The thing about hitting the bottom is that outsiders view it much differently than insiders. You are convinced your friend will finally change her ways because of a terrible episode last weekend. How could she not? This was so clearly the nadir. But your friend doesn’t see it that way because, of course, if she was seeing the world clearly she never would have been so close to a nadir in the first place. 

Still, your friend isn’t happy about last weekend, isn’t so confused to think apologies are unnecessary. This is the frustrating disconnect: both parties agree the weekend was bad, but only you think it obviously proves radical change is required. While you grant that your friend hasn’t been a model of responsibility and accountability for some time, you can’t help but think this episode would trigger such traits. And that’s the mistake: projecting your high-functioning self onto someone who is running different software is all but guaranteed to create that frustrating disconnect. 

Software upgrades are indeed always possible for your friend, but don’t count on them being downloaded per your expectation timeline – you truly can’t comprehend what it’s like to be operating from your friend’s base.

The best you can do is not care about what your friend is losing so long as it doesn’t directly affect you. How could she throw away her job, her boyfriend, her whatever? It’s beyond frustrating to witness for any halfway compassionate human, but it is frustration you must learn to dissipate. Step one: make sure you have honestly and kindly expressed your concerns. Step two: help where you can. Step three: stop caring. 

Step three sounds brutal and perhaps impossible. Achieving it begins by never initiating. Instead of calling to check, inviting to events you hope will help her psyche, or comforting when you feel she needs it, you act to help if, and only if, she requests it. There will be times when you feel like you should do more; you must remind yourself you did what you could – it’s on her now.

Lastly, don’t ignore your own selfishness. With a look of utter exasperation, you retell the entire episode to another friend painting yourself as some Mother Teresaesque altruist. You are not. While you truly may want to help, a notable part of you craves recognition for these efforts. And the fact that your friend isn’t singing a paean for your intervention is a contributing factor to your general irritation.

Oh, and one more thing. You may well be perversely enjoying your friend’s struggles because they make you feel better about your own life. Given this undercurrent, your I hope she gets better claims are outright false or deeply conflicted. And if you don’t actually want your alleged friends to be well, maybe you shouldn’t be so worried about others hitting bottoms, maybe you should instead focus on how to improve yourself.

I’m now officially on Team Ursula, and I’m stunned that you and every right-thinking person isn’t with me.

First, I see no good reason to hold a fictional world where people live and speak underwater to arcane bits of American jurisprudence, so the whole “she’s a minor” point is trivial. More importantly, though, Ariel’s world clearly views minors differently since she gets to marry a grown man.

Then there’s your consternation about selling a body part. Indeed there are interesting discussions to be had regarding the sale of kidneys, assisted suicide, or, in this case, selling one’s voice, but it’s certainly not obvious that these acts are “immoral” and should be deemed illegal. But even if they were, we are back to a mere technicality taking down Ursula.

In Ursula’s defense, however, is a concept so robust most people – from legal scholars to the woefully uneducated – would uphold: your word is your bond. Thus, the hysterical, unethical reaction by Ariel and her companions (culminating in murder) is condemnable. Of sound mind Ariel signed a deal – she should have to live with the results instead of getting a bailout from her dad and future husband (future statutory raper, I should say).

Anyway, you are the man and I have learned much from you. I look forward to your next episode.

because it failed to properly address the most frequent objection I hear: “I’m not getting vaccinated because I’m not at risk. Covid is just another flu for someone like me, and I don’t get flu shots.” If you ignore pleas about “community responsibility,” their logic isn’t easy to defeat:

• 79% of deaths are by people 65 or older (30% older than 85)

• 94% of people dying of Covid had at least one comorbidity 

So yes, it’s quite sensible for my young, healthy friends to think Covid is “no big deal,” especially when speaking from a selfish perspective. Of course, there are bad outcomes other than death, but I’ve found those are less motivating once anchored to the You should be terrified of Covid (incorrect) narrative.

Furthermore, if a healthy person is skeptical of the vaccines for any of the reasons you discussed, 12,000 random deaths from vaccines (if true) represent a greater risk than 600,000 deaths concentrated among at-risk people. Additionally, it’s reasonable to expect that the side effects from the vaccine will be worse than contracting the disease. Most people in my circle who got the vaccine were knocked out for at least a day; most who got Covid were asymptomatic.

Lastly, some of these anti-Covid vaxxers (most aren’t anti-vaxx) happen to have a starting bias that’s less trusting of authority. When you rightfully point out the countless institutional failures during the pandemic, you see “exceptions” that reduce your priors while they see “rules” that validate their priors.

A tricky problem, indeed.

Anyway, you are the man and have positively affected my life more than any person I’ve never met. Thanks for all that you do.

That I actually do have a nice, long list of interests. That there may be more to discover, but only in the way that there is more to discover in a city you’ve resided in your entire life. Which is to say, harvesting is now preferable to searching. The shift to harvesting remains true regardless of the weather: it’s the understanding and commitment to this fruit as the best you will do that makes the fruit the best it can be.

try living with someone who lacks a memory. The rhythm of do something nice = credibility gain is immediately snapped and you’ll be forced to witness how much of your own esteem was a product of that tried and true formula.

This reckoning is all the more severe if nobody else knows that you live with someone lacking a memory. It’s just you, all alone, doing yeoman’s work for the direct benefit of someone who won’t actually really know what you are doing. Except, of course, outside of the in-the-moment appreciation that may never be properly communicated, but must be felt, if only for an instant.

I consider it a massive victory to gain even a slightly different perspective on a topic. After all, the most important elements of the human condition have been so thoroughly addressed for so very long that a genuinely new take is incredibly unlikely. This unlikeliness increases the more common, more universal the topic of inquiry: it’s harder to write a unique love song than a track about Newcomb’s paradox.

Enter poet David Whyte doing the near-impossible. Not only does he reliably offer refreshingly new insights, he does so regarding “everyday words” firmly stuffed in a societal bin labeled “We Already Know What These Words Mean.”

I distinctly remember laughing after consuming “Honesty.” I definitely know what honesty is, but I’m sure he’ll say some pretty things that will prove useful in reminding me what I already know. Wrong in a wonderful way. Outlier this was not: at a rate only Barry Bonds could sniff, D Whyte pumps out unequaled originality that will change what you think, know, and believe.

I concluded this from a few of these pieces (which I’ve circled) that I encountered outside of this book. So yes, in breaking from tradition, I am sending a book that I have not completely read. I am willing to make an exception because I’m so confident in Whyte’s brilliance. And, really, if you only read the circled pieces, sending you this book will have been worth it.

it’s our smartphones.

This may seem like a semantic difference, but I contend it’s more meaningful than just that. The big problem is constant access to information, however it’s delivered. Just think of all the dead time 20 years ago: on the toilet, smoke breaks, walking anywhere, waiting for a friend to arrive, etc. That time was reserved for you and your thoughts. You still read and watched the news, yes, but these activities were necessarily limited because you had to be near a TV, computer, or a newspaper. Those limits were destroyed by the smartphone combined with unlimited, cheap cellular plans.

This is not about how we’re all lacking attention now; this is about how ever more of our attention is devoted to the news. Yes, the maximum-outrage bent of social media plays a role. Still, if the news was only delivered in prosaic terms, the problem of thinking wayyyyy too much about politics would exist so long as looking at a phone was more interesting than doing nothing. And just about anything can surpass doing nothing.

A sucker is born every minute, and today that sucker happens to be username “Peninsula FOL.” See, PFOL was once the owner of the book you now hold in your hands and apparently didn’t understand its worth. Lesson #1: know what you and your possessions are worth – then add at least 22% as a negotiating starting point.

“Big Wolf and Little Wolf” happens to be just about the most coveted kid’s book in the world because it’s beautiful, endearing, and so perfectly speaks to human emotions, and also because of supply constraints. Lesson #2: prices rise when demand outstrips supply, a.k.a. a “seller’s market.”

So in a “seller’s market” with used book prices like $51.50 (AbeBooks.com), $74.50 (Alibris.com), $99.95 (eBay.com), and $58.90 (Amazon.com), the sucker that is PFOL prices at … $25.[1] A hanging offer if I’ve ever seen one. This price was so low I wondered if I might, in fact, be the sucker. After brief consideration, I charged forward given Alibris.com’s credibility and my credit card’s fraud protection. Lesson #3: no financial opportunity is 100% certain (and anyone who talks of “easy” or “free” money is a charlatan or worse) – act swiftly when the expected reward outweighs the expected risk.[2] Lesson #4: whenever you can cheaply offload risk onto someone else without capping upside, do it, a.k.a. always buy with credit cards when possible.[3]

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your life doesn’t revolve around Twitter. But for many of the people “capitulating” to the “Twitter mob,” their life is significantly lived on Twitter.

Now, you may say this is stupid, that they should invest in the physical world. You may be right. Your initial point, though, wasn’t a normative one. Instead, it was a claim that the millennial in question was overreacting to something that didn’t matter … except that what happens on Twitter does truly matter to them.

This dynamic is similar to most times when you downplay another’s anguish. You shouldn’t care so much about your 16-year-old boyfriend; Who cares about that stupid stuffed animal – it’s just a toy; Stop crying over something so minor. Incidents of this variety are mere projections of how you would feel if you were the person in question. But of course you aren’t that person, and you don’t have his experiences and preferences. So, if anything, you should be attempting to understand why the thing you view as trivial is far from trivial for someone else. You still may up being correct that the person should reprioritize, but rarely will you find irrationality in the suffering.

Ben Felix

• Can’t compare rent to mortgage payments
• Can compare unrecoverable costs: a cost you pay w/ no associated residual value
  • Rent: the rent
  • Buy: not mortgage payment, property taxes, maintenance cost, and cost of capital
• Property taxes ~ 1%; generally higher in states w/o income taxes (like 2%)
• Maintenance costs ~ 1% of the home’s value
• Cost of capital
  • Cost of debt: interest costs ~ 3% (add with pt, mc = 5% rule)
  • Cost of equity capital: you put down 20% on real estate instead of an alternative asset.
    • Globally real estate returned 1.3% from 1900 – 2017; stocks returned 5.2% after 1.7% inflation. So a nominal return of 3% for real estate; 6.9% for stocks. Round it to 3% cost of equity capital in real estate.
• 5% rule: take value of the home you are considering, multiply by 5%, and divide by 12. If you can rent for less than that, renting is sensible.
  • $500,000K home would have $25,000 in unrecoverable costs or $2,083 per month
  • Can go the other way. Rental of $3k, multiply by 12, and divide by 5 is $720k. SO renting for 3K is financially equivalent to buying a $720k home.
• 5% rule becomes 4% if you are holding a less aggressive stock portfolio, if you are taxed harshly on those investments, etc.
• Housing best investment ever?
  • Real estate return = net rental income + price increase in the home
  • If you live in the house, you don’t get the rental income
  • So really, if you are living in the house, you already aren’t the subject of most claims about real estate’s great returns
  • 1870-2015 for GLOBAL housing 7.05% compared to 6.89% for stocks
    • but that means that you had to invest in housing in ALL countries
    • plus, housing, unlike stock, is not homogenous
    • and if you could buy housing across the world, you still have to manage all the properties
    • investing in any one asset is not a compensated risk. uncompensated risks can usually be diversified away by investing in a whole asset class, but that is hard with real estate.
  • If your monthly housing cost is higher than what you could rent it for, that loss will decline over time assuming your mortgage is fixed and there exists some level of rent inflation
  • Missing a single month of rent per year crushes returns
  • You basically have to be perfect to match the stock market
  • And if you buy in a single locality, you are in a similar situation to buying a single stock: the idiosyncrasies of the locality profoundly affect you
• Why rent instead of buy?
  • Less risk: Short-term (<10 yrs) price fluctuations can crush a buyer who has to move. Not to mention the risk of taking on debt.
  • Predictable cost: maintenance costs for homes that can be random
  • No investment illusion: homeowners will spend heavily on a variety of things under the guise of increasing the price of the home even though there is no such guarantee that such efforts will pay off
    • Buildings can never go up in value. Ever. Period. Only land can go up in value.
• Homeowners also pay “rent”
  • Renting services from the city in the form of property taxes
  • Unrecoverable maintenance costs just to keep their house inhabitable
  • Renting money from the bank while they have a mortgage
• What about once the mortgage is paid off?
  • $500k home. Could sell and keep $475. Could invest that money at 6% while the long-term expected return on real estate is only 3%. That difference is op cost or $14k per year. Plus you still have maintenance and taxes post-mortgage.
• People think their homes are better investments than they actually were. Big numbers. Failing to understand compound returns and the costs along the way.  Not to mention inflation.

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