At one time, they were in the business of teaching grammar.

Why would you use any of Autonomy's products? I can't even tell what it does!

Management estimates, not opinions. Management estimates have a risk attached to them, and it can be a really solid risk: you can have a 1% chance of hitting it big, or a 95% chance of taking market dominance; and you can predict this quite easily, if you know what you're doing.

In this case, HP and Oracle assert that they were looking at made-up bullshit, not management estimates: Autonomy was throwing out this ideal situation that had near-0% likelihood of occurring, and claiming it as the high-probability outcome.

Risk computations aren't opinions; they're solid, concrete, mathematical facts.

You pretty much nailed why I don't have $25 million dollars right now: up at 4am, check foreign markets, check news, analyze stock graphs, analyze off-hours trading patterns, make predictions, place orders, place stop losses, check market all day, then spend the evening obsessing over the market and searching through sectors, funds, and individual stocks for good opportunities was a suicide mission. I'd have scaled one of the towers on Wall Street and jumped from the top before I got 2 years in.

I'll be out of debt soon. I don't need millions of dollars; I'll be filthy fucking rich when I have no debt. Those traders can all go suck cocks.

Uh, negative on that, Jim. I used to make 1% per day in the stock market; I buy at good buy times and sell at good sell times. I currently don't trade because I don't care to lose money; if I'm not playing to win, I'm playing to fund someone else's golden toilet seat.

I know people whose accounts were halved and worse, and haven't recovered. Even if I invest in SCHD and JNK, I'll have to keep appraised of the market; it could easily go south, and then I'll have to just hold onto it--but it's easy for things to crash down and never recover, which is what happened to IndyMac Bancorp, THM, and a few others. Some of that money just went away.

This image tells a grand story: if you bought in at 1929, you were fucked; 1932, you were rich. 2000 was a bad year; 2003 was great. The DOW is nearly level with 2008. Both the DOW and S&P are showing extreme volatility; the line on the left, followed to the bottom of the second drop, is where the S&P should end up.

Buying in now is buying into a volatile market. Not great unless you have good reason to buy.

You had good sense on investment. I was being told to buy in 2008, right before the bust, on a house I wouldn't be able to sell now because it's worth $50k less. I bought a house that I could pay off quick; in 2016, I'll have some $2200/mo less of expenses, which means I could go out and buy a brand-new Cintiq 2700QHD Touch every month and still have near $1000 left to spend, after paying all my bills.

I'll just max out my 401(K) and use that as a leverage source. When I take loans, it'll be at low rates, paying interest to myself.

My parents's reasoning was never sound in any context. They're the "I saw it on TV, Obama is putting us in concentration camps, we need to stock up on guns now" type.

Imagine a person says there's a button inside that says "Push for Service", and you go there, and you find no button; or they tell you it electrocutes people, but you have no evidence of whether or not this is true.

I've recognized that my parents's experiences are useless and largely discount them. They're as useful as dogma out of a random religious text or 1700s medical journal about how leeches solve all your problems. I've gained nothing from my parents's guidance.

You are in effect, claiming I'm taking advantage of my parents's experiences by ignoring my parents's experiences, which has the same effect as not being exposed to my parents at all. This is like saying I'm taking advantage of a suitcase full of money by walking past it (more like counterfeit money that will get you thrown in jail if you try to spend it).

The increased yearly capacity in US oil production since Bush's second term is, itself, bigger than the yearly capacity of all OPEC countries combined. The Keystone XL pipeline will vastly scale that up, dwarfing OPEC; but Keystone is now questionable, since oil needs to cost at least $80-$90/barrel for it to be profitable.

I just buy "Green" electricity. By contract, my energy supplier must produce at minimum as much solar energy as has been bought from them. If they have a 10MW solar installation and sell 8MW to customers, they're fine (the utilities buy the other 2MW off them as extra power); if they sell 12MW to customers, they need to buy 2MW more solar generation capacity.

I want a Solar-Wind-Geothermal-Nuclear option, but can't get it. Anything but the 13GW coal plant here (we have 11 coal power plants within 20 miles of my house, one of which is over 13,000 megawatts output).

Yeah but that's what happened. Everyone big in oil sold off their oil. 401(k) funds bought into it. Individual retail investors saw the price dip and, thinking they're savvy day traders, bought in. Now the big price crash comes, and the big players will buy back from the idiots who are crying about all the money they lost and toweling out.

That's how you take someone's money. Sell them expensive shit, then buy it back from them for half as much.

Why? I was never escorted.

I constantly hear stories about how kids are taken away at 10 years old and live in a house with 14 year olds and wind up giving blowjobs or getting buttfucked every day. Foster care will stretch your ass and throat out.

I've learned to discount what my parents, and older people in general, tell me. They have a history of being wrong; when I learned to ignore their advice (well, I listen, process it, and reject almost all of it--sometimes something important is in there, but rarely), my life suddenly got better.

I avoided buying a house that would lock me into debt I can't handle, instead renting for 4 years; now I own a house I'll have paid off when I'm 30, and be completely out of debt and have no rent at that time. My constant argument with my superiors has pushed my career upwards, whereas I was always told to hide away and not create waves. Things change because of my influence; I even just went to a hearing to have a law changed, because I complained about the law being ridiculous, bringing no benefit to society, and doling out fines to people who can't afford them. After I testified, the committee reached a unanimous vote to amend the law to not apply in an appropriate subset of situations; all of Council is in agreement with this decision; it's now being argued with State legislature (State traffic law doesn't allow local ordinance to retract specific parking violations).

By contrast, the advice of my elders has always been to make immediate, desperate decisions on major purchases; to collect as much debt as I can, as long as the payments are less than my income so that it can be managed; and to do all the standard college, mortgage, and family stuff that everyone else does. All of that has turned out to be a waste of time and money.

I'm pretty sure my parents's experience and knowledge is all fucked up. I have vastly more life experience and knowledge than my parents now, because I've done so many things and learned so much. I've made mistakes--many of my own, most at the advice of my parents--but the cost has been low. I've failed a clearance, been unemployed, learned to cook; I've been a technical investor (and made 1% per day for a while, but it was too much work) and even headed an illegal gambling ring with a front company and business partners (the whole shebang: thousands of dollars of income, plus even more defrauding the government with misreported taxes as advised by my parents and their aged, experienced friends in the business). I've explored political theory pertaining to taxes, economics, and social policy, and taken a position similar to the Labor party of the early 1900s.

If you're over 12 and you're trying to take advantage of your parents's experiences and knowledge, you're about 90% likely fucking up your life.

So, they physically threatened his family? What do you do if someone tries to abduct your children?