rkbabang

This is absolutely true, but not the whole story. We all play the hand that we are dealt, but some people are better at the game than others. There are poker players who will win consistently and then there are the amateurs who will only win when they happen to be dealt a really good hand. The problem is that when you only ever play the game once it is hard to tell which category you are in.

Your income = 100% = (salary + bonuses + profit sharing + matching + stock plan purchase discounts + stock awards + capital gains + interest + dividends + etc) You pay 20%-75% of that in taxes depending on your income sources and where you live (federal/state/local/property taxes/etc) What you have left even before living expenses is 25%-80%. It is impossible to save 90% of your gross income before tax in the US.

How long ago was this that you were living off $8,000 a year and were you spending <10% of your pre-tax or after-tax income? It would have to have been his after tax income. If he was spending 10% of his pre-tax income he couldn't have been "socking away roughly 90%+" of his income. Both the 10% and 90% would have to have been after tax otherwise the statement doesn't add up.

To be truly ready to retire, in my opinion anyway, regardless of age is to have enough to live off of earning 2%. This way if you earn 3-5% per year you can have the principle continually growing by 1-3% per year to keep up with inflation. This way you can maintain your lifestyle regardless of how long you live. This will work if you retire at 30 or 65. The principle required will depend on how much you need. 2% of 1.5M is $30K. I'm thinking $3M is the minimum, so that you have $60K to live off of.

Yeast in a sugar solution eventually dies either from starvation (ran out of food) or toxicity (alcohol by-product). Infinity = dead ! SD Of course in the long run you are correct, but the universe is a big place, we can expand exponentially for a long time before running out of resources/energy/space. If we stay on this planet while we still have the seas, we won't last very long. Or even if we stay just in this solar system we will last a little longer, but not much. Humanity needs a much bigger frontier.

The top 5 lines on the chart right now express my sentiments toward the IRS exactly.

Is that really true? I would think that there are ways to prevent a failure in one place from compromising all the system. Clearly shutoffs or turnoffs should work pretty fine. But then I am not a mechanical engineer, so ::) In general though, this is a troll thread, so I might not reply to any further comments. What if the tubes were completely sealed every so many yards (or some other distance) and each gate only opened in enough time for the train to go through then closed again?

True, but the same argument could be made for planes. Ultimately all forms of transport have material weaknesses that make them vulnerable to accident or attack (planes = altitude and pressure, cars = bridges and tunnels, trains = any removal of track, boats = mild issue of sinking when holed). Yet, all work extremely well. I have no idea whether the hyperloop will join them, but I won't be surprised if it does. +1. Trains have thousands of miles of unguarded tracks that could be damaged in minutes using a chain and a pickup truck. Cruise ships can now carry as many as 5-6 thousand people, can you imagine if a terrorist sank one? The hyperloop will be vulnerable too, just like every thing else is.

Its a 600 km long near vacuum. There is absolutely no cheap way to make that work and the issues are obvious. Destruction of the vacuum at any point makes the whole thing fail and when vacuums fail you get explosions and/or implosions. If I were a terrorist...bash an SUV into the tunnel a little before a train is passing through at 700km/hr, the vacuum tube implodes or explodes. The pod in the tube comes out at 700km/hr and hits a building. Just too easy. The power needed to maintain the vacuum would be tremendous. The explosive energy of the vacuum itself would be incredible. And then of course there are the ridiculous cost estimates which are 1/10th what you would expect. The utterly ridiculous design which is completely insufficient to deal with the forces produced by vacuums. Its a 2 inch thick steel tube. Any real world situation which produces vacuums of the kind you will get would typically have all sorts of structural reinforcements and redundancies like multiple layers of containment which would hugely increase costs. This becomes an even bigger issue when you consider safety and terrorism which almost no typical large vacuum application has to deal with because they aren't using the vacuums to do mass transport. This of course mean you are dealing with costs that aren't 1/10 of normal public transportation costs but more like 100 times traditional transport costs. The operational problems which all center around the huge vacuum and the incredibly high speed of the pods are tremendous. Probably every single day you would have catastrophic failures. I would say the operational problems are essentially equivalent to space shuttle launch every single time a pod runs through. This article lays out the problems: http://dailycaller.com/2016/07/26/scientist-lays-out-5-huge-problems-with-elon-musks-hyperloop-video/ There is no way Musk is stupid enough not to understand this. All the problems of space and electric cars involve the type of physics and mechanics that would easily enable him to grasp this. Logically Musk must already know this isn't going to work. So then the question is what is his real agenda. Railways must have seemed just as absurd when they first came out. Strips of steel track, any one of which could have snapped or come loose at any time? Big fire-breathing tanks of boiling water that would drag you across country at unimaginable speeds? No thanks, I'll stick to my horse. And yet... You're going to get on the back of a large muscular animal, hope you don't fall off while you ride at unimaginable speeds? No thanks, I'll walk.

It's really more of a problem with the energy of the pods. Just letting air into a vacuum chamber isn't that big a deal - as long as the walls are thick/strong enough. Back in my student days, we machined vacuum chambers out of aluminum with very thick walls. We had one beast (made of steel) that you could basically walk/climb into. The easiest way to stop small leaks was to put some epoxy on the offending hole. I can't see how the project makes sense cost-wise and it does seem to be overly risky for passengers, but I've not looked into it carefully. Atmospheric pressure is 14.7 pounds per square inche. Assuming a pure vacuum, a meter square area of steel needs to resist a force of 14.7*(10000cm^2/m^2)*(in^2/ 5.6 cm^2) = 26000 pounds. Or about 10 or 11 toyota corollas. That is the force on every single square meter of the structure. To give you some idea of what that force can do: And then you compound this with an object travelling 700km/hr on the inside of the structure. The Hyperloop as Musk has proposed it isn't even close to pure vacuum. As I said before, Musk's version is really moderate and doable. A pure vacuum version won't be feasible until materials science progresses to the point where we can make the tubes to contain it safely and affordably. The full vacuum tube transportation system is in the same category as the space elevator. We could build it easily if we had a material which could handle the requirements.

I can't fathom why you think it is stupid. I first read a similar idea some time in the early 90s in a Sci-if book by L. Neil Smith called "The Probability Broach" (the book itself was written in 1979). It described a network both within cities and between cities all over North America of completely evacuated underground tubes where you just get into a pod and travel at thousands of miles per hour to your destination (it might have been tens of thousands of miles per hour, I don't remember). I remember thinking duh, that is genius. Atmospheric resistance is the real limiting factor to terrestrial high speed travel. Of course back then the reason this was unrealistic was the lack of computing power to control/navigate the pods. A collision at those speeds would be catastrophic. Now we have the computing resources to implement this. Especially the more modest partially evacuated slower speed multi-passenger Hyperloop that Musk is suggesting. After reading that book I didn't really think about it again until I heard Musk talk about the Hyperloop. It sounds even better today, than it did back then because it is now feasible.

schwab offers a checking account that will refund international atm fees when paired with a brokerage account. Fidelity does as well. I use a Fidelity cash management account as my checking account and all of my atm fees are refunded to me.

I use Fidelity, but have never used Schwab. Making foreign trades in Fidelity is as easy as making domestic trades. Also I use my Fidelity VISA card as my main credit card. 2% cash back on everything with no categories and no limit, deposited into any one of your Fidelity accounts automatically every month. I just got an email from the VISA card today that if I use it at Amazon.com 3 times over the next few months for at least $25 each time, I'll get a $25 cash back bonus. It said no exceptions even gift cards apply. So I just bought 3 $25 gift cards emailed to myself in 3 different transactions. I usually use my Amazon card at Amazon.com.

My longest and best investment by far is MIDD. I bought it in April of 2005 at around a split adjusted $2.50/share. I sold most of it around $85 or so, but I still own some today it is about $136. I should have never sold any of it.

Q: "Elon Musk...human?" A: Not for long.

Very few people prepare for the worst, I certainly don't. To be thus prepared you would need an escape plan to get to a remote area, where you have a well stocked bunker to ride out a few years worth of chaos and a bunch of gold and ammo to trade with after the worst blows over. Any paper wealth you have is gone in any worst case scenario. I'm not prepared, because I don't think it will ever come to that. I'm more of an optimist. There will be ups and downs, but we'll be fine. I'm sure whatever healthplan Trump ends up signing won't be all that great, but will fix some things and cause other problems. My biggest concern is that it is destracting him from tax cuts and deregulation.

Exactly. I can picture themselves asking "Holy hell! What if everyone only paid taxes on what their property was worth?"

Basically it comes down to this. Most of us know it, Buffett and Munger keep repeating that but we just fail. My problem is in the "rarely sold" and I don't seem to learn... My turnover is becoming crazy high (I've sold 128% of the value of my current portfolio in the last 2,5 months)... Does anyone know the cure? edit: the value would be 164% of current portfolio if I increase the time range to 4,5 months I agree. While I don't trade nearly as much as you, I have very few "bought the wrong stock" mistakes. Almost all of my mistakes were of the "sold way too early" variety. With the market so high right now I am itching to sell a lot of my positions to raise cash and I am afraid I'll regret it, as I always have before.

Monero is private. With Bitcoin if I know an account is associated with you then I can see what is in it and every transaction you have ever made. This is not the case with Monero.

I bought some about a year ago, along with Dash and Monero, I'm pretty happy that I did. I own the top 4 cryptocurrencies by market cap. I like ETH, it has the most functionality and is being actively developed. If they add some privacy features, I think it has the potential to be the cryptocurrency and dethrone Bitcoin.

To their credit, they didn't say "Dow Plummets" I've become desensitized to the whole "breaking news" "plummeting" "catastrophic" media/politician/dewshnozzle BS... "Breaking News" used to mean something exciting or extraordinary just happened, but now it is just whatever is happening at the moment even if it isn't much of anything.

Good point. It makes a better sales tactic than investment strategy. Have you asked any of the people who believe the stock market is rigged "Rigged by who?". If someone was rigging the stock market they would be the richest people on Earth, otherwise they are doing a piss poor job of rigging it. So that means it must be people like Buffett, Gates, and Bezos. EDIT: People tend to not understand things that demonstrate emergent behavior, such as network effects, prices in markets, nature, etc. This is why they postulate/support socialism, conspiracies, religious intelligent design, etc. This is just how people explain things which they don't understand to themselves. "Someone must have created it." or "Someone must be in control of it."

Which is why government always grows like a cancer taking over the host society until it kills it, and it never shrinks. Not without a scalpel and a lot of blood anyway.

I understand being a macro nut where when the market is high, you are bearish, and when the market is low you are bullish. But what I don't understand is these pera-bears who are always bearish. This guy can't even bring himself to be positive after a crash (i.e. 2000, 2007). If the market crashes this year, he will make money this year, then lose money again for the next decade.

I haven't had the time to look into it, but I know Rand Paul is calling it 'Obamacare Lite'. That doesn't make me very optimistic that it is much of an improvement.