Early Retirement Extreme Forums

niemand wrote: ↑

Sat Dec 01, 2018 5:41 am

I think we all agree that Marx’s vision of communism has never been put into practice

Yes, but this is a silly thing to say because there is no realistic set of global circumstances that would be a precursor to communism as Marx described.

Pretty sure WB's PovcalNet fits your needs.

Edit: not sure why I can't get the link to work...

Well I feel like it's largely cultural. Until I started mixing in a more international environment I didn't really know any blokes who used cologne regularly. Of course I can't speak with authority on the female side of things, but I never got the feeling that perfume was a large expense for my sist...

@MI "the nominal money supply is irrelevant" No no. You can't have meant that. If the nominal money supply is irrelevant and prices adjust frictionlessly, how does a CB printing money cause any ill effects? Observing this discussion, something I note is that a certain argument against FRB ...

@Kriegsspiel - Ethiopians may be offended if you intimate that Christianity is not their native religion. It has the next-oldest state-sponsored Christian church after the Armenian. 2-for-1 update July and August Savings rate for July: 50.3%, for August: 45.0%. Books read: Haven’t completed any, but...

If an individual bank could loan out however much money it wanted - 2x,3x, 100x its reserves, then it is literally creating money. Giving printing press ability to banks would lead to chaos, as the money supply would wantonly increase and the federal government could do nothing to stop it. No. Indi...

Savings rate for June: 6.9%. Books read: Free Culture (Lessig. Really good, a little outdated now), Virtual Light (Gibson. I keep reading more of Gibson’s work because I love Neuromancer so much, but I’ve not really liked anything else he’s done. Virtual Light is better than Count Zero and Mona Lisa...

I have guards, but they're not armed. I guess the federal police with AK47s on every street corner subsume that need. AMA...

However, I can empathize that someone who is already overwhelmed with the volume of activities in daily life, likely does not want to take the "ERE challenge" and have to come up with new, more time-intensive substitutes to solved problems. Wow. Can I just just say that this strikes me as...

Savings rate for May: 53.7%. Books read: Antifragile (Taleb. Liked it. Still going to say it didn’t have the same effect on me as Black Swan, the first time around. Certainly found a number of things to disagree with in the book but hey, I like his style. Don’t we all wish we had the flair and coura...

Savings rate for April: 59.2%. Continuing on with a strong savings rate. Still attributing it to DW being at work – this works from both ends: since she’s working we don’t do any travelling (reduces expenses) and of course it also earns income. Books read: Island Home (Winton. Dreadful. How is it th...

I'm a big supporter of investigations into basic income but it's very difficult to have conversations about it (online and off - I've not tried on this particular forum). So many people can't get past the complaint "but people won't work". Of course basic income advocates have considered t...

I'm in a developing country but I'm on an expat package so I'm probably not the candidate you had in mind to answer your questions. Still, a few thoughts: My spouse is from a developing country. Often social safety nets are near non-existent and one may be expected to care for family members, partic...

A friend of mine has been talking about Murnane for a long time. I didn't think I'd find his name mentioned here (or anywhere outside of the literature departments of Australian universities really) but I guess a NY Times writeup means his star is rising. Nothing I've heard, however, makes me want t...

I was asking after this in the ERE chatroom this week... That is, rent as a proportion of expenses. Rent as a proportion of income is much less interesting to me. Reason being, looking at my expenditures, I was marvelling at how 60% of my total expenditure is rent/power/water. It seemed high to me. ...

I prefer "If you only have one arse, you can't sit on two horses." Apparently a Hungarian proverb, but you know how accurate quote attributions are... I too tend to make changes gradually. I think perhaps the only time I consciously made a large switch in direction was on changing my cours...

March Update Savings rate for March: 58.3%. That’s as high a savings rate as I can remember ever having. I foresee April being fairly high as well, maybe not quite as high. After that, I think I’ll be running into some more expenses, but the first half of this year has been good for savings. I’d fel...

Unfortunately the diagrams and equations seem to have disappeared, but did any of you read Yanis Varoufakis during the brief period he collaborated with Valve? An example: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/arbitrage-and-equilibrium-in-the-team-fortress-2-economy/ As an economist who (once upo...

I see where I caused confusion. I did not mean to imply that Annecy is cheap! It's beautiful, very touristy, and probably somewhat constrained by geography - not a cheap city. But I did think that more broadly, the Savoie region is fairly cheap. I guess that it's true, when I was visiting I had a Sw...

I tried out fasting in December. I was suspending eating from the evening meal on Sunday (and Wednesday), through to the evening meal on Monday (and Thursday). So roughly two 22-hour fasts. I got sick late December and didn’t really feel up to modifying my habits through until about now, so I’m back...