Pros: the design is such that the scaling issues that crippled Reddit are inapplicable. The discovery is deep and multidimensional. The lack of negative reinforcement and minimal positive reinforcement curtails excessive gloryhounding. The nature of interaction builds extraordinarily strong community bonds.

Cons: The community bonds also allow outsized personalities to dominate content and silence dissent (yo!). There is no viable discovery or taxonomy topology. The intensely personal nature of discussion increases the stakes so that people become less likely to participate if they feel inadequate, down or otherwise not "up to snuff." The low churn and deeply personal nature curtails rapid growth and keeps the site below the critical mass necessary for self-sufficiency. There is no viable revenue model to cover the site's modest expenses, thus we are all hostage to the beneficence of the site's founders (and donations) to keep the site online.

Welcome.

If you click on the "People" link at the top of the page, you go to a list of the active core of the site. What I did when I started way back then was look at all the badged content and run through the comments that others felt the community as a whole needs to look at.

(cracks knuckles)

You keep asking these "simple" questions that kind of underpin the basic function of finance. I'ma try and make this simple without making it overly simplistic. Wish me luck.

Everyone is thinking short term with investing and handling money because "shareholders" aren't just long-term, personally interested people who wish to profit from being a part of something greater than themselves. When I say "Ford," you think this:

But when I say "Ford", mk (for example) also thinks this.

Now - the mutual fund or hedge fund or accredited investor or university endowment manager or dude with an eTrade account doesn't not think Steve McQueen. But he also sees EBITDA, GATT earnings, P&L, amortization, revenue, and a whole bunch of other shit. I mean, none of this makes sense to 99.9% of people but to lots of people, it makes dollars.

Those numbers are related to money. Money moves those numbers.

And the dumb thing is that those numbers impact the value of the company, and the value of the company impacts the company's financing, and the financing of the company impacts its ability to operate, and it isn't that much of a leap of faith to discover that the perception of a company affects the reality of the company and when the perception that matters is the perception of traders, you do stuff that moves those numbers, not stuff that moves the company.

There are others that can explain this better than me, but if Ford invests 10% of its spare cash in a new factory, it takes a loss. It doesn't have an asset yet, it has a hole in the ground. It can amortize that loss over several years (based on a number of complex calculations that are governed by the SEC and the IRS) but it's still a loss. If Ford instead invests 10% of its spare cash into its own shares, all of a sudden its earnings per share go up by (purchased share number)/(old share number) percent.

Nothing is created, nothing is destroyed but the numbers move and that increases the attractiveness to investors. Or, the lazy ones. But not the ones that are knee-deep in Ford who think that investing in a new factory is a much better idea.

Here's how those pitches usually go.

So it's not like it's a settled thing. But for large, lazy, algorithm-driven ETFs and mutual funds and the like, looking over a dozen and one statistics an hour, that aren't neck-deep in the lore of Ford, the stock buyback looks like a better bet.

Our TV sits in a corner of the living room next to a fireplace, there is a lot of dead unusable space. I've been making an angled cabinet to fit into the corner, maybe I'll put up picks if it turns out anything but ghetto carpentry.

A good friend of mine just moved to Haarlem and is trying to residency/citizenship, anywhere close to you?

I added a shower to a tub last week.

Learned a few things.

1. Tile, not panels. The panels were a nightmare to put in, impossible to align, and look like trash. Tile would've been much easier and looked much better.

2. PEX is awesome. I'll do PEX again for everything. It was super-easy to work with. The hardest part was connecting to existing non-PEX, and even that was easy with push-to-connect fittings. No soldering, no torches; the only threads were on the shower mixer.

3. If you're doing a shower in PEX, the mixer-to-faucet drop must be copper, not PEX. This is because PEX has a slightly smaller inner diameter, and shower mixers are designed for copper, resulting in water going up to the showerhead when fully on. Which is what happens on mine, and googling afterward told me exactly why. I'll spend a Saturday tearing the panel off and fixing it eventually.

I just bought a new house. There's a lot I want to do with it, but it's hard to find time. I may start paying contractors. I prefer doing things myself, but at some point, I have the money and not the time…

Next on my list is turning a room-shaped alcove in the basement into another bedroom. Which is hard, because my city requires floating walls, and it has a drop ceiling.

He occupies his time in the hospital by making with his one available hand little cardboard models, which he sends to the matron, doctor, and those who have been kind to him. Through all the miserable vicissitudes of his life he has carried about a painting of his mother to show that she was a decent and presentable person, and as a memorial of the only one who was kind to him in life until he came under the kind care of the nursing staff of the London Hospital and the surgeon who has befriended him.

And now I'm really emotional on a Saturday night.

John Dolan was the first critic to call bullshit on James Frey, way back before he found his alter ego.

I had a few older message show up in my inbox again.

I actually read The Commitments, flags, you should too. It was a good read. Later, I read Franzen's novel about fracking, and taking the tops off mountains, and marital breakdown (what isn't about marital breakdown?): Freedom -- yes, both books are impossibly long, but you sort of miss them when they're over. And the sentences... and the experience of living the lives of the protagonists - he does that well.

---

This review casts aspersion on the notion of writing a book about a parent dying, saying

The overwriting is meant to conceal the fact that this novel is a simple mix of three of the most hackneyed storylines in American fiction:

The picaresque adventures of a feckless male academic, borrowed from DeLillo;

The sentimental tale of the decay and death of one’s parents as in Dave Eggers’s “masterpiece”;

The old, old plot device of the family Christmas reunion to bring the centrifugal parents and kids back together again against all odds

I've noticed this: Parents die. They die in real life, and they die in novels.

---

Remember Microserfs? For all its high tech, startuptitude, in the end it's about parents dying.

---

Remember Bright Lights Big City, Jay McInerney's first novel. For all its life in New York City survivitude, in the end it's about parents dying.

---

Remember the Bible: well guess what? Parents die..

---

Full disclosure: I couldn't read the whole review by Dolan. To say that a novel about parents dying is a hackneyed storyline is saying that Hamlet has a hackneyed storyline because the son is trying to deal with the death of his father.

Bosh.