papabrown

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.

Of course, AOL switched it's focus away from dial up once it went unlimited shortly after so the entire acquisition did nothing but to make a valuable resource disappear.

AOL and Yahoo have been buying up companies, killing them, and then writing off the losses for years. This spans multiple management teams. It's inbred into the system.

It cracks me up that these two companies with years and years worth of fail between them, are somehow going to combine and become a winning organization.

Full Disclosure: I worked for a company purchased by AOL in the early 1990's, they immediately came in and ramped it up to about 120 people, and then killed it and fired everyone less than a year later.

That one was over an internal power struggle at AOL. One management team loved the idea, bought the company, and then lost political power. His replacement came in and killed everything his predecessor had been working on.

None of them started when they were children. Yes, every so often you hear about some 16 or 17 year old girl getting caught with a fake ID or something but the people most shocked in these incidents are the customers who had no clue since they were supposed to be 18+ to be working in the bar in the first place.

The vast, vast, vast, majority of child prostitution that happens in SEA is Asian on Asian. Period. That's not even open for discussion if you've spent any amount of time living in the region.

I read one article by some expat in Cambodia who questioned the Cambodian police chief about underage sex. The police chief told him flat out that westerners were only like 10% - 15% of the arrests they make. Most are locals or other Asians.

So why do the NGOs make such a big deal about it? Because nobody will send them money if Cambodians are molesting children. Make it a white westerner from a rich country and donations flood in to stop the horror.

Let's put things into perspective. It's estimated that 2,000,000 Thai women are involved in the prostitution industry in Thailand. Yet, those same estimates say that only 200,000 work in foreigner market. Do the math.

I forget where I saw it but I remember reading several years ago about a survey they did in Thailand and something like 67% of Thai men said they'd had sex with a prostitute in the last six months. Some equally high number was attributed to the number of military conscripts who had lost their virginity to a prostitute.

There's a lot of prostitution going on in Thailand that has absolutely nothing to do with foreigners.

And where to they always make those busts of girls (usually Burmese) forced into sex slavery? Thai brothels.

You need to quit watching the documentaries made by activists or people plagued with white guilt and actually spend some time learning what you're talking about.

It's not entirely unheard of for the mia noi to live with the husband and wife. Not common but I've seen it in enough Thai soap operas where it can't be completely uncommon either. Again, as long as the mia noi knows her place, the first wife often is glad to have someone to hand off her house duties to.

I can't speak for all of SEA but I can tell you that the girls come looking for jobs in the sex industry in Thailand. People don't have to traffic them or anything like that.

It's a f'd up socioeconomic situation there. According to Thai tradition it is the job of the children to take care of the parents. Many Thais have children the same way people plan their retirement.

If you're lucky, your parents are good people who have modest wants and needs and are happy if you go to Bangkok or Chiang Mai or Phuket and get a job in a factory or in a restaurant and send home a few hundred baht a month.

That's if you're lucky.

Chances are, one or both of your parents are either alcoholics, problem gamblers, or morally bankrupt (often you hit the trifecta). They send their daughter down south to make some money. Oh, but then the problems start coming in. Daddy punched a cop and they're going to kill him unless he comes up with 3,000 baht. Mommy owes the local mafia guy 30,000 baht in gambling debt. Surely someone needs a new motorcycle back home.

That puts the pressure on the girls to find ways to make more money that can ever possibly be made working a legit job. So they start calling old friends from back in the village that they remember coming home for Songkran dressed like a whore and asking if she can help her get a job.

Initially, she goes into it thinking that maybe she'll meet a nice white guy who will solve all her money problems. But that dream gets dashed pretty quickly and soon she learns that it's all about the baht. She starts learning all the tricks. How to rotate five or six tourists making them all think that she's in love with them and she's got all of them sending her money to take care of her family.

Pretty soon she's clocking 5x - 10x what a university educated Thai makes. She has the newest iPhone, is spending money like it's going out of style to impress all of her friends, and when she goes home there will certainly be grand gestures involving her giving large amounts of money to her family.

Because money equals power in Thailand in a way most foreigners don't quite understand, many times this is the girl's way of gaining respect. Everyone in her village or on her soi will know she bought her mother a beautiful gold chain and everyone will pretend that she's not a whore.

Eventually, she'll age. The number of guys willing to send her money will decline. She'll start looking around for someone to bleed for as long as they'll keep giving her money. BTW, these girls know most young guys are broke. I don't care if you look like Brad Pitt, they want the old geezer who's playing the back nine of his life. That's the guy who they want to con into moving up to Issan and buying a huge house for the two of them. And since in Thailand, foreigners can't own land, it's really her house which she'll get when the geezer kicks the bucket. And if he doesn't die soon enough, she'll just have some family members boot him out of the house since he has zero legal rights to it even though he paid for it.

Oh, and the other reason they like old guys, old guys are less likely to trade up in a few years. Young guys have a reputation for being less than faithful and that threatens the money supply. So, many of them reason that they would rather get an old guy, take care of him sexually, and not have to worry about him deciding to wander in a few years when she's starting to age a bit.

I mean, would they love a rich Brad Pitt that was 100% faithful? Of course. Come on. But they're very pragmatic as well. Marriage and relationships are just as much about security as they are about love.

How do I know? I go up country every year for Songkran. I can spot the Bangkok whores a mile away in Big C. We have a hi-so whore who lives down the soi from my wife's family. She's hi-so because she works in Singapore, not like the regular prostitutes. Oh, every Songkran their family goes up and down the soi showing off everything their daughter has given to her parents. She's bought them cars. Gold. Motorcycles. And everyone on the soi oooohs and aaaaahs over how rich they must be.

Meanwhile, me and my wife keep our mouths shut. Well, she does. I laugh my ass off.

And when we drive around her hometown, my wife will point out the large extravagant houses and say "Baan Farang" (foreigner home). Not that a foreigner lives there (anymore) but it was built with foreigner money.

And yes, in my younger and wilder days before I met my wife, I spent some time talking to gals of this profession. I had many friends in the expat community so knew many of the bar, restaurant, and other business owners. I got to know the girls over many years. I saw how it was all one big circle. Girls would land a big fish and never be seen again. And another girl would be right behind her just starting her career.

The reality is that it's way too lucrative for most of them. It's like if a prostitute in the US could make $250,000 a year. How would you ever convince her to give it up and work for $25,000 a year once she's (and her entire family) got the taste for the money?

And lest anyone think I'm, disrespecting these gals, I'm not. I just find the whole thing rather comical. Literally, you can take a girl working the bars 20 years ago and walk into a bar on Soi Cowboy today and their life stories are almost identical. I've met multiple generations of the same family in the business.

Regardless of how much money they make it never feeds the beast. They waste it on stuff full of immediate gratification and the wheel keeps going round and round.

A few make it out. They make some money. They buy a house. They find a nice guy who takes care of them and pays for private school for the children. But those are the exceptions.

I can't help at laugh at the people who freak out over a hair in their food back home but gladly sit there and eat off plates that have been washed in a tub of dirty water. Or the locals who think they're being clean and taking a tissue and wiping their utensils before eating. Believe me, the stuff you should be afraid of does not wipe off with a piece of toilet paper (aka Thai napkin).

And I have the same answer every time they have one of these crackdowns and someone bemoans the plight of the poor Thai person just trying to make a living. Thais have a knack for killing things. A few food stalls would go mostly unnoticed. Instead, they slowly consume the entire sidewalk. And then they spill out onto the street. They become hazardous to both pedestrian and vehicles. And because there's so much competition, they go to increasingly annoying lengths to get customers.

I've seen people get clipped by motorbikes walking off of the sidewalk into the street because the vendors have completely blocked the sidewalk. Screw the street vendors. How about a little sympathy for the people almost getting killed so someone can sell some fish balls?

Suk Soi 8 - In front of 7-11 but also across from a restaurant Suk Soi 5 - In front of several restaurants Suk Soi 7 - In front of several restaurants Suk Soi 11 - In front of several restaurants

I could name tons of more obscure places that I remember eating at but the above are pretty well known to most tourists and expats.

They are not friends of the local business owners. They pay the police for the space. That's why every time they have one of these street vendor crackdowns mandated by the big boys at the top of the food chain the shops usually pop back up in a week or two once the heat is off. Police can't stand not getting paid their rightful bribes.

Does anyone really think that all of those store owners right on lower Sukhumvit (between Soi 5 and Asoke) want people selling dildos in front of their shops? Viagra pills, bootleg DVDs, etc?

Literally, I have photos of cops sitting there having lunch with these street merchants (Soi 15'ish area) with dildos and fake viagra sitting on the same table they're eating off of. Guess who that street vendor is friends with? Who's the store owner going to complain to? Nobody if they value their health.

Alas those photos will never see the light of day for much the same reason.

Likewise, a professional athlete plays on a sports team. That sports team generates millions of dollars a year in television contracts. Hundreds of people are employed both at the stadiums at which they play as well as at the television stations that air the games. Millions more are made from merchandising, jerseys, hats, etc from the sports team. Hundreds more are employed making and selling those products.

And yes, they also become marketing machines. Yet that marketing machine sells products and people are employed at those companies that make and sell those products.

The ripple-on effect of a super-star professional athlete like Michael Jordon or LeBron James generates wealth for tens of thousands of people.

Sorry, looks like you got outvoted.

Now you want to sit on some panel of judgement to overrule the public.

I love it when people say stuff like this. Society has spoken. You simply don't like their decision so your answer to is to create some super-powerful organization that can veto the public and instill its own version of what society should look like.

This whole concept is like saying, well, one guy decided to do the things he loved, go to baseball games, get drunk with his buddies, and watch copious amounts of TV. But this other guy spent 8 years educating himself and working his butt off accomplishing many things. Let's reward them equally because they both grew up in the same town thus should have equal outcomes.