is an inheritance.
Expectation is a statistical fiction, like having 2.5 children. A gambler’s actual wealth varies wildly.
The code that Morse devised for his telegraph was relatively good because the most common letter, E, is represented with the shortest code, a single dot. Uncommon letters, like Z, have longer codes with multiple dots and dashes. This makes most messages more concise than they were in some of the early telegraphic codes. This principle, and many more subtle ones, figures in today’s codes for compressing digital pictures, audio, and video.
Assuming you wanted your spouse to bring home Shamu, you wouldn’t just say, “Pick up Shamu!” You would need a good explanation. The more improbable the message, the less “compressible” it is, and the more bandwidth it requires. This is Shannon’s point: the essence of a message is its improbability.
Collectively, the world’s investors own 100% of all the world’s stock. That means that the average return of all the world’s investors has to be identical to the average return of the stock market as a whole. It can’t be otherwise.
Even more clearly, the average return of passive investors is equal to the average stock market return.
Subtract the return of passive investors from the whole. This leaves the return of the active investors … Collectively, active investors must do no better or worse than the passive investors.
Active investing is therefore a zero-sum game. The only way for one active investor to do better than average is for another active investor to do worse than average. You can’t squirm out of this conclusion by imagining that the active investors’ profits come at the expense of those wimpy passive investors who settle for the average return. The average return of the passive investors is exactly the same as that of the active investors, for the reason just outlined.
Take Shannon’s pipe dream of turning a dollar into $2,048. You buy a stock for $1. It doubles every year for eleven years (100 percent annual return!) and then you sell it for $2,048. That triggers capital gains tax on the $2,047 profit. At a 20 percent tax rate, you’d owe the government $409. This leaves you $1,639. That is the same as getting a 96 percent return, tax-free, for eleven years. The tax knocks only 4 percentage points off the pretax compound return rate.
Suppose instead that you run the same dollar into $2,048 through a lot of trading. You realize profit each year, so you have to pay capital taxes each year. The first year, you go from $1 to $2 and owe tax on the $1 profit. For simplicity, pretend that the short-term tax rate is also 20 percent (it’s generally higher). Then you pay the government 20 cents and end the first year with $1.80 rather than $2.00.
This means that you are not doubling your money but increasing it by a factor of 1.8 – after taxes. At the end of eleven years you will have not 2^11 but 1.8^11. That comes to about $683. That’s less than half what the buy-and-hold investor is left with after taxes.
The marvel of its presentation would not exceed that of the even recounted, for it is a warning to those who would be warned and a lesson to those who would learn.
They seek a source of gold that is cheaper than mining ore from the ground. Alchemy does describe a means to make gold, but the procedure is so arduous that, by comparison, digging beneath a mountain is as easy as plucking peaches from a tree.
In pursuing the boy, with no hint of whether he’d succeed or fail, he had felt his blood surge in a way it had not for many weeks. And seeing the boy’s tears had reminded him of the Prophet’s teachings on the value of mercy, and Hassan had felt virtuous in choosing to let the boy go.
Rather, using the Gate is like taking a secret passageway in a palace, one that lets you enter a room more quickly than by walking down the hallway. The room remains the same, no matter which door you use to enter.
It is said that repentance and atonement erase the past.
It is also possible that a man who would make use of such a guarantee would not find his older self alive when he first used the Gate.
Driven by the curiosity that impels men to look at the heads of the executed,
It’s not auto parts that need to be fulfilled. It’s fucking art. Treat it as such. Give it a little reverence. Music used to be the thing. That is what I was doing. If I had time, I was listening to music. I wasn’t doing it in the background while I was doing five other things. And I wasn’t treating it as a disposable commodity. I don’t go into the cinema and do my taxes while the movie is playing. I’m there to watch a movie. I kinda miss the attention music got.
I’m guessing you’ve been quite courageous. But before I get into guessing, let me start with what I 100% know. I know that I’ve always enjoyed being around you and your brightness, thoughtfulness, and ease. As xxxxxxxxx became unreachable years ago, it was not just the loss of his company, but also of yours. I will always and forever cherish great times I had with you.
Now back to courage. Too often, discussions about courage revolve around the dramatic: running into burning buildings, pushing of children out of traffic. These acts are to be celebrated, for sure, but they are unthinking momentary impulses that come from who knows where. Furthermore, the opportunity to exhibit courage in this manner may never arrive. So I like emphasizing a second, more ordinary form: doing hard things for oneself that conflict with the interests of people one cares about and may well conflict with some of one’s interests and values as well.
Work as hard as you can. Even though who you work with and what you work on are more important than how hard you work.
I only really want to do things for their own sake. That is one definition of art. Whether it’s business, exercise, romance, friendship, whatever. I think the meaning of life its to do things for their own sake. Ironically, when you things for their own sake, you create your best work. Even if you’re just trying to make money, you will actually be the most successful.
Tools and leverage create this disconnection between inputs and outputs. The higher the creativity component of a profession, the more likely it is to have disconnected inputs and outputs. If you’re looking at professions where your inputs and your outputs are highly connected, it’s going to be very hard to create wealth and make wealth for yourself in that process.
Status is a zero-sum game. It’s a very old game … And for number three to move to number two, number two has to move out of that slot.
An old boss once warned: “You’ll never be rich since you’re obviously smart, and someone will always offer you a job that’s just good enough.”
Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.
Movies
- Dark Waters
- Dune: Part Two
- It Ends with Us
- The Creator
Books
- Jack Reacher
New Music
- Sanguivore // Creeper
- Railer // Lagwagon
- Challengers // Reznor and Ross
- POST HUMAN: NeX GEn // Bring me the Horizon
- Sempiternal // Bring me the Horizon
- No Name // Jack White
- Mid Air // Romy
- Silence // Blindside
- In Waves // Jamie xx
- Wake the Dead // Comeback Kid
Old Music
- Saosin // Saosin
There will be ways-of-life that are only possible during specific life phases. One should be careful rushing past these ways, especially when what awaits is a way that’s possible in many life phases.
So, refrain from living in an apartment far from campus when a dorm is the default option. You’ll always be able to live in apartments far from life; you’ll never again be able to live in a dorm.
Em-dash: use this for sentence interjections and sentence enders; can be used to replace colon. Wide as capital ‘M.’ Get there in Word with –. Can use or not use a space before and after. I like using the space. Or ctrl + alt + minus sign.
- The last time I saw him I asked him if he still believed — as he once had written — that we are at the is moment participating in one of the very greatest leaps…
- On July 22, the company was awarded the largest privatization contract ever for a prison — a 2,048-bed minimum-security facility in Taft, CA.
En-dash: half width of Em. Used to show range. Ctrl + minus in word. Often equivalent to to or versus. Width of “N.” Often represented with hyphen.
- the 1914-1918 war
- the nature-nurture debate
Hyphen: if two or more consecutive words make sense only when understood together as an adjective modifying a noun that follows, those words (excluding the noun) should be hyphenated. So special-interest money, but not special interest. Credit card vs. credit-card application.