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Author Topic:   Phat Unplugged
dwise1
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Posts: 6196
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.4


Message 393 of 523 (919722)
07-24-2024 4:06 PM
Reply to: Message 391 by dronestar
07-24-2024 2:57 PM


Re: Yes, Trump was found to have raped
Sounds like you know more about the law than the judge of the actual trial. Impressive.
The law is all about what the laws say and the definitions they set. Of course, that also involves the precise wording of those laws, which is why lawyers are forever arguing over interpretations. For example, one of the jokes in the second radio series of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy regarding Lintilla:
quote:
Lintilla is a rather unfortunate woman who has (as of Fit the Eleventh of the radio series) been cloned 578,000,000,000 times due to an accident at a Brantisvogan escort agency. While creating six clones of a wonderfully talented and attractive woman named Lintilla (at the same time another machine was creating five hundred lonely business executives, in order to keep the laws of supply and demand operating profitably), the machine got stuck in a loop and malfunctioned in such a way that it got halfway through completing each new Lintilla before it had finished the previous one. This meant that it was for a very long while impossible to turn the machine off without committing murder, despite lawyers' best efforts to argue about what murder actually was, including trying to redefine it, repronounce it, and respell it in the hope that no one would notice.
So legal findings must be based on the wording of the applicable laws. What I had gleaned from news coverage (MSNBC, which is very good at bringing in actual legal experts (eg, lawyers, law professors, ex-prosecutors) to explain and discuss the legal issues being covered), the applicable New York law regarding rape defines it as requiring penetration with the penis. Hence, penetration with anything else would still qualify as sexual assault, but not rape. Even though what Trump has been adjudicated as having done would be considered rape by anybody, it could not legally be rape. Just as many things that Trump has done are clearly treasonous, they very likely do not meet the legal definition of treason (so no swinging from the yardarm in his future).
 
BTW, my son recently graduated from law school and is currently preparing for his bar exam. Engaging in discussions and arguments with him is going to be very arduous.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 391 by dronestar, posted 07-24-2024 2:57 PM dronestar has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 395 by dronestar, posted 07-24-2024 5:07 PM dwise1 has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 6196
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.4


(1)
Message 403 of 523 (919794)
08-03-2024 3:23 PM
Reply to: Message 401 by Phat
08-03-2024 12:38 PM


Re: Keeping It Personal
One more complication may be my propensity to drink a lot of Diet Mountain Dew with aspartame. Ive heard that aspartame can affect mental clarity.
GOP VP pick JD Vance also drinks Diet Mountain Dew. That could explain a lot about his weird attitudes that are too extreme even for fellow MAGAts (at least the ones concerned with winning an election).
Sorry, couldn't resist the temptation. But it does make sense.
Was your medical procedure diabetes related?
Yes. I have a foot ulcer and I need eye surgery on this coming Tuesday.
My mother developed diabetes as an adult and died from complications after heart bypass surgery -- she had always remained active gardening and had developed a strong attitude from overcoming childhood polio such that she presented to the doctor as stronger than she actually was, fooling him into electing that surgery. My older sister who had been the most involved in our parents' later health maintains that it was diabetes that killed her, since, in her words, it attacks all the organs of the body weakening them.
When I was on active duty my wife had a friend who taught at the local university we attended. That friend's husband had diabetes and was active in diabetes care awareness education. I saw a photo from one such presentation in which he played the role of a diabetic's foot (wearing a cardboard cutout foot costume) in a panel discussion on foot care, mainly how to prevent losing your toes or worse.
My understanding (which could be wrong) is that diabetes affects the circulatory system in ways that restrict blood flow to the body's organs and tissues. Over time, that low circulation takes its toll on the body. And my understanding is that the extremities (eg, the toes, feet, and legs) tend to be early victims to those circulation problems.
I know that your doctors have informed you of all this and much more, so you already know. I'm relating this for others to be aware of how serious diabetes can be and therefore must not be taken lightly.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 401 by Phat, posted 08-03-2024 12:38 PM Phat has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 6196
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.4


(1)
Message 413 of 523 (920189)
09-09-2024 5:26 PM
Reply to: Message 412 by Tanypteryx
09-09-2024 3:35 PM


Re: My message to Phat
I've mentioned this before, even recommending the documentary personally to Phat in this very same topic. Reposting my Message 231 (12-Jul-2023):
dwise1 writes in Message 231:
Let me recommend to you a documentary that I recommended to Faith on 26 Feb 2020 in Message 5067: The Brainwashing of my Dad -- it's even on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS52QdHNTh8 as well as streaming for free on Pluto, FreeVee, Plex, Filmzie, and FREE, as well as bring available through a subscription (Gravitas) or rental (eg, Prime).
I wrote:
dwise1 writes:
It would be a good idea to watch The Brainwashing of my Dad (website at https://www.thebrainwashingofmydad.com/, also streaming on the Roku Channel, Pluto, Vudu, Amazon Prime). The revocation of the fairness doctrine gave rise to right-wing talk radio. The format of talk radio carried over into Fake News Network where the host raises his voice and becomes angry, thus inducing and feeding anger in his audience. No facts, just a lot of angry noise.
From Wikipedia:
quote:
Synopsis
As Jen Senko tries to understand the transformation of her father from a nonpolitical Democrat to an angry Republican fanatic, she uncovers the forces behind the media that changed him completely: a plan by Roger Ailes under President Richard Nixon for a media takeover by the Republicans, the 1971 Powell Memo urging business leaders to influence institutions of public opinion (especially the media, universities, and courts), the 1987 dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine under President Ronald Reagan, and the signing of the 1996 Telecommunications Act under President Bill Clinton. The documentary aims to show how the media and the nation changed, which leads to questions about who owns the airwaves, what rights listeners and watchers have, and what responsibility the government has to keep the airwaves fair, accurate, and accountable.
Content
Senko's father, Frank, was originally a "nonpolitical Kennedy Democrat" who began changing into a far-right Republican in the 1980s, she said.[1] On her father's lengthy commute to his place of employment, he listened to conservative talk radio, which Senko believes started the change in her father's personality. In particular, he listened to Rush Limbaugh and watched Fox News. Towards the end of his life, Frank's views mostly changed back to being somewhere in the middle due to his wife exposing him to less biased media. He died in January 2016 at the age of 93.

Like many Americans, especially retired men, her father started listening exclusively to conservative media (talk radio, FOX News) and subscribing to a conservative email site, all of which fed him a constant stream of far-right content. I worked with people like that and would walk in on them having a heated self-affirming discussion about huge Democrat conspiracies that I had never heard of. They hear nothing besides that content which is designed to enrage and terrify the elderly (eg, Ailes has been quoted as requiring content that would "scare your grandfather" -- fear and anger shuts down the neocortex, thus disabling rational thought).
Another victim of that media was interviewed in the film, a truck driver trapped long hours on the road with nothing to listen to on the radio except right-wing talk radio. The interviewee described the effect on him, turning him into a FOX-bot, until one day he stumbled upon NPR, a rational and informed source to listen to. We should also remember that poll testing respondents' knowledge of current events found that conservative media viewers/listeners knew significantly less about current events than did those who didn't follow the news at all.
Watch it. It is after all on YouTube and hence, in your mind, must be true.
It's still available for free on YouTube, Roku Channel, Pluto, and other minor streaming channels and for rent on a couple others (fandango, apple TV) -- search on your own streaming device to find it.
Phat replied at the time:
Phat writes in Message 236:
I watched the whole thing. It explains a lot about my own family, particularly my father.

Overall, it was a well made documentary and explained a bit of my own behavior also.

AZ has a point though. Some of my behavior is bio-chemical.
More specifically, Jen Senko's father was cured by his wife unsubscribing him from the right-wing messages he was getting (kind of like unfriending such sources on Facebook) and not replacing his radio when it broke (not sure whether she had engineered that too) so he couldn't listen to Rush anymore as well as always tuning the TV in to more sane fare.
&nbps;
PS
Finding something to listen to on the radio while traveling cross-country can be very challenging, especially if you're restricted to AM radio, which was our situation in North Dakota in the late 70's (I did later install an FM converter while we were there), where just about all you could find was religious stations and live polka music (eg, Uncle Ernie's Polka Hour). That was also before I discovered NPR which was also my major source of national and international news while in North Dakota (working the swing shift, I missed national TV news half the time and the local newspaper only had one or maybe two pages of national/international news with the rest mainly being farm reports). On our final drive home (ND to SoCalif) in 1982, after catching Prairie Home Companion for the first time I listened to my tapings of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series.
For my solo cross-country drive in 2018 I had Sirius XM in my car, so I was freed from the local broadcasting deserts and had proper programming to listen to (music, Radio Classics, MSNBC, and Progressive Radio). That included live coverage of the first confirmation hearing for Kavanaugh where Senator Kamala Harris stood up to Chairman Grassley who was trying to steamroll Kavanaugh through.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 412 by Tanypteryx, posted 09-09-2024 3:35 PM Tanypteryx has seen this message but not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 414 by Percy, posted 09-10-2024 9:32 AM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 6196
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.4


Message 415 of 523 (920196)
09-10-2024 3:07 PM
Reply to: Message 414 by Percy
09-10-2024 9:32 AM


Re: My message to Phat
... unions ...
In high school and college I worked for my father, a master carpenter and general contractor -- for 8 years every day I wasn't in school I was on the job site, so when I enlisted suddenly having weekends free was a big adjustment.
In order to be able to work alongside union carpenters, my father had to join the union (I'm not sure how the rules applied to me). He had to pay union dues and pay into retirement, etc, but he could never draw any benefits because he was management. Growing up, I saw that as unfair so I didn't have a very favorable opinion of unions.
My views have matured since then. For example, one time my friend was on a business trip she met and talked with an HR rep for a big construction company (she had a talent for getting to know strangers). He talked to her about the difficulty they had finding skilled workers.
But I should start with her question to me: "Where do construction workers learn their trade?", to which I answered, "In their union schools." Carrying on the training traditions of the guilds (as we all learned in school), you join a trade union as an apprentice and attend union classes while getting practical experience on the job site (plus making a living), then you graduate to journeyman and increase your skill level, then you finally progress to master. In a genealogy class the teacher had a copy of her German shoemaker ancestor's journeyman's book into which each master he worked for had made entries detailing what skills he had been taught and how well he performed -- when she learned that I knew German (eg, she showed us a record for the death of a German ancestor in German but until I translated it she hadn't known that it said that he had drowned in a canal), she gave me a copy.
So that HR rep had told my friend the same thing that I just confirmed. With the weakening of the unions started by Reagan the number of apprentices (and journeymen, since this is a training pipeline) getting trained by the unions also dropped leading to a reduction in the size of the American skilled work force (in construction in this case). As a result, he was hard pressed to find skilled American construction workers and had to recruit foreign workers instead. Immigrants taking American jobs, but only because there weren't any Americans with the skills that are needed. Skills that used to be taught here, but no longer without the unions. Yeah, there are vocational schools and community colleges (I saw construction classes listed), but they are hardly up to the task like the unions were.
And it's not a case of those immigrants doing the jobs that Americans refuse to do; eg, from my Message 534 (21-Jan-2019) reply to Faith:
dwise1 writes:
"Jobs that Americans refuse to do"
Remember the 1964 A-TEAM (Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracero_program#Aftermath and https://www.npr.org/...grant-farmworkers-with-high-schoolers. When we closed the bracero program the farmers had no farm workers to pick their crops for them. Despite the opponents of the bracero program decrying how they were taking jobs away from Americans, Americans didn't rush in to grab those jobs. Seeing two different problems -- lack of farm workers and lack of summer jobs for teenagers -- politicians decided that combining the two problems would provide the solutions. So in 1964 they recruited high school athletes to do farm work. They got a lot of responses, though coaches would not allow athletes enter that program because they needed to make practice during the summer. The students were appalled at the extremely bad living and working conditions, the same ones that the braceros had had to endure. Many students deserted within the first few weeks (some after only a few days) and they staged strikes in some of the camps. The program was a failure and was cancelled after the first summer.
Do the name, "Salem, Ohio", ring a bell? -- https://www.theguardian.com/...n-raid-meatpacking-plant-ohio. The Fresh Mark meat packing plant, a major industry that the town depends on, employed many Guatemalan illegals. Not only did Fresh Mark benefit from their hard work, but they and their families were a contributing part of the community. On 19 June 2018, ICE staged a massive raid on the plant arresting 146 workers. The effects on the town were devastating. The plant continued to operate, but at a reduced capacity which cost them revenue. Many Guatemalans left the town out of fear, so the businesses in town suffered from the loss of many of their customers. The plant has tried to recruit workers, which should be easy with all the Americans flooding in to fill those jobs. That hasn't been the case. On the radio, it was reported that Syrian refugees were filling those jobs.
Rather, this is a case of immigrants doing jobs that Americans can no longer do because they cannot learn the skills due to the loss of the institutions which used to provide that training. It's like the Catch-22 I recognized even in high school: you cannot get a job if you don't have work experience, but you cannot get that work experience without having gotten a job.
Which makes the threat of mass deportations of those skilled immigrant workers so dire to the American economy. Who's going to replace those essential workers if so few of us have the required skills? Even farm work requires skills which take years and we've already seen Florida farmers unable to harvest their crops because so many farm workers are leaving the state because of rabid GOP anti-immigrant rhetoric.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 414 by Percy, posted 09-10-2024 9:32 AM Percy has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 6196
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.4


(1)
Message 465 of 523 (920322)
09-27-2024 1:03 PM
Reply to: Message 462 by Theodoric
09-27-2024 10:13 AM


Re: Keeping It Personal
If you can't put it in your own words, then you don't understand it. Just because you think something sounds good doesn't mean you understand it.
Not just that, but when you explain something to someone else, then that requires you to think it through. If you cannot explain it to someone else then you don't understand it, especially if you are unable to even begin to explain it.
If you put an honest effort into writing that explanation then you will learn more about the subject yourself because writing that explanation requires you to organize your thoughts about the subject. It will also make you aware of the parts that you don't understand which requires you to research those parts more deeply.
A side-benefit of that evolution (Navy-speak) is that you are also verifying that claim. If the claim turns out to be BS (eg, just about any creationist claim), then your questions should uncover that fact. For example, if the claim requires certain assumptions, then your research into those assumptions should show their weaknesses or even that they are totally unfounded. OTOH, if the assumptions turn out to be sound and the claim well reasoned, then would strengthen your confidence in that claim.
Furthermore, going through that evolution would put you in a far better position to defend or discuss that claim. For example, Phat complains:
Phat writes in Message 461:
You don't know how often I make what I think to be a decent post only to have it exacerbated by the Peanut Gallery.
First, word choice. "exacerbate" means to make worse. I think he meant "excoriate" which means to censure scathingly.
Second, if he had performed the evolution described above then he would have been well prepared to defend and discuss his "decent post." He had not, so he could not.
That is also so sadly typical of creationists who repeat claims that they had heard without understanding them and so are completely incapable of discussing them. It took me so long in the beginning to understand why my good faith attempts to discuss creationists' claims with them was almost universally met with anger and vitriol. Finally I realized that they quite literally had absolutely no clue what they were talking about and so they had to resort to extreme unpleasantness in order to avoid discussion: it's their only defense.
And indeed, one of the best ways to learn a subject is to teach it. I discovered that while helping a fellow German student with German grammar -- as parodied by Mark Twain in his "The Awful German Language", learning German feels like having to memorize multiple tables of case endings ("You speak German, Herr Twain? Please decline this adjective for me." "I'd rather decline two drinks than a damned German adjective!"), which is more true with German than with Romance languages but less so than with Russian. As a result of reviewing and drilling with my friend, my own expertise became greater. Part of that comes from constantly reviewing the material and part comes from answering the students' questions which often requires finding different ways to explain the material, which of course requires you to think it through even more.
I should note here that my typically overly didactic writing style is itself an exercise in studying and trying to understand a subject. And there have been several posts that I started but never finished because during the writing I came to realize that I was wrong about parts (or all) of it.
 
PS
Here's an example of my approach having led to changing my mind.
I prefer working in the metric system than in the "English" system. One of my favorite pertinent scenes in Jerry Seinfeld's interview series, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, was his initial phone conversation with Christoph Waltz who was shopping in a Santa Monica hardware store for a measuring tape:
quote:
Waltz: I am trying to find something in centimeters.
Seinfeld: Why?
Waltz: Why? Because inches don't make sense.

My father was a master carpenter and a general contractor and I worked for him for eight years in high school and college (every day I wasn't in class I was on the job site, so my first big adjustment to life in the military was having weekends free). Being able to read 16ths and 32nds of an inch on a steel tape on sight requires constant daily practice, which my work schedule did not provide me, so every time I had to figure it out. That meant that I had to repeatedly calculate fractions and do fraction arithmetic in my head, then forget what I had learned until the next time I had to do the same weeks or even months later. IOW, I never learned, but had to always do it the hard way.
Then I worked construction for one summer in West Germany. The first day on the job I was handed a Meterstock and told to get a board of a specific width. I could read that measurement immediately. Verily, centimeters do indeed make more sense than inches do.
University physics class used metric which made a lot of sense; we did cover "English" units briefly, but that felt too messy to work with (eg, mass having to be measured in slugs since the pound is a unit of force, so many hybrid units, etc).
Half a century ago I learned the metric equivalences (1 cubic centimeter == 1 milliliter and 1 ml water masses at one gram), but until a year ago I didn't know that one fluid ounce of water weighs about one ounce avoirdupois.
I also do not understand fluid ounces which only come up when ordering a drink (in the kitchen it's always cups and tablespoons and teaspoons). Since my only history of ordering drinks was half a century ago in West Germany, I have to convert from fluid ounces to milliliters in order to have any idea how big the drink will be (1 fl.oz. ≈ 30 ml, the subject of a webpage I've been working on).
So my webpage on approximating converting from metric to "English" in order to learn to visualize the metric measurement started out as an examination of why we haven't switched over already. I'm in favor of switching over to using metric and couldn't understand the opposition to it, thinking that opposition to be irrational. But as I started writing that page and researching I learned that there are rational reasons for not switching and I was able to better understand the opposing opinions.
As such, that is a case where explaining my position in writing led to my learning more and to understanding the opposing position better.
That page has been superseded by another describing simple methods for approximating metric measurements into "English". In typical apologetic style, I found a quote which justifies my approach:
quote:
Dr. Stratton, Director of the National Bureau of Standards. From his testimony before US Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures. The Metric System of Weights and Measures; (Hearings on H.R. 2054). 57th Congress, 1st Session. 1902:
(my emphasis added)
"Certain objections have from time to time been raised in opposition to the adoption of the metric system, but the experience of other countries and of our own has shown that many of these objections are without foundation. Let us take for example the most serious objection of all, which is that we have learned to think in the old system of weights and measures. Manufacturers, mechanics, tradesmen, consumers, and in fact all classes of people have learned to think in the old system of weights and measures. They have acquired experience as to sizes, quantities, and relations, and this experience is daily used in new business, new designs, and new relations. These mental comparisons are never exact measurements, but none the less important . . . Fortunately in this case, the difficulty is not nearly as great as those who are unfamiliar with the metric system would have us believe. There are in all cases simple approximate ratios which will lighten the burdens of the transition stage . . . In a comparatively short time people would learn to think in the new system. The importance of these simple approximate relations cannot be overestimated, since they will prove of great assistance in the translation of our past experience in the common system to our future needs in the metric system.

Although I had already decided on that approach of devising simple approximations easy to calculate mentally, that quote expressed it well. That page is far from ready for publication (even retired I have too little free time), but if anyone is curious I could share a few.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 462 by Theodoric, posted 09-27-2024 10:13 AM Theodoric has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 6196
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.4


(2)
Message 478 of 523 (920335)
09-29-2024 2:38 PM
Reply to: Message 477 by nwr
09-29-2024 2:01 PM


Re: Keeping It Personal
That's part of critical thinking. Don't trust your intuition, and instead start looking for evidence.
As the founder of a local skeptics group said, he seeks out evidence and valid arguments against his positions. Because he doesn't want to believe something that's false, he tests his positions by inviting and listening to criticism from opponents of his position. If his position still stands after having been hit with the best that the opposition can muster, then that indicates that it is robust. But if it falls apart, then good riddance!
For an example, consider creationism and creationist claims all of which fall apart the moment you examine them.
Or, if Phat is given to seeking wisdom in quotes, there's this one from Inspector Jacques Clouseau:
Clouseau:
Assume nothing! Suspect everything!

This message is a reply to:
 Message 477 by nwr, posted 09-29-2024 2:01 PM nwr has seen this message but not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 6196
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.4


Message 482 of 523 (920342)
09-30-2024 9:00 PM
Reply to: Message 481 by Percy
09-30-2024 8:33 PM


Re: Keeping It Personal
Safeway has a 401k. You have one, right? So you shouldn't be making decisions about individual investments. You should only be adjusting your 401k fund mix to be an appropriate mix of growth and safety for your age, which Safeway's 401k website helps you do.
Story of my life. I started my 401k at work when one was first offered to me (being an engineer, AKA "Intelligent Designer", I had to move from layoff to layoff such that I would refer to myself as a "high-tech migrant worker") which was around 1995, 23 years before I would retire from my civilian career. Every time my budget would allow it, I would increase my contribution until I was at the max; if you never see it to begin with, you never miss it.
Then I paid no more attention to it, just "let it ride" (or might that trigger Phat's gambling problem?). I shouldn't post actual figures, but I retired with a very healthy sum which I don't even need since I'm free of debt and my Social Security and military retirement pay cover all my monthly expenses.
When I described my finances to my older sister, she praised my genius in planning, but I really didn't do anything except have the contributions deducted and then forget about it. In contrast, we have Trump having inherited hundreds of millions of dollars (including the over 400 million his father funneled into his failing casinos) and he has succeeded in losing almost all of it through his "stable genius" "investing". He would be so incredibly much richer had he just invested it all and left it alone, but, no, he had to squander it on stupid "get rich" schemes and cons.
Phat needs to take care of his safe investments, not look for "get rich" schemes.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 481 by Percy, posted 09-30-2024 8:33 PM Percy has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 483 by Percy, posted 09-30-2024 11:05 PM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 6196
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.4


Message 484 of 523 (920344)
10-01-2024 2:40 AM
Reply to: Message 483 by Percy
09-30-2024 11:05 PM


Re: Keeping It Personal
When I worked for a company that designed computerized greenhouse control systems, they had me read an article on PID -- Proportional, Integration, Differential control theory. Basically, in order to bring a system to a desired level (eg, keeping a greenhouse at a specified temperature), you cannot just jam it into compliance because that will cause it to overshoot and you'd have to jam it in the opposite direction, overshooting again. More hardcore engineering disciplines teach about the effects of dampening (including over- and under-dampening) and how your efforts could easily send that system into oscillation which is not a good thing.
An easier analogy (and indeed an example of PID in that article) is steering a vehicle in order to keep it on course despite spurious factors throwing it off course. If you turn the steering wheel in response to every little bump or gust of wind, you will oversteer and most likely end up all over the road. PID represents a much smarter approach than overreacting to everything.
Stock performance is an example of a system that has a lot of spurious factors; just looking at a graph of a stock's performance reveals it to be very noisy with a lot of up and down action. Reacting to every little up and down is inviting failure.
But if you look at the same graph over a longer period of time you would see an overall trend up or down or neither. That is what you should want to be looking at, but it's hard to see those trends in real time.
In our retirement planning training that was part of signing up for our 401(k) plan, we were advised that in general stocks go up in value over time, so generally the safe approach in long-term planning is to buy stock and leave it alone. More specifically, they told us to buy stock at regular intervals, even when the value was going down at the moment, because over time it should go up in value (ie, when it was going down it should eventually recover and go back up again so the stocks you bought at a lower price would be worth more).
Though of course you should go for quality stocks and avoid real dogs like anything offered by Trump (eg, "Truth Social"). And, yes, I fully realize that that appellation is insulting ... to dogs.

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
 Message 485 by Theodoric, posted 10-01-2024 9:04 AM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 6196
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.4


Message 486 of 523 (920346)
10-01-2024 10:47 AM
Reply to: Message 485 by Theodoric
10-01-2024 9:04 AM


Re: Keeping It Personal
Yeah, investing is like a scab: leave it alone and don't pick at it.
The old adage (hopefully not one of the far too many we were raised on but are now no longer valid) is to buy low and sell high. Day-trading like with ETrade can afford you opportunities to buy low, but tempt you to panic into selling low instead of riding out those momentary dips.
Back to the gambling analogies -- actually, I see almost no difference between the stock market and gambling, especially after seeing Selena Gomez' scene in one of the best movies of our time, The Big Short:
After years of being the sole software engineer ("Chief Programmer and Diskette Formatter"), I finally got a job on a team with three other programmers -- nerdy jokes abounded, especially since we all were watching the new episodes of Star Trek: The New Generation. John had a timeshare in Vegas that he actually used and his brother was a professional gambler so John had learned how to be smart about gambling -- the only smart thing I know is to budget your stake expecting to lose it all and to write it off as "entertainment", which is part of what John also advised. Another skill for the successful gambler is to manage your losses and avoid the temptation of staying in a game too long trying to recoup your losses since that only increases them. I think I can understand that since in the last couple Poker classes (our OLLI has a Texas Hold 'em class followed by a practice session) I have too often chased after straights and flushes only to see my hopes dashed by the wrong river card.
Mark was new to gambling and wanted to learn. One year we were able to talk management into sending us to the computer trade show, COMDEX, in Las Vegas, so every lunch hour John and Ollie would take Mark into the conference room for training in craps. One night in Vegas, we went to the old Strip to a casino that had low-cost crap tables so that Mark could practice. Since I don't gamble, I had nothing to do but use my roll of nickels to play video poker. I did lose it all (all $2) though it took me a couple hours to do it.
Another gambling trick to keep you from getting emotionally attached to the outcome (a prime source of doing something really stupid like "Just one more hand and I can win it all back") was to think of your bets in terms of "units" instead of in terms of the value of what you are betting. Mark tried that, but he could muttering about his losses like, "That's a new pair of pants! That's a new shirt!"
Basic point is that when you do stuff like investing or gambling (basically the same thing) you need to be very smart about it, have a sound strategy and stick to it.
Divorced three times.
Your friend should have learned his lesson the first time.
I recently found a YouTuber called emilywking who gives dating and relationship advice to other women, most of which consists of explaining to them why men won't approach them and would prefer to remain single: basically we've been burned too many times plus we have too much to lose. Like what your friend lost in his divorces.
Having myself been subjected to an abusive marriage and bitter divorce I now find myself quoting Joshua at the end of War Games: "Funny game. The only way to win is not play." Of course he was talking about thermonuclear war, not dating ... but what's the difference?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 485 by Theodoric, posted 10-01-2024 9:04 AM Theodoric has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 487 by Taq, posted 10-01-2024 10:54 AM dwise1 has not replied
 Message 488 by Theodoric, posted 10-01-2024 12:25 PM dwise1 has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 6196
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.4


Message 510 of 523 (920419)
10-07-2024 2:49 PM
Reply to: Message 506 by Phat
10-07-2024 7:54 AM


Re: Right wing grift continues
The Fib is a Fibonacci technical analysis term. The method is beyond my understanding, but it is the support argument used by this Yahoo columnist.
Since you provide us with NFI ("no fucking idea") what that's supposed to be, I'll say a few things about the Fibonacci sequence which I can only assume is what whatever that thing is supposed to be based on.
Italian mathematician Fibonacci described it in 1202, but it was also described in India in 200 BCE. Basically, you start with the numbers 0 and 1 and then generate each new number by adding the previous two; therefore:
quote:
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, ...
Fibonacci sequences show up often and in unexpected places, including in biological systems:
quote:
They also appear in biological settings, such as branching in trees, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, and the arrangement of a pine cone's bracts, though they do not occur in all species.
We were also taught that unconstrained population growth pretty much follows a Fibonacci sequence -- emphasis on unconstrained, for example when you release a pair of rabbits in Australia where they have no natural predators.
That is the kind of population growth used by creationists in their classic PRATT: Human Population Growth. You know, where they claim a constant rate of population growth such that if humans had really been around for a few millions of years then the inner solar system would be packed solid with people -- they quite seriously have made that claim, though some push it out to the orbit of Pluto.  I would love to see creationists demonstrate that by filling a square meter with creationists starting three deep and observe them live and reproduce and create an ever higher pile of humans. Of course, we all know full well (even though it goes right over the creationists' heads which is why only they would be stupid enough to volunteer for the experiment) that everybody beneath the top layer would die from asphyxiation not being able to breathe under the weight of bodies above them. They would die long before they could reproduce and yet this stupid claim itself refuses to die.
A more accurate population growth model would be what my source (Michael Olnick, An Introduction to Mathematical Models in the Social and Life Sciences, 1978, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.) called the Logistics Model; as I presented it in my 1990 page on the population claim, The Bunny Blunder:
quote:
Olnick applies this in the Logistic Model, in which the rate of population growth depends on the size of the population and on the ability of the environment to support that population. The Logistic Model postulates a maximum population size that the environment can support, called its "carrying capacity," such that the exponential rate of population growth decreases (i.e. slows down) as the population approaches the carrying capacity of the environment, eventually leveling off to zero-growth at the carrying capacity. This is a much more realistic model and fits the U.S. population curve from 1790 to 1950 quite well.
...
So the human population, like the rabbit population, can indeed be millions of years old and still be no larger than we find it at present; we need but acknowledge the effects of its environment's low carrying capacity for most of its history. Our population's explosive growth these past few centuries can be attributed to the sudden increase of the carrying capacity due mainly to applied technology, such as agriculture and, more recently, sanitation and medicine.
Hence, using Fibonacci to describe growth can only be valid when that growth is not constrained. That is not true of the market.
Who knows WTF your source was trying to do with it?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 506 by Phat, posted 10-07-2024 7:54 AM Phat has seen this message but not replied

  
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