More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly. — Woody Allen

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. Thomas Jefferson

There will always be those who mean to do us harm. To stop them, we risk awakening the same evil within ourselves. — James T. Kirk_

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one that is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. – Henry David Thoreau

A couple of days ago I posted Mapping the Financial / Media Twittersphere, an illustration of the Twitter accounts that are most central for financial news.

The good folks at Captain Economics did a great post a couple of weeks back on ‘The Economics Twitosphere Top 100 Influential Users’.

To everything, turn, turn, turn. There is a season, turn, turn, turn. And a time to every purpose under heaven. The Byrds, by way of Ecclesiastes

You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the government. And, with due respect to these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold. - George Bernard Shaw

Matthias Steiner, Beijing 2008. Pain is weakness leaving the body, and/or your central nervous system telling you you’re about to die. - source unknown

Really, the way to understand ‘net neutrality’ is it’s all about Netflix. The cable companies are outraged and scared to death about Netflix. If you’ve tried a Roku Internet TV appliance (or Apple TV, or Google Chromecast, or Amazon Fire TV), it’s a 10x user experience improvement on a cable box. For less money.

Diane Coyle says you can have either robots, or secular stagnation, but not both. In a somewhat confused tweetstorm, Marc Andreessen says secular stagnation is BS. Larry Summers, who is one of the guys behind the secular stagnation hypothesis, responds. But then, confusingly, is reported to agree with Coyle.

There are some people that will be deterred by the fact that we have nuclear weapons… But those people are the folks we can deal with anyway. — General Charles Horner. Sometimes it pays to be irrational, to do the unexpected like pass on 2nd and 1, to catch the defense by surprise. If one believes the evil genius of Belichick, he got inside Carroll’s OODA loop, he psyched Carroll into calling it and anticipated him.

Time converts the improbable to the inevitable – Stephen Jay Gould. [TL;DR 50% odds Greece leaves euro this year. Odds eurozone breaks up eventually: ~100%]

*Apple reported a blowout iPhone 6 launch quarter. In fact, reportedly the largest quarterly profit ever reported by a public company. I had a feeling they would blow away expectations, the iPhone 6 looks and feels great, it’s a must-have upgrade. *

An interesting dive into “Deep Web Marketplaces” by the folks at avc.com and USV. You have a choice of trusting the natural stability of gold or the honesty and intelligence of members of the government, and with all due respect to these gentleman, I advise you as long as the capitalist system lasts, vote for gold. – George Bernard Shaw

To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. _ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

A thought experiment: If you could buy an asset that returned the GDP growth rate, would you, should you do it?

In this post we’re going to look at a simple way to visualize the power of diversification, and what correlation really tells us.

Volatility is a proxy for how risky Mr. Market thinks an asset is.

In part 1 and part 2, we developed a framework for evaluating and identifying a good plan for retirement spending and asset allocation.