I understand your concern that we might not see prosperity anytime soon.  It's easy to see the current situation as dispiriting --  the U.S. rehired a balkanizing, statist epic fail of a President when we had a successful , pro-liberty executive like Gary Johnson ready to do the job.  If you've been...

Captain Kirk: "Bones, in your opinion...as a doctor...what do you make of these people?  What they're doing to each other...over this plant?  I'm trying to grasp it, but I can't...quite...put the pieces together." Dr. McCoy: "Dammit Jim!  There's nothing to make of this!  These peopl...

Reub, I'm so sorry to hear about all of that damage, brother.  But I'm glad that you and your dad are safe -- please stay that way!

I'm poor.  After a horrible year, I'm finally beginning to get some traction.  I have no debt.  No mortgage.  No car payment.  No children.  I have $1,000 to put away, and I could arrange to put away around $300 a month from here. The average American has something like $47,000 in debt.  You have n...

Based on this factor alone, I am going to predict that the election won't even be close--Obama will win comfortably. I agree with MT that Romney has no chance. Let's make this fun.  I predict a Mitt Romney win. Having at last accepted that Gary Johnson and/or Calvin Coolidge probably won't win this...

You both sound well-prepared.  You gentlemen please stay safe!  I'm hoping that the lights stay on for you.

I think that since this interesting exchange has erupted more or less off topic in a pretty boring sounding thread title, no one else may even be reading our posts.  :D Ha!  I'm reading.  If this forum had some kind of "Like" button or whatever, I'd have been pressing it all over this thr...

Any Amazon book reviews that anyone could take the time to write would be much appreciated. Done.  You've got a well-deserved 5-star from me in Amazon's queue.  You'll know it when you see it, for I was the only reviewer with the courage to mention leather chaps.  (Twice.) You gentlemen (and this i...

I really like the descriptions of these milestones.  That final "financial freedom" phase perfectly matches the criteria that I use.  While it's not the "last stop" (since you could always add a "filthy rich" or "more money than you know how to spend" phase), ...

Reub wrote: The book has been declared an "investment gem" by Taylor Larimore on the Bogleheads site. Congratulations!

That's great (and well deserved!)  As I've said all along, they may not like gold very much, but the Bogleheads are the good guys.

WiseOne wrote: The only correction I'd make to the above:  The modern Civic equivalent only goes 180,000 miles.  Life expectancy in the U.S. is dropping.

From what I see, life expectancy in the United States is clearly and consistently rising:

This is the chart that I was looking at.

Great topic!  I love that you've posted some hard data.  I won't try to compete with you because frankly you have wiped the floor with me in every category.  :D First, your power bill embarrasses me.  Granted, you live in the South Bay and thus enjoy the best weather in the world when I'm often usin...

It's remarkable how our two main approaches to getting that high are to burn a TON of rocket fuel or just let a helium balloon carry you up there.  It seems to me that a really elegant spacecraft would be taken to suborbital heights under a helium balloon and then fire the rockets from there. I thi...

In case anyone missed Felix Baumgartner's incredible skydive from 127,000 feet, here's the deal: our man Felix flies up into space in a balloon.  From space, he skydives, experiencing nearly 4 and a half minutes of free fall and breaking the sound barrier, reaching a speed of 729 miles per hour .  (...

As I have grown older, many mental frameworks that I thought would always be with me have gradually been worn away by experience.  Many of the "missions" I thought I would always be on have gradually lost their meaning, until one day the message from headquarters simply reads: "There...

It's also why a big central world government would never work. I am not inclined to turn over control of my daily life to the rules and regulations of what China wants for instance. They won't be in my interest no matter how they are presented. When a government makes a rule, it is saying, "St...

MediumTex wrote: They're going to call it The Man With the Golden Bum.

dualstow wrote: Is this what they mean by closed-end fund?

Come here for the investment advice.  Stay for the gold-smuggling jokes.

This looks great!  Looking forward to reading it!

Seems that this forum's a great place to meet published writers. 

Note to get picky, but when I see a chart where the Y axis is not scaled starting at 0 I immediately become suspicious. In this chart, I see it starts at a rather high arbitrary number to accentuate the point. If I'm reading it correctly it shows that Labor participation dropped from a high near 67...

The markets price these expectations in way before they come out. The stock market is up nearly 18% this year. So it's not like things are going poorly... Yeah, this is yet another confounding factor that makes market timing so tricky.  You have to know to what degree that market has already expect...

I still remember Gumby and I tussling for page after page about aliens and the pyramids.  :D Ohhh, I missed that!  Gumby has a fantastic habit of bitchslapping with facts, so I can't imagine how that topic went. It of course stayed very civil, but the amount of content and research we put into such...

I think that one reason people can get pretty passionate about this stuff is that we generally respect each other as being smart, reasonably well-grounded folks.  It's not like when you're in youtube comments or someplace where you already know everyone is... well, kinda dumb.  The people here are j...

Sliding silver coins on a ramp of neodymium magnets can distinguish fake silver coins.  Silver is diamagnetic and generates a magnetic response to strong magnetic fields. Gold is diamagnetic as well, but I've not tried any on the magnetic ramp.  It would be interesting to give one of the China tung...

Last nights debate reminded me of the 1974 boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman where Ali did the Rope a Dope maneuver laying on the ropes and letting Foreman pound on him for 7 rounds with little defense.  Then after Foreman (Romney) wore himself out, Ali (Obama) took to the offens...

In this day and age, would it be possible to carry gold through an airport without it being confiscated in such a political climate? The good news is that the South Korean smuggling community is already hard at work at solving this problem for us, stone. The bad news?  The training necessary to car...