Crazy casino talk
One of the money-talk talkers is running his usual routine pushing listeners into the stock casino.

Different dates and intervals each time, but the moral of the story is always the same. Goes like this:

If you had invested $10000 in 1932, you would have lost 69.3% in the first year.

But if you had left the remaining $3090 in the market for the next 30 years, you would have ended up with $542,378.

= = = = =

Aside from the annoying use of unrounded digits, this is supposed to make you feel bad about avoiding losses.

Nope. Doesn't make me feel bad at all.

Counterexample:

Back in 1972 I left my 1950 Willys pickup in a repair shop to get one of those stupid required Okla inspection stickers. When I picked it up, I found that the repair shop had stolen my toolbox, which was probably worth more than the Willys. Since I couldn't prove it, I didn't bother with legal action, but I sure as fuck DIDN'T TAKE MY TRUCK BACK TO THAT GARAGE EVER AGAIN.

The garage has already stolen. I can thus assume they have a pattern or habit of stealing. This is called SANITY. This is called UNDERSTANDING HUMAN NATURE.

If I had been thinking the money-talk way, I would have believed that the repair shop would never steal again. Instead, I would assume that sooner or later they would replace my old Willys with a brand new Jeep Cherokee filled with gold ingots.

I would have brought my truck in every day and paid for repairs that it didn't need, just so I wouldn't miss the chance for a brand new gold-filled Cherokee.

That belief would have been an insane delusion. Magic. Crazy.

I don't believe in magic.

= = = = =

Sidenote: Money-based rackets like stocks are the only major area of life where I didn't have to learn by painful experience. In everything else from politics to personal relations, I started out with a fantastically stupid optimistic delusion and got smashed into suspicious sanity. Some subjects required repeated smashing. With money rackets I started out maximally suspicious and I was right.

Labels: the broken circle, TMI

  ¶ 10:27 AM