rkbabang

I'm actually starting to doubt my recollection on that fact. I thought I found his blog originally because he was posting here, but I can't find any posts by searching, I may have found it because someone else was posting about it. Regardless it is an excellent blog to follow.

Anyone who was properly prepared won't be able to vote in this poll, because they are locked into their bunkers 3 stories underground sleeping by their 2 years worth of freeze dried food. I am less prepared than Parsad. I don't have a month of food in my house. I do have a stockpile of guns and ammo though. When society collapses not only will that help protect me, but I have a feeling both guns and ammo will be worth more than their weight in gold as far as trading goes. We also have chickens, rabbits, goats and a huge garden (with the land to make it much larger), so we won't starve. You have to hand it to the Mayans for their foresight though. They were correct in that there was no need for their calendar to go past this date.

I have a small position in Mongolia Growth Group, which owns commercial real estate and an insurance company in Mongolia. The CEO is a board member here and his letters to shareholders are a good read as well as his blog where he talks a lot about emerging markets. A good book you might want to pick up is World Right Side Up: Investing Across Six Continents by Christopher Mayer. He talks about investing all over the world, he's traveled just about everywhere and gives some good suggestions in each region. He interviews CEOs and fund managers, talks about trends he sees when he visits, talks about individual companies, industries, real estate, and mutual funds/hedge funds/ETFs. For instance he mentions Mongolian Growth Group on his section about Mongolia and has quotes from his interview with its CEO Harris Kupperman. I haven't yet invested in anything as a result from reading the book (I already had my small position MNGGF before reading it), but I found it a highly interesting read.

This has got to be the mushiest thread ever on this board, complete with virtual cartoon kitten hugs. :P Yeah, you guys are an excellent group of people and smart. And this board is the most valuable discussion board on the internet (for me anyway). Thanks everyone. Now shouldn't we be auguring about taxes :( , guns :) , or the existence of god :( , or something...

I am certainly impacted by my political views, but hopefully I am still able to act rationally most of the time while making investment decisions. And I'm not always consistent, returns trump politics for me most of the time. For instance I try not to invest directly in the military industrial complex, yet I might not sell BRK or FFH just because they hold a small position in a company which I wouldn't invest in directly (like say GE). Like I said inconsistent, but I tend to skew my inconsistency toward better investment returns rather than towards politics. I know this about myself even though I'm not proud of it.

Likewise Parsad. And here's hoping you are able to partake in many lunches and late breakfasts in the new year.

You have a pretty warped view of the US I think. His mother may or may not have committed suicide (not knowing her I have no way of knowing the answer to that), but she most certainly wouldn't have been murdered. Vigilante justice is rare even when someone is to blame for an atrocity (OJ was never murdered), it is unheard of for someone to go after a murderer's mother. Also, many Americans value our freedom above almost all else, but don't walk around in fear. Don't let a rare event skew your perception of the world. Yes there are bad neighborhoods that have been completely destroyed by the welfare state combined with the war on drugs, but in general the US is a pretty safe place to be and getting safer every year. I sure hope people on this board don't let emotions drive their investment decisions the way they drive their politics. [img http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/cdn0.virgin.com/uploads/images/story/image001-16678.jpg /img] No appeal to emotion there. I was responding to the barbarous suggestion that it was a "good thing" that a woman was murdered.... err.. forget it. No one is listening.... Yep we're all just gun touting loons killin' each other, better just stay up north where your safe.

You have a pretty warped view of the US I think. His mother may or may not have committed suicide (not knowing her I have no way of knowing the answer to that), but she most certainly wouldn't have been murdered. Vigilante justice is rare even when someone is to blame for an atrocity (OJ was never murdered), it is unheard of for someone to go after a murderer's mother. Also, many Americans value our freedom above almost all else, but don't walk around in fear. Don't let a rare event skew your perception of the world. Yes there are bad neighborhoods that have been completely destroyed by the welfare state combined with the war on drugs, but in general the US is a pretty safe place to be and getting safer every year. I sure hope people on this board don't let emotions drive their investment decisions the way they drive their politics.

What about: "I am not rational, yet I make my own investment decisions" We all like to think we are rational at least "most of the time". The second option from the top would get the most votes even in a random poll of people on the street. Would it be possible to answer this poll rationally if you were not thinking rationally?

The Truecrypt solution offers a higher degree of security, from plausible deniability (as you describe) to the choice of the encryption algorithms themselves. Truecrypt allows you to select the protocols and the number of rounds etc., whereas I recall KeePass has much more limited options. Ultimately you just have to decide for yourself what level of security makes you comfortable. From your other comments today (on the shooting) I take it that you're far more untrusting of government than I am. I'm happy to keep my passwords protected with the level of protection KeePass affords. I'm not keeping any secrets that are worth protecting once someone has pulled out the gun. Mostly I'd just be embarrassed for them to see my stock picking record from last year! :) The biggest problem I see is that people are generally unaware of any security considerations and do silly things like choosing bad passwords, or reusing passwords etc. I don't really think the government will bother pulling out the guns on me either. If they want my bank account or my brokerage account they will simply ask my bank or broker for it. Corporations do what they are told. And I'm not bury-gold-in-the-back-yard-paraniod. If society ever degenerates to the point where we start wishing we had hoarded gold, food, and ammo, life is going to suck for everyone. I'd like to live on the assumption that that isn't going to happen. That said, I'd never feel very comfortable living in a city. I'm in a fairly rural area with enough land to feed my family off of it if I had to. I also have chickens and goats (and guns & ammo). So maybe I'm hedging my bets just a little, and you can't beat fresh eggs. Anyway, for passwords I'm more concerned about identity theft and hackers. With them I think making yourself a harder than average target is probably good enough. Unless you are someone that is going to be specifically targeted for some reason, just pulling yourself up so that you are not among the low hanging fruit is going to be sufficient protection. I setup keepass this weekend and got it running on my computer then my iPad using google docs. It maybe a small step down in security, but it is definitely a step up in convenience. There are always tradeoffs. Thanks for the info.

What statistics are you aware of? Violent crime was reduced in every state that liberalized its gun licensing laws in the United States over the last 25 years. The safest state VT, you don't even need a license to carry a concealed handgun. There are studies which claim that handguns are used defensively by civilians many multiples of the times they are used criminally. The statistics do show that suicide by gun goes up with availability of handguns, but not total suicide, so people are using the best and quickest method which they have available to them. Yes, it would be hard to commit a mass murder without a gun, but it would also be hard to commit a mass murder in a heavily armed society. Where guns are outlawed however it is pretty easy. You may remember a group of guys some years back killing 3000 people with a few boxcutters, by taking control of aircraft where everyone was banned by law from bringing their weapons. That is why about a month later I started selling bumper stickers which said "Where guns are outlawed, terrorists need only boxcutters". I don't run the website anymore but you can see it on the wayback machine: RKBAbang.com. And now you know where my username came from. RKBAbang stands for "RKBA!", which is the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and bang(!).

So has communications/publishing. Does the 1st amendment not cover what you write over the internet? The founders never imagined that you could write something and have it viewable by anyone on earth 5 seconds later. The revolution was won because of the fact that the colonists had access to the same weaponry as the British. This is sadly not the case anymore. The only way a government will fear its people is if the people have access to the same weapons as it does. The armed aerial drone or the attack helicopter is the modern equivalent of the mounted knight in full armor riding through the medieval village. Had the crossbow, then the firearm, never been invented we'd be living in the middle ages still today. If we don't want to go into another period of violence and stagnation what we desperately need is something to once again even up the power discrepancy between the rulers and the ruled.

I'm not an NRA member I quit about 15 years ago in disgust at their constant willingness to compromise with the gun control crowd, but I do notice that the most vile and hate filled speech is always from the direction of the victim dissarmament crowd directed at the NRA. Never in the opposite direction. Have a nice day.

Every square foot of livable space on this planet is claimed by one or more of these gangs of thugs. That's like telling a shop owner that "Vinny controls this neighborhood" and if he doesn't like paying his protection money, he should move. Only in the case of the shop owner he probably could find a different city without a strong mafia presence. No one should have a claim on your production simply because of where you are physically located. And no one anywhere has a right to tell me what I can buy, sell, produce, or use to protect myself based on where I happen to be. Of course there are more of you than there are of me (might really does make right, which is the entire basis of democracy) so until the freedom meme spreads the situation is what it is. I should also add that moving to New Hampshire a year ago was a deliberate effort to at least live in a place that was slightly more free than where I was before (Massachusetts).

In short. Yes. As we are yours. Hundreds of millions of people were killed by governments in the 20th century alone. Private crime can never equal such slaughter. You support creating a violent organization which kills millions to protect you from violence. One that steals half of everything you will ever create, to protect you from theft. Tells you what you can and can't do with your own body, what you can and can't own, how and when you can protect yourself, what you can and can't produce, what you can and can't consume, what you can and can't buy, what you can and can't sell. In theory I have no problem with you doing any of this. You should be able to do what you want. My problem is that I am not allowed to opt out of the insanity.

This is very interesting. The city I live in had a string of "swarmings" a number of years back --- vicious attacks where a gang of young guys would just beat the hell out of someone for no particular reason... or maybe to steal an iPod. It went on for about two years. At the height of it I asked a friend who's a cop about the situation, and he said there's really not much they can do, and it will just stop by itself. He reiterated this point that there are fads in bad behaviour as with anything else. Sure enough, the beatings just stopped after a while. Haven't heard of one in years. In this case it's difficult to tell how media coverage affected things. I can't remember if the swarming stories started moving off the front page, and then they stopped, or whether the chronology was reversed. It seems the dynamics of these things are very complex. Meme theory. Ideas spread from one person to the next and evolve as they do. Some ideas replicate well (religions or political ideologies) and some not as well (like shooting up schools), but even these ideas can still spread among a crowd of people unusually susceptible to them. With the internet and mass media it is like infecting everyone with every meme and seeing what sticks. This is usually a good thing as many bad ideas don't survive the exposure to better ones, but the downside is that there will always be certain deranged individuals exposed to new ideas that they wouldn't otherwise been exposed to. Like with everything else in life, with increased communications technology, you need to take the bad with the good.

I agree with everything you just said, but let me point out that it is already impossible for a 20 year old to legally have a handgun in CT. You need to be 21 to buy, own, or even apply for a permit to carry a handgun in CT. And it is impossible for anyone to legally bring a gun into a school in CT. These things are already illegal (he broke a ton of laws before he ever pulled the trigger for the first time), I don't know how you make them impossible (see my comments on drugs). A strip search or medal detectors to enter a school building? Turn our schools over to the TSA and make them like our airports? Just looking at the news, apparently the shooter was 24, not 20. So it is possible for him to have had a carry permit, but still not possible for him to legally carry in a school. At 24 I was married, owned my own home, and had my license to carry a concealed weapon. At the time I owned both a shotgun and a subcompact Glock 9mm (model 26) which I could legally put in my pocket or under my coat and carry anywhere in the state of Massachusetts (although not in schools). But somehow I never got the urge to shoot up a classroom full of children.

How long would he last? Would you try to shoot up an NRA convention or would you go to the one place that you know even people with concealed carry permits are not allowed to bring their weapons guaranteeing you a building full of unarmed victims? If guns caused murder, these things would constantly happen at NRA conventions, but never in schools.

I think it's what's wrong with human psychology. If you're already disturbed, seeing the shooting in Oregon gives social proof for going out and doing something similar. Just like airplane crashes increase after a first well-publicized one. I was just watching on TV last night they arrested a few people for a credible plot to kill Justin Beiber (my daughter was horrified). The guy admitted that he didn't want to be "a nobody". There will always be the crazies, looking for notoriety any way they can get it. The media is to blame for this as much as anything else. In short order we will know everything about this elementary school shooter. If he was looking for notoriety he got it. It may be infamy rather than fame, but that is probably what he was after anyway.

I agree with everything you just said, but let me point out that it is already impossible for a 20 year old to legally have a handgun in CT. You need to be 21 to buy, own, or even apply for a permit to carry a handgun in CT. And it is impossible for anyone to legally bring a gun into a school in CT. These things are already illegal (he broke a ton of laws before he ever pulled the trigger for the first time), I don't know how you make them impossible (see my comments on drugs). A strip search or medal detectors to enter a school building? Turn our schools over to the TSA and make them like our airports?

The problem is the gun control crowd can't wait to make this political. They have the legislation written and laying in wait for events like this. This is like Christmas come early to the gun-control lobbyist. Or like 9/11 to the military industrial complex. People who want to take away freedom always need tragedy, they wait for it, they feed off of it.

I agree on the shotgun for home defense. But this latest shooting took place in someone's home? Why should you lose the right to defend yourself the moment you walk out of your door? Maybe some of the dead adults in CT today have guns at home that they are not allowed by law to take to work inside the school building. You are most at risk outside of your home, around other people.

Yeah, but I'd prefer you have to go to the black market to get your cocaine. In the same way, I'd prefer that a guy who failed to take his psych meds couldn't walk into the local Walmart/Dick's/Bass Pro and pick up an AR15 and would have to go through some more difficult channels. Sorry I don't agree. I'd prefer a world where I could buy my cocaine at the grocery story by the pound and my fully automatic machine guns without a license. I'd prefer a world without all of the violence, poverty, and corruption that black markets create.

I just read the story. My god that is horrific! CT already has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country though, and of course guns in schools are already completely banned nation wide (which is one reason these things seem to always happen in schools). This loon already broke the law bringing the gun(s?) into the school. How did restricting the principle/teachers/ and other adults from arming themselves help the situation? The worst of these mass-shootings always happen in gun-free zones (schools/post offices/cities that ban guns/movie theaters that ban guns/etc). How would banning guns stop something like this? Cocaine is completely banned, but does anyone want to tell me that if I wanted some I couldn't get some in sort order? And cocaine doesn't grow in my climate, yet any semi-competent machinist could turn out guns by the thousands in his basement. It is 300 year old technology, I don't think you can ban them. And I wouldn't want to if you could.

Okay, sounds good. What about the plausible deniability, that the truecrypt hidden volume provides. Say someone does steal your file and tries to decrypt it, or puts a gun to your head and tells you to decrypt it? If you have the non-hidden volume encrypted with a much easier to break password and contains nothing but a folder of porn pictures or something you can give them that password and say "OK, you got me" and look all embarrassed and no one will know the hidden volume exists with all your account info in it. Or if they are tying to crack your password without your knowledge they will get the non-hidden volume first and not know the hidden one exists. No I haven't gone this far yet.