David Erik Nelson's Blog, page 33
May 31, 2013
Ever Gonna Retire? Learn this Phrase: "Diversified Portfolio of Low-Cost Index Funds"
This is well worth the watch, especially if you have an inkling that mutual funds are a screw job but can't get your head around the math.
Shortest possible version: Having and holding investments is a good strategy because your interest compounds over time[*]
Actively managed mutual funds charge fees (i.e., the "costs" in the title of this post). These fees--which seem really small, generally under 2%--*also compound.* Over 50 years, you'll loose 63% of your investment gains to fees.
That is not a typo. For real. A 2% load will eat up most of your earnings. Watch the video.
Most "financial advisors" have no legal obligation to give you the *best* advice, just *good enough* advice, and almost anything qualifies as "good enough." (This goes for workplace 401ks, too, which can be loaded with actively managed mutual funds and weird annuities and whatever.)
So, unless you really dig monkeying around with investing and market research and whatever--if you just want a set-and-forget plan--then you want to say "Please put me into a diversified portfolio of low-cost index funds" and keep repeating it until they stop trying to talk you into other things.
The Retirement Gamble | FRONTLINE | PBS
Watch The Retirement Gamble on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.
[*] e.g., If I have $10 in an account with a 10% return, then next year (or over whatever the compounding period is) I'll have $11 in the account, and earn interest on that, so at the next cycle I'll have $12.10, then $13.31, and so on. If I never add a cent to that account for my whole working life, and just let it compound away on its own, I'll end up with $1700-ish--which will grow by $170 in the next year. Cool, right? I mean, you can't retire on it, but you only put $10 in; it's free money.
But the point of retirement savings isn't to drop in a lump and wait; you keep dribbling in a few hundro each month, and that gets rolled into the compounding sauce over time, and snowballs. For a more realistic example, if you start with zilch, save $200 per month in a vehicle that earns 7% annually (not outlandish; index funds regularly beat that), then you will retire a millionaire at 70 (FYI, you'll only have a half-mil at 60--remember, compounding interest is *magic*).
May 23, 2013
Recommended Reading/Listening: "LizardFoot" by John Jasper Owens
A cappella Zoo 3: "LizardFoot," by John Jasper Owens - A cappella Zoo
If there's something not to like about this story, I frankly can't imagine it--and the audio version is *even better.*
Please accept my resignation as Grand White Pharaoh of the Order of Racial Purity, and the return on these here robes (enclosed) which have been patched by Missy-Bee before she run off, and dry-cleaned all the way up in Shilohville by authentic Koreans.
As y’all know, I never quite fit in with The Order. I have nothing special against black people (except for Highsmith Jones, who beat me out for running back when we were in school, and that was more of a personal thing). Plus, I have never actually seen a Jew, but if they do control all media, I remain angry with them for taking Katie Couric off of the before-shift television, where she was good-looking to wake up to, and putting her on nights, where I have had enough of women by then.
I have long suspected anyway I was only invited to join The Order on account of my Kingfisher pontoon, on which we all can get on to go fishing, and my extra large hog pit for barbeques. And likewise for being hitched to Missy-Bee, who has long spoke out against racial intermixing, and is Super-Grand White Squid of Paladuck County Ezekiel’s sister, and second runner-up for homecoming queen, and well-liked.
Well I suppose y’all are wondering why I am resigning, on account of y’all have not been mean to me lately in any serious way. Well, it is the direct result of our LizardFoot con introduced in order to make money from Yankees.
As y’all know, Yankees are stupid. . . .
May 21, 2013
UPDATE: Oklahoma Officials Revise Tornado Death Toll Down to 24
Oklahoma City tornado: Twister touches down 10 miles south of city. Live video.
Update Tuesday, 9:50 a.m.: I have no idea how this type of mix-up could happen at a medical examiner's office, but I don't think anyone's going to be complaining (this morning, at least). The Oklahoma City Medical Examiner's Office now says that the confirmed death toll has been revised down to 24. "We have got good news," Reuters quotes Amy Elliott, the office's chief administrative officer, as saying this morning. "The number right now is 24." She added, in an apparent explanation for the confusion, that "there was a lot of chaos," and that earlier figures may have included double-reporting of some casualties.
May 19, 2013
This Is Downright Hypnotic: 15-Minute "Hamlet Mashup"
. . . although it *would* be better if it included a 15-Minute Hamlet clip. Just sayin'
Hamlet Mash Up (2013) - YouTube
May 10, 2013
Snip, Burn, Solder Blog: Too Many Mundane Secrets: The Problem of Redaction
Snip, Burn, Solder Blog: Too Many Mundane Secrets: The Problem of Redaction
I ended up writing a lot more than I meant to about redaction this morning (you know, over on my other blog that's nominally about building kites and stuff). Thought you guys might be interested, too. The beginning part goes something like this:
. . . In the course of my research I sifted through a lot of FOIAed documents released by the CIA in the early 2000s (when they were forced to 'fess up to Congress about their involvement with Pinochet as a condition of getting their budget money). Predictably, most of this stuff was at least partially redacted--and since it was all stuff form the 1970s-1990s, what I was looking at were PDFs of scans of actual hardcopy from which the offending words and phrases had been excised with a hobby knife. These pages are then stamped "SANITIZED," which tends to imply something about the parts that were removed. (Here's a representative sample; I love that the "one thing" Jesse Helms has to say is specifically redacted. I met Helms once, when I was a grade-schooler visiting Washington, DC. At the time I thought he looked like Boss Hogg, but very affable.)
Anyway, what struck me about these documents, these secrets, is that some human--likely a low-level clerk--went through all of these *very sensitive materials* and cut out those words. All day? Every day? Was this her whole job? Did every day end with a garbage can packed with word salad? In any case, still, some specific human saw all of these secrets unredacted; she knows what Helms's one important thing to say to Kissinger about Chile and Pinochet was. She likely worked in a room *full* of people just like her, and they knew *all* the secrets. And they weren't the only ones: Someone typed up this transcript. For every secret that's deemed such by fat men in expensive suits, there's someone at the bottom who could spill those beans. She's wearing a cheap off-the-rack tweed skirt-and-jacket combo. Her blouse binds under her arms when she reaches up to fetch the next page out of her IN basket. She's going to sip a Diet Tab while sitting on a concrete planter during her 30-minute lunch hour. . . .
May 8, 2013
Advertising that displays different messages to children and adults
What's most interesting isn't the technology (which is more than 300 years old) but the fact that this application is first being used for humanitarian, rather than commercial, purposes. I'm a little less jaded now than I was yesterday.
This Ad Has a Secret Anti-Abuse Message That Only Kids Can See
In an effort to provide abused children with a safe way to reach out for help, a Spanish organization called the Aid to Children and Adolescents at Risk Foundation, or ANAR for short, created an ad that displays a different message for adults and children at the same time.
May 3, 2013
Drugs, Sex, and #Risk
I was in a coffee shop last weekend where they had a blaring television playing sportsball (I was in Detroit's suburbs, where this seems a lot less crazy), and I happened to catch this Viagra ad during a commercial break:
VIAGRA 2011 COMMERCIAL - YouTube
Now, I love a good pharmaceutical ad, because the "small print" side-effect warnings--which tend to take up no less than half the ad's running time--always crack me up. This ad did not disappoint. Check out this fantastic rhetorical switcherro at the 26-second mark:
"With every age comes responsibility; ask your doctor if your heart is healthy enough to have sex."
(emphasis mine, all mine)
So, just to be clear, you should talk to your doctor and be extra sure that your *heart* can tolerate the very mild cardio stimulation associated with natural sexual arousal (which, if you're a dude old enough to worry about ED, you've probably experienced thousands, if not quajillions, of times over the course of your life), but perish the thought of asking if your ticker and brain can handle the chemical stimulation of grossly altering the mechanisms of blood-flow regulation throughout your body.
Simply astounding.
With one sentence the problem is no longer 60 years of steak and eggs, or a sedentary life, or a narrow view of sexual fulfillment, or drug interactions, or pharmaceutical industry hijinks, or doctors too used to being bullied into writing prescriptions--the problem is sex itself, which we all know is *crazy dangerous.*
Sex? *Dangerous!* Be responsible! Make sure *sex* isn't gonna damage your heart or give you a stroke, because sexy sexing is the thing that's gonna hurt you here! Seeeeeeeex!
Prescription drugs? Don't even really warrant a serious warning; those things are safe as houses.
April 30, 2013
The Headline Says It All: "Middle School Mom: Censor 'Pornographic' Anne Frank" #PureMichigan
There's a passage in the unexpurgated book where Frank talks about peeing--because, you know, this is in fact the *actual* diary of an *actual* middle school human. According to this mom (who lives in Michigan, just like me), that passage weirded out her own American middle-school girl, who was reading the book for class. Quoth mom: "It doesn’t mean my child is sheltered, it doesn’t mean I live in a bubble, and it doesn’t mean I'm trying to ban books." I can totally see the final clause but needing another girl whose been a ghost for 68 years to tell you about your own genitals is sort of the definition of either being sheltered or living in a bubble, isn't it? Here's the offending passage:
"What's even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris ... When you're standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between your legs there are two soft, cushiony things, also covered with hair, which press together when you're standing, so you can't see what's inside. They separate when you sit down and they're very red and quite fleshy on the inside."
Is Anne Frank seriously telling any girl something she won't see for herself on any given morning?
April 23, 2013
How the Textbooks Get Made (or "The Writer's Life for Me")
I continue to write a monthly column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. In the latest I take a break from talking about guns and "gun control," and instead talking about my actual work-life as a freelance writer/editor:
The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In it for the Money: Not Safe for Work
Illustrative example: I recently put together a classroom reference on Internet pornography (not kidding). The book consists of a couple dozen point-counterpoint pairs on topics like “Access to online porn does/doesn’t encourage rape” or “Teen/preteen sexting should/shouldn’t be prosecuted as child pornography” – fun stuff like that.
I hunt down these articles, then revise and massage them so that they’re high-school accessible, because that’s the market for this book – high school libraries. That’s my job:
I write reference works on pornography aimed at high schoolers.
I’ve also done books like this on drugs and teen sex. I don’t even know what to say about my life, except that if you had told 12-year-old me that this was how it was going to end up, that kid would high-five you all over the place.
The only time a lay person hears about what goes into a textbook is when some jerkwater school board in North Carolina mandates that they aren’t buying anything with this untested evolution crap in it, or whatever.
I’ve done this about a dozen times (not counting projects I ultimately passed on because the money or timing were wrong). And I gotta tell you, the editorial guidelines have never remotely approached that kind of political micromanagement. More than politics, “expedience” and “balance” are the rule.
. . .
