One year ago today: May 5, 2019, all this bad music?
Five years ago today: May 5, 2015, pedal pub prices.
Nine years ago today: May 5, 2011, early club organization.
Random years ago today: May 5, 2010, I dump Firehow.
I was all day on the webinars. If this becomes the standard mode of conveying information, we are doomed. It’s a step back to the Stone Age. I repeat, if cannot write it down, it is not a clear idea. Several of the meetings were with the same guy that we could not follow each other’s terminology. And I see he has done many of the things I asked about, but using buzzwords. He does have a balance sheet and log of period performance. He calls it “journalizing”. It works but how dare him call my spreadsheets overthink when he’s doing the same thing by pencil and paper. Huh, tell me that.
Here’s a sign in Idaho, who finally got the right idea. Either that or they just copied Washington State. Rescue the idiots who walk off the marked trails, who fly balloons over the ocean, bungee jump, and go sailing without safety gear. Then send them the bill. I’d like to see a lot more of this, but I doubt if the money saved would be used for any tax reductions. That’s not how corruption works.
On ABC news, there was almost an armed incident at a Texas bar that didn’t close down. Resistance is everywhere, but it is not organized. This lesson could be the one big lesson learned when this virus situation is over. If you want freedom, privacy, and to be let alone, you must organze. There’s the big noise about an Amazon worker who died of COVID-19 but that isn’t near enough information. Like the big deal they made of that 34 y.o. athlete who died, they forgot to mention he had just got out of chemo.
I’m still out of comedy DVDs and I’ve watched Alan Sharpton lying under oath, so where to go for a laugh? Ah, I see the NeverTrumpers are flaring up again. Those jerkwads never learn. Let’s see what they are up to this time. They can’t find trouble, so they have to create it. That liberal rag CNN is always a good starting point. Here we go, they shout he’s broken the cardinal rule of politics, whatever that is. Hey, that’s how he got elected, you duck-brains. They’ve formed yet another hate group called “The Lincoln Project” and released a video blaming Trump for everything. But it’s already backfired. They showed footage of Detroit, which was devastated by the libtard globalization that was in progress long before Trump arrived to stop shipping those jobs overseas.
What’s shaping up is another Democrat waste of money. They only way they know to manipulate the vote is through intensive ads, which they pay for with millions of donated dollars. The premise is those donors will be rewarded with political favors after the elections. The problem is, they blew $130 million last time and lost. They didn’t deliver the favors, which will make it much harder to get the donations this time, meaning they have two choices. Make even bigger and thus more ridiculous promises, or conduct a low-budget smear campaign.
Right now, it appears they’ve opted for smearing. The Washington Post, whose credibility is in the negative range, is behind an ad that shows Trump talking about unknown future death projections, then overlaying them with actual death numbers only available later—and only when the number is higher. But Trump isn’t dumb, he knows those people never get anything right. He’s used their shutdown of the economy to sign an order restricting immigration so that when employment resumes, Americans will get hired. Smooth, Don! The Obama-loving foot-draggers can’t argue with without eating crow over their virus stance.
Earthquake test bed.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
It’s confirmed. Gordie Walker is gone. He’s the entertainer former hockey star from Los Angeles who walked away from it all to play in a band in Vancouver, Canada. He married a girl from there and although he had the best bar band in the area, he played only dive bars for chump change. He was always my mentor when it came to stage work. He’s the one that guided my show to the point where I now play right to the audience rather than at them. This photo is the Gordie Walker band, he is on the far left. He wrote his own comedy material and the Reb and I were of the very few he let on stage or invited home for Xmas. That was 32 years ago.
I don’t normally get depressed, but things like this lead the way. I’m outliving my contemporaries. I grabbed the new shovel and dug in the joists for half the shed floor. Just me and the chickens. I needed the few hours time to think. He played more music in his twenty years than I did in my last forty. I have to get on stage for sure this time, solo or not. Gordie played for the audience and it’s time I carried on his tradition.
In other news, I was reviewing interviews with Snowden, the whistleblower who’s been vilified by the press. The guy who Obama hates with a passion. His best talk is at this (youTube) link, and I have a wild claim to make. He mentions the term “metadata” around 2013. Well, I began using the term “meta-information” back in 1984. It took Snowden, who is one sharp due, some 30 years after that to call it a threat. And remember, the only electronic tool for data collection in my day was the computer database, and it was not yet in widespread use. But I warned against the danger for anyone who would listen. Very few did.
[Author's note: My original objection remains the same, that it is not so much the information, but the method and intent of the collection that is the real danger. The significance of the date so long ago is that I had raised the alarm long before anybody heard of the Internet or used a network. I concluded that it would take so long for the government to collect so much data that it would take more than my lifetime.
I could not have known that just twenty years later, there would be a Facebook that tricked people by the hundreds of millions into becoming their own data entry clerks. You can fool some of the people all of the time. Snowden is right, the information is there, but the government should have to work so hard at getting it they confine it to legitimate criminal investigations.]
ADDENDUM
Now deeply into the Auvoria software, the product itself is probably as dangerous as the market. The learning curve is largely centered on what not to do, a process found by trial and error. This means the person teaching is often only knows not to do but is usually guessing at why. Did I mention their new feature called Trailing? It works like so. Instead of a fixed weekly goal, you set the goal and place a percentage that “trails behind” the percentage you make. I know, it sounds circular already. Here’s an example.
If you set your weekly goal at 3% and your trailing at 1%, once you reach 3%, it locks in your earnings at 2% (3% minus 1%). And stops trading which half-negates the purpose of the protection. Why? Because a stop-trade accomplishes the same thing. The very reason for the protection is you want to keep on trading because you are satisfied by the 2% and there still remains more prime trading days left. Note that reaching your goal is what triggers the protection, if you never reach the goal, you can lose everything. That becomes important in a moment.
Instead of a solution, you get a millennial-grade workaround. I’m using exaggerated numbers for clarity. Say I hit my 3% goal on Tuesday, so my profit is locked in at 2%. The thing has stopped trading because it reached the 3% goal. Gee-golly, it’s a good thing I’ve got nothing better to do to keep checking for this situation. So, I go in and change the template to 8% and my trailing climbs to 7% (8% minus 1%), and apply the template. But damn, it is still not trading. Then I remember the new “Reset Weekly Goal” button. I find it and click on it, and what do you know, trading re-commences. Do I get back to my yard work? Not so fast.
a) when I raised my goal to 8%, are there any hidden changes?
b) if it rose to 7%, did it wipe out my former protection at 2%?
c) does that mean I have no protection at all again until I hit 8%?
This is where we remember that second new button that said “Reset Trailing Protection”.
a) do I need to click to raise my protection to 7% or click it to remain at 2%?
b) if I click it and raise to 7%, what happens to my old protection at 2%?
c) what if I want my old protection to stay at 2%, but my new protection at 7%?
This is your classic OOPs programming gang-bang (that is the proper term among real programmers when referring to coders, it is more derogatory than it sounds because it is the polite version of the phrase that starts with "cluster"). It is not clear and cannot be made clear without restructuring the code. This is why so many offices still use COBOL. In both the scenarios above, answer c) is the most likely. I probably have no protection, but what I obviously want is to risk only my new trades. Thus, a confliction between what I get and what I want. And getting answers is becoming tougher by the webinar. And because when you apply logic and try to figure it out yourself, you will most often come back with exactly the wrong answer. And stand accused of overthinking the situation.
But consider the dollar cost of underthinking. One wrong move on the Forex market and kiss your money good-bye. I’ve got part of the trading figured out. What happens is computers allow the market to track currencies to the fifth decimal point. At this moment the Euro is bid 1.08371. If you are leveraged 1:200 and put a dollar on that fifth decimal, you put $200 into the market. If it goes up to 1.08372, it moves the needle. I can’t find the leverage ratio for my trades, but 1:100 is probably close. But it says I just bought $24.65 in Japanese Yen.
Remind me to read up on currencies again. I recall some things, like you don’t really buy and sell the currency, you buy a position. With this software, it likely doesn’t matter but I’d like to know the innards of the process. When I first read about trading on margins, I didn’t care for some things. I need a reminder what they were. But I do know the process breaks down if too many people do the same thing. Sure, I’m after the money. I also want the knowledge.
