Forget stocks, invest in washing machines

We all know 2008 was a bad year for the stock market. Down, down, down it fell. Well, just like everyone in those infomercials, I have a new sure-fire way of avoiding this downturn and generating a 50% profit: washing machines!

In 2007, I bought a used washer/dryer set for 60 bucks and today I flipped it for $90! That is an unbelievable profit of 50% considerably better than GM or AIG stock over the same period.

Washing machines are a fairly safe investment in these troubled times. Studies show that people wash their clothes consistently in spite of the US economy going to hell in a handbasket. If we look at the last 10 major recessions, clothes washing suffered a mere 5.3% drop while the markets were down on average 27.4%. Demand for clothes cleaning is currently at record levels in the smelly Silicon Valley.

Washing machines, while not offering an annual dividend, can generate create clean, wet clothes. The consume power however so investors should consult with their electricity advisers prior to investment.

As we all know, past results are not indicative of future returns and you can and may lose money! But these desperate times call for desperate measures, buy washing machines today!

Fake news: Palin's daughter's pregnacy confirms she is Pro-Life

This story from cnn.com if not fake news, is at least very confused news or a reporter desperate to find a story.

If you've been away for the weekend, the story broke that Republican VP Candidate Sarah Palin's unmarried daughter is having a child at age 17. For the record, Ms. Palin is a supporter of abstinence education.

Teenagers will do what teenagers do, so I'm personally not concerned with respect to the story. We all know that children are independent human beings that make their own choices and after a point, parents should not be responsible for the actions of their children, good, bad or ugly. For me, a lot of the interest comes from how the media and the talking heads are treating this story.

From the CNN story, as you can imaging the "Family Research Council" is a conservative, pro-family group.

"Fortunately, Bristol is following her mother and father's example of choosing life in the midst of a difficult situation," Family Research Council president Tony Perkins said.

Another segement continues:

Evangelical leader Richard Land also backed Palin completely.

"This is the pro-life choice. The fact that people will criticize her for this shows the astounding extent to which the secular critics of the pro-life movement just don't get it," Land said in a statement.

Oh wait, but she made the "choice" to keep the child, maybe you don't get it Rich. The fact that she has a choice and not a government fiat that decrees she must have the child sure seems like a good thing to Libertarian minded me. I love the fact that people can keep their children (unlike China) and the fact that people can choose to not have children (unlike America a while ago).

Granted, in her position, she has no choice as it would be the end of her mother's political career if she didn't have the baby, but that is another blog post.

Somehow someone being pro-choice to the people in these articles means they are pro-abortion in all cases and somehow choosing to have a child means you are pro-life when in fact it means you've made a choice. They missed the "choice" part. Pro-choice means a woman has the right to choose either an abortion OR having a child.

Detecting fake news

It has been written that a free press is the key to a free society. I don't think it takes much hand waving to decide that free society => free press, and the related implication that free press => free society is probably right on as well (~free_press | free_society == TRUE). Logic aside, for now this blog won't be the forum for deep philosophical debates, and I will instead focus on what I call fake news.

In my view, fake news is any news story where the author of the news either totally misses the point of the news event, can't detect that the slant of the story is bs, or the editor picks an outrageous headline that has nothing to do with the story. In my view, fake news is entirely a product of the commercialization of American news. There is no people supported public news source in this country, so sensationalist news sells. This of course implies that we should have lots of sensationalized news.

Here is my first example of fake news: Attack on Web site shuts down Rockies tix sale

The reason this is fake news is that nowhere in the article does it ever make it clear there was an actual attack on the Rockies ticket website. It is pretty clear to me that the Rockies simply could not scale their ticketing website to the volume of people who wanted to buy World Series tickets. The "attack" is just a good cover story for "We got a distributed denial of service attack from all of our hostile legitimate users". If there really was an extortion plot from some bot-network, wouldn't you want to tell all of the news writers that you are a victim and not just incompetent? Notice that the vendor the Rockies use to host ticketing had no comment. "Attack on World Series Website" is great sensational news but "Rockies website vendor's backend can't support demand" is not nearly as sexy. There isn't an attack because unnamed club officials said there was one.

We need to make sure that we keep PR out of our news. It can be hard to read between the lines, but I would love to get a better at this and I'll try to post things I view as fake news when I run across them.