fantasticshower

Thanks for that first link. I'm interested to see what the conclusions are.

Could a diet where you only eat the meat from one slaughtered cow be the ideal vegan diet? One consciousness killed.

This approach would require purchasing a half from a local farmer who raises 100% grass fed animals and makes his own hay.

The hay definitely kills some animals when harvested though. It would be interesting to quantify the death impact (calories of beef produced per bale of hay) of a hay harvest and compare that to the death impact for some staple vegan foods, and see how things stack up.

Edit: The need for hay is a climate based one. There are places where cattle can graze for more or less days in a year. Hay is used a winter feed in places where winter forage is unavailable.

I should probably finish reading it but doesn't "Guns, Germs and Steel" give a totally non-racial explanation for what they are saying?

Part of me hates Walmart and part of me loves it. I love that I can go to one place and get 80% of whatever I'm looking for. But I also like the specialty stores my town has. N of one but since Walmart moved in ~20y ago I haven't noticed much changing with the makeup of small businesses. Since Walmart moved in there have been more of the other big box stores, though.

It is your opinion that your filters and methods for discerning truth or value are correct. But you think they are the method. We disagree about the methods obviously.

Because we disagree you think there's something wrong with my critical thinking and that I'm unaware of biases. But are you aware of your own?

Typically what we criticize in others is what we fear about ourselves.

I don't know you but I think you have categorized me as one of "them" (people who don't think critically) and have been arguing with me from that perspective.

I think you have a rigid idea of what the right idea is with investing and there's some resistance to anything that might challenge that. I understand why you'd feel that way. There's comfort in believing your filter and your method for gaining understanding of this complex world is totally correct. I find myself thinking that way sometimes too!

It's so interesting to me that your conclusion about me is that I'm not a critical thinker. If you knew me in real life you'd rank me among the most critical thinkers you know (or my whole life experience is wrong).

I think it speaks to the medium of communication we're using (you've misinterpreted things I've said as one problem with the medium), mixed with the topic being a very emotionally charged one.

More examples of you assuming the worst about me. I'm well aware of what you posted.

My sarcasm didn't go through. I mean no one has written a published and cited paper about our conversation. Therefore no one should make any decisions based on our discussion.

Probably best to just ignore everything we've both said (including this advice). There haven't been any published and cited papers about this thread yet so it's too early to tell whether there's anything of value here.

For anyone left reading, let this be a live demonstration of how it can be a waste of time to try to convince someone on the Internet their thinking is wrong.

I'm pretty sure Zetice hasn't changed their mind on anything. I haven't really changed my mind on anything.

I still think the things we linked to are valuable. For those of you who have filters that let the information through, I hope you find something useful. Read the paper Zetice linked to and see what questions you come up with. Or don't.

I guess we'll have to disagree about whether I'm capable of investigating their claims. Maybe you aren't and that's well and good for you. If you cannot investigate their claims, I don't think there's much more to discuss on this topic.

Thanks for the lively discussion, Zetice!

It's a logical fallacy to assume what they are saying is false because they might stand to profit from it. They might be biased but can't we investigate their claims independently?

We certainly have different types of filters. Your filter apparently catches blogs and that's fine. I feel I've been exposed to many interesting things on blogs. I'm sure others would agree.

Your model/filter may be better because you don't have to think about as many things. There's certainly more information out there than one has the ability to ingest. In my experience many things I thought were settled turned out not to be upon further inspection. A simple filter might be good enough for your purposes!

I think your ideas about investing can be correct (in that they produce favorable outcomes) and other ideas can be correct too.

Not a perfect analogy, but Newton's ideas about gravity are correct to explain a lot of things. Einstein's ideas expand and explain more. They are both correct, depending on the level of detail you need. Sometimes "correct" roughly equals "useful".

If you're open-minded, give the paper a read. They suggest a method, that you can verify yourself, for figuring out which months are likely to be worse.

The paper you shared defines "in the market" as long equities and "out of the market" as long T-bills. The paper I linked looks at other assets you could rotate into besides T-bills. How could that one change (they offer several other ideas) impact the results of your paper?

If that's not interesting to you, skip the paper I linked.

Personally, I believe that type of research is still valuable. I don't structure my life just based on things in published and cited articles.