ICanSleepWhenI'mDead

What a jerk. He probably thinks he wears tennis shoes and drinks sodas. He ain't edumacated like my brother Darryl. https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2011/08/route.html

History may not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes. I'm not predicting that we will get the worst case scenario that the article below describes, but if you've read about the underlying causes of the last financial crisis that precipitated the "Great Recession," you can see the potential similarities: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/coronavirus-banks-collapse/612247/?utm_source=pocket-newtab Anybody have any thoughts (probably the wrong audience for financial insights) about how to track info on the level of CLO defaults? I forget the guy's name, but they made a movie about the guy who made a boat-load of $$$ by making contrarian investments after realizing that CDOs were likely to fail even though the average consumer couldn't conceive of the idea that house prices could drop. Conventional wisdom is often much more conventional than it is wise.

I have to admit that at least in the short term, I could not have been more wrong about what the stock market would do. I'm old enough, and have saved/invested enough over the years, that at this point in my life I'm more concerned about return OF my capital than return ON my capital. That personal circumstance probably skews my market views so that I am more financially conservative than the average investor these days, and certainly more conservative than I was when I was younger. For most of my adult life I was fully invested in the stock market, with one notable exception - - I got completely out about a year before the dot-com bubble broke and jumped fully back in near the bottom a few years later shortly after Time, Newsweek and US News & World Report all had cover stories about how terrible the bear market had become. I've also generally taken a pretty contrarian approach with respect to the particular stocks I bought, and that has served me well in the long term. I've never been a short-term trader. I have a tendency to stubbornly stand by my investing convictions in the absence of significant changes that affect Main Street, no matter what Wall Street is doing, and that is the case here. I did not get back in the stock market after my post up-thread. I didn't like the risk/reward proposition for buying stocks then, and I think it's even worse now. Given my overall contrarian approach to investing, I can't justify putting money into stocks at time when the market is practically booming at the tail end of one of the longest bull markets in history while the outlook for Main Street is pretty dismal. If I miss further short-term market upside as a result, I'm OK with that. Even though I'm likely to remain out of the stock market for quite a while, I try to at least occasionally read articles that seek to make sense of market trends. I don't know anything about the author, but this recent one was thought-provoking: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/3-keys-understanding-strangest-economy-ever/612373/?utm_source=pocket-newtab Good luck with your own investments Plenzmd1.

I ain't gotta see my ex-future-mother-in-law anymore Oh Lord, when it rains it pours

Yeah - - who gives a **** about grandma. The virus will probably get her anyway.

Direct quotes from the article you cited: 1. "Bayesian statistical inference uses a set of founding beliefs about a system before predicting probabilities." 2. "But a key result here is that when one compares the rare-life versus common-life scenarios, the common-life scenario is always at least nine times more likely than the rare one." Executive summary - - If your "founding belief" is that life elsewhere in the universe is common, it is much, much more likely that any mathematical model you construct based on that belief will predict (1) a greater chance of life existing elsewhere in the universe, than if (2) your "founding belief" is that life elsewhere in the universe is rare. Shocking. And as some sort of mathematical wizardry beyond the understanding of average folks with no PhD in astronomy or mathematics, if you adjust your "founding belief" so that you start with the assumption that life is even more common than you first thought, then the mathematical model you construct based on that belief will predict a greater chance of life existing elsewhere in the universe than you first thought. In other news, if you knew absolutely nothing about water but had a founding, speculative belief that it was fairly dry, any mathematical model you constructed to predict the dryness of water would predict greater dryness than if your initial, speculative, founding belief was that water was fairly wet. Speculative garbage in, speculative garbage out. Because the founding belief on which the mathematical model is based is purely speculative, the fancy-sounding model has no predictive value whatsoever.

Well, I don't know if I would call it an update, but apparently the fact that we have no real evidence of alien life tends to prove that there is a conspiracy to hide it: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/5/8/21244090/pentagon-ufo-videos-navy-alexander-wendt?utm_source=pocket-newtab

If you consider hiring a financial advisor rather than doing your own stock market research, be sure to ask him/her where they keep the customer's yachts.

I share the amazement, but interpret what it means much differently. My guess is that most computer investing models look at recent stock market drops, see a lot of "V-shaped" recoveries, and blindly predict that this time will be the same. But in my personal opinion, it's not the same. The state governors can react to vocal criticism by a minority of consumers and by their big-money business-owning donors who are losing profits, by allowing the economy to re-open, but the average consumer is NOT going to immediately resume the same spending habits they had before the pandemic. If we get a re-test of the recent lows, and those lows hold, I'll consider buying stocks - - not before then. And FWIW, I take the general optimism about stocks in this thread as a pretty reliable contrary indicator. Time will tell. Your mileage may vary. Do not try this at home. Professional driver on closed course. Consult your physician for a complete list of all side-effects. Full disclosure - - I have occasionally been called an idiot by both my significant other and by prior insignificant others.

I would have preferred Jake From State Farm:

I could understand if this thread was closed because of the trolling, but it's a mystery to me why the original "Marquis Lee Cut" thread was closed. It contained no flaming, no trolling, and concerned a player that at least some Bills fans (including some veteran posters) were willing to talk about. Does the Board lack server capacity to allow such a discussion to continue? I just don't get the delight some take in shutting down threads. This is a polite request - - can a moderator enlighten me please?

Hey Bob, Nobody will look for our new spy cam in an oversize eyeball. And if McDermott eventually figures it out, he obviously should have known he was being watched. It's genius ! ! ! We should run the CIA, Bill

More info on how computer vision helps facial recognition technology work, and on how "adversarial imagery" can be used to try to defeat it: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/16/dressing-for-the-surveillance-age?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Turns out that it's the rest of us who are more likely to be dead: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-it-pays-to-be-grumpy-and-bad-tempered?utm_source=pocket-newtab Who knew?

On the early history of government UFO investigations (also explains why we call them flying saucers and not flying pancakes): https://www.wired.com/story/how-ufo-sightings-became-an-american-obsession/?utm_source=pocket-newtab And here's a reprint of the 6/19 "Wired Guide to Aliens" - - my apologies if previously posted - - I had not seen it before. https://www.wired.com/story/wired-guide-aliens/

I need to throw out some old song lyrics to have "space" in my head for the concepts in this article - - one of the authors is an experimental physics professor who conducts research on the Large Hadron Collider: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/what-is-space?utm_source=pocket-newtab

I have no life, so I need an update on the Small Town office dilemma.

This article from 2017 just found me (so my apologies if it was previously posted a few years ago): https://getpocket.com/explore/item/a-new-theory-on-why-we-haven-t-found-aliens-yet?utm_source=pocket-newtab If we haven't been able to find alien civilizations because they're all sleeping while waiting for the universe to get colder, shouldn't we be able to hear them snore?

I have used Gate 1 Travel twice for week-long guided bus tours in Europe within the last 5 years (one was Croatia/Slovenia but included a couple days in Venice), with good results both times. Other family members have used them for two other bus tours elsewhere, also with good results. https://www.gate1travel.com/europe?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIkeTVwv6w5wIVBRitBh0smwGgEAAYASABEgLZ0PD_BwE

From https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/persian-cats-9242012/ Persian Cats How Iranian air crews, cut off from U.S. technical support, used the F-14 against Iraqi attackers. By Tom Cooper Air & Space Magazine | Subscribe September 2006 FIVE YEARS BEFORE THE 1979 Islamic Revolution transformed Iran, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a pilot who had earned his wings in 1946 flying a British Tiger Moth, arranged for Iran to purchase 80 Grumman F-14A Tomcats and 633 Hughes AIM-54 Phoenix missiles for $2 billion. (The Iranian deal is credited with saving the F-14 program, which Congress had stopped funding, and by some with saving the Grumman Corporation from bankruptcy.) Iran became the only country besides the United States to fly the big fighter.

Not directly responsive to 4merper4mer's point #2 above, but perhaps related: https://gizmodo.com/which-religion-is-friendliest-to-the-idea-of-aliens-1841241730?utm_source=pocket-newtab

I realize this isn't everybody's cup of tea, but if anybody is interested in the history of how facial recognition technology evolved in its early years, there's some good stuff in this recently published Wired article: https://www.wired.com/story/secret-history-facial-recognition/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Who did you buy it from? http://osxdaily.com/2017/11/10/can-use-iphone-x-without-face-id/