As mentioned on another thread, I've tried to shoot RAW and I guess I'm just too dense to learn to use a RAW editor. I've played around extensively with several editors and I just can't seem to figure it out even though I'm a life long photographer and retired from 35 years of computer software engineering. I have a camera that takes both RAW and Jpeg and I can't edit the raw file to even get it to look as good as the same Jpeg. There are so many variables and any time I touch any of them I make the image worse than it was!

Maybe a stupid question and I think that I know the answer, but I'm going to ask it here for clarification anyway. We all know that the .jpeg format compresses the picture data and that the data deleted is gone forever unless otherwise backed up with another type file that doesn't use compression. This can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it. Anyway, this compression obviously takes place when the original edited RAW file is converted to .jpeg, but does this also happen every time I make a copy of the .jpeg file? If I do a simple file copy to move a .jpeg file from one location to another, do I get the complete original .jpeg data or is it compressed again even if the picture is unedited?

This has been a heated discussion and I cannot remember when JPEG vs RAW was discussed previously in the forum that so much controversy was generated. I have seen some insults and disrespect for others opinions.
I have always stated that I use both files depending on the subject. I know excellent professional photographers that only use JPEG files for wedding photography and they are doing very well. If you know what you are doing a JPEG image offers lots of manipulation in post.
Yes, RAW files record all the information present at the time of the exposure and from there on it is all in the hands and creativity of the photographer when using editing software. To use the file it has to be converted to a JPEG and we loose the 14 bits, the color gradations and the color space if it was a wide color space like ProPhoto. If we save the file in the RGB color space there is no commercial printer that I know off that will be able to print that file. When I shoot JPEG I save as a TIFF in case I do further manipulation of the image in the future. What I have done has worked very well for me.
No need to talk about copying a JPEG file, it has been discussed already and Jerry among others have proved that saving a JPEG several times do no do harm to the file. I cannot speak on behalf of others but I can say that I have been very satisfied with the quality of my JPEG images and many of my best enlargements have come from those files.
No matter if we shoot RAW or JPEG, that is for each individual photographer to decide. RAW files will end up as JPEG at one time or another and those files will be compressed and data will be lost.
Modern JPEG images have come a long way since I started photographing digitally back in 2002. The majority of us cannot see the changes that take place when a 12 or 14 bits image is converted to 8 bits nor we can see either the changes in colors that take place from one color space to the other. There are millions of colors involved.
To make this short, shoot the image file you prefer but do not tell me that there is no quality in an original JPEG because that is not true.