Meta plunged 45% in 2022!!!!
20% of my portfolio is in VOO, which is an S&P 500 ETF. Advised to do this by Buffet because it has best 5 year performance over time.
I didnt know I owned Apple, Amazon, Facebook. S&P 500 weights these at 6.85%. Yikes!!!!
I am soooo glad I did not own individual shares in any of these FANG stocks or tech stocks.
Meanwhile, a reviewer says of VOO that the index actually makes an investor more impervious to such mistakes:
Red doesnt mean libertarian. Libertarians wont save America.
But on The Patriot (AM 1280) Minnesota libertarians preach that if you are opposed to “The Left” you are libertarian. And America is embracing the libertarian world view. This is based on a false dichotomy.
Jonathon Haight goes to great detail in his book to describe why libertarians have a completely different moral value system than do conservatives. They don’t even recognize conservatives are different than themselves. They think they are conservatives.
What the Am 1500 libertarian preacher said today is if you reject the left you are libertarian. I say, “No. Simply wrong. And naive as can be”.
The founding fathers made it very clear they thought America came to be because of Providence. In other words, God, and God’s provision for the human race. They viewed America as founded on the principles of Christianity.
Jefferson based Virginia laws on the Bible. On the Old Testament.
You are not going to hear that from libertarians or their high priestess Ayn Rand.
What you will hear instead is THE GREAT SILENCE about America’s foundational principles.
Religious freedom is one of the very first principles that gets short-sheeted when libertarians discuss values and world view. But religious freedom is fundamental to the gospel. As any bible believing person knows.
Bible believing people also know that freedom is derived from issues of conscience. And issues of conscience derive from God given religious freedom. This is why libertarian values sound hollow like a drum when they go on and on about “freedom versus oppression.”
The bible tells us that freedom to do whatever you want isn’t freedom at all – instead it is slavery. Slavery to sin and rebellion against God. Which leads to death, both earthly ephemeral and eternal.
How oppressive is that?
That is not in anybody’s “self interest”. Ayn Rand writes prolifically about “rational self interest”, but death ephemeral and death eternal is not in anybody’s rational self interest. In fact, it is completely irrational. And that is the true Achille’s heel of libertarianism.
The MN GOP needs to get a lot smarter about such things. And they need to start discussing world views and the beliefs of the founding fathers. Start with Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Bills 82-86.
Chromium is one of my favorite browsers and I will miss it. But it crashes at random. Here is an article from a year ago.
Written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing Editor
Posted in Networking on January 26, 2021| Topic: Networking
While Google Chrome is easily the most popular PC web browser, it’s open-source big brother, Chromium, doesn’t have that many users, but it’s always had some fans on desktop Linux. Now, though, that love affair is in trouble.
Google claims it recently found un-named third-party Chromium-based browsers integrating Google cloud-based features, such as Chrome sync and Click to Call, that were intended only for Google Chrome users. In other words, “This meant that a small fraction of users could sign into their Google Account and store their personal Chrome sync data, such as bookmarks, not just with Google Chrome, but also with some third-party Chromium-based browsers.”
Also: Best Linux Foundation classes
Google was not amused.
Starting on March 15th, Google said it will limit access to many Chrome application programming interfaces (API) inside Chromium starting March 15, 2021. This means users using the Chromium web browser or any other web browser based on its open-source codebase won’t be able to use most Google-specific API-enabled services. This includes the ability to sync Chrome bookmarks, check your spelling, find your contacts, translate text, and on and on.
Many users aren’t happy either now. Thom Holwerda, managing editor of OSNews, spoke for many when he wrote, Google’s “not closing a security hole, they’re just requiring that everyone use Chrome. Or to put it bluntly, they do not want you to access their Google API functionality without using proprietary software (Google Chrome).”
Developers can, once they jump through the necessary hoops to get API keys and an OAuth 2.0 client ID, get keys to these APIs. But, Google underlines, “that the keys you have now acquired are not for distribution purposes and must not be shared with other users.”
In theory, a developer could pull the API keys out of mainline Chrome and maintain their Chromium’s build Google functionality. However, that’s just asking for a lawsuit.
Besides, Jochen Eisinger, Google’s Director of Engineering for Chrome Trust & Safety remarked on the Google Chromium developer group, “We won’t remove the API from your key, but we’ll limit the quota to the quota for development. … this will make the keys unsuitable for production use.” These “APIs were not designed to be used by third-party software, so short of a complete rewrite, there is unfortunately no [other] option.”
So, where does that leave Linux distributors who’ve been bundling Chromium? Between a rock and a hard place.
Porting Chromium to Linux is not trivial. Alan Pope, Canonical‘s community manager for Ubuntu Linux engineering service, explained why Canonical started shipping Chromium in an Ubuntu Snap container rather than in a DEB package:
Maintaining a single release of Chromium is a significant time investment for the Ubuntu Desktop Team working with the Ubuntu Security team to deliver updates to each stable release. As the teams support numerous stable releases of Ubuntu, the amount of work is compounded. Comparing this workload to other Linux distributions that have a single supported rolling release misses the nuance of supporting multiple Long Term Support (LTS) and non-LTS releases.
Google releases a new major version of Chromium every six weeks, with typically several minor versions to address security vulnerabilities in between. Every new stable version has to be built for each supported Ubuntu release − 16.04, 18.04, 19.04, and the upcoming 19.10 − and for all supported architectures (amd64, i386, arm, arm64).
While Snap has made this easier, it’s still not easy. According to sources, Canonical has not decided yet whether it will support Chromium without the end-user support for the Google services specific APIs.
Linux Mint recently started bundling its own Chromium browser. Mint leader Clement “Clem” Lefebvre is sticking with Chromium. “We’re not going to do anything. We’ll continue to package Chromium.”
Red Hat’s community Linux distro Fedora, however, was seriously considering dumping Chromium. Tom Callaway, Chromium’s Fedora maintainer explained that it’s because Google is “cutting off access to the Sync and “other Google Exclusive” APIs from all builds except Google Chrome. This will make the Fedora Chromium build significantly less functional (along with every other distro packaged Chromium).”
However, after consideration, Callaway explained “I never said I was going to remove Chromium from Fedora. I said I was seriously considering it, but after much thought, I decided that there were enough users who still wanted it, even without the functionality provided by the Google API.” So, starting immediately, Fedora’s version of Chromium no longer supports the soon to be depreciated APIs.
Callaway really wishes Google would reconsider its position. But, he sees little chance of it. “What frustrates me,” Calloway tweeted, “the most is how no one on the Chrome team understands the concept of open source community building. Nothing the Chr maintainers did ever hurt Chrome, they only ever made it stronger.”
Other Linux distributions are edging closer to dumping Chromium. Arch Linux maintainers have thought about it, but, for now, they’ll continue to keep Chromium around even after the March 15th deadline.
Eric Hameleers, who maintains Chromium for Slackware Linux, is dropping Chromium. “I will not package and distribute a Chromium for Slackware if that package is crippled by the absence of login to Chrome Sync. I will not package a Chromium build with Google’s own ID and secret embedded. Instead, I will do the right thing: advise people not to use Chrome but switch to Firefox.”
With this move, Google has alienated code maintainers and developers at multiple Linux distributions. When Linux Chromium users discover the latest versions won’t work as they have before, they’ll be unhappy too.
True, this is only a small number. But, it’s leaving many others with a bad taste in their mouths over how Google failed the open-source community in this instance. That, in the end, will matter more than this move’s immediate impact on programmers and end-users.
[quote]
A life of radical obedience to God (discipleship) is in fact the object of God’s call to humans in salvation, and is enabled by the same free grace that enables …
[unquote]
Hmmm. Ok, well, makes me think about defining what we mean by the term “salvation.”
He is not talking about justification. He is talking about sanctification. And santification of the experiential kind. I rarely hear Christians use any of these terms.
But do I have the correct usage of the term as it is used here in his book? Sigh, now i am going to have to read another book. But its the favorite book of a friend. I am just not going to read it in the original German, that’s all.
Commodities have room to soar by another 40 percent on top of the gains in recent months, as investors could pour more money into raw materials as a hedge against the highest inflation in 40 years, JPMorgan Chase & Co says.
“In the current juncture, where the need for inflation hedges is more elevated, it is conceivable to see longer-term commodity allocations eventually rising above 1% of total financial assets globally, surpassing the previous highs,” JPMorgan strategists led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote in a note to clients this week, as carried by Bloomberg.
Higher money allocations to the commodities asset class “would imply another 30% to 40% upside for commodities from here,” all else being equal, JPMorgan noted.
So far this year, commodities have rallied amid supply constraints, exacerbated by the Russian war in Ukraine. Brent Crude prices have rallied by 30 percent year to date and reached their highest price since 2008 in March when panic gripped market participants.
Key metals have also rallied amid high demand in the energy transition and concerns that supply from Russia—a major producer of some of those metals—could be disrupted in the wake of increasingly tighter sanctions against Moscow.
Prices of lithium, a key component of EV batteries, have nearly doubled this year as commodities soared after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Now JPMorgan says that commodities have further room to rise.
Particularly for oil, Goldman Sachs is also bullish. There is “absolutely” a supply problem in the sector, Jeff Currie, global head of commodities at Goldman Sachs, told Bloomberg on Wednesday.
There are broad-based supply constraints in oil producers, particularly non-core OPEC, Currie said. Every producer except for Saudi Arabia and the UAE is producing less today than they were in 2020, he added. Throw in the Russian shock, and the supply constraints are the most severe in decades, since the 1970s, according to Currie.
The record release of U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) “is still insufficient to be able to deal with the scale of the problem,” he noted.
From the National Review Article posted by Jon Sellers:
Standing no more than five feet from Obama whose binder had a speech chock full of quotes from the Good Book, Metaxas said of Jesus:
“When he was tempted in the desert, who was the one throwing Bible verses at him? Satan. That is a perfect picture of dead religion. Using the words of God to do the opposite of what God does. It’s grotesque when you think about it. It’s demonic.”
“Keep in mind that when someone says ‘I am a Christian’ it may mean absolutely nothing,” Metaxas added for good measure, in case anybody missed his point.
The eerie feeling that Metaxas was answering Obama on a speech he had yet to give continued, as he spoke about the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and the Christian religion. Moments after Metaxas finished his speech and sat down, Obama took great pains to describe the other great religions of the world as mirroring his own Christian faith.
“I believe in God’s command to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself,’” Obama noted. “I know the version of that Golden Rule is found in every major religion and every set of beliefs — from Hinduism to Islam to Judaism to the writings of Plato.”
Translation: Christianity is great and so are the other major religions, which essentially teach the same stuff.
Carne Ross wrote The Leaderless Revolution. As a Occupy leader he is being interviewed by Bill Moyer. He complains that democracy doesnt work because only a few (what I call the 900) at the center control policy and they are guaranteed to be corrupt. Its a system that ivites corruption. So here is an attack on the democrats idea of government by the extreme left. He blames government trying to control everything as hopelessly naive. Thats what republicans have been saying for years. He says people want to control their own lives instead of electing someone else to fix things for them. Republican ideas all.
Someone said, “I love Christmas lights. They remind me of the people who voted for obama. They all hang together; half of them don’t work, and the ones that do, aren’t that bright.” One has to admire people’s creativity. What I like about these quips, however, is it sooooo offends those who have no sense of humor. They are self identifying by their anger. And *thats* hilarious.
April 7, 2012
Micheal Medved said one thing about Easter is it cannot be turned into a secular holiday (like Christmas can). Its about the resurrection, pure and simple. He also said Passover is the same way – its about the divine intervention on behalf of God’s people against the pagans – involving the blood of the lamb. So in their own way both Judaism and Christianity are about the blood of the lamb saving presumably guilty, but loved and claimed, people from a horrible fate. There is no secular version of this.
To get a genealogy site that works with facebook I would have to have the higher level paid account that allows plugins. This allows a FACEBOOK-SHARE button to be put on posts. Facebook user who click through can them like or comment on the post and leave messages.
OK, that will cost me about $200 per year, plus the cost of the domain name.
I keep genealogy separate – completely separate – from all the stuff I write on this site.
My collected family studies are actually published in pressbooks in web book form and are easily converted to PDF form.
There are technical reasons. One needs to be able to edit online but back up the daily edits. I export my books, download, and save to local and cloud media. One needs to be able to restore the book after a disaster. And one needs to be able to make hardcopy easily. Pressbooks solves all this at a reasonable price.
I also wanted to use non-standard forms for my family books, and include lots of graphics and tables and maps. Genealogy sites and programs do none of this in any satisfactory way as far as I can tell.
So, it is tempting to do a genealogy blog – but so far: “no cigar”.
Military was taken over by white supremacists, said woke general Milley. Investigation found 100 extremists out of 2,500,000 members, so 99.996% are not extremists. When questioned by the Congress about his mistake Milley just tapped danced around it.
Milley also said Ukraine would fall in 36 hours. When will Biden fire this incompetent fool?
Hmmm…We have zero social life and I have no close friends.
She has teacher friends but she tries to keep them from seeing me. I embarass her. Thank you Jesus for all that support you CREEP.
Can a Christian have loyalty to a country and to God simultaneously?
Just so you know, Facebook users cannot comment on wordpress or put a “like” on wordpress without first logging into wordpress.
Legal tender. My friend crossed the border to go Christmas shopping. The next day when she returned the currency had been devalued and changed to the US dollar standard and this currency was worthless.
Yesterday I sold 20 CF at 104.50 and put in a limit trade on CF to sell 40 CF at 105. Got it first thing this morning. Later sold another 40 at market of 108. I entered a limit order to buy 80 at 102 in another account.
The fertilizer/AG/materials market has been crazy volatile. I have long positions in CF,MOS,LXU,UAN,ADM,BG,IPI,NTR. And I trade the volatility in these as they remain volatile.
Call someone racist, pay $40 million.
The payout is now $25 million + 6.3 million in legal fees for the bakery.
John Polkinghorne proposed that minds are hypercomplex phenomena based upon quantum mechanics. One needs quantum mechanics to understand electrical signaling in the brain.
