but… what if… the words… i want to say are… ‘don’t say these words please?’….
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So, hang on: If someone says “don’t say these words”, there’s no reason to be offended because you can STILL say the words you want to say.
Nobody’s stopping you. So, being told “you can’t say these words” shouldn’t be offensive, so long as you can reply with something like, “You’re not my mom!”
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Its a mind-twister, but there’s always a danger in turning one’s OWN free speech into censorship for another. True free speech allows it for all.
There’s some strange exceptions though: schools and workplaces don’t follow free-speech laws in the same way. They’re kind of on a cloud of their own for some reason.
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I think schools and workplaces have their own special set of rules as a result of some 1850s utopian vision – I think we’re a part of a long-running experiment in “improving the future”. Workplaces haven’t changed much. Schools haven’t changed much. Why are they so fixed in their ways? All I can figure is that we’ve been a part of this social experiment for so many generations now, that we forgot it was an experiment.
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Oh I agree. Of course then there’s the issue of “who really owns your property?” I once did 30 out of 40 hours of real estate classes (then I realized it was a stupid idea for me). Anyway, I learned about all the levels of ownership of property. Layers of an onion. Your ownership really _is_ more akin to renting… not just from the federal govt or the state but numerous others have rights on your property before FINALLY there’s something left for you.
At least China’s honest: “We own this and rent it to you but we’ll PROBABLY let you stay there for generations”. They’re almost _too_ rational in how they do things. [not saying it’s right either… just an observation]
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Yeah. Private ownership is a useful illusion. But, it is what it is. Keeps the wheels of commerce spinning and really, we _do_ get a lot of freedoms in most things, most of the time. Plus, they’re usually busy and inefficient (govt) so there’s a lot of “do whatever you want as long as nobody complains”. In a sense, if you flip it around in the other direction, you *can* do whatever you want to. All you have to do is a) don’t get caught or b) know somebody who lets you slide on through (the “good to have a cop friend / judge friend), etc.
Rich people know this well. They can do whatever they like because they know people. Regular folk, well, we usually just get option a). But option a) is still good.
I’d just never want to end up in a police state where law enforcement had full powers to enforce. It’s good we have the wiggle room of the courts (justice), even though it favors certain classes. ’cause without it.. ugh, you’d REALLY find yourself in an oppressive situation.
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I think the collectivism goes back to the Christian roots of the USA: mostly the Calvinist / Puritan outlook. Austerity, sacrifice for community-good, stuff like that.
so the subtext has been running through our history.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_D._Friedman I did a quick read up on him; yeah, I can definitely see the appeal.
This is usually an area where I tend to be somewhat agnostic towards. On those silly political compass tests I usually end up as “social anarchist” (or left libertarian – take your pick) which I *guess* would classify me as a minarchist? I dunno.
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I’m not usually much for videos alas. I skip through them when I see them. But I’m a fast reader, so I’ll gladly read materials.
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I really *should* watch the Friedman and Murphy video though: economic theory is one of my weak points in knowledge. I skimmed through the video quickly, looked at a few people’s opinions of the talk to get a ‘feel’ for it, and I can see they touch upon a LOT of fascinating issues, all seen through their respective economic lenses.
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Ouch – harsh! But the one I put wasn’t much better.
There’s temperament involved I think and leanings.
I’ve taken Micro/Macro economics courses and did well on them. I have a mortgage, several bank accounts, manage money well.
I did slow investing (DRiP) back in the late 1990s/early 00s when I had a good systems analyst job at a pharmaceutical company.
I discovered contrarian investing worked for me and became e-mail friends with kenneth rogoff for a bit way back 15+ yrs ago. I didn’t know he was a “big shot” until about six months ago – he was just a guy whose CBS Marketwatch writings I liked at the time.
Did well on the investments: moved to FL in ’02 and stopped investing at that time. Lived off the earnings for 12 years while establishing a family business, which I manage.
So, the chart you have isn’t exactly true but then again, neither is the one I put up there.
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I earned when Enron crashed and burned. I earned when the dot com’s tanked. I earned through the 2008 crisis. I earned all the way through, all from smart decisions I made back in 1999-2002 – a short 3 year period.
It’s gone now: I used it up. But I could do it again if I had to. It was exciting to play the game at the time, I’ll admit. But I don’t know if I’d want to do it again. Once was fun.
The system’s not that difficult and there’s far less scheming than one might think. What you have instead is a lot of corporations and governments desperately scrambling to keep their heads above water while smiling and avoiding lawsuits as much as possible.. That hasn’t changed.
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That said, the global rules have changed post 2008. I don’t know how precisely: the things that worked in way back then WON’T work today.
I don’t know the exact changes: I stopped following the economic ebb + flow of the world once I stopped investing and was picking at the earnings… then picking at the base stocks… ’til it was all gone.
But I can see the changes in how they report Unemployment incorrectly now in the media. It’s not any worse than the terrible science reporting in the media, really, but you just have to keep your head screwed on straight to untangle it all.
I have a sense that countries report their GDP differently than they did. I don’t know, but it’s a sense. Something I’d look into if I was investing again.
I know I wouldn’t do it the same. The flukey games that too many people fell for with Enron and other “future” companies that made them crash and burn, are being played by ALL the corps now… a shift that slid in as they learned how to benefit from their mistakes while taking advantage of some of the market game-playing.
But I think that’s just a matter of paying closer attention.
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Still I think some basics would still be true enough: You can make money riding a wave if you’re willing to deal with timing issues, but I think you do better looking in the areas that everybody else is ignoring.
For example, one of my greatest achievements was investing in a tiny little company that simply moved natural gas and coal between a few states around Texas.
I don’t remember WHAT was going on at the time, but for some reason, they got devalued harshly by the market and they showed up on my radar screen as a “THIS one is being ignored by everybody but it’s very strong fundamentally”. So, I dove in. Exceeded my expectations over time.
Didn’t clean out my commercial real estate (REIT) stocks fast enough though: lost a little principle there. Knowing when to “pull out” was critical. I mostly had good timing but I blew it on a few. But for the whole portfolio, I was way ahead of the DJIA and the S&P500, all through 2014, when I plucked out my last couple of $ and closed them out.
Anyway, this doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you’re doing. I just worked with the system as I found it: I didn’t know why it worked how it did, but I knew that people were behind it and people are flawed creatures that do stupid things. Even with AI offloading some of the work and making some of the internal decisions, ultimately, there’s ALWAYS a human involved somewhere along the line, even if it’s at a starting or finishing point and for me, who finds psychology (individual and group) fascinating, that’s where I pay more of my attention to things, although the numbers certainly matter…. you just have to always be aware WHERE those numbers are coming from and why they look the way they do when taking the humans into account.
Anyway, that was cathartic – I never talk about this stuff.
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