ribuck

Anyway, swimming 4 times in 2 weeks is plenty to keep a young child clean, provided they also wash their hands regularly. It's only after reaching puberty that we benefit from wasking more often than that.

I was replying to LovePrevails, who was referring to the rice experiment (where speaking lovingly to the rice supposedly stops it going rotten). I think that counts as supernatural.

James Randi has a million dollars waiting for you if you can replicate this. Easy money!

Indeed, crazycanuck. Please post a video of you replicating the experiment.

Oh, fairness is very important. But, as James knows but the original poster doesn't, fairness requires that that you take no more value than you give. Money is a great way of accounting for this.

And how did you respond when your sister asked you this?

One thing is for sure, the researchers are definitely role-playing.

Well done for sticking to your principles and avoiding force.

No shortage of what? Islands? Bankrupt/corrupt states? For sure there is no shortage of those. But there is no state that will sell an island and grant it independence. If any state offers such a thing, that state will be beseiged with buyers.

Notice how every time Bitcoin "tanks" it has done so from a higher price than before?

Not quite. He's really saying more than that: "If this doesn't apply to you, then I realise it doesn't apply to you!".

Yes I think that's a fair analysis. The Harry Browne method forces you to maintain diversification, and diversification lowers risk. Three of the four asset categories are productive ones, so in the long term the Harry Browne method is almost guaranteed to make some money. If it doesn't, it's because those assets are somehow no longer productive, and if that happens the world's problems will be so serious that your investment portfolio will be the least of your concerns. But this doesn't change the fact that, in the long run, investing in higher-performing asset classes (i.e. stocks) will produce a higher average return (with the downside of higher volatility). For sure, the little guy can never beat the insiders. But the little guy can always invest through low-cost tracker funds. If you drip-feed your investments into these funds (instead of trying to time the market), there hasn't been any period longer than ten years where you wouldn't have been in profit, and over the long run (50 years) there is no asset class that would have done better. For the historical statistics (all inflation-adjusted), see the following PDF report: Credit Suisse Investment Banking: historical investment returns To Lowe D: I was wrong about the rebalancing. Sorry about that. To trout007: Thanks for your worked rebalancing example, with which I agree. There is indeed hysteresis in the buying and selling prices, instead of price symmetry on the way up and down. The rebalancing can cause other problems though. Suppose your investment A keeps rising in value, and investment B keeps dropping in value. At each rebalancing, you sell your high-performing investment to buy more of your junk asset. Suppose someone developed a technique for economically extracting the gold that is present in all seawater. The gold price would continue to drop towards zero, yet Harry Browne portfolios would keep selling their good assets so that they could buy more and more of this depreciating gold.

Your analogy is not applicable to Bitcoin. Analog formats like floppy disks can easily become obsolete because specialized hardware is needed to read them. Digital data can easily be moved between different types of storage media which have straightforward interface specifications. And all the software required to process Bitcoin is open source, so it will always be possible to process a Bitcoin wallet.

It's important to understand a few limitations of Harry Browne's method. In the long run, the expected return equals the average of the return of each asset class. Let's assume that (in the long run, and after adjusting for inflation) stocks return 5% per year, bonds return 3%, the money market returns 2% and gold returns 0% (in the long run, gold holds its value but is not a productive asset). The overall return will be the average of these, i.e. 2.5% per year. Harry Browne's method is always going to underperform an investment that's solely in stocks, even though Harry's method will probably have less volatility. It's a common misconception that Harry Browne's "rebalancing" will effectively harvest volatility (in other words, it would produce a profit when prices are volatile even if the overall average return is zero). Unfortunately that's not the case, because the mechanism is symmetrical in both directions. For example, if stocks fall and gold rises, we rebalance the portfolio by selling some gold at a high price and buying stocks at a low price. But when the trend is in the other direction, we will buy gold and sell stocks at the same price points! So we don't harvest volatility. Over the past hundred years, stocks in my country have risen by 5.2% per year (in addition to the rise due to inflation). By keeping an investment portfolio entirely in stocks, one should be able to get a long-term return of 4% per year even after allowing for all the costs of buying, selling and holding stocks. Harry Browne is dead now, but he did follow his own advice. He posted his returns since 1970. After he died, his wife maintained a page showing theoretical returns from the permanent portfolio, but she seems to have lost interest after 2003. Here are his wife's figures: http://harrybrowne.org/PermanentPortfolioResults.htm

Our family always "underinsures". In the long run, we always come out ahead that way because we are not paying for: The insurance company's administrative costs The insurance company's marketing costs The amount that the insurance company loses to claims fraud After you have underinsured for a few years, you can pay your own claims out of your insurance savings. The only downside is if you would have made a really big claim in those first few years. Unfortunately the web is full of stories of people who have had their really big claim rejected or watered down because of exclusions in the policy. An ideal solution, to my mind, is high-deductible insurance where you can't claim for small or routine things, and where you must pay the first amount of any large claim yourself (e.g. the first $5000). That is very low cost insurance, but still provides a way for people to share the risk of large but statistically unlikely events. Unfortunately, there are few high-deductible policies available in the UK for ordinary insurance needs (house, car, health, travel) because most people believe the mantra "insurance is good" without questioning it. Here's a very practical post on a personal finance site: Insurance: A Tax on People who are Bad at Math? http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/06/02/insurance-a-tax-on-people-who-are-bad-at-math/

The FBI "only" got $28.5 million worth of his bitcoins (144,000 BTC). That's probably enough to make the FBI the largest single holder of Bitcoins on the planet.

It's basically a combination of a non-aggression contract ("I won't aggress against you if you don't aggress against me"), an economic engagement contract ("I will trade with you provided you don't defraud me, don't pollute my air and water, agree to use arbitration to settle disputes, or whatever"), and optionally a personal engagement contract ("I will interact with you only if you share my religion, don't abort your babies, or whatever"). His book mentions in passing that the implication is false, but doesn't discuss it in detail. That would make a fine follow-up book in my opinion. The general idea is that you can mutually contract out of certain aspects of society. Consider, for example, how authors can use Creative Commons licensing to contract out of certain aspects of copyright law. Then, when it gets to the point where say 10% of the productive members of society have contracted to interact non-violently, an existing state will have to accommodate them because it can't afford a 10% hit to its GDP.

You can't have a state without aggression, but you can most certainly have voluntary government without aggression. Pete Sisco's little book "The Freedom App: Building True Freedom Through Contractual Republics" describes this model, and is a great read. It only costs a couple of dollars on Kindle. I must admit I looked around for a freely downloadable PDF first, so that I could see if it was worthwhile before I bought it. I didn't find a PDF, but it was so cheap that I bought it. It's a tremendous book! Pete very enthusiastically and carefully explains his concept, which is basically the same as the DRO model that Stefan embraces, but he takes the idea one step further. Instead of abandoning the initiation of violence, his "contractual republics" abandon all violence, relying instead on collective ostracism. When enough people have signed up, the economic and social ostracism of a large enough group of people can provide the structure for a peaceful and prosperous society. I have never been happy with the implied violence in the DRO model, even though the DRO is not the initiator. I have always preferred the model of multiple overlapping "voluntary governments", and Pete Sisco is the first person who has put together a coherent story of how this would work. The main disagreement I have with him, is that he is a strong-IP guy. But it doesn't matter, because the "contractual republics" model happily accommodates a subset of society that is free of IP.

What you describe is an "if ... ought". You can derive a conditional "ought" from an "is". However, you can't derive an unconditional "ought" from an "is". "People who don't eat will starve"--> IF you don't want to starve, you OUGHT to eat (no logical problem)--> IF you want to starve, you OUGHT not to eat (no logical problem)--> You OUGHT to eat, and not starve (illogical)--> You OUGHT to not eat, and starve (illogical)

When our children asked whether Santa was real, we replied "Some people think he is, some people think he isn't. What do you think?". Then we would honestly answer any questions that they asked. I think it was quite fun for them to enjoy the mystique of not quite knowing, then later being eventually able to work it out for themselves. I remember once my daughter announced to me that "Santa isn't real. Nor is the easter bunny. Nor are elves and fairies. Except for the Tooth Fairy, of course. The Tooth Fairy is real." It wasn't long before she also worked out that the Tooth Fairy didn't exist.

If the children were excited by some holiday, we usually participated in some of the "trimmings" rather than in the core festival. At easter, we had great chocolate egg hunts in the garden, even though we weren't celebrating the guy who got nailed up on the cross. I don't want to give the wrong idea here. Although our family is much less materialistic than the average English family, we are still quite materialistic by global standards. And within our local community, we hung out with quite a few people who were living alternative lifestyles and were much less materialistic than we were. For example, families who lived in a yurt or on a canal boat instead of in a house. From the point of view of those families, we were probably the ones with the "perceived riches"! I don't know how much younger children are even aware of these things. One time we had finished reading an old story about a rich princess and a poor shoemaker, and my daughter asked innocently "are we like rich or poor?". I could have answered "rich" or "poor", and I think she would have found either answer acceptable. It's different once children become teenagers. At some point they become acutely aware of others, and can't help comparing themselves. Hopefully by then the children have come to appreciate that their situation is unique and cannot be expected to be the same as others. Several times my children said things like "Sally's family have three cars and a boat, but Sally isn't even allowed to use a box of matches to light the candles on her birthday cake" and it was pretty clear that they felt they had the better deal.

Coffee machines are great when they are properly installed and recently serviced. But if something goes wrong (a pipe gets constricted, or a pump is sucking a drop of old milk back in at the end of each cycle, or even if they just haven't been cleaned properly), there's no human to notice that the quality of the coffee has dropped.

We didn't do religion or santa, but we still did christmas trees, outdoor lights, christmas presents, special food, etc. The children loved it. When they were young, we gave them things that we would have got for them anyway. For example, when they were ready for a bicycle, they got it at christmas. If relatives asked what to give, we always said "clothes are popular, and toys or games but nothing that needs batteries". As they got older, we gave them things of "better" quality than they would otherwise have. A really nice pair of gloves, for example. Now that they're older teenagers, they would prefer to receive money that they can spend themselves but I don't like to give a gift whose price is stated so I struggle to find other gifts. We didn't like the idea of them going begging house-to-house at halloween, but if they were really keen to go with their friends we did let them do this. When they were very small, we hovered in the distance while they rang the doorbell but as they got older we let them go by themselves - in our suburban area the risk of "stranger danger" is very low. We expected them to make their own fancy-dress outfits as we didn't buy costumes for them. One nice touch (that we only thought of after a few years) was for them to carry some gifts that they could give to the householder after receiving a gift. That went down well. When other children came trick-or-treating at our door, we tried to have treats other than candies. Sometimes we gave interesting fruits (figs, apricots, persimmons), or chocolate milk drinks, or little packs of sultanas, or stickers. Because our children didn't see us participating in halloween, they lost interest in it after a few years. Instead, we would build a campfire in the garden and toast marshmallows.

Lol, someone invents a fancy coffee machine and gets lots of PR by spinning it as being comparable to a barista.

I live in England, but I visit Sydney from time to time. It's the greatest city in the world, in my opinion, despite the drop bears. Welcome, Charles!