Jeff Yoak's Friends
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
[Friends View]
Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries.
[ << Previous 25 ]
| Monday, July 13th, 2009 | |
xkcd_rss
|
4:00a |
|
| Sunday, July 12th, 2009 |
patrissimo
|
8:34p |
|
patrissimo
|
7:14p |
|
patrissimo
|
6:40p |
|
patrissimo
|
3:53p |
medical at freedomfest
Responded briefly to an emergency during the final dinner. During a speech, there were a couple weird screams from backstage, maybe 30-60 sec apart. We thought someone was being a dick, but after the third time, a staff member went to investigate, and called for a doctor. A half dozen of us went. The patient, a young large male, was lying down backstage with blood on his lips. Coworkers reported he "just started acting really weird and didn't recognize them", and that he had been sick that morning. Patient was confused and disoriented, he knew his name but not much more. A bit freaked out by having 6 people around him. I sat down and tried to connect with him non-threateningly, but there were too many ppl and the hotel EMT came in a minute or two, so I left. So, the simple explanation (seizure), or something else? If seizure, that's twice this year I've been present for an unexpected one! I wish I could refresh my EMT training and work a shift a week...sigh...so much else to do. My life is full with a huge waitlist. |
ernunnos
|
12:08p |
Buy and hold!
So the stock market will give you 7% returns over the long run... if you exclude all the companies that just go out of business and take your money with them.
Does Stock-Market Data Really Go Back 200 Years?
As of June 30, U.S. stocks have underperformed long-term Treasury bonds for the past five, 10, 15, 20 and 25 years.
Still, brokers and financial planners keep reminding us, there's almost never been a 30-year period since 1802 when stocks have underperformed bonds.
These true believers rely on the gospel of "Stocks for the Long Run," the book by finance professor Jeremy Siegel of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania that was first published in 1994.
Using data assembled by other scholars, Prof. Siegel extended the history of U.S. stock returns all the way back to 1802. He came to two conclusions that became articles of faith to millions of investors: Ever since Thomas Jefferson was in the White House, stocks have generated a "remarkably constant" average return of nearly 7% a year after inflation. (Adding inflation at 3% yields the commonly cited 10% annual stock return.) And, declared Prof. Siegel, "the risks of holding stocks decrease over time."
There is just one problem with tracing stock performance all the way back to 1802: It isn't really valid.
Prof. Siegel based his early numbers on data first gathered decades ago by two economists, Walter Buckingham Smith and Arthur Harrison Cole.
For the years 1802 through 1820, Profs. Smith and Cole collected prices on three dozen banking, insurance, transportation and other stocks -- but ended up including only seven, all banks, in their stock-market index. Through 1845, they tracked 19 insurance stocks, but rejected 95% of them, adding only one to their index. For 1834 onward, they added a maximum of 27 railroad stocks.
To be a good measure of stock returns, an index should be comprehensive (by including many stocks) and representative (by including the stocks commonly held by investors). The Smith and Cole indexes are neither, as the professors signaled in their 1935 book, "Fluctuations in American Business." They cherry-picked their indexes by throwing out any stock that didn't survive for the whole period, whose share prices were too hard to find or whose returns seemed "inflexible," "erratic," or "non-typical."
The database of early U.S. securities at EH.net has so far identified more than 1,000 stocks that were listed on 10 different exchanges -- including Charleston, S.C., New Orleans, and Norfolk, Va. -- between 1790 and 1860. Thus the indexes relied on by Prof. Siegel exclude 97% of all the stocks that existed in the earliest years of the U.S. market, and include only the bluest of the blue-chip survivors. Never mind all of the canals, wooden turnpikes, rubber-hat companies and the other doomed stocks that investors lost millions on -- and whose returns may never be reconstructed.
|
patrissimo
|
11:22a |
Heading home
Jaw hurts from so much talking, I am exhausted from not much sleep. It was largely due to my choices - going to parties after the long conference days, so I'm not complaining, merely commenting. I think I am getting sick. I don't sleep well in Vegas, my nose doesn't like the dry air, and when my nose ain't happy, it takes it out on my sleep. I wonder if I am going to find edible food here at the airport? I just looked at Wendy's & Popeye's and could not bring myself to eat anything I saw. Which is a good thing, I've been eating pretty paleo, and I'm getting used to healthy food. Except for salads, which I don't want in the morning, the food at these places is awful. Ah, I found nuts! Really, the obesity and dietary disease in the US is totally understandable given the foods we eat. (Random fact to annoy the eco-localists: only 1% of the carbon generated by an average piece of food is due to transportation. The largest factor is making the fertilizer, as it is very energy-intensive. Half the carbon load occurs in the agricultural process. I'm not claiming that some farming techniques aren't lower-carbon, only that transportation is a negligible overall factor) The eye candy here is so annoying / distracting. My made-up evolutionary just so story is: in the evolutionary environment, hot young strange women were very unusual. You knew everyone in your tribe. So if you saw such a person, it was a serious mating opportunity. Hence, strangers are super-exciting. I dunno if that's the reason, I just know that every time I see one of these scantily clad desert beauties, lights flash in my head and bells ring and a little guy in there jumps up and down and yells "LOOK AT HER! NO, LOOK AT HER! WOW! LOOK AT THAT!" I know it sounds funny, and when I am really bored (which is rare) it is good entertainment, but the vast majority of the time when I would rather not be yelled at by a horny little libido imp in my head, it's really annoying! I have deep thoughts to think, and it is hard to think when someone is screaming inside your head. I'm still attracted to cute people I'm used to, of course, but it's toned down to a much more manageable level. Anyway, schmoozing while tired works fine for me, talking to people keeps me interested and alert, so it was a fine week for talking to people at the booth, but I did not get a lot of other work done during breaks. It's really hard for me to focus on more abstract stuff like reading/writing when I am tired. I think I'll prob. take a sleeping pill tonight and sleep 12 hours. Then, I'm going to try getting up at 8 or 8:30am every morning. Dunno if I'll be able to stick to it, but I'm healed enough that I'm ready to attempt a consistent schedule. I doubt we'll do a booth at FreedomFest again, and many exhibitors I talked to said the same. Just not a lot of foot traffic in the exhibit hall. Basically just during breaks, which is 2 hours a day. And for that, we had several staff sitting around all day. A lot of time and energy, and not worth it. I will probably come back, to talk to people and enjoy being around like-minded people. A lot of the talks were awful, but there are a few good ones in there that were fun. I am annoyed that the event charges speakers for speaking and listeners for listening, and I think that's why a lot of the talks were awful, but the event still has some value. Also a weird mix of old and young people (compared to, say, NH Liberty Forum), which some of the young people I talked to didn't like, although I didn't really mind. Anyway, a lot more I could say about FF, like the awful "debate" between my dad and Mark Skousen on anarchy vs. minarchy, where Skousen's "points" alternated between ad hominem and irrelevance, but I don't really feel like writing up more detail right now. Suffice it to say that I have a rather low opinion of Skousen as a person and a thinker. Anyway, if you are thinking of going to FF, expect the highlights to be talking to and partying with other libertarians, many who work at non-profits / think-tanks, and a few good talks. But it's expensive and the guy who runs it is lame. So much work has piled up this last week...hopefully I can get lots of sleep tonight, take modafinil a couple times next week, and work through it. ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ipsafictura is leaving TSI for personal reasons, and jhogan is moving and getting ready for a trip to Asia, which makes us even busier than usual. (I'll post our job req for a new Director of Development next week). Fortunately James is a work machine, and with luck I will be too next week. I think I might invest a bunch of my money with Peter Schiff's firm. I really hate managing my own money. So glad I put some into Palantir, I like it way better than the stock market right now. I am getting better and better at accepting reality and living in the present, either acting to change situations or accepting them. Haven't done any hard-core practicing on it, like a daily practice, but I try when I can, and I have had noticeably less frustration in my life as a result. Not sure whether I will ever get a tattoo along those lines, it is tempting, as it feels like something that will be part of my attitude for the rest of my life, but I'm not sure what purpose a tattoo would serve, I don't think I need it as a reminder, so it would mostly be advertising, and it is said that advertising one's mindfulness is anti-mindfulness, although I have mixed feelings about whether that is true. Enough rambling, my flight is boarding. 'twill be nice to be home with family and work and more regular sleep and all that. |
ozarque
|
12:45p |
Personal note; book gripe...
This past week I ordered a book from amazon.com, and I was careful to order a new copy of that book. I needed the full text of Ursula K. Le Guin's short story, "Direction of the Road," in her book The Wind's Twelve Quarters. Amazon obliged as always; the book arrived with amazing speed, and it was the right book. I have no complaints about amazon.com. But I'm outraged by the condition of the book itself, which is one of the shoddiest printing jobs I've seen in a very long time. It's a Harper Perennial edition, and it says "Printed in the United States of America." You would think, given the stature of the book and the stature of its author, that Harper would have taken at least minimum care with the production. They didn't. On the very first page that a reader sees, where Le Guin has used three verses of Housman's "A Shropshire Lad" as an epigraph, there are four words where the ink has dropped out. And all through the book, on page after page, it keeps happening. There's no excuse for this. It's an insult to the reader -- who's asked to pay $13.99 for the resulting mess -- and it's an insult to Le Guin. Harper should be ashamed. |
madbard
|
10:34a |
The first thing to note about the financial crisis is that the federal government never had any business intervening in the personal decision of whether you want to own a home. There is no rational economic argument, or any argument I know of, that says the market of buying and selling homes is imperfect in some way, requiring government action. Construction firms have plenty of incentive to build homes and sell them. People who have the wherewithal have plenty of incentive to buy homes if they so choose. For the government to intrude into homeownership was an off-budget, nontransparent, backdoor attempt at redistributing income. And when the policy became a way of transferring income to people who couldn't afford those homes, it was doomed to failure.
...
The stunning thing about Obama's spending proposals is that there's almost nothing you could defend from the perspective of efficiency. It's all about redistribution — not redistribution to the poor but redistribution to Democratic interest groups: to unions, to the green lobby, to the health care industry, and so on. At some point these everescalating government interventions will affect the size of the economic pie. If we start looking more like France, with more than 20 percent of GDP controlled by the federal government, output growth and economic freedom will all suffer.
The Case For Doing Nothing, by Jeffrey A. Miron, director of undergraduate studies at Harvard's economics department, reprinted at the Cato Institute website |
kathrynrose
|
11:33a |
Public Service Announcement
Opie would like to remind kitties everywhere that today is "Running like you're tail's on fire" Day. Extra points if you gallop through Mom's breakfast while she's eating it. It is also good to chase your brother through the card making supplies that are carefully stacked to avoid damage. That is all. |
choiceful
|
12:27a |
Mz. Lucy Fur
Speaking of relationships, another one that's going really well is with the chinchilla. That persistence and effort to get her tamed down during those first few months paid off. She's really friendly now. I don't pick her up much anymore: she doesn't like it and I don't like fighting with her over it, but now that I've stopped picking her up she doesn't run away anymore when I reach into the cage, but just hangs out to be petted. And she does the cutest little chin tilt to help you hit just the right spot. She's got these big fluffy cheeks and this teeny tiny mouth that's just adorable :) Things are also going well with Josh the fish. I can see why Betas are winners in the fish pet evolution wars. They're so beautiful, like leaves or fire with all the fins rippling. Not bad for a little critter that costs a few dollars. Josh has been much happier ever since switching over to his 3 gallon tank, thanks to everyone for the tank size advice. Current Music: So What - Pink |
choiceful
|
12:18a |
Patri's coming home tomorrow
I called Patri on my way home from Berkeley, and we talked for over a half hour on the phone. We exchange calls and emails several times/day. We enjoy each other's company and conversation. Still. After years of conversations and emails. All sorts of happy :) Current Music: Sober - Pink |
| Saturday, July 11th, 2009 |
cjsmith
|
6:49p |
|
datagoddess
|
5:18p |
|
madbard
|
2:14p |
So far, goodness
The weekend thus far, which I define as late Thursday through right now, has been nonstop awesome. Yesterday: Dinner at El Cholo with subset-of-friends-circle. Though it is tamale season, I decided to spare my stomach some of the calorie bomb and enjoyed a fajita instead. Then, along with a giant heap of my friends, enjoyed MTLA's production of Cabaret, at the conveniently located Met (not that one) theater. furfybird, though onstage only occasionally, was fantastic as I've come to expect. Her gorgeous voice just fills up the room, and she completely owned the end of the first act. I wish she could have cloned herself and simultaneously sat in the audience so she could have seen herself and swooned. One day, science, one day. This morning: I defied most of my rules for jogging and somehow had a great time. Under the impetus of the running-enthusiasm-generator that is duckierose, I drove up the very end of Encino Blvd to the Mulholland Fire Path. We did a five mile run in the blazin' heat (usually a huge no-no for me) and along a dusty, hilly trail. The view was gorgeous, though; we followed an mountside ridge circling a broad valley of SoCal hillocks and chaparral. I was covered in dust and sweat by the end, but miraculously unsunburned. After I finished the run, Lance Armstrong congratulated me on my longest run to date. This Nike+/iPod gizmo never runs out of surprises. |
forvrkate
|
12:28p |
A MATH PROBLEMIt turns out that 2 29 is a nine digit number, none of whose digits repeat. Since there are ten digits (0 through 9), one digit must not be present in the expansion of 2 29. Question: What digit is missing? Problem: Find a clever argument supporting your answer. For our purposes here, we will define clever as an argument Kate calls clever. And Kate will call an argument clever provided she thinks it is clever. No further definition is available. |
ernunnos
|
8:51a |
Well now he's just flat lying.
Obama Says Economic Stimulus Plan Worked as Intended
In asking for public patience, Obama said the recovery act “wasn’t designed to restore the economy to full health on its own, but to provide the boost necessary to stop the free fall.”
Enacted in February, the bill “was designed to spur demand and get people spending again and cushion those who had borne the brunt of the crisis,” the president said.
Obama said the measure “was not designed to work in four months -- it was designed to work over two years.”
The spending plan will “accelerate greatly” through the summer and autumn, creating “thousands more infrastructure projects” that will lead to additional jobs, he said.
Except that you made specific predictions, didn't you, Barry? Your own administration claimed that your plan would arrest job losses by Q3 2009. Two quarters before they would "naturally" peak without the stimulus.
I'm going to go make a wild prediction that job losses will continue to increase through both Q3 '09 and Q1 '10. I will further predict that after I'm proved right, Obama will not invite me to the White House to receive the benefit of my wisdom. Nor will his failure cause him to seek the counsel of anyone blessed with intelligence and foresight. |
| Friday, July 10th, 2009 |
patrissimo
|
10:26p |
Some days, I love my job
Among the things that happened today: * Knud & I talked to a guy for 10 minutes, pitching seasteading, he signed up for our mailing list ("I get bored in the afternoon and like to read political theory"), and I thought "Hmm... John Stagliano. That name sounds familiar. Well, we're in Vegas, at a libertarian convention, and he's wearing a hip open shirt showing his chest. Yeah, he's probably who I think he is." A few minutes later in the conversation, his profession came up, and we talked a bit about his current court cases, and all the fun you could have on a floating platform. * Talked to Krestin, a Dane living in Estonia (and quite a sharp guy), quite a bit about seasteading, Austrian econ, diet, and many other things. He had previously invited me to come talk in Estonia sometime, and on the way to dinner tonight he suggested that if I did come, we set up a meeting w/ the prime minister and talk about the possibilities for a treaty to put a seastead settlement in the Estonian EEZ (which fits well with Lasse & Steffen's suggestion of the Baltic as a place to start seasteading). Apparently for a connected guy in a country of 1.2 million, it is not too hard to get in touch with the prime minister. It's an exciting thought, because I think it would be significantly easier to raise capital for an expensive seastead if we had a deal with a country. (Plus, as jhogan says "It would make a great blog post"). |
lisamoe
|
8:54p |
The mall is not my friend.
We pretty much NEVER go to the mall and now I remember why. One food court trip, one pair of heelys, one pair of kid sandals, a smoothie, some socks with skulls on them, some chocolates, a bag of fancy soap, a shirt and two dresses later, we are back home. Stupid mall. The reason we went in the first place was to see their traveling exhibit of Titanic artifacts and it turned out that was in the parking lot in a temporary building so we needn't have even gone in the mall in the first place! Jesse asked me why I bought the heelys for Dingo, on account of they're dangerous and I stupidly said, "Well, he's been begging forever and they were on clearance" to which Jesse said "Great. Death at half-price." Apparently, I lose my freaking mind at the mall. |
choiceful
|
4:45p |
tired. med change.
Sleep is a longstanding issue for me, but this past week has been particularly bad. I think this may be med related. I was taking Modafinil (Provigil), but it turns out that taking it for ADHD is off label use, which means that it cost about $400/month. We ordered some via the internet which only comes to about $50/month. During the lag before the new order came in, I was taking adrafinil, which is pretty much the same thing, but I didn't feel like it was doing anything positive at all -- maybe I just wasn't taking a high enough dose. So the last couple of days I didn't take any stims. I recalled that I was taking them in the first place because of having been tired and hazy all the time. So now I'm tired and hazy all the time again. No wonder I started taking stims. ;) As soon as the guy is done messing with the phone line I intend on sleeping the rest of the day away and hopefully waking up in in a much better place tomorrow, now that my new meds have arrived. |
yoak
|
4:29p |
Hey. I don't post here often anymore. Will be around from time to time. But if I'm not watching you on twitter, reply here (locked as you prefer) or tweet to yoak. I'm not sure I'll stay there either, but I'm doing a little of that. :-) |
savorie
|
1:47p |
I went to a Giants game!
Yep. Me who doesn't follow sports, who glares at TV screens in restaurants broadcasting games.
And you know something? I had fun. And I want to go to more.
One of my favorite coworkers asked if I would take his two tickets for that evening's game against the San Diego Padres (a pathetic lot, those Padres). Funnily enough, I've never (or at least rarely) been asked to go to a particular baseball game, and really had only ever watched Little League. The seats were on the view deck of San Francisco's Giants Stadium (oh, sorry, "AT&T Park"), which is, as far as stadiums go, beautiful. How many baseball stadiums have a few of the beautiful bay, bridges, and barges?
I could see the entire game play beautifully from where I was.
It was a zippy game, running through all nine innings in just two and a half hours.
I was so fortunate to have funcrunch with me, who saw my Facebook plea for a baseball date and sped-walked over two miles across hilly SF to meet me at the Caltrain station. I'd only met her in passing previously, but we got along like gangbusters, constantly and energetically bantering and sharing and observing. And she knew baseball. Not useless things like player stats I wouldn't really care about yet, but the rules and oddities and quirks of the game, and how stadium games work. She tirelessly explained things.
And we both enjoyed salivating over the quirkily cute 25-year-old star pitcher, Tim Lincecum.
The park serves some terrific nachos, and sells some overpriced thermals to us underprepared South Bayers (but I was able to finagle a discount), and the ride on Caltrain was actually pretty fun and relaxing. I'd forgotten that I can enjoy a train ride if I have a well-charged iPhone. |
madbard
|
12:23p |
The machines have begun to rise
Last night my Nike+ module congratulated me on setting a new personal speed record. (Based on its fairly limited exposure to my running history.) Moreover, it wasn't an impersonal robo-voice, but a specific woman who identified herself by name. I don't remember who it was; I assume some celebrity runner. This is sort of cool, and sort of creepy. I hope Apple never feels the temptation to insert spoken ads into this thing. |
ozarque
|
8:18a |
Eldering; eating less, continued...
Thank you for all the suggestions and advice you've posted for me; I appreciate your help very much. I have to start by telling you, right up front, that neither George nor I is willing to tackle setting up a compost pile or a worm bin. We understand why that would be a good thing to do, we understand that it doesn't have to involve a lot of work, and we admire people who do it, but we're just not up for it. We have tried it several times over the years and have been sorry every time, no doubt because we've always done it badly. It's like dusting; it turns into something we both try to avoid dealing with; it turns into something we fight over -- about who did and who didn't take care of it, and why, and how inexcusable that is of the person alleged to have shirked the essential tasks. And then I have to tell you that neither one of us is willing to take on keeping even one chicken. Keeping a chicken means building a structure to shelter that chicken and putting up a fence to keep that chicken home, and making sure that chicken's water doesn't freeze in the wintertime, and more. Our little dog is all the livestock we're willing to look after. [Elders, right? They ask for your advice and then they don't take it. I know.] The books on cooking for one/cooking for two/cooking for students don't speak to our needs. It's not that George can't figure out how to shrink recipes so we don't end up with too much. The problem is that he always looks at the amount of food he's getting ready to cook and thinks, "That can't possibly be enough!" and then he throws in just a little more of this and just a little more of that. Intellectually, he knows about quantities; emotionally, it doesn't look right to him, and he keeps fooling with it until it does look right. Ideally, he would always make just enough for us to have two dinners from whatever-it-is; instead, it ends up being three dinners. Every single time. George would agree with you that this isn't rational, and then he would tell you that by damn if he's going to do the cooking he's going to do it his way, and that at 74 he's entitled to do it his way. And I wouldn't be willing to argue with him about that. Now we have at last come to the end of the contrary part of this post and have arrived at the courteous part. All your advice about making more efficient use of our freezer ... that has been truly helpful. So many good ideas; so many excellent tips; thank you. I'm going to read all of that again, and make notes, and see what parts we can put into practice. |
ernunnos
|
1:04a |
Mystery?
Feminists and the mystery of Sarah Palin
There's no mystery. They hate her for the same reason they drive Priuses. It's four parts stuff-white-people-like status signaling, and one part high-school-girl-clique bitchiness. A martini for unhappy women in their 40s who are probably still paying student loans on a useless women's studies degrees. No doubt abandoned by a whole string of men, starting with daddy. Status in the clique is important because it's all they have.
And there's Sarah, with none of the status, doing all this stuff, getting all this attention. What an affront to the natural order. She doesn't even drive a Prius! |
[ << Previous 25 ]
|
tired
calm
