Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

A Match Made in Heaven

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As most of you know, last year I introduced SocialTrade, a social web site for traders who wanted to share charts and articles with one another. The idea was simple: if any of you saw a chart or article they wanted to “stack” into the library of SocialTrade, they could do so with a couple of mouse clicks, and all the users of SocialTrade could view, comment upon, and restack those items to various categories of their own choosing. (more…)

Welcome To Keynesian Shangri-La

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Welcome to your new destination. A place once believed only to exist in the imaginations of dreamers, and Keynesian’s the world over. A place where market fundamentals, free markets, and more seem to no longer have relevancy in the world. However, make no mistake about it – we have now arrived.

The Keynesian argument has been made for decades. I wonder if the man (John Maynard Keynes) would be impressed with just how much his ideology is so vehemently held in the halls of academia and political circles. Many religious devotees pale in comparison. (more…)

So What’s New?

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Welcome Slopers, one and all, to the new Slope of Hope!

Since the vast majority of you are well-acquainted with the old blog, let me point out some important differences. I’m going to leave this post up for a good long while so lots of people see it.

(1) The Slope and SocialTrade user databases have been merged into one, and to log in, just use your email address and your password. I say again: your old username has no meaning to the new database. Use your email address from now on.

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My Youthful Friendship with Death

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I’ve never been rattled by human death.  I’d probably be a better grief counselor for those who have lost pets, since that has always affected me far more deeply. Even the event of losing my most brilliant engineer – which I’ve written about at some length – didn’t really shake me for a few days.

But I bring up death as a segue to sharing a tale I’ve been meaning to share for many years. It is about the death of a friend when I was 18 years old, and his name was Kurt McFall.

As a thirteen-year old, I moved out with my family to the little town of Moraga, a suburb of San Francisco which was described as a “bedroom community” (which was a polite way of saying a solidly upper-middle class town; not as well-to-do or high-strung as Palo Alto, but close). About fifteen miles northeast was a city called Concord, which was larger, more lower-middle class, and pretty much a place most Moraga kids would have no reason to visit.

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