rkbabang

Wow!!! Me:- South India -> DC Area -> Kuwait -> South India. Life has come a full circle :D This guy wins for most complex background. Stay warm in Edmonton, its damn cold there, my rule is any place where you have to plug in a car is too cold... It's interesting to see how much people have moved around the planet. My background is damn right boring in comparison. Massachusetts -> New Hampshire I've never lived more than 100 miles from the hospital where I was born. I was born and grew up in south eastern MA, I moved to Worcester in central MA for college, then moved back to south eastern MA after college and remained there for 16 years. I finally moved to southern New Hampshire this past November. A lot of you seem to move back and forth all over the place.

From all the research I've done, I don't necessary think of omega 3 as "good" and omega 6 as bad. Both are essential nutrients. The problem comes from the fact that hunter-gatherers consume them in a 1/1 or at most 2/1 (omega 6/omega 3) ratio. Where the average westernized human consumes them in a ratio ranging from 15/1 to 25/1. The reason we need omega 3 supplements is because by subsidizing corn/soy/etc we have been removing omega 3's from our food supply. How do these subsidies remove omega 3's from our food? In a number of ways. One is because with corn selling below cost makes it almost impossible to compete if you are feeding your livestock grass/hay rather than corn feed. Feeding grazing animals corn rather than grasses reduces the omega 3's in their meat tremendously. Another way we are removing it from our diets is by replacing animal fats with "heart healthy" vegetable and seed oils. These oils are very high in omega 6 fats, so they are anything but heart healthy in the context of the Standard American Diet (SAD). I try to get my Omega 6/Omega 3 ratio closer to our evolutionary norm of 1/1 to 2/1, by 1) home cooking all of my food. 2) not using vegetable and seed oils. (with the exception of olive oil which is mostly Omega 9). 3) Eating Omega 3 eggs (they feed the chickens a feed containing flax seeds. The chickens will convert the ALA in flax seed to DHA and deposit in the egg. Our bodies can't do this conversion very well, so we get little benefit from eating flax seed directly) 4) not over doing it with nuts or seeds and not eating them every day. 5) eating grass fed beef rather than grain fed. 5) eat fatty fish as much as possible. and finally 6) take a fish oil supplement on days that I do not eat fish. Speaking of fats, I also supplement with medium chain triglycerides in the form of coconut oil on a daily basis. Not only is that my go-to oil for cooking, but once per day I make my self a cup of oolong tea and add a heaping tablespoon of coconut oil to it. It actually tastes better than it sounds.

Since there is no option for where I am at, I put where I am from. :)

That is correct. There are a number of different "types" of anarchists. What they have in common is the opposition to the state. Where they differ is in what they think society should/would look like in the absence of the state. My views are closest to the "market anarchists", who often use the $ sign to signify the free market along with the Ⓐ to signify the absence of the state. I also sometimes refer to myself sometimes as a "voluntarist", who don't particularly care how people organize themselves in the absence of government as long as they do it peacefully. In my experience most of those people are also market anarchists. The socialist anarchists who "imagine" everybody "sharing all the world" usually think it is OK to use violence to suppress markets and trade. People like to create things and call what they create their own. Anyone that thinks people will ever give up property and trade without a Soviet/North Korean style totalitarian state has little understanding of human nature. That said as a voluntarist I don't care if groups of people want to form communes and try to survive that way. As long as they don't force people to join or force people to stay (i.e. form a state).

Great idea, but unfortunately my flag isn't listed. I was looking for something like "None" with a flag like this one: http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/images/q/qt-a_bra.gif or maybe this one: http://www.realityunknown.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Anarchy-Flag.png

No it isn't an eye in a triangle or anything, it is a a capital "A" with a circle around it.

Excellent suggestion. Now that you mention it, I do tend to use the avatars to recognize the posts of the people who use them. I just added one to my account.

Bedford, New Hampshire Live Free or Die

I can easily see how this program can be turned into a negative PR event as well. This could be characterize as "We lent you way more money than your house is worth or you could afford to pay us back for which we got bailed out. Now instead of just kicking you out and getting a small amount for the property in this depressed housing market or just letting the house sit vacant, we'll just take the title to your house and let you pay us to live there for a few years while we wait for the market to come back. Once it does we will then kick you out so we can sell it." It definitely makes sense for BAC to do this. I'm not sure it makes for very good PR though. From a PR prospective. It might make sense to say to these home owners. Listen you screwed up and we screwed up. You borrowed way more than you should have borrowed and we gave you more than we should have let you borrow. We got bailed so that we wouldn't suffer the full consequences of our mistake but you didn't. Your house was "worth" $500K, you owe $500K, and now it is worth $300K. If we foreclose we'll only get $250K-$275 for it. Let's split the difference, we'll refinance your mortgage at today's rate with a balance of ($what you owe - ((what you owe - what we'd get)/2)) or ($500K - (($500K-$275K)/2))=$387.5K at probably a much better interest rate than what you have. If it made this offer, some people might accept it as a way for them to stay in their homes. Others would decide that it still leaves them "trapped" and underwater (or they still couldn't afford it) and say no, in which case BAC could foreclose. For the customers that did accept it BAC would benefit by owning a loan that the homeowner could afford and would not need to forclose and loose a ton more on the property. Does this make sense or am I missing something? It would have to be offered only to a select group of customers on a one time basis only when it will benefit both the bank and the customer. And not an open offer on an on-going basis.

If you need to edit a picture and don't want to shell out multiple hundreds of $s for photoshop. Try installing GIMP, I've been using it for years on both windows and linux and it is infinitely more powerful than Paint. Once you learn how to use it, very quick to open up a picture and make your edits, then save it and import into another program like word. And it's free. http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

RKB you are correct on that as I have used both Word and Excel for this need because they have different/additional options that can be used. Ive never used that wrap text in Word though but I like the idea and will have to try it. I have used WORDART for different shapes of text and then copied them into my Paint file but the text comes out all.. how to describe??.. not crisp/clean or distorted after copied. I cant remember how PAINT was back in the day (I too was on a 386 AND A 286! :o haha..) but I did view see some youtube vids on PAINT functions recently and there are quite a few things that can be done which are not really evident to the casual user. I just went to my windows machine and started up Paint. One thing I noticed is that when you hit File->Properties. The resolution is 96dpi. That could be the cause of the pixelation when you drop wordart into it. I couldn't figure out quickly how to change the resolution so maybe there is no way. If that is the case you are working with 96dpi which will definitely look low quality both on the screen and in print if you have a lot of fine detail in your image. I never had a 286. I went from my Commodore 64 to my 80386SX25 in about 1989 or so. About a year later I bought the 387 Math-co processor for it so it could handle floating point instructions. That was nice machine at the time. Of course, I kept it for a long time after it ceased being a nice fast machine. I never got a 486 (I was in college and couldn't afford it) I didn't upgrade it until I graduated in 1996 and could afford to buy a Pentium motherboard, CPU, and some memory for it. I ran Windows 3.11 until I upgraded to Windows 98 SE in 1999 or so. Of course I was using Linux (installed on a separate harddrive) more than windows back then anyway, same as now. --Eric

I'm not sure if MS Paint gives you the option, but you can usually set the compression level when saving as JPG. If so set it higher or as others have said just save as BMP. What I usually do when I want to create something simple like this is use MS Word (or even the free OpenOffice.org). You can insert a photo, right click on it and under "wrap text" select "in front of text" or "behind text" then you can move it to any where you want on the page and you can resize it to any size you want. Next in the "Insert" menu click on "Shapes" then "text Box" You can then draw a text box anywhere on the page to put text into and reshape it or move it wherever you want. When you have it just right, right-click on it, hit format shape, then line style and set it to no line. This will make the box around the text invisible. To me MS Word is easier to use and print from than MS Paint, but then again I don't think I've even opened up MS Paint to do anything since I was running Windows 3.11 for workgroups on my 25MHz 386. It is possible that Paint isn't as bad of a program now as I remember it to be.

Out of question, what do these companies do? To me, irrespective of their industries, it is interesting that they have yet to go belly up. After all, if there is anything that we learn from capitalism, it is that all companies eventually fail... Would you describe the economy and class system of India from 1736 to now as a mostly free market capitalist system with absolutely free upward(and downward) mobility based on nothing but merit in the marketplace? Or has it been something entirely different for most of that time period? I think the latter has been the case. The answer to your question lies in the difference between the two systems, not in any property of free-market capitalism that can be studied there. Things are changing for the better in India, I wonder if those same companies/families will still dominate the economy in another 50-200 years? I doubt it. Some may still be around in some form, there are family owned businesses that have lasted a long time. Beretta in Italy has been run by the same family since 1526 (485 years).

"admitting that he is “not a journalist”: "I stand by my work. My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection..."" Translation: I make stuff up. I produce war-of-the-worlds-type fiction made to sound real and cause people to react to my BS. But of course "I stand behind my work". Whatever that means.

I'd like to know too. My reasoning is that Mr. Biglari is a greedy person who does not care about the interests of his minority shareholders, nor is he able to put his short term greed aside to even do what is in his own long-term best interests. He will increase his control over the company and that will not insentivize him to reduce his compensation plan or to treat his minority shareholders well, but just the opposite will likely be true. You can't change a person's character. Sadar will do what's best for Sadar today. He has already damaged his reputation enough that he has hurt his ability to get himself on the boards of companies and harmed BH's ability to acquire companies outright. I don't know why he will suddenly have a change of heart, start thinking long term, and doing what's best for BH's other shareholders at some point in the future as Ragu thinks he will. That seems more of a leap of faith than a dictate of reason. Also one of the largest reasons that I am no longer a BH shareholder is the situation with the Lion Fund. I just can't get over a company owning a subsidiary who's largest holding is the parent company's stock. I don't even know what you call that (Recursive Earnings?) Something funny is going on there which I am not comfortable with. He should have closed the Lion Fund, cashed out to its partners and had the company buy and retire all BH stock it held (or distribute the stock to the partners). That would have been the ethical thing to do, which apparently isn't an approach Mr. Biglari is comfortable with.

I think of gold in the same way the author of this article does. Less of an investment and more of a way to hold cash without needing to hold cash. (I don't own any gold at present). from: About those high gasoline prices…look again "Buffett (and others) argue strongly that investors should be in stocks… that a company like Coca Cola or productive farmland is a better long-term investment than a useless hunk of metal.He’s probably right. Except that the useless hunk of metal isn’t really an investment. It’s an anti-currency… appropriate for those who want to sit out of the market and be in cash without having to be in cash." And, of course, it has the added benefit that it can be fondled.

Last winter my parents decided the best way to afford spending 3 months in Florida was to buy a 2 bedroom house on a golf course for $5000 in cash. They spent 3 months living in it and working on it (it needed some TLC and my father is very handy). They then sold it and made a little money. Free lodging for 3 months in Florida plus a small profit for just a little bit of work. Sure beats paying for a hotel room for 3 months. EDIT: After re-reading this I should point out that this wasn't all quite as easy as I made it sound. They paid $5K for it and spent more than $15K fixing it up. The property had a homeowners association fee of $800/month (pays for access to 3 swimming pools, golf course, a gym, and tons of other things) which they paid for 5 months (it took more than two months to sell it after they moved out) and, of course the realtor took 5% of the selling price. They only sold it after dropping the price drastically after the first month on the market and all told they made about $1k. They said that they were so worried that they wouldn't be able to sell it that even though it worked out well in the end they wouldn't do it again. The $800/month association fee was reason they just didn't hold it until the market improved while using it every year for vacations. The market down there is crazy. If you buy property that you can hold for years, I think you will probably make out well someday. And if you can use it as a vacation home in the mean time all the better.

Anyone done any research on how to profit from afar by the situation created by the Bakken formation? Six-figure salaries, but homeless Double your salary in the middle of nowhere, North Dakota --Eric

Kraven, I just wanted to say excellent post! What you say can be applied to every aspect of your life, not just investing. If you are finding yourself in analysis-paralysis on any type of project, maybe you should put whatever you're working on in the "too-hard" pile and either outsource to an expert (if its something you really absolutely need done) or just move on to something else that will give you a greater return on your time. --Eric

Yesterday I sold a few positions, the first time in a while that I've sold anything. I sold my entire position in Fibrek (FBKZF.PK) for $1.25. My cost basis was just over $1. I got tired of waiting for the outcome of the current situation to play itself out and with the worst possible outcome being $1/share and the best (that is on the table already) being under $1.30 I thought $1.25 was a good exit. I also sold a quarter of my position in Red Robin (RRGB) for $35.96. My cost basis is $18. I used the proceeds from both of those sales to buy some BAC and some BAC Jan-2014 calls. --Eric

Some of the same things could be said about not having a king or dictator. Show me an example in all the thousands of years in human history where a society has successfully gotten rid of its monarchs for any length of time? Even our recent few hundred years of Republican government isn’t much proof, the Roman Republic lasted longer than ours yet still deteriorated to dictatorship in the end. Looking only at history you could make a good case that human society needs to be organized as a dictatorship. Remember that even a relatively short time ago in human history you could have said. “Show me one modern agricultural society that has ever functioned without slavery. None has ever existed. Please explain how we could feed our population in a world without slavery. How could a labor intensive product like say, cotton, ever be grown, harvested, and brought to market profitably without the institution of slavery? And what would these slaves all do if you set them free? They have no education, no idea what it is like to live on their own and be responsible for themselves. They have no idea what it is like to be a productive and civilized member of society? How to you integrate such people into a modern society without causing all kinds of problems?” These questions (and many more like them) where asked many times. The answer of course is that it doesn’t matter. Slavery is wrong and whatever the consequences, we will either find solutions to these problems or we won’t, but it simply isn’t morally acceptable to treat human beings like animals. And of course in the end once it was clear that slavery would come to an end, labor saving devices were invented and cotton and other crops were successfully farmed (who would bother trying to invent such devices if slavery was not outlawed). And it was sometimes a little rocky, but the former slaves were integrated into society. I would say the same things about the state. It simply isn’t acceptable to take by force from people to educate children, help the poor, build the roads, and protect us from crime. Will people come up with innovative ways of solving these problems when the state is on its way out? I think they will. There is a huge market for all of these things, because almost everyone wants all of those things. I can’t tell you how these problems will be solved any more than someone in the 18th century could have predicted tractors and the cotton gin. If human beings are good at anything it is problem solving, especially when there is a profit motive behind it. Some people have come up with ideas on how many of these problems would be solved (read some of the books I linked to in my last post), some of them sound plausible, but those are just that, plausible sounding ideas. As Yogi Berra said “Prediction is very hard, especially about the future”. No one will know for sure until it is hammered out on the forge of the marketplace.

The short answer is “yes”. I do realize that isn’t a very convincing answer. I don’t have the time right now to respond in the way the question deserves, I’ll try to respond another time in more detail. I also will say that I don’t think you can go from a massive state which has millions of people depending on it for their livelihood on a daily basis to an anarchistic society overnight. It would have to be more evolutionary rather than revolutionary. If the state disappeared tomorrow into thin air in the U.S. or Canada it WOULD be chaos. Millions would be out of work, social security and other entitlements would just stop coming, many people would not know what to do with themselves. Hell, even people in the private sector who have jobs would look at the very money they use and say “what is backing this now?” If the state is to be dismantled it has to be because of a cultural change in the population that wants it to be dismantled. Not because they are stereotypical "bomb throwing anarchists" who love chaos, but because they realize that the state does more harm than good in a civilized society and that violence begets more violence, so violence shouldn't be an accepted device used to solve societal problems. This is Somalia's problem, they have no state, but they do not have a culture of freedom either. Yet, do some research on Somalia, they are clearly better off than they were in the 1980’s and they are better off than some of the societies that surround them. All things being equal in their society as it stands culturally they are arguably better off without a state, than with one. The culture needs some evolution to create a peaceful and prosperous society, but that would be true whether or not they have a government. If Somalia forms a government tomorrow, who will control it? Most likly one of the warlord groups that are causing so much chaos in stateless Somalia today. This will not bring peace and order, it will most likely bring corruption and widespread persecution of other competing groups. All of this is also true in many of the countries in that part of the world. You could not go back in time to medieval Europe, for instance, kill the kings and all of the other royalty, tell the serfs that they are now free and expect life to immediately improve. People get used to a certain way of life and do not handle quick structural changes well. These things take time. Over the course of human history our culture has been evolving towards more distributed less concentrated power and towards more civilized, less barbarous and violent societies. Of course sometimes we take 2 steps forward and 1 step back, but that has been the general direction. Someday there will be no state, and historians will look back at our society and think of how primitive our culture was to still cling to our tribal leaders marked off by boundaries on a map even though we had relatively easy global trade, global transportation, and global communication (even if crude by the standards of the future of those things). The same way we look back at god-kings and think “how primitive”. There we're no biological differences between the humans under the god-kings and us. The only things that have evolved since then, the only difference between them and us, is our technology and our culture. Both will continue to evolve, each of us has the choice of either helping the process along or stand in its way. How much more speedily and bloodlessly would slavery have been gotten rid of if there were more abolitionists and less people who thought "slavery has always been part of human society and we couldn't function as a society without it"? As far as crime goes I think you give the state way too much credit in that area. Many murders are never solved and the vast majority of property crimes go unsolved. If your house gets broken into you will almost certainly never get your stuff back. The police will make a report, place it in a file, and that will be the extent of it. Then your insurance company will pay your claim. This is very similar to how it would work in a free market as well. You will contract with a protection agency or maybe this will be run by your insurance company. You will call them to file a claim, they will investigate and pay your claim. If you call 911 because you have an intruder tonight, I hope you have some way to keep yourself alive in the 10-15minutes it may take for the police to get there. Again, this will be the same in a free society with the exception that if you aren’t happy with your protection services company you can do business with someone else instead. Walk around your average mid-to-large city and chances are you don’t see a cop anywhere or at least not very often. The reason the people around you aren’t robbing you is because they are civilized, not because they are afraid of the government. Will there always be crime? Of course there will, it is how we deal with it that is under discussion. Only statists think that there is some magic in words on paper called “law” that “solves” crime. It just isn’t so. These laws, and the institutions that evolve to enforce them, are much more concerned with politically motivated “crimes” and fighting the "culture war" which the politicians use to get votes rather than really protecting people from violence. Most people in jail are not murderers and rapists, they are minorities who are there for violating drug laws. Middle class whites are simply not arrested and thrown in jail for these “crimes” even though they do drugs at a rate similar to poorer minorities. And since nothing will hold down your earnings potential like a criminal record, the “justice” system is used to keep the underclass in its place. It is a sick, disgusting and thoroughly broken system that needs to be done away with if our society is going to move forward and prosper. There are many books written about how crime could be handled in a free society. Milton Freidman’s son David Friedman who is a professor of economics and law at the Santa Clara University Law School wrote an excellent book called “The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism” which I highly recommend. Also some good and quick reads (and free) which deal with the subject, are Stefan Molyneux’s “Everyday Anarchy” and “Practical Anarchy”. These books are excellent. The free versions are in PDF, HTML, and the audiobook in MP3. You have to buy and pay for the print versions if you prefer paper. Other excellent books if you’ve read the above and would like to delve deeper into the subject is “The Conscience of an Anarchist: Why It's Time to Say Good-Bye to the State and Build a Free Society” by Gary Chartier “Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty”, by Gary Chartier And the classic: “For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto”, Murray N. Rothbard. This book is a good introduction to a free society and how it might work. So much for my idea of writing a short, quick post. --Eric

Funny how you associate the word “law” with the word “order”. I’m sure you’ve also been taught to associate the word “anarchy” with the word “chaos”. When in reality those definitions are backwards. This is the very reason one of the most important things the state does (in its own opinion) is brainwash…I mean “educate” the youth. That it can do this right out of the funds it steals from the parents and convince them that it is giving them a “free” service is all the better. We all want order, none of us want chaos, and we’ve all been neural-linguistically programmed to think “law=order”, “anarchy=chaos”, but it is law I want to get rid of not order. I do not want to live in Antarctica where there is no state and try to survive on penguin meat. What I am trying to say is that institutionalized violence is not only not necessary, but is a significant impediment to a peaceful and orderly society. But when you are dealing with generation after generation of people who are convinced that without violence roads could not be built and we’d all turn into savages slaughtering our neighbors for no reason, it is a very difficult point to get across. Of course taxation is theft. It is theft by definition. Taking from someone something they own by force is theft. But if you are thoroughly convinced that without such theft your neighbor would kill you and the roads couldn’t be built, it is easy to dismiss what is obvious and staring you right in the face. Of course none of that is true. You wouldn’t kill your neighbor, nor would I. Roads would be built where they economically make sense and there was a demand for their use, but they wouldn’t be built otherwise (no “bridge to nowhere” in a free market). When you read something that is obviously true and yet you want to dismiss it out of hand anyway, you should at the very least try to examine why that is and think about why you are reacting in that way. It takes a lot research and a lot of self-examination to even begin the process of deprogramming your mind to use only logic, reason and evidence, and not rely completely on the neural programming you received as a child. --Eric (I see the fnords)

I don't want to steal your money from you so I am "a law unto myself", you want to steal money from me, so you are some kind of wonderful communitarian? Let me get this straight. We are afraid of private thieves so the solution is to create an organization that will take from us by force half of everything we produce for the entirety of our lives? How exactly does this solve the problem of theft? We are afraid of private murderers so we create an organization that has murdered over 100 million people in the 20th century alone (this is murders by governments of their own citizens not even including wars which is human slaughter on a scale impossible without the state). How does this solve the problem of murder? You are afraid of unscrupulous dishonest con-men who don't like to play by the rules of civilized society and enjoy using force and/or fraud to get what they want, so you create an organization with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force? Where do you think those people are going to go? You haven't stopped the the criminals, you've made them your rulers! I'll take my chances with the private criminals any day. At least I have a chance of defending myself against them.

Taxation is theft. Why should anyone have a say in how money stolen from someone is used? The money shouldn't be stolen to begin with.