2013 — 31 July: Wednesday
Offering me "the inside dope" on a promising stock1 on the basis of its history of "big rallies" (which I take to mean unpredictable price volatility) seems a dubious proposition at best. Recall PJ O'Rourke:
You buy stock because you think other people will think this stock is worth more later than you think it's worth now. Economists call this — in a rare example of comprehensible economist terminology — the "Greater Fool Theory".
Indeed, Keynes had his notion of a Keynesian beauty contest. (And NPR conducted an amusing experiment ranking cute animals on similar lines.) It ain't what you think, it's more what you think other people will think, or indeed what you think other people will think other people will think. Not my strong2 suit. And so down the rabbit hole we tumble.
Just don't waste your breath telling a "successful investor" that :-)
Yesterday's digital...
... data shenanigans have left me plenty of scope for optimising my (it turns out quite vast) array of photos and artwork for display on the 60" plasma screen. To say that, in general, I have far exceeded a sensible resolution would not be to overstate the case. And, of course, the bigger the file, the longer the rendering time on componentry not necessarily best-equipped for the task.
Sensible filenames would probably help, too :-)
Right!
Having fended off, yet again, my avariciously-opportunistic tree surgeon, I shall be — unlike Webster's Dictionary — Bordon bound in a few minutes. I wonder where I'll end up this time?
Meanwhile, the piece here by Corey Robin (on the politics of national security) has a sidebar of reasons to donate. I liked #10: "This is an excellent way to launder money". And Gill and Chris just dropped off a DVD I now have no time to investigate until this evening... assuming I find my way back, of course. TTFN.
And, some 69.6 miles...
... further along Life's Little Highway system, here I am back at Technology Towers and wondering whether I should investigate MuseScore. It is, after all (as Ian pointed out) a lot cheaper than Sibelius. Which began life, I recall, on the Acorn Archimedes RISC OS platform I enjoyed for 13 years.
It faintly worries me to think I've now been using Windows for even longer. Although not before 2002 on my home systems. (Or system, indeed. I'm now down to just one Windows device.)
Little did I suspect...
... having learned a while ago that Emo Philips (with his fruitless search for chewing gum under the stools in singles bars) is a master of the paraprosdokian3 that the fine essay by Richard Jenkyns I'm now reading much more carefully (and with correspondingly greater enjoyment the second time around) casts the divine Jane Austen in the same mould. He takes his example from Mansfield Park:
"Dear Fanny! now I shall be comfortable."
This is the sudden turn that the classical rhetoricians called para prosdokian (against expectation). The twist back into self-centredness is brilliantly managed, and with this
quiet coup de théâtre Jane Austen closes her chapter... There is an interplay in Lady Bertram's lethargic mind between a mild fondness for other creatures and the
business of making oneself cosy. Pug is not the same as the sofa, and Fanny is not the same as Pug, but all exist, for her, as ministrants to her faint gratifications.