Malcolm Gladwell explains why it's statistically FAR better to be among the smartest kids at a 2nd or 3rd tier school than struggling to get into some elite institution where you will be below average among your peers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UEwbRWFZVc&t=220s
If you're borrowing money to pay for a degree, going to a school where you are not at the very top of the class is really taking a big risk.
Given all the trash Gladwell has spouted as truth over the years, it's hard to take him seriously. Even if sometimes what he says has merit, it's hard to know when to believe him and when not to.
I especially cringe at the idea that Gladwell is saying it's statistically better to do something, when he has a known history of deliberately misinterpreting data and massaging numbers to get the result he wants.
While I think people should be much more accepting of 2nd- and 3rd-tier schools as options than they often are, kids should absolutely push themselves for the best-ranked school they can get into (assuming they also have a solid program for whatever field/major they're interested in). Not only is it beneficial to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are, there are also second-order effects to attending an elite university, like making connections that can help you along with your career later. Not to mention that if a recruiter sees two recent-grad resumes that are identical except for the name of the school, they're going to pick the candidate that went to the "better" school.
Certainly you don't want to set yourself up for failure; if that elite school is going to be such a struggle that you're eventually going to be washed out, that's probably not a good outcome, and a lower-tier school would have been a better choice. But, absent that, I think it's good advice to attend the best school you can get into.
Thank you for posting Gladwell's talk, which should be required viewing for any young, bright and hopeful high-school graduate. I wish all my nephews and nieces had watched it.
What! A 2nd tier school still has strong peers which you can surround yourself in. If you're at the top of a 2nd tier school you can push yourself to be near the PHD researchers and graduate students giving you similar academic peer rigor.
I agree with you from an academic standpoint! Maybe my comment was too harsh, I think surrounding yourself with PHD researchers and graduate students counts as challenging and pushing yourself.
But it's more fun when the people pushing you are your friends and peers. In contrast, how many PHD researchers with a spouse and kids want to study and get coffee with a 19 year old undergrad?
I think with the rise of online communities, it's not as applicable anymore.
Gladwell says you're only comparing against yourself against your peers at your school, and not the world, but for me, I've absolutely compared myself from people from other universities (and for that matter, other countries).
For example, there are people 2-3 years younger than me who have a public output of projects/writing that is 100 times more than mine. I'm probably somewhat high up among in my own university in project output, but I still made this comparison, partially because online communities allow me to hear about these people.
There's 6 trillion M0 USD in circulation, and 20 trillion in M2.
Hyperinflation is defined as ~50% monthly inflation. This means that the value of money drops ~100 fold in a year. You tell me - how much money will the fed have to print, in order to hit that target, and where would it need to parachute it?
The M1 is visually deceptive because how it was calculated changed, leading to the spike. The M2 provides a better overview: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
> This is the strategy myself and many of my college friends took when we graduated in the late 80's. And we're all pretty comfy right now.
I wonder if your Japanese peers in a Nikkei 225 fund over the same time period would agree with your strategy. Buy-and-hold for them is still down 50% over the last few decades.
Lot of people bring up the Nikkei but averaging in money in was still better than holding cash over a long enough time period. I highly doubt anyone bought at the peak and then never bought again afterwards.
Not if they were slowly and continuously trickling in as the gp suggested. Still Japan is a cautionary counter example to the stock market always goes up.
> Why would expect the Nikkei 225 to provide similar returns to the S&P 500?
Why would you expect them to be different?
> Company quality varies greatly between these indexes.
Can you elaborate on that? Has the "company quality" differed between the two indexes 30 years ago and was the market mispricing it? Is the market pricing these indexes correctly now? Do you think the S&P 500 is going to provide better results than Nikkei 225 going forward?
Japan has a population of 125 million people and is one of the largest economies in the world (3rd / 4th largest depending on if you're using GDP or PPP).
Why wouldn't they have similar companies?
Lots of well known global brands in Glorious Nippon, too.
This is a common misconception. It's so common that I feel it merits a decent explanation -why- it is incorrect. Not to pick on your comment - it was just the first one I saw that mentioned the Nikkei :)
You can't simply look at the price graph of an index or a stock and make judgments. Aside from dividends, companies can do all kinds of wacky things such as special distributions, perform buybacks, issue new stock, pay out class action settlements etc. Oftentimes stock holders can make extra money through stock yield enhancement programs: if I hold a share of Google in my account at Interactive Brokers, and it has a borrow fee of 5%, IB will automatically lend my share out to people who want it, giving me some decent cash on the side. They split this 50/50 between you and them, so if I had 1 share worth $1000 of Google, that'd be 5% * 1 * 1000 = $50/year lending cost, of which I'd get half, or $25 profit. (Worth noting: My share remains mine to do what I want with at all times - the lending doesn't affect me at all.)
Unfortunately it doesn't even stop there. Even the total profit is not a good enough indicator. Imagine a stock market that craters from 2020 to 2030, going from $50 to $20. With dividend reinvestment and other things added, your total account value is $25 in 2030, or half of what you put in. However, in the same time, the cost of living halved. Your investment would buy exactly as much bread, eggs, housing, Netflix etc as it would when you put it in. Was your investment a good one? You still can't know: you'd also want to take a look at things such as other foreign markets, exchange rates, risk, volatility, and alternative types of investments (bonds, housing, land, etc.) I'll ignore those factors for the rest of my comment, but if you want to see data on the Nikkei and CPI, this is great: https://dqydj.com/nikkei-return-calculator-dividend-reinvest...
Anyway, back to Japan. Buying the Nikkei at its absolute peak in 1989 and simply holding it (with dividend reinvestment), never adding a penny to your account, would have produced total returns of 54% in US dollars or 13% in Yen. Still poor returns on an annual basis, yes, but this is with two rather unusual assumptions - 1) buying at the absolute all-time peak way back in the eighties after a to-this-day unprecedented growth spurt, and 2) investing on that one unfortunate day and never putting in another penny. Most people put money in gradually over many years.
Specifically, what the gp comment said was "trickling cash in slowly over time". Assuming you put money in for the decade preceding the 1989 crash, your total returns today would be (by year, investing in December, US dollars):
If you had contributed $1000 per month from '79 to '89 you would have $1.1 million today; if you did the same from '89 to '99 you would have $316k; if you did that from '99 to '09 you'd have $434k.
Over any span of time, if you contributed a few hundred dollars per month to the Nikkei during the length of a typical career, you would be a US dollar millionaire today. I would say his Japanese peers are doing just fine.
The US Navy has 11 aircraft carrier groups protecting the USD status as the world's reserve currency.
History suggests that won't last forever, but it probably won't be COIN shareholders or activist hedge funds that forces a regime change as big as that.
Digg was flooded with College Humor posts and XKCD comics before the redesign. For some reason, people think the redesign was the reason why people left.
Nothing, but I go to xkcd.com for that. IMO, the only valid use of reposting xkcd is when the thing you're posting is pertinent to the conversation. Like if somebody's among the lucky 10,000 who hasn't heard of nerdsniping until today.
Calcifediol is just a way to rapidly increase the blood levels of Vitamin D in an obvious crisis situation. Going outside, and/or supplementing Vitamin D from exogenous sources takes many days to have an effect.
Talk to your doctor, but start now. Your downside risk is fairly minimal. It is estimated that 40% of more of the US population is deficient in Vitamin D.
Yeah, definitely use salt water. I will mention that in the main post. You can get a product like the following which has a water preparation which should be safe:
Most of these products have a salt packet (you’re right - you definitely should not use fresh water - it will very likely cause damage) but you still need to start with distilled or properly filtered water.
You're right, I should mention not to use fresh water, though many people do use fresh water in India without problems.
This product I've pointed out is pre-mixed ocean water, it comes with the water, not just the salt packet. It's not nasal irrigation, just a spray. It's pretty effective for my sinus infections I've been exceptionally prone to.
You can also boil the water--it doesn't need to be distilled. I'm afraid distilled water may leak ions, probably shouldn't use just distilled water though I've done no research on the topic.
Based on my knowledge (science and tradition combined), you gotta use salt water, ideally the water is from a natural source and has been boiled. I don't know about distilled water. Indians have been doing this for millennia, there is a safe way to do it.
edit: Do you have a source for the fresh water being an issue? Is this an empirical result or just some theory without a study? I'm genuinely interested, I can't find any study of this. It should be easy to do as well, you could study populations in India.
maybe Heartbleed or the xzUtils debacles convinced them to switch.