(no subject)

More for my own reference than anything else: Jim "Mad Money" Cramer called the stock market bottom on July 23rd:

“I am indeed sticking my neck out right here, right now,” Cramer continued, “declaring emphatically that I believe the market will not revisit the panicked lows it hit on July 15. And I think anyone out there who’s waiting for that low to be breached is in for a big disappointment, and [they’re] missing a great deal of upside.”

“Stop waiting,” he said, and “buy the next dip because I think it might be the last big one.”

The DOW was at 11,632 on July 23rd. It closed yesterday at 7,552, a loss of 35% in total value since Cramer's "bottom" call.

Also on that note: Rand Simberg on how the bailouts may actually be making things worse by injecting uncertainty into the market about what the government is going to do next. The ad-hoc nature of the bailouts - AIG gets one, Lehman Brothers doesn't, Fanny/Freddie Mac gets one, the automakers don't (or will they?) - where the standards are fluid, basically at Paulson's will, is the main problem as I read it. The ripple effect of the bailouts themselves are too complex for me to provide a reasoned analysis over, and I'm skeptical of anyone who says they fully understand how exactly everything is interacting at this point, either. I see it as being like a bay after a tsunami hits: extremely chaotic, with no idea from what direction the water's going to come next.

The crazy, it is no stopping!

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2008/11/20/111855/94

I have known since very early on that I have an insight into the minds of other mentally ill folk that very few others possess. While psychiatrists and therapists can acquire it, many years and a great deal of very hard work are required. But it seems I was born with this insight.

I have never actually met anyone else who possesses my ability, but some of the mental health professionals I've discussed it with understood very well what I was doing, and were able to explain it to me, so the phenomenon is at least known to medical science. While I have mentioned it, I haven't discussed it much with my many Kuron friends. But I have demonstrated this insight many times to others, and for many years, and have discussed it at some length with many of the professionals I have known.

One example is that I can make schizophrenics stop hallucinating. But I have never tried to actually heal anyone, only to offer a little temporary relief. What I don't understand is how I gained this insight - it was never anything I ever studied. The first I ever noticed it in myself, it was already fully developed. To wield the power this insight gives me is no more difficult for me than it is to have brown hair.

"I have insight...that few others possess." "I have never witnessed anyone else do what I can easily do." Messiah complex, much?

(UPDATE: But then, I should be charitable and remember Heinlein's advice about braggarts: "This sad little lizard told me that he was a brontosaurus on his mother's side. I did not laugh; people who boast of ancestry often have little else to sustain them. Humoring them costs nothing and adds to happiness in a world in which happiness is always in short supply.")

PC Magazine and USNWR abandon print versions

both decide to go all-digital early next year:
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=081119192919.36ul595y&show_article=1

...which means I probably won't be reading either very much after that. Digital editions don't transfer well to reading on the bus, which is the only time I get to read magazines these days. Of course, if my commuter bus gets canceled in January as the MTA has planned to do, I wouldn't have time to read anymore anyway since I'll be driving in to work every day.