1) Asset allocation: Basically, how much you want in stocks, how much in bonds. Those are the two major asset classes. Go way heavier on stocks early in life and maybe trend toward 50-50 later in life when you have less time to ride out dips.
2) Diversification: What specific entities you invest in. Suggestion: Total US stock market index, total world non-US stock market index, total US bond market index. This way you don't have to pick winners. You just buy everything. Let the bad stuff drop off along the way, and let the good stuff do its thing.
3) Rebalancing: Like once a year, or every time your chosen asset allocation gets at least 5% off. Whatever feels good, but keep your asset allocation under your own conscious control.
As a note, Ric Edelman, when he had a radio show, went over the IRA to Roth conversion. Several times. According to him, it's a wash. Pay tax before you invest or when you withdraw, but either way the net effect is almost identical.
I like silexia's comment. There is a lot of information not included in the story, and, if you think about it, this whole story is one data point. One guy did some things/had some things happen at a particular time in history. Don't expect to cut and paste into your own life and get rich by next week.
Important points:
1) Start as early as you can.
2) Be religious about regular investing without fail.
3) Never break into the piggy bank to buy a house or a fancy car, or for any other reason short of a dire medical emergency.
4) Take advantage of every break you can find, and any employer matches.
5) Wait.
There is a huge amount of information at Bogleheads Investing Advice and Info ( https://www.bogleheads.org/ )
Also, get as many 20,000/1 profit ratio private insider secret deals as you possibly can under your belt and let other people work their lives away to enrich you.
> As a note, Ric Edelman, when he had a radio show, went over the IRA to Roth conversion. Several times. According to him, it's a wash. Pay tax before you invest or when you withdraw, but either way the net effect is almost identical.
It depends on where the tax rates are when you deposit and when you withdrawal. Some of that is politics, and some of that is where you fit in the tax brackets.
There's some amount of unknown and unknowable there, but if you're early in your career and not making a lot of money, Roth contributions might make a lot of sense --- might as well pay taxes upfront while they're low. Once you start making more money, traditional contributions start making more sense, as you're likely to have lower income as a retiree than while employed.
If you have some years later in life where you aren't earning much (by choice or not), roth conversions can make sense then, although that gets real complex if the reported income will interfere with benefit programs you would otherwise qualify for.
This book is an incredibly good read: "'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' is a history book written by the American journalist and historian Richard Rhodes, first published by Simon & Schuster in 1987. The book won multiple awards, including Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The narrative covers people and events from early 20th century discoveries leading to the science of nuclear fission, through the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
Possibly the best book that I have ever read. It deals with many of the issues raised in the comments here, and with politics, industrial development, economics, military capabilities, and the history of modern physics.
Rhodes also wrote "'Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb', which told the story of the atomic espionage during World War II, the debates over whether the hydrogen bomb ought to be produced, and the eventual creation of the bomb and its consequences for the arms race." Also impeccable
Second this. It's currently available free on the RSS feed in every podcast directory. The whole back catalog can also be purchased, and IMHO it's well worth buying. I bought it a couple years back and have been very happy with it. I think it's like $80, but you get countless hours of good history from a master storyteller.
His series on World War I (aka The Great War) called "Blueprint For Armageddon" was one of the most interesting and captivating of any podcasts or audiobooks I've ever listened to.
When I was younger the older folks would talk so highly about the days of theater radio, when actors and storytellers would tell audio-only stories. I used to wonder how that could possibly compete with video. After listening to Hardcore History, I get it now. There's something really powerful about listening to a natural storyteller lay things out, and Dan Carlin is a master of the craft. If you're new to him, the last few years of shows are always freely available through the RSS feed that's in every podcast directory.
I have heard that Carlin's historiography isn't great... but I will fully agree that the man is a master storyteller and does wonders for making insanely complex topics comprehensible. Ghosts of the Ostfront was the one that sold me on him.
If he's not dead-on, all the time, well, I can read more later and be corrected.
I had no idea you could just buy his old episodes. May have to go buy them now.
Hard disagree that it is inherently "mean" to pirate a book regardless of its status. If you can afford to support someone you should, but IMO we should value most of all unrestricted access to knowledge without shame.
Also this book first came out in 1986. One hopes the author is still not dependent on its sales.
Yep. Personally I’m generally in favour of copyright as it was originally drafted: only valid for 7 years, with an optional extension to 14.
I’m all for creative people making a living from their work, but 40 years copyright is too long. To say nothing of the absurd rules today of 70 years after the death of the author or whatever it is.
My example is Disney's 1959 Sleeping Beauty. Had today's copyright regime been in force, Tchaikovsky's 1890 ballet would have still been under copyright, so Disney couldn't have made it.
Also a lot of history books were funded by government money or NGOs. Which is understandable considering that it may very well take years of research to write one.
I disagree that purchasing the book is automatically the “right” thing to do. If someone cannot afford the book, it is my view that society should not expect them to pay. I believe that this view towards knowledge will lead to a wiser society, and we deviate from that path at our peril.
> IMO we should value most of all unrestricted access to knowledge
This is not "unrestricted access to knowledge". This is a creative work produced by a creative under the assumption that their work would be paid for.
You don't have the right to take someone else's work without compensating them on their terms. That's theft.
Even worse, it's unnecessary theft. You're not advocating for someone pirating a book on exercise so someone can get in shape and extend their life - you're advocating for pirating a book, cheating the author out of revenue, for entertainment alone. People are not going to die because they couldn't get their hands on a copy of "Dark Sun."
And, even if the book was actual utility - the contents for the majority of actually useful books are already made freely available online in the form of research papers, websites, public domain books, or Creative Commons licensed content like LibreTexts or OpenStax. "unrestricted access to knowledge" is effectively already here - you're just being entitled to other people's work, and that is truly shameful.
Books, especially digital copies, are not property in the same way that a house is property. If someone could download a duplicate of my house and live in it without having any impact on my own house, that would be great.
We invented the idea that information is property, and I think restricting access to knowledge via copyright is a net harm to society. Authors need to survive, but IMO we should seek solutions that provide for authors while also allowing unrestricted access. We have seen for well over a decade now that "pay what you can" schemes to fund music and books can work very well. There are three billion people on this planet with an opportunity to gain internet access in the next 50 years. Should we paywall every book written in the last 150 years to benefit publishers? Or make a free public library of every book available to benefit humankind? This is the question we face, and I know what my view on it is.
We also invented the idea that a house is property. That’s not some fundamental law of physics. Some people even think that restricting access to your house is a net harm to society. Perhaps you should experiment with a “pay what you want” scheme for your spare bedroom.
Or, a "pay what you want" system for your employer.
I've never met a single IP pirate (thief) who is willing to reciprocate and let other people take their work (i.e. their labor to their employer) for free.
In fact, the people who are the most vocal about piracy are also those who are most vocal about getting their employer to give them as much money and benefits as possible.
Published works, not "all information". It's up to society to decide if we want to prioritize publishers or humanity. I don't believe our restrictive legal regime will persist around the world in perpetuity. It is too harmful to humanity, and someone will break ranks with "harmonization" even if the USA does not.
Open source is something different. Of course, if you're hoping to confiscate Oracle or Mathematica source by force of law, that IS theft. If you're creating new bodies of code, or even encouraging proprietary code owners to open-source their stuff, I think that's great.
> Books, especially digital copies, are not property in the same way that a house is property.
Yes, this is why the concept of IP/copyright was invented in the first place. And, as people familiar with the copyright system know, the "property" in "intellectual property" does not mean the same thing as for physical property, and that the reason for its invention was not to give people "ownership" over/"property" of information (that's slang that is inaccurate but useful, assuming that the hearer is informed enough to tell the difference), but to give them a time-limited monopoly over the duplication (the "copy" in "copyright") so that they can make a profit proportional to the number of people who have enjoyed their work, before it passes into the public domain to enrich the cultural commons (which is also explicitly part of the copyright system since its conception).
The reasoning for this is because the cost of duplicating IP approaches zero, so some economic system needs to exist that allows people to make money off of IP, and...
> We have seen for well over a decade now that "pay what you can" schemes to fund music and books can work very well
This is disingenuous and wildly misinformed at best, and flat-out intentionally deceptive at worst. No, "pay what you can" schemes do not work very well. They constitute a tiny fraction of the economy, with a corresponding tiny fraction of people who can actually make a living off of them, because they simply do not scale - in addition to being fundamentally unfair for obvious reasons. The vast majority of people who sell IP do not use these schemes. They do not work, except under specific circumstances, for a very small number of people, and absolutely do not scale to anywhere close to the economy. Anyone with even a small amount of internet exposure knows that systems like this are highly uncommon and very rarely provide for the creator's financial needs.
> Should we paywall every book written in the last 150 years to benefit publishers?
Nobody in this thread has suggested this. This is a ridiculous strawman.
> Or make a free public library of every book available to benefit humankind?
...and this is a ridiculous false dichotomy.
> restricting access to knowledge via copyright is a net harm to society
Beyond a large number of people disagreeing with this as an opinion, the majority of available empirical evidence points to this being objectively incorrect. Society has been greatly enriched through books created and sold under the copyright system.
Even worse, you're ignoring the massive amount of information made freely available on the internet, through scientific papers, and through IP that is voluntarily made available for free consumption by the authors (copyleft content, open-source code). And all of this information is more than you need to live a "good" life or learn almost anything you want to. The vast majority of content locked behind copyright is either entertainment or esoteric knowledge that isn't relevant or needed by anyone who can't afford it (e.g. high-energy particle physics textbooks). Approximately zero people are going to die because they can't get their hands on a copy of Introduction to High Energy Physics.
Finally, you do not have the right to the works of other people's hands without reimbursing them on their terms. That's theft. You can make your own work available for free, if you wish, but you do not have the ability to take other people's work.
The solution is already here. It is copyright. If you want to tune the knobs (e.g. reduce the length of copyright from "70 years after the author's death" to "15 years" or something), then that's fine and reasonable. But these arguments for both IP theft and what is essentially book-socialism directly conflict with both morality and empirical evidence.
This is my all-time favorite book, I’ve read through it numerous times. The level of detail and scope of focus is breathtaking. Its narrative reflects to me a deeper truth about the asymmetric leverage that mastery of a new technology bestows, and the unpredictable outcomes of its inevitabile diffusion among humans in a barely-stable world. I can’t recommend it enough, I feel like I learned something major about the nature of our species after completing it.
I'm about an hour into "The Making of the Atomic Bomb"! Great so far.
I recently finished "American Prometheus" the Pulitzer Prize winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and it was phenomenal. I recommend it highly. It's a great different perspective on the story of the making of the bomb since it's more focused on the man's life. Really cool.
I read this after seeing Oppenheimer. Just a tremendous book. I learned so much from his description of the early debates around the structure of atoms. It really illuminates the theorists' struggles with quantum mechanics and how, as we often see, progress required a new generation of thinkers.
I resisted seeing the movie for quite a while, maybe for similar reasons to you. I was certain it would be depressing.
It was much better than I expected. This will sound stupid but I didn't expect it to focus on the story of the man himself rather than the bomb (you'd think the title would be a hint).
"When displaying an e-mail address on a website you obviously want to obfuscate it to avoid it getting harvested by spammers. But which obfuscation method is the best one? I drove a test to find out."
I was just going to post this, but you already done it. Good on ya. Proves that I'm not the only one who thinks that things like this are relevant.
A couple of years back I also enjoyed reading "The Pagan Christ" by Tom Harpur. Thesis: Joshua ben Joseph, aka Jesus, did not actually exist: "early Church leaders fabricated a literal and human Jesus based on ancient myths." (Mithras, Dionysus, Osirus, et al.) A very good read. Info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pagan_Christ
There is also the story of "Ya" v "El", two examples of the One-True-God, worshiped by competing proto-Jewish tribes, later merging into Yaweh, while letting their wives and children get scraped off and forgotten in the process.
I keep wondering about this, but you know what? I just keep using Blogger from Google.
It's there, it works, and it's totally simple. I don't have to do any maintenance or worry about hosting or a domain name.
Images go into my Flickr account, and I save a copy of each post's text, in case I ever want to do something else. But not so far. Been on Blogger since 2009.
I keep both of these on my Firefox toolbar so they're alwasy visible and available. Takes about one second to hit the bookmarklet and clear the browser window of brain dead crap.
1) Asset allocation: Basically, how much you want in stocks, how much in bonds. Those are the two major asset classes. Go way heavier on stocks early in life and maybe trend toward 50-50 later in life when you have less time to ride out dips.
2) Diversification: What specific entities you invest in. Suggestion: Total US stock market index, total world non-US stock market index, total US bond market index. This way you don't have to pick winners. You just buy everything. Let the bad stuff drop off along the way, and let the good stuff do its thing.
3) Rebalancing: Like once a year, or every time your chosen asset allocation gets at least 5% off. Whatever feels good, but keep your asset allocation under your own conscious control.
As a note, Ric Edelman, when he had a radio show, went over the IRA to Roth conversion. Several times. According to him, it's a wash. Pay tax before you invest or when you withdraw, but either way the net effect is almost identical.
I like silexia's comment. There is a lot of information not included in the story, and, if you think about it, this whole story is one data point. One guy did some things/had some things happen at a particular time in history. Don't expect to cut and paste into your own life and get rich by next week.
Important points:
1) Start as early as you can.
2) Be religious about regular investing without fail.
3) Never break into the piggy bank to buy a house or a fancy car, or for any other reason short of a dire medical emergency.
4) Take advantage of every break you can find, and any employer matches.
5) Wait.
There is a huge amount of information at Bogleheads Investing Advice and Info ( https://www.bogleheads.org/ )