flash+boys+a+wall+street+revolt

https://www.amazon.com/Glock-Americas-Paul-M-Barrett/dp/0307719952

The Brand Gap: How to Bridge the Distance Between Business Strategy and Design https://www.amazon.com/dp/0321348109/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_CxL6ybH1VJ80Z

And listen to everything you can by Sasha Strauss

Lords of Finance?

www.amazon.com/Blackwater-Powerful-Mercenary-Revised-Updated/dp/156858394X

>I recently read the book "Glock"

This one?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307719952/ref=cm_sw_r_other_awd_AF9QwbP813TQ4

also, check out this TED talk on business strategy. Read this book on branding.

Read the following books:

• http://amzn.com/0375758259
  
• http://amzn.com/0393338827
  
• http://amzn.com/0307588343
  
  You'll find documented proof in those books (and in the other 15 titles I've read on this subject) that everything I wrote is factual.
  

Correction to myself - it was originally his 17th patent, so previous things may have been non-guns, as /u/presidentender mentions.

I had originally read about this in Glock: Rise of America's Gun

No problem. I recommend taking several days/weeks to just soak up information before you buy anything.

Also watch an economic calendar and you can begin to see what effect different events/information releases have on the market.

(Ex. Janet Yellen speaks at the FOMC meeting and decides not to raise interest rates and her speech is very dovish; Gold will go up on speculation that the next rate hike wont be for a long time.)

Edit- Another good book on how the stock market has evolved with technological changes

Scahill's book "Blackwater: The Rise Of The World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army" is a very difficult but informative read. It focuses on exactly how Blackwater (Xe) gained so much political clout and how they actually use their resources. I could only read a chapter or two at a time because it just made me physically ill. Scahill has quite a lot to say specifically about Prince and his upbringing.

Edit: Link added

I read (in Lords of Finance) that one of the main reasons that France and Britain insisted on the high reparations was that the US insisted on both of them paying back their (also quite high?) war debts to the US. So one the one hand the US tried to get a lighter treatment of Germany, on the other hand they indirectly caused it. Again: one of the reasons, the book does not try to explain it all with that argument.

Well its not really a trading book but I recently read When Genius Failed and found it not only very interesting but relevant to markets today.

The Glock company has done a great job with their culture, image, and marketing. It might have something to do with the fact that many PDs use the Glock as their service weapon, so the officers buy Glocks as their off-duty weapon and word-of-mouth takes it from there. New gun buyers see that so many people have Glocks, so they assume it's a reliable/good gun to buy. I think there's an entire book written about Glock culture. - Edit: The book http://www.amazon.com/Glock-The-Rise-Americas-Gun/dp/0307719952

GL on your qualifying! Don't get "Glock thumb."

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0058DRUV6/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

not a novel

Still employs American workers - would you consider an M1 Garand to be an American gun? Downvote all you want but it is "Americas Gun"

• Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by H.W. Brands
  
  
• Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by Alan Brinkley
  
  
• The Crisis of the Old Order: 1919-1933, The Age of Roosevelt, Volume I, by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
  
  
• The Coming of the New Deal, 1933-1935 The Age of Roosevelt, Volume II, by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
  
  
• The Politics of Upheaval: 1935-1936, The Age of Roosevelt, Volume III, by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
  
  And to understand the Great Depression better (which is important):
  
  
• Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, by Liaquat Ahamed

here you are https://www.amazon.it/Digital-Gold-Bitcoin-Millionaires-Reinvent/dp/0062362496 scusa l'attesa :\

I read the book about them. By the end they just kept shorting vol hoping mean reversion would bail them out, but the rest of Wall Street squeezed them into oblivion. There really was no algo.

"Glock" Glock: The Rise of America's Gun https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307719952/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_ZYwAybGMZJPX1

/r/SecurityAnalysis maintain a decent reading list.

The following is taken from it:

History

• A History of Financial Speculation - Edward Chancellor
  
  
• A Short History of Financial Euphoria - Kenneth Galbraith
  
  
• Barbarians at The Gate - Bryan Burruough
  
  
• Irrational Exuberance - Robert Shiller
  
  
• Liar's Poker - Michael Lewis
  
  
• Manias, Panics and Crashes - Charles Kindleberger
  
  
• Money of the Mind - James Grant
  
  
• Oil 101 - Morgan Downey
  
  
• The Box - Marc Levinson
  
  
• The Prize - Daniel Yergin
  
  
• The Big Short - Michael Lewis
  
  
• The Great Crash of 1929 - Kenneth Galbraith
  
  
• The Panic of 1907 - Robert Brunner
  
  
• The Predators Ball - Connie Bruck
  
  
• This Time Is Different - Rogoff & Reinhart
  
  
• Too Big to Fail - Andrew Ross Sorkin
  
  
• US Bank Deregulation in A Historical Perspective - Charles Calomiris
  
  
• When Genius Failed - Roger Lowenstein
  

"Gaston Glock enjoyed showing off the Glock 18, a fully automatic version of the pistol. Depressing the trigger of the Glock 18 unleashes a stream of bullets in the fashion of a machine gun. It can hold a capacious thirty-three-round magazine that sticks out of the gun’s grip and empties in a matter of seconds. Unless the user is familiar with the Glock 18, its enormous recoil results in the barrel jumping upward. Many an embarrassed police officer inadvertently peppered the ceiling of the company shooting range with rounds. Unavailable on the civilian market, the Glock 18 is designed for police SWAT squads and military special-ops units. Rolling it out for visitors to Smyrna remains a Glock marketing practice."

From Glock: The Rise of America's Gun

A glock is a mechanical device, prone to failure just like any other mechanical device, made of metal, polymer and springs. I've owned a g19, g17 and a g26, still have the g17. I used to shoot IPSC with my 17, and carried my g26 concealed for about a year.

My observation was it had the same failure rate as any other handgun. Nothing special about glocks except their marketing..

You might find this book interesting http://www.amazon.com/Glock-The-Rise-Americas-Gun/dp/0307719952

Against The God: the remarkable story of Risk- Outlines the history of probability theory and risk assessment through the centuries

https://www.amazon.com/Against-Gods-Remarkable-Story-Risk/dp/0471295639/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475105434&sr=1-1&keywords=against+the+gods

When Genius Failed - A narrative of the spectacular fall of Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund which had on its board both Myron Scholes AND Robert Merton (you will recall them from MFE)
https://www.amazon.com/When-Genius-Failed-Long-Term-Management/dp/0375758259/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475105453&sr=1-1&keywords=when+genius+failed

Black Swan/ Antifragility- A former quant discusses the nature of risk in these controversial and philosophical books. Some parts of this book are actually called out and shamed in McDonald's Derivative Markets, one or the both of them are worth reading

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness-Fragility/dp/081297381X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475105478&sr=1-1&keywords=black+swan



Godel, Escher, Bach- Very dense look into recursive patterns in mathematics and the arts. While not actuarial, it's obviously very mathematical, a must read.

https://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0465026567/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475105497&sr=1-1&keywords=geb

Endurance- This was recommended to me by a pure mathematics professor. Again, not actuarial, but more about the nature of perseverance though problem solving(sound familiar). It's about Shakleton's famous voyage to the south pole.

https://www.amazon.com/Endurance-Shackletons-Incredible-Alfred-Lansing/dp/0465062881/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475105520&sr=1-1&keywords=endurance+shackleton%27s+incredible+voyage

Thank you for the well thought out reply.

Fat tailed distribution is what your are looking for, or more [popularly black swan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory].

This is a good part of what lead to the downfall of LTCM which if you have not read the book When Genius Failed, I would highly recommend it

For the average person, it's very hard to argue with the advice to invest 10% of your salary into low load broad market index fund (or funds) and follow basic asset allocation rules.

Right now people don't save at all, whihc compounds the social security problem. Basically there's not enough there to keep people 'living comfortably' which leads to ever increasing taxation, which has failed to address the fact that people don't save. So people bitch that SS is not enough yet also bitch that taxes are too high.... Same goes for medicare and a whole host of other govt services.

Not to say those would disappear as they are good programs...

However we seem to be in a death spiral of ever increasing taxation to fuel programs that account for the fact that people fail to save and plan for their financial future..

Probably a bit aggressive but there is no doubt that Allied negotiators wanted to exact revenge on Germany and her allies, and ended up causing WW2 (the reparations and penalties extracted from Germany created the conditions for Hitler's rise). More in this excellent and well-respected book: https://www.amazon.com/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke-World/dp/0143116800

>there is nothing else meaningful to base your government policy, or your ethics off of.

My ethics are based on providing maximum freedom to the individual, irrespective of what they do with it. I'm not concerned about promoting the greater good by central planning. Why does the good of the group outweigh the good of the individual?

>I am not sure there is any realistic example in which some can suffer a lot for others benefit, and this maximises utility.

I would say this depends on the scope of the group you are talking about benefiting. The US harms many overseas to benefit the domestic population, for example.

>Ultimately I have some faith in governments... to fail less than the market does. i simply think they fail less (or have the potential to fail less) than the free market.

When the government fails, it does so after having threatened the people with violence, taken their money, and then wither wasted it, lost it, and hurt the many to benefit the politically connected. Market failures certainly do happen, but they are the result of the choices people make, which to me is far less unethical than a government failure. Do you think governments have the potential to fail worse than the market, with worse outcomes from those worse failures?

>I am a Keynesian, so I think deficit spending is terrific.

Even Keynes only suggested deficit spending during recessions, not every single year during good times as well.

>The only way to deal with this is a very informed electorate, which is hardly an exciting solution.

It's an irrational solution. Have you ever read anything like They Myth of the Rational Voter? The amount of time it takes to become educated on all the relevant topics compared to the meaninglessness of your vote statistically among many millions makes it a very poor investment of your time.

>These are deeply heterodox views, and you would have a hard time finding a respectable modern academic to back you up on them.

The government isn't exactly known for its historical honesty, and supports people who support its views. However, there are some recognized works, including this Pulitzer Prize winning book. Ben Bernanke has a concurring view of Milton Friedman's work to show the great depression worsened by Federal monetary policy

>respectable

The trouble with this word is that in today's discourse anyone who supports a heterodox view of anything is instantly branded as "not-respectable."

I'm going to skip your stuff on austerity, as I am not familiar with the particulars of those countries and don't have anything informed to say about them. My apologies.

>I am all in favour of a smaller military

Yes, but if you're concerned about the environment, then the military is currently and ongoing government failure, dare I say a disaster. Can you point to something the market is failing at that has an equally large impact?

>that energy would have been consuming by the free market equivalent of the services provided by government anyway.

This assumes the government programs are as efficient as market ones. Would you make that assumption?

>Again, while the government is not perfect, it is the better than the alternative.

False dichotomy. What is the alternative? There can be many alternatives.

>Almost all of the top universities in the world are publicly run, Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford etc.

Harvard is private. The Ivy league schools are private. Also, what does "top" mean? Top at what? Promoting an orthodox view? Producing the best minds to go into politics and lord over people?

>higher than many poor people could afford in the free market, this is the ultimate problem of education in the market.

In much of the developing world private education is stepping in where the government fails.

>What sort of social mobility can you expect when the lower classes are educated so badly relative to their more rich counterparts?

The US government is a worst offender of this I can think of, because it funds schools on property taxes. Government education is a massive failure, yet it produces people at the ready to denounce private education.

this is probably because the complexity of the instruments means it would be extraordinarily difficult to decompose into individual mortgages, which means it would be prohibitively expensive to do so. This is in addition to the near-certainty that banks like Citi and Merril have absolutely no interest at all in becoming large-scale landlords.

If this all seems absurd (why would you buy something whose collateral has no real value to you?) it's because it is. The level of hubris and greed behind most of these financial instruments is absolutely stunning.

If you want to get really angry about this, read When Genius Failed about the collapse of the Long-Term Capital Fund & Long-Term Capital Management, its manager. In a couple of places you can see the author basically connecting the dots on the mortgage-backed security problem, but just like no one really called out the derivative implosion that caused the LTCM collapse, despite the writing being on the wall even before it happened, no one was really calling the MBS before it happened either, even if it was obvious to them. (Of course this is not true as a blanket statement, but in general, you're not going to read anything about the danger of MBS's in the mainstream press newer than a couple of years, despite the ability of a journalist, the author of When Genius Failed, to call it out as early as 2001(I can't get a clear idea if '01 was the reprint date or the original publication).)

>September saw a spasm of retrospectives on the 10-year anniversary of the financial crisis. Lost in all of the hoopla was the 20-year anniversary of another collapse — that of hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in September 1998. In many ways, that episode was a precursor to the next crisis.
>
>This privately held investment firm believed — incorrectly, we later learned — that it had come up with a new and more profitable way to invest capital. And for a while, it did: Returns soared, with annualized gains after fees of 21, 43 and 41 percent in its first three years. The team had the appearance, according to journalist Roger Lowenstein, of being a “$100 billion money-making juggernaut.”
>
>Although the firm’s managers were brilliant — two future Nobel winners had major roles in developing its investing strategies — they made some not-very-smart decisions.
>
>This is what happens when too much risk and too much leverage meets too little humility. As detailed by Lowenstein in the masterful book “When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management,” the telling of the LTCM story reads like a crime thriller. But even more important, the story contained many of the themes that played out in the financial crisis.
>
>The investment team at LTCM found many small, overlooked opportunities. Thus, it had an edge. But it was so small that it wouldn’t have created any worthwhile gains after expenses. The solution was leverage, and the key was managing the associated risk through hedging strategies.
>
>At its peak, LTCM held $124.3 billion of assets against equity of $4.72 billion, for a 26-to-1 leverage ratio.
>
>But let’s back up a bit and set the scene leading up to the firm’s collapse. Maybe it will seem familiar:
>
> • Falling interest rates led fund managers to reach for yield;
>
> • Asset managers searched the backwaters of finance for opportunities in exotic, illiquid credit markets;
>
> • A single firm amassed huge derivative positions;
>
> • Debt obligations of one firm intertwined with the rest of Wall Street, necessitating the involvement of the Federal Reserve.
>
>You know how this ends: It doesn’t take a whole lot of trades to go sour for a fund that’s levered 26-to-1 fund to go bust. If LTCM only had had a few million dollars in holdings, no one would have ever heard of it, and it would have quietly gone bankrupt. But all of those big brains attracted billions of dollars; leverage that up enough and it begins to smell like what we now call systemic risk. By the end of September 1998 as the firm’s trades unraveled, capital had shrunk to a mere $400 million while assets were still more than $100 billion, giving the fund an unsustainable leverage ratio of about 250-to-1.
>
>The towering leverage ratio and rapidly depleting equity meant an imminent bankruptcy. The Fed, under the guidance of Alan Greenspan, organized a group of 16 financial institutions to pony up $3.6 billion to keep LTCM afloat while the derivatives and illiquid holdings were unwound over time.
>
>In an email exchange, Lowenstein said that the implosion of LTCM had many of the hallmarks of a financial panic. “In 1998, it didn’t feel like a dry run” for 2007, he wrote. “It felt like the end of the world.”
>
>Lowenstein added that while the Fed’s rescue of LTCM worked to “soothe traders and numb investors,” it also taught the wrong lesson, namely that “the government would always be there” to help out in a crisis.
>
>“Modern finance remains overly complicated.” Lowenstein observed. “Speculation and bubbles are a regular part of markets. Government involvement and the occasional bailout is the default setting, rather than allowing market participants to suffer the consequences of their own actions when the pain would otherwise be too severe.”
>
>This was exactly the moral hazard that helped to create the financial crisis. If the collapse of a private hedge fund leads to a bailout, well then, the lesson here is make sure you are big enough, highly leveraged and intertwined with the rest of Wall Street.
>
>In a nutshell, Greenspan failed to understand the impact of private gains and socialized losses. In doing so, he set an awful precedent that to this day has not been corrected. 
>
>“We live in an age of bubbles, perforce of occasional crashes.” Lowenstein said. “The Fed was created as a lender of last resort, and we should expect that its services (at some point) will be called upon again.”
>
>It’s obvious that the lessons of LTCM were of no use in preventing the crisis that followed 10 years later. The same can probably be said of the main event in terms of the next crisis, I’m afraid.
>
>(Corrects Long-Term Capital Management’s assets in sixth paragraph and leverage ratio in sixth, eighth paragraphs. )

​

Brexit = Death of the Technocrats
Michael Krieger | Jun 24, 2016

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) … the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.– J. R. R. Tolkien

What transpired last night in the United Kingdom represented one of the most extraordinarily expressions of democracy of my lifetime.

When faced with an event of such monumental significance, it’s difficult to pick any particular direction for a post like this.

I have so many thoughts running through my mind and so many angles I could potentially address, it is simply impossible to do them all justice.

As such, I’ve decided to focus on one very meaningful implication of Brexit: death of the technocrats.

To start, I want to dive into one of the more interesting controversies from the weeks leading up to the vote.

What I’m referring to is the statement made by Vote Leave’s Michael Grove regarding “experts.”

From the Telegraph(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/06/eu-referendum-who-needs-experts-when-weve-got-michael-gove/):

On Friday night, during an interview on Sky News about the EU, Faisal Islam challenged the Justice Secretary to name a single independent economic authority that thought Brexit was a good idea. Mr Gove’s response was defiant.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/03/how-did-michael-gove-cope-with-the-sky-news-audience-and-faisal/]

“I’m glad these organizations aren’t on my side,” he said.

“I think people in this country have had enough of experts.”

Mr Islam spluttered incredulously.

People in this country, he repeated, “have had enough of experts?”

Mr Gove stood his ground.

Yes, he said, people in this country had had enough of experts “saying that they know what is best”.

Mr Gove had “faith in the British people”.

The so-called experts, clearly, did not.

For his words, Mr. Gove was attacked relentlessly.

He was lectured about his dangerous language and scolded for its supposed anti-intellectualism.

The “very smart people” issuing these condemnations did so in their typical self-satisfied, smug manner.

Nonetheless, Michael Gove was absolutely correct in his assessment, and in this post I will detail precisely why.

First of all, what is an “expert?”

From what I can gather this term is bestows upon someone with an advanced degree who has successfully maneuvered him or herself into a position of prominence within government, a think tank or academia.

As someone who worked on Wall Street for a decade, I was constantly surrounded by people with advanced degrees from the most prestigious institutions.

I also know that your degree means absolutely nothing the moment you walk in that door for the first day of work.

You enter a place filled with people who have battling it out for years if not decades in their profession of choice, and the only thing that matters now is performance.

If you don’t perform you’re gone, and nobody’s gonna care about the long string of letters next to your name.

The world of politics, government and central banking famously and problematically does not work this way.

Look around you at all the discredited “thought leaders” who continue to be paraded around on television, and who still advise Presidents and Prime Ministers the world over.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis no changing of the guard was permitted.

Sure we were given a fresh face with Barack Obama, but his advisers didn’t change.

He immediately hired both Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, and that’s the moment I knew he was a gigantic fraud.

To summarize, the exact same people who ruined the world bailed themselves out, avoided all accountability and continue to call the shots.

These are the men and women we know as “the experts.”

The point isn’t to say that having an advanced degree in a particular field of study doesn’t make an individual especially useful to society. It does.

The issue here is accountability.

If you want to go around calling yourself an expert and demanding that your views be implemented across a given civilization, you had better do a good job.

If you do a poor job, you should be immediately replaced with someone who has a different perspective.

After all, there are plenty of experts out there to choose from.

Unfortunately, our societies tend to get stuck with egomaniacal, incompetent, but politically savvy experts who never go away.

They can blow up the world a million times over and still somehow survive to call the shots.

This is the main reason the world is in the state it’s in, and it’s the reason reactionary forces are rising across the globe.

The Brexit vote in itself proves the point.

Sure, David Cameron has announced his intention to resign, but where are the the resignations of EU technocrats?

If anyone was discredited by this vote it’s the leadership of the EU, but they aren’t going anywhere.

Why?

Because they’re experts, and experts stay around forever.

Like Larry Summers, bank executives and neocon war mongers, these people never suffer the consequences of their actions and thus remain free to run around endlessly destroying the world from their unassailable perches of power.

That’s the point.

Being an expert does not make you infallible.

Your credentials should certainly offer you a seat at the policy making table, but from that moment on you had better demonstrate performance.

It’s the same way with a corporate job.

The resume gets you in the door, but your production day in and day out keeps you in the seat.

The status quo doesn’t see things this way.

To the status quo technocrat, this is a lifelong position.

They consider themselves to be the wise indispensable elders required to steer the world in the right direction irrespective of any and all calamities they cause along the way.

Unfortunately for us, history shows us that the biggest disasters happen precisely when you combine such expert arrogance with unbridled power.

One of the best modern examples of this relates to the tale of the 1990’s mega hedge fund Long Term Capital Management (LTCM).

A story that was perfectly captured in the excellent book by Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed.(https://www.amazon.com/When-Genius-Failed-Long-Term-Management/dp/0375758259)

The leadership of LTCM was hailed as the best of the best from the beginning and expectations were high.

It’s principals consisted of not only Wall Street veterans but also several former university professors, including two Nobel Prize-winning economists.

Yet, what transpired after only five years in operation was one of the most spectacular failures of modern times.

A train wreck so large and so completely out of control, it required a Federal Reserve led bailout.

What happened with LTCM is happening right now across the political and economic spheres in virtually all nations.

You have a collection of self-assured, arrogant “experts” running the world into the ground with their policies.

As I said earlier, I have no problem with experts.

I have a problem when experts are permitted to operate with zero accountability.

The EU represents such technocratic immunity better than any other in the Western world.

The British people recognized that they couldn’t remove these technocrats from power from within (something proven once and for all by the fact no EU leaders have resigned), so they decided to leave.

I commend that choice and I think the sooner the status quo is disposed of, the greater the likelihood for a positive long-term outcome.

As I warned last year in my post, A Message to Europe – Prepare for Nationalism(https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2015/11/14/a-message-to-europe-prepare-for-nationalism/):

Actions have consequences, and people can only be pushed so far before they snap.

I believe the Paris terror attacks will be a major catalyst that will ultimately usher in nationalist type governments in many parts of Europe, culminating in an end of the EU as we know it and a return to true nation-states.

Although I think a return to regional government and democracy is what Europeans need and deserve, the way in which it will come about, and the types of governments we could see emerge, are unlikely to be particularly enlightened or democratic after the dust has settled.

My thoughts and prayers go out to all the victims of these horrific events, but the Paris attacks didn’t happen in a vacuum.

The people of Europe have already become increasingly resentful against the EU, something which is not debatable at this point.

This accurate perception of an undemocratic, technocratic Brussels-led EU dictatorship was further solidified earlier this year after the Greek people went to the polls and voted for one thing, only to be instructed that their vote doesn’t actually matter.

Actions have consequences, and we’ve now witnessed the first of these consequences.

The “experts” have warned us of the disaster to befall Great Britain should it Brexit.

Well we now have front row seats from which to observe the outcome of the UK versus large economies that remain in the euro such as France, Spain and Italy in the years ahead.

As usual, I suspect the experts will be wrong.

More: http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2016/06/24/brexit-death-of-the-technocrats/

From a great post on /r/neutralpolitics from /u/rynebrandon, I quote:

> Why I think George W. Bush is arguably one of the five worst presidents in our history and inarguably one of the ten worst is one thing: The Iraq War. The Iraq War was a massive failure of the intelligence community, intellectual honesty and transparency in our political system and good common sense. Using my method of measuring the quality of presidential candidates, the Afghanistan War likely would have happened in some form or fashion under a Gore Administration or a McCain Administration or really anyone in power at the time. However, no other politician - none in the 2000 presidential field (Edit: based on subsequent conversation it appears there's at least some possibility the Iraq War happens under McCain) - would have moved for war with Iraq which was widely considered - even at the time - a distraction from the War on Terror and it's not like the War on Terror couldn't be criticized in its own right. The various failures of the Iraq War have been recounted in numerous places: Abu Ghraib, crony contracts to companies like Halliburton, the privatization of key American military operations. But those are all somewhat narrow execution concerns in a chaotic time - war is often messy. To me, the most unforgiveable facet of the Iraq War is that it happened at all.

Maybe there isn't "no way", but it would have been highly unlikely.