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Showing posts from February, 2015

Out of Beach

Recreating dream scenery in a video game.

Let Slip the Stocks of War

War is widely seen as indefensibly evil. Edwin Starr's question, " What is it good for ?" is clearly rhetorical. However, some like yours truly have a macabre fascination with the notion that it can enrich. The link between war and wealth was probably around before Nathan Rothschild reputedly used advance knowledge of Wellington's victory to enhance his fortune. God ordered the Israelites to plunder their enemies with fluctuating specificity . A family story has my great-grandfather reaping huge profits from selling surplus American military landing craft (that he just happened to have lying around the yard.) America's last wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are cast as cynical ploys to create customers out of victims. Keep Calm and Invest. Data tells its own story. In particular, we can cross reference periods where the U.S. was at war, against the S&P500 and its precursor index from 1940 to 2014. I would think that the massive government spending in mo