“One of the current economys problems is also that advertising and such creates otherwise frivoulous needs that prodeucts can be marketed for. ”
This is an excellent summation of a point that gets bandied about a lot in certain circles. Do you mind if I shamelessly steal this?
It does seem like these are two mostly unrelated skills—leadership, teamwork, and time management on one hand, and vision, creativity, and drive on the other. They don’t really oppose each other except in the general sense that both sets take a long time to learn to do well. There are enough examples of people that are both, or neither, that these don’t seem to be a very useful way of carving up reality.
When I read the phrase “adult man’s skill set”, I immediately thought about carpentry. Did everyone else think about sex, or are there other people that thought this was going to be a post about practical, traditionally manly things?
I think you are thinking about this the wrong way. People become caffeine tolerant quickly, but tolerance goes away pretty quickly too. You would get more benefit out of the opposite approach—spending most of your time without caffeine, but drinking a cup of coffee rarely, when you really need it. You would effectively be caffeine naive most of the time, with brief breaks for caffeine use, and this never develop much of a tolerance. If it’s been a long time since that first cup of coffee that you don’t remember it, trust me, the effects of caffeine on a caffeine-naive brain are incredible.
I know I once read a study that says you can get back to caffeine naive in two weeks if you go cold turkey, but I can’t find anything on it again for the life of me. I do remember distinctly that going cold turkey is a bad plan, as the withdrawal effects are pretty unpleasant—slowly lowering your dose is better.
On a more practical level, it is certainly possible to have relatively little caffeine, such that you aren’t noticeably impaired on zero caffeine, while still having some caffeine. The average coffee drinker is far beyond this point. I would try to lower your daily dose over the course of a month or so until you are consuming less than a cup of coffee a day—ideally, a lot less, like no cups of coffee. Try substituting tea (herbal or otherwise) if you need something hot to drink to help kill the craving—herbal tea has no caffeine, black tea has about 1⁄4 of the caffeine per cup, and if you add cream and sugar the taste will be familiar.
EDIT: VincentYu’s comment above is interesting in light of this. I am not going to perform my own meta analysis on this, but there are a great deal of studies that find that caffeine tolerance and caffeine withdrawal are real things—a quick Google Scholar search for “caffeine tolerance” will find them.
I am now very interested in a large study on this without the possible conflict of interest. Also, I find it odd that they choose to not include studies before 1992.
Just because it would be good for society if people stayed home when they were sick, doesn’t mean legislating that would actually have that effect without any drawbacks. Something between the two states seems to be in order.
I’ve been watching various colds and winter ailments move through my workplace. While I’ve been doing my part by trying to convince my co-workers that they ought to stay home if they’re sick, people still come in when they’re sick maybe half the time. At other places I know of, where workers don’t get dedicated use-it-or-lose-it sick time, matters are much worse. I wonder if legislating sick time would have a strong effect.
Actually, it looks like this is happening (http://www.natlawreview.com/article/voters-four-jurisdictions-pass-sick-leave-ballot-initiatives). Should be a couple of papers for some enterprising economist or sociologist comparing productivity per worker in states where this happens compared to states where it doesn’t.
I’ve been following Bitcoin for a while with fascination. Are there are reputable exchanges left, or is trading money for cryptocurrency back to being the wild west?
That is absolutely true, although “reasonably” in this case works for average American household income (about 50k) if you don’t live in a very high cost of living area. The same techniques that let a middle to high income household (50k+) retire early only let a 30k household make ends meet and save some money to retire comfortably around the “official” age of 65, but that’s still much better than most Americans do. His thoughts on hedonic adaptation are pretty much the same as we talk about here (having probably drawn from the same sources), and not falling prey to the tendency to spend money without getting much utility from it is more key to the whole early retirement thing than earning power. That is to say, not spending money is more important than earning money.
Mr. Money Mustache is very US centric. YMMV with the investing advice if you are in a country with different tax codes or a smaller stock market with less international exposure. The advice on how to save money is good no matter where you are.
I am a big fan of his. If you want to retire in ten or fifteen years, and yes that’s not only possible, but achievable without any major sacrifices, read him. He is someone who has taken what science knows about happiness and really applied it.
“You can’t convince anyone of anything using rational argument” is one of those cached thoughts that makes you sound cool and mature but isn’t actually true. Rational argument works a hell of a lot worse than smart people think it does, but it works in certain contexts and with certain people enough of the time that it’s worth trying sometimes. Even normal people are swayed by facts from time to time.
The Three Laws of Robotics are normally rendered as regular English words, but in-universe they are defined not by words but by mathematics. Asimov’s robots don’t have “thou shalt not hurt a human” chiseled into their positronic brain, but instead are built from the ground up to have certain moral precepts, summarized for laypeople as the three laws, so built into their cognition that robots with the three laws taken out or modified don’t work right, or at all.
Asimov actually gets the whole idea of making AI ethics being hard more than any other sci-fi author I can think of. although this stuff is mostly in the background since the plain English descriptions of the three laws are good enough for a story, but IIRC The Caves of Steel talks about this, and makes it abundantly clear that the Three Laws are made part of robots on the level of very complicated, very thorough coding—something that loads of futurists and philosopher alike often ignore if they think they’ve come up with some brilliant schema to create an ethical system, for AI or for humans.
For those of you not familiar with the technology, Python is a programming language not know for speed and the Raspberry Pi is a cheap, low-powered computer smaller than your palm.
For those of you familiar with the technology, this is just another reason why Python is amazing.
I wish I had actually applied myself in studying a foreign language instead of putting in the minimum effort to pass. I wish I had studied computer science, it would had accelerated my career by 5 years and CoSci is fun. I wish other people had taken more English classes, because writing clearly is hard and needs to be taught*.
*My alma mater my be unusual in actually teaching clear writing in English classes. I credit the professors involved.
If you think you will be let go from your current position in the near or mid future, start looking for a new job now. I’m not sure whether you will gain anything by disclosing your condition, vs. having the unexplained gap. Don’t lie outright, of course. Can you say that you paused your studies to care for your child, without mentioning exactly what’s going on? Your plans to return to grad school are a mark in your favor—that could also be a stated reason to switch jobs (i.e., “I want a job that will support me doing night school/ flexible hours for a year or two while I get even smarter”).
Also, you have a Master’s in EE. I’m guessing that’s a field where there are far more jobs that qualified applicants, like basically all forms of engineering. That, plus the fact that even neurotypical engineers are really weird, and I wouldn’t expect things to be too bad on a job hunt.
I got the shot (for free via my insurance), and it was completely painless. I looked away from my arm to prevent tensing up, and I literally did not feel the needle go in. There was a little soreness later that day, but not much. Worth keeping in mind—getting the shot is not unpleasant.
American Northeast proof: layers, as other posters have said. My strategy is, from bottom to top: sneakers (I don’t have boots at the moment), thick socks, long underwear or pajama bottoms, pants, T-shirt, sweater or sweatshirt, waterproof winter jacket, balaclava, beanie or other warm and flexible hat, hood over the hat. This is enough to get you through the coldest day of the year almost everywhere people live, but since I mostly walk between heated building, this lets me strip down to long pants and a T-shirt if I need to.
More to the point, what are you doing that people both know you’re wearing long underwear and care about it to any substantial degree?
As Lumifer said, if you sell stocks (and they’re up) you pay taxes on the capital gains—the difference between the price of the stock when you bought it and the price now. If the price now is lower, you get a tax credit for the losses, up to a certain point. Capital gains taxes tend to be lower than regular taxes (in America, at least). Selling shares of an index fund works the same way, where you pay taxes only on the gains, so selling stock to buy what is essentially more stock is pretty much a wash—you don’t pay more taxes overall, you just pay them now instead of later. I’m not sure whether being a gift affects the taxes, or what your basis is for capital gains. Investopedia might know, or ask an accountant.
Pretty much the choice of whether to sell the stock and buy more shares of the index fund is like any other choice in investment: which will make you more money? To simplify the math, imagine you sold all the shares now and paid taxes, so you had $X and could invest that in stocks or an index fund. Keep in mind the status quo bias—it is unlikely you would invest in this specific stock if you had $X to invest, and you should only keep the stock if that were the case (tax issues exempted—you’ll have to do the math yourself).
(I’d be remiss if I didn’t link this Mr. Money Mustache post on index funds that explains why they are a good idea)
To buy an index fund, you buy shares of a mutual fund. That mutual fund invests in every stock in the chosen index, balanced based on whatever criteria they choose. Each share of the mutual fund is worth a portion of the underlying investment. At no point do you own separate stocks—you own shares of the fund, instead.
Toy example: You have an index fund that invests in every stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The fund invests in $1,000,000 of stock split evenly among every stock on the NYSE, then issues a thousand shares of the fund itself. You buy one share. Your share is worth $1,000. You can sell your shares back to the fund and they will give you $1,000. Over the next year, some stocks go up and some stocks go down. The fund doesn’t buy any more stock or sell any more shares. On average, the nominal value of the NYSE will go up by about 7%. The fund now owns $1,070,000 of stocks. Your one share is now worth $1,070.
The dividends go wherever you want them to. The one share of a thousand you bought above entitles you to 1/1000 of the dividends for the underlying stocks in the fund’s entire investment. If you’re smart, they go to buy more shares of the fund because compound interest will make you rich. You can have them disbursed to you as money you can exchange for good and services, though.
Investing in an index fund is very easy. You will pay by direct withdrawal from a bank account, so you will have to do something to confirm you own the account, but other than that it’s like buying anything else online.
Index funds cover costs—which are low, because buying more stock and re-balancing existing stock can be done by a not-that-sophisticated computer program—by charging you a small percentage of your investment. This is reflected by your shares (and dividends) not being worth quite 100% of the fund’s value. Index funds are good because they have a very low expense ratio. Many normal mutual funds charge upwards of 1% annually. A good index fund can charge about 0.20%-0.05%. That means you pay your fund about $20 for the privilege of making you about $700, every year.
Opinion time: I own shares in index funds. They are amazing. For a few hours work setting up an automatic transfer and filling out paperwork, I am slowly getting rich. I don’t need the money any time this decade, so even if the market crashes tomorrow in a 2008-level event, overall the occasional 1990s-style rises cancel that out, leaving real growth at about 5% assuming you use any dividends to purchase more shares.
I will let you skip the next part of this process and recommend a specific fund: The Vanguard Total Stock Market Index, VTSMX. It invests in every stock listed on the NYSE and NASDAQ. If you have $10k invested in it, the expense ratio is a super-low 0.05, and American stocks are very broad and exposed to world conditions as a whole (this is good—you want to spread out your portfolio as much as possible to reduce risk). Go to vanguard.com , you can figure it out online.
I think I could talk about the minutiae of investing all day. It’s fascinating. I should write that post about investing and the Singularity one day.
To clarify, the definition of the prisoner’s dilemma includes it being a one-time game where defecting generates more utility for the defector than cooperating, no matter what the other player chooses.