banx

Karma: 135

banx 8 Apr 2016 6:21 UTC
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread April 4 - April 10, 2016

Anyone remember that monopoly pc game with the nice music?

The jazzy music? I played that a lot.

don’t reuse floss

I think most of the answers there imply that one shouldn’t use floss picks (unless you use many per day)? That’s unfortunate.

isn’t the nurturant parent model blatantly the best parenting style, obviously?

Seems to me like it’s the best. But I can imagine being convinced otherwise by data. It also depends on what you’re trying to optimize for. The generally agreed-upon answer to that question has likely changed over time.

edit: fixed formatting

banx 26 Nov 2015 0:50 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 23 - Nov. 29, 2015

Given this definition, I don’t see why only stocks and bonds qualify.

My claim is that equity and fixed income are the important pieces for reaching that goal. With a total stock index fund and a total bond index fund you can achieve these goals almost as well as any other more complicated portfolio. Additional asset classes can add additional diversification or hedge against specific risks. What other asset classes do you have in mind? Real estate? Commodities? Currencies?

True, but given that you said “cash and CDs” I thought your idea of cash excludes deposits.

Fair enough. I was unclear.

banx 26 Nov 2015 0:11 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 23 - Nov. 29, 2015

What’s the criterion of importance?

Important to the goal of increasing one’s wealth while managing the risk of losing it. Certainly there are other possible goals (perhaps maximizing the chance of having a certain amount of money at a certain time, for example) but this is the most common, and the one that I assume people on LW discussing basic investing concepts would be interested in.

Um.… I hate to break it to you...

I’m not sure if you’re referring to the fact that popular banks are returning virtually zero interest or if you’re interpreting “cash” as “physical currency notes”. If the former, I have cash in bank accounts that return .01%, 1%, and 4.09% (each serving different purposes). If the latter, I apologize for the confusion. The word is used to mean different things in different contexts. In the context of investing it is standard to include in its meaning checking and savings accounts, and often also CDs.

banx 25 Nov 2015 21:47 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 23 - Nov. 29, 2015
Yes, but those are the important ones. Stocks for high expected returns and bonds for stability. You can generalize “bonds” to include other things that return principal plus interest like cash and CDs.

banx 11 Nov 2015 0:52 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Daniel_Burfoot’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 09 - Nov. 15, 2015
I had already heard about this, and was 95+% sure of my answer. But you didn’t say to not answer if you already knew, so I voted. I’m letting you know so that you can disregard the vote if you want to.

banx 8 Oct 2015 5:07 UTC
15 points
on: Open thread, Oct. 5 - Oct. 11, 2015
My employer changed their donation matching policy such that I now have an incentive to lump 2 years’ donations into a single year, so I can claim the standard deduction during the year that I don’t donate, thereby saving around $1200 every 2 years. I’ve been donating between 10 and 12.5 percent for the last few years. This year I would be donating around 21%. Has anyone here been audited because they claimed a large fraction of their income as charitable contributions? How painful was the experience? I doubt it’s worth paying $1200 to avoid, but I thought I’d ask.

banx 3 Sep 2015 23:52 UTC
2 points
in reply to: username2’s comment on: Stupid Questions September 2015
I don’t know for sure, but the answer is very probably yes. I recommend searching http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/ for Australia-specific info.

banx 3 Sep 2015 23:51 UTC
0 points
in reply to: banx’s comment on: Stupid Questions September 2015
At least, this is the way I make sense of my behavior. Maybe I’ve got it wrong.

banx 3 Sep 2015 23:46 UTC
3 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Stupid Questions September 2015
Some people may make arguments for morality based on things similar to Coherent Extrapolated Volition. I don’t find those arguments convincing. I help people I don’t know because when I think about the alternatives, I prefer the world in which one fewer person is suffering to the one where I’m better off in whatever way (e.g., I have more money in my bank account) because I didn’t help. That preference is based on empathy, which was evolved, but I don’t particularly care where it came from. At some point that preference gets outweighed by selfish preferences, which is why I haven’t given all of my money away.

I don’t think maximally helping others is a particularly good way to maximize your own quality of life unless you already want to do that. Both (a) and (b) are true, but if your goal is maximizing your own quality of life you’re almost certainly going to do better if you focus on that directly. At least, in my particular case, there’s some amount of warm fuzzies I get from helping people and from identifying as someone who tries to effectively help people. So in that way my quality of life is improved. But I think that if I wanted to I could get that amount of fuzzies at a lower cost.

banx 4 Aug 2015 4:02 UTC
1 point
in reply to: DataPacRat’s comment on: Integral vs differential ethics, continued
I think you’re talking about ordinal numbers vs cardinal numbers. With ordinal numbers you can say a > b, but not by how much.

banx 22 Jun 2015 1:12 UTC
0 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Open Thread, Jun. 15 - Jun. 21, 2015
Monolithic posts can be intimidating. You can accomplish close to the same thing with digestible posts that end with a link to the next one.

banx 9 Jun 2015 20:49 UTC
8 points
in reply to: falenas108’s comment on: Open Thread, Jun. 8 - Jun. 14, 2015
If you want to take one more step of complexity (and assuming you have at least $6000 to invest) you can split your money between VTSMX and VGTSX as Unnamed mentioned. In doing so you would be diversified across the global economy, instead of just across the US economy. You would want 20% to 50% of your funds that are in stocks to be in international stocks.

Vanguard Target Date funds (e.g., VFIFX) are also a good option if you want something you never have to manage, and they have a minimum investment of $1000. They allow you to invest in a pre-determined allocation of domestic and international stocks and bonds, and keep you balanced at a target allocation that gets more conservative as you get closer to retirement age.

You should also strongly consider investing in a Roth IRA if your income is not over the limit for contributions (and if it is, there are ways around that). Contributions to a Roth IRA can be withdrawn at any time, though there are restrictions on accessing the investment returns. Your employer’s 401(k) plan is another good option for long-term investments.

The Bogleheads wiki and forum are excellent resources for learning about low-cost long-term investing.

But I agree with everyone else: if you want to do the simplest thing and stop thinking about it, invest in VTSMX.

banx 1 Apr 2015 3:41 UTC
3 points
on: Open thread, Apr. 01 - Apr. 05, 2015
What do folks here think about blood donation? Is the consensus that it’s not an efficient way to help people?

banx 31 Mar 2015 20:34 UTC
3 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Open thread, Apr. 01 - Apr. 05, 2015
Does she know that you (presumably) don’t believe in supernatural things? Does she know why? How do you explain (to yourself) her stories about seeing spirits. Those seem to be a lot more serious than simple beliefs in absurd things like “healing powers” (or astrology, etc). Do you really believe she’s not crazy? Is she making it up? (If so, why?) Using drugs? Believes they’re there but doesn’t actually see them, just “senses” them or something?

banx 31 Mar 2015 19:57 UTC
6 points
in reply to: sediment’s comment on: Open thread, Apr. 01 - Apr. 05, 2015
From GW’s perspective, each of their top charities can consume a certain amount of additional money before the expected value of an additional donation decreases by some amount. Their goal is to move money such that each charity hits that target, and then they’ll reassess. So they recommend donors split donations so that, as a whole, these targets are hit and EV is maximized. From your perspective, you may decide that concentrating your entire donation in one organization has a higher EV, since that organization has a generally higher EV relative to the others and since your action isn’t going to affect the actions of the rest of GW’s audience.

banx 19 Mar 2015 23:09 UTC
0 points
on: Good forum for investing?
I like bogleheads.org. I think I found it from someone’s comment on LW. They advocate a simple portfolio of low-cost index funds. The community is really helpful for figuring out the details.

banx 5 Mar 2015 23:15 UTC
1 point
in reply to: raecai’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 116
I thought it was bleeding because of the magical resonance that was actually happening at that time when other Harry hit LV with the stuporfy.

banx 25 Feb 2015 4:27 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Kaura’s comment on: Open thread, Feb. 23 - Mar. 1, 2015
I remind myself that I care about each individual that can be helped by my action. Even if there are huge numbers of individuals I can’t help, there are some I CAN help, and helping each one is worthwhile.

banx 19 Dec 2014 0:37 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Emily’s comment on: Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014
You could also just think that GiveWell doesn’t currently have as much room for more funding as the recommended charities do, even though GiveWell may disagree with that assessment.

banx 19 Dec 2014 0:30 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Metus’s comment on: Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014

you should split your donations just as you split your investments, because of risk.

Isn’t it the case that most investment opportunities have essentially the same expected returns, due to market efficiency? In that case you want to diversify, since you can lower the variance without lowering the expected return. But if you can identify a single giving opportunity that has a significantly higher expected return than the alternatives, then it seems like you’d want to concentrate on that one opportunity.