rkbabang

As I say every time he writes on this topic. If the federal treasury is the best use of his money, why has he not given them more over the years? Why has he not left his entire fortune to it? He does not put his money where his mouth is on this issue. Actions speak louder than words. He knows, as well as you and I know, that if the deadly force was taken out of the equation, (i.e. no one was forced to pay the U.S. government, but could choose to do so) there would be no U. S. Government. If this is an organization so many people claim to love and think does so much good, how could that be?

I agree. This is why I sold all of my KO in 2010. I know Coke makes other products besides soda, and the stock is up since I sold, but sugary soda (and even worse the diet crap) is its bread and butter. I just didn't feel comfortable owning it any longer. I've sold most of my BRK as well. I think when the public opinion on sugar turns sour, it will happen quickly and KO will be one of the largest casualties. KO won't go out of business or go bankrupt or anything, but its stock will tank. Might be a good buy when that happens.

I've been eating a low carb paleo diet for the last 2 years, so I definitely haven't had any in that time. But looking at that list of products I'm not sure I've had a Hostess product in the last 10 years or more. I remember most of them from when I was a kid though. I used to love ring dings and funny bones. I've never been a fan of twinkies. --Eric

I've always wondered why index funds don't take some time to buy or sell when there is an index change. Do they really have to do it the same day? You aren't accurately representing the market value of the companies in your index if you are forcing a large change in the market value yourself. Index funds are supposed to mirror the market not cause large swings in stock prices. If they bought or sold over 2 weeks or a month whenever there was a change it would soften the effects.

It's back down to $345 now.

I bought FRFHF at $345.87 this morning. I only bought 50 shares because that is all the cash I had available in the account and I already have so much FRFHF already. My portfolio basically amounts to positions in 2 companies now. FRFHF and BAC (common, warrants & options). Other than that I only have a handful of 1-3% positions which is basically just my watch list. I've never been this concentrated before.

IB is way cheaper than $7/trade. Flat rate is $1/trade and if you go for variable pricing it can be even cheaper if you are willing to provide liquidity. According to this : http://individuals.interactivebrokers.com/en/p.php?f=commission Their "flat rate" is $0.005 per share with a $1 minimum. So for 200 shares or under it would be $1. If you traded 1400 shares it would be $7. If you traded over 1400 shares it would be more. This would usually save me money, although I recently bought 20000 shares of something and Fidelity charged me $7.95 for the trade. IB would have charged me $100 using the flat rate.

Why not use a bank for banking and stay with Scottrade for brokerage (if your happy with them)? I use Fidelity ($7.95/trade) and I do my banking at a local credit union. It takes me about a day to transfer money between accounts electronically. I've actually been looking into switching to Interactive Brokers because the costs of trading options is so much lower than Fidelity charges me now. And even stocks, their flat rate option is $0.005/share. You would pay $7 or less for any transaction of 1400 shares or less. It depends on how many shares you tend to trade I guess.

Yes. You picked a good two years to start with. I started investing in 1996 and thought I could do no wrong, 4 years later I learned that I could. I kept 20 shares of Cisco that I still hold with a cost basis of $66.56 to remind myself every time I look at my portfolio.

If these guys set up the company email servers they certainly have access to all of the emails that pass through it. I’m not sure there is anything you can do to know for sure that they are reading them, unless they fall for the picture trick above. Email is an inherently unsecure form of communication. Treat it the way you would shouting from office to office in a crowded office building. For important business, encryption should be used. PGP / GPG type encryption should be set up. This way even if unauthorized people copy or view the emails they can’t read them. Back in the early 2000s a person close to my wife's family set up his own ISP & webhosting company and gave many of the people in our family free email accounts. One day he tells someone in my wife’s family that his wife is cheating on him and proceeds to show him printouts of email exchanges and chats on myspace. He was not only reading all of her email, but used access to her email to get her myspace password to find the really good stuff on her. My wife and I discontinued using those email accounts immediately after that. I use gmail now and while I have no doubt that there are Google employees who have access to the gmail database I feel safer being lost in the millions of gmail accounts rather than having someone who knows me personally with access to my info. In the corporate environment the IT guys will have access to the email. That is a given, and precautions should be taken. I also know someone who works for an insurance company selling insurance and he was reprimanded for something he wrote in a personal email using his company's email account. He, like many, was under the false impression that email is private. It isn’t.

Just to give credit where credit is due: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2436 My two favorite web-comic sites are SMBC and xkcd. The current xkcd has a funny graph on it. I'm sure everyone knows people who fall on the high end of the drama law curve. And then of course there is everyone's favorite xkcd strip: xkcd: Duty Calls. --Eric

And how much was it during the Bush era? Oh..and there was no financial mess to account for before Obama's presidency? Anyway, it seems that Republicans will always be Republicans, Democrats will always be Democrats, and a tiny part of the electors will vote on one side or the other depending of the candidate.. 'Democrats did this'. 'Well, Republicans are just as bad, because they did that'. Back and forth, divide and conquer. If you stand back and look at it from a distance you realize where they differ is inconsequential and for anything that matters they are all basically the same. Regardless of what they call themselves, they are all the same just with a small variance of degree on certain small issues. Regardless of who wins there will be more war, higher debt, more taxes, and more government control over every aspect of our lives, from which drugs we can take, to how we run our businesses, to what healthcare is available to us, to how our children are educated. Yes the economy may grow despite all of this as it has in the past. These are small men doing small things, creating road blocks that the productive in society need to find ways around. The best description I've found of the whole process is that the market is a network and government is damage to the network which needs to be routed around.

I think this goes almost without saying.

Me too. I've been taking the gold producing probiotics for years. It's where I get money to invest from. Some people are good at flushing their wealth down the toilet, others at flushing it out from the toilet.

Based on what you said, the Tesla Model S cannot be made unless it is a reinforced Hummer. Yet the EPA rates it at 89 MPG equivalent (going from memory here). That's one hell of an efficient Hummer! Anyways, energy efficiency isn't the entire story. We finance a massive military in part to secure our access to the global oil markets. Maybe you are burning domestic fossil fuels like natural gas (or even coal) to generate electricity to power the cars? That's a win/win even if the math worked out to be no better than burning gasoline (however the math does work out to be better than with gasoline due to the lost energy of the internal combustion engine). I saw somebody argue on TV last night that Obama wasted 80 billion on green energy subsidies. He threw the Tesla investment in there. It just seems to me that energy security and national security are in the same pot. Do we need as many aircraft carriers etc... if we didn't run our economy on oil? How much do we spend on defense and can 80 billion be saved from our defense budget without reliance on oil supplies from the Persian Gulf? I suspect that we just spent hundreds of billions fighting a war in part for the oil security. By the same token, if we didn't spend $trillions on foreign wars to protect our oil supply and gasoline was much more expensive, private capital would be pouring into trying to find an alternative. Instead we are taxing (stealing) money from everyone to fund both sides (keeping oil cheap and available plus finding alternatives that private capital no longer sees the need for now that gasoline is cheap and available) one side of which entails the murder of hundreds of thousands overseas... Socialism, war, and central planning is bad from every angle.

No I didn't forget that. I put "total cost of ownership". The electric plugin is supposed to save you money, if not, what's the point? You could be right, maybe the coolness factor or perceived environmental benefits (even thought there probably aren't really any) may be enough for many people to pay the steep premium. I don't understand it, but then again, I don't understand a lot about how most people think. And the other factor is, GM may make a profit on it even if it is a very limited selling product. That I can at least wrap my head around as a strategy. Sell a few and make some money until the price comes down far enough to sell them to the rest of us who care more about what we are getting for our money. Personally, If I wanted to spend that much on a compact car I'd be looking at a BMW 3 series, not a Volt or a Prius, but even that would be out of the question for me. I'm way to cheap to do something like that. I'd rather buy an Elantra, drive it for 10+ years and invest the rest. We'll see if I still feel this way in 2017-2020 when I look to replace it. Who knows, electric vehicles may be a good value proposition by then.

Not GM, so much as the Volt. Compare the two vehicles in any metric you wish, looks, size, comfort, features, luxury, performance, or total cost of ownership. The $15K car comes up as better or just as good in each one. As far as the Prius goes, I don't really understand why anyone would choose to buy one of those either, but $23K is much more reasonable a starting price. It at least puts it in spitting distance of similarly featured/equipped cars.

I'm sure I would. But if you look at it rationally. Comparing size, comfort, performance, and total cost of ownership. The Volt will lose to cars that are anywhere from $10K to $17K cheaper. How could you buy a Volt over a Corrolla or an Elantra, or even a Chevy Cruze? I can't think of a single metric where the Volt wins, other than the "look at me I drive an electric vehicle" factor. I don't think that is a good long term strategy. I think you are correct they should have gone after the high end market where people can afford the premium and introduce a Chevy when the costs had come down to compete with similar gas vehicles on something other than environmental-bragging rights. I don't think many middle-class people can't afford to pay double for a vehicle just to wear their environmentalism on their sleeves. A 10-15% premium, maybe, but not double. I think Tesla is positioning itself correctly. Targeting the performance/luxury sedan market with a premium vehicle, that is desirable in its own right, at a premium price. I know starting a new car company isn't the easiest thing in the world to do, but with a little luck they could just pull this off. I'm not investing (too risky), but wouldn't short it right now either. If I invested at all in Tesla it would be with some long term calls. A small enough amount where I wouldn't care if they ended up worthless. That just might payoff much better than expected. Where shorting it, might just cost you a lot more than expected.

My point was that the Volt shouldn't even come up in the same conversation as the Model-S. There is no overlap in the market. There isn't anyone who is seriously considering a Model-S who says, "No I'd rather have a Chevy Volt instead". My point was that a $15K Elantra is what people might consider in the same conversation as the Volt, and might wisely choose to buy it instead, not the Model-S. Someone who considers the Model-S and chooses something else instead will most-likely choose a gas-guzzling luxury sedan in a similar price range, maybe a hybrid Lexus if they want to play on the "look at me, I drive a hybrid" environmentally conscious thing. But a hybrid Lexus is still quite a gas-guzzler compared with a Volt or even my Hyundai. The Model-S is in a category all by itself right now.

VW Bug owners have fun. I meant fun in terms of top of the line sports sedan fun -- M5 level fun. My commuting car is a $15K Hyundai Elantra with a 5 speed manual transmission. While I'll admit that I've never driven a Volt. I have a suspicion that my Hyundai is more fun to drive (and at much less than half the price). The Model-S is in another class entirely. EDIT: At least by the first website that came up in a google search my statement above appears to be true: from: http://www.zeroto60times.com/Hyundai-0-60-mph-Times.html "2007 Hyundai Elantra SE 0-60 mph 7.8 Quarter Mile 16.1" (my car is a 2007) from: http://www.zeroto60times.com/Chevrolet-Chevy-0-60-mph-Times.html "2011 Chevrolet Volt 0-60 mph 8.9 Quarter Mile 16.7" The Volt doesn't seem to be a performance car to me. At quite a bit more than double (almost 3x) the cost of the Hyundai, you'd have to save quite a bit of money on gas to justify that difference in price for a less fun car. The 2012 Elantra's are rated at 40mpg, mine was rated on 36, but gets 32-34 in real use.

As someone who has been following battery and EV technology closely for years, I disagree with everything you said. I'll leave it at that :) I disagree as well, twacowfca's statement about the weight of batteries is close to true for the lead-acid batteries used in most cars (even most hybrids), but the Model-S does not use lead-acid batteries.

I voted "other" of course, which is to say none. As soon as you join a party you tend to root for your team regardless of what they do (see liberals overlooking Obama's murderous foreign policies for a good example), it becomes all "Go TEAM!!!!" and all principle, logic and reason go straight out the window. P.S. I'm only picking on Obama because he's the current president, this same thing can be said for all the other parties, the Libertarian Party included. Anyone who could support Root or Bar and still call themselves a Libertarian has some serious cognitive dissonance going on. In general politics seems to do this to people.

I was just thinking that a bunch of people located around the world in different countries and time zones having a discussion in almost real-time over a global computer network is completely unnatural and should probably be banned as it is almost certainly an abomination in the eyes of the almighty god.

So it isn't "Believe or I'll torture you" it is "Believe or I'll kill you, but I'll make it quick and painless." No thanks, that might be OK for a mob boss, but I'd like to be able to hold supreme beings to a higher standard. I haven't read Mere Christianity, until this discussion I had never heard of it. I just put it on my "to read" list in goodreads so that I don't forget to read it. I've spent my life thinking about this stuff, ever since I fist admitted to myself that I was an atheist at about 9 or 10 years old. I've read the bible cover to cover more than once. As well as certain sections 10's or hundreds of times. I've read the Book of Mormon, the Urantia Book cover to cover (2000+ pages). I did a 200+ page humanities project on the history of Zoroastrianism (basically the oldest monotheistic religion) in college. I got credits equal to an entire course just for writing that paper. I've looked into Buddhism and shamanism, and all kinds of other things. Religion interests me. Having never really believed myself, even though I was raised in a strict Catholic home, I'm interested to know why people believe what they do. I'll certainly read Mere Christianity, and I'm sure I'll even enjoy it. But I'd be shocked if it changes my thinking on the matter. All this said, my wife and I have had a pact since we were teenagers that the first of us to die will haunt the other one (if possible) to let them know if there is an afterlife (if there is one).

Pascal's wager is exactly what I had in mind when I wrote my 2nd to last post above. Pascal's wager comes down to: "If you don't believe, the giant sky-bully might decide to torture you for a long time. If you do worship him, no harm done." It is an appeal to power and a threat. "Do this or you might get hurt." My ultimate theory is this: Any god that cared what I believed (might even hurt me because of it) and at the same time provides no conclusive evidence of his existence, is not a god I would want to spend eternity with or have anything to do with. Whereas any god that I would care to spend eternity with, wouldn't give a damn what I believed. So why bother? God either exists or he doesn't. If he doesn't, then the whole discussion is pointless and I don't need to bother with religion. If he does exist, then there are only two possibilities: 1) He doesn't care what you believe, in which case I don't need to bother with religion. or: 2) He is not a good and decent civilized moral being. In which case I'll take my punishment and know that I'm better than him. There is no situation in which any good and decent person needs to bother with religion. And as a bunch of people have already pointed out during this discussion, there is no evidence of god, so there is no good reason to think that there is one. "I don't know how [X] happened." "My loved one died and I want to think (s)he went to a better place and I will see them again someday." "I'm going to die someday and I want to think that I go to a better place and keep living." "I'm afraid of what the people around me would do to me if there was no threat of hell looming over their heads." "I can't deal with life very well without someone that can hear my thoughts who I can talk to silently whenever I need to." None of these is a logical reason to start making up magical places inhabited by magical beings. If you need an imaginary friend to get through your day or to deal with realities (like death) then admit that to yourself. Don't try to pretend your "friend" is real though and call anyone who tells you that he isn't "arrogant" or "rude".