Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm trying to figure out what to do with my money as well.

My opinion, stay away from gold in any shape or form or any mutual fund, stock or investment . It is in a absurd artificial speculative bubble that due to burst any day now, its too late to make any money off that.

Real estate market is still imploded, being a landlord sucks anyways. If you must invest in real estate, go for the run-down inner-city properties, avoid suburbs and rural properties like the plague. Gentrification is a increasing trend that isn't showing any sign of slowing down.

I'd avoid most mutual funds/ money markets/ hi-low caps, because you don't know what sort of toxic crap their value is attached to

If you like shiny things or speculating on commodities, buy up copper, petroleum and rare earth elements. These things have real intrinsic value and are becoming more and more scarce. Copper prices in particular took a price drop which could mean its a good time to buy copper as its sure to go back up in the future.

Petroleum will go right back up in price once the economy picks back up, Exxon-Mobile stock is the single top performer right now and there isn't any reason why it won't pick up even more in the future when fuel prices inevitably returns to its previous levels. Big evil corporations are usually safe bets anyways.

Short-term, 5-10 year high interest CD accounts are easy enough if you don't want risk and just want your money to do something slightly more productive then gradually lose value against inflation.

Anyways, that all is my outlook on it and its how I'm going to invest my money.

Another thing, one thing I've noticed in terms of a business type investment is simply buying used cars off private owners for cheap, and selling the things off at auctions, or list them at higher prices then what you paid for them somewhere else. This is the basic business model of any used car dealership that does trade-ins. If you advertise that you'll pay slighter more then Car Max, you'll collect a lot of business from people trying to sell their cars quickly. Being a useless middle-man is the easiest and safest type of business model and used cars car market is booming because people can't afford anything better and others are selling cars at desperate prices for survival money.

Just an idea, like any business it will consume time and effort and might not pay off.

Sounds like an idea conspiracy theorist types will probably assert. Kinda like Elvis and Walt Disney, some people just can't seem to die.

Ah well, guess we'll find out for sure if and when an immortal titanium-alloy Robo Steve Jobs 2.0 emerges from his hidden laboratory bunker and submits an application for his old job.

I own a cell phone because its a necessity, I've got to have a phone number I can be reached at.

I don't send texts unless I need to relay something complicated like an address or stock number that somebody would need to write down. Mostly I don't text because I suck at typing with the tiny cellphone buttons and also because its just easier and quicker to just call the other person. I always figured texts were good for people that can't talk over the phone because they are in a meeting or class or whatever.

Yeah, I'll agree with most here that resource scarcity probably won't be the end of civilization, per se, technology is always adapting and technologies can't be uninvented. I do think standards of living in the western world will probably decline, or at least the incredible levels of consumption and economic activity will slow down on their own. I have a feeling the current world economic slump is really just the start of things to come, for a long while, but It'll sort itself out at some point.

The times they are a changing, and that's basically the underlying reason behind these protests. People brought up and raised thinking they'll have it at least as good as their parents are pissed by the realization that they will be the first generation to have it worse then the generation before it.

Right.

When you think about it, most employment everywhere is makework already. The primary and secondary sectors need less and less people to produce more and more and this labor surplus led to the creation of the modern teiriary sector. Crap like call-centers,fast food, wal-mart greeters is basically pointless makework that is a symptom of having lots of extra people and very little for them to do. In less developed nations without much of a service sector, you have extended families where only a handful of members work to provide for a family that does nothing but domestic chores or tending to goats and similar make-work and this is perfectly normal and acceptible there.

The problem with right-wing thinking is they believe a massively growing world economy can provide meaningful work to anybody who wants it and effectively end poverty, but the problem is that such an economy would implode when resources become sufficiently scarce. Really, any and all models of modern economies run into the problem of resource scarcity, down the timeline eventiually.

So, really, industrialized society has this problem with having an excess of people, a shortage of work and a finite amount of energy and resources to sustain it. It seems doomed to collapse unless science figures out said infinite-energy-machine so industries have so much cheap energy available they can turn red sand into white sand, to extract every stray iron atoms out of it to meet ever-increasing demand for steel for an industrialized economy.

The world population along with the economy of resource consumption will just have to shrink dramatically and there is a real lack of moral, political or philosophical willpower to allow/make that to happen, or industrialized society as we know it will simply be impossible to continue.

Everybody is basically correct.

Iron/steel armor can weigh a lot and slow down marksdwarves with poor strength or armor skill. Their volume of fire will slow, which is really more important then their defense, fighting from a distance and all.

That said, marksdwarves trained in danger rooms don't have any problem with wearing heavy metal armor.

Also, the best defense is a shield and since materials don't effect how well a shield blocks, a lightweight wooden shield is all a marksdwarf really needs.

Didn't they theorize neutrinos went FTL a long time ago? I know there are particle interactions that exceed the speed of light, anyways.

Neutrinos have always been weird particles anyways, they have virtually zero mass and they zip through Earth like it's not even there. About 65 billion solar neutrinos per second pass through every square centimeter perpendicular to the direction of the Sun in the region of the Earth.

With M-theory and all that, it's probably something that exists primarily in another dimension, like gravity. That or the people studying them are not reading their instrumentation correctly, or their instrumentation isn't working as intended.

If they wanted to create jobs, the gov't would just print more money. Inflation would make American products and services competitive in other countries (as well as making foreign imports less competitive against domestic goods) it would also reduce the debt burden of the government and people without much liquid capital. It would also cause wealthy people to invest their money, rather then sit it in a bank to try to maintain their wealth against devaluation. Reasons why the Chinese intentionally devalue their currency.

Of course, inflation is bad for debtors and banks, so has thus convinced a majority that inflation is the worse of evils.

People should probably be protesting the central banks if they wanted policies that created demand for labor.