Joshua Kennon

I love this story about Charlie Munger which can be found here:

https://www.joshuakennon.com/if-charlie-munger-didnt-quit-when-he-was-divorced-broke-and-burying-his-9-year-old-son-you-have-no-excuse/

In the past five years, I've started and sold a company. Bought a house on a golf course, purchased expensive foreign cars and went on insane trips all over the world.

Last year, my wife woke up one morning and told me that she no longer wanted to be married (that's a story for another time). Got divorced and lost almost everything except the stock that I still own in the acquiring company that may never have an exit. The house, the cars and the trips vanished.

I guess my take away from this is that life is a series of ebbs and flows and it's our responsibility to gain greater self-awareness each day that we wake up. If you feel like you're behind then that is actually an amazing step in the right direction. Ask yourself why you're you're feeling behind and work through those emotions with yourself.(Literally talk out loud to yourself. It's weird but it works)

Are you biased because your former co-founder still has his house and a new baby? Are you biased because your closest friend just took his company public?

What I noticed about myself is that envy tends to create the anxiety that leads to feeling behind and the inadequacies associated with that emotion.

If you understand and even accept those emotions then you can reverse it by playing devils advocate to your feeling…

When I google this query, this is the first result that comes up:

https://www.joshuakennon.com/the-six-common-biological-sexes-in-humans/

“The Six Most Common Karyotypes
The six biological karyotype sexes that do not result in death to the fetus are:

X – Roughly 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 5,000 people (Turner’s )
XX – Most common form of female
XXY – Roughly 1 in 500 to 1 in 1,000 people (Klinefelter)
XY – Most common form of male
XYY – Roughly 1 out of 1,000 people
XXXY – Roughly 1 in 18,000 to 1 in 50,000 births
When you consider that there are 7,000,000,000 alive on the planet, there are almost assuredly tens of millions of people who are not male or female. Many times, these people are unaware of their true sex. It’s interesting to note that everyone assumes that they, personally, are XY or XX. One study in Great Britain showed that 97 out of 100 people who were XYY had no idea. They thought they were a traditional male and had few signs otherwise.”

Given this, Perplexity seems fine?

Not to defend stockbrokers, but part of what made the tech bubble so uniquely frothy was that it was the first time retail investors could easily circumvent the Wall Street gatekeepers via online, discount brokerages. No doubt many mom and pop investors were led into the bubble by advisors, but a sizable portion entered the fray on their own. For a brief time, many malls had trading boutiques, Internet cafés that catered to aspiring traders. Police officers and schoolteachers were quitting in droves to daytrade. CNBC was on in every coffee shop across the country. It's common to hear financial pundits comparing it to the mania of the 20s, when shoeshine boys were offering hot stock tips. I'm not sure we could ever see that level of participation from crowdfunding, but I think you're correct to worry that retail investors will continue to behave irrationally, with or without predatory advisors [0].

[0] http://www.joshuakennon.com/gt-advanced-technologies-bankruptcy/

Why the bitterness? You could blame the politicians just as well for the climate disaster, or the corporations, why the wealthy?[1] What do you know of their family life or love of dogs?

I think the rich are not who you think - if you put less energy into hating them you may have more time to improve your own life, e.g. by studying personal finance or
investing:
https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics

https://www.joshuakennon.com/add-jack-macdonald-list-secret-millionaires-just-died-left-188-million-built-investing-stocks-charity/

[1] Incidentally, one of the best climate mitigations, a source fuels carbon tax, has been blocked not because the wealthy but because its supposed impact on the poor (limiting travel & commuting). One hopes the Carbon Tax & Dividend proposals will gain traction, but how can they, when they pay out to the people, instead of the special interests? https://citizensclimatelobby.org

The master's requirement is nonsense. It was put in place as a credential roadblock to make entering the teaching profession more difficult, but it has zero effect on student results.

If we are going to compare inputs in that way, we can look at the test scores of college students going for education degrees, and see that they have worse English scores than the math majors and also have worse math scores than the English majors.[1] For most education majors, their alternative isn't to become a lawyer or scientist or Python developer.

The education degree is useful for people who are doing research into education, not actually teaching themselves.

[1] First google hit among many for SAT scores of education majors: http://www.joshuakennon.com/sat-scores-ranked-by-intended-college-major-show-teachers-are-below-average/

>Do you believe that at any point in future, we will have a reliable store of value in form of digital information? Banks don't provide that, it's somebody else saying that he will take care of your money an give you when you need it.

1. Banks don't provide that? Care to provide a source for banks taking or losing your money after the great depression?

2. The money in my checking account is in USD which is accepted everywhere I go and the price for things hardly ever changes. The bitcoin to USD price can fluctuate by up to 50% a day. How is that a "reliable store of value".

3. You don't want to sit on money but instead use it to make more money. Assets like gold are the worst way to do that: https://www.joshuakennon.com/stocks-vs-bonds-vs-gold-returns-for-the-past-200-years/