Again as well, supposed serious grown-ups investing other people's money.

When it's in response to an obvious joke, yes. Look at the volume and tell me that's not a lot of so-called level headed serious investors acting like someone yelled BOO in a henhouse.

Which Wikipedia article is that? I'd like to follow the cite since other figures suggest much less generics.

Good for you! Pin a rose on your nose! A lot of otherwise reasonable people got sucked in to this by trusting that the person who is supposed to be constrained by ethics was actually constrained by ethics.

Who says it wasn't one of 20 sign here's somewhere in the middle. Did I mention these brokers were fraudsters?

Not diamonds. Diamond prices are whatever deBeers says they are. ... Synthetic diamonds, now, possibly. But their prices are lower. If you want comodities, then iron is fairly good, but storage prices are high. (Notice I didn't say comodity futures?) A few decades ago I thought that monocrystalline silicon would be a good commodity to invest in, but I'm not sure that would still be a good long-term choice.

Analogy, overly pedantic kid in middle school who starts every sentence with "Well technically..."

WoT doesn't work anywhere. I know it's a popular idea but it doesn't work, period, end of story.

Problem: the PGP web of trust is tiny and has fewer than 4 million keys published to the SKS key pool, EVER. That's pathetic. But of those keys, many are not really connected to the WoT at all. The strong set is only 50k keys. The WoT is a failure, numerically. For comparison: "Yo", an app created as an April fools joke which only lets you send the word "yo" to other users, managed to get 3 million users. The WoT's entire existence has been matched by an April fools.

Problem: the PGP web of trust converts everyone you trust a CA. Unlike real CAs that protect their keys with hardware security modules, are audited, etc, PGP users routinely do things like carrying their private keys through airports on general purpose laptops onto which they install whatever the latest cool toy is. If any of the users you trust are compromised, the entire WoT can be faked through them and your client will accept it. Sure, if you're some kind of crypto guru you can maybe detect this. But most people aren't.

Problem: the "web of trust" is misleadingly named. The graph edges in it are not indicative of social trust. They are in fact reflecting a trust that is more like, "I trust you to protect your private key and do accurate ID verification" which has nothing to do with the more ordinary, human, every day use of the word trust. In your post you mix up these very different kinds of trust, and this is a very frequent but fundamental error. Protecting private keys and doing accurate ID verification are difficult, skilled tasks, whereas what being trustworthy usually means simply requires loyalty.

Problem: the primary criticism of the CA system is that CA's could be coerced by governments via legal means. However the same is true for people in the web of trust - any of those people can be served with a a court order forcing them to sign the governments key.

Problem: the WoT leaks the entire social graph to the entire public. In this day and age, that's unacceptable.

Problem: the WoT has fake keys uploaded to it and there's nothing anyone can do about it. This isn't theoretical, it has happened and routinely fools large numbers of people.

In short, after many years I've come to the conclusion that the web of trust has no redeeming qualities at all. It was a neat sounding idea, it was tried, it has failed. It should be taken out the back and quietly shot, so it can't mislead any more people into thinking it's a good idea.

Why use the dollars to support foreign (to them) jobs, when they can just use them to purchase resources, companies, etc. True some minimal number of jobs will be involved in that, but any labor intensive processes can be shipped back home.

So its not just "jobs in the far future" it's "strip mine the country when convenient".

It was bad loans that financially naive people accepted on the knowingly bad advice of mortgage brokers who needed fodder to fraudulently sell off as AAA investments.

Try looking beyond the gates sometime.

No, Facebook can only "put out" as much as everybody else puts in. For example my classmates from primary school are a tightly connected clique and since some of them have told Facebook they went to the same school, Facebook has correctly deduced that everybody in that clique probably went there too and is asking me to confirm it, but they basically know anyway. Another relative of mine did some genealogy thing and basically drew up the whole family tree for Facebook. Same with people tagging you in photos and checking you in and whatnot, even though you can hide it from your own timeline or even untag yourself Facebook knows that when a friend tagged you it was almost certainly correct. I doubt they really forget anything.

And most annoyingly, Facebook often knows when I send email because the one I send to has shared their address book/inbox with Facebook. There's no other way some of those "friend suggestions" could turn up on social media, so even when you try to keep a life separate from Facebook it's no good when the other end is being a tattle-tale. And I don't know if it's just my friends, but my impression is that you don't reach out and actually tell friends about the things that friends normally get told about. They post it to Facebook and expect people to have read it there, that's more or less the expected way to socialize. Not reading Facebook gets you the "Oh sorry, I didn't know you were stationed on a nuclear submarine under radio silence" looks.

Sadly, all that would mean is that you'll be 'asked' to tighten your belt so their constant stream of hookers and blow can continue through a massive bailout.

These people are truly the scum of the Earth.