profitable

Question from a reader:”I am planning on continuing my education and getting a degree in Engineering but I am scared that by the time I get out of college that my skillsets may be obsolete because of new technology.  What should I do, Kim?”

My answer is welcome to the realities of the life that we live and  lead.  I am constantly retraining and re-educating myself and what you will have to do is prepare for a lifetime of retraining.  Oh, it isn’t as bad as you think it is and it does sound terrible.  Consider this though, your brain will be kept young from all the education that you are constantly pouring into it.

I re-train and take 30-90 hours of tax re-certification each year as well as whatever else I need or am interested in.  You need to be disciplined to make a constant effort to want to relearn things.  Once your brain is engaged you should have no problems retraining unless you decide you want to change fields of study.

If you are doing that, be prepared to spend a lot of midnight oil learning things from the ground up.  If for example you are taking a Life Sciences class and you had something similar ten years ago, expect the subject to have changed with new discoveries and a different approach to learning.

My best to you.  You sound like you will do okay and just be ready to retrain.

Here is an excerpt from my new book, “Practical Gaming” that will be coming out in September 2009.  I hope you like it.

EXCERPT FROM “PRACTICAL GAMING” by Kim Isaac Greenblatt

The Coin Toss Casino

Welcome to Kim’s Coin Toss Casino.  We are starting off here so you can get an idea of when you are playing a game what elements you need to take into account.  We are starting off with the one game in my casino, namely flipping a coin. 

There are two sides to the coin-one side is heads and the other one is tails.  The way the game is played is pretty simple.  You call out loud what you think will come out when the coin is tossed in the air, caught and thrown by hand on the back of my other hand.  We will pretend to make this game interesting, since it is a casino, that you bet a dollar for each call and if you call “Heads”, and it comes up “Heads” I pay you a dollar.  If it comes up “Tails”, I pay you the dollar.

Pretty simple, yes?  Are you following me so far?  Great!

Now the odds of you getting the correct call are as follows:

Heads – 50%
Tails   – 50%

That also is reflected as 1 out of 2 for each chance.  That means that there is a one out of two chance that you will toss “Heads” and a one out of two chance that you will toss “Tails”.

That means that all things being fair and equal, with no cheating, no fixed coin, every coin toss gives you an even chance that your call will be the correct one and if you are betting a dollar that you would win $1.

Now for the purposes of this illustration I am not making any money on this in my casino.  I make my money by not having an air conditioner, having my casino in the desert and charging $100 for each glass of water.  As you might imagine, I don’t get too many customers in my casino.

Now we come to the questions and answers that drive gamers  nuts.

Here is the first set-up.  You come to one of my tables and a good looking girl elbows you and says, “Wow, I am on a streak.  I have tossed ‘Heads’ five times in a row.  I think there is no way that I can throw another ‘Heads’.  In fact, the odds are that I am going to throw a ‘Tails’.  It is due.”

Is it? 

The answer is no, the odds are still one out of two that the coin will come up heads.  It is a fifty-fifty shot and it can be that our good looking coin toss girl is just on a lucky streak.

The incorrect observation that the girl presented is called, “The Gambler’s Fallacy.”  The definition of the Gambler’s fallacy is the belief that if deviations from expected behavior are observed in repeated independent trials of some random process then these deviations are likely to be evened out by opposite deviations in the future.

That is quite a mouthful but what it is saying is that just because you have seen something happen with random events, it doesn’t mean that things will balance out while you are there watching them.

So what is the probability that you could flip two heads in a row? 

Well, you have a matrix of flips as follows:

Flip 1: H or T
Flip 2:  H or T

Combinations that result could be:

HT
TH
HH
TT

That should be a 1 out of 4 chance that you would throw two heads back to back.  The interesting thing is that the longer a streak continues, the more likely that you should go with the streak and not consider when it is ending from a math point of view.

How about in your daily life?

That is the end of the excerpt.  For more information, please keep following the blog and you should see the book available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and any fine bookstore within a few weeks.  Part of all sales go to research Rett Syndrome as usual.

Aug 27 2009

Also, please  don’t quite go anywhere yet.  Having some tax issues or tax questions?  Any problems with trying to make it through the financial Depression we are in that is making you depressed?  Please read on.

I am expanding  my practice and taking on new tax clients.  If you are interested in having somebody who is a successful businessman and tax professional with integrity review your returns discretely and see if your tax guy or gal is doing a good or goofy job, please drop me an email or post a comment with your contact information and time.

I have experience in international business, small businesses, partnerships, multi-state tax returns (they can get complicated) and anything else you can probably think of.

I also do business consulting and have ran several businesses (still running a few) myself so you are in good hands.

If you are looking for a day job, part time work, suggestions for saving money or investing, please check out my book, Practical Money Making, that is listed right after his paragraph in this very post. There are some great suggestions and ways to survive the Depression we are in.

Practical Money Making-Surviving Recession, Layoffs, Credit Problems, Generating Passive Income Streams, Working Full Time or Part Time and Retirement

Interested in any of my books? You may want to make a stop over here. Please click through to purchase my books and some other interesting items that actually ARE on sale.

Have you read my book, “Bad Tax Idea, Good Tax Idea“? Please order it today. The tips inside can save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars! Tax planning should be done year round and not just two weeks into January or later.

Part of all the proceeds from the sales of that book go to Rett Syndrome research. One girl is born with Rett Syndrome worldwide every fifteen minutes. My daughter Arianna has Rett.  Thanks for your support.

Kim Isaac Greenblatt

Plan for your future with contingencies

Tags: Business, Practical Gaming

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