ICanSleepWhenI'mDead

Don't trust the Martians!

If you're just trying to get your 401K into something you may not be making the most of the opportunity.

The design considerations and mission planning for NASA's upcoming attempt to fly a small helicopter on Mars are fascinating: https://www.wired.com/story/a-helicopter-ride-over-mars-nasas-about-to-give-it-a-shot/#intcid=recommendations_wired-right-rail_501b807b-3e8a-416c-ae72-16e452077286_popular4-1

I'm not suggesting that you should feel sorry for them, or that they are entitiled to pandemic-related relief payments from the government. But be honest - - would you have guessed that 50% of all millionaires never paid more than $300 for a watch? Or would you have guessed that the vast majority of them paid thousands of dollars for a fancy Rolex?

A lot of people have misconceptions about how most (obviously not all) millionaires live. From https://assetbuilder.com/knowledge-center/articles/the-next-millionaire-next-door-provides-a-road-map-for-us-all ". . . seventy-five percent of millionaires paid less than $1000 for their most expensive suit. Fifty percent of millionaires paid less than $300 for their most expensive watch. Three-quarters of American millionaires paid less than $300 for their most expensive pair of shoes. She also found that 65 percent of American millionaires live in homes that are currently worth less than a million dollars. Today, about 9 percent of U.S. households have a net worth that exceeds a million dollars. That’s up from 3.5 percent in 1996. Most millionaires (93 percent) have a college degree. But most millionaires didn’t go to an expensive private college."

Nationwide resource re various federal courts: https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/court-website-links/court-orders-and-updates-during-covid19-pandemic WNY federal court: https://www.nywd.uscourts.gov/sites/nywd/files/COVID-19 General Order - Extension Through September 25%2C 2020.pdf

There may be opportunities next year for the Bills to pick up players that must be cut to get under next year's potentially lower salary cap: https://sports.yahoo.com/several-teams-rough-cap-shape-095959408.html

The most likely options are burial or an indoor cremation, but if it's one of the Vikings, maybe it's an outdoor funeral pyre in Crestone, Colorado. I kid you not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyre

Interesting read that presents both sides of the argument re potential for finding life on Mars: From https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-discovering-martians-could-be-disappointing?utm_source=pocket-newtab Examples: "Most life on Earth is small, dumb, and deep, and the same might be true on Mars." "We’ve sent a fleet of invading spacecraft to Mars—it’s like the inverse of 1950s space horror movies—and we can’t find anything."

I thought this article presented an interesting perspective on current stock market trends/issues: https://www.vox.com/business-and-finance/2020/7/9/21314119/stock-market-day-trading-reddit-dave-portnoy-barstool-robinhood?utm_source=pocket-newtab Even if the people interviewed/mentioned represent a small share of market volume, it's a window on current market psychology among retail "investors."

Looks like you may have to wait until 2021: https://www.juggalogathering.com/

Did you catch anything?

Nice shoes - - wanna F * * * ? FISH - - the missing word is FISH.

Sadly, "My other brother? - - Darryl" Thanks a lot Mom & Dad

I'm a stable genius.

Jim McKay: Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports... the thrill of victory... and the agony of defeat... the human drama of athletic competition... This is "ABC's Wide World of Sports!" while watching some Slovenian ski jumper spectacularly wipe out at take off.

Here's what a co-author of the "36 intelligent alien civilizations in our galaxy" prediction recently said about his own study: From https://getpocket.com/explore/item/scientists-say-most-likely-number-of-contactable-alien-civilisations-is-36?utm_source=pocket-newtab _______________________ “Basically, we made the assumption that intelligent life would form on other [Earth-like] planets like it has on Earth, so within a few billion years life would automatically form as a natural part of evolution,” said Conselice. The assumption, known as the Astrobiological Copernican Principle, is fair as everything from chemical reactions to star formation is known to occur if the conditions are right, he said. “[If intelligent life forms] in a scientific way, not just a random way or just a very unique way, then you would expect at least this many civilisations within our galaxy,” he said. He added that, while it is a speculative theory, he believes alien life would have similarities in appearance to life on Earth." (emphasis added) ________________________ The assumption is not "fair," because although, according to Mr. Conselice, we know that chemical reactions and star formation "occur if the conditions are right," we don't have any idea how life began on earth, which is the only place that we actually know that life exists. If we knew how life began on earth (we don't), we could establish those conditions and create life from something that was previously non-life. We have never been able to do that, and don't have the slightest clue how to make that happen. Even the co-author of the study admits that his model is "speculative" and based on an "assumption." That is far different from storm path models that are based on actually observed facts about multiple prior actual storm paths. Those fact-based models can be fine-tuned to become more accurately predictive as time goes by and more actual storm paths are observed. If we ever do find life elsewhere in the universe, we can start constructing models based on actual facts. Right now we have only one relevant fact. Life exists on earth. And we don't know how it started. Speculative assumption in, speculative calculation out.

I think I had an update on this, but the details seem to have escaped me. My brother Darryl says he found me in a ditch around midnight, and my other brother Darryl says I just kept mumbling something about the mother ship. Go figure.

Sometimes I wish Al Gore had not invented the Internet.

No. It's not establishing a minimum, it's assuming a minimum, and that assumption is based on a guess or an opinion, not "on things we know" (i.e., actual facts). We know that life exists on earth. That is a fact. We don't know if life exists elsewhere in the universe. Nobody has ever found any, but there's plenty of places we haven't been able to look. Speculative assumption in, speculative "calculation" out. So yeah, it's "not super meaningful" because it's not meaningful at all.

<<It assumes that intelligent life comes to occur on other planets much as it has done on our own planet.>> If you make that assumption to start with, even though we don't understand how life "came to occur" on earth, you're begging the question. The point is, an assumption is just that. It's not evidence of anything.

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