Tuesday Tweets: July 17th, 2012 ? 6400 Personal Finance

I try to make sure that I keep my following activity on Twitter restricted to quality sources of information.? Newspapers are a fairly solid bet (Wall Street Journal) however some agencies apparently have as bad a staff managing their tweets as they do writing their reports, ahem,? Associated Press, looking at you.? Seriously, in the last ten years the quality of your articles plummeted and now I see half a dozen contributing authors listed for a 500-word piece that couldn?t get a passing grade in a freshman political science or? journalism course.? How did that happen?? But I digress.

Despite my attempt at censorship the forces of unrestricted freedom of speech manage to prevail a few times a day leaving me staring at the Twitter feed wondering why I signed up for the service in the first place.? Somehow Twitter took a society that already had a penchant for making itself look dumb on paper, on the radio, on TV, and on Facebook and got us to keep doing exactly that somewhere else?all while imposing on us a 140 character limit.? Hats off to the evil genius who came up with the idea.

That said some tweets do catch my eye for actually being interesting or (preferrably) linking to an interesting piece of writing that I hadn?t seen yet.? It is in those moments that Twitter redeems itself.

Below I present you with a mix of tweets (meaning their quality) with some feedback from yours truly.? The goal here is a little bit of education with a side of humor and as well as addressing some unresolved drill sergeant flashback issues that I might or might not have.

Tweet 04:? When was the last time that people weren?t overly sensitive to short-term volatility in recent memory?? Just scan the headlines everytime the S&P 500 rises or declines by more than 1% and you are almost guaranteed to find the word ?hope? alongside any move to the upside while ?fear? goes with the downside moves.

By the way, those two words are feelings, not facts.? I can hope that Coca-Cola stock will double in value every three months from now up until the day I die and it won?t change the value of the business one bit.? I can also fear that enough people will realize that smoking is actually bad for you that my Phillip Morris stock will implode but that still doesn?t change the value of the business.? Investing based on future projections that are supported by evidence is a perfectly sensible move, doing so based on hopes, dreams, and nightmares is stupid.

Tweet 05: File this under ?Obvious Headlines That People Click On Even Though They Know What The Article Is Going To Say.?? Look its not nice to pick on people who have a disease however I believe it is completely justified if that disease was brought on by a series of completely avoidable actions.? I got it, sometimes genetics screws you and sometimes you just get unlucky.? However when you live in a country where information overload on health matters is a fact of life then claiming that you had no idea that all that soda and cookies that you have been consuming for years was bad for you then there is no excuse.? Seriously, were any of you unaware that constantly causing your insulin levels to spike could have consequences?

Now before I start seeing the list of athletes who have died of heart attacks thrown back at me (see above: unlucky) let me ask you this: if you had the choice of performing an activity that would drastically reduce your chances of suffering from a fatal disease or cardiac event, would you do it?? Or would you point to the small percentage of people who both did that activity and still died and say that it clearly didn?t work?? If that is how you think then you might as well rack up as much credit card debt as you can because hey, you?ve heard of people getting all that written off right?? This health stuff is so easy that it would be a waste of my time to lay it out for you right now (but it wasn?t here LINK GYM ARTICLE).? Bottom line: take care of yourself and spare us the need for patronizingly simplistic health articles.

Tweet 06:? I cannot improve upon perfection.

Twitter survey for the week is now complete, come back tomorrow for something more closely related to this personal finance stuff that I?m supposed to be writing about.

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Source: http://6400personalfinance.com/2012/07/17/tuesday-tweets-2/

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