“I recently got my hands dirty and ran the numbers for just how much time you buy back when you save money. The result is incredible: if you’re an average reader of this site, for every $18.12 you save today you buy back an entire day of your life when you retire.”

Check out the post (and calculator) here: ALifeofProductivity.com

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Photo by Moyan Brenn on Flickr

The best defense is sometimes…a good defense:

When Tyler Allen agreed to fork over $3 million in cash for a luxury condominium near Concordia, Kan., he wasn’t attracted by the indoor swimming pool, 17-seat movie theater, or hydroponic vegetable garden.

The real selling point of the 1,820-square-foot apartment: It will be buried 174 feet underground in a decommissioned missile silo sturdy enough to withstand a nuclear attack.

…The so-called Survival Condo complex boasts full and half-floor units that cost $1.5 million to $3 million each. The building can accommodate up to 75 people, and buyers include doctors, scientists and entrepreneurs, says developer Larry Hall.

The development is sold out.  I found this bit interesting:

…the complex has enough emergency food on hand to last for up to five years. There’s also a holding cell for unruly occupants.

The full story is here.

I found this to be a diffuse year in movies, one where old-style mainline releases lost their grip on a lot of multiplexes and opened up the market for more quality and diversity than we have seen for a long time.  My cinematic self came away from the year quite happy, yet without a clear favorite or a definite sense of which movies will last the ages.  Here are the ones I very much enjoyed or otherwise found stimulating:

The Invisible Woman, the secret love life of Charles Dickens.

Particle Fever, reviewed by me here.

Le Weekend, brutal tale of a vacation and a marriage collapsing.

Under the Skin, Scarlet Johansson in Scotland, to say more would be spoilers.

The Lunchbox, resembles an old-style Hollywood movie about a correspondence romance, yet set among the Indian middle to lower middle class.

Viola, an Argentinean take on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, condensed into 65 minutes.

A Touch of Sin, Chinese, brutal, it did not see mainstream release in most cities, I saw it in London.

Godzilla, Straussian review by me here.

Transformers 4, reviewed by me here.

Obvious Child (under the Straussian reading only)

Ilo, Ilo, a movie from Singapore about a Filipina immigrant.  And I had the best dark chocolate gelato I’ve had in America, right after watching it at the Angelika pop-up.

The One I Love, an excellent movie about mind games, love, and commitment.  This was perhaps the most clever movie of the year and also the most underrated.

Skeleton Twins

Lucy, the energy and style overcame the absurdity.  That gives Scarlett Johansson two for the year.

Fury, an old-style WWII movie with Brad Pitt, there is a good David Denby review here.

Interstellar, my review is here, here is one Straussian reading.

Of that whole list, for favorites I would pick Fury as #1, along with Touch of Sin.  Both of them need to be seen on a large screen.

For TV, the Modern Orthodox Jewish dating show Srugim was a clear first, this year I didn’t watch many movies on video but thought Terence Malick’s 2012 To the Wonder had been underrated.

Looking at your smart phone may in fact be more interesting than watching your small child, at the margin at least.  It seems that some child injuries may be going up for this reason.  Here is a new paper (pdf) by Craig Palsson at Yale:

From 2005 to 2012, injuries to children under five increased by 10%. Using the expansion of ATT’s 3G network, I find that smartphone adoption has a causal impact on child injuries. This effect is strongest amongst children ages 0-5, but not children ages 6-10, and in activities where parental supervision matters. I put this forward as indirect evidence that this increase is due to parents being distracted while supervising.

Here is Palsson’s other work, I hope he sends me a copy of his Haiti research once it is available.

Circa:

The European Space Agency (ESA) Philae probe successfully landed on the Comet 67P, a first in space exploration.

The Rosetta satellite and its probe payload arrived at the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko Aug. 6 after 10 years, five months, and four days in space. Rosetta traveled 6.4 billion kilometers (3.98 billion miles) on its journey and orbited the sun five times.

10-year mission. 4 billion miles. Landing on a comet traveling 40,000 miles per hour. Science.

“Excuses. Procrastination. It all leads to one thing, nothing. I rationalized that financial security was the most important thing. I now know, that it definitely is not. I regret doing nothing with my energy, when I had it. My passions. My youth. I regret letting my job take over my life. I regret being an awful husband, a money-making machine. I regret not finishing my novel, not travelling the world. Not being emotionally there for my son. Being a damn emotionless wallet.”

Check out the entire story (and takeaway!!) here: EliteDaily.com

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Hat tip: Derek // Photo by SamboD

A Buffett of Advice

My friend Eric recently sent me an article describing advice Warren Buffett once gave an employee.

In the article, Buffett wanted to help his employee get ahead in his working life, so he suggested that the employee list the twenty-five most important things he wanted to accomplish in the next few years. He then had the employee circle the top five and told him to prioritize this smaller list.

All seemed well until the wise Billionaire asked one more question: “What are you going to do with the other twenty things?”

The employee answered: “Well the top five are my primary focus but the other twenty come in at a close second. They are still important so I’ll work on those intermittently as I see fit as I’m getting through my top five. They are not as urgent but I still plan to give them dedicated effort.”

Buffett surprised him with his response: “No. You’ve got it wrong…Everything you didn’t circle just became your ‘avoid at all cost list.'”

An Important Reminder

I read this story on Scott Dinsmore’s site, where Scott explains he heard it from a friend who heard it from the employee in the story: so some details have likely been mutated during this multi-hop dissemination.

But the story nevertheless resonates because it promotes a truth that I think is vital to remember in our current networked age: spending time on lower priority goals, even though they’re helpful and generate value, can leave you worse off than if you had avoided them all together.

The logic supporting this observation is simple.

• Your highest priority goals return significantly more value per unit time invested than your lower priority goals.
• In addition, your time and attention are limited.
• It follows that effort invested on your lower priority goals steals effort from your higher priority goals.
• If you spend time on the lower priority goals, therefore, your total quantity of value produced is reduced.

The reason I describe this lesson as particularly vital to our current age is that the behaviors that consume more of our time and attention — e.g., social media, web surfing, chronic networking  — often fall onto the low priority end of Buffett’s List of Twenty-Five.

These behaviors are sold to us with the promise that they offer some benefit (e.g., “you never know, the contact you make on Facebook might end up bringing you new business”) – but they do so at the cost of stealing time from the harder efforts that are guaranteed to return a lot of benefit (e.g., make your product too good to be ignored).

It’s with this in mind that it’s useful to remember Buffett’s caution: Don’t just prioritize what’s most important, but support this prioritization by avoiding everything that’s not.

#####

For another take on this idea see Tip #2 in my 2008 article on the Steve Martin Method — the article, interestingly enough, in which I first mentioned his advice to “be so good they can’t ignore you.”

(Photo by Javier)

I’ve always been a do-it-yourself investor. This habit started around age 19 with a series of ridiculous speculative trades in individual high-tech company stocks. “This stock is sure to go through the roof”, I would think, “because their products are so great.”

This is a terrible way to invest.

But after a few early financial haircuts and the subsequent 20 years of reading an investment book or two every year, I’ve come to appreciate the much more boring and successful strategy of extremely long-term investing in extremely low cost index funds. Nowadays, I don’t just avoid trying to guess the short-term movements of individual stocks. I avoid looking at financial markets and news entirely, for weeks or months at a time.

This is a much better way to invest. In fact, doing just this will not only put you ahead of most average Joes, but you will also beat the vast majority of expensive personal financial advisers and professional investors as well. The reason is simply that you minimize the main sources of potential loss: human error and our flawed boom-bust psychology, fund fees, capital gains taxes, and broker commissions.

If we were to put a wide range of popular investing styles on a spectrum of effectiveness, it might look something like this:

Fig. 1: A few asset types with expected annual return after inflation.

You can see that we’re already up near the top of the chart. You can improve slightly on buy-and-hold-forever investing, but at this point it starts to take some work. To really beat it, you need to be a lifelong business prodigy who devours financial statements and human psychology in equal parts for most of your lifetime. (Note that most of us currently feel like stock geniuses because of the recent 20% annual gains in the overall market, but this all tends to average out over the decades and in reality you’ll do well to get 7% after inflation.)

For almost 40 years, Vanguard has been the place* to invest to get these high-on-the-chart results. As a member-owned firm, they have patiently operated with maximum integrity** and zero bullshit salesmanship while most financial firms leveraged, hedged, churned and charged their clients to maximize their own profits. I started my own Vanguard account in 1999 and have never looked back as multiple recessions and crises, booms and dividends have helped my small militia of green employees expand their ranks by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But in recent years, technology and the latest startup company boom have brought new options for index fund investing. ETFs have delivered even lower expenses, easier transactions, and allowed Vanguard-like options to spread to Canada and European countries. Lightweight wealth managers like Future Advisor, Wealthfront, and Personal Capital deliver their own takes on index investing, with more service than Vanguard in exchange for moderate cost. Then there is Betterment, which appeared on my radar when I discovered some financially savvy friends were entrusting the company with big chunks of their wealth (Jesse Mecham and the Mad Fientist among them).

So Why did I Pick Betterment?

In two words, technology and psychology are what attracted me to this company. At the core, Betterment is just a fancy frontend for Vanguard funds – when you invest with Betterment, you end up owning Vanguard funds just like a wise person would already do. But they add value by automating two things that actually allow you to earn and keep more money: automatic portfolio rebalancing, and tax loss harvesting. They do this for a fee that amounts to roughly $150 per $100,000 invested. I expect the benefits to be substantially greater than that, meaning it should prove to be a profitable choice if I have done the homework right.

On top of that, their mobile and web-based interface make contributing and watching your growing ‘stash a lot of fun, which is a big part of the battle. But your interaction with the company remains in the digital realm – no adviser will be making personal calls to offer hand-holding and warm guidance. This works well for my typical engineer’s personality – I answer the phone for my mother, my wife, and a few close pals. The rest of the world can send me an email or put their information on a website. I’ll go read your site if I want your information, thanks very much.

What is Rebalancing and Tax Loss Harvesting Anyway?

Rebalancing means maintaining your original mix of stocks, bonds and other bits of the world economy in a strategic proportion. If one class goes up while another goes down, the system automatically sells a small portion of the winners and/or buys more of the discounted assets. On average this amounts to systematically buying low and selling high, which improves your returns slightly over the years, as explained in my older post on Asset Allocation.

In the normal course of all this rebalancing, Betterment will end up selling some index fund shares for you at a profit, which means capital gains taxes. This can be cleverly offset by selling other funds that have lost money in the same year, but then using that money to buy other funds that still allow you to own those same companies. This is called Tax Loss Harvesting.

You can’t do this trick by just selling and re-buying the same stock in the last week of every December: that is called a “wash sale” and the IRS disallows it. But with today’s wealth of interchangeable funds and within the whole scheme of automatic asset allocation, it is a perfectly valid strategy that Betterment estimates could improve the performance of a non-retirement account by about 0.77% annually, which is again several times the fee they charge.

The Experience of Betterment

Shortly after becoming convinced of the benefits, I had the unexpected good fortune of meeting with a crew of Betterment workers, including co-founder Jon Stein. Over dinner I was pleased to absorb the realness of the company culture – technical and pragmatic, and completely free of the stuffed-shirt hype that has been pervasive in most of my peeks into the financial services industry. They answered every question I could throw at them, and then lent me one of their engineers to handle any follow-up technical questions that might come up in further research.

At last I decided to take the plunge, and I signed up for an account just as any new customer would do. The reassuring simplicity of it was a joy. I did the basic account setup, linked in the checking account, and within a day I was able to transfer the last $100,000 of leftover cash from my recent house sale into productive investments where it should be.

What I Bought

Betterment is designed to make things simple for you, even while they do some pretty sophisticated management in the background. They start with a brief questionnaire on how long until you retire, and your financial goals. In the end, this translates to a ratio of stocks to bonds, and people closer to retirement get more bonds because stability is often preferred over the higher returns of stocks.

However, I retired 10 years ago and I still don’t care at all about stability, because we have sufficient safety margin to allow (and even benefit from) greater volatility. So I overrode the system and selected “90% stocks, 10% bonds”. The portfolio ended up like this:

My $100k Betterment portfolio (which has since drifted up to $105k) is balanced across 10 Vanguard funds.

A Slew of Educational Emails

An unexpected benefit of the process has been enrollment in what I would call “Betterment University”. Since starting the account I have received no fewer than fifteen emails from the company’s system, nicely timed to be easily digestible in my limited email schedule. Some of them were just status updates: “Congratulations on funding your account / Your pricing plan has been upgraded”, etc. But others were concise tutorials on investing itself: “Explore Betterment’s historical performance / Why market timing is even more dangerous than you think / How we use dividends to keep your tax bill low.”

Vanguard does the same thing to an extent, but they tend to focus on drawn-out webinars and the presentation is less approachable. I look at Betterment as being a service to get started, plunge straight into top-tier investing, and then learn about what you’re doing in the coming months after you’ve already done it. For the typical beginner with no idea where to start, this can be an ideal approach since fear of starting often keeps many of us in savings accounts for far too long.

Where To Go From Here

I’m excited to watch this investment carefully over the coming years. While I’m not expecting magical performance, I do expect Betterment’s simple but worthwhile automated management to outperform my own overly complacent investing style, and to more than pay for the company’s fees. Much like this blog’s Lending Club Experiment (now well past the two year mark), I’ll set up a dedicated page where we can keep track of things in detail and compare Betterment results after fees to my default investment, which would have a two lump-sum purchase of Vanguard’s Total Stock Index(VTSAX) and Total International (VTIAX) funds.

Update: I have now set up this page, and you’ll find it here:
The Betterment Experiment – Results

As always, you are welcome to follow along with your own investment. If you do so with the banner below, this blog will benefit (and thanks!)

But even if you aren’t ready to invest at this time or need a few more opinions, I would suggest that the service could provide value to almost any US-based Mustachian. Put it onto your list of things to research further – I’m glad I did.

 Conflict of Interest Warning! After this post came out, many described it as reading like an advert for Betterment and accused me of becoming a sellout. That’s a fair opinion and if you hold it, you should probably hold all of my recommendations as suspect. To be clear on the background, I did not get paid to write this or any other post. I just like the way this company works, so I invested a good chunk of my own savings with them and thought it was worth telling you about it.

But since they have a referral program, I signed up for it just as I always do for services I happen to use (Capitalone360, Republic Wireless, Lending Club, etc). Other things have no referral program (Vanguard, the public library, Costco, bicycling) and yet they get the same recommendation. But it’s a fine line to walk, and I have appreciated the callouts from readers to watch it – it is much better to sacrifice potential income than credibility and reputation.

Footnotes:

* in the US, anyway. Luckily they have finally reached Canada – learn more in Mr. Frugal Toque’s article on Canadian Investing. And in the UK, where you can get great education and investing knowledge by reading anything from my friend The Monevator.

** In fact. Vanguard founder John Bogle has done so much in his long career for the individual investor and for business ethics as a whole that he is up for a presidential medal of freedom. I’d say he is a good candidate. You can read more about it in this story on Jim Collins’ site. I also wrote a bit about Mr. Bogle in the article called “Enough”.

A study by the Wall Street Journal in 2010 showed that an average NFL game has just 11 minutes of actual action based on the amount of time the ball is actually in play. While a lot of other things do go on in between plays, that leaves a lot of time that networks must fill during a typical 3-hour broadcast.

Well, according to Vox.com, most of that time is spent just showing players standing around and doing nothing. During one recent NFL game, the network broadcast spent 35% of the game showing players just standing around. That would be approximately 64 minutes of inaction during a typical game. Another 24.5% of the broadcast was dedicated to commercials, meaning more than half of the game is either commercials or players standing around.

Football sounds a little less exciting when framed this way.

Join the conversation about this story »

Multibillionaire Bridgewater Associates founder Dalio, who manages money exclusively for institutional clients, had some familiarity with Robbins before sitting down for an interview for his book. He had listened to a set of Robbins’ tapes years earlier. But he was captivated by Robbins’ ability to converse with him—what Robbins likes to call “pitching and catching”—at a high level. “I was blown away by him,” says Dalio. “He got the investment concepts we talk about better than many highly professional institutional investors who devote their lives to this subject. And he was able to convert it to a practical level. For me, it was really exciting.” 

For Dalio, who last year released a 30-minute animated video called How the Economic Machine Works, that ability to distill information is particularly compelling. “Sometimes people are wary of simplicity,” he says. “He’s able to see things in a simple but granular way. It’s a talent. I find that it’s a rare case that people have an ability to see things in a simple way and also appreciate the complexity of things. He’s blessed with a mind that allows him to see that way.”

"Thank you for buying these thoughtful, coordinated storage baskets. Now we will never leave our toys on the floor again."

Submitted by Jennifer C. 

A case study in how quickly incentives can warp the rule of law.

Hat tip: Daniel Lippman.

From Inside Higher Ed:

The University of Michigan’s regional accreditor has signed off on a new competency-based degree that does not rely on the credit-hour standard, the university said last week. The Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools gave a green light to the proposed master’s of health professions education, which the university’s medical school will offer. In its application to the regional accreditor, the university said the program “targets full-time practicing health professionals in the health professions of medicine, nursing, dentistry, pharmacy and social work.”

The link is here, via Phil Hill.

Here is what happened when I asked twenty-seven thousand people “What is page for page the book with the most wisdom you’ve ever read?”

My thinking was, and still is, that you need to filter what you read. Reading, I mean really reading, is not simple. It’s time consuming. So aside from finding time and remembering what you read, you want to make sure you’re reading the right things. There are a few approaches to this filtering. One is to employ the Lindy Effect. But another approach that I use personally is, and this is really going to sound simple, to ask smart people what they’re reading, what they learned from, or, in this case, what book has the most page-per-page wisdom.

The results are often surprising and I usually find one or two books that I’ve never heard of that offer a lot of value.

In no particular order, here is what twitter had to say:

Seeking Wisdom, by Peter Bevelin
This is number 8 on the list of books that changed my life. It is also the book I give away most often, sending innumerable copies around the globe.

Cosmos, by Carl Sagan
This is one of the best-selling science books of all time. I’ve never read it, so I ordered it after reading the blurb: “retraces the fourteen billion years of cosmic evolution that have transformed matter into consciousness, exploring such topics as the origin of life, the human brain, Egyptian hieroglyphics, spacecraft missions, the death of the Sun, the evolution of galaxies, and the forces and individuals who helped to shape modern science.”

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
A book that a lot of people, myself included, talk about but have never read. It’s time to change that.

Do the Work!, by Steven Pressfield
I liked Pressfield’s, The War of Art enough to pick this manifesto arguing that ideas are not enough, you actually have to do the work.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
I’ve picked this book up at least 3 different times in my life and stopped reading it for one reason or another. Considered a cult classic by many, I haven’t found the right time to read it … yet.

The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell
First published in 1930, this book attempts to “diagnose the myriad causes of unhappiness in modern life and chart a path out of the seemingly inescapable malaise.” The book remains as relevant today as ever, and in this edition Daniel Dennett, who showed us how to how to criticize with kindness, re-introduces Russell’s wisdom to a new generation of readers and thinkers calling the work “a prototype of the flood of self-help books that have more recently been published, few of them as well worth reading today as Russell’s little book.”

This is Water by David Foster Wallace
This is one of the best things you will ever read (and hopefully periodically re-read). I wholeheartedly agree with this selection.

Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius
Another of the books that changed my life and also one of the books that I gave away at the Re:Think Innovation workshop. Translation matters enormously with this book, get this one.

Letters from a Stoic, Seneca
Love love love. As relevant today as it was when it was written.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
The person who recommended this book said “you can’t throw away any one page of this book.” You can read a quick overview of the book, but I’d recommend digging in.

Dr Seuss, Oh, The Places You’ll Go!
I agree. Don’t write it off because it’s a kids’ book. I love this book.

An Intimate History of Humanity, by Theodore Zeldin
I’d never heard of this work exploring the evolution of emotions before. Time magazine called it “An intellectually dazzling view of our past and future.”

The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck
I’d never heard of this book (seriously) either and it’s sold 7 million copies. A book to “help us explore the very nature of loving relationships and lead us toward a new serenity and fullness of life.”

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
“For all the answers, stick your thumb to the stars!”

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Brought to you by: CURIOSITY: A curiously unconventional ad agency that helps you stand out in today’s crowded world.

Here is Guy Norris:

Hidden away in the secret depths of the Skunk Works, a Lockheed Martin research team has been working quietly on a nuclear energy concept they believe has the potential to meet, if not eventually decrease, the world’s insatiable demand for power.

Dubbed the compact fusion reactor (CFR), the device is conceptually safer, cleaner and more powerful than much larger, current nuclear systems that rely on fission, the process of splitting atoms to release energy. Crucially, by being “compact,” Lockheed believes its scalable concept will also be small and practical enough for applications ranging from interplanetary spacecraft and commercial ships to city power stations. It may even revive the concept of large, nuclear-powered aircraft that virtually never require refueling—ideas of which were largely abandoned more than 50 years ago because of the dangers and complexities involved with nuclear fission reactors.

Here is another account.  It is suggested that the reactor can fit on the back of a truck.

In response to such speculative reports I usually say: “If it’s true, why isn’t the price of oil down?”  But these days the price of oil is down!  I am not suggesting this is the reason, but at least I can no longer say “If it’s true, why isn’t the price of oil down?”.  I have to say something else, so if this is true — which I cannot judge — there is no great stagnation (any more).

For the pointer I thank various MR readers.

Scanning the news, it's easy to think the world is falling apart. But, on Monday, we got a major piece of good news: hunger is on a major decline in the world. Since 1990, there's been a sustained and massive collapse in the number of people who have difficulty accessing food.

The data comes from the 2014 Global Hunger Index, a measure of global hunger from the International Food Policy Research Institute. The index tracks "the percentage of the population that is undernourished, the percentage of children younger than five years of age who are underweight, and the percentage of people who die before the age of five." Malnutrition is particularly bad for children, and poor access to food makes kids way more vulnerable to diseases, the leading cause of child death in the developing world.

The Index goes from zero, which indicates a country with no undernutrition, to 100, a country where everyone goes hungry. Here's the overall score for "developing nations" since 1990, which basically means all countries except for industrialized "developed" nations such as the US, the UK, Japan, and the like:

That's a 39 percent decline over 24 years. That decline in hunger is a massive win for humanity.

Why are things getting better? Credit two things: economic growth and government programs. Global poverty has declined sharply since 1990, especially in India and China, making it easier for people to afford food. Meanwhile, government programs and international aid have made major improvements in getting people access to healthy diets.

Progress on undernutrition hasn't been even. Some countries, like Swaziland and Iraq, have gotten worse over time. But almost all have made huge strides — India, as The Hindu's Rukmini Shrinivasan explains, posted one of the largest absolute declines in hunger in the world. Here's a GIF that shows country-by-country changes in Global Hunger Index for since 1990:

(International Food Policy Research Institute)

See how there's less and less red and orange but more and more green? That means food insecurity is declining. Just another reason to believe that, for all our troubles, we're living through the greatest era in human history.

I double-checked these figures with [Philip] Cook, just to make sure I wasn’t reading them wrong. “I agree that it’s hard to imagine consuming 10 drinks a day,” he told me. But, “there are a remarkable number of people who drink a couple of six packs a day, or a pint of whiskey.”

As Cook notes in his book, the top 10 percent of drinkers account for well over half of the alcohol consumed in any given year. On the other hand, people in the bottom three deciles don’t drink at all, and even the median consumption among those who do drink is just three beverages per week.

The piece, by Christopher Ingraham, is interesting throughout.  Here is my earlier post on “The culture of guns, the culture of alcohol”, one of my favorites.

Addendum: Via Robert Wiblin, Trevor Butterworth offers a good critique of the data.

Clay Shirky:

Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor of the elephant and the rider is useful here. In Haidt’s telling, the mind is like an elephant (the emotions) with a rider (the intellect) on top. The rider can see and plan ahead, but the elephant is far more powerful. Sometimes the rider and the elephant work together (the ideal in classroom settings), but if they conflict, the elephant usually wins.

After reading Haidt, I’ve stopped thinking of students as people who simply make choices about whether to pay attention, and started thinking of them as people trying to pay attention but having to compete with various influences, the largest of which is their own propensity towards involuntary and emotional reaction. (This is even harder for young people, the elephant so strong, the rider still a novice.)

Interesting comparison to second-hand smoking, too:

The final realization — the one that firmly tipped me over into the “No devices in class” camp — was this: screens generate distraction in a manner akin to second-hand smoke. A paper with the blunt title Laptop Multitasking Hinders Classroom Learning for Both Users and Nearby Peers says it all.

April Fool’s joke in 2013, actual news story in 2014.

Fascinating and persuasive short film by C.G.P. Grey on the inevitable upheaval in employment opportunities wrought by automation:

Horses aren’t unemployed now because they got lazy as a species, they’re unemployable. There’s little work a horse can do that pays for its housing and hay.

And many bright, perfectly capable humans will find themselves the new horse: unemployable through no fault of their own.

Why should trading be the province of humans only?:

One project is Michael Marcovici’s Rat Trader. The book describes the training of laboratory rats to trade in foreign exchange and commodity futures markets. Marcovici says the rats “outperformed some of the world’s leading human fund managers.” The rats were trained to press a red or green button to give buy or sell signals, after listening to ticker tape movements represented as sounds. If they called the market right they were fed, if they called it wrong they got a small electric shock. Male and female rats performed equally well. The second generation of rattraders, cross-bred from the best performers in the first generation, appeared to have even better performance, although this is a preliminary result, according to the text. Marcovici’s plan, he writes, is to breed enough of them to set up a hedge fund.

I don’t myself like the electric shock idea, but there you go.  That is from Diane Coyle, and for the pointer I thank Michael Gibson.

I wrote this in 2004 on MR:

Here are my suggestions:

1. There is always time to do more, most people, even the productive, have a day that is at least forty percent slack.

2. Do the most important things first in the day and don’t let anybody stop you.  Estimate “most important” using a zero discount rate.  Don’t make exceptions.  The hours from 7 to 12 are your time to build for the future before the world descends on you.

3. Some tasks (drawing up outlines?) expand or contract to fill the time you give them.  Shove all these into times when you are pressed to do something else very soon.

4. Each day stop writing just a bit before you have said everything you want to.  Better to approach your next writing day “hungry” than to feel “written out.”  Your biggest enemy is a day spent not writing, not a day spent writing too little.

5. Blogging builds up good work habits; the deadline is always “now.”

Rahul R. asks me if I would like to revise the list.  I’ll add these:

6. Don’t drink alcohol.  Don’t take drugs.

7. At any point in your life, do not be watching more than one television show on a regular basis.

8. Don’t feel you have to finish a book or movie if you don’t want to.  I cover that point at length in my book Discover Your Inner Economist.

I think I would take back my old #5, since I observe some bloggers who have gone years, ten years in fact, without being so productive.