The national security complex is putting on the full court PR press for encryption back doors. See here and here. Basically this is about giving someone a TSA lock to your phone and promising to keep it really really safe unless a legit law enforcement request is received. Of course, legitimacy is in the eye of the beholder.

Here’s a word cloud of StreetEYE headlines in 2015 (click to embiggen).

Tim Cook has been running around heralding the end of the PC. A self-serving assessment, but Intel and the PC ecosystem are going to struggle to maintain their traditional relevance. In this post, I will look at 1) the narrowing Intel/ARM performance gap, and 2) what the ‘end of the PC’ might look like.

There’s this notion going around that since the Fed buying Treasurys was QE, therefore China selling Treasurys constitutes monetary tightening. Nope. The root cause of the disequilibrium and resulting capital flows is capital flight from China to the US.

A hard problem in retirement planning is a safe spending rate, so you don’t outlive your money.

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.