I thought we had that with HIPPA.... Did I miss something?

Maybe it's enforcement that's lacking? Actually, take them to civil court, recover damages... That will fix them..

How hard is it to keep a fictional identity? Just pick one, birth day, legal name and the like. Use your made up identity for everybody by default, until you are faced with situations where the REAL information is legally required. Unless you are just crazy about not being tracked and think you need to keep everything separate... In which case you need to make sure you never use your internet connection from your cellphone or at home (Not to mention you need to be careful to use only public WiFi connections in various geographic areas too... ) At that point, you just need to deal with keeping track of your lies as the price you pay for being nuts....

Which is why I ALWAYS lie to such sites... The only businesses who get my legal name and birthday are ones that legally require it, everybody else gets a standard fictional set of data that's somewhat related, but not my real information. Yea, I get facebook "Happy Birthday's" on the wrong day and a lot of my friends don't know my real birthday isn't what they think, but my data isn't at risk of accidental exposure this way.

Shaking head.... Our education system has failed you...

Not that far back.. It's WORLDCOM to you buddy....

Yea, so? It doesn't mean we shouldn't at least try to help because you never know if that addict really is at the end of themselves and ready to get clean, or just saying what they have to in order to stay out of jail. Going clean should ALWAYS be an option, and staying clean should be the requirement to stay out of jail, but we should offer to help anyone who is willing to do rehab... (We being the government.. Personally, a whole lot of addicts are enabled by their loved ones to remain addicts and that should stop... But government should never give up trying.)

Never said they didn't. I'm saying that it's about how you THINK about money that really matters in most cases... Drop a boat load of money on somebody and how they think about money determines where they will be in 10 years, not how much you dumped on them in the first place. So, if you are wrong headed about money, it doesn't matter if you make a bunch of it, you will still be poor. If you are wrong headed, you won't manage your money the correct way, you will just spend it. So hiring somebody to manage your assets is really an example of the mindset you need to stay rich, and it is the mindset is what keeps you that way.

I'm not necessarily a avid supporter of "Think and Grow Rich" but the guy pushing all that stuff is right about one of the major differences between the "rich" and the "not so rich" is mind set.

How many stories have you heard about people who won large sums of money but ended up bankrupt a few short years later? How does this happen? It's how you think about money, and how you choose to live. Change the way you think and manage your money instead of letting your money manage you.

Haven't you seen the news stories of the guy that dies and leaves millions to charity but nobody suspected he had money? One story is about a guy who worked as a janitor all his life, invested wisely and lived modestly and retired with nearly 10 million. How can this guy do this? Was he just lucky? I don't think so, I think the difference was his attitude about money.

I knew an older gentleman in my pre-teen years. He was rich, literally worth tens of millions in today's dollars but you'd never would have known. He drove an old pickup, lived in a log cabin with two bare electric lights and a small wood stove for heat. He spent his days working his ranch, moving cows, cutting and bailing hay and the like. He died about 15 years after I knew him, worth millions, but he lived happy. His secret? Don't let money define you, don't make it the measure of your success, manage it instead of letting it manage you.

Perhaps not, but addiction treatment for users and prison for producers/distributors seems like a good thing to try, even if we don't seem to have an epidemic of long term thinking going on in the country. I believe in giving multiple chances and upping the anti each time.

How do you stop people from making sour dough? Yeast is literally everywhere...

Oh for Pete's sake... GEORGE LUCAS has had more significance than our founding fathers to the current generation?!?

What kind of history are they (not) teaching in public schools these days? If what you say is true, this is sad. It means we are abandoning our founding principles and putting principles in place from fictional stories, and between Star Wars, The Hunger Games and the like we get our ideas of government? Lord help us.

I dare say that MOST of us are way more impacted by our founders than by Star Wars, what's lacking is understanding of what that impact actually is because we haven't learned our history.

And the alternative is?

Nobody out there claims capitalism is perfect, surely there are problems with it. However, I dare you to look though history and find any better examples of an economic system that works long term.

All the "solutions" to the above problems (perceived or real) don't work out so well. They kill economies, kill governments, and kill lots of people in the process. Give me capitalism, even with the wide gap between the rich and poor, because in that system the poor are better off and there is at least the chance of working one's way above their current station.

Capitalism is the best system we have, even with it's warts..

On the fall of democracy... I think this has been WAY overstated. Politics is not always just about money, though it may seem so at times. There are ways though to "fix" this and I think term limits at the federal level is the best place to start. Say we put a 12 year limit on congress in both houses combined and you are out after that. It won't fix everything, but it will surely make the money going to incumbents get spread around eventually once the member's time is up.

Oh come on...

The difference here is NOT being rich or not. The difference is in managing your investments and your risks. You can make a LOT of money in stocks, but you have to take huge risks if you want to get rich quick. Huge risks mean failure is likely, so if you don't want to be poor you have to manage your risks.

Rich people generally know how to manage their risks, or they don't stay rich very long. The trick to making money is not being lucky, but being smart.

Stop approaching wall street like a giant casino where you place your bets and spin the wheel. LEARN about investing, understand the investments you make and learn about ways to limit your risks. Because until you learn what you are doing, you may win some, but you WILL loose more.

It's like learning card counting and playing blackjack. FIRST you need to learn the rules and play the odds to even the risks, then you can learn to count cards to get better odds. But it takes time to learn each new step. Investing is the same kind of thing...

Don't have time to learn all this? Then stick with letting the pros manage your money for you and stay in those mutual funds, preferably those with low expenses and good rates of return.

Not much, of course chicken little is always talking about the sky falling and that little boy keeps crying wolf. Usually they are both wrong... Usually...

Look, a stopped watch is right twice a day and the stock market will go up, and it WILL go down so the bulls and bears have their share of days they are right. The issue here is if you know how to manage things so you don't loose too much when the markets don't do what you expect. The average casual investor doesn't manage their risks well and are usually the ones who get stuck.

My advice to investors is that you KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING, or only use money you can loose. Of course this applies to ANY investment, not just stocks.

No it's not..

Where "book value" is an important component of a company's stock value, so is Price to Earnings. "How much money are they making?" is a more important question. You can have nearly zero book value, but if you are raking in the cash with a low cost of sales your company is worth a lot, even if it has no real assets.

That's not to say P/E ratios are not at pretty high levels too, but some academic's statistics isn't proof of anything.