Domain: joshuakennon.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to joshuakennon.com.
Comments · 8
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Re:"have every right to make a bad decision"
Wow, that's a lot of logical fallacies in one tirade.
Not vaccinating a child that doesn't have a medical reason not to vaccinate increases risk of permanent damage or death to that child. If they contract a disease that vaccines cover, that becomes actual harm caused (hey, it's fine for me to dangle my child out of a 10 story building because it doesn't harm them).Oh, we see the difference very clearly. But they are both wrong (c.f. the dangling child out of a window above). Can you clarify the reasons for that decision that actually make sense? No anti-vaxxer I've encountered ever has.
Science is not "forced" on people at all. This is where you're absolutely losing the plot in its entirity. Science does not say that boys are girls and vice versa. It actually says there's a variety of chromosomal arrangements that give varying phenotypes. Which is entirely correct. And there are cases where people subjectively feel that they are in the wrong body. If they want to do something that makes their life subjectively better, I'm all for that, as long as they're not tyrannical enough to force me to call them something special, or give them special treatment.
Granted, there are outliers that allow gender reassignment to minors, but this is generally though of as unethical until they reach majority and have a firm grasp on what sexuality is, and stabilise on it. This link explains it fairly well (and it's science!): https://www.joshuakennon.com/t...Unborn fetusus have cognition well below later gestation. If you believe that it's never ok to terminate for the 'people' rationale at this level, then you need to stop killing things from bacteria through to insects (and definitely animals bred for food, or fished). Strict veganism with no cleaning products for you.
Yes, there are links between single parent families and children underperforming quite significantly. What does this have as an argument against vaccination?
I'm all for people having different views, but there are definite limits on that. If you're increasing risk of serious harm to the child, and many people around you, then that's where I draw the line. That's the old "If your sober driving works so well for you, why should my drunk driving scare you?".
Basically, you're choosing to increase risk of harm (up to and including permanent physical damage and death) for arbitrary groups of people, and the child that remains unvaccinated, in exactly the same fashion as a drunk driver does with the car. There's a reason that people get pulled for DUI, and that's it.I am in agreement that two parent families produce superior results in general to single. But that has nothing to do with vaccination status, so is completely irrelevant to this discussion.
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Re: Let's not forget....
A 100K salary in Silicon Valley doesn't go very far, so the net worth wouldn't be particularly high.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Everyone thought Ronald Read was a poor man because he lived frugally and worked all his life as gas station attendant and later as a janitor. When he died at the age of 92, he left $8M to the local hospital and library.
http://www.joshuakennon.com/janitor-ronald-read-leaves-behind-8000000-secret-fortune/
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Re:You are not likely to make the cut to top 1%
The following webpage, which is admittedly is a few years old shows the calculations related to the numbers I presented.
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Re:Ten years?
If Kodak was once a "film" company, they were really a chemical company, rather than a camera company. In that vein, one of their little-known successes in the reinvention department is their spinoff of Eastman Chemical, which currently is a thriving $11B company.
To me, the craziest thing about Kodak is that it would have been a good investment despite going bankrupt, because of the Eastman Chemical spinoff.
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Comment on the final paragraph
I agree mostly with this article, but I have one comment on something said in the final paragraph: "But they're borne from a similar mindset: one in which financial returns are the priority, independent of whether they're associated with something innovative or useful in the real world." The main point of businesses is, and always has been and always will be, to make money. They're producing something people want or need only because that is the way to get money. Otherwise, it would be a governmental subsidy or a charity, rather than a company. I think, instead, the actual dichotomy is between short term and long term gains. The examples the author gives of CEOs that have been successful by resisting the pressure from the financial markets are of companies that did make money, lots of it. There is an interesting article by investor J. Kennon that summarizes it as impatience robbing speculators of much higher gains they could have earned by investing in the long run. So, I think it is more a problem of speculators trying to get rich quickly; investors trying to become rich, in itself, is not so problematic.
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Re:Gridlocked with No Way to Prime the Pump
hat is your point, you think that for example somebody buying gold OR aluminum (Goldman) is doing something stupid, you think they are NOT protecting themselves against inflation?
http://www.joshuakennon.com/stocks-vs-bonds-vs-gold-returns-for-the-past-200-years/
Yes, they are doing something stupid. To protect yourself against inflation, you invest in something productive. The only reason to invest in gold is if you need to be able to run. (and in that case, make sure that you have the gold in your own hands, and not simply papers that indicate that you own gold in some other location)
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Re:Don't worry, Romney...
The problem here is not that the example was unrepresentative. The problem here is that the example was bogus. Somebody who accumulates a few million dollars in personal assets through their own work is certainly not in the top 1% of wealth. That would be somebody's whose disposable income amounts to that much in a week.
But that's simply not true. http://www.joshuakennon.com/how-much-money-does-it-take-to-be-in-the-top-1-of-wealth-and-net-worth-in-the-united-states/
"The 99th to 99.5th percentiles largely include physicians, attorneys, upper middle management, and small business people who have done well."
"It is true that, using the Federal Reserve figures, almost half of the top 1% of wealth made less than $500,000 in income and 5 out 6 of the top 1% of wealth made less than $1,000,000 in income."
I feel like you're thinking of the top
.1%. I believe that is the "do-nothing" wealth category you complain about. -
Re:I didn't get any money from the Fed
There's no way that you, on a middle class income, accumulated the $15 million necessary to break into the top 1% of net worth.
You mean somewhere around $9 million. And IMHO someone who's been investing most (not merely 10-20%) of their middle class income for many decades can indeed hit that.