It only seems like yesterday that we were all driving around with citizens band rigs in our cars and base stations in our homes. That was a long time ago back in the twentieth century when all that stuff was state of the art. Sales were in the millions and seemed as though they were endless. The airways were so crowded that a person could hardly get a word in edgewise! CB was the big thing. Anyone with a head for business could see where this was leading. CB really brought home the point that people like to socialize. It was about that time that I realized that I was spending a great deal of valuable time on my rig and the novelty was also starting to wear off by the late seventies. I got tired of wasting my time on CB and had dropped out of it by 1980. The Rigs are now gathering dust in my attic somewhere. I decided to spend more time focusing on my business and my family activities.
Recent events in the stock market this week have caught my attention. For the past seventeen years that I have been doing business on the Internet I have often compared certain segments of the Internet to Citizens Band Radio. My basic conclusion is that while social networking can be very helpful in business and maybe even in your personal life, it definitely is a time thief. It is also opening the door to many seriously bad Internet experiences. Not everyone receives a happy ending. The real winners are the owner operators of these sites who reap millions of dollars in advertising revenues and that's OK by me. Advertising money is good clean money in most cases and the cheats get caught sooner or later.
I guess what I really want to say is that I'm not ready to invest in something that does not really offer any tangible assets and rides on the back of every whim and latest fad of the public. I remember Citizens Band Radio and how one day I blinked and it was gone. Oh well, at least all I have to show for it is a couple of dusty CB radios in my attic and not my life savings tied up in dusty bundles of stock certificates. All I'm saying is to look down the road a few years before you invest in anything because paper assets do not seem to have much stability, or value anymore. I don't look for huge gains. I look for solid investments in tangible assets.
If you like to gamble then go to the casino. You might have a better chance.
