> Robin, would you care to make a Julian Simon/Paul Ehrlich style bet on
> stock prices ten years from now? (The difficulty will be in agreeing on
> an index to use.)
Pick 5 or 10 large downtown office buildings in various cities that you expect to be still standing in 10 years. Each of you invest, on paper, $10000 in (Max) shares of a publicly traded company occupying the building, and (Robin) the land on which the building sits. To be scrupulously fair, the starting and ending stock prices should both be reduced by the percentage of the company's market value that is composed of its real estate assets.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC