EclecticLip

The other week, I partook in a stock trading course I’d bid on as a lark, as part of the company United Way campaign.  I can blithely report that it amounted to a get-rich-quick scheme for people who are otherwise immune to get-rich-quick schemes. 

I doubt any of the professionals in the room would fall for chain letters, winning-lottery-ticket emails or advance fee fraud (the son of the brother of the President of Nigeria needs your help!) – but we indeed shared the collective gullibility that there was a way to rake in the dough at the Wall Street casino.

Come of think of it, apart from style of dress and dental health, we were probably no different from our tribal forebears in millenia past, who sought shamans’ advice to ensure their own prosperity.  (Contrary to popular belief, cavities seem to’ve been rare, way back in the day – most food simply wasn’t sugary enough to cause tooth decay.)  And I suppose our behaviour wasn’t so different, either, from Fortune 500 executives bringing in high-priced consultants to turn their companies around.  It all seems like a lot of dart-throwing, in the end. 

The course centred on “technical analysis”, the theory that a stock’s price follows near-immutable patterns – unless it doesn’t, which is why you arrange your bets such that you cash out with only a small loss the other 48% of the time; the stock market equivalent of a seat belt and air bags, I suppose.  Nor is it as nutty as some of the purportedly-professional investment advice I’ve read, some of which relied on planetary alignments.  (Hmm… maybe that was the Wall Street Journal’s astrologer?)

As for the brotherhood of technical analysts – there’s no handshake, but the password is “Fibonacci” – their investment numerology is based on the purported role of the Golden Mean (0.618) and various permutations thereof, in predicting future prices.  I’m not sure if Euclid would’ve been proud or horrified, but since he was smart, he’d’ve probably demanded a royalty.

By the logic of this arcane rubric, it should be possible to make money on a stock without knowing a thing about the company.  While I’ve proven the opposite true many a time, that prospect struck me as somehow inappropriate.  After all, even when it comes to making money in the stock market, shouldn’t you have to earn it by putting in hard work to research a company, and so forth?  Then the cognitive dissonance hit me: I had enrolled in a course to learn how to make easy money, and was now irritated that there could be a way of making easy money.  Naturally, I resolved this by deciding that maybe easy money wasn’t such a bad thing after all.  When it was in the right hands.  Specifically, mine.  Such is the clueless egotism of the modern male. 

All in all, the course reaffirmed my sense that the surest way to get rich quickly off of secret knowledge is to claim you have some, then meter it out for an exorbitant fee.  A recent motivational poster from despair.com does put it nicely. 

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Ah, Hamlet, were you only alive to read this…  or, given that you were a fictional character, were you only ever alive.  Hmm…  actually, given how horrific your end, maybe ’twere better you stayed fictive.

A recent Harvard Business School study (”Red Light States“) further confirmed the trend that conservatives buy more pornography than progressives.  Conservatives can take comfort that maybe, just maybe, the difference is that progressives steal more porn through file-sharing.

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Male humpback whales — like Sir Mix-A-Lot — like voluptuous females.  Or at least, what passes for voluptuousness in the cetacean world.

For their part, female humpbacks may prefer their males to be exotic foreigners — or again, what passes for foreign among creatures who migrate far enough each year to half-circumnavigate the globe.
There was a famous case in the mid-nineties (in nerd herds, at least) of some Indian Ocean male humpbacks getting lost and veering into the Pacific Ocean.  Their songs were different from those of the males in the local Pacific Ocean population — but within two years, almost all the Pacific Ocean-male humpbacks had changed their songs to be more like the Indian Ocean males’!

And to complete a humpback hat trick, here’s a link to a website about a wild albino humpback named Migaloo. 

This New York Times article summarizes why I believe peak oil’s imminence doesn’t mean the end of first-world living-standards as we know it.

It turns out, the US is ridiculously unproductive when it comes to GDP-per-unit-CO2: at 93rd (of 137) it ranks below even Thailand and Mexico!  [corrected from 167 as per comment below]
Ah, but there’s more to that than meets the eye…

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I’ve encountered a major fallacy in two fields, relating to the incorrect application of a steady-state assumption.  So I’m making it a category.

I’m going to say arguments suffer from a steady-state fallacy when they improperly assume that a present-day circumstance will carry over unchanged into the future.  Because over time, most circumstances do change.  People get older.  New technologies emerge.  Empires fall, and new ones rise. And so forth.
A few examples below the fold…

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I posted recently on the topic of executive greed, and how it could have impaired American automakers’ ability to compete with Japanese automakers.

John Robb posted much more eloquently on this, in greed is….  The salient passage is this (emphasis mine):

If approach this from the perspective of game theory and evolutionary biology, the propagation of greed as a virtue among elites is a game changer. It is a survival strategy mightily benefits the early adopters and confers great success. We have clearly seen evidence of this in our experience (from multi-billion dollar fortunes to CEO pay w/o reference to performance to Hamptons estates..). However, once greed becomes a universal survival strategy, it destroys system value (as the formal rules of intrinsic/moral fair play are replaced by hideously expensive and slow enforcement/legal mechanisms). It can also result in the type of massive economic collapse we are seeing today.

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Via Rob Cottingham’s excellent blog, I found 90-9-1, which breaks down contributions to social media websites.  It looks like these follow power law type distributions.

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The new Honda Insight — which it clearly hopes will be the mongoose to the cobra of Toyota’s Prius — is coming.  Globe & Mail articles such as this seem to go behind subscriberwall, so here’s an alternate if lighterweight article.

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Again via Rob Cottingham, an intriguing article that pre-workforce Millenials (aka Gen Y, aka the Net Generation) use e-mail less than their workforce Millenial counterparts — a lot less.

• “Older workforce millenials” -     9.5 hours e-mail per week
• “Younger workforce millenials” - 7.7 hours per week
• “Pre-workforce millenials” -        2   hours per week

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We leave a page trail in our browsers — a cyberspace equivalent of the wandering snail’s mucous trail.

Here’s a fiendishly clever application that establishes which of the top 10,000 US websites (according to Quantcast) you’ve visited.  It takes the male/female ratio of (known) users for each of those sites, then multiplies all the numbers together to develop a probability of your being male or female, based on browsing habits.

According to this measure, I’ve got a 100% likelihood of being male…

More information here.