INSIGHTS
APR
9
COSTA’S CORNER
“Never argue with stupid people. They will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”
Thank you, Mark Twain, for wrapping up stupidity so succinctly.
Examples of stupidity abound in society, just go on Twitter or Instagram for an hour. Go search stupid cat tricks on YouTube and I am sure three million videos will pop up. Stupid people are all around us.
If you have been following the “Pay to Easy entry” scandal with Felicity Huffman, Laurie Loughlin, et al, you know what I am talking about.
Simply put, these well to do parents paid an “college advisor” to help get their kids into elite schools across the country. They had the kids SAT tests taken by someone else, they had the kids pose on rowing machines to make it look like they were training for the rowing team they were not on. They “donated” money to certain schools they did not attend themselves all in the hopes of getting their kids into schools they probably did not deserve to attend. Taking the place of students who had worked very hard and qualified to attend those schools.
There are levels of stupidity here that defy explanation. First and foremost, they want you to believe the kids had no idea that their parents were pulling strings and paying off people to get them into these elite schools.
Come on now.
You’re a high school junior and you are a mediocre student at best. You spend your summers in the Hamptons or traveling with your family. You have no interest in sports or science or anything every other kid does to pad his resume’ and you get into USC or Yale. Those kids didn’t know?
Let’s be serious, they may not have appreciated the work their parents were putting in, trying to get them entry but you can never convince me that the kids did not know.
You believe it? I won’t argue with you.
Another example, and I don’t have an explanation for it, is the incessant robocalling everyone with a cellphone suffers through.
State governments and the Federal government are all putting legislation to curb these calls and that’s a good thing, but it is not nearly enough.
Verizon ATT and T-Mobile all have apps you can download to block these nuisance calls but it’s still not enough.
These robo dialers and Jack from US Pharmacy most likely, don’t originate in the US. They have sophisticated programmers that find a way around the robo blocking programs and still get through. The tally I read is that over five billion of those calls were made last month in the US. Doing the math, I think that’s a little low since my phone receives roughly 7 of these calls a day. Multiply that by 150,000,000 cellphones in use by 31 days and the number is more like 32 billion.
The number is somewhere in between I’m sure.
Anyway, the reason these calls exist is because of the belief that Americans are stupid. I know that hurts but how else can you explain people spending the time and resources developing these automatic calling programs if people weren’t on the other end of the line buying something from them?
Someone is answering the phone, listening to the pitch and placing an order for something, otherwise these robocallers would give up and find another way.
That’s my rant for the week. Still hanging tough on my allocations but I am sensing we will see a mild signal to reallocate resources soon. Stay tuned.
50% Stocks
25% Fixed Income
25% Cash
Thank you, Mark Twain, for wrapping up stupidity so succinctly.
Examples of stupidity abound in society, just go on Twitter or Instagram for an hour. Go search stupid cat tricks on YouTube and I am sure three million videos will pop up. Stupid people are all around us.
If you have been following the “Pay to Easy entry” scandal with Felicity Huffman, Laurie Loughlin, et al, you know what I am talking about.
Simply put, these well to do parents paid an “college advisor” to help get their kids into elite schools across the country. They had the kids SAT tests taken by someone else, they had the kids pose on rowing machines to make it look like they were training for the rowing team they were not on. They “donated” money to certain schools they did not attend themselves all in the hopes of getting their kids into schools they probably did not deserve to attend. Taking the place of students who had worked very hard and qualified to attend those schools.
There are levels of stupidity here that defy explanation. First and foremost, they want you to believe the kids had no idea that their parents were pulling strings and paying off people to get them into these elite schools.
Come on now.
You’re a high school junior and you are a mediocre student at best. You spend your summers in the Hamptons or traveling with your family. You have no interest in sports or science or anything every other kid does to pad his resume’ and you get into USC or Yale. Those kids didn’t know?
Let’s be serious, they may not have appreciated the work their parents were putting in, trying to get them entry but you can never convince me that the kids did not know.
You believe it? I won’t argue with you.
Another example, and I don’t have an explanation for it, is the incessant robocalling everyone with a cellphone suffers through.
State governments and the Federal government are all putting legislation to curb these calls and that’s a good thing, but it is not nearly enough.
Verizon ATT and T-Mobile all have apps you can download to block these nuisance calls but it’s still not enough.
These robo dialers and Jack from US Pharmacy most likely, don’t originate in the US. They have sophisticated programmers that find a way around the robo blocking programs and still get through. The tally I read is that over five billion of those calls were made last month in the US. Doing the math, I think that’s a little low since my phone receives roughly 7 of these calls a day. Multiply that by 150,000,000 cellphones in use by 31 days and the number is more like 32 billion.
The number is somewhere in between I’m sure.
Anyway, the reason these calls exist is because of the belief that Americans are stupid. I know that hurts but how else can you explain people spending the time and resources developing these automatic calling programs if people weren’t on the other end of the line buying something from them?
Someone is answering the phone, listening to the pitch and placing an order for something, otherwise these robocallers would give up and find another way.
That’s my rant for the week. Still hanging tough on my allocations but I am sensing we will see a mild signal to reallocate resources soon. Stay tuned.
50% Stocks
25% Fixed Income
25% Cash