rkbabang

In his 1st term he created the Space Force, in his 2nd term he may create a Hash Force.

It certainly is. NH is beautiful. Lakes & mountains! Just a couple a pictures I snapped with my phone in the last year.

I lived south of Boston and worked North of Boston. I would get up at 4:30am, leave my house about 5am and get to work about 6:10am (not too bad). Unfortunately in the afternoon I'd leave work about 3:30-4pm and not get home until 5:30-6pm (sometimes later). It was brutal and took a lot of time away from my family. And like you said, I was too tired to do anything during the week other than work and commute. In 2011 I changed jobs which would have added another 25 miles to my commute further north so I decided to move to NH so that I would have a 20min commute. That was life changing. Of course when COVID hit I worked from home which was even better. Then in 2022 I got my company to transfer me to the NH office and now I work from home 3 days per week and have a 10min commute the other 2 days. AND I no longer pay MA state income taxes, so life is good.

I'm in my early 50s and there isn't a lot I regret. One regret is not taking better care of my health when I was younger. I became obese in my mid-20s and didn't really change that until I was almost 40. Two, was having a long commute early on. For the 1st 15 years of my career I was on the road about 3 hrs per day getting to and from the office. I should have moved closer to my work. Those are the main regrets, basically the fist 15 years after graduating college I got fat and drove too much. Other than that I wouldn't change much even if I could. I'm happy I got married young (because I found the right woman) and had kids young. I love my family and my career. I'm happy I got into investing early, but was still young enough in 2000 when the tech crash happened that I didn't lose all that much. I of course have investing regrets that I try not to think about. I bought Netflix very early on at a split adjusted price of under $2 and sold after a triple. Also in 2011 I was reading the Bitcoin Talk message boards and wanted to buy some right around when it first hit $1. I looked into it and decided it was too much trouble and a little sketchy to wire money to some Japanese company called Mt Gox. I decided to look into mining it instead, but I was busy, so I put it off. I never ended up mining it and didn't end up buying any until a few years later when it was 200 times more expensive. And even then I didn't buy as much as I could/should have.

Thanks. It worked out better than I imagined, and quicker.

Not by choice, but my payout from the acquisition of Shockwave Medical (SWAV) by JNJ just hit my account today. I bought a small amount in Feb/2020 for $42.60 and received $335.00 today.

Semler Scientific Announces Bitcoin Treasury Strategy https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/semler-scientific-announces-bitcoin-treasury-strategy-302156715.html "Semler Scientific announced that it has purchased 581 bitcoins for an aggregate amount of $40 million, inclusive of fees and expenses... "After studying various alternatives, we decided that holding bitcoin would be the best use of our excess cash," said Mr. Semler." Press release from the company: https://ir.semlerscientific.com/static-files/caa023b3-4bc8-4b56-a475-a112cbae9355

Exactly. Even in a perfect world where the fed hits its inflation target of 2% every year in perpetuity, holding USD is an awful way to store wealth for the long term. And we don’t live in that perfect world. It forces people to invest in risky assets such as stocks or bonds just to have a chance of preserving their wealth. Yes you could buy government debt, t-bills, etc, but long term those aren’t as safe as people think they are. Certainly not 0 risk the way most people treat them. There is a black swan blow up risk there that most people and institutions don’t take into account.

And the drop in USD by far greater than 75%, more like 98%, is a permanent one that it will never recover from. In fact it is still dropping further year by year and no one expects it to ever stop dropping.

I read somewhere that there are now more females graduating from college than males. I wonder if this will be more common in the future. If the wife makes more being a medical specialist or something then the husband will stay home with the kids.

Absolutely. I just couldn't have done it. I think the same thing whenever I see a male elementary school teacher. How on earth do you spend the day in a room with 30 kids?

It's like 3 out of 30. 10% has got to be an anomaly. My wife and I talk about how weird it is all the time. 2 of the wives are Doctors and 1 is a lawyer. In 2 of the cases the wives are far more masculine than the men. If I had to physically fight either the husband or the wife, I'd fight the husband no question.

I agree with everything you said. There are always exceptions though. On my street (ave. house value ~$900K-$1.2M) there are 3 families with only 1 income where the man stays home with the kids and the wife works and supports the family.

There is likely a lot of that, especially in marriages where there is only 1 income. But most families have 2 incomes. Two people with 2 incomes pooling their resources is likely much better than 1 person with 1 income trying to go it alone.

Absolutely, but it takes work to make sure your time and/or money goes to the right place though. It's like when you try to sell something on FB or Craigslist and get these sob stories about why you should just give the item away to someone. If you actually believed these stories you would give the item away, but you know that they are likely just scammers looking for something for nothing. The welfare/charity space is full of people looking to get something for nothing. Both the recipients and the organizations claiming to help them. My great-aunt was a nun who went on charity missions to Haiti and we used to donate money to buy food and shoes for her missions. This was the most bang for our charity buck for many years. We knew the money was going to the people actually in need. Unfortunately she doesn't do this anymore (she's in her 90's now).

Bitcoin. It's easier on your rectum.

I had a realization like this about 20 years ago. My wife and I were looking to buy a rental property, we were looking at 3 family buildings in a poorer part of a nearby city. We didn't end up buying anything, but the way these poorer people lived was eye opening. This was back in 2004-2006 and these people had gigantic TVs (I still had small tube TVs in my house), video game systems that my kids would have killed for, a lot of late model cars parked on the street (many a lot newer than mine), yet their apartments were all completely trashed and filthy, most of them stunk something awful. We ended up deciding that we didn't want to be slum lords so we didn't buy anything in that part of the city. And we couldn't afford multi-family investment buildings in the nicer areas as the time. Another time we volunteered at a soup kitchen for the poor/homeless. We expected to be preparing/serving food to needy poor families down on their luck, but we were just serving drug addicts and mentally ill people. There were no families there, it was all adults and there wasn't a single person that I would characterize as a normal person down on his luck. Needless to say we never did that again. And another time we volunteered for an organization that provided winter clothes to needy families. We had a stack of about 300 gift cards for JC Penny and we where supposed to provide each child with a $100 gift card and go shopping with the child who would have a list from their mother of what they needed, this was to make sure the money was actually spent on clothes for the child. This took place in the largest city in the state, we had a large group of volunteers, 300 gift cards, and were prepared for hundreds of children to show up. We had 10. Those 10 kids did get much needed winter coats, hats, and boots though. It is a lot harder to actually help the needy than most people think.

Another thing to factor in is your age. If you are 25-35 and have a mortgage with a 3% rate, you should probably keep it. If you are in your 50s and thinking about when to retire, you should probably pay it off. I was 48 when I paid mine off and have no regrets. I have more to invest every month now and am comfortable knowing I'm completely debt free. When I was in my early 30s I wanted to leverage the equity in my house to upgrade to a bigger house. I wasn't thinking about how I could pay it off.

It wasn't an appeal to authority, it was simply a historical example of an authority getting something wrong. An appeal to authority would be in the form: "<X person> says your are wrong, so you are wrong." This isn't as easy to see as dropping bombs from airplanes, because it is in a completely different domain. The internet has been around for a few decades longer than Bitcoin and yet there hasn't been a major war with a major front taking place online yet. It is simply my opinion that this happening is only a matter of time.

If Bitcoin disappeared tomorrow it wouldn't affect US security one whit. Unfortunately for US security Bitcoin isn't going anywhere. If airplanes disappeared in the 19-teens they wouldn't have affected US security one Whit. “Airplanes are interesting toys, but of no military value.” General Ferdinand Foch, Supreme Allied Commander of WW1

Yes, also I know there are companies researching replacing the steel with different carbon fiber like materials to make them stronger and lighter, but I can't see a switch away from aluminum for the conductor, unless they find some type of engineered material that has both a strength to weight ratio improvement over steel and at least the conductivity of Aluminum. EDIT: at a reasonable cost.

I think the only thing better than copper in a generator would be silver and that is even more expensive.

Yes, those thick aluminum cables are super hard to work with, but dirt cheap compared to copper. We had an April snow storm that took down my drop wire between my house and my detached garage, so I decided rather than put it back up the way it was to run a line underground. It's a 100A panel in the garage and I needed ~170' of cable. I bought 175' of 1/0-1/0-1/0 aluminum cable for $292.25 at an electrical supply. That would have been thousands in cable costs to do in the appropriate gauge copper. I know in-wall aluminum house wiring was used in the 1970s when copper prices were high and there were some house fires due to contractors not using the correct gauge. Aluminum house wiring became a red-flag when looking at properties built in the 70s. EDIT: I just looked it up the aluminum house wiring fires were due to the type of wire used and not being compatible with the outlets and light switches. Aluminum to Copper connections caused corrosion at the connections which caused the fires.

My thinking that Bitcoin is the only digital property that matters and that there is no second best doesn't rely on whatever the SEC or Congress, or President of the United States does or doesn't do. The thing about Bitcoin is it makes the hierarchical players at the center irrelevant. I don't think ETH is a security in the traditional sense, but it isn't money nor is it a viable long term store of value. My views won't change even if the SEC decides to approve a Dog-with-a-hat-poops-on-the-sidewalk-coin ETF.