Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Spiels I like to give

I have a couple things planned out to say whenever the occasion arises. I figure I should write them down before I become senile and forget about them. This means that some of you will be bored by this post, as you've already heard these.

Stocks: I really don't understand what a stock is. If I went back in time and had to modernize an economy, I wouldn't know how to describe the concept of a stock. A company decides it wants to bring in some money, so it issues some pieces of paper to the public. These pieces of paper allow you to vote in shareholder meetings, but the founders of the company typically give themselves a majority holding to start out with, so this isn't a very useful thing. The company is then under no obligation to buy back the shares, pay dividends, or in any other way make your stock valuable. What you hope will happen is that someone will look at this company and decide that they really want this worthless piece of paper and buy it from you. It just makes no sense. And then there's the fact that money is never created in the stock market. For every gain there is a loss somewhere along the line. Stocks just give us with too much money something more to buy than goods and services.

Peeing: For some reason, men like to stand when they pee. At a urinal, this makes sense, because there is no where to sit. However, it makes absolutely no sense to stand and pee into a regular toilet. Let's look at this for a moment: Why do women yell at you to lift the seat up before you pee? Because you miss and/or splatter and urine gets on the toilet seat. Now, why is it ok for this splatter to land on the rim of the toilet bowl and surrounding floor? It's just plain nasty.

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