rkbabang

Seriously? Can you provide any substantive evidence of your claim? I can't provide any proof of that, but it certainly appears that way from the things they say and support. I tend to agree more with republicans than democrats when it comes to taxes and social programs, but the racism, homophobia, hatred of foreigners/immigrants, war mongering (although Obama seems to be trying to outdo them in this regard), religious intolerance (for any religion other than extreme Jesus worship), really gets to me. I have nothing to go on except what I hear Republicans I know saying and their presidential candidates, etc. Democrats are a bunch of utopian socialists with an unrealistic view of what problems government is capable of solving, but in general they are decent people not likely to look at you funny or treat you differently because you're white and your adopted son is black, or you're a gay male who is walking hand in hand down the street with the love of your life, or you're a Muslim, or you don't speak English. Etc, etc, etc, etc, etc,........ You can't provide any proof so you go on to state your opinion as fact. Amazing how labeling those who don't agree with you as intolerant just highlights your intolerance. Maybe they look at you funny and treat you differently not because your white and your adopted son is black, but because your an "____", (keeping it family friendly), and you would still be one even if your adopted son was white. Easier to blame things on appearances than your own character. I admit that it is my opionion based on what I see and people I've talked with. I'm not sure I wrote anything that wasn't "family friendly", sort of adds to my observational data.

I have run into all of those things personally in various people I know. Although obviously not all republicans are racists and hate gays, or are super religious, it's just that of the large minority of Americans who fit this description most are republicans. But when it comes to the extreme flag-worshiping and war mongering, I'm not sure I've ever met a republican who doesn't fit that mold of extreme nationalistic pride, which I find almost equally appalling. I've been accused of "hating America" or "Blaming America first" more times than I can count when discussing the wars. That's from republicans, the democrats are of course completely silent about the slaughter because it is now their guy ordering it.

Seriously? Can you provide any substantive evidence of your claim? I can't provide any proof of that, but it certainly appears that way from the things they say and support. I tend to agree more with republicans than democrats when it comes to taxes and social programs, but the racism, homophobia, hatred of foreigners/immigrants, war mongering (although Obama seems to be trying to outdo them in this regard), religious intolerance (for any religion other than extreme Jesus worship), really gets to me. I have nothing to go on except what I hear Republicans I know saying and their presidential candidates, etc. Democrats are a bunch of utopian socialists with an unrealistic view of what problems government is capable of solving, but in general they are decent people not likely to look at you funny or treat you differently because you're white and your adopted son is black, or you're a gay male who is walking hand in hand down the street with the love of your life, or you're a Muslim, or you don't speak English. Etc, etc, etc, etc, etc,........

But no reporting or journalism ever is. There is always a million different ways to say the same thing. A million different ways to frame any event. A choice of which photos to display, etc. The way one chooses to do so is always colored by their prejudices even when they are making a conscience effort to be neutral. Every human being is biased in ways they don't even realize consciously. So this is a problem that is impossible to solve, yet the cable news networks have problems above and beyond this sub-conciseness bias. They are all consciously and intentionally biased in either the left or the right direction as a corporate policy. None of them even make an attempt to be neutral. And none of them have a libertarian/anti-government/pro-individual bias, either intentionally or otherwise.

I don't see why people get so worked up about guns. No one wants to talk about it, but we all know who is really behind violence in the US. Bill Gates. http://i.imgur.com/47D7zGq.png

Not that catastrophic. Mythbusters did an episode on this. They pressurized a plane and shot a hole in the fuselage. Nothing. They blew out an entire window. A lot of wind, but nothing catastrophic. Then they blew a big hole with some explosives and it was quite impressive...very catastrophic. A few bullet holes or even an entire window isn't a big deal, if this were not the case there is no way anyone (pilots, air marshals, or anyone else) would ever be allowed to bring a firearm onto a plane. If you were really worried about that though, you could load up with frangible ammo. --Eric

The only thing I find insane and retarded is that Byrne isn't allowed to carry his Glock onto a plane. When I ride in a car, take a bus, ride the subway, etc. I can carry my Glock. When I get on a plane I'm disarmed by my own government and at the mercy of 3 guys with razor blades. That is insane. That said, I am not a CEO of a public company and even I realize that not intending to hurt anyone is no protection from a government hurting you if you don't follow their insane laws. I wouldn't carry my Glock in a gym bag and try to get on a plane. Which is the reason why I don't like to fly. That and I'm not a big fan of body cavity searches. Where guns are outlawed, terrorists need only boxcutters. http://web.archive.org/web/20020803090525im_/http://rkbabang.com/images/rkbabanner3.gif :)

Not just this board, but the internet as a whole. As Cory Doctorow wrote in "Eastern Standard Tribe" you can be part of a community based on any number of things which you have in common with other people, not just where you happen to be physically located. In fact you can easily find others throughout the world with whom you have significantly more in common with than your neighbors in any number of different ways. You can be part of many different communities for different reasons with people who are all physically located all over the world. The whole current theory of the nation-state (marking off areas of land and calling the people a 'nation') is falling further and further into obsolescence every year in proportion to the ease of communication and the network effect linking us all together. (and good riddance to it).

Giofranchi, I agree. I don't know what I'd do without my audiobooks. I started listening to audiobooks in my car maybe 12 years ago or more. I used to get them on tape (then CD) from the library even way back before I had an mp3 player. Up until about a year ago I spent an average of 3 hrs per day in my car, now I spend about 1hr/day in my car. Plus I listen when I do yard work, or workout, etc... I can't tell you how many books I've listened to over the years, too many to count. I enjoy them so much that I've never thought of my commute as wasted time. I always have 3 books in progress at all times, one audiobook, one on my nook, and one dead tree version. I probably only watch on average about 2 hours of TV per week and that is a Netflix movie not anything showing on TV itself. If it weren't for the wife and kids I wouldn't be subscribing to cable at all.

Trading again!

No because of Roe versus Wade, http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittTheImpactOfLegalized2001.pdf And/or the decrease in lead exposure during childhood. http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--MITcvOw0QQ/UO0GUwa1UGI/AAAAAAAAguY/VFpNow1JNfs/s400/Lead_Crime.gif from: Strong case that childhood lead leads to a lot more youthful adult violent crime, teen pregnancies and IQ loss

The big oil, gas, and energy companies are always on my watch list. For instance I bought XOM in 2010 for $59 and sold in 2012 for $88. I've made money in the past on CHK as well and I might be buying now if I didn't have better ideas. The need for energy isn't going anywhere and will only be increasing as the developing world develops. When these companies go on sale they are worth picking up.

I'm not actually convinced that any facts about the crime rate make much of an impact on consumers' decisions about installing an alarm (or taking any other sort of defensive measure such as not allowing your kid to walk to school or buying a hand gun). The decisions get made based on the perception of risk rather than any objective measure of risk. In many cases, it's truly an irrational, emotional decision. Many of my friends and colleagues have monitored alarm systems that cost anywhere from $300-$500 annually. Unless your community has a demonstrably high break-and-enter rate, that's basically wasted money. Canada's national break-and-enter rate is about 700 per 100,000 annually, implying that on average there's a very small probability of your house being hit. If your house does get hit, most people have basically nothing of interest to the crack-head perpetrators (ie, maybe a small amount of cash, some booze, or a couple bits of electronics), so your losses to theft are likely going to be small in any case. And if your losses do actually amount to something significant due to accompanying vandalism, then you just make an insurance claim. So, in essence, every year my friends and colleagues are incurring a 100% probability of losing $300-500 to mitigate a 1% probability of losing a couple thousand bucks. Crime rate be damned! This is true unless the crime rate was very high and on the increase, people would perceive the danger, constantly hearing about friends, neighbors, or family members being burglarized, and would be much more likely to buy an alarm system. The point you made about insurance is exactly what my wife told ADT when they kept calling us after we bought our house (they previous owners had the alarm monitored). The guy was very pushy asking her what if your home alone and someone breaks in? She told him "I own guns I'll be fine". He paused and said "but what if your not home", my wife just responded "that's what insurance is for". He finally hung up. In general I don't like to do business with companies who employ pushy salesmen with appeal to fear tactics even if I was inclined to purchase a service. I

Unfortunately (for home alarm companies) crime has been on a downward spiral for almost 40 years. EDIT: It would be more accurate to say "over 30 years" than "almost 40". http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Property_Crime_Rates_in_the_United_States.svg

You can tell with a proper MRI study. Certainly how well a sociopath functions in society is determined by environment. There are definitely degrees to this dysfunction as well as vast differences on how it is expressed in different people. The sociopath or psychopath who becomes a senator or president is behaving differently than the serial killer who kills people and eats them. True the president may be killing far more people by proxy, but the serial killer is doing it himself personally. I wonder is this just different manifestations of the same dysfunction expressed differently because of environment or do these people have a different severity of the same dysfunction, or a different problem all-together?

What on earth is wrong with being motivated by monetary gain? I am motivated by monetary gain, WEB is as well. What makes something either moral or not moral has nothing to do with it being motivated by monetary gain or not. If someone robs me and gives the loot to charity it is still immoral even though it wasn't motivated by monetary gain. If someone invests my money for me and makes me rich while charging me a fee it is moral even though it was completely motivated by monetary gain. I know it is a small point, but I see this "money is evil" meme all over the place, it is discouraging to see it even on an investing discussion board.

I believe your conjecture is largely correct. Power doesn't just corrupt, it also attracts the corrupt and the corruptible like flies to manure. Fearless dominance and the U.S. presidency: Implications of psychopathic personality traits for successful and unsuccessful political leadership. Just do what I do, I assume that they are all psychopaths and/or sociopaths (I'm most likely correct much more often than not) and I don't encourage them by voting.

I scored 16 out of 33. It said that 16 is below average. It was probably higher than it otherwise would have been, because of my "strongly agree" answers to questions about driving fast cars and liking roller coasters. As well as thinking I'd be OK in a dangerous job because I can make quick decisions. I wonder if they weigh those questions the same as the one about not being concerned about an animal being injured or killed? Of course for the test to be valid at all you would need to tell the truth on the questions, so it doesn't control for lying psychopaths.

If you go here, this is all the info sent to the RSS reader: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/.xml/?type=rss I don't see the authors name there, so I don't think the board's software is sending the author to the RSS readers.

The Church of Technical Analysis. Telling the future by the readings of the Sacred Charts. :) Just poking a little fun. Welcome to the board Phaceliacapital.

Agreed. I'm sure they started working on iPhone6 (or more likely iPhone 5S) as soon as the iPhone5 was released. Both long before that. I'm not sure about software or other hardware, but I know semiconductors. The development time from concept to product release on something like the A6 chip in the iPhone5 is anywhere from 12-24 months depending on how much is carried over from the generation before. The A7 is probably nearing completion, but there are groups in Apple working on the A8 and even A9 right now. I'm sure the A10 is in the concept stage. I wouldn't be surprised if there are already people working on the iPhone7. If you count chip development then there are certainly people already working on the chips that will go into the next 3 iPhones maybe the next 4. These things aren't hobbled together in 6 months.

Exactly. And just because someone is internally testing something called iphone6 doesn't mean that there won't be an iPhone 5S released much earlier. This "iPhone6" they are testing could be nothing but a software emulator or it could be a hardware test board as big as a PC motherboard at this point loaded with multiple processors and FPGAs to emulate what will be on the next i-chip. This isn't the same as a sighting of someone with a market-ready prototype, this really doesn't mean much of anything.

so, I was thinking about this some more (it was bothering me as I expected general outperformance from the board)--the graph is deceiving. It looks like a normal distribution, but the y-axis (in this case) is not linear, it is <0, 0-10 (gap of 10), 10-25 (gap of 15), 25-50 (gap of 25), 50+ (gap of 25), so I bet the underlying data are not centered around the S&P TR, but a bit above it. Admittedly it is a poorly done poll indeed. I did this because I didn't realize that it was possible to add more than 5 choices, but I see by your compounding poll that it is possible. I thought I was limited to 5 categories and I wanted to capture negative returns as well as really high returns. This left only 3 categories to work with in the middle. I broke them up best I could. Had I known I could create more options I would have done a much finer granularity. These types of polls are not scientific anyway. They are self selected in at least two ways. One is that we choose to be members of this board, and two we need to choose to answer the poll. Also someone could lie or estimate mistakenly when answering. They are fun though. And I agree with your analysis. There are 60 people (right now) in the 10-25% category which contains the 16% S&P500 return, but there are more people in the categories above that (55 people) than there are in the categories below that (46 people), and as you pointed out the higher categories have larger ranges than the lower ones, so it stands to reason that the center is on the higher end of that middle category, not the lower. Also, I apologize for the offensive looking results using 5 categories produces. Like being flipped off every time you look at it.

Congrats, I will need couple of this. I could use a couple myself. I'd have to do 200% 7 years in a row to be a Billionaire. Difficult, but they say the first $Billion is the hardest.

I'm not answering in the poll because I don't know. I've been using Fidelity's "your rate of return" feature at years end since 2009 and keeping track: 70.9% in 2009 21.2% in 2010 12.7% in 2011 9.4% in 2012 The problem is that Fidelity will only go back 24 months and I've been managing my own portfolio since about 1997. I have a text file with every transaction I've ever made in it, I just need some software to enter it all into. Anyone have any suggestions? I've thought about a spreadsheet, but what about splits, dividends, and symbols which no longer exist.