I guess you missed the part "over any 20 year period". Since the Dow was first calculated in the 1800s, noone has ever held it for 20 years and lost money.
It's never happened. Same with the NASDAQ composite. Nobody has ever put their retirement or college money in a major index for 20 and not made just about as much as they'd expect.

The same can be said of any 10 year period, except the period 2000 - 2010 and if you pick specific dates at the great depression.

I suppose there COULD be a losing 20-year period, even though it's never happened before. Eating a banana could kill you by choking too. You wouldn't call eating a banana "gambling". Bananas HAVE killed people, "buy diversity and hold for 20 years" has never lost for anyone, making it safer than bananas.

Sure you CAN gamble with the stock market, just as you can gamble with a Coke bottle, but you need not. Buy broad and hold long term works every single time.
Kind of boring, yes, a boring way to get rich slow.

FYI my dad WAS one of those veterans. Not a "former vet" as you said - there's nothing former about being a Vietnam vet.

> You didn't have as much as the other people in school did because of your toilet-scrubbing father, and you felt ashamed because of it. So you vowed you'd to anything you could to "make it". You've got a big chip on your shoulder.

You mean when I was seven, flying around on the corporate jet?!?!? You're far too busy arguing your preconceived notions based on political idealogy to read anything I'm writing, aren't you? Obama doesn't care about your well being. He and Jon Stewart feed you whatever line serves their interests. Here we're talking about you're real life. Stop parroting Stewart long enough to read what I'm saying.

You truth is, we all get some good hands and some bad hands. We get thousands of cards in our life, and make thousands of decisions. I got birth defects requiring dozens of surgeries, a 100% rate of alcoholism in the family, and an extremely high IQ. Those I was dealt and a thousand more, good and bad. During the years I make good decisions, I prosper and have much to give. During the years I do dumb things, short sighted, lazy and selfish things, I do not prosper.

Invite a professional poker player over. You might win the first pot; one pot just depends on the cards. Play against a pro for six hours and they'll take all your chips. Why? Because they make their good cards count and don't use the bad ones as excuses.

No. Breaking Tor needs a bit more. Also, as long as they require actual evidence (i.e. the US is not yet a totalitarian state), timing correlations between packets are very weak.

They cannot (yet) sniff all traffic at all entry and exit points. Tor also seriously distorts timing information and packet-sizes are not the same.

The other ting is that correlating traffic, while possible, is something that needs a competent human in the loop.

But rest assured, if the US population continues to sit on its collective ass in the face of this clear and present danger of a surveillance state being established (and a totalitarian state right on its heels, no doubt), eventually they will be able to monitor all domestic traffic in the US.

He grew up WAY back woods, as in he'd never heard of a toothbrush until he was seven years old and the floor of his parents house was dirt.

He got out of there by taking the bus. He went to Austin, where he worked as a janitor. Ghetto? Maybe. He worked overtime and moved. He kept working overtime and moving. When I was seven years old, we had Easter at the country club.

It woils be another 25 years before I understood HOW he ended up at the country club, with me doing a lot of short-sighted, dumb, and lazy stuff to make myself poor. Sometimes bringing in good money for short periods, but still doing poor things. For example, at 25 I didn't have a high school diploma. I sold a business for $100K and DIDN'T use the money to go to school, so four years later I was poor again, evicted from my rented house. My dad didn't do dumb like that, he did whatever was necessary to get an education.

Yes, my dad was in the right place at the right time .

If you've survived to adulthood, you proably realize that you jump off enough buildings, you'lo eventually get seriously hurt. It might happen on the first building, it might happen on the tenth. That's luck.

Everyday we decide whether to hit the snooze button or get up and get going, whether to iron our shirt or wear something with a few wrinkles. We choose to leave for work 10 minutes early or five minutes late. Thousands and thousands of good choices over the years created thousands and thousands of opportunities for luck to shine. I have made thousands of decisions, like not brushing my teeth some nights, that made it much harder to get lucky.

My dad was in the right place at the right time because he made a habit of being in the right place all the time, all day every day until the right time came.

When you work really hard both on today's work AND on becoming better prepared for five years from now, such as education, some people are going to want to hire you. Whether my dad got promoted on Monday or on Friday was luck, but he did promotion worthy things everyday. It was luck whether he got hired by company A or company B. He treated the people in both companies extremely well, so SOMEONE was going to want him working with them. That's luck - do you get hurt jumping off this building or that one, does the inevitable happen today or tomorrow.

Dyson came up with just the right vacuum design. After building and testing over a THOUSAND prototypes, he got it right and now he's rich. That tends to happen when you keep trying over a thousand times - eventually you hit it. Some call that luck. Dyson calls it hard fucking work. Since Dyson's way of thinking about it WORKS, I think I'll listen to him.

Maybe used by a lot of people, but only a very specific application. Definitely not worth wasting everybodies time with calculus. Now, statistics would have been a real benefit, and a bit of calculus is needed to support that, but not this monster that is typically taught.

I was very specifically not talking about math in general, but about calculus in particular. Maybe read my posting?

Indeed. As to set-theory, different continent. I did have naive set theory in primary school, though they dropped it because "it confused kids". Not that I noticed any... Real set-theory I taught myself to the degree I found it interesting.

Indeed. I am not opposed to math at all. I just say that calculus with its specialized proof-techniques is overrated. Application of calculus is different.

I do not agree at all. And I am a bit above the "peon level" with an engineering PhD in the IT area from one of the best technical universities on the planet.

The other thing is that once you get serious about statistical approaches, you need a real statistician, i.e. specialized mathematician. CS folks routinely mess up statistics, because it is just too complicated.

You need to distinguish between "Calculus" and "Application of Calculus". The former is about a lot of very specialized proof techniques and some specific insights some people had. The later is about calculating things in the real world. Applications of calculus are useful, but the only use I ever found for the proof-techniques taught in a proper calculus lecture were some complexity calculations that did just as well with approximations.

Yes, but they do not need a calculus lecture. They only need an "Application of Calculus" lecture and that is a whole different beast.

I did have classical Linear Algebra, which still has some usefulness. Modern algebra was not available. I also dipped into abstract algebra lately. Fascinating, but time-consuming.

Well, calculus in the engineering space (you know, the place where a lot of things hold that in general calculus just do not work) is something different. I still remember when an EE prof told us that we "could always swap the order of integration in a double integral", when we just had learned that this is in almost all cases _not_ possible.

Still, engineers do not need all the proofs and theorems a real calculus lecture comes with. They just need to understand what the things do and then have a good computer-algebra package (or graphical engineering calculator) to do it for them. That is a whole different thing.