**** Way OT ****
Greg is a human being. True. A human being is Greg. False.
12 is a dozen. True. A dozen is 12. True.
"To be" has several meanings. One is "to have identity with," which is how you were reading it. Another is "to belong to the class of." I understood Tim's original statement ("but any investing is a gamble") to mean "an investment is a kind of gambling." You read it as "investing and gambling mean the same thing." We're both right, depending on how you interpret the statement.
But it's obvious which of those two that Tim meant. He wasn't trying to subsume all types of gambling within the ambit of investing, so it proves nothing if you come up with an example of a type of gambling that isn't a type of investing, or argue generally that not all gambling is investing.
Note that I didn't disagree with your conclusion. I happen to agree with you that investing is not like gambling, because investing entails educated decisions and reaping the benefits of human labor, whereas roulette is simply a matter of odds, no matter how much analysis or strategy you use. Even blackjack, when played by the rules (i.e., no counting at all, not even the +1/-1 simple count method), is a winning game for the player only if he or she beats the odds, which is impossible over the long term. Stock investing is nearly 100% likely to give a positive return over the long term.
But if you go around believing that the falsity of a converse proves the falsity of an original statement, eventually you're going to get humiliated when you end up getting your statement thrown back at you in a logic battle.
(Now, back to a dismal last half-hour of day trading, where it looks like I'll prove your point and close out my 400 ASND shares at a half-point loss for the day.) |
