The Monday Read

Sakura Edition

Once again I have totally missed out on sakura season by being too busy to breathe. Hoping that will be different next year!

Japan Times article

I was asked to contribute to a Japan Times article, and it came out yesterday. I think they did a great job!

Money matters: Fight inflation with better finance fundamentals

The Forum

The Forum is doing well (20,391 posts so far). Here are the latest active threads:

This week’s books

Still working my way through the Reacher series. Read Never Go Back this week. It’s one of the best in the series, which is why Tom Cruise chose to base his second Reacher movie on it. Sadly the film was much worse than the book is.

Six books left, then I can get started on my backlog of non-Reacher books 😉

This week’s item

My go to painkiller here in Japan: plain EVE. This is basically ibuprofen. Standard dose is two pills (150mg) but my understanding is that Japanese drug doses are based on a 45kg woman, so on the advice of my godfather (a doctor in Germany) I usually take 2-3x that at a time.

  1. Good stuff from Ben Carlson: Financial Advice for Young People
  2. Also this (I recommend frugality when you are young/poor and extravagance when you are older/richer): Frugality vs Extravagance
  3. Or multiple plans, more likely: You Don’t Need a Promise, You Need a Plan
  4. Damn, that’s brutal: Generation C
  5. This was an interesting video: Asking 80 Year Old Millionaires If It Was Worth It
  6. I do the phone thing! (but still don’t get enough sleep): Here’s Your Secret To Success: Go The F*ck To Sleep
  7. This really pessimistic video was incredibly interesting. Lots to think about: Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio
  8. I think everyone is stressed right now: Fear
  9. No idea how accurate this is. My main takeaway is that it seems sensible to continue being cautious for now: The risk of Long COVID explained
  10. Can definitely see myself not spending any of our investments: Why It’s So Hard to Spend Money in Retirement
  11. Ooops. Staying Put
  12. This is my approach to personal finance and planning for the future: Save Like A Pessimist, Invest Like An Optimist
  13. There is a lot of money sloshing around the world now: The Real Yacht Rock: Inside the Lavish, Top-Secret World of Private Gigs
  14. This sounds like a terrible idea: When your bot is better than you

What do you think? Anything interesting in there?

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3 Responses

  1. #11 – Staying Put.
    Unfortunately, the change in the employment rules that resulted in more contract-based, limited term work flies in the face of this: Change jobs and possibly also move every five years or less.
    Less constancy in one’s life, weaker social networks and/or longer term friendships. Families that are less rooted. Less trust of (and confidence in) the other on both sides, employer and employee. And as pointed out in the article, short term is transactional and is like investing by buying and selling regularly, staying put compares to long term compounding.

    1. Eeek. That wasn’t on my radar 😉

      The link mentions seeing adverse effects as early as ‘after a week of continuous use’ though, and fortunately painkillers are still once or twice a month for me.