Most depressing day of the year
Paul Baker
Posts: 6,351
I was poking around to see if anything of significance happened on my b-day (Jan 24), only to find it's the most depressing day of the year ROFL. Some of the factors the social scientist used in his·calculation was: holiday debt, average sunlight, average temperature, breaking of new year's resolutions, no major holidays to look forward to, etc. etc.
I put this in the test forum, cause it didn't even seem to rise to the level of placing it in the Sandbox.
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·1+1=10
I put this in the test forum, cause it didn't even seem to rise to the level of placing it in the Sandbox.
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·1+1=10
Comments
Are you sure about the date? I thought the most depressing day of the year was January 28th. On this day last Saturday, I took the family out to breakfast at a resort popular for their amazing breakfast. I had some eggs benedict and they were worth the twelve bucks I paid. Because it was snowing heavily, I asked my family to stay inside the lobby while I ran to get the car (a 99 Subaru Outback), about a tenth of a mile away. With about a foot of snow in the parking lot, all I could see were the snow marker poles. However, the snow poles are mounted in cement-filled tractor wheels. Got in the car, backed up and put it in drive. . . wham!! Drove the car right into the cement-filled wheel at less than 2-3 mph. No big deal, I thought, until I tried to turn the steering wheel. I broke the Y-shaped steel arm which holds the wheel wheel right off the chassis!
Spent the rest of the day trying to round up a rental car, getting my car towed by a cash-only outfit for $150 (just four miles, too), and dealing with insurance issues.
Don't feel sorry for me, but I think the worse date is actually the 28th of January. I'm marking my calendar to see if next year is any different.
February can only get better, Paul!
Ken Gracey
Parallax, Inc.
Obvioulsy social scientist can be wrong.
Additionally predictions are probabilites, never 100% certainties. And never apply to broad populations. Much as I love astrology, I prefer to look into the part about personalities and have given up on its dubious predictive powers. I can't get the stock market right either.
My sympathies about having a bad day. Actually the worst day of the year for me is usually April 15th or there abouts, but what do I know. The beauty is that you can always change your mind.
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"When all think alike, no one is thinking very much.' - Walter Lippmann (1889-1974)
······································································ Warm regards,····· G. Herzog [noparse][[/noparse]·黃鶴 ]·in Taiwan
Sometime in the 80's a bunch of extremely wealthy investors dusted it off, combined the social variables into a single one and came up with a predictor for it using alot of assumptions in it's derivation and invested BIG-TIME into a fund using the equation (it think the minimum buy in was 300 million), the fund had billions upon billions in capitol and they started inventing all of it using the equation, options and massive hedging. The investors likened it to a giant hoover sucking up all the loose pennies and nickels in nearly every global market, and the fund sky rocketed, all capitol being pushed back into the massive venture. This went on for several years making very hansome profits for all involved.
Then one day things began to turn (I think in the lead up to the '87 crash), but the way the formula works, said "invest more, hedge your bets". So the fund kept at it, but still no matter how much hedging was done the fund kept loosing. The NOVA special likened it to tossing a coin several billion times and it always turning up tails, eventually the fund lost everything, taking the inventors and many very large financial institutions with it. The entire global economy was on the verge of complete financial collapse, making the 30's depression seem like child's play. But at the very last minute the US and several other major governments stepped in and quietly bailed the fund out (I think the total indebitedness was about a half trillion).
What when wrong? the equation of course, thier social prediction model was way too simplistic and was unable to forcast human nature when an already chaotic system becomes even more so due to investors unpredicatability. To this day the whole debacle is still pretty much hush-hush, and its fairly hard to find good articles covering the incident, it is my opinion that the powers that be don't want the general public to know how easily the global market can fall into the abyss by just a few over-zealous and greedy investors.
Its been many years since I saw the show, so the numbers may be off.
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·1+1=10
Post Edited (Paul Baker) : 1/31/2006 5:37:44 PM GMT
It's basically about Japan and how they depend so much on the US and other countries to buy their products.
Due to a faulty Japanese part in a car, the US put major tarriffs and such on them that basically stopped them dead in their tracks as far as the US buying from them.
They then went on to attack the US financial market but creating 'fear'. Many things in the Stock exchange are based on models and the big 'houses' have the best ones.
People tend to copy what these big houses do. Well, a recently purchased house (bought by a japanese biz-man) when and....this is where I am pretty ignorant of financial stuff....he sold every US treasury note they had, which caused the models to shift and declare what was basically a huge selloff of US treasury.
It created a domino affect and the US was in deep S@!T!
Anyhow, they went on to talk about how the market crash in teh 20's was really all about fear. It took a bunch of the big investors to get together and dump their own cash in to the market to start things moving.
Sure it's a Clancy novel...but it was kinda interesting....seemed representative of lemmings really!
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Steve
"Inside each and every one of us is our one, true authentic swing. Something we was born with. Something that's ours and ours alone. Something that can't be learned... something that's got to be remembered."
How about a stamp using random numbers?
More significantly, if the worse thing any of us have to worry about is a broken care while on a family outing, we pretty much have it made. It is certianly frustrating at the time, and towing company should have provided a nice blonde (I like to get kissed while I'm getting scr??ed.) But the fact that we are able to be on these forums, and afford things like family outings, is a pretty good sign we're doing OK compared to most of the folks out there. Don't take this to undermine the fact that we've worked hard to earn it.
For the record, my most depressing day is December 16th, my birthday. It reminds me that I'm another day closer to death, and I really don't want to go for a while!
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John R.
8 + 8 = 10
Ignore the third paragraph above.
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John R.
8 + 8 = 10
When I was a teen my mom would always say when I was fussing and fuming about something that happened, "Honey, no matter how bad you may think your life is right now, there are countless other people who would trade thier life for your's in a heartbeat". It took quite a few years to fully understand what she was saying.
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·1+1=10
Post Edited (Paul Baker) : 1/31/2006 8:10:44 PM GMT
But here it is ,the present day now,and there is so much to be thankful for.The little things bother us all.Sometimes too much and for no good reason.That's why we come here to think of electronic things and maybe get some satisfaction from learning .
Perhaps this is the best day of the year for all of us,we just don't see it in front of our noses.
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Thanks, Parallax!
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·1+1=10