10-21-2010

Today I learned several things...

I learned that the making of the movie TOP GUN was pretty ridiculous, like at one point the director paid the captain of the aircraft carrier they were filming on $25,000 (for fuel) to change directions so that he could film for ten more minutes.

You're dangerous Tony Scott. You're gonna get somebody killed someday.


Also my friend, who is a lawyer-type in St Louis, told me this:

"The core of the sun spins slightly slower thant the sun, it has a 33 day period for its rotations

and they've found that it corresponds to accelerations and decelerations in carbbon decay

minor minor velocity changes but when velocity changed spike, they can accurateley predict solar flares 33 days before they happen making space considerably safer

for travel...

also this could be the first viable theory for why neutrinos exist"

But the thing that I learned today that ties in with the thing I was talking about yesterday is Speculating.


Mark Twain was a big fan of speculation.



OCTOBER: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The other are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar




Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's lab


What Mark Twain is referring to when he says speculating is something different than what I'm referring to. Speculating the way I'm talking about means that you are trying to make money by deciding what the market, or really the price of something in the market, is going to do in the future.

Really it is an easy thing to do. Because the prices can really only do three things.

A Price can go up, down or stay the same.

But deciding what you think the market is going to do is crazy because it can change the whole game. If you're well known enough everyone follows your decisions and then the market will do whatever you thought it was going to do, and of course everyone thinks this means you knew what you were talking about. Which is ridiculous, because all you were saying is basically that you thought everyone would agree that the relationship between two things would do one of three things, but you'll never get everyone to agree and not everyone understands the relationship between things, which is a good time for us to talk about currency.

Currency is unit of wealth. It can be anything in my example the other day we used bananas, which makes sense in some regards, and doesn't in others.

But the crazy part about currency, is that it is a constantly shifting shared belief, like most social constructs. The U.S. dollar isn't backed by gold, or silver. The government promises that it is worth something, but it isn't equated to anything specifically. It stopped being directly related to things in the U.S. during the Great Depression.

But even if the U.S. dollar was based on a commodity it would still be based on a fluctuating shared belief. And that's all that value is.


Tomorrow (hopefully) we'll get to how speculating can make or lose money for you.

But now a short rant about taxes.

Taxes are great! If I could I would pay more of them. Do you know what taxes are directly responsible for? America, in so many ways. We are the exercise in big government. Remember the Revolutionary War? Yeah we won that because people collected taxes, even though we really fought it because the British had a tax on their books that they really never got around to collecting. Also we fought it because of impressment, which is when a bunch of British sailors would go around and just grab dudes and make them go work on British ships, which you know means that the dudes that got grabbed became British sailors. It was kind of like the Borg from Star Trek.


Anyway, taxes are good. If you like roads, and schools and the troops, and America, and the Moon then you should like taxes. Also you should like taxes if you like not being from the following list of countries:
The United Kingdom,
Canada,
Mexico,
Spain,
France,
The Republic of Texas,
The Republic of California,
Russia,
or the fact that the following list of countries doesn't exist:
NAZI GERMANY (do I need to go on?)
The Republic of Texas (such a dumb plan by the way.)
Hawaii (aren't you glad it is a part of America?)

Because American taxes made sure that everyone of those countries did not exist in America, or even more extreme they wiped them out.

Tomorrow,

hedges?
Maybe some things about the moon?