https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLpfbcXTeo8
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There is no afterhours trading in pennystocks.
As has been explained many times, those T-trades are when a broker is selling a huge block for a seller (usually an insider) over the course of one or many days.
The broker sells ~OUTT of the house account as opportunities present themselves during the day, and then at the end of the day, they report a T-trade to square up their house account sells filled with shares transferred from the seller's block at the VWAP of that days sales.
Yeah, a multimillion dollar house bought right when he exited personal bankruptcy and claims he wasn't drawing any salary or other income from NTEK and the predecessor company that he rolled into the trading shell (Aldar Group) that became NTEK.
Yeah, guys go directly from personal bankruptcy and claiming to the court that they are too poor to pay for a lawyer in his criminal cases so they had the court appoint a CJA freebie lawyer -
- to immediately acquiring a multimillion dollar house, a Maserati, and a private school tuition for the kidd.
All while claiming he never took a dime in salary or other payments from NTEK while he was working there since 2007!
And nobody seems to question that magic. LOL!!! It's hilarious that some cannot see the blatantly obvious criminality in NTEK and DaFoleyCrimeFambly!!
See, I'd never want to have a binniss jet just for me. I'd feel too guilty (no, make that too wasteful) spending all that money and fuel and other people's time (pilots, ground crew, etc).
Even if I had Zuckerberg's money, I wouldn't feel right about it if it made no economic sense.
Butt hay, I'm a blue collar guy and I think and act practically.
I just picked up a penny lying in the discount grocery store parking lot yesterday in the rain (true, no joke).
Regardless of how much one has, why overpay? Why be wasteful?
Besides, the Gulfstreams don't have enough headroom for a guy of my height. I'd rather take a seat on a 767, 777, or A350. Honestly, a good first class on trans-Pacific flights is more comfortable than a Gulfstream. Why pay more for less?
OK, sure, you have to go through the airport and gates like everybody else, butt that's manageable with lounges and early boarding if you're in the right clubs/programs.
Now, if I had Zuckerberg's money, I very well might buy a T-38 or a Czech L-39C for fun (nott travel). That's a steep learning curve though. Long way up from the Cessna with a Lycoming.
That's what a tool would do. He ought to be enroute to Astana, where he can live free without hiding, have a really nice house, and make a bundle even if he's disbarred - simply doing CONsulting for transactional work and legal review/drafting/counseling internationally for clients in Kazakhstan or doing business with same.
Plus if he was smart enough to park a decent fraction of his cash or other assets outside the grasping hand of US authorities, he might nott even have to work. Plus it's nott too difficult to buy a second passport, so he could travel to quite a number of locations (for weather or just variety) and nott fear extradition to the USA.
Or if he likes heat - he can live in Dubai.
Belize? Hell no. That's no place to flee justice, IMO. Better life can be had in DaJoynt in the USA. Even a sailing life is off the table now, as the US Coast Guard now treats the entire Caribbean as its wholly-owned bathtub. One day that orange and white cutter or helicopter is off your bow and it's all over.
Fractional ownership and things like NetJets make it a lott less expensive that one might imagine.
If you spread the cost across 8-10 seats that you can fill, it's prolly often nott more expensive than 8-10 first class tickets bought day-of or even just less than 14 days prior.
Hell, even a business-class ticket to Tokyo from Cali is over $8,000 on short notice - and I've seen one person pay $12,000 for a biz-class seat to Tokyo purchased day-before.
10 seats like that and you're break even or cheaper rolling out the G650ER long-range.
Good! Diane Dalmy is a crook and should be both disbarred and imprisoned. At least this is a small step along that path. Now they need to make that ban permanent.
"he behaves and thinks like a kid"
His stint in prison will beat that right ~OUTT of him.
It often won't change impulsiveness, absurd risk-taking, and criminality. Butt it has a tendency to pound the 'kid' ~OUTT of anybody who is really a kid at heart.
Still no assplanation of why Richard Baker fled the scene of this crime-in-progress after only 2 months as a Director - like a squirrel with his tail on fire.
Maybe Richard Baker is in the Federal Witness Protection Program and is going to start a new life, trying to leave the stain and odor of NTGL behind him.
It's my hope that Stevia is able to do that too. Move on with his life and wash the stench of NTGL off him. Erase those years on the resume at NTEK/NTGL and replace with a more benign story - like doing time in prison, in a coma in hospital with life-threatening eczema, or exploring a career in panhandling. Anything to explain those missing NTEK/NTGL years.
Richard Baker is probably already relocated to some new subdivision in Fargo or Great Falls, where they serve egg noodles and ketchup and call it spaghetti in marinara sauce; living just like a schmuck.
Airball HighballWaterTower is suspended on WoV for a year. So we won't be able to mine that source for inane quotes from the El Ex-Prez-I-Don'te of NTGL ...
... until he registers there with another alias (probably before the New Year or shortly thereafter).
He'll be back on WoV. He can't help himself. Watch for a new poster on WoV who posts on the NTGL/NTEK, CasinoKat, and Pinball threads there - and who starts a thread about how to best land a gig running the carpet cleaner at low-end casinos.
"I finally gott one of my machines into a casino!"
No, there's no shorting. It is shareholders' accounts dumping the stock by year-end to take the tax loss in 2015.
FNRG is done. It has zero fundamental value - absolute zero.
Has been since St. Julien was arrested and all the shareholder lawsuits hit and the SEC suspended trading and this company became unfinanceable and has a history of massive operating losses which now have no way to be financed.
LOGG DOWN 85.37 one-year performance. Continuing to plummet as it should.
Still one week of trading left for LOGG to top 90 percent loss for the year. I have faith that LOGG can break that mark and be down over 90 percent for the year.
Oh yeah, another 52-week low today (both intraday and close).
They do expire - when NTEK files bankruptcy. Then those unused credits simply become general creditors' claims in the BK.
So, in other words, they'll expire by summer or maybe even by Easter 2016.
I do this all the time. I know exactly how that boilerlate phrasing is used.
If you want to piss off a judge, just tell them "there's no way in hell we'll ever agree to settle this matter".
Judges nearly always pressure the parties to settle - sometimes strongarming the parties to first try mediation with a neutral mediator, or a court magistrate - before a trial date.
Butt even without regard to that, all parties have a duty (lawyers owe a duty to their clients) to try to settle all disputes without resorting to trials and appeals that use up precious judicial resources and juror time.
We also know that investors feel better when they read crapola like "the matter is being resolved" or "the dispute continues to move towards resolution and the parties have been in settlement discussions".
It's all window-dressing. It is always technically true and unsophisticated (and even many sophisticated) investors read in a positive spin when worded that way.
It sounds better than "we're closer to the trial date this Q than last Q", but it means the same thing. "Progressing toward resolution of the dispute"
W(r)ong is NOTT saying K2 is settled, quite the opposite. See the prior post of mine for an explanation of the meaning of his boilerpate.
EVERY lawsuit - at ALL points in time - is ALWAYS moving toward a resolution.
EVERY lawsuit - throughout the litigation process (including appeals) the parties engage in settlement discussions - often judges require a settlement conference before a trial date - very rarely does it produce a settlement. Butt it is part of litigation to 'try' to always be settling the matter.
That is IR-speak - and any lawyer can translate it easily. Lett me illustrate:
"the K2 complaint is being resolved"
Translation: Nothing has changed. The lawsuit is still pending and proceeding. That is the process by which it is being resolved and continues just as before. The resolution process began when the lawsuit was threatened and then filed.
Every lawyer in the corporate world uses this catchphrase ALL THE TIME to refer to open legal proceedings.
We can even 'spin it more' (depending upon how management wants it) - like "the matter is being resolved and the parties are in settlement discussions". This says NOTHING. In EVERY lawsuit, at all points in time, the matter 'is being resolved' and the parties are always discussing settlement.
That phrase is boilerplate and makes people THINK the lawsuit is close to an end when nothing has changed.
It's typical deceptive lawyer boilerplate - and I've used and use it all the time advising IR people and in drafting/reviewing 10-Ks. 10-Qs, and S-1s.
Takehome message: nothing substantive has changed with regard to the K@ lawsuit.
LOL! You are getting no 'recovery'. Anyone nott on the restitution list is nott even going to gett the half-penny on the dollars.
The endless nonsense about unknown mystery 'defendants' fr which there is no evidence is beyond silliness and into the realm of pointless absurdity.
It's over, man. The munny is G-O-N-E. And it ain't coming back. It won't even send a postcard.
No it doesn't. This pig will be in trip zeroes by the Superbowl.
Wow, just read the NTEK/NTGL thread on WizardofVegas - what a total douchebag the ex-Prezidon't is.
One has to question the judgement of the BOD for EVER thinking headcase HighballWater would be suitable as an exec like Prez. Only a bunch of fools would have approved that move.
Oh well, no audits, no S-1 being drafted, no gaming license APPLICATION even submitted - NTGL is just a total farce and clusterfk.
The NTGL Christmas party - dinner in a private room at Silverton Daycare Center
NTGL typical 'working' day at the office closet
Last NTGL staff conference videoCON of the year (yes, this is an actual screenshot of an NTGL staff videoCONference!):
Another bleak Christmas for PPJE shareholders. Brokeass Basu cannot afford the coal and wood this year, so it's going to be just coal ash and wood ash for the shareholders this Christmas, as Brokeass Basu has diluted this scam to dust.
It's just a pile of dust now, and an old, broke pennyscam huckster 'CEO' on top of that ash pile.
The entire capital stock of all classes in PPJE - here is the summed value of the entire capital stock:
LOL!!! "237k active users" - 236k from one IP address or paid hits from Thailand - much like buying tens of thousands of 'likes' on FB from Thailand. Or like buying Alexa hits using the refresh button scam and folks with dynamic IPs gaming the system by switching IPs every time.
The only thing that matter is is PAID RENTALS. Butt UF never wants to talk about THAT pathetic number.
165 total rentals for Interstellar over the entire 9 month lease - and 25 of those were from the same IP address! GROSSED a total of $1,648.35 for a cost of $700,000.
#NOTWINNING
HighballWaterTower is just an incredible jerk - no wonder the FoleyCrimeFambly kicked him to the curb outta the Prez-I-Don't spott - dude is an embarrassment.
If they want a guy with decent people skills, who can be made at least presentable, and is nott widely insane and a thin-skinned egocentric, NTGL should put Stevia in the Prez-I-Don't seat.
Buy him a suit and some nice shoes. Have him dump the watchcap. And lett Stevia front for the scamco.
With a little training and experience, Stevia could prolly pull it off. Of course the power in the scam is always and everywhere in DaHandsOfDaFoleyCrimeFambly, butt Stevia could be their nominee/frontman/scutboy as the public face of DaScam.
I'll have to read that WoV website later and see how HighballWater gott himself banned there.
Mental stability seems to be a serious prollem for him based on the WoV posts he's made. Total jerkwater.
C'mon, subpennyland! You still have a week of trading to hit subpenny by yearend.
And from there to trip zeroes will be the adventure of the first half of 2016. Once all those floorless convertible notes are in maturity and all the weekly conversions and dumps accelerate, the Death Spiral tightens, and this scam will go down the drain fast.
Ironwill, it is because YIPI is a scam run by a buffoon, Little Richard Granville, and the 'news' doesn't mean a thing - YIPI is circling the drain.
It's a typical pennyscam with a less-than-even-below-average pennyscam CREo who has put himself and the company in a very badd spott and is being sued in two major lawsuits where he and the company are going to gett tossed into bankruptcy (personal and corporate).
Other than that, no prollems.
HTH.
The shareholder class action lawsuits will sink whatever is left of KBIO. Watch them tumble in. Saw the same thing with FNRG when the FBI arrested the chairman, Richard St. Julien, on securities fraud charges.
KBIO will wind up like FNRG (an exchange-traded listed stock at the time of the arrest) - dead. Killed by a deluge of lawsuits.
The investor losses here will totally swamp any amount of D&O insurance coverage and the entire asset base of the company. It will be forced into bankruptcy, and the assets sold off to pay creditors and the legal settlements/judgments.
This pig stock is now officially proclaimed DEAD.
It will trade for awhile, like FNRG, butt it's on the black diamond downhill slope now and gravity is unforgiving.
I could just do a search-and-replace on the company name for my earlier posts:
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=112891155
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=113223965
OUCH! Sykes was right again. He must be in cahoots with the FBI, DOJ, and SEC, right?
It can't be that he's right. Can it?
I've found that on iHub, many of the people that make those type of statements are either retirees or near retirement.
Eventually, when the stock craters and they lose all hope, they write "this scam took all my retirement funds" or "Is it alright with me that the SEC failed to enforce buy-in laws that could have resulted in hundreds of thousands of profit to me? Money that could be used to pay for such frivolous things as life-saving medical treatment?"
They are often old, nott Millenials. Old in NTEK, old in SPNG, old in KBIO.
This is ironic - SPNG and then KBIO - and the bad guys were 'short sellers' and the media in both cases (read both):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=119010890
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=118983785
Law school is ridiculously easy. When you gett ~OUTT you don't really know shit about the real world of law. Nott a clue.
I learned more about law the first summer I clerked between law school academic years than I had learned in law school at that point.
I had many, many options open to me - stunningly so - and I chose based on only two criteria - which firm had the better mentor that I'd work with and which firm had the most interesting client base. I found the #1 mentor was also coincidently the guy who had, by far, the most interesting clients, so it was an easy choice.
The common adage in my subject area is "you make your bones the first five years" - which means it takes five years of working in this area at the fast pace of a law firm before you can consider yourself competent or 'graduated'. I'd say 85 percent of my knowledge in law came from those five years after law school and maybe 15 percent (if that) from the three years of law school. My buddy is a traumatologist orthopedic surgeon, and he says medicine is pretty similar. He didn't feel competent until after his five years of residency and a one year fellowship. Even then, he sought advice and counsel from his more experienced colleagues to provide a sanity check on his treatment plans (orthopedic trauma cases often require the surgeon to plan 4-10 operations that may take place over 2-5 years before the injury(ies) is/are fully healed - there has to be a stepwise strategy before you make the first cut on the first operation or you can box yourself into a corner and then the injury can never be fixed properly).
Again, the value of real world practical education versus 'academic' education is exemplified.
By the way, my ortho surgeon buddy is also from dirt. He's an adopted kid raised on a farm by a dad who was also an ex-Marine from WW2 (who was on Iwo Jima). He also lives frugally and modestly. Last time I saw him he had an old Honda Accord and a Toyota Tacoma pickup truck in his garage, and a Case tractor in his barn. He bought two parcels of farmland and built his house, a barn, and a machine shed. His hobby is raising 'boutique' grass-fed, no antibiotics or steroids beef cattle that a joint friend of ours butchers and retails to select restaurants throughout the Midwest. When he puts down the scalpel, drill, powered screwdriver for the day and rounds on his patients and Czechs in with his residents and leaves for the day, he gets home, puts on the overalls and fires up the tractor, and goes ~OUTT in the fields to move the movable fence so the cattle have fresh grass to graze on. Then after dinner he dictates note and answers pages and calls from the hospital - and makes orders over the phone and computer. Quite an active life he leads. His wife and my wife also come from dirt. We are quite the foursome when we get together.
One time, long ago, when I was visiting my friend when he was doing a fellowship in Indianapolis, he and I came ~OUTT of a restaurant and a top end Mercedes drive up and the driver getts ~OUTT and throws his keys to me and says "I'll be about an hour and a half." - he thought we were the parking valets! We are pretty unpretentious guys and nott on anyone's best dressed list, so we understood his error. Unfortunately we told him we weren't the valets before we considered the opportunity to take his car for a 90 minute joyride.
Always blue collar guys. You can't wash that ~OUTT of us nor could we - even if we tried. Always feel uncomfortable at a Four Seasons or Fairmont, prefer the Holiday Inn Express or even the Best Western. Don't mind the Super 8, although Motel 6 is now too sketchy unless it's in a place like Kalispell, Columbia Falls, Whitehead, Buffalo, or Sheridan.
If alone, I almost always will prefer Dinahs in Culver City or the Suburban Diner in Paramus over Cut or 17 Summer, even though I'm nott paying for the meal myself. Same with hotels - I usually only stay at the top end places when traveling with colleagues or clients who are staying there. Given the choice alone, I feel more comfortable at a Holiday Inn or HI Express.
Old-money rich people have too many rules, expectations, judgments, and stupid games for me to deal with unless I'm being paid to do that. I don't like being around them unless I have to.
Maybe my uncle, best friend, and I all suffer from deep-seated fears of being unworthy dirt people. I don't think so. I think the rich folks just have been insulated all their lives have a very poor grasp of reality and what is important. I think they have the deep-seated fear that they are unworthy of their wealth and use status and material goods to either self-validate or to maintain the facade that they think keeps the world from discovering their unworthiness/inferiority.
Butt what he hell could I possibly know. I never took a psychology course. :)
If I may ask a personal question(s), my first query is:
Janice, did you grow up in an upper middle class or wealthy family?
"But no matter what you think, nowadays it's clear that most young people think making money is "success". And that nothing else counts for very much."
Do you really believe that in the bold above? Have you hung ... errr... hanged ... errr ... spent some time talking with Millenials?
My son and his friends surely do nott follow that belief. Nott at all.
As I stated in a much earlier discussion maybe a couple of months ago, I volunteer with our local high school. The students at our school certainly don't believe that money is success.
In fact, these are much more grounded kids that my generation was. They kind of know the national debt and demographics have fucked them over. They know that global competition is brutal and will get worse.
These kids are largely eschewing money and material success in favor of experiences and hobbies. My son is nott driven by a desire for money, only for an interesting job where he can use his knowledge and skills for a long time and nott be pigeonholed or made obsolete by time.
Maybe the kids where I live are different than the ones where you live. California is notoriously way more laid back than the East Coasties.
It's never too late!!! Grandma Moses didn't start painting seriously until she was almost 80.
You can do it, Barb. Plus Vermont is such a pretty state, even in winter.
You'd be great, and even if you didn't practice, you'd enjoy the mental exercise and the way it will change the way you think (how you analyze problems and issues).
Don't expect to find either beauty or truth in law. If those ever existed in the law, they left a long time ago back in England.
It will absolutely provide a unique way to think - and read - and write. And you can grow with it forever - your perspectives and analytical frameworks will keep changing with experience. There are 90+ year old lawyers (and at least until recently a 93 year old Federal judge) who are nott only competent, butt their experience and skills better their younger colleagues in many respects. When you have a question about how to handle something, the old white-haired senior guy is who you go ask for advice. My mentor used to do that all the time - going to the second oldest lawyer at the firm and ask him for advice.
Law is nott like sports or medicine or engineering. You get better with age (assuming your mental faculties remain) with no upper limit.
Go for it!
Those poor kids made it in economic terms, didn't they? Butt hay, I don't want to bore you with examples like Larry Ellison or the guy that The Pursuit of Happyness was about.
Belfort and his poor kids found a way to make it - albeit illegality was involved. That doesn't discount my point that poor kids are 'advantaged' by a greater drive to succeed economically than kids of rich folks. I have tons of examples and experience.
In fact, the kids from some of the richest families have a very poor track record of personal success, economically or otherwise. Of all the people I know who came from wealthy families, a very high percentage of them have died - from suicide, alcohol, drugs, car accidents - long before they even would have been 30. Many who are still alive have marital, substance abuse, and even financial problems at a quite high frequency compared to the general population.
One of the biggest 'disadvantages' is to be a trust fund kid and know it. Those sloths generally have zero ambition. They know they don't have to work, so they don't. You can find a ton of them at South Beach, wandering about with a drink in their hand - at 10AM. Gosh, I've seen so many kids from my 'rich' friends and clients go that way.
Another huge 'disadvantage' is to be the son of a very successful, self-made father. A very small fraction of these kids are driven to match or beat their dad's success (it's possibly the Oedipal drive), butt most - the majority - are intimidated by that challenge and simply give up. Because of this, I made and make a very concerted effort to live way below my means. My son grew up nott as a 'rich kid' - and knowing the value of money and the lack of value of money. He knows that possessions are of little importance in the big scheme of life and he has become very much a minimalist. I made sure that he always believed he was able to overmatch me in many academic areas, butt still making it hard enough that he can never be sure of success (however measured) so he is motivated and his self-confidence is high butt nott so high as to be overconfident. The key in anything - business, academics, law, etc. is to always be hungry for better - to use Arnold's phrase, you have to "Get Hungry".
IMO, hunger for success, however defined, is the key factor in obtaining success - nott economic background, parents' education level, or any of the hooey that the coneheads who think smoking causes divorce think are relevant based on some charts and social 'science'.
"Practical experience" goes only so far if, for example, you want to be a lawyer."
Oh I would nott agree with that.
Let me first insert here that, as you may know, in California you can join the bar without ever attending a law school. You study as an apprentice of a California attorney and then sit for the bar (and pass the moral character requirements). Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming also license attorneys who have never been inside a law school butt have 'read the law' under the tutleage of a lawyer and taken and passed the exam and morals/character qualification. (I believe, butt do nott know, that Abe Lincoln became a lawyer this way. it's still used today.)
And frankly, some of the best lawyers in many areas are those with street smarts and who have walked a rough road.
I could cite a lott of examples of really bad lawyers with stellar academics butt no real world experience, and the flip side - great lawyers - like Morgan Chu (his brother, Steven Chu is the Nobel prizewinning physicist) who grew up in a poor Chinese immigrant family in New York - and as a kid he was tough as hell, rode the subways with his gang, and frankly had little use for school. He's probably one of the top ten IP litigators in the USA. His brother picked up a Nobel prize (and I know him and did some work for him one time). Nott bad for a couple of poor Chinese kids in the low-rent area of NYC from very poor parents, eh?
You are quite fond of stereotyping I see.
No, my folks didn't use crack. My dad drank and smoked.
Even with your odd counterexample of Belfort, you still don't counter my point that he did in fact succeed.
Kids from poor backgrounds and who have other hardship experiences growing up are often successful (economically).
Belfort was one of them. So he proves my point when the outcome is income and wealth. Thank you.
Unfortunately, your example of Belfort seems to stereotype poor kids as lacking in the morals that you seem to imply the 'advantaged' rich kids have. Like most leftists, you have a very deep disdain for poor people (and black people) - subconscious or at least you won't admit it to yourself. You assume that poor people and blacks "need help". How patronizing! "Oh, you poor soul. Of course you need extra points to catch up." - How demeaning an ASSumption!
I thought the premise of your argument is that poor kids (and parenthetically, blacks - dealt with separately elsewhere) need 'extra help' because they are economically 'disadvantaged' and thus will lag in income and wealth generation over their lifetimes as compared to the rich kids.
Now you cite Belfort, who clearly was successful on these economic metrics, butt you use him to somehow imply that the only way poor kids can make it economically is to be crooked, unethical, and ruthless - and you also imply backhandedly in that statement that poor kids must have a higher tendency to have low ethics.
Honestly, I am having trouble seeing how Belfort counters my point. Can you explain it further?
Executive summary of prior post:
(1) economic status is only one of many, many variables that correlate with a person's likelihood of 'success' as measured in income or wealth over a lifetime. Other variables outweigh this factor but leftists are preoccupied with economic status as a predictor of future performance.
(2) poor kids have many intangible 'advantages' over rich kids - ambition, lack of fear of failure, practicality, and just plain guts.
(3) education is often trumped by practical experience and drive.
(4) 'advantage' cannot be quantified nor equalized, and government is particularly incapable of both.
"I assume you had parents who valued education"
Nott my dad. My mom always encouraged me to read and write. Neither had college degrees. My dad, while a really supernice guy, could nott even figure percentages (e.g., what is 10 percent of 200 - he wouldn't know) and was born a 'blue baby' and probably had some brain damage at birth (he said he was told that by his aunt and his mother confirmed it). He was a Marine in the Pacific from spring 1942 until the winter of '45 into '46 - he was in many of the well-known battles across the Pacific - from the Aleutians, Kwajalein, Peleliu,the Gilberts, Makin, Okinawa, and the Battle of the Surigao Strait at sea. He was on the battleship Mississippi when it was hit by a kamikaze and he jumped into the 5" gun turret to throw live shells overboard so they would nott be detonated by the fire. When he was discharged, in 1946 in New Orleans, he had hearing loss, scars from flash burns, and a metal sliver in his eye that he had for over a year because there was no opthalmologic surgeon in the western Pacific or at sea who was qualified to do the surgery - so they disembarked him at New Orleans to have the eye surgery done before he was discharged. He was a great man, butt just nott very smart nor into the value of education.
My mom was a voracious reader and writer. Butt enough on that or this will be a very long post. She was more of an example to me than one who ever said or implied "you must do well in school".
And this goes to my point; at no time did I or do I feel disadvantaged because of our economic limitations - if anything, I feel the opposite - and maybe this is why I am so frugal and like ghetto tourism - I feel that being on the poorer side actually drove me to success. I feel that I was advantaged, if anything, by being from a low economic household.
My uncle (my mom's bro) also became very educated (in math and in computers in the early 1960s) on his own volition at public schools and public university/college. He was trained in computer science before they had computer science departments or degrees. After his masters degree, he took a job at Boeing in computing, then he went to LA and worked for McDonnell-Douglas in computing, then another company (I can't recall the name). He took all his available money and bought a janitorial service, then he had workers and pickup trucks so he had them learn to install fire and burglar alarm systems in his commercial clients as well and he bought a PDP-11 computer to have the alarms tie into to monitor all the alarms with one user at a monitor. He then had all kinds of spare computing power, so he sold one of his clients at Chino airport who sold airplane parts located all over the world a monthly subscription and he converted all those 3x5 cards they had to a searchable database (to use all the free time of the user sitting at the monitor he was paying to monitor alarms) - he saved them so much money that the client was paying him $14,000 a month in the early '80s just for that database service - more than his entire business expenses. Then he still had this person at the display with time on their hands (the alarms had to be monitored 24/7 so it was multiple individuals doing the same job at different shifts) and he realized that if his trucks had mobile radios the monitor person could dispatch them more efficiently when a janitorial emergency, an alarm, or whatever occurred. So he bought from a company that was divesting themselves of all their radio assets. He only wanted mobile radio, butt they wanted to sell the whole package - mobile radios, pagers, and this new thing called cellphones! So he bought it all, just for the mobile radios. Well, sure enough pagers became more popular and then the cellphone wave came along and he was king of cellphones in the Inland Empire - and sold his entire business to a larger cellphone carrier that was then bought by McCaw cellular and then became MCI. Bottom line - he made a ton of money after years and years of hard work and saving and investing in his business.
I suppose some people would call that just "good fortune". Nonetheless, he came from dirt, and even though he was and is what I think would be considered rich my everyones' measure except maybe Trump, when he visited he would go to the local low-end dive bars. I asked him why he goes to the dumpiest places with sawdust on the floors. He said to me "I'm a blue collar guy. That's all I've ever been or ever will be." He drove one of the old, dented, faded paint Ford Courier mini-trucks he kept from his business (until it finally blew a head gasket and cracked the block) even though he had tens of millions of dollars. I asked him why he left his aeropace computing career and bought the janitorial business in the first place. He said (I'll paraphase from memory): "I'm really nott that smart, butt I'm smart enough to know that I'm nott that smart. If I stayed with a big company, I'd eventually be pushed aside by younger kids from better schools. I know I'm a blue collar guy, so I knew I could do janitorial work even if business got bad, I could still sweep and clean toilets my myself. I've been so poor I don't fear failure, so I take risks and play in areas I know I can compete. That's all I've ever done. I was driven to make it work, no matter what it took or how much crap I had to deal with. The rich kids that were in my cohort at Boeing and McDonnell were stuck there because of their fear of losing their comfortable job and status. They don't think like us blue collar guys. They fear manual labor. They fear losing their new-car-every-two years or their house. They fear becoming poor - a fear that traps them. I've never had that fear. I've failed at things. I lived poor for a long time. Because of that, I succeeded at my business. Being a blue collar guy is what made me. Why would I nott go to bars where I belong - the blue collar bars - where guys who build stuff, get dirty, and rely on their ability to work - to survive and feed their families go to relax for a few beers after work or on the weekend. All I am is a blue collar guy who decided to work for himself and wanted to do a good job and be efficient."
I took that to mean that if he hadn't been poor, he would have wound up like the rich kids who wound up trapped in the bureaucracy and politics of Boeing and McDonnell.
So, tell me how 'advantaged' those rich kids were and how 'disadvantaged' my uncle was.
He's nott the exception either. One of my good friends is a very successful attorney - who came from a poor farm town in CA - his dad was a Japanese internee - the family lost everything in WW2. So he grew up with his dad running a salvage yard and farming a small plot of land. My friend used to work the vegetable field and also man the roadside fruit stand. His dad worked to find a way to grow the gobo root - a Japanese vegetable that people seemed unable to cultivate in the USA (the root didn't grow right and was misshapen and tasted wrong). His dad found a way to grow the gobo root in plastic tubes inserted into the ground, so the root filled the tube and formed an almost perfect cylinder - and it tasted right. My friend went off to a UC while his dad worked to expand his gobo root plot and find Japanese markets and restaurants that would buy it from him. My friend graduated and went to work for a major semiconductor company. Like my uncle, he decided he was a blue collar guy/farm kid in a bureaucracy that he didn't want to stay in, even though the money was very good. So, he saved and wound up buying three rental homes while he lived in a garage that was converted into an illegal apartment, and he went to law school - living off the rental income and his savings. He joined our firm a couple of years after I did - and us two farmboys/blue collar dudes hit it off. We'd play poker with these blue-blooded kids from Ivy League backgrounds who were slumming by inviting me and my friend into their game. While these schmucks would lecture us hicks on why we were misplaying our hands base don mathematical probabilities, we buddy and I were cleaning them ~OUTT. The mouthiest guy (after a few drinks) was a Ph.D. scientist/lawyer - he'd have to run ~OUTT to the ATM almost every game to replenish his chip stack. Everytime he'd explain why my friend and I were fucking upp by nott playing according to the mathematical probabilities. That chump prolly dumped $25k to us over the course of a couple of years - lecturing us all the way - never understanding that poker is nott a game where the mathematician wins.
I offer these as examples of how being from poor and/or rural backgrounds is often a real world advantage - and being a rich kid is a disadvantage. You should read this book - and this is why the top universities are accepting and inducing to matriculate applicants who were orphaned - they succeed at much higher rates than those with comfy childhoods with no experience dealing with obstacles or failing:
http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017930
I'll end this overlong screed with a quote from Gordon Gekko:
"Gimme guys who are poor, smart and hungry."
There is pure truth in that statement. Those are the kids with the 'advantages' who are much more likely to succeed.
Let me also add that, to the point about measuring undefinable things like "opportunity" or "good fortune", my experience is that social 'scientists' are nowhere near science and are among the dumbest, rock-stupid people at the university (and I've been at a couple of the universities with the very top rated social 'sciences' departments - rated at the top for many decades.
Those people are buffoons and straight-up dolts. One very esteemed professor of sociology actually believed that a graph in the book of census results (the highly detailed survey sent to a very small sample of households) showed than smoking was a factor in the divorce rate. He used this graph that showed that as the number of smokers in a household and how many cigarettes they smoked on average per day increased, so did the divorce rate. He could nott distinguish correlation from causation - a very, very basic concept. He argued that since the graph showed this relationship it was perforce proof, or at worst strong evidence, that smoking was a causative factor in the divorce rate. He really believed this.
These are the chuckleheads who are at the top of the pyramid of social engineering - he had been an extensive advisor to the Johnson administration is justifying his Great Society proposals.
These are the kind of chuckleheads you'd apparently like to define, measure, and provide a designed 'remedy' to push society in some direction you deem preferable.
My atheist lord, you want the government to design social engineering frameworks when they cannot even run the Post Office, Amtrak, or the Obamacare website design?
Even if you somehow believe government SHOULD be doing social engineering, do you realize the buffoons who implement that plan? Will you like it when Jerry Falwell Jr. is President and he wants to mandate that every school teach 2 hours a day of Bible study and drop sciences?
Do you see the problems with having government being an intentional social engineer?
Do you nott realize that is exactly why the income tax code is so bloody ridiculous? Because 'equal under the law' was tossed aside and tax policy became used as a tool to force people to do certain things - and those are always determined by political strength - so lobbying is now more important in determining a business's success than conducting the actual business itself?
When you throw away "equal under the law" you gett the heavy, lumbering, mistake-prone hand of government guided by political lobbyists and ultimately corruption. Do you know why all centrally-planned economies ultimately fail? Do you think these governments are more competent to be a social engineer than they are economists or business planners?
Oh my.
How do you know I had less opportunities because I came from dirt?
I never asked for special treatment, nor do I think I deserved it.
I liked to hang ~OUTT ... errr ... spend a lott of time at the library, reading. I liked to learn stuff.
Shirley there were better elementary and middle schools than the one's I went to - I had a teacher claim that lightning was caused by two raindrops hitting each other. I corrected her (I head Issac Asimov non-fiction books since 4th grade). She sent me to the principal's office for arguing with her. I had a science teacher steal my jacket because I made him look the fool he was when he could nott make his own stoichiometric chemical equations balance.
I had some variable teachers. One chased me down the hall with a baseball bat before I realized at 6'1" in seventh grade I had nothing to fear from her bat. When I turned, she stopped and began crying. She was fired at Christmas break and she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Nott because of me, butt because she was nuts.
Just because my folks were nott rich and I had some questionable teachers, I don't think I was 'disadvantaged' at all. In fact, I had a lott more drive and ambition than the rich kids I ran into.
You and (excuse me) your 'ilk' think that you can determine 'disadvantaged' and measure it or make proxies for it. You're simply damned wrong and frankly arrogant in believing that you know better.
In any case, if you have these beliefs and a desire to 'equalize the opportunity' in whatever way you see it, then do it with your time and your own funds.
It is nott for the government to do. It cannot be an 'equal before the law' government and also a social engineer. These are mutually exclusive things, and frankly the government has no means or basis to make such determinations.
Taft was President before there was TV. Nixon lost in 1960 because Daley delivered over 50,000 fake votes and because he didn't have a close shave for his TV debate with Kennedy.
Name a recent President who was under 6 feet?
Why was FDR so wary of the electorate seeing him in a wheelchair?
Well then, no need for equality under the law if we can compromise on everything.
How many affirmative action points do I get for being half Czech (Bohunks - a discriminated class for many decades)?
How many points do we deduct from the WASPs in the Daughters of the American Revolution?
Does a 100 percent African ancestry gett more affirmtive action points than a 'colored' person who may be 80 percent European butt self-identifies as black? How about a Nigerian prince just off the plane versus a black in Gary, IN - same aa points for both on college admissions?
Do you see why definitions, measurement means, and who measures is hopelessly unfair and capricious?
Let's compromise - I'll make the NY Times illegal and you can make Fox News illegal. Deal?
Is that what you think the DOI and the Constitution is about?