rkbabang

I wasn't judging. I started my comment about the book with "I suspect this book probably ...". I know nothing of this book, but I do have my suspicions. All presidents are outliers and they are all sociopaths and narcissists to one extent or another. What is different about Trump is that he might not be as bright as most of his predecessors, he really doesn't care to behave like he's "supposed to", he has no interest in pretending to play the game, and he really enjoys going out of his way to say things that the liberal elites will get outraged about. On that last point I have no doubt at all that he does this on purpose and enjoys it immensely. The Pocahontas comment this week was great.

Is this like one of those jokes where you pretend it happened to you, or are you Michael Goldstein? Maybe he was at the airport too.

Someday that will show up on the blue square in Jeopardy and the contestant will say: "What is the method Libertarians used to take over the world?"

Government bonds are backed by the taxes the government will collect in the future, government fiat currencies are only protected by the fact that government has a lot of guns and can pass legal tender laws to force businesses to accept it.

Not a single one. ::) Which, coincidentally, is the same number of anarchists I've met who have started an anarch-state ;D I haven't read the book...but I agree with rk on this one. I'm not sure what there is to gain from reading a psycho-analysis of Trump. An anarch-state? Is that like an atheist church? :)

Serious question: Has anyone ever met a Psychiatrist that didn't have serious mental problems themselves? I suspect this book probably reveals a lot more about fears and mental issues of the 27 Psychiatrists than it does about Trump.

Sometimes they kill cows, abduct and rape people and surgically put implants in their heads.

There is a big difference between life and intelligent life. There is another big difference between intelligent life and life capable of leaving its home planet. Then there is another huge leap (one we have yet to make and have no near or medium term prospects of making) to life capable of interstellar travel within its home galaxy. Then, probably the largest leap will be between life which can travel interstellar distances and life which has figured out how to travel intergalactic distances. Unless there is new physics which we haven't figured out both of the last two categories may not even be possible. Maybe all lifeforms to date have been trapped within their solar system of origin. There is also the time scales to consider. The universe is only 13 billion years old and Earthlike planets have only been possible for less time than that. How likely is life really to appear on a planet that supports it? The Earth is pretty life friendly yet it only originated here once in over 4.6B years (as far as we can tell). If life was a sure thing, you would think that new completely unrelated lifeforms would be originating on earth all the time. Even if it only happened every billion years there would be 4 completely different families of life on Earth, but there is only one. What if whatever happened that day that life started on Earth failed to happen? Maybe Earth would still be barren of life and would remain that way forever. It certainly hasn't happened again in over 4B years. Then there is the question, if life does develop how likely is intelligent life? I'd propose that it is rare indeed. It took 4.2B years for intelligent life to evolve on earth which was capable of leaving the planet. What if in all that time we had one more mass-extinction event (or one fewer) it may have never happened at all. The Earth might exist without intelligent life right up until the sun burned out. The universe has only been around for 13B years and it took us over 4B years to evolve, what if it usually takes a lot longer than that? Maybe there hasn't been enough time yet for many intelligent life forms to exist. Then there is the question, if intelligent life does form, what is the chance that it will be able to leave its planet? Dolphins are intelligent, they communicate with each other and they have a culture passed down from one generation to the next. Yet, they will live in the water, raise their families, hunt fish, play, etc, but because of the limitations of their biology they will never use tools or harness fire, etc... How far would humans have gotten without opposable thumbs? I think many intelligent species in the universe are probably evolutionary dead ends as far as settling the stars goes. And how many "great filters" are there for even life like ours? How many species destroy themselves with nuclear bombs or antimatter or nanotechnology or AI or something else long before settling their galaxies? Like I said, I suspect intelligent life capable of interstellar travel is so rare that it is not at all surprising that we haven't been visited yet and I suspect that intergalactic travel will never be possible for any lifeform anywhere. I also suspect that intelligent life itself is so rare that we may be the only ones in the Milkyway. Whether we might find someway to detect life in the universe someday is an open question, but I seriously doubt we will ever meet up with any intelligent lifeforms in person.

Just wanted to bump this thread up. I re-read it from the beginning and found it interesting how I went from highly sceptical of Bitcoin in 2014 to buying my first bitcoins in January 2015. Wachtwoord's post are really good and worth it to re-read.

Don't make trades that scare you. I'm not talking about me making trades. Well yes, anyone who buys bitcoin (or any of the others) needs to understand volatility could be extreme at times. If you are holding for the long term that shouldn't matter, you might get nice buying opportunities from time to time. However if you are 100x leveraged....good luck. I'm not too worried. If my cryptocurrency portfolio drops by 95% tomorrow I'll still be in the black.

Don't make trades that scare you.

Even the high estimate is under 25%. http://fortune.com/2017/11/25/lost-bitcoins/ "3.79 million bitcoins are already gone for good based on a high estimate—and 2.78 million based on a low one. Those numbers imply 17% to 23% of existing bitcoins" AND: "both estimates make a critical assumption that coins belonging to bitcoin’s inventor, Satoshi, are gone for good" Take Satoshi's coins out of the estimates and you get 2.75M to 1.73M lost coins or 10% to 16% And these estimates are considering a large amount of coins which haven't moved in a while to be lost (30-50%), no one really knows which are lost and which are simply being held.

There are a lot of exchanges trading BTC for USD, as well as foreign currencies, as well as other cryptocurrencies. I'm not saying fraud can't take place, but it would take hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars spread across multiple currencies (both fiat and crypto) in dozens of exchanges to fix the price of BTC right now. I think what you are seeing isn't fraud, but simply increased demand. https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/volume/24-hour/all/

Mars gravity is 38% of Earth's so it won't be quite as difficult to re-adjust from weightlessness, but with no medical teams waiting to take care of those 1st pioneers who will be landing in rough shape anything that goes wrong could be deadly. It won't be easy, but some will survive (hopefully) to build a civilization. My question is what will happen to the human body once you've lived on Mars for 10+ years, or the people born and raised there, could you ever come back to Earth? Probably not. The book sounds interesting, I'm going to order it.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1/text

Yes you are exactly correct in the paragraph above. The conclusion I draw is that we have not been visited, or at least we are no longer being visited. My personal opinion based on nothing concrete is that intelligent life is rarer than most scientists think and we may be the only intelligent species in the Milkyway right now. There are surely others in other galaxies (there are just too many of them to think otherwise), but we may have this one to ourselves.

Anti Fragile in the Talebian sense doesn't mean something that survives disaster and comes out stronger long term, but something that benefits immediately from it. Such as gold or bitcoin if the US Dollar or the US Government collapses. I think an anti-fragile stock portfolio would consist of nothing but long term out of the money calls and puts to benefit from a black swan event in either direction. The only way you lose money is if nothing much happens.

With all of the QE, do you think it is possible for it to persist? That isn't a rhetorical question, because I don't know. My gut tells me that at some point the chickens are going to come home to roost and we are going to be hit with an uncomfortable rate of price inflation. Most of my wealth is still in stocks and USD, not bitcoin, but I'm glad I have some bitcoin nonetheless.

Yes. And I'd argue that inflation hurts the elderly who are trying to live off of their fixed savings far far far more than it hurts the super rich who have investments which more than keep up with inflation. When you are at the grocery store and see the elderly cashier ringing up the other elderly woman's cart full of cat food you have seen the effects of inflation. no_free_lunch Well maybe I didn't explain myself correctly, I am going to pass from one subject to another, I don't understand why would you think I was only going to talk about inflation, My intention was just to start the conversation. What does it mean when you say you don't like that I am talking about inflation ? isn't it (or should I say the lack of it) part of bitcoin ? so why shouldn't I speak about it ? rkbabang I don't really think your criticism about inflation is really about inflation. Isn't it about not having proper financial planning ? If I am a retire that saved enough money why is inflation hurting me more than the 1 percent ? both of us have our wealth invested just that my money is more in a fixed income than his. still i'm getting my income stream and the market is pricing the security for proper real return. Why do you think inflation hurts the elderly "far far far more" ? There are many reasons. One is that the elderly (today's elderly) have been lied to their whole lives and thought that they would be taken care of by Social Security. Then they retire to find out that they barely get coffee money and healthcare is huge issue. Thus they have not saved enough and whatever they did save is being eaten by inflation every year so they now have to work. Also your risk tolerance is less when you need the money presently. At 30 or 40 years old you can invest in higher risk/higher return investments, but when you are retired (and you are not very wealthy) you need to both live off of your investments and try to not lose any ground. This is hard to do for the average person with no interest in investing in an inflationary environment. What ends up happening is that being risk averse leads to inflation loses. In a non-inflationary environment (or deflationary environment) you could save money if that was your intention and not have it eaten away by the year. If you did want to invest your money, then any return at all would be positive, you would only lose money if your investment actually lost money. It would make it much easier to plan for retirement, live conservatively, and know that you will always have enough. Forcing everyone into the stock market whether they wish to be investors or not just to avoid losing your wealth is not an ideal situation. Not to mention inflation in the housing market creates houses to be re-evaluated for tax purposes and the elderly end up paying much more to simply live in their paid off homes then they had ever imagined. There are all kinds of ways that inflation hurts the elderly.

Yes. And I'd argue that inflation hurts the elderly who are trying to live off of their fixed savings far far far more than it hurts the super rich who have investments which more than keep up with inflation. When you are at the grocery store and see the elderly cashier ringing up the other elderly woman's cart full of cat food you have seen the effects of inflation.

Not today, but earlier this week I added to my MIDD, UBNT, and BAM positions. And took some profits by selling about half of my OSTK holdings.

You mean like iRobot's new security bot? Don't worry my security bot doesn't like dogs.

The WSJ’s analysis 1 Dallas, 2 Boston, 3 DC https://www.wsj.com/graphics/amazon-headquarters/?mod=e2fb

Once you start arguing, "its not the system its really just human beings that suck", you have all but outright admitted that your system sucks. See below for something I extracted from Feynman's talk on Cargo Cult science. What I find interesting about this, is this whole idea that replications should not be done because they are a waste of time. Its never ever about time. Its about priorities. And priorities are about incentives. What people really mean when they say something is a waste of time is that the current system is pushing hard them to do certain things (publish more research, get more grants, get more citations) and they don't have the time to do other important things that they aught to be doing. Its the incentives and design of the system that are wrong. Not the people. http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm Even in Feynman's example it isn't the system itself that sucks, there is nothing about science that says experiments should not be repeated, in fact in theory every scientist will tell you that indeed they should be. It was the individual professor who told her that she'd be wasting her time who sucks. In the end it always comes down to specific individual people. You can have the best methods and systems in place theoretically, but if people choose not to follow them in practice they will not work. Take hand washing by doctors as an example. Every doctor will tell you that hand washing is important, yet 100,000 people per year die because doctors simply don't practice what they preach. The theory is great and everyone agrees, but in practice individual human beings choose to do it the wrong way. People suck.

I have a suggestion. A way to refresh your search. I punched three symbols into the search bar yesterday. Today my tab was still open and I wanted to re-do the same search. The search bar looked like the picture attached. Hitting the magnifying-glass icon did nothing. Using the browser refresh cleared all the symbols and I had to retype them in. There should be a way to re-run the search with the same symbols that you have already typed in. Maybe this exists already and I just couldn't figure it out.