Investing With A.I.

 

It's been 6 months since I asked ChatGBT to pick 10 equities for a hypothetical investment. It disavowed any expertise in the field, picked 10*, 5 of which were tech stocks, and my theoretical investment has since made me a theoretical 28%. Thinking that a good investment advisor would watch the markets and move the monies around from time to time, I asked it the same question again. It picked 8 of the original 10 picks, and dropped GOOGL and META in favor of JPMorgan and Home Depot. I adjusted my portfolio to remove the 2 and added some declared dividends and the newly favored equities. Now I guess I wait another 6 months to see what this gets me.

Since I'm already paying a boffin to manage my finances for me, it would probably be silly of me to fire him and follow the AIs advice on no record at all. Still, if I had, I'd have recovered all my losses from the Bidenomics "boom".

Managing an imaginary account like this is a bit more difficult than doing it for real. Since it's all imaginary, I have to make all the adjustments to the account myself, and Yahoo finance gets confused when I do a trade. In real life, I'd just call my broker, execute the buy and sell, and get a monthly statement showing the results. O.K. it's not THAT hard, but I'm lazy.

On 8/1/2023 8:31 PM, David Aitken wrote:

Managing an imaginary account is easy. It's when you have real money on the line that it gets emotional, and hard.

Well, yes. Any project involves work and money and when you eliminate the money part, it's easy to not get too attached to the project. Using AI like this is definitely an experiment with no precedence and so I'm not going to take this for a full ride until I'm convinced it won't blow up on the pad. Next year, maybe I'll try it on a small scale with real money. So far, though, it's working well "in the lab".

The other problem here is that I may not be able to "cross the same river twice" as GPT is itself an ongoing thing undergoing continuous changes. The 1/24/2023 version I started with is probably not the 7/23/23 version I just used to generate an update. GPT-4 is now the current thing, but GPT-0 is still available. Or is it now GPT-0.6?

An aerospace engineers approach to the problem. Excess caution -> Paralysis by analysis. At what point do I take the plunge? I'm thinking after 2 consecutive winning 6 month runs.

* Original picks: AAPL, MSFT, AMZN, GOOGL, FB, JNJ, PG, V, IVV, VTI. Don't recognize some of them? Go to Yahoo finance and type in those ticker Ids.

D.C. to honor Jack Smith with Statue

 Shown here the proposed statue of Jack Smith, prosecutor of Donald Trump to be installed in front of the D.C. jail where several dozen protesters are being held without charges:

Shown: The D.C. Jail with proposed statue of prosecutor Smith in front.

Proposed statue of Prosecutor Smith. The completed statue is available at a very reasonable cost and only requires that the circle D logo be added to the pediment, and the head be revised slightly.

The Green Energy Scam Redux

 Back in the '90s, the big deal in the Green world was "clean coal" stuff that had very low non-fuel elements included in it. There were 2 sources of this in the whole world: Northern California, and Indonesia. The Riady family in Indonesia had a sweet deal selling their coal to California which had mandated the stuff for all their coal plants, their inability to produce enough of it notwithstanding. Prospectors, however, discovered a huge deposit of the stuff in southern Utah that promised to make the U.S. independent of Indonesian coal. The Riadys countered this by donating heavily to the Clinton campaign, and when Slick Willie got elected, he declared the area in Utah with the coal to be the Grand Escalade National Monument. All mining was forbidden, including some that had been going on for some time, and the Riadys kept their income stream. So did the Clintons.

Fast forward to today: Coal in any form is now the (pardon the expression) "bete noir" of the Greenies, and Nuclear power is now looking like a workable answer, but only to people who know what they're talking about. The Biden administration is taking a page from the Clintons, and looking to declare the U.S. biggest uranium deposits to be a National Monument. In Arizona. Stinking Desert National Monument maybe? Not to worry, Uranium can be purchased from close friends like the Russians and maybe some African states. 

NICS Checks June 23

 The graph continues to droop. Mostly this is the summer doldrums.

XL continues to thwart me. The upper graph is annual totals. The Y axis is supposed to show the years. Last column is a projection for 2023.

Affirmative Action, Out Loud

The DNC has never forgiven the Republicans for freeing their slaves, but it's been gauche to just come out and say so. Sometimes, though, someone lets slip the truth. 

New DNC logo

 How things are shaping up: The old hammer and sickle logo having fallen somewhat out of favor,, the left will change their logo and hope you aren't reminded of where it came from. This one would also look fine in the upper left corner of a green flag, a rainbow flag, or any of several others doncha think?

 We used to institutionalize the insane. Now we institutionalize the insanity. 

Sweeden Recognizes Sex As Sport

 Fun with headlines department:

Sweden recognizes sex as a sport; first European Sex Championship to take place on June 8

According to the report, 70% of the votes from the crowd will be included during the final evaluation, while the remaining 30% will come from the judges’ votes. The European Sex Championship candidates will compete in 16 disciplines, including seduction, oral sex, penetration, Appearance, and so on.

Rumor has it that teams from Afghanistan and Scotland have been rejected as the governing committee as yet does not recognize sex between men and either goats or sheep as legitimate. Both countries have appealed. 

U.S. teenagers eagerly anticipate formal recognition of the sport into high school sports. 

NICS Checks May 23

 Again, no real surprises or panics despite Biden declaring he will ban assault weapons, etc, etc.

Gun Law Overreach - Term Limits?

 Seems New Jersey is going for the title of possessor of the most obnoxious gun laws in the country, having passed some that make even possession of a Daisy BB gun a felony. 

I don't see this withstanding any court challenge at the federal level, but due to the way the system works, they get to keep it on the books for 2-3 years while cases drag their way from one court to another until the SCOTUS tosses the lot of them. Of course at that point, the NJ legislature simply passes a variant of the unconstitutional laws, and they get another 2-3 year run of illegal gun control.

I thing that if a legislature passes any law that is subsequently found to be unconstitutional in the supreme court, all the legislators at the state legislature who voted in favor of it should be removed from legislative office, and forbidden from ever holding such office in perpetuity. Should also include the governor who signed it.

Green Energy - Nuclear

 The Finns finally got their new nuclear plant turned on to full capacity. Yup, It caused a national disaster. In fact the output from the plant drove the price of electricity in Finland into negative numbers, necessitating throttling back the plant so the rest of national power grid could actually show a profit.

The low, flatt(ish) area on the right is when the reactor was running in test mode. The green circled area is when it went full time on line.

The article also mentions that the plant was 14 years late getting going without mentioning why, exactly, but given that this is almost certainly a government project, I would be surprised if it didn't come in about 2-4 times the estimated time, and 10 times the original estimated cost. 

Fun With Headlines / QOTD - Elections

 Found at Newsmax. First the headline:

Musk Talks 2024: Want Someone 'Fairly Normal' for President

and the quote:

"I've said publicly that my preference — and I think it would be the preference for most Americans — is willing to have someone fairly normal in office," Musk said.

 Wouldn't we all. Note that he is not asking for complete normality, just mostly normality. In Washington, this may be a high bar, but certainly less so for the rest of us. Note as well that this plea is coming from a man who does not think it unreasonable to be planning to move to Mars. 

Fun With Headlines

 Here's a goodie:

Biden Crime Family Used 20 Shell Companies to Launder $10 Million

The actual story says more than $10 million, and given that the money seems to have been divvied up between several family members, the actual total is probably higher. 

Also worth noting is that in 8 years or so his former boss, went from a net worth of around 2 million or so to something in the neighborhood of $60M making Slow Joe look like a piker.

Oh yeah, and 30 years ago, Mr. Trump was boffing bimbos.

Colorado Education Drops The Mask

 And issues a statement openly advocating communism. 

First, here's some definitions: Capitalism is trade, purely and simply. Its only drawback is that it's impractical to trade a whole cow for a loaf of bread, so it needs a medium to make change, hence money. That's about it.

Socialism is capitalism with government meddling.  Government is an elastic term. It can include anything from an elected democracy to a hereditary monarchy, and also includes criminal mobocracies or subjugation by invading barbarians. The only difference is the amount of meddling the government does.

When government exercises total control, it's called communism. 

So here's the statement by the Colorado Education Association, written by a history teacher who, of all people, should know better.

A final version of the resolution that was passed states that "CEA believes that capitalism requires exploitation of children, public schools, land, labor, and/or resources. Capitalism is in opposition to fully addressing systemic racism (the school to prison pipeline), climate change, patriarchy, (gender and LGBTQ disparities), education inequality, and income inequality.

However, a screenshot captures an earlier draft of the resolution that included a call to replace capitalism with a "new equitable economic system." 

The screenshot of the original version of the resolutions reads "CEA believes that capitalism requires exploitation of children, public schools, land, labor, and/or resources and, therefore, the only way to fully address systemic racism (the school to prison pipeline), climate change, patriarchy (gender and LGBTQ disparities), education inequality, and income inequality is to dismantle capitalism and replace it with a new, equitable economic system."

This is what the union wants to teach your kids.  

NICS Checks, April '23

 Back into the summer doldrums I guess.

Colorado and Washington just passed some onerous gun laws. The lawsuits were filed the same day.