Dude, people find cartoons with orangutans playing volleyball offensive. I honestly don't care; I've got enough brain power to reserve offense to things requiring physical retribution, like rape. We should definitely pipewrench people for rape. People whose vocabulary uses the word fuck a lot, well, we can pick the meat off the bones and toss the rest away.
You're just being a dense politician. It's like you're shouting "STEM CELL RESEARCH HAS PRODUCED SO MANY MEDICAL ADVANCES!" in an attempt to attack someone who hasn't funded embryonic stem cell research, when 100% of the medical advances produced from stem cell research are adult stem cells: you can come back and say you never said that, because you didn't; but you did imply a lot, because you did. You can defend your rhetoric effectively, even though you know every statement you made would mislead and imply things that are simply not true.
I've explained this repeatedly in great detail, and you only respond to "suggesting a diversified portfolio of long-term investments will make income is suggesting that just 'investing' magically gets you income, when that's a non-strategy equivalent to a game of chance" with "well I said a diversified portfolio of long-term investments is a good plan; I didn't say you didn't have to actually apply your own thinking or anything".
You are correct that a million will net about $60k. That's in a diversified portfolio of long-term investments, a fairly reliable income. Actually $600K per ten years is reliable - year to years gains will fluctuate and that's okay - your spending doesn't have to fluctuate to match each year.
A million dollars dumped into a diversified portfolio of long-term investments will either be half a million dollars or 1.1 million dollars or 1.5 million dollars or 200,000 dollars in several years. A million dollars INVESTED CONSCIENTOUSLY AND MANAGED CAREFULLY-- which may not quantify with a level of diversification you consider "diversified", because a person may hold 80%+ in low-interest, guaranteed income sources (like CDs) because they don't have any great knowledge on most of the market sectors and so can't do much other than blindly invest in "diversification" that's entirely likely to just throw money away; and which may not qualify as long-term because the only real definition of "long-term investment" is the tax definition that tells you you pay income brackets on less than 1 year holdings and capital gains on more than 1 year holdings, and so the term "long-term investment" has no meaning as a description of investing strategy--may, likely, make gains in respect to the relative skill level of the investor against all other investors in the market in aggregate based on investment influence (which comes down to how much capital they can move and how much news they can make).
The statement, "That's in a diversified portfolio of long-term investments, a fairly reliable income," is just fluff. It has no meaning, and implies bad advice.
"But no sunscreen is meant to facilitate prolonged exposure of bare skin to direct sunlight." This is just bullshit. No sunscreen is meant to last for an extended period of time; they all say reapply in 2 or 4 hours or such. A sunscreen which removes 97% of UV radiation turns some 5.5 hours of sun exposure into the equivalent of 10 minutes, stretched over a lot more time. If you'll notice, your body gets about 7,000 hours of sun exposure in 10 years if you're out in it for 2 hours per day, and being in direct sun for 2 hours straight may burn you; yet being out for 15 minutes every hour for 8 hours every day doesn't cause sunburn! Neither does standing in the shade all day--which is roughly equivalent to filtering 97% of UV....
Titanium dioxide nanoparticle sunscreen does cause cancer. At micron size, it works well; at nanometer scale, the TiO2 particles migrate through the cell membrane, where they harmlessly do nothing. Sunlight reaching the skin reflects off these particles, lengthening its path through the cell, avoiding interaction with melanin, and more frequently damaging DNA than sunlight on untreated skin.
It's called "unspoken implications", which may or may not be true, but which are nonetheless implied by a statement. Stock market advice--such as all that you cover here--is littered with it.
Suggesting so flippantly that laymen should be in a "diversified portfolio" without qualifying the statement with a disclaimer of skill and strategic considerations is suggesting they take up a strategy, with the implication that "diversified, long-term holdings" are a strategy for making money. The greatest armor in this sort of lie is the ability to come back and show that you are *technically* correct, even though you've made fertile ground for people to make exactly one and only one conclusion from your statements.
I've taken the route of shaping information myself to control my parents. That's how I dealt with them growing up: I said things which all suggested, iron-clad, whatever I needed them to believe, unless they were in possession of specific other information. They made up their own conclusions, consistently incorrect. This is the same way legal con artists work, and the basic foundation for diplomatic circumlocution.
At what time point do you think stocks became completely bad idea as a part of "diversified portfolio of long-term investments" ?
The entirety of your original post heavily and directly suggested to the lay-person--to the person who would find something new in your advice, instead of seeing tripe that any experienced investor has heard again and again--that just buying up a bunch of diverse stocks and sitting on them for years creates an income.
To a lay-person, "long-term investment" means "buy and hold" and "don't cash out until you're ready to spend it; just let it grow."
To a skilled investor, the term "long-term investment" has little meaning. The only investments bought on term are term investments--bonds, CDs, etc.--intended to mature and pay a fixed rate of return; stocks are bought and sold on market sentiment, buying when it's opportune and selling when it's opportune. Your "long-term investment" may suddenly be a bad investment in 3 days's time when company news comes out that sends the stock rocketing up 60%, and you immediately know it's going to sharply come back down in the next day if not the next few hours, so you sell out of that immediately. Markets turn around: what's good this month might not be good in 3 months or 2 years, hence why I got out of basic materials after making a tidy profit--I was buying and selling every several days (I used to swing trade to handle the 3 days settlement time), but eventually got out of that market entirely.
I'm so aggressively against bad investment advice because I know how the market works. I stopped trading long ago, and won't just stick my money in "long-term investments" and hold a "diversified portfolio" and hope for the best. When I was trading, I was looking at the market for 18 hours every fucking day, waking up at 4am to inspect foreign markets, and carrying out technical analysis using online tools and some additional techniques not currently in practice (which, really, took up time not well spent; paper analysis to use special techniques didn't give me an advantage). I'd hold a stock for about a five-day, or else when I sold I'd have to wait 3 days for the funds to settle before I could buy again; no margin or day trading. My return was approximately 1% per day, with a peak at 29% gain in one month.
Never again. That shit drives me bat shit crazy; it's not worth the money.
Now my money sits in 1-2% guaranteed income accounts. The rest of you are all playing a form of lottery with more money in the pot and less lost to failure. You might come out ahead much of the time--most people do, eventually, and the market mostly biases inflation toward the better players--but a lot of people just lose their ass taking all this generic advice and packing their 401(k) money i
Nobody said it is a way to make sure you have a steady upward gain. But that in itself is no reason to not participate in stock market - or if it is, you don't show how in your longish replies to my short posts.
Let's try this:
That's in a diversified portfolio of long-term investments, a fairly reliable income.
A "diversified portfolio of long-term investments" is nothing. It's not a reliable income, it's not a reliable strategy, it's not even really a *strategy* in the stock market (diversification is a risk strategy, not an investment strategy; an investment strategy has to have some planning for how to select in such a way as to produce gain).
In other words: that sentence is just a bunch of gibberish and jargon, the kind oft-repeated to people who have *no* investment strategy, frequently *by* people who have no investment strategy, and otherwise by people who stand to profit by getting you into the market (e.g. funds managers who can skim a fee off the top). Buy and hold is crap and professional investors--the big capital investors stealing money hand-over-fist, and particularly the people employed to invest and make gains in investment banking houses--are buying and selling based on sentiment (buy low, sell high). The buy-and-hold strategy--the strategy of "keeping long-term investments"--imposes a timing restriction ("don't sell before X time") or a timing strategy ("buy things you won't have to sell for X time") blindly and bluntly, as a cudgel, with no actual investment strategy related to growth and gains-taking (i.e. actually increasing the value of your portfolio).
Nobody said it is a place where money is generated, instead of stolen.
The suggestion that you *should* be investing if you're not a skilled, well-versed, highly-competent investor implies that money is generated in the market.
There are exactly two kinds of people in the market: Con-artists and marks. If you're just leisurely walking through the stock market buying what looks good, you're a mark; if you're studying the market to determine when idiots are holding out their money to be happily taken away, you're a con-artist. Marks are marks because they believe money comes out of the market magically: they'll "invest" and they'll get a return.
You don't have to outright say a thing to *say* a thing. Smoking improves your mood, gives you more confidence, and puts you among peers of great smokers like John Wayne. A great mass of marketing is built around this--it's all true, of course--and historically has lead people to believe smoking would make them healthy, happy, relaxed, and virile because the marketing statements create an association between smoking and all of those things *without* ever stating as much. They greatly *imply* such things. That's the same as when you tell the fish they can easily make income by putting their money in a diversified, long-term investment portfolio; without a huge pile of additional information, it sure sounds like money just pours out of the stock market as long as you're "diversified"...
This sort of marketing by heavily implying untrue situations, by deliberately misleading the audience, is well-known. It's so well-known that most modern advertisement is based heavily in legal research to stick to common knowledge (which is often faulty--Vitamin C doesn't cure or prevent colds, but look at the orange juice ads...) or shaky research (there *is* research, with poor controls and bad experimental design... and we cite the one study that supports us out of 100 that don't) and avoid criminal false advertisement by deliberately misleading consumers.
But like vegetables are not grown in vegetable market but yet it might make sense to buy them in vegetable market, just because money isn't generated in the stock market doesn't mean
It's not really the same business if the management structure has changed. In that case, they're not really backpedaling after getting caught doing something wrong; they're party to a lump of shit being handed off to them, and have to decide how to handle it.
I would hope any responsible business would make such a decision--even if it looks, on the surface, unethical and *highly* illegal, you want to get a handle on the whole thing first to identify why it's in place, if there was some mitigating factor, and then *how* to handle it if it is in fact unethical and *highly* illegal. I'd rather new management fly with it for several months if that's what it takes to identify, understand, document, develop an action plan for, and explain the situation. In situations of urgency, the timing changes: management devotes large amounts of resources to stopping things which, for example, incur loss of life; they may possibly mitigate the situation first, e.g. by implementing crude lock-out systems on processes which regularly place employees in immediate danger of loss of limb or life, allowing them to continue business as usual while planning out how to permanently resolve the situation.
That's how proper businesses handle things. Improper businesses fire a bunch of people, creating fear, homelessness, tarnished professional reputations, ineffective countermeasures, and a sharp reduction of remaining employees capable of learning from the situation and making better decisions in future, similar situations. Then they make the same mistakes all over again in a few years.
To eat them, yes. To trade them back and forth? Only as a show to get money out of other idiots who think they can make money the same way.
In essence, it's a giant pyramid scheme: as long as more people keep coming and bringing more money on the table, you can buy from the big winners above you and sell to the new fish below you, making income mostly by inflation or fool-hardy eagerness. The usual line that you can "invest your money and let it grow" (that just getting into the market and holding onto so-called "investments" means you *necessarily* *will* get more money later)--importantly, the narrative that everyone can do this and make money, properly *NOT* mentioning that *someone* else must lose money in the exchange, implied largely by telling people that investing in securities and funds is what they *should* do or else they're not being financially responsible--relies on the market being a pyramid scheme of this sort.
In reality, the market doesn't function exactly that way. It's sold as a glossed-over pyramid scheme, but it functions as a poker table. Poker isn't really gambling, in the strictest sense of the word: we legally and generally consider gambling to encompass games of chance, and exclude games of skill (this creates interesting situations where wagering on which baseball team wins is gambling, but wagering on whether your team can beat an opponent is not: your ability to collect on that wager relies on your skill, and you can affect it by training yourself and your own team). Skilled poker players regularly fleece every last dime out of new fish who come to the table thinking poker is a game of cards, rather than a game of psychological manipulation; the stock market also is a game of psychological manipulation, and immunization of the self thereof.
As a poker analogy, it's quite apt: someone must lose money for someone else to gain money; and you mostly affect this by reading the sentiment of the other players and avoiding distortions of thinking which cause unrealistic sentiments. That is to say: when you see a bubble market, you read how excited the others in the market are by identifying the movements of securities prices and the news and other reporting, and buy into it; when you see these indicators showing a slowdown and a loss of confidence, you sell out to the portion of the market which is still fully-confident and driving the (now more slowly climbing) price upward. You come out with a tidy profit, and those overconfident fools are left holding a bag of pink slips that suddenly become worthless.
Pure technical analysts would say this is why the stock market is curves and not spikes: it grows, its growth slows, and then it rounds off and accelerates downward; it doesn't grow linearly upward, then instantly reverse and start going downward in a straight line. More broad analysts try to read the sentiment from news, and identify if the small fluctuations and the slowdowns are a matter of growing disillusion or just slow trading days and cold feet in general. Nobody in-the-know really says it's like a roulette wheel waiting to hit even or odd and instantly reverse direction without warning, although black swans (like 9/11 or Fukushima Daiichi) happen.
All in all, the whole of this doesn't suggest diversification is a way to maximize profits; rather, it's a way to minimize losses in unpredicted, poorly-read markets where your skill isn't up to par or the situation is just uncontrollable. Nobody can predict a nuclear meltdown--anyone who does predict a nuclear meltdown *prevents* *it* *from* *happening*. Any business which predicts its own demise does something to stop or soften the blow. In general, businesses and governments have much better data than you--they have everything you can see plus loads of secret data, as well as better facilities to analyze it--and so most negative (and positive) situations you can see coming are already being handled (mitigate the negative, exploit the positive). Hedging your bets is necessary only
Well that's annoying. I can see why they'd control the radio hardware firmware itself (you can make it use a full range of frequencies and thus violate FCC regulations readily), but not the software.
They're talking about the radio controller chipset. The radio is a small CPU (like a 50MHz ARM) plugged into a radio chip. This small CPU provides a GPIO interface to the PCI bus--often also on-chip if using a SoC with wifi--which exposes a Wifi interface to the OS. The OS says, "use channel 4, transmit at 72mW, connect to ESSID Bacon," and the Wifi radio handles setting the actual frequency, sending data, selecting power level, and filtering for the selected ESSID. If the OS asks for non-existent channels or power levels outside what the firmware allows, the firmware refuses.
The summary and the nerd response is to confuse operating system software (ddwrt, tomato) with radio firmware (specialized Thumb instruction set run on a customized microkernel) and claim the feds are banning custom software.
That's not a great analogy. The vegetable market is where you go to buy consumables, produced by farmers. The problem is our vegetable market in question is a place where some farmer dumps off vegetables he grew, then goes back to being a mason; meanwhile the consumers who buy vegetables sit in the farmer's market for about 30 years selling those same vegetables back and forth between each other, with some consumers coming and going, and with the occasional opening or tightening of their wallets.
Sounds like Michael Chrichton's ranting about aliens and global warming, pointing out that a lot of our mathematical equations are [Unknowable] = [Bunch of unknowable variables multiplied together]. The Drake Equation, for example, says there's as much a chance of us finding aliens or aliens existing or whatever based on how many planets there are, how many are inhabited by aliens, etc., just a pile of quantities we can't know.
I actually considered hanging lampshades on this when I described wealth and buying power--pointing out that certain relationships exist, but that they don't imply any ability to calculate any sort of meaningful metric.
Yes, the last thing about solar panels is pretty context-sensitive.
I wrote up a fully risk-analyzed, funded, well-computed Citizen's Dividend. It's essentially just replacing all our welfare (not medicare/medicaid) with an expansion of social security in which everyone starts getting paid at age 18.
The whole thing is worked off the actual market cost of everything. For example: I paid $725/mo for a 700sqft apartment, and a lot of people are paying less per square foot (I've seen rents as low as 64 cents per square foot in nicer areas, which is ludicrous). I took the $1/sqft number, computed from a market where the typical margin was 33 cents profit on the dollar, and added a 33 cent risk margin ($1.33/sqft). Worked out how to put together a good 224sqft apartment (I can do better: 100sqft capsule apartments) for $300. That means we can definitely supply this, we can supply it for a profit, and we can make an assload of money doing it.
Carry the same out for food, clothing, utilities, and so forth, and you come up with surprisingly little. After piling it all together, I added an 8% risk margin (I want a 15% margin; that will come with time) on top of the total in 2013 computations. It came out actually under $600 for the market economy to make a large profit supporting a single individual--note that's $600 per individual for merchants and landlords to make themselves rich as all fuck, not $600 for a person to go out, today, and find some non-subsidized housing and food. Because the people who pounce on setting up the infrastructure fastest will find themselves richer than Warren Buffet in about 3 years, I expect the magical hand of the Free Market will become the immensely greedy hand of give-me-that-shit-now in this particular case (in the same way I expect a cat to eat a bowl of tuna if I leave it near a thousand cats).
17% happens to be the viability number for 2013. In 1950, it'd have to be a 120%-135% income tax; obviously, that's more income than actually existed at the time, so not viable. At the time, welfare cost 1.5% (including social security OASDI). As of 2013, the total cost of welfare made up 17.2% of the total IRS reported AGI, while the total cost of a viable Citizen's Dividend came to 17%. State welfare services to support immigrants and children (neither of whom receive a dividend; it's only for natural-born, resident, adult, American citizens) would shrink to a tiny fraction of their current size, providing the risk control for obvious fallout of either eliminating such welfare or just handing out money every time people had babies (the latter strategy is not only an insanely bad idea, but an unaffordable one).
The CD gets cheaper over time, because of how wealth works (work in progress). For complex reasons, I contemplate fixing the number at 17%. The first obvious reason is to get that risk margin up to 15% (in case we have another 2007 Great Recession--the upcoming automation crisis will be worse); and the second is to ensure that, while any income represents a substantial improvement in quality-of-life, the quality-of-life of the poorest continues to improve right along with the wealth of society. I also just don't want bureaucrats and politicians tinkering.
It's fairly involved and requires a lot of transitional planning and a lot of built-in risk controls. Once it's set, it doesn't require any bureaucratic tinkering; all it takes is some administration to collect money and send out ACH, which is kind of "we keep the pumps running" and not "we decide who gets what." The fact that it's cheaper than modern welfare also helps.
That's in a diversified portfolio of long-term investments
Dogma, most often repeated to dazzle small fish into thinking the stock market is a place where money is generated, instead of stolen. It's roughly equivalent to a poker table, and it's a zero-sum game. There's a great illusion where you put in a million dollars and a $5 stock with 200,000 shares issued becomes a $50 stock and woo there's ten million dollars!!...except the other guy at the table only has the million dollars that was put into the market in the first place; you're not getting more than a million dollars by selling all your stock (the price will collapse or you won't sell it all) unless he brings another nine million dollars from outside *into* the stock market, netting $10 million in and $10 million out.
The trick is the idiot does come back with $10 million, because he sees the price going up and up, and wants in on that; you sell it back to him because you see the climb slowing and showing distress, and then it collapses and he cries and sells it back to you for $1 million, and you sell it to the next moron with $10 million in his pocket when it climbs back, and now you have $19 million in your pocket and two poor single-millionaires across the table from you.
The biggest argument against diversification isn't the most obvious. The most obvious is that investing 100% into SPY (the S&P500 tracker) is an instant diversified portfolio; as corollary, any selection of multiple securities--stocks, bonds, options (though they expire), commodities (they get delivered, so you have to keep trading contracts in practice; exchange funds that handle this for you are a close substitute)--behaves like a single security, fluctuating up and down as the market does and as their representative sectors in total do.
A diversified portfolio doesn't magically make money; it simply lowers risk. You must make good buying and selling decisions to make money. In the extreme, a single-stock strategy has the potential to gain *much* more than a diversified portfolio; it can also *lose* much more. In a diversification strategy, you try to select a bunch of securities--stocks or funds which represent a strategy (sector investment, profile investment)--based on what you think would make a good single-security investment, scaling their proportion to their relative risks versus return and your risk tolerance.
That all sounds complex, but it's easily illustrated. Let's say you think BGWNR is likely to climb sharply, making you a 7% profit in the next 6 weeks, but that it's of course more risky than SFBT which you believe is near-guaranteed to make you a 2% profit in the next 6 weeks. You have a pile of money with which to purchase these investments to fill a gap in your portfolio. If your strategy is an aggressive, higher-risk affair, you might put 75% of your money into BGWNR, and 25% into SFBT; if the market betrays you, BGWNR losses should be partially or wholly mitigated by SFBT losses, and the loss in total should be less even if both lose (because BGWNR would lose more of its value than SFBT). If your strategy is a conservative, lower-risk affair, you might put 10% into BGWNR, and 90% into SFBT, because a loss in both would be almost as small as a loss in SFBT, and a win in both would be significantly (but not greatly) larger than a 100% investment in SFBT, and a loss in BGWNR is way more likely than a loss in SFBT and so would probably leave you with *most* of the gain from SFBT if SFBT went up and BGWNR went down.
Does diversification magically mean profit? No. It means less profit, and less loss; it means you don't wake up one day finding out you got wiped out at the race track, and so can keep playing. If you're not a good trader in the first place, you might consistently lose money until you bleed to death slowly. For that matter, the market as a whole has a strong influence on individual securities: MSFT or AAPL can experience a 1.2% drop for the day for ab
If I had $250,000/year income, I could do my own dishes, tend my own yard, and so forth. I probably would tend the bees; but I'd get out of gardening. I'd have a gardener. Someone else would clean my house.
There is no faster way to create jobs with some $200k/year of disposable income than by paying some teenage wench to clean your house, and some old fuck to tend your trees. There just isn't.
If you have millions of dollars, that's great! You can start businesses; but can you create jobs? Well, kind of. If you find a way to produce something currently in production, but with *less* labor, you can produce that product more cheaply. That means you can undersell your competition, outcompeting them, and *eliminate* jobs. More unemployed.
With more unemployed, but cheaper common goods, people generally have more money after buying all the shit they need (except the unemployed, who are struggling to get by). That means you can now spend your millions to expand some niche market--say, smart phones, which still cost $600 and bump your bill by $30/month, but now everyone has more than $600 on hand, whereas before they had the ability to spend an extra $50 on shit they wanted--and make a shitton of profit. That, of course, requires workers--this is why it costs money--so you wind up creating jobs, although only about the amount you displaced in the first place.
This is why we always have unemployment, and why population tends to expand: you create wealth by making things cheaper to produce; you make things cheaper to produce by reducing the total invested labor-hours in production. All those layers of profits added on every good (coal to make steel, steel to make bolts, bolts to make cars) are just aggregate price; bulk purchase can negotiate that down, and direct competition can force it down, but only to the aggregate human labor costs of everything put together. When you reduce the labor cost, you wind up increasing the total buying power--same number of humans produce more things, thus the same percentage of the total income (of everyone and every business) purchases more--which means you can re-employ the same amount of displaced labor (not necessarily the same people) elsewhere, and everyone can buy more shit.
It also means the cost of high amounts of production drops. Producing 10 things costs $100 per unit because of inefficient methods (you wouldn't open a million-dollar production facility to make ten chairs; you'd do it in a slow, inefficient manner that costs less than a million dollars in labor); producing producing 10 million costs $10 per unit, because you can use better methods; and then producing 10 billion starts relying on things like fertilizer and artificial irrigation to grow trees for wood, which is more expensive than simple tree farming, and so it costs $50 per unit. You can actually support a bigger population as you raise wealth in this way, because suddenly everyone can afford that $50 per unit good, since they're spending $50 less elsewhere on other goods; of course, then the population grows and keeps its 4%-8% unemployment, because low unemployment is restrictive on total population wealth and weird shit happens.
So yeah. I'd have tutors, manservants, and landscapers. I might have a purser, but uh... look, my finances are better than yours. Financial management is a side hobby that's reached such a point of acuity for me that I scare bankers and accountants. Their balls shrivel up and die when we talk. I'm hoping our interest rates will go up to 14% median on mortgages so I can start an information campaign to eliminate the 30-year mortgage, since high interest rates make 10-year mortgages accessible for most people who can afford a 30-year mortgage (you wind up only having to tip in $100-$200 more per payment, instead of $2,000+ more; and you pay overall less for the same house). I was going to kill my mortgage in three years, but decided to stretch it to four or five so I cou
Dude, the fall-out around climate science is constant.
I've had someone pull the 97% number out, and I pointed out their abstract says they started with 14,000 papers whose primary topic was climate change or global warming, and then discarded all papers which took no final position; the dude came back and said that the discarded papers weren't about climate change at all (which contradicts what the actual study says). The 97% figure also counts papers, not authors; yet it's referenced as a consensus among number of scientists--without even counting *all* climate scientists. The whole thing also ignores the valid scientific standpoint that we don't know about something--you know, like the tons of scientific papers that claim WE DON'T KNOW IF VACCINES CAUSE AUTISM, because we've seen no such evidence supporting that claim, versus the single paper that claims it does.
In the realm of actual science, we have studies for and against which tend to follow the lines of who buys the study; in reality, someone will commission 100 studies, and 99 of them will fall one way, and vanish under NDA. The last study, obviously, gets published. You don't buy results; you buy experiments which may, occasionally, produce faulty results (statistics demands this happen occasionally), and just hide all the ones that don't go your way.
We also have poorly-designed analysis, goal-driven analysis, and all kinds of other shit. Bad experiments in climate scientists aren't because climate science is hard (it is) or because climate scientists are terrible scientists (they're not), but because there's political pressure to do certain things in a certain way, limiting scope, data, etc.
On top of all of it, we have stupid shit like the IPCC coming out and saying they've faked all the data and reports for the past decades because they think if they gave us real numbers we'd think it was ridiculous. They've essentially come out to say they've claimed 0.1C jumps over 50 years when it's really more like a 10C jump over 30 years coming, just they didn't think anyone would believe the earth would catch fire spontaneously.
I haven't analyzed the numbers or taken a full assessment because it's not worth my time doing. I assert it's probably way wonkier because I know the pressures on the field and I know what those pressures do to the rightly pursuit of knowledge. I also know that, regardless of the hard truth, people will take a position based on such political (which, really, is just social) pressures that drive them into their feeling of safety and superiority; it doesn't particularly matter if they're right or wrong, in the same way that murdering someone you meet in an alleyway so you can rob them doesn't immediately become righteous because that person was just on his way from raping and drowning a small child in a nearby lake. Motives are of the mind, not of the physical world.
Some you can analyze, yes. Kai Wynn is uh. The crazy engineer girl she manipulated, too. Lots we could say about these nutjobs. It's amazing how the brain shuts off the prefrontal cortex and brings up the amygdala when the facts inserted into the PFC conflict with the collective, most basic memories everything else is held against. That's what religion does: it bases everything on a set of assumptions, such that violating those assumptions violates everything in all your experiences; such violation can garner rather violent reactions.
I've programmed a reflex to suppress that. Obvious advantages there may be, this has clearly become a very bad idea.
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64-bit Linux native Unity 3D Editor in an Ubuntu Partners repository.
Dude, people find cartoons with orangutans playing volleyball offensive. I honestly don't care; I've got enough brain power to reserve offense to things requiring physical retribution, like rape. We should definitely pipewrench people for rape. People whose vocabulary uses the word fuck a lot, well, we can pick the meat off the bones and toss the rest away.
You're just being a dense politician. It's like you're shouting "STEM CELL RESEARCH HAS PRODUCED SO MANY MEDICAL ADVANCES!" in an attempt to attack someone who hasn't funded embryonic stem cell research, when 100% of the medical advances produced from stem cell research are adult stem cells: you can come back and say you never said that, because you didn't; but you did imply a lot, because you did. You can defend your rhetoric effectively, even though you know every statement you made would mislead and imply things that are simply not true.
I've explained this repeatedly in great detail, and you only respond to "suggesting a diversified portfolio of long-term investments will make income is suggesting that just 'investing' magically gets you income, when that's a non-strategy equivalent to a game of chance" with "well I said a diversified portfolio of long-term investments is a good plan; I didn't say you didn't have to actually apply your own thinking or anything".
You are correct that a million will net about $60k. That's in a diversified portfolio of long-term investments, a fairly reliable income. Actually $600K per ten years is reliable - year to years gains will fluctuate and that's okay - your spending doesn't have to fluctuate to match each year.
A million dollars dumped into a diversified portfolio of long-term investments will either be half a million dollars or 1.1 million dollars or 1.5 million dollars or 200,000 dollars in several years. A million dollars INVESTED CONSCIENTOUSLY AND MANAGED CAREFULLY-- which may not quantify with a level of diversification you consider "diversified", because a person may hold 80%+ in low-interest, guaranteed income sources (like CDs) because they don't have any great knowledge on most of the market sectors and so can't do much other than blindly invest in "diversification" that's entirely likely to just throw money away; and which may not qualify as long-term because the only real definition of "long-term investment" is the tax definition that tells you you pay income brackets on less than 1 year holdings and capital gains on more than 1 year holdings, and so the term "long-term investment" has no meaning as a description of investing strategy--may, likely, make gains in respect to the relative skill level of the investor against all other investors in the market in aggregate based on investment influence (which comes down to how much capital they can move and how much news they can make).
The statement, "That's in a diversified portfolio of long-term investments, a fairly reliable income," is just fluff. It has no meaning, and implies bad advice.
It's because everyone's a quack.
"But no sunscreen is meant to facilitate prolonged exposure of bare skin to direct sunlight." This is just bullshit. No sunscreen is meant to last for an extended period of time; they all say reapply in 2 or 4 hours or such. A sunscreen which removes 97% of UV radiation turns some 5.5 hours of sun exposure into the equivalent of 10 minutes, stretched over a lot more time. If you'll notice, your body gets about 7,000 hours of sun exposure in 10 years if you're out in it for 2 hours per day, and being in direct sun for 2 hours straight may burn you; yet being out for 15 minutes every hour for 8 hours every day doesn't cause sunburn! Neither does standing in the shade all day--which is roughly equivalent to filtering 97% of UV....
Something is happening.
This is something else happening.
This must be causing that. Otherwise how do you explain it?
The logic of the retard.
Titanium dioxide nanoparticle sunscreen does cause cancer. At micron size, it works well; at nanometer scale, the TiO2 particles migrate through the cell membrane, where they harmlessly do nothing. Sunlight reaching the skin reflects off these particles, lengthening its path through the cell, avoiding interaction with melanin, and more frequently damaging DNA than sunlight on untreated skin.
Vanilla banana boat doesn't do that.
It's called "unspoken implications", which may or may not be true, but which are nonetheless implied by a statement. Stock market advice--such as all that you cover here--is littered with it.
Suggesting so flippantly that laymen should be in a "diversified portfolio" without qualifying the statement with a disclaimer of skill and strategic considerations is suggesting they take up a strategy, with the implication that "diversified, long-term holdings" are a strategy for making money. The greatest armor in this sort of lie is the ability to come back and show that you are *technically* correct, even though you've made fertile ground for people to make exactly one and only one conclusion from your statements.
I've taken the route of shaping information myself to control my parents. That's how I dealt with them growing up: I said things which all suggested, iron-clad, whatever I needed them to believe, unless they were in possession of specific other information. They made up their own conclusions, consistently incorrect. This is the same way legal con artists work, and the basic foundation for diplomatic circumlocution.
At what time point do you think stocks became completely bad idea as a part of "diversified portfolio of long-term investments" ?
The entirety of your original post heavily and directly suggested to the lay-person--to the person who would find something new in your advice, instead of seeing tripe that any experienced investor has heard again and again--that just buying up a bunch of diverse stocks and sitting on them for years creates an income.
To a lay-person, "long-term investment" means "buy and hold" and "don't cash out until you're ready to spend it; just let it grow."
To a skilled investor, the term "long-term investment" has little meaning. The only investments bought on term are term investments--bonds, CDs, etc.--intended to mature and pay a fixed rate of return; stocks are bought and sold on market sentiment, buying when it's opportune and selling when it's opportune. Your "long-term investment" may suddenly be a bad investment in 3 days's time when company news comes out that sends the stock rocketing up 60%, and you immediately know it's going to sharply come back down in the next day if not the next few hours, so you sell out of that immediately. Markets turn around: what's good this month might not be good in 3 months or 2 years, hence why I got out of basic materials after making a tidy profit--I was buying and selling every several days (I used to swing trade to handle the 3 days settlement time), but eventually got out of that market entirely.
I'm so aggressively against bad investment advice because I know how the market works. I stopped trading long ago, and won't just stick my money in "long-term investments" and hold a "diversified portfolio" and hope for the best. When I was trading, I was looking at the market for 18 hours every fucking day, waking up at 4am to inspect foreign markets, and carrying out technical analysis using online tools and some additional techniques not currently in practice (which, really, took up time not well spent; paper analysis to use special techniques didn't give me an advantage). I'd hold a stock for about a five-day, or else when I sold I'd have to wait 3 days for the funds to settle before I could buy again; no margin or day trading. My return was approximately 1% per day, with a peak at 29% gain in one month.
Never again. That shit drives me bat shit crazy; it's not worth the money.
Now my money sits in 1-2% guaranteed income accounts. The rest of you are all playing a form of lottery with more money in the pot and less lost to failure. You might come out ahead much of the time--most people do, eventually, and the market mostly biases inflation toward the better players--but a lot of people just lose their ass taking all this generic advice and packing their 401(k) money i
Nobody said it is a way to make sure you have a steady upward gain. But that in itself is no reason to not participate in stock market - or if it is, you don't show how in your longish replies to my short posts.
Let's try this:
That's in a diversified portfolio of long-term investments, a fairly reliable income.
A "diversified portfolio of long-term investments" is nothing. It's not a reliable income, it's not a reliable strategy, it's not even really a *strategy* in the stock market (diversification is a risk strategy, not an investment strategy; an investment strategy has to have some planning for how to select in such a way as to produce gain).
In other words: that sentence is just a bunch of gibberish and jargon, the kind oft-repeated to people who have *no* investment strategy, frequently *by* people who have no investment strategy, and otherwise by people who stand to profit by getting you into the market (e.g. funds managers who can skim a fee off the top). Buy and hold is crap and professional investors--the big capital investors stealing money hand-over-fist, and particularly the people employed to invest and make gains in investment banking houses--are buying and selling based on sentiment (buy low, sell high). The buy-and-hold strategy--the strategy of "keeping long-term investments"--imposes a timing restriction ("don't sell before X time") or a timing strategy ("buy things you won't have to sell for X time") blindly and bluntly, as a cudgel, with no actual investment strategy related to growth and gains-taking (i.e. actually increasing the value of your portfolio).
Nobody said it is a place where money is generated, instead of stolen.
The suggestion that you *should* be investing if you're not a skilled, well-versed, highly-competent investor implies that money is generated in the market.
There are exactly two kinds of people in the market: Con-artists and marks. If you're just leisurely walking through the stock market buying what looks good, you're a mark; if you're studying the market to determine when idiots are holding out their money to be happily taken away, you're a con-artist. Marks are marks because they believe money comes out of the market magically: they'll "invest" and they'll get a return.
You don't have to outright say a thing to *say* a thing. Smoking improves your mood, gives you more confidence, and puts you among peers of great smokers like John Wayne. A great mass of marketing is built around this--it's all true, of course--and historically has lead people to believe smoking would make them healthy, happy, relaxed, and virile because the marketing statements create an association between smoking and all of those things *without* ever stating as much. They greatly *imply* such things. That's the same as when you tell the fish they can easily make income by putting their money in a diversified, long-term investment portfolio; without a huge pile of additional information, it sure sounds like money just pours out of the stock market as long as you're "diversified"...
This sort of marketing by heavily implying untrue situations, by deliberately misleading the audience, is well-known. It's so well-known that most modern advertisement is based heavily in legal research to stick to common knowledge (which is often faulty--Vitamin C doesn't cure or prevent colds, but look at the orange juice ads...) or shaky research (there *is* research, with poor controls and bad experimental design... and we cite the one study that supports us out of 100 that don't) and avoid criminal false advertisement by deliberately misleading consumers.
But like vegetables are not grown in vegetable market but yet it might make sense to buy them in vegetable market, just because money isn't generated in the stock market doesn't mean
It's not really the same business if the management structure has changed. In that case, they're not really backpedaling after getting caught doing something wrong; they're party to a lump of shit being handed off to them, and have to decide how to handle it.
I would hope any responsible business would make such a decision--even if it looks, on the surface, unethical and *highly* illegal, you want to get a handle on the whole thing first to identify why it's in place, if there was some mitigating factor, and then *how* to handle it if it is in fact unethical and *highly* illegal. I'd rather new management fly with it for several months if that's what it takes to identify, understand, document, develop an action plan for, and explain the situation. In situations of urgency, the timing changes: management devotes large amounts of resources to stopping things which, for example, incur loss of life; they may possibly mitigate the situation first, e.g. by implementing crude lock-out systems on processes which regularly place employees in immediate danger of loss of limb or life, allowing them to continue business as usual while planning out how to permanently resolve the situation.
That's how proper businesses handle things. Improper businesses fire a bunch of people, creating fear, homelessness, tarnished professional reputations, ineffective countermeasures, and a sharp reduction of remaining employees capable of learning from the situation and making better decisions in future, similar situations. Then they make the same mistakes all over again in a few years.
To eat them, yes. To trade them back and forth? Only as a show to get money out of other idiots who think they can make money the same way.
In essence, it's a giant pyramid scheme: as long as more people keep coming and bringing more money on the table, you can buy from the big winners above you and sell to the new fish below you, making income mostly by inflation or fool-hardy eagerness. The usual line that you can "invest your money and let it grow" (that just getting into the market and holding onto so-called "investments" means you *necessarily* *will* get more money later)--importantly, the narrative that everyone can do this and make money, properly *NOT* mentioning that *someone* else must lose money in the exchange, implied largely by telling people that investing in securities and funds is what they *should* do or else they're not being financially responsible--relies on the market being a pyramid scheme of this sort.
In reality, the market doesn't function exactly that way. It's sold as a glossed-over pyramid scheme, but it functions as a poker table. Poker isn't really gambling, in the strictest sense of the word: we legally and generally consider gambling to encompass games of chance, and exclude games of skill (this creates interesting situations where wagering on which baseball team wins is gambling, but wagering on whether your team can beat an opponent is not: your ability to collect on that wager relies on your skill, and you can affect it by training yourself and your own team). Skilled poker players regularly fleece every last dime out of new fish who come to the table thinking poker is a game of cards, rather than a game of psychological manipulation; the stock market also is a game of psychological manipulation, and immunization of the self thereof.
As a poker analogy, it's quite apt: someone must lose money for someone else to gain money; and you mostly affect this by reading the sentiment of the other players and avoiding distortions of thinking which cause unrealistic sentiments. That is to say: when you see a bubble market, you read how excited the others in the market are by identifying the movements of securities prices and the news and other reporting, and buy into it; when you see these indicators showing a slowdown and a loss of confidence, you sell out to the portion of the market which is still fully-confident and driving the (now more slowly climbing) price upward. You come out with a tidy profit, and those overconfident fools are left holding a bag of pink slips that suddenly become worthless.
Pure technical analysts would say this is why the stock market is curves and not spikes: it grows, its growth slows, and then it rounds off and accelerates downward; it doesn't grow linearly upward, then instantly reverse and start going downward in a straight line. More broad analysts try to read the sentiment from news, and identify if the small fluctuations and the slowdowns are a matter of growing disillusion or just slow trading days and cold feet in general. Nobody in-the-know really says it's like a roulette wheel waiting to hit even or odd and instantly reverse direction without warning, although black swans (like 9/11 or Fukushima Daiichi) happen.
All in all, the whole of this doesn't suggest diversification is a way to maximize profits; rather, it's a way to minimize losses in unpredicted, poorly-read markets where your skill isn't up to par or the situation is just uncontrollable. Nobody can predict a nuclear meltdown--anyone who does predict a nuclear meltdown *prevents* *it* *from* *happening*. Any business which predicts its own demise does something to stop or soften the blow. In general, businesses and governments have much better data than you--they have everything you can see plus loads of secret data, as well as better facilities to analyze it--and so most negative (and positive) situations you can see coming are already being handled (mitigate the negative, exploit the positive). Hedging your bets is necessary only
Well that's annoying. I can see why they'd control the radio hardware firmware itself (you can make it use a full range of frequencies and thus violate FCC regulations readily), but not the software.
Interesting. Wasn't the point, though.
It looks like they changed their logo to a flat, unshaded, extremely-simple affair you could display on a Commodore 64 in two-color mode.
They're talking about the radio controller chipset. The radio is a small CPU (like a 50MHz ARM) plugged into a radio chip. This small CPU provides a GPIO interface to the PCI bus--often also on-chip if using a SoC with wifi--which exposes a Wifi interface to the OS. The OS says, "use channel 4, transmit at 72mW, connect to ESSID Bacon," and the Wifi radio handles setting the actual frequency, sending data, selecting power level, and filtering for the selected ESSID. If the OS asks for non-existent channels or power levels outside what the firmware allows, the firmware refuses.
The summary and the nerd response is to confuse operating system software (ddwrt, tomato) with radio firmware (specialized Thumb instruction set run on a customized microkernel) and claim the feds are banning custom software.
That's not a great analogy. The vegetable market is where you go to buy consumables, produced by farmers. The problem is our vegetable market in question is a place where some farmer dumps off vegetables he grew, then goes back to being a mason; meanwhile the consumers who buy vegetables sit in the farmer's market for about 30 years selling those same vegetables back and forth between each other, with some consumers coming and going, and with the occasional opening or tightening of their wallets.
Sounds like Michael Chrichton's ranting about aliens and global warming, pointing out that a lot of our mathematical equations are [Unknowable] = [Bunch of unknowable variables multiplied together]. The Drake Equation, for example, says there's as much a chance of us finding aliens or aliens existing or whatever based on how many planets there are, how many are inhabited by aliens, etc., just a pile of quantities we can't know.
I actually considered hanging lampshades on this when I described wealth and buying power--pointing out that certain relationships exist, but that they don't imply any ability to calculate any sort of meaningful metric.
I said "most often repeated to dazzle small fish".
The company backing the stock is what might generate the money - stock is just a part representation of it
The money traders get by buying and selling stocks is not generated by the company behind the stock. Traders bring all the money to the table.
Yes, the last thing about solar panels is pretty context-sensitive.
I wrote up a fully risk-analyzed, funded, well-computed Citizen's Dividend. It's essentially just replacing all our welfare (not medicare/medicaid) with an expansion of social security in which everyone starts getting paid at age 18.
The whole thing is worked off the actual market cost of everything. For example: I paid $725/mo for a 700sqft apartment, and a lot of people are paying less per square foot (I've seen rents as low as 64 cents per square foot in nicer areas, which is ludicrous). I took the $1/sqft number, computed from a market where the typical margin was 33 cents profit on the dollar, and added a 33 cent risk margin ($1.33/sqft). Worked out how to put together a good 224sqft apartment (I can do better: 100sqft capsule apartments) for $300. That means we can definitely supply this, we can supply it for a profit, and we can make an assload of money doing it.
Carry the same out for food, clothing, utilities, and so forth, and you come up with surprisingly little. After piling it all together, I added an 8% risk margin (I want a 15% margin; that will come with time) on top of the total in 2013 computations. It came out actually under $600 for the market economy to make a large profit supporting a single individual--note that's $600 per individual for merchants and landlords to make themselves rich as all fuck, not $600 for a person to go out, today, and find some non-subsidized housing and food. Because the people who pounce on setting up the infrastructure fastest will find themselves richer than Warren Buffet in about 3 years, I expect the magical hand of the Free Market will become the immensely greedy hand of give-me-that-shit-now in this particular case (in the same way I expect a cat to eat a bowl of tuna if I leave it near a thousand cats).
17% happens to be the viability number for 2013. In 1950, it'd have to be a 120%-135% income tax; obviously, that's more income than actually existed at the time, so not viable. At the time, welfare cost 1.5% (including social security OASDI). As of 2013, the total cost of welfare made up 17.2% of the total IRS reported AGI, while the total cost of a viable Citizen's Dividend came to 17%. State welfare services to support immigrants and children (neither of whom receive a dividend; it's only for natural-born, resident, adult, American citizens) would shrink to a tiny fraction of their current size, providing the risk control for obvious fallout of either eliminating such welfare or just handing out money every time people had babies (the latter strategy is not only an insanely bad idea, but an unaffordable one).
The CD gets cheaper over time, because of how wealth works (work in progress). For complex reasons, I contemplate fixing the number at 17%. The first obvious reason is to get that risk margin up to 15% (in case we have another 2007 Great Recession--the upcoming automation crisis will be worse); and the second is to ensure that, while any income represents a substantial improvement in quality-of-life, the quality-of-life of the poorest continues to improve right along with the wealth of society. I also just don't want bureaucrats and politicians tinkering.
It's fairly involved and requires a lot of transitional planning and a lot of built-in risk controls. Once it's set, it doesn't require any bureaucratic tinkering; all it takes is some administration to collect money and send out ACH, which is kind of "we keep the pumps running" and not "we decide who gets what." The fact that it's cheaper than modern welfare also helps.
That's in a diversified portfolio of long-term investments
Dogma, most often repeated to dazzle small fish into thinking the stock market is a place where money is generated, instead of stolen. It's roughly equivalent to a poker table, and it's a zero-sum game. There's a great illusion where you put in a million dollars and a $5 stock with 200,000 shares issued becomes a $50 stock and woo there's ten million dollars!! ...except the other guy at the table only has the million dollars that was put into the market in the first place; you're not getting more than a million dollars by selling all your stock (the price will collapse or you won't sell it all) unless he brings another nine million dollars from outside *into* the stock market, netting $10 million in and $10 million out.
The trick is the idiot does come back with $10 million, because he sees the price going up and up, and wants in on that; you sell it back to him because you see the climb slowing and showing distress, and then it collapses and he cries and sells it back to you for $1 million, and you sell it to the next moron with $10 million in his pocket when it climbs back, and now you have $19 million in your pocket and two poor single-millionaires across the table from you.
The biggest argument against diversification isn't the most obvious. The most obvious is that investing 100% into SPY (the S&P500 tracker) is an instant diversified portfolio; as corollary, any selection of multiple securities--stocks, bonds, options (though they expire), commodities (they get delivered, so you have to keep trading contracts in practice; exchange funds that handle this for you are a close substitute)--behaves like a single security, fluctuating up and down as the market does and as their representative sectors in total do.
A diversified portfolio doesn't magically make money; it simply lowers risk. You must make good buying and selling decisions to make money. In the extreme, a single-stock strategy has the potential to gain *much* more than a diversified portfolio; it can also *lose* much more. In a diversification strategy, you try to select a bunch of securities--stocks or funds which represent a strategy (sector investment, profile investment)--based on what you think would make a good single-security investment, scaling their proportion to their relative risks versus return and your risk tolerance.
That all sounds complex, but it's easily illustrated. Let's say you think BGWNR is likely to climb sharply, making you a 7% profit in the next 6 weeks, but that it's of course more risky than SFBT which you believe is near-guaranteed to make you a 2% profit in the next 6 weeks. You have a pile of money with which to purchase these investments to fill a gap in your portfolio. If your strategy is an aggressive, higher-risk affair, you might put 75% of your money into BGWNR, and 25% into SFBT; if the market betrays you, BGWNR losses should be partially or wholly mitigated by SFBT losses, and the loss in total should be less even if both lose (because BGWNR would lose more of its value than SFBT). If your strategy is a conservative, lower-risk affair, you might put 10% into BGWNR, and 90% into SFBT, because a loss in both would be almost as small as a loss in SFBT, and a win in both would be significantly (but not greatly) larger than a 100% investment in SFBT, and a loss in BGWNR is way more likely than a loss in SFBT and so would probably leave you with *most* of the gain from SFBT if SFBT went up and BGWNR went down.
Does diversification magically mean profit? No. It means less profit, and less loss; it means you don't wake up one day finding out you got wiped out at the race track, and so can keep playing. If you're not a good trader in the first place, you might consistently lose money until you bleed to death slowly. For that matter, the market as a whole has a strong influence on individual securities: MSFT or AAPL can experience a 1.2% drop for the day for ab
Half a million would be enough for me to immediately retire just fine. Probably not the happiest position, but it would be manageable.
The first thing you do is hire manservants.
If I had $250,000/year income, I could do my own dishes, tend my own yard, and so forth. I probably would tend the bees; but I'd get out of gardening. I'd have a gardener. Someone else would clean my house.
There is no faster way to create jobs with some $200k/year of disposable income than by paying some teenage wench to clean your house, and some old fuck to tend your trees. There just isn't.
If you have millions of dollars, that's great! You can start businesses; but can you create jobs? Well, kind of. If you find a way to produce something currently in production, but with *less* labor, you can produce that product more cheaply. That means you can undersell your competition, outcompeting them, and *eliminate* jobs. More unemployed.
With more unemployed, but cheaper common goods, people generally have more money after buying all the shit they need (except the unemployed, who are struggling to get by). That means you can now spend your millions to expand some niche market--say, smart phones, which still cost $600 and bump your bill by $30/month, but now everyone has more than $600 on hand, whereas before they had the ability to spend an extra $50 on shit they wanted--and make a shitton of profit. That, of course, requires workers--this is why it costs money--so you wind up creating jobs, although only about the amount you displaced in the first place.
This is why we always have unemployment, and why population tends to expand: you create wealth by making things cheaper to produce; you make things cheaper to produce by reducing the total invested labor-hours in production. All those layers of profits added on every good (coal to make steel, steel to make bolts, bolts to make cars) are just aggregate price; bulk purchase can negotiate that down, and direct competition can force it down, but only to the aggregate human labor costs of everything put together. When you reduce the labor cost, you wind up increasing the total buying power--same number of humans produce more things, thus the same percentage of the total income (of everyone and every business) purchases more--which means you can re-employ the same amount of displaced labor (not necessarily the same people) elsewhere, and everyone can buy more shit.
It also means the cost of high amounts of production drops. Producing 10 things costs $100 per unit because of inefficient methods (you wouldn't open a million-dollar production facility to make ten chairs; you'd do it in a slow, inefficient manner that costs less than a million dollars in labor); producing producing 10 million costs $10 per unit, because you can use better methods; and then producing 10 billion starts relying on things like fertilizer and artificial irrigation to grow trees for wood, which is more expensive than simple tree farming, and so it costs $50 per unit. You can actually support a bigger population as you raise wealth in this way, because suddenly everyone can afford that $50 per unit good, since they're spending $50 less elsewhere on other goods; of course, then the population grows and keeps its 4%-8% unemployment, because low unemployment is restrictive on total population wealth and weird shit happens.
So yeah. I'd have tutors, manservants, and landscapers. I might have a purser, but uh... look, my finances are better than yours. Financial management is a side hobby that's reached such a point of acuity for me that I scare bankers and accountants. Their balls shrivel up and die when we talk. I'm hoping our interest rates will go up to 14% median on mortgages so I can start an information campaign to eliminate the 30-year mortgage, since high interest rates make 10-year mortgages accessible for most people who can afford a 30-year mortgage (you wind up only having to tip in $100-$200 more per payment, instead of $2,000+ more; and you pay overall less for the same house). I was going to kill my mortgage in three years, but decided to stretch it to four or five so I cou
Dude, the fall-out around climate science is constant.
I've had someone pull the 97% number out, and I pointed out their abstract says they started with 14,000 papers whose primary topic was climate change or global warming, and then discarded all papers which took no final position; the dude came back and said that the discarded papers weren't about climate change at all (which contradicts what the actual study says). The 97% figure also counts papers, not authors; yet it's referenced as a consensus among number of scientists--without even counting *all* climate scientists. The whole thing also ignores the valid scientific standpoint that we don't know about something--you know, like the tons of scientific papers that claim WE DON'T KNOW IF VACCINES CAUSE AUTISM, because we've seen no such evidence supporting that claim, versus the single paper that claims it does.
In the realm of actual science, we have studies for and against which tend to follow the lines of who buys the study; in reality, someone will commission 100 studies, and 99 of them will fall one way, and vanish under NDA. The last study, obviously, gets published. You don't buy results; you buy experiments which may, occasionally, produce faulty results (statistics demands this happen occasionally), and just hide all the ones that don't go your way.
We also have poorly-designed analysis, goal-driven analysis, and all kinds of other shit. Bad experiments in climate scientists aren't because climate science is hard (it is) or because climate scientists are terrible scientists (they're not), but because there's political pressure to do certain things in a certain way, limiting scope, data, etc.
On top of all of it, we have stupid shit like the IPCC coming out and saying they've faked all the data and reports for the past decades because they think if they gave us real numbers we'd think it was ridiculous. They've essentially come out to say they've claimed 0.1C jumps over 50 years when it's really more like a 10C jump over 30 years coming, just they didn't think anyone would believe the earth would catch fire spontaneously.
I haven't analyzed the numbers or taken a full assessment because it's not worth my time doing. I assert it's probably way wonkier because I know the pressures on the field and I know what those pressures do to the rightly pursuit of knowledge. I also know that, regardless of the hard truth, people will take a position based on such political (which, really, is just social) pressures that drive them into their feeling of safety and superiority; it doesn't particularly matter if they're right or wrong, in the same way that murdering someone you meet in an alleyway so you can rob them doesn't immediately become righteous because that person was just on his way from raping and drowning a small child in a nearby lake. Motives are of the mind, not of the physical world.
Some you can analyze, yes. Kai Wynn is uh. The crazy engineer girl she manipulated, too. Lots we could say about these nutjobs. It's amazing how the brain shuts off the prefrontal cortex and brings up the amygdala when the facts inserted into the PFC conflict with the collective, most basic memories everything else is held against. That's what religion does: it bases everything on a set of assumptions, such that violating those assumptions violates everything in all your experiences; such violation can garner rather violent reactions.
I've programmed a reflex to suppress that. Obvious advantages there may be, this has clearly become a very bad idea.
You went through a lot to try to not say "because of sound psychological principles which tell us that the human mind will see what it wants to see."
It seems to me double-blind experiments exist because of a scientific understanding of psychology.
Explain what you are referring to about this stuff on TV. I can't recall one instance of psychology being invoked in RWBY, Inuyasha, or Deep Space 9.
What I said was generated on-the-fly from an understanding of psychology (along with politics and a few other things).