Gyroscopic Investing

It's funny you mention video game consoles. I'm 29, and this was a huge issue for me personally when I was growing up not too long ago. My parents never let me have a video game console, my own TV, or even a console in the house. All of my friends did. I did have my own computer (gift from a grandfather), but never a console. They also never let me have a private internet connection to my computer, even after all my friends did. So no online gaming after school or on weekends. I really resented them at the time for these restrictions, but now I think they made the right decision. All the reasons they gave for denying them to me totally happened once I got them. I became addicted to video games, pornography, and the internet, constantly plugged into the media stream. If it's rough as an adult, I can only imagine what this would have been like as a more impressionable child and teenager. In particular having basically unrestricted access to porn as a child is something that I think is incredibly damaging. Despite the restrictions I managed to occasionally look at porn anyway on my mom's internet-connected computer as young as age 12 (she was not very tech savvy) and I have to say it really warped my sexuality in ways that I'm just getting over today. I don't even want to think about what it would have been like to be able to look at porn in private anytime I wanted.

My parents were more permissive with my sister and let her have a smartphone and a computer with a private internet connection at like age 14 onward, and they practically destroyed her life for years. The social drama of school followed her home and she got no respite from it. She would have protested bitterly had they taken it away or said no in the first place, but even they acknowledge that it would have been the right decision.

A lot of the things kids crave aren't good for them, in either the short or long term. If I use a ridiculous example like saying no to heroin use in the house, it illustrates the point but the point is true for a lot of less severe examples too. Not all features of modernity--particularly modern media entertainment, and communications--are suitable for children. Heck, a lot of them aren't suitable for adults either.

I hear you about sports, trips, braces, expensive yet enriching hobbies, and the like, and I expect I'll be happy to pay for these. But clothes? If they want brand name clothes, they can buy them themselves and learn bargain shopping! Ridiculous. What child needs branded clothes? They aren't even a status symbol anymore. Our society is awash in clothes, and they aren't particularly expensive even for adults if you don't buy everything new. Even the strangely-coveted-by-some name brands can be had for pennies on the dollar if you know where to look. I've been redoing my whole wardrobe to look less like a slob and everything I've purchased has been used or heavily discounted. It's not that hard.

MangoMan wrote:

Pointedstick wrote: I've been redoing my whole wardrobe to look less like a slob and everything I've purchased has been used or heavily discounted. It's not that hard.

You're welcome.

Slob is subjective. Slobs shop at Walmart. Slobs have droopy pants. Slobs wear Mr. Roger's sweaters. etc.

Stealth wealth can be done in T-shirts and jeans, but not a wife beater and sweatpants. PS must been really letting it all hang out. Heh!

Yes, it's really unfortaunte people are incredibly superficial (esp women) and judge others by the clothes they wear and the car they drive. It sounds to me like those old farts with five cars is getting to PS. After all, the #1 determinant of your lifestyle (and expense) is the neighborhood you live in. Skid row's looking pretty good right about now!

More seriously, I'm amazed at the effect smartphones has had on self-consciousness. Even in the poorest regions of the world, people appear to take pride in their very colorful clothes. They're certainly not slobs, but it increases competition for everyone globally when the even lowest of the low dress good.

I really enjoy flyingpython's posts. It's a pity he doesn't post more.

One of the things I disliked (maybe hated) about growing up was everything was always about status and competition. It was almost the law of the jungle. Your parent's jobs and income (or lack of) determined your own social standing among peers. Your own innate abilities (or lack of) modified that standing further which is how you usually wound up in a clique or group with like-minded. The pressure to belong was almost manic and I imagine its really through the roof now with 24/7 social media. Worse of all, there's nothing you can do about it. Either you became one of those minor social outcast weirdos or you participated and tried your best. I'm not sure if the pressure exactly lessens as you get older, but you certainly have choice to stop paying attention to it or you move on to an urban/subruban metropolitan area if you feel like amping it up.

Another reason I think having kids is irrational is because I haven't finished growing up myself nor learned everything I want to feel secure, so if you don't know who the hell you really are, how are you going to raise children who are going to go through the exact same process as you did? It's bad enough to live that hell once, but to do it multiple times just isn't appealing to me. Nonetheless, I feel like I made the right choice given my options and limitations. I've come to consider it being very responsible because it certainly is easy and the path of least resistance not to be responsible. I won't lie and say I never feel the pangs of being "left out", but it gets easier and easier to suppress envious feelings like that over time.

Frankly, I think biological life sucks when you look at it objectively. We're stuck in meatbags dealing with a multitude of hardwired biological impulses and motivations that worse yet, come up as emotions. And which all of society is intent on exploiting purely for selfish profit. It's almost as if its a self-designed Matrix.

Pugchief wrote:

Pointedstick wrote: I've been redoing my whole wardrobe to look less like a slob and everything I've purchased has been used or heavily discounted. It's not that hard.

You're welcome.

Yep, I've got to admit, you were right! It hasn't really been that much of a change, even. Just nice shoes, a belt that matches the shoes, and some tucked-in long sleeve shirts. I'm still looking for a good cowboy hat.

MangoMan wrote:Believe me when I tell you that the great sex you've been having with your wife will be even better when you both take the time to look nice for each other. <----Dang-it, the devil emoji doesn't work either.

Pointedstick wrote:It's funny you mention video game consoles. I'm 29, and this was a huge issue for me personally when I was growing up not too long ago. My parents never let me have a video game console, my own TV, or even a console in the house. All of my friends did. I did have my own computer (gift from a grandfather), but never a console. They also never let me have a private internet connection to my computer, even after all my friends did. So no online gaming after school or on weekends. I really resented them at the time for these restrictions, but now I think they made the right decision. All the reasons they gave for denying them to me totally happened once I got them.

Actually, I think it's quite common for kids that have been denied things to completely binge on them once they are in control. In my experience, it was always the kids with the strictest parents that ended up having the biggest issues, whether that was with video games, alcohol, sex, or something else. We are all warped to some degree by the decisions our parents make or don't make on our behalf.

I am just about to turn 50 so I grew up in a different era. There were no home video game consoles, my friends and I had to walk to an arcade after school (5 miles uphill each way of course) and pump quarters into each machine, which we did on a regular basis. I guess one of my friends did have an Atari console at some point and it was fun and addicting to an extent but he was the only one and consoles were not also being used as communication devices. That's the huge difference-maker with today's consoles, in my opinion... the social aspects of it all. The kids don't go to arcades to interact, they do it all online. So today's kid without the right console is like the kid who couldn't go hang out at the arcade, and who wants to be that kid?

Of course there was also nowhere near the amount of porn available to kids or anyone else at that time. I remember having a part-time job on a garbage truck around age 12 and the biggest perk was when people would throw out boxes of old magazines and some of them would be Playboy and the like (what were they thinking?!). We would get to look at them on long runs to the town dump before they got thrown out. Those were the days! Things are very different now.

One of the childhood experiences that has influenced my parenting philosophy the most is that my parents never let me play with little green Army men, or G.I. Joe action figures, etc. And what happened? I eventually joined the Army (via Army ROTC). So I guess that plan backfired on them, and I always remind myself of that. Not quite the same as some of the other issues we're discussing, but similar enough. By contrast, I had some incidents involving alcohol and marijuana at a very early age and rather than being "grounded for life" or anything I was tacitly allowed to sort it out for myself (though I'm not sure it was an official strategy, I think my parents were busy with their own issues) and I did. Other than my freshman year in college when I turned 18 and could drink legally, there was never an urge to binge simply because it was previously forbidden and I got through that phase fairly quickly once it lost its appeal.

Most of the decisions around all of these technology issues are heavily dependent upon the individual kids. We're pretty fortunate that we've been able to give increasing amounts of latitude to our kids, making corrections as we go. There have been a few cases where we've had to clarify what is appropriate and what isn't, and the kids understand that it's a great big internet out there and just like in the real world there will be things that are inappropriate for kids and even some things that are inappropriate for anyone. But we don't just leave it all up to them, we set flexible limits about how much time they can spend on their various devices, and they know we monitor things periodically. Actually, despite the increased access to "bad stuff" on the internet, the ability to monitor what your kids are doing is far greater than it ever was back in my day. Sometimes I almost feel sorry for kids these days (but only almost!), though perhaps that's because I have well-behaved kids and I still have the upper hand in terms of tech savvy.

Social drama is a slightly different issue. We've had no problems with my son, he has social media accounts but doesn't really use them except to promote videos he posts on YouTube (he likes to do "trick shot" videos with his friends). On the other hand, I think we may see more drama with my daughter, simply because girls are more dramatic in general. Just the regular "girl drama" at school has been an issue at times, but social media has not become a factor yet. We'll have to see how that goes when the time comes.

In the end, there is no "one size fits all" solution to managing this stuff and while I agree that some of the things kids crave are not good for them, some of those things are just not good for certain kids, or to certain extremes. Each family needs to figure out what works for them given their circumstances. We didn't allow our son to have a phone until just last year when he turned 14 (he says he was the last kid in his entire school to get a phone and I might actually believe him). My daughter who is almost 12 does not have a phone but some of her friends do. We don't allow our kids to have TVs in their rooms or have devices in their rooms overnight and computers are only used in "public" areas of the house, but again we know other families that different rules for all of that.

So in a meager attempt to bring this back on-topic, I think it's important to allow kids some freedom to explore technology a bit, and understand how it impacts the real world. The only way they can do that is by using it, and they've got to be allowed to have successes and failures along the way. Those things don't happen with an adult denying them access or hovering over them every step of the way, but obviously there need to be reasonable limits. I always try to remind my kids that the most successful people in the future will be the ones who know how to leverage technology to do something useful rather than just use it for consumption. So far so good, we'll see what tomorrow brings.

This can't last. These people aren't providing a hill o' beans to society.

According to the website Driverless-Future.com, most manufacturers are less than five years away from offering an all-driverless or semi-driverless model.

• Volkswagen expects to have one by 2019.
• General Motors expects to have its first model by 2020 or sooner.
• BMW already announced it will launch the iNext, a self-driving vehicle, in 2021.
• Ford expects to have driverless vehicles by 2020, but they may not go everywhere.
• China’s Baidu expects large numbers of self-driving cars by 2019 and full production two years later.
• Elon Musk says the first fully autonomous Tesla will be available in 2018, but Department of Transportation approval could take one to three years more.
• Uber expects its entire fleet will be driverless by 2030, since Uber will be so inexpensive that car ownership will make no sense.

Just think of all the extra money you'll be able to invest into the PP not having to blow it on a depreciating asset that sits unsued 95% of the time!

Now they're even using exploding robots to kill murderers like the guy in Dallas. Everything is possible.

Reub wrote:Now they're even using exploding robots to kill murderers like the guy in Dallas. Everything is possible.

Shit, I guess I better expose my virgin eyes to the news porn and check that out. Why can't I just live in a rose-colored bubble?

Benko, looks like you better have a Plan B!

Hey PS, how long was it supposed to take those continuously breeding Republicans to overtake the Democrats?

TennPaGa wrote:Well cool beans! This will be a great experiment!

Having spent some time thinking about this, I believe it's going to be a failure. As that economist who won the Noble Prize for it showed, people make permanent decisions based on their stable, long-term stream of income (cash flow), not any so-called wealth effect. So any 6 to 12-month temporary handout from SuperRich Tech Millennials is not going to induce permanent long-term changes to eradicate poverty -- recipients will rightly see it as free money to solely upgrade their short-term comfort. We need a real Citizen's Dividend administered by the Feds that is permanent for life.

According to a recent Stanford University study, manufacturing robots cost the equivalent of $4 an hour.

Huzzah! Lawyers are finally on the list.

ROSS is barely three years old, doesn’t wear suits, and hasn’t graduated from university with a law degree, but he — or really, it — has already been hired by several of the world’s largest law firms.

ROSS is an artificially intelligent computer system that was a few years ago developed by Andrew Arruda, Jimoh Ovbiagele, and Pargles Dall’Oglo at the University of Toronto as a plain-language legal research tool. ROSS was originally a submission in a global competition in which IBM challenged 10 universities to come up with commercial uses for its “Watson” artificial intelligence platform.

http://business.financialpost.com/execu ... -law-firms

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