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That's right. (One might also wonder why it works this way.) By the way, Wikipedia has an entry for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloppy_identity.

From another thread: There is a generalization of this "sloppy identity" between anaphoric expression (here "do so", meaning "donate her body to the local medical school") and antecedent expression used to interpret it (here "donate my body to the local medical school") which says that...

The interpretation of "did so" raises an interesting grammatical issue, which (as I understand it) I am precluded from commenting on here.

Yes, that's what I said. That's why the universal principle "there is a limit to what any human can do for another" is wrong. It's just not true.

Which word did I take too literally? "Any"? "Human"? What is the general way of understanding his message that I missed?

I didn't express what I meant very clearly. I didn't mean that individuals can't do better than mutual funds on costs (by trading less), but rather I meant that mutual funds can trade a given share for less, because they trade in large blocks and, probably, they can negotiate lower per-share...

I imagine that my own capacity for this is probably limited. But recognizing that we may run up against our personal limits is a far cry from what you proposed, which was "there is a limit to what any human can do for another." I think we should recognize that some people have been able to...

That makes sense to me.

That sounds like fun, except maybe the lightning part.

I question whether that is true.

I have read that mutual funds pay less for trading costs than individual investors do. I think that deserves mention when comparing pros and cons of owning stocks directly. (If it was mentioned earlier in this thread, I'm sorry that I didn't notice it.)

But that course was open to you, too, wasn't it? Do you envy those other people for having made more fortunate choices than you did? If you don't, you have nothing to complain of. If you do envy them, why is it their fault that you chose foolishly? In that case also, you have nothing to...

Traditional dance in Zomba, Cape Maclear, Malawi

Paranoia runs strong here. (I'm rather paranoid, myself -- I wouldn't trust a banker.)

The other side of this is that you may be able to do better than you thought, or your children may. My mother cared for her father-in-law for several years at the end of his life, and when her turn came, I cared for her, for about 2 years. It's within normal human capacities to do this. Well...

Your program sounds great, and I think everyone does need to do it.

Probably holding gold would have been better than the gold stock mutual fund I used for an IRA back in the mid 70s, but that IRA has done really, really poorly. After all these years, it's only doubled in value, while the IRA my wife started about the same time, which used a small cap mutual...

Zenni just sent me email that orders >$50 are being shipped for free.

Good for the Greeks, and good for me. I'm congratulating myself for investing all my cash on Tuesday afternoon.

If online communities sometimes encourage people to make risky financial decisions, that may be a good thing. The article seems to take "risk" in the popular sense of "downside risk", but some people lose out through not taking on enough risk.

I think it is a win-win. It might be real money to a few employees near retirement if it applied to them, but the proposed bill affected only new hires.

I don't make it a matter of motivation. If I did, I couldn't keep it up, because I'm not good at motivational stuff. Every morning, I do it without wanting to or asking myself why do it. To be is to exercise.

I hope that's right, and thank you for the clarification. (I still think the referenced article is not clear.)

If I knew that buying an affordable LTC policy would keep me from winding up in that scary scary place, I'd buy it in a second. But there are a lot of problems here. For instance, how do I know that the LTC insurance will buy me a place any less scary than Medicaid would get me? How do I know...

As I understand it, the state's current plan is to increase taxes/fees/employee contributions over 30 years to achieve full funding of the pension fund, probably assuming 7.75% earnings on the portfolio. So maybe you could estimate how much each household will save each year through the...