tnicola

Not always. If you were 45 and entered the market in 2008, you'd be in a great shape now, probably better than a 20 year old who entered the market in 1999.

You are completely correct. You should always look at the performance. In fact, you should be focused on your own performance.

I was merely displaying the parts of that performance and illustrating that one part of it is far more volatile and the other is less so. Knowing that fact alone, if you had invested in divindend paying securities and focused on the cash flow of the economy, you would have been personally better off.

Not all stocks pay dividends. Not paying attention to that can bring you closer to the -1.5%/an and farther from 4.9%.

>>Not a good return, but you also picked one of the worst dates.

I have picked the current situation. We can talk about historical rosy times in the market, but that is somewhat beside the point. This is our current reality.

Yes, the S&P is diversified in the stock portfolios. What I meant was diversify into things like fixed income vehicles, first mortgage securities, real estate income trusts etc.

And yes again, most investors came out much worse over the past decade that -1.5%, but even the theoretical return is dismal enough to illustrate the point.

Negative returns, while a simple concept, can be a real jaw dropper for many a DIY investors. If you invest $100.00 and lose 10%, you'll have $90. But $10 out of $90 is 11%. So you'd need to return more in the positive just to make your money back. And the greater the negative return, the greater the positive required. If you lost 20%, you'd need 25% etc.

S&P 500 Price has returned -1.5%/annum on price alone since 1999, while S&P 500 dividend return has been 4.9%/annum over the same period.

Longer term, since 1971, S&P 500 Price has returned 6.3%/an, while dividend has returned 5.6%/an.

So, yes, if you are a lucky soul who was 21 years old in 1971, bought the market, and held it to today, you would be slightly better off than you would be with dividend.

But what if you were a 45 year old in 1999 who started their retirement savings and are nearing retirement with over a decade of negative returns?

Time horizon and suitability of your choice are often more important than what you actually pick.

Having other people manage your finances may be problematic if the fiduciary responsibility has been misplaced as you have pointed out.

When you go to a lawyer or an accountant, you do not question their advice, largely because they have been positioned as a services experts rather than sales folk.

Properly diversified portfolio will carry you through the ups and downs in the market, because it hedges your risk against those fluctuations. And for that kind of portfolio, you need a bona fide, unbiased expert's advice. The kind of advice that is currently NOT available to mid-networth market, and the kind of advice that the rich are paying a premium to obtain.

The article pointed out that the financial services is broken and investing in broad index is a band-aid solution, but wouldn't it be more appropriate for us to have a solution that solves the problem rather than the one that patches it?

"App Store has remained a high quality experience"

Show me a dev that thinks that App store is a high quality experience and I will show you an Apple fan boy! :-)

"Her real problem is a lack of decent web developer"

She is a WRITER. Her business process should not require a web developer and I hope that Apple does not operate on a basis that people have pocket web devs, just in case they convolute the process whereby you need native expertise to unravel.

(that comment aside, Holly does employ a web dev, and it clearly did not help her)

While pitchforks may not be necessary, the inquisition and the transparency of the process are absolutely necessary.

2 + 2 = 5; for large values of 2.

This is not going to add much to the conversation, but.. Urgh!

As a hiring manager, I disagree with this somewhat. Deselecting people based on the fact that they did not send you a thank you email is, imho, quite foolish.

1) It assumes that the hiring manager is holding all the power in the interview process (which is actually not true). As a hiring manager, Ms. Liebman, how many 'thank you' emails have you sent to your interviewees? You think you should not have to? Well, I disagree.

2) It's a nicety, but by no means a necessity. It's a bit old school and in this day and age, with the amount of emails people get, it's not always as welcome as you think.

It falls into the trap of A players hiring A players and not worrying about minutia like this. When B players hire C players, you may get deselected cause you did not stroke their egos.

Yes, you're right. However, given I said it's a place you can expand your knowledge, it's clear that by saying away from teaching environment, that I meant classical teaching (lecturing literally). Sheesh!

Leadership is not necessary exclusive of administration and facilitation. Contrary to the intuitive belief, it is not synonymous with 'command and control' and therein lies the issue Joel was trying to expose. Also, being an administrator does not mean you are a secretary.

You can be a leader, a facilitator and an administrator at the same time.

> Seductively, it even works OK for a three person company.

Anyone who thinks command and control is a good idea with 2 other people has got bigger fish to fry than finer points of effective management.

'Office hours' are a college term. It's the time that teachers or professor allot for students to go get extra help. A place where your teacher keeps their purse (sort to speak). It's away from the teaching environment where teachers can focus on your lack of knowledge or desire to expand it.

Keep in mind though. High school teachers are mostly overworked. Even the ones that know what they are talking about (some don't - we established that already), so do cut them some slack and be curteous. But keep asking questions. And if they don't answer, ask anyone who will. Read, explore and keep learning. It's what keeps us alive and what - at least according to this post - keeps us smart.

Good luck and you are on the right track to greatness.

This reminds me of that joke from long time ago where there was a machine that recommended potential mate. A woman requested a man of shorter stature, who likes water and cooler climate, dresses formally most of the time and loves to eat fish. The machine recommended her a penguin.

The problem is, no matter how you slice it, there's nothing more effective than a good old fashioned cup of coffee and one of the interesting parties taking a bit of a risk. It's just the way it has always been and I highly doubt that it's possible to do this with an app or a program that works perfectly. No matter what you try, someone will try and game it.

In high school (and I truly hate to be the one to tell you this), it is quite possble that your teacher doesn't know the answer, so he is annoyed at you for asking questions so that you do not expose his/her shortcomings.

A lot of high school teachers know little past what they are actually teaching and even that not in a lot of depth. This is for a lot of reasons, some of them not their fault, but it is a sad fact.

So, keep asking and keep annoying them. Try going and asking during their office hours, but don't be surprised if you do not get a satisfactory answer and if it does not seem satisfactory, I would question its validity.

> If you asked the same question to a "newbie" on HN I'm not sure they would be so secure to admit the same because they wouldn't know how ubiquitous the company was. And they would be afraid of showing how clueless they were.

This would only hold true if they were conditioned to fear the reaction of them not knowing. If someone had never heard of Google and they admitted that, if someone simply said 'it's a commonly used search engine' without much negative connotation, they will not be afraid to admit not knowing something similar in the future.

However, if you laugh, point, call them a 'newbie' and make them leave the room with their heads hung in shame, then yes, they may be more careful next time.

It boils down to respect. If you respect people, even if they don't know the obvious, then they will have an opportunity to learn and thrive.

If PG acted immaturely every time someone admitted they did not know something that was obvious to him, he quite possibly would not be able to do what he does.

Why don't you ask your question later, once the client relationship part is no longer in play?

I went to school in former Yugoslavia and Tesla was idolized and given duly deserved credit whereas Edison was the guy who invented the lighbulb. We even had nursery rhymes about his inventions.

We were also taught that Yugoslavia was a major factor in getting Germany to capitulate in WWII where if you think about it, it was rather insignificant on the grand scheme of things.

You can't really escape the spin. Some are for the better and some are for the worse, but hopefully, we can sort things out once we start learning and thinking for ourselves.

If there truly is an enviromnment that discourages asking questions because they deem them as 'dumb', then you need to work to improve such environment.

In my experience, the only time questions were discouraged (and almost always in the interest of time) was because it was otherwise possible to get an answer to your questions.

Can you give an example of the environment you would be talking about?

Asking questions is not only a trait of smart people, but it is quite possibly the simplest most effective tool that can set you appart in many things.

Think about the last time you bought something where you had a great sales experience. How many questions did the sales person ask? Think about last time you were on a great date? Did the person ask questions about you.

Asking questions is a sign of validated learning and active listening and those two concepts are the way we better ourselves and our surroundings.

I was hoping someone from US might help, but I'll bite. I think that your best bet is to hire a lawyer and give them power of attorney to do it for you.

Especially if you plan on incorporating in US, I would not try to do it without consulting an attorney. There are differences in which state you start the business and these things matter.

I am Canadian, so no first hand experience in the US, but consulting a lawyer is probably the best bet. On all accounts.

Good luck.

Rock climbing will always give you a rating (bigger premium) if you do it with any kind of frequency. Snowboarding, while somewhat dangerous, is not as deadly and the underwriting has adjusted.

Your insurance questionnaire being more detailed had nothing to do with who was the beneficiary of the policy (think about it - why would they care who gets the money), but the fact that the death benefit was probably larger than anything you would have applied for individually until now. The level of detail underwriters go into is almost always 100% dependent on the size of the cheque they have to write upon ones death.

If you took out the same size insurance policy individually from the same company, the questionnaire would not have been any different.

That is actually a very good password.

I am not entirely familiar with modern day algorithms behind brut force attacks, but the math I described above is the theory behind them. I would imagine that it would have to be in some kind of ordered sequence so that you didn't miss any possibility and that your brut force time would average out (assuming infinite number of tries over rendom selection of passwords). It is, however, reasonable to assume that once the attack got part way though a word, that it would then try most common words etc. But assuming a random compilation of characters, sequential would be the most efficient over many number of tries.

Note: the above does not apply to brut force attacks that try most common passwords and other techniques that include human element. It's just math behind the algorithm.

Add to that myriad of posts how Zuckerberg's tax rate will be lower than his employees (as if he has anything to do with the obtuse way IRS taxed RSU's). People just take some things on face value and get their daily exercise by jumping to conclusions.

> Pure brute force is a bad metric, every 12 character password is equally good or bad by that standard.

This is not entirely correct. If you had 12 q's in a row (or any 12 lower case letters) there would be 12^26 permutations that computer would have to check in order to guess it. Adding a capital Q would increase the number of permutations to 12^52. For each additional character set you throw in the mix, you would add the total number of those characters to the exponent part. Adding numbers would make it 12^62 etc. Not all 12 character passwords are created equal and some (like 12 numbers in a row) can quite possibly be brut forced.

> I think we must also work on changing the rules to encourage it.

You hit the nail on the head here. What I meant by not come from the top down, I meant that it will come incrementally from the people who will reward it with their support. It cannot be ordered, it has to be desired, recognized and rewarded.