papabrown's comments

The idea was that people benefitted more from staying in the market over a long period of time rather than maximizing their returns in any particular year.

So the fund was aimed to smooth out the peaks and valleys along the ride so investors would be more inclined to leave their money parked in the fund rather than getting a statement that said that they're down 30% and going to cash and missing the next run up.

>With one study suggesting ~25 million cryptocurrency traders outside the USA & Europe, it seems quite likely there are over 100 million owners of bitcoins.

>If true, it means about 1.3% of the world's population owns bitcoin.

I've seen a few other sources make a similar estimate using different methodologies.

In 1929 if the shoeshine guy was giving you stock tips, it signaled a very different level of market euphoria than today when your gym trainer is talking about stocks.

Also, today we live in a world where there's just so much more accessibility to information. Only about 1.3% of the planet has ever owned Bitcoin. About 13% of Americans have ever owned Bitcoin but 90% of Americans surveyed have heard of Bitcoin.

I don't mean this to be about Bitcoin, only trying to point out the massive gap between something that is relatively niche, and the number of news articles/stories, discussion, etc about it.

Many things are potential lurking time bombs. I can't think of a single period during any bullish market where you could not point to something and claim that that could be a potential end to the bull run.

The problem is when you are in the business of making predictions, if you just scream "Bear" long enough, eventually you'll be right and then you can write a book subtitled, "By the man who called the 2021 (or 2022 or 2023 or 2024 ...) stock crash" and people think you're some sort of genius.

>In fact, only approximately 10 percent of American households held stock investments and speculated in the market; yet nearly a third would lose their lifelong savings and jobs in the ensuing depression.

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-hostos-ushistory/chapt...

Yet, this poll seems to indicate that around 55% of Americans now hold stocks.

>Thus far in 2020, Gallup finds 55% of Americans reporting that they own stock, based on polls conducted in March and April. This is identical to the average 55% recorded in 2019 and similar to the average of 54% Gallup has measured since 2010.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/266807/percentage-americans-own...

So if slightly more than one out of every two people you meet owns stocks, I would assume you're bound to run into a lot of people talking about stocks.

You cannot conceal bubbles while on SCUBA.

Breath in, you begin to ascend. Breath out, you will sink.

Your goal is to find a breathing pattern that allows you to stay neutrally buoyant so you’re not fighting the rise and fall by swimming against it.

Part of the instructor exam, at least when I took it, was a pool session where they tested your ability to achieve and maintain neutral buoyancy.

You would sit cross legged holding your fins for balance like a meditator half way between the bottom and the surface and you could not rise or fall more than a foot.

It’s something a lot of divers also practice when doing safety stops. Even if there’s an ascent line, many will simply stop at 15 feet, and watch their dive computer trying to maintain exactly at 15 feet using only their breathing.

The reason for that is often there will be no ascent line or you may have to do decompression stops in open water with no physical point of reference.

I have 5 classroom sessions of about an hour each and two pool sessions and 4 open water dives to take you knowing nothing to keeping you from killing yourself.

When I first got certified as a diver, I would suck down a tank in 15 minutes. By the time I became an instructor, my longest dive on a single tank was close to 1.5 hours and I had plenty of air left.

It would be pointless for me to try and teach breathing control techniques I was using by the time I became an instructor to an Open Water Diver student who will be lucky enough to remove and replace his regulator to pass the course.

We teach not holding your breath because most inexperienced divers will default to panicked fight or flight the second anything goes wrong.

Believe me, I’ve had to physically restrain students underwater when the reg fell out of their mouth and it took them more than 2 seconds to find it. They immediately want to shoot to the surface and 100% they’ll be holding their breath (another aspect of panic) if I don’t hold them down, put the reg back in their mouth, and calm them down.

If Tim says X works, how many Silicon Valley types suddenly start doing it?

In fact, given that former Navy SEAL Jocko Wilnick is all the rage in the business world and Tim Ferriss is also followed by the same crowd, the crossover between those two groups is probably larger than you think.

I have savings that I don't want to have to tap into so I can just let it grow for another 10 years or so. Really, I just need to make enough to cover my monthly expenses and have health insurance.

Also, I've managed development projects across multiple continents (US, Europe, Middle-East, and Asia), so I'm hoping that I have a pretty good understanding of what management needs to make them feel comfortable.

It's probably a little different for me because I'm not necessarily looking to advance my career the way someone earlier in their career might. Obviously, I want to do a good job and add value, but I could just as easily teach scuba diving or something.

I code because I like it. It also pays better than average. A good combo.

I've been thinking about getting back into coding after a multi-decade hiatus. I taught myself to code in my early 20's. Coded through my early 30's and have been in management roles (involving software development or for technology companies) ever since.

I went from Perl to Java (hated Java) to PHP and have played around with tons of languages (just enough to complete the project) in between. Right now, PHP is my go-to language for my own projects simply because I'm used to it.

I still hack stuff. I run a few websites. I write plugins for WordPress. I write little PHP or Bash scripts to automate some stuff on my server.

Recently, I've been diving into Swift. I hope to get good enough at that, that I can get a remote job and semi-retire. For me, working from home would be almost like working part-time. I don't mean that it's that easy, just that a lot of management and office politics is so soul sucking that it feels like you're working 24 hours a day.

It's tough coming back. But, I've never strayed too far from coding to begin with.

It seems the advantage I have is experience. I've been there and done that before, even if I wasn't the one writing the code. Even being in management, I still enjoy sitting in a room with engineers and white boarding solutions.

And having worked in management, I have a better understanding of the "why" behind features and can suggest different paths to get to the same outcome.

I guess I'll find out if you're too old to code when I start looking for jobs :-)

But then it started taking longer and longer for bitcoin transactions to clear. And the price was often moving during this window between when I bought in one currency and I could sell in another currency.

Now I just use TransferWise. Less hassle. Costs are much more reasonable (a few bucks for small amounts) and I don't have to have do multiple transactions to get money from Point A to Point B.

That said, I think the old "unoccupied houses" thing is way overblown. It presents the most ugly side of foreign real estate ownership so that people who are priced out of the market get angry at all of the foreigners buying property. Even if you removed every unoccupied SFH (single family home) from the market, prices, generally, would still be rising.

It's sort of like saying that the reason that a car costs so much is because the demand is high based on too many families owning more cars than they need. It gives people a target for their dissatisfaction with current auto prices but really isn't the main issue and even if you solved for that issue it wouldn't dramatically impact auto prices.

But having a target for your anger is a wonderful way to distract people.

I think that number is closer to 100%. Most babies do not obtain government IDs on their date of birth.

Do you mean a third of people on earth? A third of people over a certain age?

I think if you cut all of the waste and abuse and held agencies to certain targets (i.e. 90% of taxpayer funds earmarked for education have to make it to the classroom level) you would free up enough money that you could actually create poverty programs that solved poverty. You could improve education without paying more for it. You could smooth out demographic shifts that challenge the social security system.

The government is a big money sucking machine. It's not that we aren't paying enough taxes, it's that they're being spent irresponsibly.

If he has secret video of US forces firing on unarmed civilians, yes, of course, I consider it an obligation of WL to release it and expose who covered it up.

If a diplomat sends a cable back to his superiors at the State Department and says, "The prime minister is rumored to act irrationally under stress. I suggest that we do not snap react to any statements he makes without obtaining further clarifications from other contacts within the administration." what good does that information being in the public domain do? It embarrasses the prime minister. It ruins the relationship between the sender and the prime minister. But what public good does it do to have this information in the public domain?

Sometimes I think WL revels in knocking the powerful down a peg or two whether or not they've actually done anything other than share a private thought that was now exposed to the public.

And part of my point is that I think Assange already picks sides. He's doling out punishment based on his own political biases. That's why I don't trust him.

Information is powerful and it can be used both to force transparency and it can be used as a weapon. My impression is that Assange views it more as a weapon that he can use against others.

Nobody can operate effectively in a 100% transparent environment. I was living overseas when WL released the State Department communications and most of the information released pertaining to the country I was living in revealed little of noteworthiness. It was all tabloid level stuff where some ambassador made a dismissive or insulting comment about some government official in a report back to Washington.

How would any of us like every email we've ever written to be put into the public domain? If we were doing nothing illegal what purpose would it serve to let everyone know that I hate my aunt's cooking and tried to get out of a family dinner in June of 2013? The only thing that information would do is embarrass me and strain my relationship with my aunt. No public good comes from it.

And that's where I see many of the WL releases being. Many leaks seem to stir up trouble where nothing illegal or malicious is actually occurring.

So, an organization like WL has a great responsibility. I applaud them for uncovering deceit and illegal activities, and I think we need some outside force doing it, but they also need to use that power in a way such that they don't try to prove their own importance by releasing information that is merely sensationalistic in order to heighten their brand.

I've never trusted Assange to be the kind of person who can make that distinction. WL would be much better off in the hands of someone/people who were far less concerned about elevating their own notoriety and were able to better able to separate the mission of WL from the politics.

Part of the original article is a lie (at least as how it pertains to the US). The social security system will eventually be unable to pay out at current rates. But notice how nobody worries about whether we'll still be able to spend 10x what everyone else spends on the military?

A lot of this is about how we plan on spending our money. The current argument is framed as "if we don't change anything, this might happen" but the change everyone focuses on is the change in how much money goes towards satisfying the retirement savings.

You notice nobody suggests buying less aircraft carriers or scaling back the military? Instead it's all about not reducing any other spending. Putting the spotlight on one particular form of spending and then declaring that if it can't pay for itself due to demographic changes, we should scare the shit out of everyone and privatize it and pour trillions of dollars into Wall Street.

For awhile, most of the content on the internet was non-commercial. People, myself included, posted stuff online because we wanted to share information. We had no expectation of ever receiving compensation for it.

Nowadays way too many people want to thumb their nose at boring jobs and travel the world writing blog posts and getting paid for it. Or they want to become Instagram stars so they pimp products for money.

I'm not saying that as a cranky old man. What I'm getting at is everybody is trying to monetize everybody else. It's not that you get annoying ads on CNN, it's that your cousin is trying to get you to watch his YouTube channel so he can quit the rat race and live in Thailand for $500 a month.

I know this is unrealistic but I would like to see things move back more towards how they used to be. Ad platforms used to actually have standards. You had to be doing pretty decent traffic to even be considered. The bar was set high enough that it limited the number of people who created websites as commercial ventures.

People used to create websites because they were passionate about a topic, not because they figured out that there was an SEO niche where they could rank #1 for a keyword and then slap ads all over the site.

And the way this relates back to services that could not exist otherwise, if they're valuable enough people will either pay to use them or advertisers will bid up the price for the limited advertising inventory and the provider can make a decent return.

Because the real problem is that the supply of content is virtually infinite while the money going into the advertising space is finite. Thus, supply of space to advertise exceeds demand willing to pay to advertise on it.