rkbabang

Your statements may be correct but your inference is precisely wrong. If you believe both to be true AND you can observe life on earth than it is safe to assume that there is a possibility of alien life somewhere else. Mind sharing the hypothesis for that pre supposition? If life exists here, then it is possible that exists in other places too. Life exists, so we can say that life originated somewhere. That could be either here on Earth, somewhere else and was transported to Earth (naturally or by other life), or it may have come to be in multiple places in the universe independently. Even if we are living in a simulation, that means that intelligent beings created that simulation and are living in a universe where life originated somehow. We do not know the answers to these questions and nothing can be ruled out. There does not have to be anything greater than ourselves. That is a subjective statement anyway depending on your definition of "greater". There may or may not be something other than ourselves.

Although I personally like the simulation hypothesis, it may be just glitches in the matrix that we are seeing. Maybe very little processing power is spent rendering those areas normally not observed by humans and we just never noticed before. If this is the case, wait until we start expanding into space. Maybe the whole system will be in need of some serious upgrades, or maybe they will just decide to turn it off or let it crash. The other possibility is that it is intentional, the creators of the sim are just messing with us to see how we react. Of course there is the possibility that there is some other explanation, extra-terrestrial explanations shouldn't be ruled out entirely until they can be ruled out. It is interesting that the state (all existing governments) are not more interested in this. There is a possible explanation in this Washington Post piece: "Wendt and Duvall argued that state sovereignty as we understand it is anthropocentric, or “constituted and organized by reference to human beings alone.” They argued that the real reason UFOs have been dismissed is because of the existential challenge that they pose for a worldview in which human beings are the most technologically advanced life-forms: UFOs have never been systematically investigated by science or the state, because it is assumed to be known that none are extraterrestrial. Yet in fact this is not known, which makes the UFO taboo puzzling given the ET possibility.... The puzzle is explained by the functional imperatives of anthropocentric sovereignty, which cannot decide a UFO exception to anthropocentrism while preserving the ability to make such a decision. The UFO can be “known” only by not asking what it is." UFOs exist and everyone needs to adjust to that fact UFOs are not the same thing as extraterrestrial life. But we should start thinking about that possibility. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/05/28/ufos-exist-everyone-needs-adjust-that-fact/

This is reassuring. I was worried that wouldn't be the case. I'll have to pick up a copy. Unfortunately it isn't $1.99 anymore. I'm putting it on my to read list. Hopefully it will go on sale again.

Rkbabang won. Fame? Fortune? BTW, it traded lower than that yesterday, so someone else somewhere in the world won.

Haha. Yeah, they left me out of the count. I just assumed everyone one this site, wisely, had me on ignore. Sorry, I didn't count. I wrongly assumed DooDiligence could count. :)

Me 4 @ $199.66

If you shop around for the right neighborhood I'm sure you can accomplish this immediately.

I hate to disappoint you, but I think you're in the wrong profession. You should take up investment banking instead. Sure. Just crush a man's dreams why don't you.

Independence. Quit my day job before I'm too old to enjoy retirement. House paid off, maybe a condo someplace warm. Ability to go on many vacations every year. I don't have any desire to learn how to fly a plane, and I don't plan to waste a ton of money buying a fractional jet share (even if I could afford it, it seems like a waste), so I'll be happy flying 1st class commercial.

"However, some experts point out that expert systems were not part of true artificial intelligence since they lack the ability to learn autonomously from external data." It's funny that whenever we get a system to do things that computers could never do before we declare that it isn't "real" AI and we move the goal post further back. To some "real" AI won't be achieved until artificial systems can think, think about thinking, feel, love, hate, fear, not want to die ....

Okay, so I am a non-practioner and I do tend to be slightly paranoid (okay, maybe exceptionally paranoid). I mostly don't hesitate to install apps from the Google Play store, or from the Apple iTunes App Store, or add-ons or extentions officially sanctioned by Crome or Firefox. But, installing a 3rd party app that happens to be on GitHub? Nope, I'm a bit too paranoid for that. I use my browser to log into my financial accounts, so I have a certain discomfort with installing apps that are not vetted through the major channels. I have no idea what those apps do and what they don't do. Is there spyware on them that will steal my brokerage and online banking passwords? Do you have any reassuring intel? I don't mind Outline because when it's run in Chrome, it's sandboxed. But who has gone through the Bypass-Paywalls app to ensure it's okay? I will admit to being paranoid, but there are a few people on this site who are trying to protect their assets. SJ I agree with you. One thing you might do if you use chrome is install this app on firefox and only use firefox to read the wsj.

I just finished a really good novel about new space, gravity ships, asteroid mining, and not asking for permission. "Delta-V" by Daniel Suarez. If you are familiar with Suarez, I think this is his best book since "Daemon".

I always picture 10 people standing around a computer in a conference room arguing about what to say and how to word it before hitting "Post".

My IRA is with Schwab and they allow writing cash-covered puts. It is exactly the same as writing a covered call. I write cash covered puts in both my IRA and 401K with Fidelity.

That's an aptly named location for a member of this forum. Very apt indeed. I once pondered calling myself SussexHathaway online as I live in one half of that traditional county, a couple of counties away from the Royal County of Berkshire, which for those who don't know, contains Windsor Castle in the town of Windsor, one of the Queen's major residences. But someone had made the same kind of joke on Motley Fool I think - SuffolkHathaway if I recall correctly. I worked in the county of Suffolk for a while too. I wonder @Lemsip, if, like me, you've adopted the American pronunciation for the company Berkshire Hathaway (which I did after a number of years when there was more audio content and YouTube videos to confirm how it was pronounced by the likes of Warren and Charlie) We Brits have developed some bizarre pronunciations for place names (famously Leicester being pronounced LESTER, and Worcestershire being pronounced WOOSTER-SHEAR with a short OO sound, and don't get me started on small places like Trottiscliffe = TROZE-LEE, Wrotham = ROOT'UM or Happisburgh = HAZE-BRUH!). For Brits, the county of Berkshire is pronounced BARK-SHUH or BARK-SHEAH by the non-rhotic Brits from the south-east who usually drop the final R sound from words like Hear in normal speech, or BARK-SHEAR for those rhotic accent Brits mainly from the western parts. I've heard British financial journalists like Evan Davis, who interviewed Warren Buffett a few years ago for the BBC, refer to Berkshire Hathaway with both American and British pronunciations at times, but probably veering to the more American version BURKE-SHUH or BURKE-SHURE or even BURKE-SHY'R for consistency with the interviewees. Interesting I didn't realize there was a different pronunciation for Berkshire. In Massachusetts there are plenty of towns with English names and funny pronunciations, but Berkshire is still pronounced the American way. I went to college in Worcester, MA and I heard it pronounced both Woost-ah and Wist-ah (but never with an r at the end), when someone says War-chester or Wor-kester you know they aren't from the area. I pronounce Worcestershire as WOO-STAH-SHEAH (no "r"s). There is a Leicester, MA as well and it is pronounced Lestah (basically LESTER without the "r"). I lived for a time in Raynham, MA and it had two different pronunciations that were used by the natives interchangeably: Rain-ham (emphasis on 2nd syllable) or Rainem (no "h" and emphasis on 1st syllable).

Considering this is a financial forum, I'm somewhat surprised that this thread doesn't have a lot more big friggin applers than it does.

;D Dad, I really really just became a millionaire... ... I started with 10 million and invested in Canadian O&Gs, some promising biotechs, even more promising techs, couple airlines, IBM, and triple index tracker. Reminds me of this quote, "To make a small fortune in the futures market, start with a large fortune." Or Richard Branson saying " If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline."

Really good read on the current state of AI from an economist's view. Not a technical book at all, so it is a quick and easy read. It goes into what AI can/can't currently do and what the effects will be in certain industries and businesses and on the economy as a whole. As well as a look at where it is going in the short to medium term. They emphasize that current machine learning is not AGI (artificial general intelligence), there is no creativity, ability to make value judgments, etc, so humans are almost always (but not always) needed to work along side it. Which is why they use the term "prediction machines" rather than AI to refer to it.

I had a similar story, but I did exercise my options as soon as I could so that I wouldn't be too overweight in my own company. The problem was that after exercising the options I invested half of the proceeds into other tech stocks. You can guess what happened. Luckily I was still fairly young in 2000 (about 4 years out of college so I didn't have 7 figures in investments to lose) and I was married already and had my wife to convince me to spend half of what I did have on a house, so I didn't lose 7 figures like others did in the crash, just very low 6 figures. It still hurt though and it lead me to reading about investing in general, Buffett, value investing, etc...

And even better. I've found this. A deep learning death metal generator. It constantly streams deep learning generated death metal in real time as it generates it 24/7. It isn't bad. Something you can just keep on your headphones as you work.

‘You Can’t Take My Door’, A Country Song Created by a Neural Network That Studied a Catalog of Country Hits https://laughingsquid.com/country-song-created-by-neural-network/

I just wish I had the foresight to have bought ZOOM at $0.01 a few months ago so that I could have sold it >$5 today. Anyone with a sufficiently low opinion of humanity should have been buying ZOOM as soon as they found out that Zoom Video Communications was going to go public. I completely missed this.

Just finished it. I watched it because of your post and I totally agree with you! Great recommendation. No problem. Another Spanish show on Netflix that was pretty good (although not as good as Unauthorized Living) is "Fugitiva", it's worth watching. I'm watching the Amazon original "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" now, it's a little silly at times, but it is funny and worth watching as well.

http://www.defenseworld.net/uploads//news/big/mirage-v__1476787129.jpg

Also, one thing to consider is that sometimes politics does have an effect on the market and therefore you could make the argument that it has a place on an investment board. You mentioned that you are fairly new to the board, so you may not understand the reason the politics section was created in the first place. Political discussions were happening in the investment threads all over the place and especially in the general category. Pushing it into its own section has cleared up most of that. It is now (for the most part) all in one place and can easily be ignored if one wishes. The other thing to consider is that ignoring it doesn't have to be permanent or all or nothing. I go back and forth between ignoring it and reading/participating depending on the mood I'm in.