2008/01/25

oh, the federal reserve is a government controlled private bank

January 25th 2008 Posted to Uncategorized

Kind of a bizarre self-quizzing format, but informative:

Who is the Federal Reserve, who owns the Federal Reserve

and this,

Where does the Federal Reserve get the money to fund its operations?
(Read the article)

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2008/01/23

resolving the St. Petersburg paradox

January 23rd 2008 Posted to Uncategorized

The St. Petersburg paradox is based on one of those gambling games where the usual model of using expected gain to decide whether to play the game gives a counter-intuitive result.

In the simplest of examples, you pay some entry fee to play the game, $1 is put in a pot by a counterparty, then a coin is repeatedly flipped and the pot is doubled on every coin flip by the counterparty, until “tail” comes up. You receive the money in the pot. The expected gain of this game is infinite, regardless of the initial entry fee. So it would seem that one should always play the game, regardless of the amount demanded as entry fee. But, as the article points out, “few of us would pay even $25 to enter such a game.”
(Read the article)

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