A rant on politics for a Labor Day weekend.

A donut with no hole, is a danish. Ty Webb

A quick post about poker! That seemingly simple, deceptively complex game with a number of interesting parallels to investing. I just watched the MIT lectures on ‘Poker Theory and Analytics,’ an ‘Independent Activities Period’ mini-course, and for our mutual amusement, I worked through the math on bluffing, which is an interesting problem I had never done the full deep dive into. Here it is, including a Mathematica notebook.

Curiouser and curiouser! — Alice in Wonderland. Having written about Greece the last couple of weeks, why stop now?

So, last week I said, Greece was getting booted out of the eurozone.

More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly. — Woody Allen

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. Thomas Jefferson

There will always be those who mean to do us harm. To stop them, we risk awakening the same evil within ourselves. — James T. Kirk_

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one that is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. – Henry David Thoreau

A couple of days ago I posted Mapping the Financial / Media Twittersphere, an illustration of the Twitter accounts that are most central for financial news.

The good folks at Captain Economics did a great post a couple of weeks back on ‘The Economics Twitosphere Top 100 Influential Users’.

To everything, turn, turn, turn. There is a season, turn, turn, turn. And a time to every purpose under heaven. The Byrds, by way of Ecclesiastes

You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the government. And, with due respect to these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold. - George Bernard Shaw

Matthias Steiner, Beijing 2008. Pain is weakness leaving the body, and/or your central nervous system telling you you’re about to die. - source unknown

Really, the way to understand ‘net neutrality’ is it’s all about Netflix. The cable companies are outraged and scared to death about Netflix. If you’ve tried a Roku Internet TV appliance (or Apple TV, or Google Chromecast, or Amazon Fire TV), it’s a 10x user experience improvement on a cable box. For less money.