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DavidV

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Posts posted by DavidV

  4. Digital Broadcast Television

    in Current Events

    Posted

    In a free market, bandwidth would go to the most productive use. I would not be surprised if the <5% of users who only have analog options contribute less than the potential new users (such as mobile phone users, for example).

    I don't have cable either, so I also saw my channel count shrink. However, I was able to get most of them back by looking the channels up online and adding them manually, then tweaking the antenna until I got a signal. I think with a better antenna, I might be able to get all of them back.

  5. Help me with my investment strategy

    in Work, Careers and Money

    Posted

    I have a little investment story to tell.

    When I opened an IRA in late 2007, my broker suggested some nice, high-yield dividend paying ETF's and closed-end funds. (High dividends are good for retirement funds because they are non-taxable.)

    During the crash of 2008, I had about 45K in my portfolio, and about 80% of that vanished in a few months.

    When I decided to invest on my own in 2009, I sold the obvious losers in my portfolios, but did not investigate some funds until today. When I did some research, I realized that most of my portfolio was invested in sub-prime mortgages! This seems really dumb today, but even then (though I am a young, aggressive investor), it was probably not such a good idea.

    Doing some research today, I read from some newsgroups, that the funds in question were basically created up by firms that wanted to get rid of them, and then sold to investment advisors by paying them fat kickbacks when their clients invested in them. The posts claim that the investment firms and advisors knew that the funds were overvalued, and basically defrauded the clueless individual investors.

    Does this apply to me? I have no idea - maybe my broker was just incompetent, or didn’t care about me - but it certainly seems like a risky strategy to invest such a large portion of my retirement funds in such a scheme. I think the lesson here is to never take the advice of an “expert” for granted.

  6. Voting Rights

    in Political Philosophy

    Posted

    Why do you think that expanding the franchise limits the incentive to appeal to pressure groups? In every country where suffrage expanded, government controls increased as political parties rushed to appeal to the newly enfranchised, or were replaced by new parties that did.

    For example, the expansion of the franchise in the UK from 1832 to 1928, and in the USA the move to direct election of presidents in 1824 and Senators in 1912 led to the abandonment of free-market policies and the rise of the regulatory state, and the expansion of the franchise to women in 1920 in the USA made possible the modern welfare state. The forces leading from the expansion of power to the masses, followed by totalitarianism, followed by social collapse were first identified by Aristotle in his Politics:

    For tyranny is a kind of monarchy which has in view the interest of the monarch only; oligarchy has in view the interest of the wealthy; democracy, of the needy: none of them the common good of all. Tyranny, as I was saying, is monarchy exercising the rule of a master over the political society; oligarchy is when men of property have the government in their hands; democracy, the opposite, when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers...

    the ruling class should be the owners of property, for they are citizens, and the citizens of a state should be in good circumstances; whereas mechanics or any other class which is not a producer of virtue have no share in the state

    By citizen, Aristotle means someone who contributes substantially to the welfare and governance of a state. I agree: citizenship should be a privilege reserved for a small meritorious minority.

  7. A New Shutterbug

    in Miscellaneous Topics

    Posted

    If you're serious about photography, I would suggest a few things:

    • A DSLR camera - you can get a used 6MP camera on eBay or something. (I have a Sony Alpha a350)
    • A tripod - it will dramatically expand the kinds of shots you can take. (I have a full-size tripod and a small gorillapod.)
    • Get a Flickr Pro account to share your photos
    • Photo management software: I use Google Picasa (free) and Adobe Lightroom
    • Photo editing software: I have Photoshop, but you can get free software like Paint.Net
    • Keep up with some amateur photography websites for new techniques and ideas - like http://www.stuckincustoms.com/ and http://digital-photography-school.com/

  8. Star Trek, 2009

    in Movies, Shows, and Theatre

    Posted

    One thing I find personally annoying is the absurdly unrealistic postmodern "realism" of constantly subverting authority. In Firefly, if you disobey the captain, you (literally) get shoved out an airlock. That's a bunch of outlaw pirates. How is it that a quasi-military ship like the Enterprise is ruled democratically, with no real consequences for disobeying orders?

  14. Can one patent life and living organisms?

    in Political Philosophy

    Posted

    If the courts rule in favor of patenting plants, what is to stop corporations from patenting people? The precedent has been set that living organisms can be owned.

    You are confused about the difference between owning a patent on the DNA of a living organism and owning the organism itself. The DNA is information, the organism is a particular physical instance of that information. It's like the difference between owning a physical copy of a book and owning the copyright of that book. If you got a custom-made designer body, you might own your body without owning the DNA to it. If you want to argue against patents and copyrights, fine, just don't confuse intellectual property with material property.

  15. Would an object be invisible if traveling faster than light?

    in Physics and Mathematics

    Posted

    i think that light is for the most part instant, that it has no speed in which it must travel. It simply fades out at different lengths depending on the strength of the source.

    The speed of light was first measured in 1676 by Ole Christensen Rømer, who was studying the motions of Jupiter's moon, Io, with a telescope. You can verify their results yourself by heating marshmallows in a microwave (they will show wavelength of the microwaves) or a cheap Walmart telescope.

  18. Working on my wedding ceremony/vows

    in Introductions and Personal Notes

    Posted

    In just a few months, I will be getting married to the future Mrs. GreedyCapitalist. We'll be getting married in Maroon Bells National Park in Aspen, Colorado.

    We are creating our ceremony from scratch, and I am writing our vows. I have asked my friends and searched online to see what their ceremony was, but I have not found much. No one I've found had a wedding of our scope. I intend to put a lot of thought into the ceremony and publish it online as a template for others. Would anyone here care to share their wedding with me? What made it different from a traditional wedding?

  20. Help me with my investment strategy

    in Work, Careers and Money

    Posted

    Rationally, I know that I don't have the expertise to make any short-term moves. But it's very tempting to do so something, given my tinkering nature and what I have at stake. Realistically, I don't intend to do anything right now, but discussing potential moves makes me feel more involved in the process.

    I'm kind of uncertain about gold because I was sure that we would have dramatic inflation sometime this year, but that isn't happening yet, and gold seems to have deflated and stabilized.

  21. Help me with my investment strategy

    in Work, Careers and Money

    Posted

    I'm just bragging here, really, but I'm still 15% up on the S&P. Only now, I'm down for the year on gold, silver and precious metals mining. I can't decide if I should buy or sell. ;)

    post-1-1239403765_thumb.gif

    What I see is more of a deflationary event on the horizon.

    Huh?! What about the 10 trillion just created out of thin air by our Infallible Great Leader? Why would the political class allow that - the threat of deflation is the best excuse they have for more looting.

  23. Spam from mignulikz

    in Website Policy and Announcements

    Posted · Edited by GreedyCapitalist

    It looks someone was able to send spam via private messages to 2647 the users of the site. The software is supposed to prevent this, but they were able to get around this somehow. I deleted the actual messages, so you may get a notification about a message that was deleted. I am taking some steps to try to prevent this from happening again.

  24. The Pot is Beginning to Boil

    in Current Events

    Posted

    It's just a game, people. North Korea escalates threatening noises until someone pays them a few billion to shut up for a while. The North Korean elite goes and blows it all on movies, gambling and prostitutes, and Western politicians get foreign policy credit. After the N. Koreans blow all their cash, they start grunting again and cycle continues.

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