gmarx

On the other hand I pretty well fit the implied description of someone who would go on to be very successful and yet I did not. I'm doing okay. I took my shots and they didn't work out.

My class valedictorian, in a bizarre coincidence, lives next door to me (even though we moved across the country and didn't plan it). He is a very rich ex VC who now has a decently successful startup going.

So as much as I would like to use this article to prop up my ego...

This isn't much the case anymore from my experience. A generation ago I recall it being general knowledge that if a loved one had to go into the nursing home you would bankrupt and have medicaid pay. A relative tried that this recently and is close to destitute as a result.

Most boys think of themselves as attractive and this is stable?

Is this statement true for most of you?

I was a fat kid (and fat young adult) and always thought I was unattractive. Even though it may not have affected me as much as it would had I been a girl, it remains prominent in my self image

Ok stranger on the internet :). How about this. You pick 20 hedge funds. If over the next 20 years they return more to investors after fees and such than the Vanguard S&P 500 Admiral fund you win, otherwise I do?

I'd even let you change your list Jan. 1st of each year as long as we agree that any hedge fund found to be a fraud of some kind counts as a zero in your sum.

This is actually a pretty good bet for you given how poorly one would expect stocks to perform over the next 10 years

As with many high performers he did it by fantastic returns at some point. I just looked up his returns in a business insider article and a quick calculation indicates that although someone who invested year one got rich, his returns over the past 30 years average to 6% (by my calculation- willing to be corrected)

I recall reading a stock book back in the 1980s that claimed that Buffet's legendary status at the time was entirely due to his purchase of Geico

I understand you have declared we are at an impasse so I will just take the "last word". Your second paragraph is mere assertion. I assert the opposite. The existence of extreme outliers is exactly what we see in statistical distributions all the time. Being able to identify them in retrospect is childs play.Doing it in advance is the trick. That fund very likely does have great skills and plans at work that happen to have been met with circumstances that made them work. Yes you can attribute that to skill.

same could be said of venture capital

The coin flip being tired or a trope is irrelevant. The million and 20 may not even be correct (haven't checked). the point is that people see patterns even where they don't exist. That's why science has methods for telling whether a pattern really represents something or if it would likely be seen even if the data were random. Until you do those stats on hedgefund returns your irritation at the trope remains unconvincing.

This strikes me as typical gambler mentality. I'd definitely bet against you. I saw your post above about skill and I agree there are people who have better skills at this. The problem is they are operating against a chaotic system. Their way of doing things may get huge returns consistently...until it doesn't.

We learned early on that one of the difficulties in eliminating HIV is that it hides in the nervous system and can reemerge at any time. This article show promise in that it can reduce HIV viral load during active shedding. I think it is less likely that it could ever eliminate HIV entirely (i.e. cure)

I disagree. There is a housing bubble and it will pop is a thing you could have been right about or wrong about and many people were. When is it going to pop? You could predict this within plus or minus five years and I'd say you were doing pretty well but I guess in terms of making money you'd better get a little lucky and have all your stuff line up at the right time

Maybe but it was also towards the end of an age when people generally considered it to be in poor taste to talk about money.

Ha!

When Fortune (or was it Forbes) introduced the list of 500 richest Americans (early 1970s?) many people on the list were angry and threatened to sue.

Now it's honor, a form a celebrity

Uber is heading for the rocks? What did I miss?

These things don't matter and the airlines know it. People will continue to fly. I guarantee that a year from now if United is the most convenient flight to a place that guy needs to go, he will fly United.

We simply aren't in the "free market competition" will fix it zone with air travel. I hate air travel and do everything I can to avoid it for work. Most people think I'm crazy. Why wouldn't you jump at the chance to fly to an obscure town in India on the company dime!?!?!?

So do not expect this to affect anything unless the government gets involved

The first three aren't parallel in my mind. Those people aren't saying 9/11, Pearl Harbor and JFK assassination didn't occur. they just have different, mostly unfalsifiable theories about why they occurred.

genius. I think it really adds something that we make this case strongly. Like it would make normal sane people question whether maybe Godzilla did exist for realsioes!

I'd be interested in that if it were just a critical mind examining how cognitive bias might have affected numbers and perceptions.

The fact that most of them are only that way about the holocaust argues otherwise.

Still I have to wonder- if you hate Jews why pretend the holocaust didn't happen?

I am fascinated by holocaust denial and the people who think the moon landing was faked. Does anyone believe both? Do the people who believe those have any other historic events that they think were made up?

Most importantly (too me) would it be possible to start one of these on purpose? If you wanted to, what would be a good candidate?

I concluded that the atomic bomb is an excellent choice. I say there never was an atomic bomb. It was propaganda to prevent the US and Soviet Union from engaging in a disastrous WWIII so soon after WWII. And it was very effective but it's time for all the suckers to wake up.

I know you've seen the films. Special effects! Hiroshima/Nagasaki? Regular fire bombing that happened to get out of control because of favorable (or unfavorable) winds! Godzilla? Well that's more difficult to explain but I'm sure if we put our heads together we could come up with something.

Who's with me?!?!?

plus all the guests that will be coming through (who have even less incentive to respect standards of quiet and order).

exactly. I've been in that situation. It sucks

You should complain to my medical school

3-5 to start ;)

So they are building too much luxury housing which normally would cause prices to go down but fortunately a startup is making it easier to pack people in like college students or illegal migrants? Wonderbar.

If I rented a "luxury" apartment by myself and found I was living next door to 5-10 people crammed into one place I'd be pretty angry.

why do they keep saying "factory fresh"? Is the CIA at the factory doing the install on every phone that comes off the line? If they install it later on a per target basis then what does "factory fresh" mean? After a few weeks is it no longer possible to install the software?

that's the joke. Well that and "works in test animals" clearly means nothing for humans

Oh to be a test animal. They need not fear cancer or AIDS or even aging...

My development team spends more time evaluating new tools and doing proof of concepts for problems I am pretty certain could be solved just fine with existing web service providers available for Tomcat and an old fashioned PostGres install that I don't know if they are ever going to build the actual solution.

If they do I will never sleep again as the rickety POC gets deployed in the wild

Pretty sure this explanation is just really old speculation. Even if the ancient greeks kept records of word origins, those documents would likely be lost by now