rkbabang

After Obama goes on TV and explains why America has no choice but to go to war and pulls on all the patriotism strings that where installed in every American's brain during their 13+ years of government indoctrination. 60+ percent of Americans (including many here on this list) will agree. Once again there will be American flag stickers on every pickup truck and the military will have a field day recruiting all the lower class kids right out of high school. Talk of bringing back the draft will turn serious. While no one is paying attention to anything but the war government at home will increase in size and scope in all kinds of ways.... Even many years later after the unmitigated disaster is years in the past, the veterans will be honored as some type of heroes for their "service". It's the same old story. The same old song and dance. We will be fooled again. --Eric Yeah but there has to be incentive. Middle class has gotten very rich and much better informed over the past 90 years. I cannot see an incentive in the immenent future for attacking a large country. It would completly destroy the economy, and there are enough liberals to block this. I can see how the US can attack some shitty small country, but not another first world economy. There were huge incentives before world war 1 and 2. You dont have that now. Maybe if the US falls of the cliff tho, but then it seems more that China has incentives to attack the US. But then you have to explain to your people why its good to get half your country nuked. And im not sure if it can get bad enough in the US to make it worthwhile for china. Did you know 2500 nukes were exploded between world war 2 and now? Both countries have super advanced stealth bombers, and it would be a question of time before one got through and manages to nuke like 8 huge cities in a row. You didnt have that in world war 2 (except for japan, and see what happened there). This would also make land on land battles vs two huge countries impossible. And once you win the war you would have a giant problem supressing all the guerilla attacks and rebuilding your economy. So there would have to be a waaaay larger incentive to start a war now then 60-80 years ago. All true of course. I'm just always skeptical of "it can't happen here", "it can't happen again", "things are different now" type arguments. Technology changes, weapons change, but for the most part, people don't change. I bet the average American thinks we can wipe the floor with China and wouldn't need much convincing if national pride was at stake. I hope you're right.

After Obama goes on TV and explains why America has no choice but to go to war and pulls on all the patriotism strings that where installed in every American's brain during their 13+ years of government indoctrination. 60+ percent of Americans (including many here on this list) will agree. Once again there will be American flag stickers on every pickup truck and the military will have a field day recruiting all the lower class kids right out of high school. Talk of bringing back the draft will turn serious. While no one is paying attention to anything but the war government at home will increase in size and scope in all kinds of ways.... Even many years later after the unmitigated disaster is years in the past, the veterans will be honored as some type of heroes for their "service". It's the same old story. The same old song and dance. We will be fooled again. --Eric

Thanks, I'm adding that to my to-read list.

I believe all of the above (with the exception of possible extinction) were widely believed before both of the major world wars in the last century. Agreed. Don't overestimate the decisions of humans in large groups. I agree. The other popular opinion immediately prior to the first world war was that there was too much wealth, trade, and economic dependencies between the various countries of Europe to go to war. That the governments would never risk killing the goose that had been laying the golden eggs. This was all true of course, but they decided to kill the goose anyway.* Never underestimate the desire of the political classes to actually get to use all of these toys that they've spent all these years building. *EDIT: Maybe they didn't actually kill the goose, but they did give him a damn good beating, as well as destroying almost every egg it had laid up to that point.

I believe all of the above (with the exception of possible extinction) were widely believed before both of the major world wars in the last century.

Not everyone here, but some of us are Dawkins and Rothbard fans.

I read that a few weeks ago. Not as good as the Shining, but I enjoyed it.

A Major Wall Street Bank Just Initiated Coverage On Bitcoin And Identified A Fair Value "We believe Bitcoin can become a major means of payment for e-commerce and may emerge as a serious competitor to traditional money transfer providers. As a medium of exchange, Bitcoin has clear potential for growth, in our view." -- David Woo, FX and Rates Strategist at Bank of America/Merill Lynch.

Almost done with Antifragile by Nassim Taleb. I highly recommend it. http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Gain-Disorder/dp/1400067820 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bb/Antifragile.png

+1 +100 Finding a good charity is not an easy thing to do and if you go and actually meet some of the people that they are helping it can be an eye opener. I won't go too much into detail, because I don't like to talk about what I do in this area, but lets just say that most people in the US that are considered in "poverty" have bigger TVs than I do and more video games than my kids do. I have been concentrating on Haiti (The person I give the money to, goes there personally to distribute food) where I believe I get the most bang for my buck and help people who actually need it. I have no desire to enable people to more easily live with the consequences of their bad decisions. Unfortunately my tax dollars are doing that already.

A mostly bullish Merrill Lynch forecast report "we’re seeing a surge in U.S. business and technological innovation that has the potential to revitalize the economy and spark another long-lived bull market." A Transforming World

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. A good illustration of why anonymity is a valuable asset while one is still alive. Being rich is desirable, it gives you options even if in the end you don't exercise them. Being rich and famous, not so much. He clearly understood that if he were to start giving away millions while alive that he would have to deal with the publicity and envious pricks like the author of the above article second guessing his every move. IMHO, he made the right call.

Something else no one is mentioning is that the above story explicitly states why he tried to look poor: “Jack went out of his way to look poor, partly because he didn’t want to be badgered by people who wanted money" Modesty isn't the only reason one would not want to let others know he was rich. Not wanting to deal with the envy and greed of others is a perfectly legitimate (and selfish) reason to do so. Maybe he was a saint, or maybe he just thought most people suck.

I'm not a bitcoin bull, I've been watching bitcoin for years, but I have never owned any. If I did own some bitcoin right now, I'd probably sell some now and hold onto some to see what happens. Let's look at the potential, not what is likely, but what is the best possible case. That would be bitcoin being used for almost all human trade and replacing all other currencies. Almost every person in the world using bitcoin for every transaction, all businesses using it and reporting in it and paying their employees with it. Stocks trading on all the major exchanges priced in bitcoin, etc.... The world GDP is somewhere around $70T-$85T depending on how you calculate it. So to trade that amount with only 21M bitcoins each bitcoin would have to be worth at least $4M, probably a hell of a lot more. What will the world GDP be in 10 years? Even after this happens holding "cash" (i.e. bitcoins) will be a sufficient savings strategy for the average person as there will typically be a yearly deflation over time as the world economy grows. Of course none of this is the likely outcome. So, my prediction is that in 10 years 1 bitcoin will be worth somewhere between $0 and $100M.

Maybe I'm not understanding, but if you are going to give away 100% anyway, does it matter if you compounded it all and then gave it away or gave away your whole life? Aren't we just choosing who benefits--people now or people later? Is there a big difference between now-people and later-people? I'm not sure I particularly care which time period of people I'm helping, but perhaps there is some reason for preference for now-people. I guess you could argue affecting people now is better since they can influence more people, but isn't that similar to the lost-compounding of money that you have given away? (In other words, does the helping of people now help more over the long term than waiting and giving more away? That seems very hard to answer, and would dramatically depend on what you were giving to.) I think it is much better to give $190M away when you are 98 than it is to give $50M away when you are 75.

My very limited understanding of the mining process is that yes to both. You can think of the mining as the processing of the transactions. Obviously this processing takes more processing power as the number of transaction grows. When they successfully process a block they get issued a number of bitcoins. This is why it is decentralized and no big central data center is needed to process all of the transactions, people all over the world are competing with each other to do it. And if you take down one or two miners it doesn't effect the system. If you created a company called e-coin and you started a digital currency where you did all the processing with your own servers and charged a fee per transaction, someone could kill the whole system by shutting you down. Or the system would just die if your company went bankrupt. With bitcoin once it was released into the wild no one owns it or controls it and anyone can get in on the competition to process the transactions.

Just out of curiosity for the tech savy people: why has mining gotten harder over the last few years? My understanding is that it is getting more difficult by design. It was designed to get progressively harder to solve a block the more bitcoins are in circulation and also less bitcoins are issued overtime. There will never be more than a certain number of bitcoins (21M I think), but there will also never be 21M bitcoins. This is because as the number in circulation gets closer to the maximum, the mining gets harder and the number of bitcoins issued gets smaller. It will eventually take an enormous amount of processing to earn a tiny fraction of a bitcoin. At the beginning you could have mined with your PC's CPU and earned bitcoins (but they were only worth pennies each), then you needed a video card, then multiple video cards, then FPGAs, now ASICs, and even if you have an ASIC board you are competing with the facility in the above link which has many times the number of boards and each one running much faster than yours (due to the liquid cooling). In general the price per bitcoin has gone up as the cost of mining them has gone up. And the cost of mining them is going to continue to go up, by design. Basically the more total processing put into mining bitcoins the harder they get to mine. From this paper: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System "To compensate for increasing hardware speed and varying interest in running nodes over time, the proof-of-work difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of blocks per hour. If they're generated too fast, the difficulty increases."

One thing is for sure, it is too late to try to mine bitcoins. Take a look at this mining facility in Hong Kong owned by a company called ASIC Miner. It looks like a supercomputer facility with racks and racks of mining ASIC boards submerged in some kind of cooling liquid from 3M which is piped up to giant radiators and fans on the roof. Visit of ASICMINER's Immersion Cooling Mining Facility

It's the day before Thanksgiving everyone is liquidating their portfolio to raise cash for black-Friday shopping.

You can book a flight on an airplane or a spaceship. You pay for a college education or buy a sandwich. I'm sure a year from now you will be able to use them in more places than now.

I first started investing in 1996 after graduating from college and from '96 to 2000 I invested mainly in tech stocks, Cisco, Texas Instruments, AMCC, ADI, etc, etc,. I made a lot, then I lost most of it. Since then my biggest "mistakes" have all been selling way too early. I seem to do this again and again. Some examples: I held MIDD with a cost basis of about $8. Most of it got called away at $80, because I wrote a covered call, and I didn't buy it back. I was waiting for it to go under $80 again and it didn't. I had Netflix with a cost basis of $11 and sold it around $60. Then also with Netflix, I had a small amount of Jan 2014 calls that I sold for about breakeven and they would have been worth 6X only a month later, and they are worth many times more today. I bought SAM in the $20s and sold around $115. These are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head, there are many more.

What makes you say that? If you buy one of their cheaper laptops, yes, but that is true with a cheap laptop from Samsung or Acer as well. They are all plastic and you will find the USB ports will stop working as something inside snaps off after you've used it for 6 months and don't dare drop them, etc. If you buy one of Dell's aluminum laptops they are very well built and durable. Yes, Dell loads their machines with all kinds of crap that you need to spend a day removing from your system, but I've seen this with Acer and HP as well. The best thing to do is format the Harddrive and install the OS fresh no matter which brand you buy.

I like to build my own desktop systems and then use my ipad for a tablet, but I don't really travel for business so the iPad is just for web surfing and email. What I would look for if I was you would be one device that can do everything. Like one of these from Dell: http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-12-9q33/pd They look well-built, I used to have a business class Dell laptop made out of aluminum and it was very well built, this looks like similar construction. Get one with an i7 processor and 8GB of RAM so that it will last you a long time without you wanting to upgrade and get the docking station so that you can just plug it in at your desk and use a large monitor, desktop keyboard, & mouse.

As of right now: 70% BAC (Calls & Common), increasing daily lately. This was 60% not too long ago. 9% AIG (Warrants) 5% or less possitions in: BRK-B FRFHF HOTR AAPL SD (Calls) MNGGF MIDD SYTE This excludes: My 401k plan which I've been contributing to for 2 years at my present company and is 100% invested in mutual funds and would be about 2% of the above portfolio. Some real estate I own. About 50% equity in my house and I own 50% interest in 20 acres of buildable land. I've owned this land for about 15 years and I'm not sure what the present market value is. A large amount of restricted stock in company I work for. This would be about a 25% position if included in my above portfolio, but the majority of it isn't yet vested.

TCU are good and patient people. they must be as they employed my eldest child for quite a while!! ;D That's cool. I don't know how they are to work for, but I've had my checking account with them for 2 years and have been very happy with them.