rkbabang

And you'd almost certainly have more (due to efficiency) is govt stayed out of all those things minus rule of law. Private schools outperform. Private infrastructure works just fine. There are hundreds of examples. me Too bad my parents couldn't afford private school for me. If the government ran all food distribution in the country "for free", you're parents probably couldn't have afforded to shop at private grocery stores or ate at restaurants like the rich people do either. If there had been no government involvement and a flourishing education market for over 100 years you would certainly have had an education almost regardless of your parents' means.

Take the word "public" out in the two places you used it and I would agree 100%.

On my FB profile this is what I list as my favorite quotes: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." --Robert A. Heinlein "I heartily accept the motto, That government is best which governs least; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe -- That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have." -- Henry David Thoreau, "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" http://www.ibiblio.org/ebooks/Thoreau/Civil%20Disobedience.pdf "Human beings are individualists by nature, who don't 'play well in groups'. The collective Intelligence quotient of any group is the IQ of the brightest person in the group divided by the number of its members" --L. Neil Smith, "The Serbian Mirror" http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle1997/le970401-03.html "If a politician isn't perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash -- for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn't your friend no matter what he tells you. If he isn't genuinely enthusiastic about his average constituent stuffing that weapon into a purse or pocket or tucking it under a coat and walking home without asking anybody's permission, he's a four-flusher, no matter what he claims...If he doesn't want you to have the means of defending your life, do you want him in a position to control it? " --L. Neil Smith, "Why Did it Have to be...Guns?" http://www.lneilsmith.org/whyguns.html "Government is the disease that masquerades as its own cure." -- Robert LeFevre "Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest." --Mark Twain "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it." --Warren E. Buffet

Your just being selfish. Where would they get the money to murder brown kids overseas by the tens of thousands from if everyone thought like you? Did you ever even once stop to think of that?

"Don't be a jerk, Don't be lazy, Don't spend more than you have, Invest your extra money." --me EDIT: And I almost forgot to add ".. And don't trust the government."

Just finished "Unauthorized Living" it is a Netflix original based in Spain. You can set the audio to English, so you don't need to turn on subtitles. It was excellent. The best show I've seen lately.

The best observation in the article is "You can support any argument by changing the start and end dates."

Thanks for posting this. I downloaded the audible version the day you posted this and just finished it this morning. Excellent book.

Don't you know envy is one of the deadly sins? No need to be so jealous of him, not everybody can be a self-made billionaire. Absolutely! It's like the fat guy at home in his arm chair second guessing what the quarterback does in the Superbowl. The number of people who make 8 figures per year is quite large compared to the number of billionaires in the world. Anyone who ends up a billionaire has done something extraordinary. Actually they've probably done a great number of somethings extraordinary.

More LAACZ, I've had an order in at $2190 for a long time, today I bought a few at $2275. Itchy trigger finger.

That's totally not something that is happening in this topic. :P Never seen this essay. Its really nice. I have had a few instances which were big oops type ones where I completely changed what I was doing. One question I have though is what you do if: 1) You are sure what you are doing is failing 2) You have no idea of a better alternative. Here I'm not talking about investing because the obvious alternative is to index invest. I more thinking about big problems like a failing career or a lack of passion in life. I am thinking of rut like patterns in life that people don't know how to break. I can think of a few answers: 1) Try anything new and different...experiment with a lot with different things 2) Meet different people 3) Look for the person who is succeeding while you are failing. Especially if that person fall into the psychological category of someone you dismiss because they had some unfair reason for succeeding or because you don't believe in what they are doing. 4) Take LSD or some psychedelic. I don't really think I have a good answer since I am having problems like this and I don't really have a good solution. 1 in combination with 2 is a huge problem. I'm reminded of the saying "When you find yourself in a hole ... stop digging". The first thing to do is stop doing whatever it is that is failing. Even if it means doing nothing at all until you figure out how you want to try to proceed.

Another 2 books I'll mention which are good reads are Kevin Kelly's "What Technology Wants" and his follow-up "The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future". He's got an interesting take on the evolutionary process of technology, both how it evolved in the past and where it is likely going.

You know the photo is staged when she wears high heels on the factory floor. Was there any expectation that it wasn't staged? As in, a photographer sneaked in the high-security ITAR-compliant factory and just happened to catch in a candid moment the COO of SpaceX admiring some hardware on the factory floor? ;) Because I like nit pick: 1) High heels are not allowed on the factory floor typically, because they are considered a safety concern. 2) The fact that the COO wears high heels on the factory floor means that she either doesn’t care about safety violations and/or she is almost never on the factory floor (except for PR). Or perhaps nobody cares about safety violations 3) It’s not a big deal, but sometimes, these little things give you and insight into the company culture. Or maybe she only wears high heels on the factory floor when she knows she is dressing up to be photographed by the press?

In a town in MA that I used to live in, someone discovered that this one guy who was on the town payroll as a full time employee for more than 20 years, had another full time job in the private sector the entire time and had never done anything at all for the town. He had a full time salary, benefits, and pension and had never worked. The funny part is that after it became public and they fired him, they wanted to replace him. There was an uproar in town, because if the job had never been done and no one had ever noticed, then why should he be replaced? In the end the position was eliminated, but only because of the publicity. Had it never been in the newspaper no one would ever have known or cared.

It comes down to incentives. City governments know that they can spend now and tax or issue bonds later to take care of pension liabilities. And anyway the politicians that are in office now can do the spending and let someone else deal with the long run consequences. As long as it isn't going to collapse during your tenure in office, the long run consequences will be someone else's problem. This works year after year, decade after decade, ... until it doesn't.

Technology to the rescue. http://whiskyadvocate.com/rapid-aging-whiskey-feature/ "The Science Behind Alternatively Aged Whisky. The Rosies pump ultrasonic waves through whiskey and other spirits to achieve the smoothed-out flavors and textures that typically come from years of barrel aging."

I use Fidelity as my brokerage and I use their watchlist feature. It lets you add companies to the watchlist and set alerts, it's ok and it works for my purposes. I used to use Yahoo, I'd create a portfolio which mirrored mine and a watchlist portfolio for tracking stocks that I was interested in. But they kept changing their financial section for the worse, and when they got rid of their portfolio feature I stopped using yahoo altogether.

I looked up "The Undoing Project" on Amazon and it said "Read for free" with prime. So I just had that delivered to my Kindle. Thanks. I've also never read Clockwork Orange, I'm going to put that on my list as well.

Yes, but when I say there has got to be a better way of doing things than through coercive government, which has no incentive to make any reasonable real world decisions, I am the crazy one. This is what government does, it steals and it spends until it just can't steal and spend anymore. Government creates no wealth, it can only take it from others. So exactly like any other Ponzi scheme, when it can no longer continue it won't.

Yes, it was me who recommended that to you! Also, I love Haidt. Have you read The Righteous Mind? I have, I didn't list it here because we've talked about it before so I knew for sure you'd read it.

Books I've read recently that I enjoyed. "The Coddling of The American Mind" Jonathan Haidt "The Happiness Hypothesis" Jonathan Haidt "The Myth of the Rational Voter" Bryan Caplan "iWoz" "Christmas Eve, 1914" Charles Olivier "The Everything Store" "Thinking in Bets" (but I'm pretty sure it was you who recommended this, so you read it already, if not, it was good) The 2 "Luna" books by Ian McDonald

Maybe off topic, but my favorite way to use the site is to click the link at the top right under your username that says: "Show unread posts since last visit." Also the one under it ("Show new replies to your posts.") is useful as well to show only topics which you've participated in which have new messages.

I have an elderly neighbor who is originally from Taiwan, he's in his 70's but has lived in England, Canada, and the US since college. So he speaks English very well, with only a hint of an accent. But when he jokes around and does an exaggerated Chinese accent it is hilarious. "Fried Rice" comes out "Flied Lice" for instance. He just goes on and on and can keep us laughing for hours.

I was applying for Australian citizenship and the interviewer asked, "Do you have a criminal record?" I said, "No. Is that still required?"

IP addresses are very easy to hide/fake. You can't track people by IP address. EDIT: That is poorly worded as you can track most people by IP address. You can't track someone who doesn't want to be tracked by IP address.