you expect everyone to have read your memoirs? Then call people idiots that have not done so?...Your social skills are rather lacking, which I'm sure you will try to spin as a sign of genius.
Calling people idiots is just kind of iamback's thing. Even those who agree with his overall thesis would be hesitant to defend his social etiquette.  Nevertheless let me try to move this back and forth into a more academic and hopefully harmonious direction. You made a statement that without usury, "there is no economy and nothing moves (as was evident in the Dark Age)", then a post later you say it's "the scourge of mankind". For a person that pretends everything he says is gospel, those are rather contradictory ideas.
iamback has argued that finance and thus usury was useful (in the past) as a means of increasing prosperity and via allowing economies of scale to be created in situations where without usury individuals would be unable to collect sufficient capital to engage productive ideas. He has also argued that finance eventually attempts to steal from/suppress knowledge as it becomes increasingly irrelevant as we move into an era where knowledge rather than fixed passive capital dominates production and productivity. He is thus arguing that usury was needed to jump start the industrial revolution however going forward it will increasingly become a scourge. I have copied the relevant sections from his essay Rise of Knowledge (link in the OP). Production with hard resources and manual labor requires financing. To the degree that knowledge production is not financed, then the value of financing declines and value of knowledge production increases relative to each's proportion of GDP.
Hunting and gathering required extensive hours of manual labor for a subsistence level of nutrition— all of mankind's time was consumed in producing food. Agriculture increased the economy-of-scale of food production, yet it still required three to six months of financing (savings) for the hard resources (e.g. seeds, fertilizer) and manual labor inputs. Mechanized agriculture still required financing the amortized depreciation of the machines. Against the violent protest of the cottage industry Luddites, mass production industry further increased the economy-of-scale of manufactured goods, a.k.a. hardware, but knowledge remained a small component of cost as explained below. Ongoing automation continues to reduce the manual labor required.
To the degree that knowledge production is not financed, for passive capital to retain its share of GDP (i.e. retain its aggregate net worth), mathematically it must steal from knowledge production.
Thus if knowledge production was increasingly not financeable, then we would expect to see top-down suppression of knowledge production by vested financing interests and widespread theft by those vested interests trying to maintain levels of net worth they would not have in an economy with more knowledge production.
I assert that is what we see today. To correctly argue that politics is the cause of allowing excessive indebtedness and its resultant misallocation of resources (which is a loss of knowledge), is as irrelevant as arguing whether the chicken or the egg is first. It is sufficient that there exists the destruction and suppression of knowledge coincident with the macro-economic failure of over indebtedness, to conclude the financing and knowledge production do not coexist. Because we know from the “Economy of Knowledge” section, that knowledge production must increase as a share of GDP for there to be increasingly prosperity.
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I wanted to share the leading article on zerohedge. It is a piece of pure unfocused rage. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-13/one-americans-rage-spills-over-shut-your-mouth-start-fighting-these-political-parasiOne American's Rage Spills Over: Shut Your Mouth & Start Fighting These Political Parasites Submitted by Thad Beversdorf via First Rebuttal blog, I was shocked today by the absolute gaul of the Fed releasing a statement about Net Worth in America reaching record levels
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The ugly reality is that the bottom 80% of Americans experienced none of that gain. That’s right a big ole goose egg. And so when the Fed via its ass pamper boy, Steve Liesman, start banging on about the fact that some sliver of society is being handed extraordinary wealth while the working class has lost 40% of their net worth since 2007
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It is embarrassing that our policymakers are either that inconsiderate or that stupid to celebrate such a brutal dislocation between the haves and have nots.
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And for Americans, why, please god tell me why is it that Americans are so willing to be shit on for so long without so much as a hint of standing up to these monsters that steal our wealth and pass it around their political class.
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I used to think of Americans as an incredibly admirable people. The type of people that are confident, strong, intelligent and command respect. I really truly did. But having lived here now since 2001, what I see is a people that have rolled over on our backs.
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And for those of you that think I’m an ass for being so harsh on us, well stuff it. Get up off your stool you lazy drunk, shut your damn mouth and start fighting these political parasites like a damn man, like a damn American. I’m not the one stealing your retirement, stealing your income, stealing your wealth and stealing your freedom all while making myself wealthy and exonerated from all the laws that would put your ass in prison.] Normally the comments on ZeroHedge are pretty good. However, the posters there seem to blindly support rage pieces like this one without understanding that the rage will only make things worse. Rage without insight is more then useless. Such anger is easily manipulated and will be directed into an attack on the productive elite and small businesses.  With each raging assault on the hated rich 1% red cape the bull is confused to find that its wounds have deepened. It responds by attacking the cape with more vigor. The proper response to this spectacle is not rage but pity. The bull has been brought up and trained its entire life to ignore the torero and has no chance. The only logical choice is to opt out. Don't be the bull and make sure you are not the easily targeted red cape. |
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Some other endorsement of M.A. if anyone is interested: HereAn interesting back and forth thanks for sharing. Below are two posts that highlight the debate on that thread. Anti ArmstrongIf you read his blog, Martin Armstrong keeps pushing stuff back. Now a lot of his posts are talking about 2017 when SHTF. Keep pushing dates back and you will eventually get it correct. But in terms of overall big trades, I haven't been impressed with any of his forecasts recently. For example, he didn't call the huge decline in energy markets over the past 6 months. In fact, back in December once prices had been routed, he was posting they would go much lower. So obviously he missed the recent rebound in energy prices completely.
Gold was supposed to drop below 1K in 2014 according to him. Big miss. DOW was supposed to trade between 23K-40K according to him. Big miss. Then recently he claimed the DOW was supposed to trend down into May, and seems to have already changed that call. Lots of changes and misses for someone who always claims to be correct. He is painted into a corner with his 2015.75 prediction. Will be interested to see if he pushes that back too.
Things will implode given the circumstances in the world. But the question is when. You will go broke being on the wrong side of a long-term correct trade for too long. Haven't seen many forecasts by Armstrong that will make you a lot of money. Lots of misses and a few hits here and there. Not trying to bash, but just trying to be realistic. Pro ArmstrongI've been following Armstrong for a short while and I'm very impressed with his theories and systems. First he is into neo-classical economics and he's a monetarist, that's great to start. More Friedman and less Keynes is what the world needs today. Then he bases his ideas in a lot of math and history.
As things develop signals change and that's why sometimes he changes his forecasts on what might happen. Like weather, society can only be forecasted not exactly predicted, especially in short terms views. That's the main confusion, people think he predicts stuff and he doesn't. He forecasts.
Also with all due respect Tekmnd I think you are missing the time frames completely when you attempt to decode Martin's system signals. And one more thing, he says the Dow can rally over 24000 AFTER 2015.75, not by that date but after. I saw his conference about the euro from 1999 just a month ago and I was speechless at how right he was back then about the whole thing. The guy does have a unique understanding of capital flows, money and the markets and I really think the world would benefit big time from just listening to him. Armstrong has certainly caught my interest enough that I am going to go directly to the source material and form my own opinion. It actually took me a while to find all his prison writings. The older ones do not appear to be available on his website. If anyone else is interested a complete (I think) collection of them can be found here. https://www.scribd.com/kzuur58 |
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I never read it before, so there's no way I'm repeating something he typed...
Some people do nothing but play chess at a high level, but can't do math, programming, art, or anything else good and are referred to as "genius". Where exactly do you draw the line here extending that term?
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All ideas a built on a foundation of existing knowledge. Once the time is ripe for the emergence of an idea it is very common for similar insights to be developed independently. If it becomes important enough (few ideas are) historians can and will sort the matter out. I see little point in arguing who was first. Even when money is at stake as with patents this can be difficult to determine. Recently our legal system has abandoned its duty to even try. http://patentlyo.com/patent/2015/02/supreme-constitutionality-patent.htmlThe Supreme Court has denied MadStad Engineering’s petition for writ of certiorari in its case arguing that the first-to-file patent system is unconstitutional because the new law awards rights for the filing of a patent application and no longer requires invention.
Rather than reaching the merits, the district court found that MadStad lacked standing to file the lawsuit because the plaintiff could not prove any particular injury due to the law’s enactment.
Patent/Copyright law is a example of something that started out with a good intent but is morphing into something very detrimental. These laws are increasingly being used as tools for theft (via first to file) and suppression (via lawsuits) of innovation and competition. |
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I also commend people who write astute and smart posts. You can find many, many, many examples of that.
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Armstrong has correctly stated that the experts learned by doing, not from theory and academic cathedrals.
Thus there are very few experts (at least amongst those who speak out in public or publish). Most of the talking heads or those who publish research are just spouting delusion.
I agree on all counts I have praised the genius of proof-of-work. your recent posts have been very impressive
That is an excellent (astute, perceptive, efficiently summarized) high-level perspective
I wonder how much freedom those in academics truly have to explore nontraditional non approved economic models. Academics is a publish or perish profession. If you cannot get your research published in good journals (which requires the approval of today's leading economists) your career stagnates. Unorthodox ideas that reject the modern economic thought are probably much more difficult to publish. Just look at the case of Ludwig-Von-Mises essentially the founder of the Austrian school of economics. However, he was arguing against the status quo. http://mises.org/library/ludwig-von-mises-scholar-who-would-not-compromiseMises never obtained a full professorship in Vienna or in any German university; nor later did he obtain one at any of the prestigious American universities when he moved to the US. The best he achieved during his long career in which he published 47 books was the rank of a poorly paid visiting professor. Perhaps it is a very good thing that I abandoned the field of economics. I do not think I would have been a big status quo supporter. |
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Also CoinCube's formal training in economics is mostly irrelevant. Beyond Economics 101, most of what you learn from theory is wrong. For you to imply that is a requirement for you to read this thread, is way over the top (bringing that snotty academic cathedral attitude into a Bitcoin forum).
CoinCube, you are correct I don't give a shit about politics, because having the correct ideas and knowledge is what matters. Nothing is accomplished if decision making is done groupwise. Am I going to have to prove that, when I single-handedly have to write the crypto-currency we need?
I am tired of begging Skycoin, Monero, etc to work on what we need.
Leaders lead by doing. Followers talk, waste time, and eventually adopt what the leaders did successfully.
For my doing action today I downloaded Armstrongs prison writings. Holy smokes 2000+ typed pages. I did not realize the size of the project I have committed myself too. When I said that I was going to report back in a week... well that date looks likely to slip. I don't want to mislead anyone about the extent of my economics training. I was an undergraduate economics major for one year before changing career paths eventually obtaining a doctorate in an unrelated field. I have long had an interest in economics but I do not by any stretch of the imagination claim to be an expert in the field. I do not believe any formal economics training is required to read and understand the concepts in this thread. |
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CoinCube, I have a question about Finance Part I:
In the most basic terms a bank can't lend money unless it has money to lend, they need to physically have the cash to give to me (for example) for a car, home, etc. So how can those funds be spent if they're made (out of thin air or accounting wizardry) as a deposit in my account upon their grant of the loan? I take that deposit, give it to the person I'm buying the car from and the bank has to payout that payment.
I'll keep reading, but I'm sure you've had questions like this before.
Edit: It's because banks can borrow too, isn't it? They can put a deposit in my account for an amount they can't cover today because they can borrow that amount tomorrow. Do I have it correct? And if so, what keeps Coinbase from doing the same thing with bitcoin, The public ledger?
Possum577 you are more or less correct. The money banks create goes by default into other banks. Thus even if the bank does not attract deposits they can borrow money from their neighbor banks. This is not free and the cost to do this is artificially set (in the US) by the FED. It is this cost that is the true limiting factor on how much money a bank can create. This interbank lending rate is called the Federal Funds Rate. Nothing prevents Coinbase from doing fractional reserve off chain lending. The underlying asset cryptocurrency, however, is fixed and limited in supply. Thus if when Coinbase starts doing this it will be operating much like the fractional reserve banking system did when we were on a gold standard. The key to understanding the scam is the realization that bank lending is not limited by their deposits. Rather they create they money and in the process debase/devalue the currency of everyone else. When a bank makes a loan it must be paid back with interest. This interest must be drawn from the larger economy. Every time a bank creates a loan it creates more debt than currency and the overall debt burden relative to currency grows. How is this debt paid? It can only be paid via two mechanisms. Someone somewhere in the economy must take out even more debt to pay the initial loan (delay), or debt must go into default and the underlying collateral seized (eventual guaranteed outcome). Selling assets to pay debt does not change this. A specific individual debt may be satisfied, but that money is then removed from circulation resulting in even less money to pay other debts. Banks create a false boom via sustained periods of money printing. This results in an unstable and volatile imbalance between saving and investment. Low interest rates by a central bank stimulate the creation of money by the banking system. This leads to increased capital spending funded by newly issued bank credit. This debt induced boom results in widespread malinvestment. When credit is cut off there is a massive bust as assets are liquidated at fire sale prices in an attempt to service an ultimately unserviceable debt burden. Rinse wash and repeat and you have a parasitic cycle.  |
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Possum577 I would not take insults from AnonyMint iamback too seriously. He tends to throw them around liberally at pretty much everyone. He is a very smart guy, however, and once you wade through the noise he almost always has something interesting to say you just need a strong filter. I no longer view you as a rational and sane person..
Hey you myopic dimwits:
You all are insane.
AnonyMint I greatly respect your intellect (I started this post to explore your ideas after all). Noise, however, while very provocative and often amusing is nevertheless fundamentally just noise. This is not a moderated thread and thus all parties are free to post anything they want. However, as noise tends to lower the overall quality of the conversation I do kindly ask all parties try and keep it to a minimum. The more things change the more they stay the same |
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Also he was very specific in his weather prediction and his specificity (both the prediction for violent storms and the prediction for volatility in both directions...how much more specific do you realistically expect?) was met precisely by the outcome in California (as well the abnormal reduction in tornados in the Midwest). You are choosing to erect strawman arguments because you don't want a model with many bottom-up, onion layers (a fractal and high entropy), rather you want a flat earth with hierarchical, top-down structure (low entropy guaranteed failure and implausible).
Confirmation bias , also called myside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, or recall information in a way that confirms one's beliefs or hypotheses. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. People also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).
A series of experiments in the 1960s suggested that people are biased toward confirming their existing beliefs. Later work re-interpreted these results as a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and ignoring alternatives. In certain situations, this tendency can bias people's conclusions. Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Another explanation is that people show confirmation bias because they are weighing up the costs of being wrong, rather than investigating in a neutral, scientific way.
Confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Poor decisions due to these biases have been found in political and organizational contexts. I think further narrow discussion about Armstrong's weather prediction in 2013 is a low utility exercise. I am going bow out on further debate until I can get more up to speed on Armstrong overall. I am curious to see if my interpretation of Armstrong differs substantially from yours or if I reach the same conclusions. I suspect that will make for a much more interesting back and forth. |
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A partial list of Armstrong's correct prognostications that come to mind:
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I mean seriously the guy's computer and models have been predicting everything correctly since it was created in the 1970s.
Ok you have succeeded in sparking my curiosity. I will do some homework on this topic over then next few weeks and report back. |
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Dr. CoinCube  It's good to see that you are studying the risks of financial collapse. Put that nice income of yours to work! Its really not all wine and roses in doctorate land. Not a bad gig but definitly not what people often think. http://www.forbes.com/sites/phildemuth/2013/11/25/are-you-rich-enough-the-terrible-tragedy-of-income-inequality-among-the-1/These people are small business owners and doctors and lawyers and frequent-flier mile hoarding executives rising up the corporate letterhead. They got there through advanced education, through marrying someone just like themselves, and then laying on long hours of hard work. Tell them they are “rich” and they will suppress a chortle, even though they are undeniably rich compared to the median U.S. dual-earner couple taking home $67,000. Nevertheless, as I point out The Affluent Investor, they feel like galley slaves. Their lives are fifty shades of bondage to discipline. What is their number one worry? Money, naturally. Yep pretty much. But the article fails to say why money is the #1 worry its because of student debt. http://blog.credit.com/2014/06/i-have-520k-in-student-loans-where-do-i-start-84603/The guy who posted to Reddit about his half-million dollars in student loan debt from dental school. And while dentists earn a lot of money, $520,000 in student loans is still a massive sum. (Dentists’ salaries range from $75,003 to $229,091 and rise rapidly during the first five to 10 years of their careers, according to PayScale.)
As this new dentist wanted to know, where do you start with that kind of debt?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danmunro/2014/01/30/med-student-gives-sober-assessment-of-future-with-500k-in-student-debt/The median four-year cost to attend medical school – which includes outlays like living expenses and books – for the class of 2013 is $278,455 at private schools according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, a nonprofit group of U.S. schools. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke testified before Congress that his own son will complete his formal medical training with $400,000 in loans. http://money.cnn.com/2014/07/15/pf/jobs/lawyer-salaries/Lawyers have been struggling for a while now, but it's gotten even worse: Half of lawyers are now starting at a salary of less than $62,000 a year, according to the National Association for Law Placement.
Not only that, but starting salaries have fallen 13% over the past six years, down from $72,000 in 2008. At the same time, lawyers' student debts are piling up. Thompson is carrying over $150,000 in student loans.
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Together these are quite simply the most insightful piece of economic theory I have ever read.
How much economic theory have you read, I think that's an important piece of information for me to use to decide if I should: A) Read any further, and B) Put any credit into your opinion that this reading is valuable. I await your response. I was an economics major for a year before deciding that the opportunity cost of that career track was far too high. I subsequently jumped ship to biochemistry and mathematics. I have a doctorate but it is not in a field related to economics. I very much value my time and the time of others. If I did not believe the information was both unique and worth reading I would not have posted it.
(CoinCube this is an example of how to be efficient. Don't waste your time (as coinits says, let them "jump fuckers"). You don't have much time remaining).
As the old saying goes you can catch more flies with honey then vinager. |
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I think my optimism/head in the sand was/is partly due to being duped in my early 20s by the doom sayers and buying into the collapse-mongers. But Armstrong is fairly unbiased and makes an excellent case. Part of me believes that TPTB are gonna run this into the ground. Which makes me wonder if there is any safe place to put my capital now.
Even if we completely discard Armstrong, the essays and logic in this thread provide a powerful and internally consistent forecast that addresses the who, what, where, and why of our current economic decline. What Armstrong potentially adds to this is the when. As my recent back and forth with iamback makes clear I am not yet sold on Armstrong but I am most certainly not disregarding him either. You don't need Armstrong to see the trend and the trend is very bad. I don't think real estate is in itself a bad investment but it is very easy to tax so you need to look closely at the underlying fiscal situation of your area. Is your country insolvent when you account for debt and promised pensions/benefits. In the end this will drive long term taxation. If the fundamentals are bad the productive will leave causing the fundamentals to deteriorate further. For an insolvent government fixed immovable real estate is low hanging fruit. |
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And I really appreciate your concern. A a short side note, off topic, my bank has recently changed it's policies (literally this month) making a loan far less attractive to me. So perhaps I have dodged a bullet. I faced a similar decision a few months ago and decided to rent for a few reasons. 1) Taxes are rising and will continue to rise in the west. Property tax is thus a huge and unknown future liability. 2) If the predicted downturn in 2015.75 happens we are looking at a time of unprecedented economic chaos and a potential deflationary collapse. In the Great Depression everything crashed hard against the dollar. Even silver declined by 50% because there was a liquidity crisis and everyone needed dollars to make their debt payments. 3) Fractional reserve banking is an immoral institution. Why participate if you don't have to? If you understand the scam why help perputate it if you have the option to opt out. 4) With huge debts you are gambling with your future freedom. If you screw up you set yourself up as a debt slave. In a time when the global economic system is obviously fraying at the seams I see little reason to take the risk. |
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"Economic Devastation" is a wonderful thread. Look at how long it has endured and how many read here and comment. The nature of financial thought, IMO, especially if one is carefully constructing comments so that others may understand and appreciate, is one that invites careful consideration among your counterparts.
I believe one of the reasons the back and forth between between iamback and I is fruitful is because my own personal filters and biases compensate well for his areas of excess. Take the following. It saddens me that you have poor logic skills (well it is not surprising, because that is what makes me an excellent programmer is my extraordinary 100th percentile logic skills). Why can't you grasp that the cyclical models are generated from data and correlation and have no human interpretation involved in their generation. Thus for you to present logic about Armstrong's personality and human flaws is entirely irrelevant.
I don't think you've ever won a logic debate with me yet. The one time you've made very strong logic was in private where you pointed out clearly the reasons why you probably had until at least early 2017 to make an exit from the USA, because of several factors. And I commended you on those insights and immediately saw the astute logic you had employed. I was beginning to gain respect for you.
But this latest from you is extremely subjective and illogical.
What I see when reading this is the following: (words and self confidence)... the cyclical models are generated from data and correlation and have no human interpretation involved in their generation.... Armstrong's personality and human flaws is (are therefore) entirely irrelevant. (excessive self confidence )... (more words). this latest from you is (wrong for the above reason). Others would focus on different parts of the above post and discourse would get sidetracked. iamback always has a reasonable argument in his posts. Sometimes it is just buried a bit. |
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Shit that dress was gold and white again and slowly morphed to blue and black over about 3 seconds! Is anybody else getting this effect?
Its one of those rare images that is perfectly ambiguous. Final color assigned probably depends on low level estimates your brain is making about ambient lighting. I cannot see it as anything other then white and gold no matter how long I look at it. Some, see it as shifting between the two colors, and others can only see it as blue and black. Its a good example of how a the same data set can be interpreted differently by different brains  Edit: for those who see it only in white and gold like myself. I figured out how to see it as black and blue. If you bring up the picture on a tablet or cell phone and then rotate the device 45-75 degrees away from your eyes it reduces the brightness of the picture and makes it easier to see the darker colors. |
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These risks of seizure of our assets (even if completely innocent of anything) mean having quiet assets (gold, even Bitcoin) is more important than the usual arguments. Having BTC100 in a Ledger Nano, for example, means a certain freedom in that the +/- $23,000 would be easy to get past TSA en-route to "Plan B".
That's one of Bitcoin's greatest features: easy capital mobility.
In the future it seems likely that moving any form of precious metals over national borders will become increasingly difficult. North Korean Diplomat Caught Smuggling 27 Kilos, Or $1.7 Million, In Gold http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-07/north-korean-diplomat-caught-smuggling-27-kilos-or-17-million-goldSales of gold have long been an important source of funds for the North Korean regime, which has been largely cut off from the global financial system by sanctions imposed to curb its nuclear-weapons program. The problem for North Korea is that its traditional gold-smuggling routes may be about to close up, leaving the nation unable to "liquify" its gold holdings
According to the BBC reports, Young-nam's baggage was searched and almost 27 kilos, or 59 pounds, of gold bars and ornaments were recovered.
Initially the diplomat refused to allow customs officers and police to examine his luggage. "He insisted that his bags cannot be scanned because he's carrying a red passport and he enjoys diplomatic immunity," Moinul Khan, head of Bangladesh's customs intelligence department told AFP.
Then "after more than four hours of drama, he gave in and we found gold bars and gold ornaments weighing 26.795kg (59lb), which is worth 130 million taka." Or about $1.7 million dollars.
The customs head said the diplomat was told that more than 2kg of gold could not be brought into the country. Which means that now that the gold, nearly $2 million of it, now belongs to the great Bagladeshi void, after it was confiscated |
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CoinCube, for you to claim that he was not intentionally joking (being sarcastic) just boggles my mind.
You should try not to take things so personally. Different rational actors can interpret the same data very differently. What color is the dress?  Answer: Black and Blue However, a majority including myself can only see white and gold. |
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CoinCube, to summarize my prior two rebuttals in one sentence:
My confidence comes from the math of statistical confidence of repeatability of cyclical patterns; and the well documented astounding performance of Armstrong's cyclical turn dates from the 1980s to present has convinced me that his computer has verified the necessary statistical confidence for each cyclical pattern it has identified.
Human error is thus entirely irrelevant.
I understand that you doubt the documentation of his record of performance. You've even tried to hint that he might have back edited documents. Based on my intimate, multi-year, deep, daily study of Armstrong, I have come to the conclusion that your doubt is ludicrous and absurd. It is litany of factors which my mind has weighted statistically and determined the odds of Armstrong being a fraud is unlikely. My confidence interval is roughly 95% at this point, as I mentioned upthread yesterday.
P.S. the stress of Armstrong's reality is so bitter for you to swallow, you will naturally attempt denial for as long as you can. This is human nature.
iamback this is by far your best reply to my critiques of Armstrong. I want to clarify that I did not state that he back edits his predictions. I only stated that I have seen him edit one post (to correct an error in my opinion and for clarity in your opinion). I stated that I did not know if this was a widespread practice. You have reported that he does not back edit his predictions. The edit I saw was not an edit of a prediction. Since you follow him closely I have no reason to doubt you on this. To try to defend Armstrong and his models as perfect, however, is in my opinion a losing proposition. No humans and no models are 100%. Even if Armstrong is exactly what he says he is and his supercomputer does exactly what he claims each additional predictions he makes (especially short term market predictions) increase the chances he will get one wrong. I believe he got one wrong with his weather prediction as I documented. You think I am misinterpreting his prediction. Regardless, given enough predictions it is a certainty that Armstrong will get one wrong. No matter how sophisticated and accurate his cyclical modeling it cannot be perfect. Judging a prognosticator like Armstrong is not a binary decision always wrong or always right. Rather it is an assessment of reliability. With that in mind if you have time it would be helpful if your sourced with links your list of Armstrong predictions above. You mentioned several that I did not have on my list that I do not have the source for. I very much have an open mind regarding Armstrong. As I stated upthread I believe his prediction of a sovereign debt crisis that starts 2015.75 seems likely to happen. I honestly have no idea if he is legitimate or an opportunistic but talented fake. That is why I am interested in documenting both his potential inconsistencies (as I have done) and his future predictions. Further data will help. This back in fourth has also inspired me to dig a little deeper and as I have time I will start go go through Armstrong's earlier writings starting with his prison writings. Perhaps once I do that I will share your confidence in him. |
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