Shocking Obamacare didn’t create a generation of democrats
Turns out lying is an unbeatable political weapon.
Lol they “should be in pretty good shape” with 8 million banked in their 50s.
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Its hilarious that they are worried about running out of money and there is literally no discussion of their 100k to 150k annual expenses, for people that claim no mortgage and no dependent responsibilities. Like its inconceivable that two adults that own a home can’t squeeze by on 75k per year.
Bro, some years its 100k, and other years its 150k depending on the quality of the vacations taken. I think we’re squeezing enough here, let’s not be crazy.
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Hahaha, I just read this and saw that it’s written by someone who lives in Boston and signs off S.P.
I love imagining that it’s actually S.P. Kothari, professor at MIT Sloan and former SEC Chief Economist. He’s an uber famous researcher in capital markets and once yelled at me in a conference right before I went up for tenure.
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I think we’re gonna need a little more here.
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I’m not stanning for these people but whether they could live on less is only of minor relevance to their question.
They have decided that they like a lifestyle in which they spend 100-150K. They want to know if they can sustain that with their current savings and if you factor in expenses like health insurance.
It would be like if someone came in here and asked something like “Do you think Tesla is a good short? I’m thinking of doing it” or "Do you think bitcoin is going up? I’m thinking of buying some " and then you come back with “Lol no, Vanguard Total Market is what you should be investing in.”
That response is not wrong, but it doesn’t really answer the question.
Agreed. But we actually do have data about what people do in retirement when their lifestyle goals and savings amounts come into conflict. They reduce their consumption. And most of the people reducing consumption are doing so starting from a much lower baseline. So their question presumes an inflexibility in spending that exists only in their minds.
This is a sub-2% withdrawal rate. The article is clickbait nonsense.
Like yeah, if shit gets so bad that your $8 million goes to zero, you have way bigger problems and are likely dead.
93,000 likes aorn. That’s a lot of guillotines
Probably rustled by the now dead billionaire wealth tax.
They definitely print these for the rage clicks. Pointing out the absurdity if these people is like pointing out when Conservatives hold inconsistent beliefs. It’s addictive and pointless.
Terrible design, imo.
Not sure the person on the extreme right will get a clean cut. Blade probably stops somewhere in the middle of his neck. Now that fate may be deserved, but we’re not monsters.
On the other hand, I’m sure some minor tweaks we can get the volume increase that this design strives for while preserving the speed and, from what I understand, painlessness of the classic guillotine.
This is probably not going to be interesting to many people, but it was very memorable to me, so here you go. Spoilering this because it’s so long.
Summary
Background:
Getting tenure is obviously a desirable thing. The main criteria for the tenure decision is the quantity and quality of your publications. Now, in my field, the number of publications is much lower than many other fields - 4 or 5 good publications is enough at most places outside of the very top. But on top of the number, you also need to develop a reputation in the field, so that people outside your field (when called upon to give input on your tenure case) can say “yes, spidercrab is a very thoughtful researcher. He is an expert in his niche.” or “no, spidercrab is actually a moron”. This outside judgment is subjective, but really important because virtually all of our publications are coauthored with other people. Which means that when you’re evaluating spidercrab and spidercrab has 5 publications coauthored with 8 other people, you have to try to figure out whether spidercrab himself is actually a good researcher, or if he was just fortunate to work with good researchers.
So one way that someone can develop a reputation is by speaking at prestigious conferences. If you ask a question or make a comment in front of the top people in the field, and that question/comment is really insightful, that can tilt the scale on how those top people see you. And obviously the reverse is true - if you say something stupid, people are likely to remember that as well.
The conference:
This is an academic conference hosted by one of the top 3 journals in my field. It’s invitation only, and there are about 50-80 people who attend over 2 days to see 6 papers presented. The format is a standard workshop format, which means that the author/presenter starts presenting the paper to the group, and audience members immediately start raising their hands to ask questions. It can be an aggressive atmosphere, and the presenter basically gets pummeled for 90 minutes.
During this particular conference, someone was presenting a paper on IPOs I think, and talking about the first day discount. I raised my hand, was called on, and said something like this:
"In this paper, we look at IPO underpricing and post-offering returns. And the way that you/we characterize those returns is that positive returns are really bad - they indicate that the firm had to issue shares at a discount, presumably because the firm was really opaque and investors were very uncertain about firm value.
“But the paper that we just saw before this looked at returns following some other event, and the way that they characterized returns was that positive returns were very good because they indicated strong performance by the firms. That seems very inconsistent to me. How do we know when positive returns are good things (the firm is performing well) vs. bad things (investors demand a higher rate of return because the firm is so risky)?”
I thought this was a very good question. I still think it was a very good question. But things got weird very quickly. Because instead of the presenter responding to me, SP Kothari–who was sitting directly in front of me–turned around and responded to me. This was incredibly atypical - audience members don’t normally engage in a back and forth. [This was probably a very good thing for the presenter though, because it was a break in the pummeling.]
Anyway, SP turns around and says, “spidercrab, in this case the returns are so low that it has to be such and such. So it’s clear how we should interpret it in this case.” And said, “Ok, but how do we know? What makes it obvious?” And he slams the desk with his hand and yells, “Because I’m SP!”. I stopped talking after that.
This is one of the most respected researchers in capital markets AND someone who has done it in practice - he was the global head of equity research for Barclays. He is also an obvious candidate to write a tenure review letter for anyone doing capital markets research (that includes me). So I was quite stunned and wondering if I had just torpedoed my career.
After that part of the presentation was over, a couple of people came up to me and said that actually my question was a good one. But those people were notably silent when it was all going down, rather than coming to my defense.
Things turned out fine and I got tenure and now it’s just a funny story I can tell at conferences. But man did experience some stress in the moment.
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Great story!
Few questions:
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Was SP a co-author on the paper, or was he otherwise connected to the group that wrote the paper was presenting?
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When you are up for tenure does you department just ask whomever they think is appropriate about you or do you influence that in any way. A buddy of mine is on faculty at a Big Ten school and was recently up for tenure in a different field. What he had to do is submit a list of other tenured professors of same rank in same discipline at other institutions as references. The obvious strategy is to just submit names of people you are friends with (which is what he did…it’s not as if they had to lie about him though, he was more than deserving).
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Your question actually does seem like a very reasonable one. Now that you’ve presumably had years to think about it, are you any closer to an answer. If so, what is it?
Completely unconnected to the paper, which is why this experience was so odd. To be fair, he did know me (he was the advisor of one of the members of my dissertation committee), so it wasn’t a completely random shot. But still very unexpected.
Probably varies a little from place to place, but here’s how it works at my current place, and I would expect it to be pretty similar in other schools:
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The promotion & tenure committee meets to decide who good external reviewers would be. So you’re looking at mostly full professors from peer and aspirational schools. That list is about 12-13 people with the goal of getting at least 7-8 responses.
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The candidate is given that list and has the option to strike up to 2 of them and then suggest 2-3 potential reviewers of their own. (When I went up, I struck one of the people on the list because I had no idea how he perceived me or even the area of research I focused on.)
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Letter writers are supposed to indicate any conflict of interest, but there’s a lot of subjectivity there. For example, there are lots of people I’m friendly with (through repeated interactions at conferences, etc.) that I don’t think rise to a conflict of interest level.
My answer is that I think a lot of people tell stories about the data they analyzed, and sometimes those stories are more convincing than others. So I’ve just become grumpy guy who can appreciate the empirical analyses that someone has done without at all buying the conclusions they draw.
I take it SP wasn’t on the list? If he was, I assume you would have struck.