Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!

In this Discussion

Here's a statement of the obvious: The opinions expressed here are those of the participants, not those of the Mutual Fund Observer. We cannot vouch for the accuracy or appropriateness of any of it, though we do encourage civility and good humor.

    Support MFO

  • Donate through PayPal

Can somebody explain the differentiation between the “On Topic” and “Off Topic” boards?

edited March 2022 in Off-Topic
Some threads in off-topic like “Bitcoin Hacked”, “Bill to freeze Russian Gold Reserves” or “Starlink” seem to have more in common with investing than some like “Putin” over on the other side. Or am I just being picky?

Comments

  • Hank, you're not being picky. I used to attempt (Fund Alarm) to twist words with meanings to travel a thought in two directions. A blend of a political action that would likely have an affect on investing. Roy and I had several nice email exchanges after he would kill a post he thought went too far way from investing in funds.:)

    At MFO, I decide what "event/information" I think will/may/can affect our investments. My Russian gold post could have been, other investing.

    There will be those who will disagree with a category posting. I always expect that someone here should state their difference of opinion about a topic. But, I also expect proper manners in any debate, not a rant. For the most part, I've always been a "facts" person; although I'm fully open to the "this is just how I feel person", but then I'm going to ask "why" do you feel as you do.
  • I can't-sometimes for me, other investing and off topic boards blend together. I'm at the point where I'm grateful the political alternative facts and nonsense is largely confined to Off-Topic!
  • That was the hope when the present setup was established.
  • catch22 said:

    ”There will be those who will disagree with a category posting. I always expect that someone here should state their difference of opinion about a topic. But, I also expect proper manners in any debate, not a rant.”

    Agree. And I’m not aware of any rants (at least recently). I noticed one lengthy thread where some questioned the placement and were met by rebuke from the poster. I did not read much of the thread because when I’m on the investment side of the board I’m looking for investment information and there appeared little contained in that thread.
  • edited March 2022
    To the Off T folks, the people on the On T side want to silo investing in a sterile modern portfolio theory fantasyland ruled by a rational amoral homo economicus where the market has no connection to life, reality, the vast majority of people, fauna and flora on the planet who don't own stocks, Keynesian economics, pure greed or the political sphere. To the On T folks, the Off T folks are EAPs who have to drag their woke philosophy into everything and ruin all their completely innocent guilt-free money making. One can buy, for instance, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), and pretend it doesn't have any connection whatsoever to the history of slavery:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison

    https://nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/prison-industrial-complex-slavery-racism.html?mtrref=duckduckgo.com&gwh=8F82DF17206CF194D3A16481879BBF2B&gwt=pay&assetType=PAYWALL

    Of course, by making these unseemly connections to how investable businesses are actually run and the consequences they have for human beings one becomes an EAP.
    I suppose though mentioning this would qualify as a rant, but then going on and on about how the now multi-trillion dollar ESG movement is inefficient and must lag the market for leaving companies like CCA out of one's portfolio doesn't qualify as a rant:
    https://wsj.com/articles/why-the-sustainable-investment-craze-is-flawed-11642865789
    That's despite the fact there are now many solid low-cost ESG funds.
  • FWIW : It seems to me all is going good in the different topic categorizes.
  • edited March 2022
    No argument with any of the above. Just trying to clarify why there are two categories. I’m as guilty as anyone of trespassing beyond the dividing line - however it is defined. I think not having the OT section surface as one legitimate category when someone logs on does relegate it to some type of “inferior” status. If it’s considered a legitimate and valuable contributor to MFO why is it less visible when logging on?

    Per @Catch22’s point, MFO’s forerunner, Fund Alarm did not distinguish among different categories. Roy Wietz moderated with a firm (decidedly undemocratic) hand. Topics not related to investing quickly disappeared - though good humor was often evident in discussions. They say “You can’t go back to the past”, and I think that’s true in this case. Investing has changed since the days of FA; society has changed; the internet has changed; and we as investors have changed.

    @Old_Joe probably understands better than anyone the rationale for creating the OT section and also the reason(s) for making its existence partially hidden (requiring clicking on an extra link). ISTM Ted’s occasional abuses had something to do with its creation. If so, it might raise the question of whether or not OT still serves a purpose. @LewisBraham was a bit uncharacteristically verbose - but I took away from his post that topics often deemed by some as “off topic” do really bear on investing in a direct or indirect way and need to be included in investing discussions.

    Thanks all for helping clarify. The board exists for everyone. Nice to see so many still find value in this wonderful community or investors / thinkers.

  • It's a long and involved story and to an extent does involve posters who are no longer present, as @hank alludes to. Lewis Braham's comments are something of a parody, but contain more than a germ of truth.

    Here's the situation, highly abridged, but as succinct as I can make it.

    • In the past, any post in the OT section (category) which had a response would "graduate" into the "Discussions that have Comments" (DTHC) section. That section is widely visited and read by a large number of MFO participants.

    • Also in the past, a number of posters extended considerations of financial subjects to include examination of underlying political aspects.

    • Predictably, this generated response from others who had differing political opinions. This led to hostile posting exchanges resembling the mindless warfare typical of the reader commentary found in the Wall Street Journal. If you've been there, you know exactly what I mean.

    • Sometimes these posts were made in the OT section, sometimes not. In any case, because of the then-operative MFO software parameters all of this contentious posting became highly visible in the DTHC section.

    • This deterioration of MFO civility was definitely not appreciated by the majority of MFO posters, who prefer, as Lewis nicely puts it, "to silo investing in a sterile modern portfolio theory fantasyland".

    Here's where I'm really abridging the story:

    • David Snowball, determined to salvage civility, made it clear that politically charged commentary was not particularly welcome, and further, that any such commentary was to be confined to the OT section. In fact, he seriously considered eliminating the OT section altogether.

    • He was persuaded by a fast-talking MFO poster, as an alternative, to reconfigure the MFO software so that it would no longer "escalate" into the DTHC section, thus removing it from sight unless someone specifically visited the OT section.

    He made it clear that we were to exercise good judgement in the assignment of a category to our posts, with the underlying suggestion that if this was not done, the OT section would be permanently discontinued, and that inappropriate posts would be severely monitored and deleted.

    That is pretty much where we are now. As a personal comment, I would like to say that in the past couple of months I've noticed some "leakage" of what really should be classified as OT posts over into the "sterile" financial sections. Those particular posts have not been at all controversial, but still, I would hope that we all take care to play by the rules that David set down for us.

    With David stepping away from the daily oversight, it's particularly important that we don't rock the boat, and make life as easy as possible for the new management crew.

    Regards to all-
    OJ
  • edited March 2022
    OJ summed it up quite nicely. The drift I've seen lately seems to be in that grey zone called "Other Investing." In the world of Star Trek it might be called the Neutral Zone.
  • edited March 2022
    To @LewisBraham: Let me be VERY clear about this: I may be an EAP, but I'm sure as hell not "woke", and have no intention whatever of "waking up" any time soon. There's enough of that nonsense here in SF to make me choke. A couple of weeks ago "they" changed the old, prestigious and landmark Sir Francis Drake Hotel to the totally generic "Beacon Grand", because Drake "was a pirate and he had slaves". "Beacon Grand" my ass.

    The group of idiots who comprise our SF School Board had nothing better to do for a year or so than come up with the names of 44 schools which were to have their names changed, also because they either had slaves at some point or had committed some other egregious "woke" transgression.

    On that list were the Abraham Lincoln and George Washington high schools, as well as schools named for naturalist John Muir, Spanish priest Junipero Serra, American Revolution patriot Paul Revere, Francis Scott Key, composer of the “Star Spangled Banner", Dianne Feinstein, and of course, Thomas Jefferson. Diane is in pretty good company, I'd say.

    41 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence had slaves at some point. I would imagine that to be consistent the "woke" clowns would like to either change all their names or maybe just conveniently erase them from history.

    Grrrrrrrr!

    Signed: OJ (he/him/EAP)
  • edited March 2022
    Lewis- very good- the Neutral Zone- I like that. :)

    ps- no hard feelings!

    OJ
  • edited March 2022
    Not saying you are "woke," but it's funny how the right-wing calls the left "woke" as an insult, but the left doesn't call the right "asleep." I feel like the asleep narrative is much older than the woke one and has been largely overlooked as a problem for, well, centuries. So, now young folks who are sick of the old ways are forcing the issue on everything when they should perhaps save their ammunition for the most egregious pressing offenses, or they won't be taken seriously.

    Anyone looking at a company like CCA closely will realize the issues with it and the privatized prison industry are genuinely pressing and problematic in the U.S. A for-profit prison system incentivizes punishment, and historically has been used as a means to continue slave labor as the 13th amendment excluded prisoners from anti-slavery rules. You can't have justice and certainly will never have rehabilitation when it's profitable to keep people in prison.
  • edited March 2022
    No argument at all. You just happened to hit a nerve. Living in this city drives me nuts, sometimes.

    "when they should perhaps save their ammunition for the most egregious pressing offenses" is exactly right on.
  • The problem I have with the Sir Francis Drake story you described is that such name changes are just cosmetic and don't really address the pressing problems we have today. There is racism now in our justice system and there is massive income inequality and so many real issues to address. Changing the name of a hotel doesn't solve them.
  • Exactly.
  • If a few more statues are removed the problem will be fixed ?! Just kidding while grinding my teeth !! Part of the history of this great country , be it good or bad !
    My $.02 , Derf
  • edited March 2022
    The statues I feel differently about, depending on which one. Most of the Confederate statues had nothing to with "preserving history" when they were erected as they were put up decades after the Civil War during the height of the Klan in the 1900s:
    https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/confederate-statues/
    The biggest spike in Confederate memorials came during the early 1900s, soon after Southern states enacted a number of sweeping laws to disenfranchise Black Americans and segregate society. During this period, more than 400 monuments were built as part of an organized strategy to reshape Civil War history. And this effort was largely spearheaded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who sponsored hundreds of statues, predominantly in the South in the early 20th century — and as recently as 2011.
    Their whole reason for existing is to intimidate African Americans and they should come down. That said, statues of America's founders are a different story.
  • edited March 2022
    +1 Thanks for the history @Old_Joe. I didn’t know (or remember) how convoluted the whole process had been. Guess we’re fortunate to be where we are. Yes - the new folks at the helm need and deserve everyone’s support.
  • edited March 2022
    @hank- That was the short version. We don't even want to think about the long one.

    (Signed: a fast-talking MFO poster)
  • And I snapped a screen shot. It’s a classic.
Sign In or Register to comment.