Yes, it *migth* help with some of the problems, but at the same time it'll do precisely nothing at all to many of the others.
For example, the fact thaqt different coloured ligths gets bent differently by a lens (as demonstrated with a prism) means it's impossible to make a single lens that'll perfeclty focus ligth with different wavelength. The problem gets worse the more you bend the ligth, which means that fundamentally, a too short lens will produce more colour-error. Nothing fluid lenses can do about it.
Or another example; to make pictures you need ligth, to make pictures when there's not a lot of it, you need either a long shutter-time, a large aperture, a sensible film (or CCD) or a combination thereof.
The CCD in a mobile will be less capable than that in a normal camera due to space-constraints. Similarily a lens that has a 5cm^2 ligth-opening will collect 10 times as much as the typical camera-lens that has maybe 0.5cm^2 opening.
There's nothing any lens-technology can do to change this.
easytag.
It has a parser that can fill in id3-tags from the filename, or the other way around (rename files to match id3-info).
The parser is quite flexible, using user-provided patterns. So for example if the files where named like ARTIST_ALBUM_SONGNAME.mp3 you'd provide easytag with the pattern {artist}_{album}_{title}.mp3 and have it work as expected.
Also supports looking up info from cddb aswell as specifying manually as a last resort.
Just a question; where exactly do you get the idea that Eve ate the forbidden fruit 2000 years ago ?
(hint: even raving mad christian fanatics generally place the event at around 5000 B.C.)
Why would anyone care to include in a cite where or when your particular exemplar of a book or article was printed ?
My particular exemplar of Chaums "Transactional system to make big brother obsolete" was printed on my HP Laserjet around a year ago. Doesn't mean I include this useless fact when I cite it. I *do* include that Chaum wrote it, the title, when he wrote it, and where it was first published.
Not at all. In the contrary, advertising has a lot of externalities.
Let me make a example; You own property, you rent it out to a company wanting to put up a billboard. With this, you make $X profit. The company considers the effects of the ad-campaign worth more than they pay you, so they also come out ahead.
However, the other property around your migth degrade in value as a result of the visually noisy advertising. Or the people passing trough every day migth consider the ads annoying and be willing to pay (in aggregate !) more to be free of the ads than your profit is.
Summa summarum, a net loss, but the loss is on other parts than you and the advertiser.
Other example, which more slashdotters will agree with;
You hire me to send 1 million emails with ads for your product. The sales generated give you $5000 in profit, and I do the mailing for $2000, having costs of my own of $500.
We both come out ahead, you by $3000 and I by $1500. $4500 in sum. Looks good, no ?
Until you consider the loss for the 1 million receivers. If the sum of annoyances at the ISP and end-user exceeds 0.45 *cent* pro message, then emailing the spam wasn't really profitable. It only looked that way to you because you get the profits, and someone else carries the cost.
If you think about it, this ain't rare in advertising, though rarely is it so blatant as with spam.
For example in moving so that there's first a small force lasting 1s trying to turn you clockwise, and then a 5 times bigger force trying to turn you counterclockwise.
Friction stops the first force from doing anything at all, so the net result is you're rotating counterclockwise.
Similarily, it's not hard to sit on an office-chair and without touching the ground or anything cause the chair to roll in a given direction. This doesn't mean you've invented the reactionless drive...
Actually, all resources any project consume comes from somewhere. In pretty much all cases you could drop the project, and use those resources (even if those resources are mostly man-hours) for some other purpose.
Doing *anything* has an opportunity-cost equal to the next best thing you could be doing.
Now, perhaps you mean that government spending on fundamental research should be increased overall, rather than just reprioritised, that I'd agree with, but that's not what you said.
I don't know what a reasonable definition of "children" in a discussion about pedophilia is, but "under 18" is clearly not reasonable.
First, in most parts of the world the age of consent is lower than that (mostly 16, sometimes down to 14), and even where it's not, like in USA a *large* part of the population has voluntarily made their sexual debut with a partner in similar age-group before that. (how large a part of the US girls do *you* think are virgins at their 18th birthday ?)
Thirdly, if you insist that all under-18 are children, then you can't at the same time say a quarter of the population have experienced a sexual urge for children. With that definition I expect the true number to be more like 90%.
A more reasonable definition is probably pre-pubescent. For example in Norway the age of consent is 16. Sex earlier is however nonpunishable if the involved are similarily old in age or development, and voluntarily sex between an over 14 and an adult is punished milder as "sex with underage person" rather than as child-molestation.
I'm pretty sure you mean it rigth, but this came out a bit strange;
No new theory should dismantle an old theory that has stood.
I don't agree with that. Even a single reproducable counter-example is in principle enough to disprove a theory. Even in the absence of alternative theories.
The moment you can experimentally show some effect of relativity, you know that Newton is wrong. Or more accurately, that Newton is only a good approximation for situations where the speed and distance is low.
I do agree with what you're probably trying to say though; for a new theory to be anything worth, it must explain all the occurences that the old did, and then some. An experiment which the old theory could successfully predict, must still be predictable by the new theory.
For example, you could predict your market-share will grow to 98%, and in reality see it fall to 70%.
Besides, they're talking about growth of sales, not growth of market-share. In a growing market there's no reason you can't grow, even if you already enjoy monopoly.
All authenthication-schemes can be fooled. The one you just suggested more easily than most;
There are multiple online services where you can register your sip-phone (i.e any program or device connected to the internet and capable of using the sip-protocol) and get a free normal telephone-number for it so people using normal phones can call you.
Thus, it takes me about 10 minutes work to give my computer, located in Germany, 10 different phone-numbers in 5 different countries.
I bet you either didn't know this, or didn't think of it.
Fact is, the only people who think that authenthication is easy, are people who either doesn't know enough about the problem, or hasn't spent enough time thinking about failure-modes.
Biometrics alone is, atleast presently, useless. There's simply two orders of magnitude too many false positives and false negatives.
Aside from that, the implementation is icky. Half a year ago you could read about every single comersially available fingerprint-scanner being defeated by cheap and simple tricks such as for example blowing graphite-dust over them (sticks to the fat-traces from previous finger), and then pressing down on them with a piece of clear tape.
Also, in many situations they're just not useful, how could biometrics secure the login to your online bank ?
Authentication is based upon one or more of what you *know* (for example a password), what you *have* (for example smart-card or key) and what you *are* (for example biometrics).
Good, robust security uses a combination. For example, the combination of posessing a smart-card and knowing a code is used to authenticate to my online bank.
Even if someone convinced an account-holder to give up the password, that'd still not matter, aslong as they didn't *also* convince the person in question to hand over the smart-card.
Actually, I'd be satisfied with a open, available server so that there'd be free competition in making servers ("worlds) available. That way the market itself would set fair prices.
I refuse to pay money to tie myself to a monopolic service-provider that overcharges, and that I have to pay to to have any use of my purchase.
Yes, that'd kill the wet dreams of many game-companies, "let's make an MMORPG, and then we can collect not only $50-$70 for the box, but an additional $15 every month from every player !"
Aslong as it stays like it is though, the large majority of gamers will not play MMORPGs. I personally know atleast two dozen people who spend considerable time gaming and buy atleast half a dozen games a year. I don't know *anyone* who has an account with *any* MMORPG. And this despite the fact that many of them like online gaming and frequently play stuff from Starcraft to Counterstrike online.
You don't need much knowledge to improve relations.
It's a bit like when I was visiting Quebec. I have a vocabulary in French of maybe 200 words and hopeless pronounciation.
Still, it wasn't hard to notice that people reacted very differently when I approached them with a simple question in French, rather than automatically assuming everyone speaks english fluently.
Even if they understood nothing else of my french, they understood one thing: He's actually trying. He *recognises* that he's in a french-speaking area, and that speaking french is the sensible thing to do.
From discussing this with the friends I was visiting there, this alone made me different than 95% of the non-locals which visit there.
Somehow, they've gotten people to accept the notion that it's normal for you to pay the bank for the priviledge of storing your money there.
I don't pay anything whatsoever to have a bank-account. In the contrary, I get interest, which would seem normal as a bank-account essentially lends my money to the Bank.
I still pay the grand sum of zero, regardless of how many transactions (inland or international) I have, regardless of if I need online banking or phone-banking. There's no demand for any balance, I'd still be paying zero if my average balance was $10.
The same for a stock-depot, to establish a house or car-loan and so on. The only exception I'm aware of is that if I purchase stuff billed in a different valuta, then I'll be charged the exchange-rate + 0.75%, so if I buy something from the US for $100.00 I'll actually be charged the equivalent of $100.75
Yes sure, when asked what mileage you're getting at this moment the computer will generally use lookup-tables like you describe.
But many SAABs can also tell you what mileage you've been getting on this tank of gas, or on the last 100 miles or whatever. And to do that, the computer simply divides the miles driven by the gallons of gas used, giving an accurate result.
I don't think that's true. The stock markets represent human decisions and analysis. The market is constantly moving towards the successful companies. The failures in the market fall out of the market. Thus the overall stock market can continue to succeed because the entire purpose of it is to weed out the failures. Which means, that if you pick a random sampling of stocks, you're going to get both future winners and future losers. You have to be mobile enough to cut your losses from the losers at the appropriate time, and move them to the winners.
There's a fallacy in there, you just refuse to see it. Stay clam and read this carefully. There really is no doubt about this, what *is* in doubt is if I manage to explain it to you well enough.:-).
For you to "cut your losses" and move away from the loosers, someone else has to *enter* the losses and move towards the loosers. Think about it; EVERY time you sell a stock for $X, someone else bougth that stock for $X. That's what a sale is. You sell it, someone else buys it. Or you buy it, someone else sold it.
It really is mathemathically certain that for the sum of stock-traders, this is a zero-sum game. Playing it can mathemathically certainly only make you richer if it makes someone else exactly equally poorer.
Now I'm *NOT* sayong you can't make money in the stock-market. Sure you can, because there is a second factor at work. The companies themselves in sum make a profit. That is, the sum of profits of companies on the stock-market is larger than the sum of losses of companies on the stock-market. And that profit goes to the stock-owners in one of two ways, either in plainly being paid out as dividend, or in being invested in the company and thus increasing the worth of the company you're holding a part of.
Brokerage-firms would like it very much if you where rigth, it would mean everyone should panickally buy and sell and try constantly to predict the market, moving in the rigth direction.
But at the end of the day, that's wrong. See it this way, imagine there's only two stocks, A and B, and only two persons investing, me and you. Assume that today I buy A and you B.
Will we do better if every month we swap the stocks, you buying mine and I yours, or will this make no difference, except for the trading-fees being lost ?
Does the answer to this question change if there are more than 2 stocks to trade, or if there's more than 2 traders ? If you still think so, why ?
Huh? Risk is measured by the potential to lose your investment. How can it not impact the average ROI?
I told you, but apparently you didn't read it or didn't understand it. RISK is expected standard deviance. That does indeed, as you say, have impact on the chanse that you'll lose your money, but it also has impact on the chanse that you'll do better than expected, and those two balance eachothers. Let me make an exmaple.
Assume I say if you give me a dollar, and toss a die once, on getting a 6er you'll be returned $10.
Now you've got 1/6th of a chanse to get $10, so with average luck you'll get $1.67 that is, your expected ROI is $1.67.
83% of the time you get 0 and 17% of the time you get $10.
Assume instead that I offer you a similar deal; give me a dollar, and toss a dice once. If you *avoid* getting a 1, I'll give you back $2. This gives you 5/6 chanse of getting $2, and 1/6 chanse of getting $0. The *average* you'll get from me is still the same: 5/6*2 = $1.67.
The two examples have the same expected ROI, but very different risk.
Thus as demonstrated, you are wrong. risk and roi are unrelated, and you can perfectly well change one without changing the other.
I do agree that most of the time, given two investments with the same roi, the best one to choose is the one with the lowest risk.
Sorry if I didn't make it clear. When I said randomly invest in the worlds stock-markets, I actually meant that.
I did *not* mean randomly invest in new-started bussinesses that migth some day in the future be listed on some stock-market.
Yes, a very large part of new businesses fail, but the fail-rate among established businesses is much much lower, more than compensated for by the profits of those businesses that do not fail. If this wasn't so investing on the stock-markets would on the average be a loosing proposition, and so it'd be stupid to do it.
I see you've fallen into a common trap. You claim that there are well-known, simple things to do that if you fail to do them will net you a poorer ROI, and if you do them will help;
Rebalance it on a regular basis.
Keep abreast of changes in the market that might make their asset allocation unfavorable.
Thing is, diversification doesn't change the average ROI. It changes only the risk. Investing $100K randomly in a single company has the same expected ROI as investing $10K randomly in each of 10 randomly selected companies. Really. But the latter proposition has a smaller risk.
That's risk in the economic sense, meaning expected standard deviation by the way, the expected average ROI is the same, but the chanse that your ROI gets much higher, or much lower, increases.
"staying abreast" assumes that you are more clever than the other investors and is a zero-sum game. That is, you can only manage to do better than the average in the stock-market if someone else does poorer than the average. The only ones predictably winning from such strategies are the brokers.
Possible exception is if you *really* realistically think that you know more about a company than the large majority of other investors. This will always be the exception, but sure, I'm not regretting that I bougth RHAT and shorted SCO shortly after the current bruhaha started.
But noone is suggesting we build an entire space-elevator of a single molecule 40000km long, that is, as you demonstrate, clearly unreasonable. (allthough your math is a bit questionable, because you jsut assume it'll not be possible to start by growing a few million relatively short nanotubes, then somehow get two and two of those to fuse into one longer one, and so on until you've got one long instead of many short fibres.
epoxying together the short fibres to make a ribbon or cable that has strength in the same ballpark as the individual fibers is indeed a challenge, but not nearly as big a challenge as you seem to think.
One thing you overlook is that if you double the average length of the fibers used, you halve the needed strength for the "glue" used. Se below ascii.
short fibers:
xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx x
x xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx
xxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xx
Long fibers:
zzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzz
zzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzz
zzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Obviously, in the latter example, the glue a weaker glue will do, because the individual fibers have the same strength, but a larger surface for the glue to work on.
The illustrations exxagerate grossly offcourse, even todays "short" nantubes are thousands if not millions of times longer than they are thick.
I've seen claims that if we could make individual nanotubes in bulk, 3cm long each on the average, then even todays weaving and gluing techniques would suffice to give the finished cable 90% of the strength of the individual fibers with only 30% weigth-addition to that of pure fibers. If the math in that checks out I dunno, and I can't seem to find the reference, so it's even possible I misremember that.
I never argued that investing does not benefit the economy. Sure it does. The fact that there are people willing to invest, even when it's sometimes risky means that a new company with good ideas has a chanse to get enough funding to get the viability of those ideas tested in the marketplace.
What I *did* argue is that there's rather a lot of people who do not need to work for any reasonable definition of "work".
Spreading the million you inherited randomly over the worlds stock-markets and thereafter leaning back for the rest of your life living from the proceeds is not "work" in my vocabulary. Especially not when you got the money from for example inheritance.
Sure, at some point your parents, or their parents, or someone else probably had to do real work to earn that money, but *you* don't have to.
As they say, most of us need to run pretty hard to stay where we are. However, what is also true is that if you're able to earn even a moderate sum more than you spend, you can reasonably manage to get off the treadmill, and when you manage that, it's not only you off the threadmill, but all of your kids and their kids and so on too.
For example, if you manage to save $10 a day, that is $300 a month, or $3600 a year, perhaps 10-20% of a average salary and save that in say random stock-funds, then it'll probably take around 30-40 years to reach the million. Menaning you'll just about make it for your pension.
Practically though, a lot of people inherit a few hundred K from their parents when they're like 50 years old or so, it's actually quite practical for a large part of the population in richer countries to be finished with having to work at that point. (many would still *choose* to work, atleast part-time, but that's something else.)
Also, if you're a bit more modest, you don't really need a million. Even with half a million, normal ROI in the stock-market will bring in 42500 a year, after taxes that's like 30K (depending on how much taxes you pay on capital earnings in your jurisdiction ofcourse), I could live happily for that, infact at the moment I spend more like 25K/year.
Slashdot Mirror
Or the variant I read on, I think it was Technocrat at some point.
How about a copyrigth-regime where every new work gets copyrigth for say 10 years.
Thereafter the copyrigth needs to be renewed. Renewing costs $1000.
And here's the rub: each time you renew, the cost is double that for last time.
Yes, it *migth* help with some of the problems, but at the same time it'll do precisely nothing at all to many of the others.
For example, the fact thaqt different coloured ligths gets bent differently by a lens (as demonstrated with a prism) means it's impossible to make a single lens that'll perfeclty focus ligth with different wavelength. The problem gets worse the more you bend the ligth, which means that fundamentally, a too short lens will produce more colour-error. Nothing fluid lenses can do about it.
Or another example; to make pictures you need ligth, to make pictures when there's not a lot of it, you need either a long shutter-time, a large aperture, a sensible film (or CCD) or a combination thereof.
The CCD in a mobile will be less capable than that in a normal camera due to space-constraints. Similarily a lens that has a 5cm^2 ligth-opening will collect 10 times as much as the typical camera-lens that has maybe 0.5cm^2 opening.
There's nothing any lens-technology can do to change this.
easytag. It has a parser that can fill in id3-tags from the filename, or the other way around (rename files to match id3-info). The parser is quite flexible, using user-provided patterns. So for example if the files where named like ARTIST_ALBUM_SONGNAME.mp3 you'd provide easytag with the pattern {artist}_{album}_{title}.mp3 and have it work as expected. Also supports looking up info from cddb aswell as specifying manually as a last resort.
Just a question; where exactly do you get the idea that Eve ate the forbidden fruit 2000 years ago ? (hint: even raving mad christian fanatics generally place the event at around 5000 B.C.)
My particular exemplar of Chaums "Transactional system to make big brother obsolete" was printed on my HP Laserjet around a year ago. Doesn't mean I include this useless fact when I cite it. I *do* include that Chaum wrote it, the title, when he wrote it, and where it was first published.
Today they lost another 6.18%
Must mean that the true merits of the case are trickling trough atleast the financial community.
Let me make a example; You own property, you rent it out to a company wanting to put up a billboard. With this, you make $X profit. The company considers the effects of the ad-campaign worth more than they pay you, so they also come out ahead.
However, the other property around your migth degrade in value as a result of the visually noisy advertising. Or the people passing trough every day migth consider the ads annoying and be willing to pay (in aggregate !) more to be free of the ads than your profit is.
Summa summarum, a net loss, but the loss is on other parts than you and the advertiser.
Other example, which more slashdotters will agree with;
You hire me to send 1 million emails with ads for your product. The sales generated give you $5000 in profit, and I do the mailing for $2000, having costs of my own of $500.
We both come out ahead, you by $3000 and I by $1500. $4500 in sum. Looks good, no ?
Until you consider the loss for the 1 million receivers. If the sum of annoyances at the ISP and end-user exceeds 0.45 *cent* pro message, then emailing the spam wasn't really profitable. It only looked that way to you because you get the profits, and someone else carries the cost.
If you think about it, this ain't rare in advertising, though rarely is it so blatant as with spam.
AI has been 10 years away for the last 3 decades or so, and ain't really showing signs of coming any closer.
For example in moving so that there's first a small force lasting 1s trying to turn you clockwise, and then a 5 times bigger force trying to turn you counterclockwise.
Friction stops the first force from doing anything at all, so the net result is you're rotating counterclockwise.
Similarily, it's not hard to sit on an office-chair and without touching the ground or anything cause the chair to roll in a given direction. This doesn't mean you've invented the reactionless drive...
Doing *anything* has an opportunity-cost equal to the next best thing you could be doing.
Now, perhaps you mean that government spending on fundamental research should be increased overall, rather than just reprioritised, that I'd agree with, but that's not what you said.
First, in most parts of the world the age of consent is lower than that (mostly 16, sometimes down to 14), and even where it's not, like in USA a *large* part of the population has voluntarily made their sexual debut with a partner in similar age-group before that. (how large a part of the US girls do *you* think are virgins at their 18th birthday ?)
Thirdly, if you insist that all under-18 are children, then you can't at the same time say a quarter of the population have experienced a sexual urge for children. With that definition I expect the true number to be more like 90%.
A more reasonable definition is probably pre-pubescent. For example in Norway the age of consent is 16. Sex earlier is however nonpunishable if the involved are similarily old in age or development, and voluntarily sex between an over 14 and an adult is punished milder as "sex with underage person" rather than as child-molestation.
No new theory should dismantle an old theory that has stood.
I don't agree with that. Even a single reproducable counter-example is in principle enough to disprove a theory. Even in the absence of alternative theories.
The moment you can experimentally show some effect of relativity, you know that Newton is wrong. Or more accurately, that Newton is only a good approximation for situations where the speed and distance is low.
I do agree with what you're probably trying to say though; for a new theory to be anything worth, it must explain all the occurences that the old did, and then some. An experiment which the old theory could successfully predict, must still be predictable by the new theory.
For example, you could predict your market-share will grow to 98%, and in reality see it fall to 70%.
Besides, they're talking about growth of sales, not growth of market-share. In a growing market there's no reason you can't grow, even if you already enjoy monopoly.
There are multiple online services where you can register your sip-phone (i.e any program or device connected to the internet and capable of using the sip-protocol) and get a free normal telephone-number for it so people using normal phones can call you.
Thus, it takes me about 10 minutes work to give my computer, located in Germany, 10 different phone-numbers in 5 different countries.
I bet you either didn't know this, or didn't think of it.
Fact is, the only people who think that authenthication is easy, are people who either doesn't know enough about the problem, or hasn't spent enough time thinking about failure-modes.
Aside from that, the implementation is icky. Half a year ago you could read about every single comersially available fingerprint-scanner being defeated by cheap and simple tricks such as for example blowing graphite-dust over them (sticks to the fat-traces from previous finger), and then pressing down on them with a piece of clear tape.
Also, in many situations they're just not useful, how could biometrics secure the login to your online bank ?
Authentication is based upon one or more of what you *know* (for example a password), what you *have* (for example smart-card or key) and what you *are* (for example biometrics).
Good, robust security uses a combination. For example, the combination of posessing a smart-card and knowing a code is used to authenticate to my online bank.
Even if someone convinced an account-holder to give up the password, that'd still not matter, aslong as they didn't *also* convince the person in question to hand over the smart-card.
I refuse to pay money to tie myself to a monopolic service-provider that overcharges, and that I have to pay to to have any use of my purchase.
Yes, that'd kill the wet dreams of many game-companies, "let's make an MMORPG, and then we can collect not only $50-$70 for the box, but an additional $15 every month from every player !"
Aslong as it stays like it is though, the large majority of gamers will not play MMORPGs. I personally know atleast two dozen people who spend considerable time gaming and buy atleast half a dozen games a year. I don't know *anyone* who has an account with *any* MMORPG. And this despite the fact that many of them like online gaming and frequently play stuff from Starcraft to Counterstrike online.
It's a bit like when I was visiting Quebec. I have a vocabulary in French of maybe 200 words and hopeless pronounciation.
Still, it wasn't hard to notice that people reacted very differently when I approached them with a simple question in French, rather than automatically assuming everyone speaks english fluently.
Even if they understood nothing else of my french, they understood one thing: He's actually trying. He *recognises* that he's in a french-speaking area, and that speaking french is the sensible thing to do.
From discussing this with the friends I was visiting there, this alone made me different than 95% of the non-locals which visit there.
Somehow, they've gotten people to accept the notion that it's normal for you to pay the bank for the priviledge of storing your money there.
I don't pay anything whatsoever to have a bank-account. In the contrary, I get interest, which would seem normal as a bank-account essentially lends my money to the Bank.
I still pay the grand sum of zero, regardless of how many transactions (inland or international) I have, regardless of if I need online banking or phone-banking. There's no demand for any balance, I'd still be paying zero if my average balance was $10.
The same for a stock-depot, to establish a house or car-loan and so on. The only exception I'm aware of is that if I purchase stuff billed in a different valuta, then I'll be charged the exchange-rate + 0.75%, so if I buy something from the US for $100.00 I'll actually be charged the equivalent of $100.75
here.
They have exactly what you're searching. I have a DP-500 myself and have only positive experiences.
But many SAABs can also tell you what mileage you've been getting on this tank of gas, or on the last 100 miles or whatever. And to do that, the computer simply divides the miles driven by the gallons of gas used, giving an accurate result.
There's a fallacy in there, you just refuse to see it. Stay clam and read this carefully. There really is no doubt about this, what *is* in doubt is if I manage to explain it to you well enough. :-).
For you to "cut your losses" and move away from the loosers, someone else has to *enter* the losses and move towards the loosers. Think about it; EVERY time you sell a stock for $X, someone else bougth that stock for $X. That's what a sale is. You sell it, someone else buys it. Or you buy it, someone else sold it.
It really is mathemathically certain that for the sum of stock-traders, this is a zero-sum game. Playing it can mathemathically certainly only make you richer if it makes someone else exactly equally poorer.
Now I'm *NOT* sayong you can't make money in the stock-market. Sure you can, because there is a second factor at work. The companies themselves in sum make a profit. That is, the sum of profits of companies on the stock-market is larger than the sum of losses of companies on the stock-market. And that profit goes to the stock-owners in one of two ways, either in plainly being paid out as dividend, or in being invested in the company and thus increasing the worth of the company you're holding a part of.
Brokerage-firms would like it very much if you where rigth, it would mean everyone should panickally buy and sell and try constantly to predict the market, moving in the rigth direction.
But at the end of the day, that's wrong. See it this way, imagine there's only two stocks, A and B, and only two persons investing, me and you. Assume that today I buy A and you B.
Will we do better if every month we swap the stocks, you buying mine and I yours, or will this make no difference, except for the trading-fees being lost ?
Does the answer to this question change if there are more than 2 stocks to trade, or if there's more than 2 traders ? If you still think so, why ?
Huh? Risk is measured by the potential to lose your investment. How can it not impact the average ROI?
I told you, but apparently you didn't read it or didn't understand it. RISK is expected standard deviance. That does indeed, as you say, have impact on the chanse that you'll lose your money, but it also has impact on the chanse that you'll do better than expected, and those two balance eachothers. Let me make an exmaple.
Assume I say if you give me a dollar, and toss a die once, on getting a 6er you'll be returned $10. Now you've got 1/6th of a chanse to get $10, so with average luck you'll get $1.67 that is, your expected ROI is $1.67.
83% of the time you get 0 and 17% of the time you get $10.
Assume instead that I offer you a similar deal; give me a dollar, and toss a dice once. If you *avoid* getting a 1, I'll give you back $2. This gives you 5/6 chanse of getting $2, and 1/6 chanse of getting $0. The *average* you'll get from me is still the same: 5/6*2 = $1.67.
The two examples have the same expected ROI, but very different risk.
Thus as demonstrated, you are wrong. risk and roi are unrelated, and you can perfectly well change one without changing the other.
I do agree that most of the time, given two investments with the same roi, the best one to choose is the one with the lowest risk.
I did *not* mean randomly invest in new-started bussinesses that migth some day in the future be listed on some stock-market.
Yes, a very large part of new businesses fail, but the fail-rate among established businesses is much much lower, more than compensated for by the profits of those businesses that do not fail. If this wasn't so investing on the stock-markets would on the average be a loosing proposition, and so it'd be stupid to do it.
I see you've fallen into a common trap. You claim that there are well-known, simple things to do that if you fail to do them will net you a poorer ROI, and if you do them will help;
Rebalance it on a regular basis. Keep abreast of changes in the market that might make their asset allocation unfavorable.
Thing is, diversification doesn't change the average ROI. It changes only the risk. Investing $100K randomly in a single company has the same expected ROI as investing $10K randomly in each of 10 randomly selected companies. Really. But the latter proposition has a smaller risk.
That's risk in the economic sense, meaning expected standard deviation by the way, the expected average ROI is the same, but the chanse that your ROI gets much higher, or much lower, increases.
"staying abreast" assumes that you are more clever than the other investors and is a zero-sum game. That is, you can only manage to do better than the average in the stock-market if someone else does poorer than the average. The only ones predictably winning from such strategies are the brokers.
Possible exception is if you *really* realistically think that you know more about a company than the large majority of other investors. This will always be the exception, but sure, I'm not regretting that I bougth RHAT and shorted SCO shortly after the current bruhaha started.
epoxying together the short fibres to make a ribbon or cable that has strength in the same ballpark as the individual fibers is indeed a challenge, but not nearly as big a challenge as you seem to think.
One thing you overlook is that if you double the average length of the fibers used, you halve the needed strength for the "glue" used. Se below ascii.
short fibers: xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx x x xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xx Long fibers: zzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzz zzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Obviously, in the latter example, the glue a weaker glue will do, because the individual fibers have the same strength, but a larger surface for the glue to work on.
The illustrations exxagerate grossly offcourse, even todays "short" nantubes are thousands if not millions of times longer than they are thick.
I've seen claims that if we could make individual nanotubes in bulk, 3cm long each on the average, then even todays weaving and gluing techniques would suffice to give the finished cable 90% of the strength of the individual fibers with only 30% weigth-addition to that of pure fibers. If the math in that checks out I dunno, and I can't seem to find the reference, so it's even possible I misremember that.
I never argued that investing does not benefit the economy. Sure it does. The fact that there are people willing to invest, even when it's sometimes risky means that a new company with good ideas has a chanse to get enough funding to get the viability of those ideas tested in the marketplace.
What I *did* argue is that there's rather a lot of people who do not need to work for any reasonable definition of "work".
Spreading the million you inherited randomly over the worlds stock-markets and thereafter leaning back for the rest of your life living from the proceeds is not "work" in my vocabulary. Especially not when you got the money from for example inheritance.
Sure, at some point your parents, or their parents, or someone else probably had to do real work to earn that money, but *you* don't have to.
As they say, most of us need to run pretty hard to stay where we are. However, what is also true is that if you're able to earn even a moderate sum more than you spend, you can reasonably manage to get off the treadmill, and when you manage that, it's not only you off the threadmill, but all of your kids and their kids and so on too.
For example, if you manage to save $10 a day, that is $300 a month, or $3600 a year, perhaps 10-20% of a average salary and save that in say random stock-funds, then it'll probably take around 30-40 years to reach the million. Menaning you'll just about make it for your pension.
Practically though, a lot of people inherit a few hundred K from their parents when they're like 50 years old or so, it's actually quite practical for a large part of the population in richer countries to be finished with having to work at that point. (many would still *choose* to work, atleast part-time, but that's something else.)
Also, if you're a bit more modest, you don't really need a million. Even with half a million, normal ROI in the stock-market will bring in 42500 a year, after taxes that's like 30K (depending on how much taxes you pay on capital earnings in your jurisdiction ofcourse), I could live happily for that, infact at the moment I spend more like 25K/year.