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.

Last time we solved the problem of the perfect retirement spending plan, assuming a fixed known real return, and a CRRA utility function.

*Let’s see if we can come up with an ideal spending plan for a retirement, if you have a guaranteed annual return, for different levels of risk aversion. *

I was scanning the news the other day, and someone on Hacker News mentioned that half the items above the fold on StreetEYE were about Bitcoin. And I said to myself, I haven’t seen the neckbeards this excited since the early days of Linux. And it hit me, Bitcoin is the new Linux.

. In 2011 I blogged about why Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme doomed to fail.

Profits, like sausages… are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them. Alvin Toffler