Apex Money Posts

This is a review of a book, Everybody Loves Our Dollars by Oliver Bullough, and it sounds like a really fascinating read. I tried to find it on Amazon but apparently not available in the USA – no idea why.

Everybody Loves Our Dollars by Oliver Bullough review – a jaw-dropping exposé of money laundering [The Guardian] – “From handbags to drug gangs to central banks – one of Britain’s finest investigative reporters reveals the surprising links in a global chain of crime”

Follow the incentives…

Why Advisors Don’t Recommend 529s [The College Financial Lady] – “There’s a reason a lot of advisors don’t like 529s, and it has nothing to do with making sure that you have money available for college. Instead it’s this: if you put your college savings into your state’s 529 plan, the advisor usually can’t charge you a management fee for it. There, I said that part out loud. If you are saving for college and working with an advisor who tells you not to use a 529, ask them whether they’re a fiduciary to you because it’s unlikely that that advice is in your best interest.“

Paul Graham was asked (and then unasked) to give a talk to a high school.

He originally published this article 21 years ago and it’s just as accurate today.

This is what he was going to say:

What You’ll Wish You’d Known [Paul Graham] – “But there are other jobs you can’t learn about, because no one is doing them yet. Most of the work I’ve done in the last ten years didn’t exist when I was in high school. The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it’s not a good idea to have fixed plans.”

Before I was a finance creator, I was a software engineer and worked with a lot of other software engineers.

I know for a fact I would’ve benefited from learning some of these lessons earlier rather than later and many have crossover appeal to other industries… especially the “cleverness is overhead” bit. Humans love being clever, whether it’s in code or otherwise. Simplicity is elegant. 🙂

21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google [Addy Osmani] – “3. Bias towards action. Ship. You can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank one.

The quest for perfection is paralyzing. I’ve watched engineers spend weeks debating the ideal architecture for something they’ve never built. The perfect solution rarely emerges from thought alone – it emerges from contact with reality. AI can in many ways help here.

First do it, then do it right, then do it better. Get the ugly prototype in front of users. Write the messy first draft of the design doc. Ship the MVP that embarrasses you slightly. You’ll learn more from one week of real feedback than a month of theoretical debate.

Momentum creates clarity. Analysis paralysis creates nothing.”

Professor Donald Knuth is a professor emeritus at Stanford University and a 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, considered the Nobel Prize of computer science, and I love this note of his from back in the day.

I don’t know when exactly it was written but I suspect it’s been decades. And it’s just as accurate today as it was then.

Email (let’s drop the hyphen) [Don Knuth’s Stanford website] – “Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.”

I also like this quote:

`I don’t even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.’ — Umberto Eco, quoted in the New Yorker

I enjoy Morgan Housel’s “a few things I’m pretty sure about” posts because it’s a rapid fire list of ideas worth pondering.

I went to Carnegie Mellon University to study Computer Science, a very competitive program. At our first day of orientation, the speaker said “you were all in the top 5% of your class, 95% of you will have to get used to the idea that you won’t be in the top 5% anymore.” Welcome to CMU. 🤣

A Few Things I’m Pretty Sure About [Collab Fund] – “An iron rule of math is that 50% of the population has to be below average. It’s true for income, intelligence, health, wealth, everything. And it’s a brutal reality in a world where social media stuffs the top 1% of moments of the top 1% of people in your face.

You can raise the quality of life for those below average, or set a floor on how low they can go. But when a majority of people expect a top 5% outcome the result is guaranteed mass disappointment.”

I think his housing affordability argument has some serious legs.

OK, nothing to do with money but today’s a good day to learn about trains!

(and you get a good shot of Point State Park in Pittsburgh where the Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela Rivers meet from 7-13 seconds in)

Every Type of Railcar Explained in 15 Minutes

How to Not Torture Your Retirement Numbers [The Best Interest] – “Why am I bringing this up? Who cares about “torturing numbers?”

Because I think it’s important we avoid this pitfall in our personal financial planning, our portfolio decisions, our retirement planning, etc. It can be all too easy to torture these numbers. Sometimes accidentally. Sometimes to avoid painful realizations. Usually, though, because we simply don’t know any better.

Here are some big examples:”

The cornucopia in the Fruit of the Loom, the Berenstain Bears, and other false memories are known as the Mendela effect.

It’s when you misremember things. Like how Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s when he actually passed away in 2013 at the age of 95.

Here’s why it happens:

What’s a false memory? Psychologists explain how your brain can lie. [Popular Science] – “Academics have strongly debated how common these memories are, but everyone agrees that they do happen. In this story, we’ll explore what false memories are, why they happen, and what experts still don’t understand about them.”

The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking is a talk by Peter D. Kaufman and Shane Parrish’s summary taught me a lot about life and prosperity in just 24 minutes.

Here is the 24-minute summary (or you can read the original talk’s transcript):