10% is the charitable giving limit. There is another thing to be asked about, and that is the impact of the job. If I were to be a tax lawyer, I would be directly harming the ability of the US government to spend on social welfare programs. If I worked on Wall Street anywhere but Vanguard I would be bilking people out of their life savings, and at Vanguard I wouldn’t be making $100 K a year. Someone working as a tobacco farmer to raise money for cancer research has some misplaced priorities.
wubbles
Karma: 114
Yes.
The Rational Investor, Part I
CAPM explains 70% of equity returns, Fama French model 90%, but over the 20th century it’s not clear what the Fama-French factors are. I fully agree with your minor quibbles. As for upkeep and worry, yes, risk leads to return. But it is an input, and like any sort of input it should be minimized for a given level of output.
No, IRA’s avoid a tax which the other investments don’t, so money in an IRA is worth more than money outside. There is a cost, namely you have restricted access to it.
Intrade sells fed OMC rate binary options. I think if the market was more liquid, it would absolutely get used to hedge interest rate risks, and as people tend to be long bonds and short rates as a result, there might be a bias towards predicting higher rates as people want the protection. But the total holdings and the degree of hedging would be very opaque. Policy prediction markets could have similar problems.
Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antionus Pius, Marcus Aurelius we all able and capable administrators, and their reign was largely peaceful. But then they were followed by Commodus. Benevolent dictatorship with succession by training and adoption was tried, and so long as it worked it worked. But the one failure was a pretty dramatic one, considered by some to be the start of the fall of the Roman Empire.
Things were a lot worse then everyone knew: Russia almost invaded Yugoslavia, which would have triggered a war according to newly declassified NSA journals, in the 1950′s. The Cuban Missile Crisis could easily have gone hot, and several times early warning systems were triggered by accident. Of course, estimating what could have happened is quite hard.
Some banks offer money market accounts, or even a savings account might be a good idea.
Small business are illiquid. They also have capital requirements that might not fit your investment needs. If you have enough money that these two problems aren’t an issue, as well as the skill in finding small business that won’t fail and that are on the market, and have the time to supervise them/manage them, then they could be a good investment. But that isn’t a lot of people.
Yes: all tail-calls are guarantied not to exhaust resources. The precise definition of what is tail is in the spec.
I would like to declare the following: I have submitted a program that cooperates only if you would cooperate against CooperateBot. You can of course create a selective defector against it, but that would be a bit tricky, as I am not revealing the source code. Evaluate your submissions accordingly.
Hermione didn’t erase her own existence, but implanted false memories to get her parents to go to Australia. Distance did what magic couldn’t.
I would have expected a few more metaevaluator bots which clean up the environment to prevent detection. Of course this can be an expensive strategy, and certainly is in programmer time. A metaevaluator bot would have probably broken several recursion detection strategies, or even defining set! out of the language.
How do we draw the line? Tit-for-Tat is very simple, yet does very well. Arguably before knowing how it performs it could be considered a troll.
I think the problem with elite common sense is that it can be hard to determine whose views count. Take for instance the observed behavior of the investing public determined by where they put their assets in contrast with the views of most economists. If you define the elite as the economists, you get a different answer from the elite as people with money. (The biggest mutual funds are not the lowest cost ones, though this gap has narrowed over time, and economists generally prefer lower cost funds very strongly)
By “Wall Street” I’m including the Buy Side as well as the Sell Side. The big buyside firms like Fidelity and Charles Schwab sell products that most people shouldn’t buy. Insurance probably has a better case to buy some actively managed products, or some exotic derivatives, but I don’t know why it can’t do it itself.
To the extent that finance reallocates risk it can provide a positive utility benefit. However, the very productive businesses have questionable utility. Promoting active trading, picking hot funds etc, all eat into the returns clients can expect. Justify the existence of Charles Schwab’s S&P 500 index fund, with expense ratio twice that of Vanguards. The most profitable divisions of investment banks tend to be the ones with the least competition, and hence most questionable social benefit.
I’m aware Dodge and Cox is in SF, and Vanguard in Valley Forge, Blackrock in Princeton, etc. However, they are all on “the Street”.
The IRS doesn’t pay well: for government pay one might as well work for NASA and accomplish something fun.
The Prime Number Theorem
A group of four people can stand two by two, but a group of five people can only stand five in a line. The number of numbers like five, and not like four, between two numbers, is the number of times you take two times what you had, starting at one, to get between the two numbers if the two numbers are close.
Trotskyism is represented in the US by the Spartacist League. The members do not seem well adjusted socially.
Hello, my name is Watson. The username comes from my initials and a Left 4 Dead player attempting to pronounce them. I am a math student at UC Berkeley and a longtime lurker. I’ve got a post on rational investing, based on the conclusions of years of research by academic economists, but despite lurking I never realized there is a karma limit to post in discussion. I’m interested in just about everything, a dangerous phenomenon.