cesarbs

Quick answer:

You could do a lot worse than parking it in an index fund, so yeah, that's a good approach :) If you have a 401(k) or other retirement account, it is quite common for those to offer an S&P 500 index fund where you could invest your money. If you want to do it in a taxable brokerage account, you should open an account with Vanguard and buy their Total Stock Market index fund (VTSMX, or VTSAX if you have more than $10,000 to invest).

Then stay the course - if the market tanks 50% the day after you put your money in, don't panic. Wait it out. Your investment horizon here is at the very least 10 years.

But that's the quick, the-best-time-to-invest-is-tomorrow-so-just-do-it answer.

There are a number of things you should do if you want to learn more about how to invest your money in stocks (and maybe bonds):

0) A good resource to get started quickly is If You Can, by William Bernstein:

https://smile.amazon.com/If-You-Can-Millennials-Slowly-ebook...

But you can skip it if you want to dive deeper with the stuff that follows.

1) Learn about what investing in the stock market means, what's the nature of it and what to expect from it. I have two recommendations here:

1.1) jlcollinsnh's Stock Series: http://jlcollinsnh.com/stock-series/ He recently released a book (The Simple Path to Wealth) which is supposedly a better-edited version of the Stock Series. He's a rather optimistic guy, but what he says is not wrong. He stays away from investing in non-US markets, which is not the most common position among indexers.

1.2) A Random Walk Down Wall Street, by Burton Malkiel. It's an amazing book that everyone should read if they want to learn about the stock market. Many people recommend Bogle's books (he's the father of index investing), but I find them incredibly tedious to read.

2) Learn about the different investment accounts available to you - 401(k)/403(b)/457(b)s, IRAs, HSAs, taxable brokerage accounts. Each one receives different tax treatment and you should be familiar with that in order to avoid "tax drag" i.e. taxes slowing down the growth of your investments.

3) Another resource I highly recommend is the Bogleheads wiki: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page. In particular, check out the following pages:

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Bogleheads%C2%AE_investing_s...

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Three-fund_portfolio

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Tax-efficient_fund_placement

4) Don't obsess about it once you get started. After you've learned a few things it's tempting to start "tweaking" your investments here and there, but if you do that often you do yourself more harm than good. Invest your money then go have some fun :)

One thing I like to point out whenever this kind of discussion comes up, is that there is no single index. Articles like this always seem to assume that everyone will buy the same index, namely the S&P 500 or total US market.

But that's not what a lot of index investors do. Indexers enjoy adding tilts to their portfolios. So some people will buy value funds, others will buy small cap funds, and yet others will buy small value funds. There are people who overweight certain sectors, like REITs or utilities. There are those who invest in international index funds (with all their variations) and those who don't. So there's a huge number of combinations you can think of when it comes to indexing.

Now, with people indexing like that, there would still be market liquidity. Maybe not as much as when there are single stocks being actively traded, but on any given day there will be people buying into different indexes, selling shares, or rebalancing.

Valuation would become troublesome though, but at least people would still get some return from dividends.

Sorry for being pedantic, but wouldn't that be $[some_large_number + some_large_numer*(1 - tax rate)]? :)

How do they ramp up until college? We saw a considerable reduction in expenses when our kid started public school, since we went from $$$ day care to $ after-school care. We expect expenses to stay somewhat the same until she hits her teenage years when she'll likely become more demanding in terms of clothes, going out with friends, etc. (at which point we plan on encouraging her to find a part-time job).

I think it's coming. Rents have been climbing at a fast rate. My wife and I are paying close to $3K for a two bedroom + den in Bellevue, and this was the cheapest we could find. When we first moved in 3 years ago, our rent was just a little over $2K.

I'm having fun watching the outrage on the Twitter feed.

> you are being judged 100% of the time

This hits close to home. I've been living in America for ~3.5 years now and my wife and I were just talking about this the other day. In our home country (Brazil), people are a lot more genuinely interested in other people. Here, it is very clear to us that people judge whether we're worth their time and attention, and that judgment is clearly based on achievement and how important/great/awesome our lives are.

We are extreme introverts, not "people people" at all, but we've learned to appreciate our own people a lot more than when we were living back there. We used to be annoyed at most Brazilians' extroversion and warmth, but now we appreciate it because it is a very genuine sentiment of just wanting to know new people, no matter who they are or where they come from.

The problem is, how do you measure that? There are a bunch of good ideas that most people will agree provide a benefit, but it's really hard to come up with an objective measure of how much money that makes or saves.

If you refresh the page multiple times, it switches between "Not dangerous" and "Dangerous downloads".

I love going to the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in Oregon because many of the volunteers there are folks who worked at NASA. Once I struck up a conversation with one of the Saturn V propulsion engineers - it's indeed fascinating to hear from the people who were actually there doing all this stuff.

Sorry, I didn't mean to do that. That's the explanation I've heard before and it was never brought to my attention they were painful processes for the people. The way I was told about it, I thought it was a pretty streamlined process that impacted only the people in power.

Turkey is a little different here. Their military is supposed to take power when the president gets too radical. They're then supposed to run an election for a new president. AFAIK this has happened a number of times in their history.

Curious: how hard is it for people to get access to free university education there?

My home country - Brazil - offers free university education, and actually our federal universities are the best in the country. While there are quotas for certain socially disadvantaged groups of people (e.g. racial quotas), the sad reality is that regular seats are taken mostly by rich kids whose parents can afford to pay them prep courses - because the admissions process is incredibly difficult. So our free higher education system ends up doing a poor job in helping upward social mobility, and people who are not well-off end up going to private colleges whose schedules allow them to work and pay for their tuition.

Wow, I had no idea about that. TIL. I always thought all of Mexico was very hot year round.

Oooh, that was it. I had a completely wrong recollection of it, so my previous comment is BS now :/

There was a similar sentence in Brazilian Portuguese. Something about our largest TV network (Globo) lying about the existence of Acre (a state people jokingly say doesn't exist, like North Dakota in the US). I can't remember the exact sentence now though.

:)

I had no idea London was an economic disaster. Any links?

My mother (southern Brazilian of German descent - white, blonde, blue eyes) recently went to Natal, RN, and was harassed a lot by the locals (with sexist slurs and aggressive approaches) because they though she was from abroad and couldn't understand them. Cops constantly recommended her and her friend (same looks) to leave the areas were they were (they were going after historic sites, buildings, churches, etc.) and to stay only withing the proximity of beaches, were it was safer.

Another problem with the Brazilian tourism industry is the amateurish way everything is conducted. Guides don't have good knowledge of English, don't carry insurance (e.g. when taking people on boats), and their equipment (e.g. life vests) is often outdated and in bad need for maintenance. A lot of nature tours are much riskier than most people realize, and if something goes wrong, there's not exactly a good plan in place to take them to safety/medical help.

Safety is a concern everywhere. There is no large Brazilian city, except perhaps Florianopolis and Sao Paulo (surprisingly), where the murder rate is not sky high. Contrary to America, where areas with high murder rates tend to have such rates due to gang-related crime isolated in bad neighborhoods, violent crime is widespread in Brazil and people aren't safe anywhere except maybe in very touristy areas like beach fronts.

Brazil has some extremely beautiful places to visit, but I don't think going there is worth the risk. America has equally or even more beautiful places and the people in charge have much better training (e.g. National Parks and their Park Rangers).

As a Brazilian living abroad, I always tell people to not waste their money traveling to Brazil.

Did you have any success with the first one? Sounds like a fascinating problem.

I worked for ~3 years at a startup that built chemistry and geology software. We were all computer graphics and image processing folks, so we approached problems from those angles. We had three main products:

- A hardware/software solution for thin-layer chromatography. This was the product that actually got the company started. Basically we built a chamber with a camera and UV lamp that people could put their TLC plates in and have the software take pictures with and without UV an analyze the results.

- A point-cloud visualization application for LIDAR data, used by geologists to scan large rock outcrops and study them. By far the most challenging of our projects, since LIDAR data consists of gigabytes of 3D point data and we had to figure out how to enable quick interactive manipulation of the data (rotating, zooming, etc.) without requiring hundreds of gigs of memory to hold it all at once.

- An image processing application for enhancing electron micrographs of ostracod fossils. It required only a few "hints" (in the form of clicks) from the user to know about important areas in the image, then cropped unimportant parts, enhanced contrast, and whatnot. It also had some tools for layering annotations on top of the enhanced image, taking measurements, plus a few other things.

By far the coolest job I've ever had. Sadly, the company failed. It was founded in a rather business-hostile country in South America, where taxes are absurd and one can't hope to start a company that isn't in an already established market where money can be made right away. I'm fairly positive it would have succeeded had it been in the US.

Compiler and compilation-related bugs are quite interesting to come across, since they can produce truly mind-boggling behavior.

A while back we ran into this one in the .NET jitter while working on ASP.NET Core: https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/issues/8825

I suggest you read A Splendid Exchange. Although humanity didn't have the exact same economic system as today's, it's a mistake to think there weren't complex systems in place in the past.

I think they're referring to the fact that the Russian stock market collapsed completely (i.e. total loss) in the beginning of the 20th century.

> and it's keeping people from investing in actually producing value for themselves and others.

What do you mean?

That last picture made me cringe thinking of all the toxic material that person must be coming in contact with.

> We need to tax those who're benefiting tremendously from the current economy

While I agree in part with the sentiment, I think this needs to be done carefully so as not to end up in a situation where everyone is at a disadvantage.

Take for example that a higher earner is able to afford a high deductible for his yearly health expenses. If you start taxing that person heavily to the point where they can't afford that deductible anymore, all you did was to increase the bucket of people who can't afford proper healthcare.

It's not just about taxing the richer, it's about adjusting the system as a whole.

Another example, this one personal: my wife and I earn a high combined income. Because of that, we're able to afford a more expensive apartment in our city's Downtown (not luxurious by any standard, just a little above the average in our area). That frees us from having to use a car most of the time (we have one that we use sparingly and incurs minimal yearly costs), which 1) drives down car costs 2) is friendly to the environment 3) makes us happier thanks to not having a long commute and 4) somewhat (although minimally) helps local government revenue because we're paying for bus fares. If we were taxed to a point where we couldn't afford our rent anymore and were forced to move to the suburbs, we'd see a dramatic increase in car costs (more gas, more frequent maintenance), we'd be joining the ridiculous lines in traffic during our commute, which would likely lead to more stress and more health issues, and we wouldn't be part of the group of people providing revenue to the local transit authority. So it's not like high earners can be indiscriminately taxed and that would only help other people but not impact those being taxed.

This discussion also comes down to the question, "who is a high earner?" I don't think people earning $100K+ (or couples earning $200K+) should be the target here, but executives earning millions upon millions every year, as well as the corporations they run.

> It's all a result of luck and/or leaching off of the backs of the exploited masses.

I can't accept someone truly believes that. You are polarizing this discussion. While it is known that people born with an advantage have a higher chance of succeeding in life, those people have to do their part in order to succeed. That means seizing opportunities offered to them, studying hard, working hard. They might have had an easier time having access to things, but that doesn't mean they could just slack off and yet succeed.

Would X-rays corrupt the data on the floppy disk? Honest question, I have no idea.

Seems to be. Funny though how I've never watched it and construction is my #1 mental escape for burn out. #2 is military.