rkbabang

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".

Just an aside, I love that site ^^^ "goodreads.com". If you or anyone else here wants to friend me on goodreads click here: http://www.goodreads.com/friend/i?i=LTM1OTg2Njk0NjE6Mzcw I'm always interested in what people are reading to find ideas about what to read next.

I've said many times that if I believed that the god of the bible existed that I'd be his sworn enemy. Sure he could kill me and torture me for all eternity, but that would just be further proof of my moral superiority to that tyrannical monster. I've never gotten the people who worship god, because they are afraid of hell. I don't worship power, I detest it.

In my opinion it is the non-beleivers who understand how little we really know and are humbled by it. It is the believers who think they have all the answers and understand the universe and arrogantly refuse to admit that they really don't know. Because to a believer they think they DO know where the universe came from and even more arrogantly they think they understand not only what created the universe, but why. It is the height of arrogance to think that you KNOW that a supreme being exists and that you KNOW what he wants. You don't know, because no one does. How is it that when we tell people to stop claiming to know things they don't know, that we are suddenly the arrogant ones? This would be like if a scientist claimed to know exactly how many inhabited worlds there were in the entire universe. Other scientists would tell him that he needs to show his evidence or stop claiming to know things he doesn't know, and when he refuses to show his evidence they would dismiss him. They are not being arrogant for dismissing him, he is being arrogant for not proving his claim, yet claiming to know that it is true. If he was like some on this thread he was then turn around and say "You arrogant bastards. You can't prove me wrong, can you? " When all the time it is he who is the arrogant one who lacks humility.

Moore, I think that (and some other things people have been writing) are a bit of a stretch. I'm a huge fan of Rothbard and Mises. I'm a fan of gold and have about 5% of my portfolio in gold just in case the excrement hits the fan. Not only do I think government isn't necessary for a civilized society based on free-trade, but I don't think it has a moral right to exist at all. Anyone who believes that they have a moral right to initiate force to solve social problems is not a moral human being. I'm 40 years old. All this and I don't believe in any of the 10,000+ gods that have been worshiped by humanity over the years, not even whichever one(s) you believe in. In fact I would think a belief in intelligent design would make a person more likely to not understand free-market capitalism. "How can anything work if there is no state directing and controlling everything? Why, it'd be chaos!" God is socialism writ large.

You have basically answered your own question. We can only make assumptions based on what we know. I would have to believe if I was given reasonable evidence for doing so. This doesn't just go for a supreme being. If there was proof of fairies in the garden or leprechauns or the Lochness monster I would believe in them as well. My criteria is the same. If the only evidence is a mix of hearsay, tradition, fear, and wishful thinking. Well, I won't be convinced. I find this world and the universe we inhabit infinitely wondrous and fascinating just contemplating the things we do know. I feel no reason to make stuff up. One thing that bothers me about religion is that I think it demonstrates a lack of imagination and appreciation for the universe as it is, for reality itself. It's a form of escapism. Science fiction author L. Neil Smith said (I'm paraphrasing because I'm too lazy to look it up) that religion is for people who either can't handle death, or can't handle life. I agree, it is escapism either way. So to answer your question, short of god showing himself (or some other proof), I can't think of anything that would make me believe. I do respect the "god of the gaps" people much more than the born again types who think the world is 5000 years old and god put all this geological evidence of an old Earth, as well as fossil evidence of evolution, just to "test our faith". I mean, what a jerk. If I thought there was a god and he pulled a move like that, I certainly wouldn't be getting on my knees and worshiping him. Then I'd read in the bible how he hates women and gays, and indiscriminately slaughters people all over the place and I'd be declaring myself to be his enemy and joining the other side. What it comes down to is that I just can't imagine worshiping anything or anyone. If god exists and he wants me to believe he exists, he knows where I live. He's welcome to come for a visit. If not, hey, no skin off my back. But if he wants me to worship him? I don't care who or what he is, nor what he'll do to me....he's out of luck. He'll need to earn my respect same as anyone else. Hiding away in the gaps isn't something I respect. Making people doubt his existence or blindly follow what they've been told "on faith", isn't very respectful. Which leads me to conclude only two possibilities, either god doesn't exist or there is a god who went through the trouble of creating the whole universe, but he's a big irresponsible jerk. Occam's razor clearly points to the former.

That can be arranged. If L. Ron Hubbard can start a religion about space aliens living at the center of the earth, there is no reason why I can't start one about a celestial tea pot. That is interesting, but not proof of god. There are many odd states of consciousness that some people can put themselves into. Buddhist monks can manipulate their brain and body in ways you or I probably can't. I will never speak in tongues because I will never be able to put myself into that frame of mind. If you could prove that the image was caused by radiation, that would be interesting, but still only proof that there was a source of radiation and someone's image was captured by it. Hardly proof of a resurrection from the dead or that Jesus himself is the one in the image. Many people existed at that time. Many of the people mentioned in the bible probably existed as well. Still not proof that Jesus (if he existed) was what he said he was (if he indeed claimed to be some kind of man-god creature). You are talking about a very primitive superstitious desert people from thousands of years ago. I'm sure they told all kinds of stories. These particular stories happened to be the ones a Roman emperor wanted canonized in the 4th century to be the official religion of the empire. Not very convincing. There was a study done where someone created the whole tunnel and light effect by electrically stimulating a certain section of the brain. I'm sure that when you almost die or you do stop breathing and your heart stops for a while and you come back that it is a very emotional experience and affects you in some profound way, which may even change the way you think about life. All of that is understandable, and none of it is proof of anything. Humans are pattern seeking creatures. While this helps us survive and thrive it also has some weird "side effects" where we see patterns when their aren't really any. Do some reading on a few conspiracy theory websites for a good course in what I'm talking about. Things happening in your life right when they "needed" to happen and that you were praying for are nothing more than lucky breaks. Its funny how when you think something "needs" to happen and you pray for it, then it doesn't happen, you look back on it and think that what actually did happen was "for the best" and you interpret that as "god's plan" or "god looking out for you". People interpret things through their own lenses. Even though bad things certainly do happen to good people, for the most part human beings are wonderful at adapting to and surviving almost anything life throws at us. We just don't often give ourselves the credit for our resilience. It is more comfortable to think that someone more powerful has our back. I'm just an odd duck who is more concerned in what is true than what makes me more comfortable.

Thanks for posting this fascinating study. I've never heard of this one before. "Groups form easier than they fall apart" This is unfortunately true, which is why we all need to think of ourselves as human beings first and foremost and relegate whatever other B.S. group you think you belong to (country, team, race, etc), a very, VERY, distant second (if at all).

Yes, mankind will never know everything there is to know, so regardless of how much we shrink those gaps there will always be gaps for god to hide out in. One reason that god of the gaps doesn't appeal to me is that I am afraid to die and everyone I know is afraid to die. I know how attractive "life after death" sounds. So much so that if it didn't really exist, someone would have to invent it. In my opinion that is exactly what happened. The intense feeling of not wanting to die is proof enough to me that religion is invented. Nothing else could explain an almost universal belief in something for which there is absolutely zero evidence for. As Dawkins says I also don't believe that there is a teapot orbiting the sun between the Earth and Mars. Of course I can't prove that there isn't, I just have never seen one shred of evidence to make me think that there is one. God is the same. There is plenty of reasons to invent god if he doesn't exist: Fear of death or the willingness to use peoples' fear of death to gain wealth or power over them. But, like the teapot in space, there is not one shred of evidence to support it.