Golden Butterfly Results: -2.78% (including dividends)

PS, Your previous thread comment: If you want to live off your investments, you just need a shitload of money. Is 100% correct.  That was always my goal in being too risky for the first 20 years of investing, and getting absolutely freaking nowhere.  Now that I am older, with one child a couple yea...

Love this thread! As a headphone buff, my personal entry-level faves are: KOSS KSC-75 :  Stunningly good for the money, and very portable. http://www.amazon.com/Koss-KSC75-Portable-Stereophone-Headphones/dp/B0006B486K To increase the level of sonic detail, cut a quarter sized hole in the center of e...

Any chance we can sticky this thread?  There is really good stuff here.

Keeping in mind that I am in the accumulation phase (and recently rebalanced after hitting 35% cash):

26.4% Gold
24.4% Cash
25.5% Stocks
23.7% Bonds

One topic that I think that has not been covered in detail to my satisfation is tax loss harvesting. Every book Boogleheads etc just touches the surface. For a mostly taxable investor in the PP It would be interesting to explore set tax loss harvest rebalance bands and replacement funds that could ...

My personal general readership faves are: Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris - From the book jacket, " Winner of the 1988 American Institute of Physics Prize and named one of 1988's best books by the New York Times Book Review, this brilliant, lively and informative book seeks to ...

MediumTex wrote: How about farming?

Sadly, I suspect the wearing of PP-style leather chaps might not sit well within the Amish farming community.

As an aside, is it just me or do those two in the back look kinda bad-ass?

The best book on it, at least when I was actively exploring these ideas several years ago, was Live More, Work Less: The Way Into Semi-Retirement by Bob Clyatt.     Seconded.  This book provides the basic model by which Mrs. Amish & I wish to do something less lucrative but more fun with our li...

This is a really nice deal. The only thing that keeps me from feeling like I completely wasted my money on my Fisch testers is the ability to test fractional PMs, which lately has been the majority of my purchases. I strongly recommend folks who buy PMs get one of these as you really can't beat the ...

41 and growing my PP as an early semi-retirement slush fund to be drawn upon in 5-10 years.  Currently saving ~50% of my salary for this purpose. I stumbled upon the PP while exploring investment options that would provide a reasonable rate of return with reasonable stability under most economic con...

I do think that much of western biomedical science is based on genuine observation of the real world though. Most of physiology, biochemistry, genetics etc seems to all hold together with what you actually get in the body. Agreed.  When in doubt, pay most attention to studies that are based on quan...

MediumTex wrote:
I heard it was fish lips compressed into the form of a filet.

Sounds like the fish equivalent of a hot dog.  Yummy.

Lots of good advice here.   Once you get some experience buying coins and feel more comfortable with the process, be sure to check out local coin shows for some of the best deals on small quantities.  They can be hit or miss, but I recently picked up a 1/4 Krugerrand for $10 under spot during the la...

Although others comment that you should not look at the PP results every day, I have been.  As is my luck, the PP declined in early September.  Gold took a dive, although that was somewhat offset by bonds and equities.  So I went through all of September and the better part of October before my PP ...

moda0306 wrote: I can tell you that the lack of something like this is what has kept me from doing direct bond ownership.

Same with me.  I will now be owning them with my next rebalance.

This. Is. Awesome.

Within higher ed, I am constantly being asked by upper administrators to explore achieving greater "educational efficiency" from my science faculty.  This is a less than subtle nudge to offer more online courses.

Gumby,

Thanks for this!  I really miss the Google version of the chart you brought to our attention.  That was pure gold!

The yahoo version, although not as "clean", will have to do.

Bigamish, You seem like someone who might have thought about this a lot, so how do you think that first cluster of proteins (and whatever else cells are made of) got together to create a self-replicating organism? Going from nothing to something spontaneously is a pretty amazing step. Now that my m...

Medium Tex, they think it was first an RNA world. RNA can be both a genetic coding material and also fold up to form enzymes. We share relics of that RNA world in our ribosomes (the things that translate the genetic code into proteins). Ribosomal RNA shows amazing sequence conservation across all l...

The eye is another one... mind-boggling. What is even more mind boggling is how cephalopods (squid, cuttlefish, octopuses, etc.) evolved an eye functionally identical to that of that of mammals, through a completely different evolutionary and embryological path.  The anatomy is disturbingly similar...

moda sex is very ancient http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_conjugation. It is a key way to ensure survival because it is much easier to tinker with the existing tool kit by recombining than it is to start afresh. Definitely.  Sex encourages tremendous genetic variability in offspring due to th...

From an evolutionary perspective, how did we come to have hair on 90% of our bodies that is basically programmed to grow to a certain length and then stop, but we have hair on our heads that appears to never stop growing no matter how long it gets? What possible survival advantage could there be in...

I'm confused on a few points: The saliva of carnivorous animals does not contain digestive enzymes. Human saliva contains the carbohy- drate–digesting enzyme, salivary amylase. This enzyme is responsible for the majority of starch digestion. Is Mills' implication that salivary amylase (carbohydrate ...