Iran Bad Bad

Netaniyahu is a master in getting through his message. Simplify, simplify! is the motto.

He is a maestro.

Lactating in Ariel University of Samaria

The campus has been enriched with a Lactating Room for students with babies. I have worked years in TAU (Tel Aviv) and never heard about this facility. Ariel is different, in the student body there are many married religious women, with their turbans and long skirts. The management is very PC conscious and the image shows  a dark skinned mother and baby. The university website also shows many Africans, and truly, one finds many in the campus.

Iran's Nice Side

The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran is actively promoting art. Two new works of Iranian veteran artist, Mahmoud Farshchian (right), called Sham-e-Ghariban (The night of the dispossessed) and Aseman-e-Chaharom (The fourth heaven), were unveiled in a ceremony attended by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (left, in a typical gesture) and his wife. There was a time when we had excellent relations with Iran.

Darwin Award Candidate from Palestinian "March of Return" Riots

Interestingly, the Israeli left did not organize counter-protest demanding the border be opened and the Arabs let in. Imagine those thousands of angry, violent youth on the streets of Tel Aviv. We would suffer the fate of the Yazidis.

What was the Islamic State? It was the rebellion of the Sunni Muslims of Syria and Iraq to escape the rule of their Shi'ite masters. In the stress of the war, the Assad dynasty was revealed as a tribal Alawite dictatorship over the Sunni majority. The Alawites, while barely Muslim, allied themselves with Iran, the Shi'a patron of the Middle East. ISIS was strangely silent about Israel and never anti-Jewish, possibly exposing the underlying structure of the Middle East conflict: The Sunni peoples vs. isolated Shi'a pockets.

The Sunni are the Palestinians, Syrians, Jordan, Western Iraq, Saudia, the Gulf. The Shi'a are Iran, South Lebanon, the Alawite pocket, the Houthis in Yemen. Paradoxically, the Sunni seem to consider Israel as a not acknowledged ally, and semi-legitimate owner of Palestine. We shall overcome.

Gravitational waves

Humanity has detected the real existence of gravitational waves. The universe described in The Dark Forest seems to be real. Now we have to discover the splitting of dimensions, but what is a dimension?

The usefulness of hedge funds

Reflections on investing.

What is hedging in investment? You buy something that tends to rise AND something that tends to sink. You are betting for the best horse AND hedging your bet with a slow nag. That kind of hedging makes no sense.

You can hedge against an expected catastrophe, like inflation or deflation. You can hedge against expected market changes or new regulation. 

It has been demonstrated that almost none of the hundreds of hedge funds existing generates alpha. Why are they prospering? Because there are pension funds, wealth funds and so that need management, and the services of a professional "safe" management. It is not really expensive, about 2% per year.

If they maintain their value is enough of an achievement and justifies the fund manager's salary. Eventual alpha is only a bonus, not really expected.

Therefore, if a managed fund produces AT LEAST the same as an index fund, then it is worthwhile. If it does so by investing in lower risk bets (if there really exist such a thing) then it is the best thing available.

The Futility of Diets and Excercise

Obesity is very difficult to impossible to treat. The most common prescription, and indeed the prevailing conventional wisdom, is that “lifestyle” changes are the best solution. This typically means diet and exercise. However, this has been extensively studied. Across the population, diet and exercise, each individually and in tandem, are completely useless to treat obesity, in the long term.

In the case of exercise, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) don’t even show a short-term benefit. One 2007 meta analysis by Franz et al looked at the results of all sorts of different interventions. For exercise-alone prescriptions, it found that the treatment groups lost no weight at 6 months (well, less than 2 kgs, but even this number comes only when you look at those who remained in the study). Indeed, after a year, the control groups actually lost more weight than the treatment groups. The total weight change was small and close to zero throughout.

In the case of diets, particularly the most common low-fat and low-calorie diets, a very large meta-analysis of RCTs with a combined N > 60,000 (of which ~48,000 came from a single mammoth trial) and a study duration of 2.5 – 10 years, found that diet was completely ineffective for weight loss. The subjects showed no aggregate permanent weight loss at the end of the study period. The largest of these studies, the one by Howard et al (2006) found little change, a total loss (over 3 years) of less than 1 kg (and a difference between control and treatment groups of 1.29 kg, favoring treatment).

As for diet and exercise combined, several studies in both previous meta-analyses look at trials which tested both together. The result was the same: little to no significant aggregate weight loss, especially after longer periods of time.

This is true of low-carbohydrate diets as well. One meta-analysis looked at RCTs. Each of the trials were individually small (n = 11 – 153), but all told there were 712 subjects in the low-carb trials. The duration of studies ranged from 12 to 24 months. The total average weight lost with the low-carb diet groups was on the order of 4 kg! And that’s with considerable attrition in the studies. Low-carb diets don’t work much better, either.

A new randomized comparison trial (Bazzano et al, 2014) of a low-carb vs a low-fat diet (N = 148) found only a weight loss of 5.3 kg after 1 year with the low-carb diet, but only 1.2% change in body fat percentage.

Source: JayMan 

The question is how much I am harming myself by being obese? Should I just sit and wait  till a heart attack or signs of diabetes hit me?