“A BLINDFOLDED monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages,” wrote Burton Malkiel in “A Random Walk Down Wall Street”, his 1973 bestseller, “could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by experts”. Many investors took issue with Mr Malkiel, an economics professor at Princeton University. Some researchers have also contested his prediction, but not because they think that he exaggerated the power of randomly picking stocks; rather that he was too modest. Simulating a dart-throwing monkey has resulted in portfolios that would not just beat many investors, but also outperform the market. […]

Click here to view original article No monkey business?

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Alice and Jim Walton at the 2011 Walmart annual meeting. Photo: Walmart Stores’ Flickr. The Walton family is America’s richest, worth some $140 billion between them and longtime fixtures of the Forbes 400 list thanks to their approximate 50% ownership of Walmart, the world’s largest retailer. Their Walton Family Foundation, established by the late Sam and Helen Walton in 1988, is considered a heavyweight in the world of nonprofits with just under $2 billion in assets. In 2013 alone, the Foundation invested $325 million across three key areas: education reform, the environment and the family’s home region of northwest […]

Click here to view original article Report: Walmart’s Billionaire Waltons Give Almost None Of Own Cash To Foundation

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Behind the Scenes From a potential lead who died of a drug overdose to a marshmallow man suit that went up in flames, Ghostbusters looked like anything but a slam-dunk when Columbia Pictures made it. How Dan Aykroyd’s big idea led to an all-time comedy classic. © 1984 Columbia Pictures/from MPTV Images. For the record, Dan Aykroyd really does believe in ghosts. “It’s the family business, for God’s sake,” he says from his family’s farmhouse in Ontario, site of Aykroyd séances for generations. Aykroyd’s great-grandfather was a renowned spiritualist; the family had its own regular medium to channel souls […]

Click here to view original article The Making of Ghostbusters: How Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and “The Murricane” Built “The Perfect Comedy”

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Malcolm Bedell The Breakfast Burger from Carl’s Jr. Unless your idea of fine dining includes eating a room-temperature slab of grey beef from a warming tray at a highway rest stop while sitting in the stuffy sleeping compartment of your semi, the cold sweat prickling your skin as you pray to come down smoothly from the benzadrine you’ve been taking to stay awake for three days to make your next pick-up, you probably haven’t had occasion to eat at Carl’s Jr. While the "Breakfast Burger" may not be a new menu item, it’s often overlooked in the avalanche of […]

Click here to view original article This Week in Self-Loathing

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The greenhouse gas reductions required by the Obama administration’s proposed rule on power plants will not get the world to where it has to go to avert the worst consequences of climate change. But they are likely to be enormously beneficial: good for the nation’s health, good for technological innovation, good for President Obama’s credibility abroad, and, in time, good for the planet and future generations. The proposed rule — and the importance of this cannot be overstated — signals the end of an era in which polluters could dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere without penalty. It would […]

Click here to view original article Nearing a Climate Legacy

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What You Need To Know About The Release Of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl On Saturday, President Barack Obama announced the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the last remaining American prisoner in Afghanistan, in exchange for five Taliban-linked militants imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. The right-wing has attempted to transform the issue into a criticism of the Commander-in-Chief. The details around Sgt. Bergdahl are murky — he may have been a deserter, and the Pentagon is reviewing claims that U.S. soldiers died while attempting to rescue him. His father has roundly criticized the War in Afghanistan. But Think Progress has been covering […]

Click here to view original article Not Left Behind

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