Category: Uncategorized

Far too many outdoorsy hobbies involve waking up before dawn on your day off.

The Journey to the West arrived today, but I wound up knocking this out first. It took about eight hours, and not much of that was reading.

Odd book.

I didn’t like it that much, but it was better than I enjoyed. You know the feeling of seeing something well done in a way that doesn’t affect you and appreciating it while you don’t enjoy it? This was that book. It’s like a marvelous dish I don’t like, or a well done play in a sport I find boring. It’s a jamming country song with all of the twang.

The prose was thick, the writing thick, and it defied modernist style. Things are said but also faltered. The sensuality was of an odd, rough form, more like amateurism done well than the modernist way. It reminds me an awful lot of fanfic, and yet the fanfic written like this usually isn’t very good. This one was well done, but done as a child might, as a junior high kid thinks of sex put to well written words. It’s rough and overly polished, covered in jagged edges and pieces that don’t line up, buffed to a glossy shine.

Lee was often rejected by publishers for her style. I understand why.

And yet there’s something here.

It’s not magnificent, but it’s worth reading.

We’re watching Hong Kong’s freedom die. This will be a moment in the history books, and future generations will ask, “Why didn’t you do something?”

And like all such bystanders, we will reply, “Do what?”

I support the UK opening their immigration doors to HK residents and wish the US would do the same.

I just realized I’d never actually read this. Better late than never, etc. and it’s moved to the top of my stack.

The basic recipe for writing a story about a character doing a thing is:

1) Establish why the character can’t do the thing.

2) Establish that if the character doesn’t do the thing, terrible other things will happen.

3) Have the character do the thing.

If you don’t answer the issues raised in 1 in 3, the story makes no sense.

I like dogs. Big, fluffy ones.

The day to day business of engineering is more fun than the day to day business of physics. The ideas of physics are more exciting than engineering.

In both you ask questions of the form, ‘Why is this the way it is?’

The physics answer speaks to the nature of creation itself.

The engineering answer is, ‘Because I did it with a different servo, broke six of them, and now I don’t have any left. But I found a stack of these suckers in a closet.’

Is a dumpsterfire. How does it require 80% CPU to open a script?

Not run. Open.

And the profiler is violently wrong, often under-reporting time by orders of magnitude. In real world time, scripts take minutes, plural, to run. In profiler space, the function is listed as 11 seconds total time.

Financial professionals often lose sight of the people they serve. It’s a problem, but one not unique to the finance world. This filters down into the retail base, resulting in people who spend more time looking at the particular characteristics of the market right now than their own situations.

I fell prey to this many times.

When you’ve got enough money to dump into investments and savings, it’s easy to look at market valuations and so forth and decide to wait. Here are a few tricks to make sense of the proposition.

1) Would you actually be saving money by holding off a purchase, or are you about to waste it on stupid stuff?

An advantage to a retirement account is it’s hard to raid the account for stupid stuff, and frankly, I like buying stupid stuff. I could spend a lot of money on my car. Skiing isn’t necessarily an expensive hobby, but it can be. This exists.

So I look at the S&P and think to myself, a 50% correction is perfectly plausible right now. But whatever I throw in is not completely wasted, and I’m on a 30-60 year timeframe for retirement. Meh. The odds are good the market will come back, and they’re not nothing that the correction will hold off.

2) If you’re going to do something, you might as well do it now.

Markets usually go up. That’s why people use them. Even now in the era of madness, bubbles, and froth, they tend to rise. What’s more, no one can see the future, so we’re all looking at the same data, present and past. Many people are trying to time the market and they can’t all be right.

3) Are you playing to your strengths or someone else’s?

We all have the same data, present and past. But we don’t all have the same goals. A money manager can’t lose for five years. Their investors will take back all their money. I can’t get my money out of retirement for decades, so I might as well go long.

This also means that the importance of present and past data is lower for me, because the further ones goes out into the future, the more new present or past becomes meaningful. So if I’m looking at pulling cash out in 2060, 2040 will be old news then. It’s new past.

But obviously no one can predict that well now. It’s twenty years into the future! It only gets worse from there.

What I can control is right now, and if I’ve got some retirement cash right now, I may as well put it to work. Markets do generally rise. Even Japan is starting to come back. With regards to a worst case scenario, if I dollar-cost averaged into the Nikkei over the 80s, I’d be well ahead by now, even with the ’89 crash. (The Japanese stock market hit insane bubble heights in the eighties, crashed in ’89, and has not yet recovered)

There’s a chestnut floating around that you shouldn’t invest money you can’t afford to lose. This is absurd. I can’t afford to lose my retirement, but without investing it, I won’t afford to retire on it either. Obviously I invest money I can’t afford to lose. There’s no alternative.

I’m reading Lost Horizon by James Hilton. It’s the origin of the Shangri-La myth. I’d thought that was some ancient story, but it’s less than a hundred years old. The book is one where the story is more interesting than the telling.