It Ain't Necessarily So

I didn't have a lot of time on the weekend to look this stuff up, but maybe I will when you're gone this time. For some reason, I didn't readily find the article I read a few years ago. Maybe it's all been changed in typical Wiki fashion, or maybe I typed the wrong key words in the search box. Sometimes I get to clicking on things and end up somewhere, not knowing exactly how I got there. I used to have a similar problem with the old fashioned print encyclopedias. I would start reading something that caught my interest on the way to somewhere else, and pretty soon I would forget why I came there in the first place. As disorganized as I am about stuff like that, it's a wonder I did so well in school.

When the paper mill was closing down, we all had to roll our retirement funds over into some kind of IRA or else we would have had to pay a big tax on it. They gave us some classes on the subject and I did some independent reading and talked about it a lot with my colleagues. We had about a year's warning that the mill was closing, which gave us time to make decisions and plans. Before that, the only thing I knew about the stock market was that, if you get involved in it, you will end up jumping out a window sooner or later. Having recently been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the computer age, I knew that the biggest barrier to understanding anything new is getting over the notion that you're not supposed to understand it. The next thing you need to do is realize that you don't have to learn everything there is to know about a subject, you just need to learn the parts that pertain to what you are trying to do. You can always look up some of the other stuff later as the need arises.

Like I said, I soon decided that complicated high risk investments like futures contracts were not my cup of tea, but that doesn't mean other people shouldn't do it. If somebody wants to put their time and money into something like that, what's the harm in it? It's their time and money after all, it's not mine and it's not yours. Just because somebody gets rich doing something that you or I choose not to do doesn't necessarily mean that they are crooks or fools. Of course some of them are probably crooks or fools, just like some poor people are crooks or fools. Being rich or poor doesn't necessarily make you a good guy or a bad guy, any more than being White, Black, Hispanic, or gay does.