An elementary school on my walk to work. I liked the colours in this picture.

I am still taking cold showers once a day (haven’t missed a day since August) and walking/cycling to work every day, but due to a series of unfortunate events have already failed to keep up with my eating, gym, and jiu-jitsu resolutions. Sigh.

Still, I will do better tomorrow. How are you doing this January?

Kyushu (and online) Talks

A final reminder that I will be in Kyushu this weekend! I’ve been invited to give talks by the JALT chapters in Fukuoka (Jan 22nd) and Kitakyushu (Jan 21st) -for Kitakyushu due to limited capacity at the venue please sign up via this form.

I’ll be doing a new workshop: quick list of tips followed by Q&A. Should be fun 🙂

Would be great to see some of you there.

If you can’t make it I will be doing a similar talk for the ACCJ Chubu chapter online on Jan 17th. Details here.

YouTube

Thank you for your support of the RetireJapan YouTube channel. Incredibly, we are nearing the 1,000 subscriber mark (although still far from the 4,000 view hours in 365 days mark).

We published a new video on the Your First Ten Million Yen course this week.

The Forum

The Forum is doing well (25,322 posts so far). Here are the latest active threads:

This week’s books

I am enjoying the second book in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series, Children of Ruin. Some of the most readable science fiction I have come across in a while.

Also really vibing with Grant Sabatier’s Financial Freedom. He and I seem to have very similar opinions and outlooks on life.

This week’s links

  1. This. So much this: You can’t pay people to have kids
  2. Love looking at this every year: Updating My Favorite Performance Chart For 2022
  3. This is an amazing resource: “Akiya” abandoned, cheap/free* houses in Japan / annotations, resources, riffs, musings, stories
  4. Vitaliy’s 2022 article almanac
  5. Craig Mod is doing another pop up newsletter. The last one was AMAZING: TOKIO TŌKYŌ TOKYO 2
  6. Seems like an easy fix: Japan reality check #1: how does Japan Inc. distribute its spoils?
  7. RIP: The end of the high school essay
  8. Simulating a US military intervention to stop a Chinese invasion of Taiwan (Twitter).
  9. That is one hell of a headline: Uniqlo: Fashion giant to raise pay in Japan by up to 40%
  10. I really enjoy both of these guys (YouTube): MrBeast: Future of YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram
  11. I discovered this channel recently, and I’m enjoying it quite a bit (YouTube): Criminal Lawyer Reacts to and Breaks Down the SBF FTX Situation
  12. Vitaliy is not a fan: How Greed and Leverage Destroyed the Crypto Tulip Market
  13. These people should be in prison and the company should be seized: Exxon made ‘breathtakingly’ accurate climate predictions in 1970s and 80s
  14. Some better news. Hopefully this will accelerate further: World enters ‘new age’ of clean energy manufacturing: IEA
  15. That would be most welcome: these Vanguard expected returns remind us it’s darkest before the dawn

What do you think? Anything interesting in there?

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6 Responses

    1. I had no idea, but there is a footnote at the end of the article:

      “*EW on the chart is for equal-weight and is simply an equally weighted average return of these asset classes.”