DISQUS

Tim,

I would second the suggestion that you read "a random walk down wall street." He introducing the "sleeping scale," and says that if you want to sleep well at night, you have several options.

If you want to sleep well, but also make a bit more than a bank account, a nice mutual fund of MUNICIPAL BONDS will do nicely. They pay better than a bank account, are almost as safe as a FDIC insured account, and in many cases you don't pay taxes on your earnings!

You also might want to look into getting the "Consumer Reports Money Adviser." Money advice in a magazine that doesn't take advertising, and isn't trying to sell you anything. Its about 20 pages a month.

Perfect for those on a low-information diet ;-)

sorry, here's a search for Butler's quote on Google Books:

http://books.google.com/books?q=spare+rod+spoil...

FYI... "spare the rod, spoil the child" is NOWHERE in the bible. Its a line by poet Samuel Butler, in Hudibras (1664).

Butler's line is a perversion of several psalms and proverbs, the proper meaning being that if you do not properly discipline your child, you are a bad parent.

http://www.helium.com/items/274817-spare-the-ro...

Its often quoted by "religious" types who enjoy beating children.

Glad to hear you're free, Torah!

Tim,

Love your blog, but what a wasted opportunity! The answer to your question is in every single Warren Buffet book ever published! That's why he chuckled.

You should have asked us what question to ask him.

Yes, use low-cost index funds if you don't have time to do research... you can't take time out of your hectic 4-hour work week schedule to find time to invest? ;-)

Other advice from his books:

1) EVERYBODY can be an investor. Pick an industry, learn it VERY well, and only invest in what you know well. Buffet invests in boots, bricks, insurance, and food.

2) Get to know the management of a company before investing anything in it.

3) You can have a pretty diversified portfolio, even if you only own 10 stocks.

If I were you, I'd put the majority of that cash into something like a Vanguard index. Then pick some industry to learn well, network with the management of several companies, and invest in the ones that sound the most competent.

Keep an eye on those with a corporate culture of training and retaining talent: recruiting is a sign of a poorly run company.

Avoid like the plague any company that did a "cost cutting initiative." As Buffet says, no good businessman should suddenly decide to cut costs, any more than he should suddenly decide to start breathing!

Tim,

Sorry to hear Mortenson (Three Cups Of Tea) didn't get back to you... I've sent emails to them as well and haven't yet received a reply. I hope that this is simply because the popularity of the book is hurting their ability to respond promptly... maybe they need some virtual assistants ;-)

One observation... LitLiberation uses First Giving, who charges about 7% overhead on each donation. That's great for a one- or two- time thing, but if you want LitLiberation to be a multiple-year project, you might want to think about creating a custom app.

If you go the custom app route... the cheapest option I've found is Google Checkout, which only charges a 2% fee. The 5% savings could really add up...

After reading your post, I've been thinking a lot about how this could work, and be both more effective and cheaper than First Giving... I'm happy to share pro-bono... let me know.

How much did that Vietnam school cost? It looks a tad opulent. Building schools is a great idea, but you could probably make 2 more humble looking schools for the price of that one you just made.

Greg Mortenson from "Three Cups of Tea" fame has been building schools in impoverished areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan for ten years now. He spends about $20,000 on each... he uses local contacts, local supplies, and PASSIONATE local labor to keep costs down.

You guys should trade ideas:

http://threecupsoftea.com/

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Hi Bex,

The school cost less than $15,000 to complete, so I wouldn't call it opulent, thought it does look nice. I actually contacted Greg's organization FOUR TIMES to offer to raise money for their schools in LitLiberation, and not a single person responded to e-mail or phone calls.

If that's how they handle inquiries from donors, I can't trust them in execution. It's an inspiring book, but their response was uninspiring and quite depressing. I was essentially offering them funding for 10+ schools.

Room to Read has been in awesome in all respects.

Hope that helps,

Tim

and what precisely is (gasp) wrong with email??? ;-)

trust me... if I tweeted my every thought, nobody would be happy.

dude... this is up there with Fake Steve Jobs pretending to be sued by Apple...

both were a little hard to spot because neither technically happened on April 1st.

Although there were quite a few you could not have outsourced... such as the one where you did pen tricks, or showed how to do the egyptian magician tie.

that would have required some hollywood special effects there...

Far be it for me to continue my role as the serial contrarian, but... cell phones suck.

In my opinion, cell phones have yet to cross the threshold to become more useful than a map and a plan.

For those of us who carry cash and know where we're going, they have little benefit.

ditto... I hate coffee... but I'm quite the tea snob ;-)

my old employer had a nice stocked fridge, until people kept stealing stuff... then they had subsidized soda: 25 cents a can.

Its indicative of how C-Ruby and Rails performs poorly, but not necessarily a reflection of Java-Ruby and Rails.

Most of the performance problems in Ruby/Rails (poorly written IO, poorly written thread management, poorly written garbage collector, poorly written memory management) can be mitigated by using what's built-in to Java.

The JRuby guys have a chance to re-do Ruby the right way... they're already getting better performance than optimized C-Ruby for number crunching, without even trying hard:

http://headius.blogspot.com/2007/11/java-6-port...

You're correct about startups... I know of at least 2 that use S3 currently, and might move to SimpleDB. Having a data store that's 'query-able' by more that 'id' would be killer...

Regarding Oracle's direction, which one of their 4 databases would you use as the back-end? ;-)

That rule might not apply for JRuby... Or should I say, "all benchmarks lie"?

In JRuby, one line in the 'model' might represent an invocation of one hundred lines of Java.

Unless rake stats are smart enough to follow invoked Java code, count lines, and add that to the report... in which case, I'm impressed ;-)

meh.

"Social Apps" are just a speed bump on the road to Identity 2.0, IMHO.

Once there's a coherent, simple, open, distributed way to port your identity (and contacts) between servers, the distinction of a "social app" completely disappears.

Suddenly, EVERYTHING is a social app.

Related rants:

http://bexhuff.com/2007/08/open-social-networks...
http://bexhuff.com/2007/08/identity-management-...

Great idea, but there's a lot of security gotchas that I don't think they've thought of... they could be leading a charge off a cliff.

http://bexhuff.com/2007/08/open-social-networks...

Also, I think Facebook will regret going after the "grown up" crowd...

Imagine a tragically hip mother uttering to her teen daughter "I use Facebook too!" Dude... nails on a chalkboard. Why has Facebook ignored the #1 rule: responsible adults are frigging kryptonite to anything cool.

I don’t find it surprising that bloggers didn’t track down FSJ... they had no incentive to unmask him!

Only mainstream media really cared who this guy was. I’d bet most bloggers would have preferred that he stayed anonymous.