"Please don't offer feedback until you can avoid being insulting. I suppose I misspoke, as by money market funds I meant those offered by investment firms--Fidelity's Magellan fund being the first one that comes to mind"
Well, you qualify as a complete moron, and so insults are warranted. There is a huge difference between "money market funds" and "equity funds", such as Fidelity's Magellan, and even the rawest neophyte financial advisor knows that. You don't have to tell me that equity funds can decrease in value; as a licensed broker, I know that quite well. When you throw around terms you don't understand, and then use the Nixon-esque "I misspoke", you fully deserve any opprobrium and calumny I can find.
DON'T GIVE PEOPLE FINANCIAL ADVICE UNTIL YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT, BECAUSE YOU CAN DO THEM REAL HARM!
"The other issue is that these damn things are so huge"
The last one that came close was, IIRC, 1.5 km long. You're saying that 10 or 20 nukes couldn't reduce that to a pile of rubble? As for all the energy hitting the earth - why does it necessarily have to turn into heat? Some of it surely has to perturb the earth's orbit, minutely.
Finally "not to mention that the numerious "rubble pile" astreriods and comets are fantastically resistent (read completely immune) to this sort of effect." And we know this how? Deep Impact blew a hole in comet Tempel1, and it wasn't a bomb, just a spacecraft. If you know of unsuccessful attempts to bomb meteors, do share, won't you?
My (limited, I admit) understanding of the concept of using nukes to take out an incoming asteroid is that they would break up a world-shattering superstone into a world-thrilling display of shooting stars. If the rocks are small enough, they burn up in the atmosphere. And even if the rocks remaining don't completely disintegrate in the sky, their impact on the ground, while causing loss of life in particular, will be so limited as to not cause loss of life in general.
And, respecting the FP's request that we avoid REM lyrics, I offer "I wanna be a space cowboy".
Because you vote for so many offices at one time! A friend of mine in the states said he voted for 40 different offices, from president to local sherrif - took him about 15 minutes. Up here in Canada, we only have multiple votes for municipal elections, and that's usually about 4 ballots - mayor, councillor, school trustee, and hydro trustee. Takes about 2 minutes.
Obviously if you have to tally 40 different sets of ballots, it's going to take a long time, and so there was a desire to automate the process. Why not just have president, senator, and congressman on that second Tuesday, and move the other stuff to other days? Then you can realistically tally the votes and still have a decision by morning.
Well, up here in the Great White North, we use paper exclusively. Here's how the system works:
When the ballot boxes are opened, the returning officer counts the ballots. However, each party (of which we have four major, and many fringe) can have a 'scrutineer' present. These scrutineers can examine and dispute ballots, but they also watch the validity of the entire process. Stuffing ballots or removing them is pretty difficult.
I haven't always been happy with the outcome of our elections (the last government fell after a huge scandal regarding advertising contracts that got funnelled back into party coffers), but I've always been pretty confident the process is clean.
I agree completely that a competent instructor helps. I'm trying to learn MS-SQL in an office where no one is an expert. My basic queries work fine, but when I try to add something extra, and have to refer to the documentation, I find, to my dismay, that the syntax in the Help files is completely different than the syntax I need to make things work. For example, it took me hours to figure out that if I want to use, say, COUNT DISTINCT, it has to be the first field in the SELECT statement. It doesn't say that anywhere in the documentation, or in the examples MS provides. (Yes, I know it's MS, so I shouldn't be surprised..) A good instructor would have caught that immediately.
I'm actually off to a VBA course next week, and I'm looking forward to it.
We run Win2000 PC's hooked up to an AS-400 at my office of roughly 400 peons. I work in analysis, and I have lots of reports that need to be copied to other locations on a daily basis. I wrote DOS batch files to take care of that.
One day, my PC won't open any files. The mouse works, the cursor moves around the screen, but nothing happens when you try to open the file. I call my sysadmin. She arrives, and asks "What seems to be the problem?".
I tell her I can't open anything, even my batch files. Her response "What's a batch file?".
Thanks for being gracious enough to admit your error. And, having checked the link you cited, Moody's says there were 45 instances of firms reneging on their commercial paper in the last 28 years. It also says that they exited in "orderly fashion", and that there were no "appreciable" losses to investors. No self-respecting money market manager would put a sizeable fraction of his portfolio in any single entity (save government paper). So, even in two or three firms defaulted, the balance of your money is protected, and the normal result is that the yield on your money will drop for that time period, but your principal will be protected.
I'm glad to see that at 16, and with the experience of zero market cycles, you feel confident in dismissing other people's assessments. Those of us who have been around a bit, and know that human nature doesn't change, are more than ready to accept your money (from your bad and poorly informed investment strategy) as 'tuition fees'.
Please mod this up. I've already posted, so I can't. But this post accurately encapsulates what's happening in the markets. I have managed a low 7 figure account for my wife's family for the last 12 years. I missed the wild ride at the end of the 90's because I didn't trust it, but the good news is I maintained my capital. I bought gold, oil, and money markets in 2000, and they have all done well for me.
I also agree it's probably going to take another few years before stocks are a good investment - say, 2012-2015 - and we're going to need a major market dump before that happens. As one market analyst remarked some 30 years ago "You can't breathe in all the time; at some point, you have to exhale". It's just so with markets - the cycles the poster above referred to are the result of new technologies changing societies and markets, and then a sort of 'resting period' while they digest all those changes. The bull market from 1916-1929? Society was investing in cars, telephones, and radio. A bear market while that was digested. The bull market from 1949-1966? Television, jet travel, mainframe computing. Then a pause from 1966 to 1982 while they were digested. The bull market from 1982 to 2000? PC's, internet, cheap telecoms, broadband cable, etc., etc. We're still digesting those changes.
My guess is the next boom will be fueled by major advances in biotechnology, natural language speech recognition and synthesis, and, of course, pr0n and anally implanted RFID's.
"Also keep in mind that money market funds can go down. Say you buy one that represents a selection of normally reliable stocks and then the stock market declines as a whole (like it has been recently). Money market funds are generally a good choice, but you still have to consider overall market behavior if you aren't interested in long-term investing."
Please don't give people financial advice until you learn something. Money market funds do NOT invest in stocks. They invest in various short term financial loans (T-bills, commercial paper, etc.). They NEVER go down in value - they are usually priced on a par value of $10/unit, and you get your $10/unit back (unless there's been a complete financial meltdown), plus whatever interest has accrued. That interest is usually paid monthly, and usually (if you select the DRIP option) starts compounding for you.
Please don't give financial advice to people. Anyone can open an account with any of the major brokerage firms (Waterhouse, Schwab, etc.) with about $1,000, and put that into any of the many money market funds available. Be sure to buy a "no load fund". They will pay the current 90 day rate (just under 5%), which I'm sure is more than the rate you get on your "normal" account. You can usually get access to your funds in 3 business days or less.
"How do you advertise the other ~90% of your catalog?"
The following snips are from Slate's recent article on the long tail:
"At Slate, our inventory is our articles. We publish 20 or so stories every weekday, but we also have a backlog of about 33,000 pieces in our archives. Because those stories are freely available to our readers, a chunk of our traffic each day comes not from our "hits"--current pieces that are promoted on our home page, which typically draw tens of thousands of readers--but from older pieces with narrower appeal. "
"Why did the piece pull in such consistent numbers? Google. When readers type "Girls Gone Wild" into Google's search box--seeking intellectual succor, no doubt--Levy's piece is the fourth hit. The story here, of course, is not that Levy's dispatches got 2,354 hits last Tuesday; Slate as a whole pulled in about 1.9 million hits that day. The story is that that traffic was free--we paid for the piece years ago, and we didn't expend any additional man-hours last week assigning, editing, or producing it. That means Levy's dispatches provided 2,354 chances for our advertisers to reach our readers--and pay us for the privilege of doing so--without costing us a thing. "
Whole article is here: http://www.slate.com/id/2146301/
How interesting that of your three examples, not one is a logical fallacy. They are wrong, yes, but not illogical.
A logical fallacy goes along the lines of "Snowball is a pig" "Snowball is white" "Therefore, all pigs are white"
to use one very common example. There are many others.
"People who use academic terms out of context, without knowing how wrong they are, look like morons."
Oh please. You pay the cable company to deliver the signal. The ads are designed to pay for the content.
And while many ads are crap and of zero interest to me - feminine hygiene products, for example - there are ads that make me laugh, and there are ads that actually provide information to me, such as a new restaurant opening or a movie trailer. Now if this technology could be used to find out what type of ads interest me, and the whole broadcasting team - TiVo, cable, and the networks - could work together so that only ads that are likely to entertain or interest me show up - well, then, that would make the whole thing work better, wouldn't it?
Of course, you do have the choice of watching subscription only services like HBO today. But that's rather expensive for many. I don't mind putting up with a few commercials to watch South Park for free.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's hope they include the scene where Kirk finds Bones and Scotty snorting dilithium crystals down in the engine room....
Very exciting, yes, but... will it run Linux?
Anally injected RFIDs
Well, you qualify as a complete moron, and so insults are warranted. There is a huge difference between "money market funds" and "equity funds", such as Fidelity's Magellan, and even the rawest neophyte financial advisor knows that. You don't have to tell me that equity funds can decrease in value; as a licensed broker, I know that quite well. When you throw around terms you don't understand, and then use the Nixon-esque "I misspoke", you fully deserve any opprobrium and calumny I can find.
DON'T GIVE PEOPLE FINANCIAL ADVICE UNTIL YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT, BECAUSE YOU CAN DO THEM REAL HARM!
The last one that came close was, IIRC, 1.5 km long. You're saying that 10 or 20 nukes couldn't reduce that to a pile of rubble? As for all the energy hitting the earth - why does it necessarily have to turn into heat? Some of it surely has to perturb the earth's orbit, minutely.
Finally "not to mention that the numerious "rubble pile" astreriods and comets are fantastically resistent (read completely immune) to this sort of effect." And we know this how? Deep Impact blew a hole in comet Tempel1, and it wasn't a bomb, just a spacecraft. If you know of unsuccessful attempts to bomb meteors, do share, won't you?
What are you? Some kind of cheese-eating Scientologist?
And, respecting the FP's request that we avoid REM lyrics, I offer "I wanna be a space cowboy".
" In a pervese variation"
"It's not that the average product of the US public education system's"
"Fortunately we have the Internet with places like slashdot, where everybody's bad grammar and spelling can shine"
Quite.
Of course, they've been promising that baby for five years now...
Obviously if you have to tally 40 different sets of ballots, it's going to take a long time, and so there was a desire to automate the process. Why not just have president, senator, and congressman on that second Tuesday, and move the other stuff to other days? Then you can realistically tally the votes and still have a decision by morning.
When the ballot boxes are opened, the returning officer counts the ballots. However, each party (of which we have four major, and many fringe) can have a 'scrutineer' present. These scrutineers can examine and dispute ballots, but they also watch the validity of the entire process. Stuffing ballots or removing them is pretty difficult.
I haven't always been happy with the outcome of our elections (the last government fell after a huge scandal regarding advertising contracts that got funnelled back into party coffers), but I've always been pretty confident the process is clean.
Is that where you order every piece by mail? Is that because
hardware doesn't easily fit through the tubes?
I'm actually off to a VBA course next week, and I'm looking forward to it.
Oh, goody, lots of internets! Can someone send me one? I already have my own tube.
One day, my PC won't open any files. The mouse works, the cursor moves around the screen, but nothing happens when you try to open the file. I call my sysadmin. She arrives, and asks "What seems to be the problem?".
I tell her I can't open anything, even my batch files. Her response "What's a batch file?".
Now please bend over for your new RFID...
I also agree it's probably going to take another few years before stocks are a good investment - say, 2012-2015 - and we're going to need a major market dump before that happens. As one market analyst remarked some 30 years ago "You can't breathe in all the time; at some point, you have to exhale". It's just so with markets - the cycles the poster above referred to are the result of new technologies changing societies and markets, and then a sort of 'resting period' while they digest all those changes. The bull market from 1916-1929? Society was investing in cars, telephones, and radio. A bear market while that was digested. The bull market from 1949-1966? Television, jet travel, mainframe computing. Then a pause from 1966 to 1982 while they were digested. The bull market from 1982 to 2000? PC's, internet, cheap telecoms, broadband cable, etc., etc. We're still digesting those changes.
My guess is the next boom will be fueled by major advances in biotechnology, natural language speech recognition and synthesis, and, of course, pr0n and anally implanted RFID's.
Please don't give people financial advice until you learn something. Money market funds do NOT invest in stocks. They invest in various short term financial loans (T-bills, commercial paper, etc.). They NEVER go down in value - they are usually priced on a par value of $10/unit, and you get your $10/unit back (unless there's been a complete financial meltdown), plus whatever interest has accrued. That interest is usually paid monthly, and usually (if you select the DRIP option) starts compounding for you.
Please don't give financial advice to people. Anyone can open an account with any of the major brokerage firms (Waterhouse, Schwab, etc.) with about $1,000, and put that into any of the many money market funds available. Be sure to buy a "no load fund". They will pay the current 90 day rate (just under 5%), which I'm sure is more than the rate you get on your "normal" account. You can usually get access to your funds in 3 business days or less.
Where are the blipverts? And how is Max, anyway?
Guess I'll have to take your word for it.
The following snips are from Slate's recent article on the long tail:
"At Slate, our inventory is our articles. We publish 20 or so stories every weekday, but we also have a backlog of about 33,000 pieces in our archives. Because those stories are freely available to our readers, a chunk of our traffic each day comes not from our "hits"--current pieces that are promoted on our home page, which typically draw tens of thousands of readers--but from older pieces with narrower appeal. "
"Why did the piece pull in such consistent numbers? Google. When readers type "Girls Gone Wild" into Google's search box--seeking intellectual succor, no doubt--Levy's piece is the fourth hit. The story here, of course, is not that Levy's dispatches got 2,354 hits last Tuesday; Slate as a whole pulled in about 1.9 million hits that day. The story is that that traffic was free--we paid for the piece years ago, and we didn't expend any additional man-hours last week assigning, editing, or producing it. That means Levy's dispatches provided 2,354 chances for our advertisers to reach our readers--and pay us for the privilege of doing so--without costing us a thing. " Whole article is here: http://www.slate.com/id/2146301/
A logical fallacy goes along the lines of "Snowball is a pig" "Snowball is white" "Therefore, all pigs are white" to use one very common example. There are many others.
"People who use academic terms out of context, without knowing how wrong they are, look like morons."
Quite.
And while many ads are crap and of zero interest to me - feminine hygiene products, for example - there are ads that make me laugh, and there are ads that actually provide information to me, such as a new restaurant opening or a movie trailer. Now if this technology could be used to find out what type of ads interest me, and the whole broadcasting team - TiVo, cable, and the networks - could work together so that only ads that are likely to entertain or interest me show up - well, then, that would make the whole thing work better, wouldn't it?
Of course, you do have the choice of watching subscription only services like HBO today. But that's rather expensive for many. I don't mind putting up with a few commercials to watch South Park for free.