The Monday Read

A Taste of Spring Edition

Walked to work yesterday and it really felt like spring! Warm sunshine, pleasant breeze, flowers…

Of course the arctic wind picked up in the afternoon but it was pleasant while it lasted 🙂

Soon the cold will be a half-vanished memory and we’ll all be complaining about the heat again. Plus ca change!

Stay the Course

Checked our accounts for my monthly update of our spreadsheets, and my wife and I were up 39.5% from the dip last March. Just goes to show the value of investing in somewhat sensible things regularly over time and ignoring drops or crashes in the market.

Stick to the plan, stay the course, and things should be okay in the end.

The Forum

The forum is looking good again this week:

Book of the Week

I’m really enjoying Scott Galloway’s Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity. It’s very similar to his blog writing, so if you like that you should enjoy the book (and if you hate the blog, then don’t bother with the book). Lots of ideas about what companies, markets, and society will look like over the next decade or two.

This week’s links

1. This video of a man on a desert island for 300 days is wonderful. He seems such a normal guy but I wouldn’t have made it past the first 36 hours!
2. This comment on carbon emissions seems plausible. Kind of like compound interest. Slow, slow, slow, woah!
3. I haven’t thought about this enough. Has the internet been a net good or net bad for me? So Much Time and So Little to Do
4. So chess is cool now? I’ve been waiting for this my whole life… (come find me on chess.com as sendaiben) https://www.protocol.com/chess-streaming-twitch-hikaru-botez
5. Peter Lynch is the GOAT. I enjoyed his book, too.
6. I haven’t noticed any shortages in Japan apart from the masks and toilet paper last year: https://awealthofcommonsense.com/…/shortages…/
7. This is very cool, but also kind of worrying. Biggie Smalls rapping a Lovecraft poem courtesy of AI voice synthesis: https://youtu.be/tp2IuT-cgHc
8. I am pretty bullish the next few decades: medical, energy, technological, social development. The future seems bright: https://academictimes.com/first-vaccine-to-fully…/
9. Long (old) article about koseki in Japan. Kind of infuriating reading, because of the subject matter not the author! https://catforehead.com/…/the-value-of-a-family-from-1996/
10. These tsunami sea walls are all along the coast here. Very much not a fan. https://japantoday.com/…/the-towering-sea-wall-legacy…?
11. We did this without knowing what it was called -was talking to a friend the other day about my cool concept and he just said ‘Oh, that is coast FIRE’. Was a bit deflated that I hadn’t invented some new thing https://fourpillarfreedom.com/what-is-coast-fire/
12. Interesting. Buy more Japanese stocks?https://www.japantimes.co.jp/…/japans-problem-much…/
13. Nikkei 30,000. Why it matters. https://www.petertasker.asia/…/nikkei-30000-why-it…/
14. I would love see lower stock prices: https://awealthofcommonsense.com/…/could-inflation…/

Not bad this week! Anything good in there? Probably #1 for me, or #11 for putting a name to a concept I’ve been thinking about a lot!