It's cute you think share price controls executive salary, instead of, you know, contracts. I mean come on, we have companies rewriting contracts to get rid of CEOs by paying them a pile of money. There's a contract for X salary, Y bonuses, Z stock options, plus a golden parachute in case of termination.
Yes but that's my point. The entire stock market is overvalued. People believe that this overvaluation means that money is created in the stock market--that the stocks are worth something, and that if you buy a stock and it goes up in price and you sell it then the stock market just created the $200 you made. In reality, you got that $200 by making other people $200 poorer.
The only time money actually moves into the market is when people put money there, through dividends or buying into the market or whatever. The amount of money in the market is untrackable, as it's basically however much people are willing to spend--it's theoretically the total BUY orders on the books everywhere, but there's more money in the market waiting for something to reach a price where it makes sense to place a BUY order. Ye cannae measure it all.
Point is that the whole market is worth less than the valuation of the market. It's overvalued. Of course stock prices are overvalued or undervalued relative to where you think they're going on a timescale; but I'm talking about the immediate timescale--there is not actually more money in the market, just the prices in the market increase. People buy some fraction of the total market cap, and the spot price goes up; what about the rest of the market cap that wasn't traded? The difference between volume and total shares, you know, all those shares for which there is no demand at this price point? People value the market by multiplying the stock spot price by all issued shares--and that's obviously wrong. You can only get out exactly what was put in.
This is something I'd actually like to see. What happens if you buy up 50.1% of the common stock of a company, and it then goes bankrupt?
The moment the company files bankruptcy, common stock is cancelled. So the company you own is ejected from your ownership with no pay-out. Think about that.
It's suddenly an interesting question. Though, now you're just arguing semantics and fantasies; the reality is your "ownership" of a portion of a company means precisely dick, you have no rights to any of their money unless they say so (it's called "embezzlement"...), etc. Money being spent is not "your money"; you own stock, you don't have more than the valuation of stock, and the company doesn't owe you anything for that.
There should be proper operational management and risk management at every level. If you're elevating everything to the same people in full, uh. Yeah, that's broken.
Patching is an operations issue. If the patch process ever changes--if you find a patch that breaks your stuff and you need to take an unprecidented action--that's some kind of project. Decisions are made. Usually it's a very minor project that ends in a decision to exercise a known process (upgrade, contact vendor for fix, etc.), and doesn't require spinning up a whole waterfall methodology and going through all these motions of scheduling and such. Part of project management is knowing when to be more or less formal.
Any remotely well organised IT department will have processes for handling both emergency deployments and retrospective approval. I'm not going to be cheerleader for the concept of CAB but if you're going to make a case against it then at least make a reasonable one because hiding behind obvious nonsense like this will just make you look stupid and change averse to your employer.
At least someone gets it.
OP should probably pick up a book on project management and familiarize himself with change control management concepts, and the need thereof. In large IT shops, change controlling patches is important: I've been in shops where critical patches were held back because the 2 week testing round showed that they caused critical services to fail, which was unacceptable. We worked out workarounds, fixed our own software, or got the vendor on the phone as necessary and suspended those patches for those systems in particular until we could get things straight; but if we'd just fired patches off as they came, we would have been in a WORLD of hurt!
My current employer has no change control management for anything, and every time something breaks there's just arguments and shouting. I have to weed through a whole lot of shit, de-tangle lossy memories, and eventually form a picture of when this was first noticed, how frequently it occurs, what changed around that time, what else could be broke in the same way but is not, etc. Kepner-Tregoe problem analysis. If we had a CCM, I could just pull up the changes at that time and avoid a whole lot of guesses and conjecture, solve problems quicker, and have fewer instances of problems never getting solved because everyone would rather sit around and cry like babies while throwing wooden blocks at each others' heads.
And they wonder why I'm suddenly studying for project management...
Liquidity is the ability to turn an asset into something else, I guess. It has to do with spending. If you can spend it, it's liquid. Savings accounts are less liquid than checking accounts because you can only make 3 withdrawals per month from savings (Federal regulations). Concrete is not very liquid because you can't trade directly in concrete; you have to liquidate it to cash first.
I got something jumbled up above though, yeah. Solvency is access to funds equivalent or greater than funds required. Ugh.
Point still stands: The stock market has as much money available as it has coming in and out. It does not, however, have the capability to liquidate its assets. It is insolvent: those $72 billion worth of AAPL are not worth $72 billion, because if you liquidated the whole fucking market cap you would find FAR more than $72 billion, but enough of it would be spent buying off other stocks that there wouldn't be $72 billion left for AAPL and the price would come down.
Or something. Look, the mechanism is too complex in the real world to explain in any sensible terms.
It's like the young universe: There's more matter (stock value) than antimatter (cash value), and if we ever tried to annihilate it all we'd wind up running out of antimatter and have just piles of matter sitting around that can't find any antimatter to react with. The stock market is valued at more than the actual cash value of the stock market in practice; there is not more money in the market simply because we turned up some of the numbers.
So running a store is also a zero sum game. Because for some reason we're also including money "from the outside" in the sum.
Running a store is different. When you run a store, you are buying product and selling it for a profit margin. Tangible goods and services. You staff people for a certain wage and provide services for a higher hourly surcharge.
The stock market is like running a store where you sell iPads, but nobody opens and uses the iPads. Instead, you sell iPads to other stores, and then use that money to buy iPads back when you think they're undervalued and can be sold again later next week for more money. Someone in this might get their hands on more money by other operations (i.e. actually selling iPads to customers) and buy more iPads from the supplier (new stock) or from other stores.
Trade provides a comparative advantage, where one party can provide one economic service cheaper than another party, and vice versa. For example: consumers can't build iPads cheaply, and manufacturers can't open direct retail outlets cheaply. Thus manufacturers use ecommerce and shipping, as well as third-party retailers. Because of the comparative advantage each participant has over others, the total wealth of this system is greater than the wealth of only individuals accomplishing the same: less labor and capital and energy and other resources are expended to get the same result.
The common argument for the stock market NOT being a zero-sum game is that share prices can be bid up without introducing new money. Unfortunately, this ignores the fact that you allegedly have $5000 of stuff to sell, but everyone together has only $500, and thus if you actually tired to sell all of that stuff you would eventually end up selling it all off for $500, in the process some of it likely becoming worthless.
This argument, thus, ignores the whole of the market. It's the same argument as "I am rich because I buy lots and lots of shit I can't afford on my credit card": you're making the payments, but you're perpetually in debt you can't pay off and thus you are poor. That you just got another car loan for a $60,000 Jaguar is immaterial, since you still only have $1000/mo and you have a 40 year mortgage letting you pay $150/mo on that jag by some fantastic manipulation of the banks.
That's just a little under a 7% return on my investment. Not exciting, but also quite low risk.
You own $3300 of stock and get $225 per year dividend, so in about 14 years 9 months you'll break even in the event of a sudden bankruptcy, assuming their dividend doesn't decrease for any reason (i.e. more dividends to preferred, more stock issued from executive stock options exercise or otherwise, competitors, a change in government policy in the US to not buy 500,000 tons of sugar every year as a way to keep the prices artificially high...). We haven't even considered income tax on dividends, but some investment plans in the US have no taxes.
Your risks are that the stock could go up, and you'd make more money; that the stock could go down, and you'd lose money (your break-even point approaches, but cannot exceed, 15 years); that you could save more than $225 per year by paying off debt instead of holding a stock; that profitability drops for any reason; that company policy leans toward more bonuses or more stock options; etc.
The dividends come from profitability; the stock price is a spot price on the exchange, which is based on public sentiment. You could hold a worthless company taking heavy losses and the stock price is soaring. I did that for a while, made a lot from securities like IVAN and schizophrenic symbols like GMCR. But don't tell me you've found a magical risk-free investment.
I got the advice years back that dividend stocks are more stable from The Motley Fool. It has been proven true. But that doesn't mean they're no-risk investments; they're lower-risk investments with more steady return. If Domino Sugar starts flooding the Canadian market with cheap sugar, your little nest egg will suddenly shrink, and you might take a loss or just break even.
Liquidity is not an all or none thing. Stocks, over a long time, have proven to be very liquid. And the core of their valuation - the ability of a company to create value - is more stable than most other asset classes.
That's not money coming from somewhere; it's the ability to access money. The correct term for this is "solvency", and if you yank out the full actual dollars on hand then the bank (or stock market) becomes "insolvent". It's when you have less money being demanded than is actually there, even if there's much more money on paper than in reality.
There's plenty of other ways money effectively enters the market. Companies pay dividends to investors. They buy back shares. Public companies are bought or liquidated. The reason stocks are worth money is because companies create value; they did that, and were worth money, before there were stock markets. Owning part of a company isn't just trading baseball cards for companies you like, it's owning a productive asset - and that's why companies are largely evaluated by their price/earnings.
Nobody who has any understanding of economics thinks it's a zero sum game.
Except dividends are money from outside being put into the market, increasing the money in the market. Buybacks are money being put into the market from outside the market, to remove stocks from existence. In any of these cases, there is money flowing into the market.
Money flows from an outside source into the market. When an investor puts capital into the market to buy stocks, money comes into the market. When an investor sells those stocks, he has money that he can re-invest. If he decides to not re-invest some of the money, then that money leaves the securities market. If he decides to bring in more capital, he injects more money into the securities market.
The securities market has exactly as much money as has been injected into it minus exactly as much money as has been removed from it; you cannot put $100 in to buy 100 shares of a stock, hit $2/share, sell that for $200, and actually get $200 unless another $100 is brought to the table from outside the stock market.
This is called a zero-sum game. Every stock that's brought in is put there from the outside. Every dollar that's brought in is put there from the outside. The amount of money in the market minus the amount of money that has come from outside the market is zero, and when we all go home we have exactly the same number of dollars that we started with--just divided up differently. That somebody can bring more monopoly money in at any point in the game doesn't change this: money comes from outside, not from within. The market doesn't create money and it doesn't destroy money; it transfers it.
1) A typical well-diversified index fund delivers returns over the long-term well over the interest charged on mortgages or car loans if you took out those loans when you have decent credit.
Buyandhold! If you buy-and-hold, you are nearly guaranteed not to loose--and if you do, it'll probably be less than a 3% loss over 20 years. Sure, you might gain 14% in 20 years (not the much touted 10% per year), but importantly you won't lose so much. Of course trying to time your investments to the market can make you 56% gains per year, or lose you 48%--and that's a lot more loss than a buy-and-hold strategy might expose you to, and a lot more likely to happen!
Yeah, the market is hard. The easy version of the market is slow.
(Yeah, credit cards do suck and you should pay those off ASAP after you get your max 401(k) match, if offered.)
My credit cards cost me less than my house. Consider $150/mo per payment, versus a one-time $80 payment and a year and some months with no interest. I do some monkey business with the cards to get that kind of thing going on (BAC has 14 month no-interest balance transfers all the time), and I frequently have exceedingly high credit card debt which costs me all of $200/year in fees and interest the worst of times. If I ever bought a $6000 motorcycle, I'd finance it with my credit cards in part, due to 6% motorcycle loans. For the most part, my cards stay high because I target other debt or stack up cash before paying them--it's a strategy that has saved me thousands of dollars.
My employer's 401(k) match is a lower immediate return than paying extra into my mortgage, which is nearly a 70% return. To make this more physical: If I put $225 in my 401(k), I get a match of $112.50. If I put $225 in my mortgage payment, I skip about $150 of interest at the moment. $150 > $112.50, even though they both end in 50.
You have not done full-scale investment. I can tell. I can tell because you obviously have not spent several 8-12 hours per day analyzing the indexes against each other (it's just division), analyzing technical metrics, analyzing news (yay Marketwatch), waking up at 4am to read the news and check the foreign markets, making trends predictions, drawing arcs and channels and other funny things on graphs, squinting hard when you see multiple indicators in conflict, trying to resolve the conflicts to work out a good guess at what the market will do, and then just gave up and cashed out on Friday so that you don't have to worry about 2 non-trading days and what might happen while you can't do anything about it, come back Monday to start again.
Have you ever seen someone who was completely sober, had gotten 2-3 hours of sleep per night for weeks, and talked reallyreallyfastliketheywereonmeth? That was me for a few weeks.
This is not a leisure job. You don't lay back, masturbate some while checking out Playboy Asia, idly click on a few things, buy, sell, mmhmm... It's not World of Warcraft. It is a vicious game of absolute timing, of completely predictable behavior that requires mountains of knowledge to actually predict, of a complete lack of those mountains of knowledge, of strife and fear and reflexes and reaction and bounds and calculations. It's chaos theory: the random element is what you don't know. Insider traders get to look at all the cards, high-level traders look at some of the cards and do card counting, and the fish are there just throwing down chips and hoping they can get a full house.
I don't care to work that hard. I got an honest job instead, and worked on minimizing my mandatory expenses and enhancing the stability of my financial positi
Yes that's the result of giving women rights. You don't think anyone really cared about that whole "Women's Suffrage" thing, do you? It went like this: heyyyyyy... maybe we can convince women they're equals.... yeah, and heyyyyyyyyy then they can get jobs! And then... they'll have MONEY! And then, when couples want to buy a house, settle down, have kids like, ya know? Then, we'll milk them for all they're worth! Yeahhh!/zephod
If women had just stopped at "right to vote" and not gone on to "right to be men and have careers as steel workers and go to college and all get jobs", we'd have been better off. Women already had jobs. Have you ever been a bachelor? Have you ever worked a 40 hour work week, then came home and had to do your own house work so you don't live in an unkempt shithole? THAT SHIT IS HARD. Women were cooking and cleaning and doing mildly complex manual labor (look, I don't know about you, but my biggest problem with cleaning house is WHERE THE HELL DO I PUT SHIT THAT ISN'T TRASH?!), and then we told them, oh, you should get actual jobs.
Are. You. SERIOUS?!
A married woman has a job. If you bang her the right way, she'll have three jobs. If I ever had kids, I'd do the housework and tell the woman to deal with the babies. Fuck that. I can handle dishes and vacuuming and ironing, she can get up at 2 in the morning to change diapers.
So yeah. If you want to buy a small house, you need two people working at least three jobs.
if you made smarter choices, like using a home equity line of credit instead of credit card financing to do your insulation work you'd save even more.
My credit card costs me $80.
I'm serious. I don't pay interest. And no, I'm not on any introductory rate. I simply don't pay interest; I have two credit cards, and I constantly get promos to pay 1%-4% for a balance transfer, so I run one card up like hell when I need a few grand and then pay it off with a balance transfer. $3000? $120. If I have some cash on hand, I just pay down the first card partly before doing the balance transfer. Then it's like... oh you transferred $2500 in March 2014? You have until November 2015 to pay it off. Yeah uh, it's going to be paid off in 2014 (but I stack cash in a separate bank account and pay it off all at once when it won't totally drain my liquid funds, in case I suddenly need CASH).
Trust me, there's nothing obvious that's going to save me money. I'm not aggressively leveraging debt; I'm just aggressively looking for ways to minimize the impact of debt when leveraging cash is either not possible or actively bad (i.e. would I rather have $0 or would I rather pay $80 to have $3000 still on hand, but be $3000 in debt for the moment? Uhh... I'll take a little debt).
It's not really much like poker, because it's not a zero sum game. Stock value has gone up fairly steadily over a century.
Oh my god are you KIDDING ME?! This again?!
Let's say you have 100 stock WORTH A DOLLAR. $100 = 100 x EAX. You go on the market and sell 100 stock, get $100 from the only other person in the market.
Now the market has $100 and 100 stock. Jake has $100, and Tim has 100 x EAX he bought.
Valuation of EAX goes to $2. Jake spends $50 and buys 25 x EAX. Jake now has $50 + 25 EAX, Tim has $50 + 75 EAX.
Tim tries to sell Jake more EAX. Jake has $50, Tim has 75 EAX. Tim sells Jake 50 EAX for $45, taking a loss. Tim: $95 + 25 EAX, Jake $5 + 75 EAX.
Now Tim tries to sell Jake 25 EAX.
Jake has $5.
How many EAX can you sell when there are $5 in the market?
The answer is simple: Jake's $5 start to become much more valuable than EAX, because dollars are scarce. Eventually the price comes down to 20 cents per EAX, Jake gives Tim $5, Jake has 100 EAX and Tim has $100.
We can change this dynamic by bringing more dollars into the game: Jake or Tim pony up more money in the bidding war, or Alex shows up wanting in on the action and brings us money. But here's my point: If you have $100 and 100 x EAX @ $10/share, you aren't going to sell 100 EAX and get $1000. The price of EAX is going to come down as there's less money in the market, thus less trading, thus the market crashes.
Yes, it's a zero sum game. Exactly as much CASH DOLLAR CURRENCY as you put in comes out. Exactly as much of each individual security as you put in come out. There's a lot more money on paper than there is actual, accessible money; and for you to get your money on paper, somebody has to give you their actual, real, physical dollars.
But eventually, you'll almost certainly want money in the stock market if you're ever going to retire.
Except when the big correction comes and you lose 90% of it, and 10 years later still have not recovered. I know quite a few people who have taken to working in old age because their 401(k) funds became worthless. That's a black swan event, but it happens. The market was simply overbought.
If I had $500,000 right now, in cash, I could simply retire. I'd make it until age 85, although I have luxury models that make me a pauper at 72 and frugal models that take me to 90-ish.
I know about inflation. You seem to not know about interest. I'm getting, currently, around a 70% return on my money--this will scale back as I pay down my loan balances, of course. But essentially, I pay $220 in principal and $150 in interest per month; every extra $220 I pay on my loan balance (roughly--that number gets bigger each payment or pre-payment) saves me $150 (roughly--that number gets smaller) in total.
My employer will match 50% up to 2% of my paycheck. So I get a 50% return, which is smaller. I put my money into HSA, which gives me a 33% return (which is still smaller) due to skipping taxes; but I spend the HSA on toothpaste, bandages, and dental work, expenses I'd have anyway, and I have 33% more money free to put into knocking down my loans. I can go for Traditional IRA, which will give me an even smaller return: it appears to be 33% (pre-tax), but when I withdraw I will pay taxes. Also I can get a 1% raise out of my employer? Fantastic.
If you are saving money, and qualify, you should be putting the money into a ROTH IRA if you're just saving it post-tax anyway. You can withdraw up to the amount you contributed at any time with no penalty and you pay no tax on the interest and the money is tax free when it is taken out.
If you have a ROTH IRA and you place post-tax money into it, you pay full tax. Say you pay 30% tax overall, you take $5000 and pay $1500 in taxes, store $3500. You can pull that $3500 when you retire, with no tax penalty.
If you have a traditional IRA and qualify for the tax rebate (I almost don't),it's different. Instead of paying 30% tax, you stick $5000 in. When you withdraw, it's income. If you withdraw, say, $15,000 per year, you only pay 15% tax. So from that $5000, you pay $750 and keep $4250, which is $750 more than the $3500.
But wait, there's more! Taxes are bracketed. Income below some $8925 is 10% taxed. Up to $36250, it's 15% taxed. So for your $15k, you'd actually pay $892.50 plus 15% of $6075 ($911.25), meaning you pay roughly 12.025% taxes if you withdraw $15k/year in retirement.
It floats around, but the point is that you can expect roughly 15% total immediate growth from your pre-tax contributions. Post-tax contributions are for people who expect to spend more in retirement than their income while working, or who expect to play the market hard and win. Neither applies to most people.
And honestly, what would you do if you spent all this money and found that, in the end, you're 30 years old with $500/mo expenses and $3200/mo post-tax income, with a full $3500/year going into HSA on top of that? Time to have kids? I mean you can certainly afford it (not to mention getting married would give you a huge tax payout with that $11500 standard deduction and 15% tax rate). Honestly I could have done this 5 years sooner, I'm just slow and it took me a while to figure out how to handle finances.
You cannot assume that.You don't know how long this vulnerability has been exploited, and it is reasonable to expect that some high-profile targets that use OpenBSD in their stack may have been compromised.
Netcraft reports BSDs as 1% or less of the servers out there, OpenBSD being a fraction of that, FreeBSD being another, NetBSD and other such probably being a smaller fraction than either. I would expect OpenBSD to be the bigger fraction--who uses BSD on a server?--but FreeBSD appears to be more popular as a desktop OS, and that may carry weight. Of course we're talking about the tastes of the 1% so who really knows?
Thing is we know a lot of high-profile targets are straight Linux or they have dedicated appliances that were vulnerable (FortiNet products, SonicWall products, Cisco and Juniper gear even). When making conjectures, I take the larger probabilities--look up Operational Risk Management and related analytical techniques--and draw likely conclusions. "OpenBSD isn't vulnerable" would not have convinced me (or likely anyone) that the situation is any different from a practical standpoint, except that a few machines somewhere would theoretically escape vulnerability, and even then you may be able to modify the attack (i.e. take less than 4k?).
The problem is, on top of the fact that no boundary check was performed on a copy operation, this passed a code review and was incorporated in the most widely used SSL library, that reads and process sensitive information.
Yes I've said this a few times about "better coding practices". Cleaner code would have helped, heartbleed was very self-contained, the process of review and clean code *may* have increased the likelihood of Heartbleed not making it past a review, but it did make it past several manual reviews as-is, etc etc. Part of my larger argument has been that Heartbleed isn't exposed by technical runtime countermeasures until exploited, and apparently nobody thought to look for this particular kind of bug, so it was never tested.
That actually sounds interesting. What happened to it?
Well besides that I am not the world's best programmer--I do have a certain strength in the area, but it's vastly outweighed by my weakness in larger architecture and I always had this perfectionist thing going on with no real code discipline so I was always frustrated with my own bad code--I could never get the allocator tested. You do understand why it might be hard to test a memory allocator as it's incrementally written, right?
The basic plan was to implement parts of malloc(), and fall back to glibc's malloc() for cases I don't handle. I used a staged design, with arbitrary object sizes based on some research papers I read--16 byte objects are common, so I have a "picoheap" or whatever I called it that's just a collection of mmap() areas for holding 16 byte objects. For larger (128 byte-256 byte?) objects I had separate mmap() areas which used canaries to detect write overflow (too much overhead to do that with 16 byte allocations, just made them 4k pages with a bitmap). And so on. I tried to implement one class of allocation, and fallback to malloc() otherwise... and the interposing wasn't something I knew how to do.
Eg. acessing odd memory positions is a stall in most modern CISC cpu's (and some ancient ones too), so your code will actually run slower. In some cpu's, the stall is everything that is not 16-byte aligned.
Yes of course, it's all very complex. My point is, however, that the secondary market is a big money pump to move money from idiots to smart JP Morgan investors. I know because I've moved money from idiots to me, on purpose. It's not exactly easy, either; rocket science is what I would call easy.
The stock market is an exercise in chaos theory. Stock market movements are 100% predictable; however, you have less than 100% information, so you cannot predict them 100% reliably. The stock market is rather transparent, and a combination of technical analysis (stock trends), knowledge of current events (business acumen, awareness), and fundamentals (awareness of fundamentals applied to any information that leads you to think focus will be moved onto those fundamentals) allows you to make fairly reliable judgments about what is good to buy and what isn't. You can take this all the way out to dividing market sectors by the market as a whole to find out what is growing faster than the market, and dividing stocks by the sector as a whole to find out what are the hot stocks, and then doing further analysis, and picking winners nearly every time.
The average person trades on news, on "this stock is doing well", on "this is a good company". The amount of analysis an investment banker makes is huge. That means an investment banker has significantly more wins, has an understanding of how much they can lose, and can assure continuous average growth over a period. Day traders play entirely on technicals (day trading is round-tripping repeatedly in one day on minor fluctuations; it's the same as long-term trading, but is less influenced by news and major current events, so requires much less information to pull off successfully--but requires more money and/or margin leverage).
Think about it this way: You're playing poker, 5 card stud, with JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and three of your buddies. JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs can see 3 of the 5 cards of everyone's hand and the first card on the top of the deck. You and your buddies can see one card of everyone's hand, and can't peek at the deck. None of you knows how many cards each person is going to hold, or which. Who is going to leave the table rich, and who is going to leave dirt poor?
I actually did some funky math and found out that it works out better for the banks too, to the tune of twice as much profitability with 14% interest rates. It turned out that they would get half as much money from interest if people started aggressively paying down loans for a 10 year mortgage cycle; but it would be half as much money in a third as much time, so about 50% more profitable. Meanwhile, the individual paying their way out of debt has to make about 30% larger payments to get the mortgage paid off in 10 years (with 2.25% interest rates, it's 150% larger--you pay $2700 instead of $1150 to get a 10 year payoff on a $425k house with a $310k price tag, versus a $450k house with a $110k price tag), but shave about half the cost off the house.
That means house valuation is complex. House valuation isn't just sticker price, but total payment on the house. Problem is that itself depends on what people are willing to pay per month and how long of a loan they're willing to pay--30 year loans because nobody wants 45 year loans and nobody will pay up for 10 year loans. But at higher interest rates, you start talking that $425k house gets stickered at $110k and in 30 years you pay $425k from $1150/mo... but $1500/mo payments get you out of it in 10 years, $200k less total payment, so now it's apparently a $225k house--at least, it's a $225k house on a 10 year payment plan, because people are willing to pay that much per month to get out of debt in 10 years, but they won't pay that much per month for 30 years.
Complicated market forces at play.
But this is of course from years of research and some unimpeachable scientific subject called "Mathematics". It's hard to explain in simple terms.
401(k) is a place to play the market, which is a lot like playing poker: it's not the cards and the luck that make you win or lose, but rather the other players shaking your inexperienced ass down so you make bad decisions and lose all your cash.
I'm already financially ahead, I no longer have any 401(k) investments, and I've not yet had a job reaching $70k salary. I've got a mortgage--it's going to be paid off 3 years after its inception--and my mandatory expenses are less than 1/3 of my salary. I killed off a car loan and now have additional money to put toward my debt. I saw those $500/mo utility bills and leveraged credit card debt to do some insulation work; when I pay the cards off, I'll take my $350/mo savings on heating and AC (pays for the insulation in a year!) and get some medium-low to medium range windows (mine actually got wet on the inside last night, condensation).
So you see, by the time I'm 30, I'll have a house paid off, I'll have $500/mo of expenses, no credit card debt, and just piles and piles of thousands of dollars being shoveled into savings. I spend a lot in discretionary spending, for example I'm expanding my knowledge base out of IT and into project management--that will open my career path, but I'm not banking on big salary jumps. When I get them (I'm not stupid--if I jump to a PM career, I'll get at least $80k), I'll look at my finances again and decide what to do. Notably I won't be able to get a tax deduction for IRA contributions AT ALL after that; I do get a tax deduction for HSA contributions, which I maximize because I USE THAT TO PAY FOR HEALTHCARE. That's not even a savings thing; that's a projected expense, which I just got a 30% discount from.
So others my age have $50k or so in their 401(k) by now. So what? I can stick that much in savings in under 2 years. Your move.
They're not saving. They're playing a game they fundamentally don't understand. A game of strategy, group psychology, numeric analysis, graphical analysis (shortcuts through visualization--"I can just see it"), tracking the news (HEY MARKETWATCH!), etc.
When I was last into it, I had a coworker arguing with me about how the S&P grows 10%, so he just buys SPY with all of his money. I told him that's a bad idea and S&P was about to drop. It did. He delayed his retirement by 5 years, and came out with a little less money than he started with.
The S&P growing 10% was never true. Averaged over 80 years of volatile movement, it's been shown to grow by 10% per year on average. The market is a hellish place where you don't belong if you are not ready to face dragons and Forbes telling you false things about the market and claiming they are "debunking myths".
Slashdot Mirror
So of course you can get out more than you put in.
No, you cannot get out more than WHAT EVERY FUCKING PERSON PUT IN.
You put in $10. Sam puts in $10. You get out $20, Sam gets $0. Market becomes illiquid because there are $0, all stocks become worthless.
It's cute you think share price controls executive salary, instead of, you know, contracts. I mean come on, we have companies rewriting contracts to get rid of CEOs by paying them a pile of money. There's a contract for X salary, Y bonuses, Z stock options, plus a golden parachute in case of termination.
Yes but that's my point. The entire stock market is overvalued. People believe that this overvaluation means that money is created in the stock market--that the stocks are worth something, and that if you buy a stock and it goes up in price and you sell it then the stock market just created the $200 you made. In reality, you got that $200 by making other people $200 poorer.
The only time money actually moves into the market is when people put money there, through dividends or buying into the market or whatever. The amount of money in the market is untrackable, as it's basically however much people are willing to spend--it's theoretically the total BUY orders on the books everywhere, but there's more money in the market waiting for something to reach a price where it makes sense to place a BUY order. Ye cannae measure it all.
Point is that the whole market is worth less than the valuation of the market. It's overvalued. Of course stock prices are overvalued or undervalued relative to where you think they're going on a timescale; but I'm talking about the immediate timescale--there is not actually more money in the market, just the prices in the market increase. People buy some fraction of the total market cap, and the spot price goes up; what about the rest of the market cap that wasn't traded? The difference between volume and total shares, you know, all those shares for which there is no demand at this price point? People value the market by multiplying the stock spot price by all issued shares--and that's obviously wrong. You can only get out exactly what was put in.
This is something I'd actually like to see. What happens if you buy up 50.1% of the common stock of a company, and it then goes bankrupt?
The moment the company files bankruptcy, common stock is cancelled. So the company you own is ejected from your ownership with no pay-out. Think about that.
It's suddenly an interesting question. Though, now you're just arguing semantics and fantasies; the reality is your "ownership" of a portion of a company means precisely dick, you have no rights to any of their money unless they say so (it's called "embezzlement"...), etc. Money being spent is not "your money"; you own stock, you don't have more than the valuation of stock, and the company doesn't owe you anything for that.
There should be proper operational management and risk management at every level. If you're elevating everything to the same people in full, uh. Yeah, that's broken.
Patching is an operations issue. If the patch process ever changes--if you find a patch that breaks your stuff and you need to take an unprecidented action--that's some kind of project. Decisions are made. Usually it's a very minor project that ends in a decision to exercise a known process (upgrade, contact vendor for fix, etc.), and doesn't require spinning up a whole waterfall methodology and going through all these motions of scheduling and such. Part of project management is knowing when to be more or less formal.
Any remotely well organised IT department will have processes for handling both emergency deployments and retrospective approval. I'm not going to be cheerleader for the concept of CAB but if you're going to make a case against it then at least make a reasonable one because hiding behind obvious nonsense like this will just make you look stupid and change averse to your employer.
At least someone gets it.
OP should probably pick up a book on project management and familiarize himself with change control management concepts, and the need thereof. In large IT shops, change controlling patches is important: I've been in shops where critical patches were held back because the 2 week testing round showed that they caused critical services to fail, which was unacceptable. We worked out workarounds, fixed our own software, or got the vendor on the phone as necessary and suspended those patches for those systems in particular until we could get things straight; but if we'd just fired patches off as they came, we would have been in a WORLD of hurt!
My current employer has no change control management for anything, and every time something breaks there's just arguments and shouting. I have to weed through a whole lot of shit, de-tangle lossy memories, and eventually form a picture of when this was first noticed, how frequently it occurs, what changed around that time, what else could be broke in the same way but is not, etc. Kepner-Tregoe problem analysis. If we had a CCM, I could just pull up the changes at that time and avoid a whole lot of guesses and conjecture, solve problems quicker, and have fewer instances of problems never getting solved because everyone would rather sit around and cry like babies while throwing wooden blocks at each others' heads.
And they wonder why I'm suddenly studying for project management...
Liquidity is the ability to turn an asset into something else, I guess. It has to do with spending. If you can spend it, it's liquid. Savings accounts are less liquid than checking accounts because you can only make 3 withdrawals per month from savings (Federal regulations). Concrete is not very liquid because you can't trade directly in concrete; you have to liquidate it to cash first.
I got something jumbled up above though, yeah. Solvency is access to funds equivalent or greater than funds required. Ugh.
Point still stands: The stock market has as much money available as it has coming in and out. It does not, however, have the capability to liquidate its assets. It is insolvent: those $72 billion worth of AAPL are not worth $72 billion, because if you liquidated the whole fucking market cap you would find FAR more than $72 billion, but enough of it would be spent buying off other stocks that there wouldn't be $72 billion left for AAPL and the price would come down.
Or something. Look, the mechanism is too complex in the real world to explain in any sensible terms.
It's like the young universe: There's more matter (stock value) than antimatter (cash value), and if we ever tried to annihilate it all we'd wind up running out of antimatter and have just piles of matter sitting around that can't find any antimatter to react with. The stock market is valued at more than the actual cash value of the stock market in practice; there is not more money in the market simply because we turned up some of the numbers.
So running a store is also a zero sum game. Because for some reason we're also including money "from the outside" in the sum.
Running a store is different. When you run a store, you are buying product and selling it for a profit margin. Tangible goods and services. You staff people for a certain wage and provide services for a higher hourly surcharge.
The stock market is like running a store where you sell iPads, but nobody opens and uses the iPads. Instead, you sell iPads to other stores, and then use that money to buy iPads back when you think they're undervalued and can be sold again later next week for more money. Someone in this might get their hands on more money by other operations (i.e. actually selling iPads to customers) and buy more iPads from the supplier (new stock) or from other stores.
Trade provides a comparative advantage, where one party can provide one economic service cheaper than another party, and vice versa. For example: consumers can't build iPads cheaply, and manufacturers can't open direct retail outlets cheaply. Thus manufacturers use ecommerce and shipping, as well as third-party retailers. Because of the comparative advantage each participant has over others, the total wealth of this system is greater than the wealth of only individuals accomplishing the same: less labor and capital and energy and other resources are expended to get the same result.
The common argument for the stock market NOT being a zero-sum game is that share prices can be bid up without introducing new money. Unfortunately, this ignores the fact that you allegedly have $5000 of stuff to sell, but everyone together has only $500, and thus if you actually tired to sell all of that stuff you would eventually end up selling it all off for $500, in the process some of it likely becoming worthless.
This argument, thus, ignores the whole of the market. It's the same argument as "I am rich because I buy lots and lots of shit I can't afford on my credit card": you're making the payments, but you're perpetually in debt you can't pay off and thus you are poor. That you just got another car loan for a $60,000 Jaguar is immaterial, since you still only have $1000/mo and you have a 40 year mortgage letting you pay $150/mo on that jag by some fantastic manipulation of the banks.
That's just a little under a 7% return on my investment. Not exciting, but also quite low risk.
You own $3300 of stock and get $225 per year dividend, so in about 14 years 9 months you'll break even in the event of a sudden bankruptcy, assuming their dividend doesn't decrease for any reason (i.e. more dividends to preferred, more stock issued from executive stock options exercise or otherwise, competitors, a change in government policy in the US to not buy 500,000 tons of sugar every year as a way to keep the prices artificially high...). We haven't even considered income tax on dividends, but some investment plans in the US have no taxes.
Your risks are that the stock could go up, and you'd make more money; that the stock could go down, and you'd lose money (your break-even point approaches, but cannot exceed, 15 years); that you could save more than $225 per year by paying off debt instead of holding a stock; that profitability drops for any reason; that company policy leans toward more bonuses or more stock options; etc.
The dividends come from profitability; the stock price is a spot price on the exchange, which is based on public sentiment. You could hold a worthless company taking heavy losses and the stock price is soaring. I did that for a while, made a lot from securities like IVAN and schizophrenic symbols like GMCR. But don't tell me you've found a magical risk-free investment.
I got the advice years back that dividend stocks are more stable from The Motley Fool. It has been proven true. But that doesn't mean they're no-risk investments; they're lower-risk investments with more steady return. If Domino Sugar starts flooding the Canadian market with cheap sugar, your little nest egg will suddenly shrink, and you might take a loss or just break even.
Liquidity is not an all or none thing. Stocks, over a long time, have proven to be very liquid. And the core of their valuation - the ability of a company to create value - is more stable than most other asset classes.
That's not money coming from somewhere; it's the ability to access money. The correct term for this is "solvency", and if you yank out the full actual dollars on hand then the bank (or stock market) becomes "insolvent". It's when you have less money being demanded than is actually there, even if there's much more money on paper than in reality.
There's plenty of other ways money effectively enters the market. Companies pay dividends to investors. They buy back shares. Public companies are bought or liquidated. The reason stocks are worth money is because companies create value; they did that, and were worth money, before there were stock markets. Owning part of a company isn't just trading baseball cards for companies you like, it's owning a productive asset - and that's why companies are largely evaluated by their price/earnings.
Nobody who has any understanding of economics thinks it's a zero sum game.
Except dividends are money from outside being put into the market, increasing the money in the market. Buybacks are money being put into the market from outside the market, to remove stocks from existence. In any of these cases, there is money flowing into the market.
Money flows from an outside source into the market. When an investor puts capital into the market to buy stocks, money comes into the market. When an investor sells those stocks, he has money that he can re-invest. If he decides to not re-invest some of the money, then that money leaves the securities market. If he decides to bring in more capital, he injects more money into the securities market.
The securities market has exactly as much money as has been injected into it minus exactly as much money as has been removed from it; you cannot put $100 in to buy 100 shares of a stock, hit $2/share, sell that for $200, and actually get $200 unless another $100 is brought to the table from outside the stock market.
This is called a zero-sum game. Every stock that's brought in is put there from the outside. Every dollar that's brought in is put there from the outside. The amount of money in the market minus the amount of money that has come from outside the market is zero, and when we all go home we have exactly the same number of dollars that we started with--just divided up differently. That somebody can bring more monopoly money in at any point in the game doesn't change this: money comes from outside, not from within. The market doesn't create money and it doesn't destroy money; it transfers it.
1) A typical well-diversified index fund delivers returns over the long-term well over the interest charged on mortgages or car loans if you took out those loans when you have decent credit.
Buy and hold! If you buy-and-hold, you are nearly guaranteed not to loose--and if you do, it'll probably be less than a 3% loss over 20 years. Sure, you might gain 14% in 20 years (not the much touted 10% per year), but importantly you won't lose so much. Of course trying to time your investments to the market can make you 56% gains per year, or lose you 48%--and that's a lot more loss than a buy-and-hold strategy might expose you to, and a lot more likely to happen!
Yeah, the market is hard. The easy version of the market is slow.
(Yeah, credit cards do suck and you should pay those off ASAP after you get your max 401(k) match, if offered.)
My credit cards cost me less than my house. Consider $150/mo per payment, versus a one-time $80 payment and a year and some months with no interest. I do some monkey business with the cards to get that kind of thing going on (BAC has 14 month no-interest balance transfers all the time), and I frequently have exceedingly high credit card debt which costs me all of $200/year in fees and interest the worst of times. If I ever bought a $6000 motorcycle, I'd finance it with my credit cards in part, due to 6% motorcycle loans. For the most part, my cards stay high because I target other debt or stack up cash before paying them--it's a strategy that has saved me thousands of dollars.
My employer's 401(k) match is a lower immediate return than paying extra into my mortgage, which is nearly a 70% return. To make this more physical: If I put $225 in my 401(k), I get a match of $112.50. If I put $225 in my mortgage payment, I skip about $150 of interest at the moment. $150 > $112.50, even though they both end in 50.
You have not done full-scale investment. I can tell. I can tell because you obviously have not spent several 8-12 hours per day analyzing the indexes against each other (it's just division), analyzing technical metrics, analyzing news (yay Marketwatch), waking up at 4am to read the news and check the foreign markets, making trends predictions, drawing arcs and channels and other funny things on graphs, squinting hard when you see multiple indicators in conflict, trying to resolve the conflicts to work out a good guess at what the market will do, and then just gave up and cashed out on Friday so that you don't have to worry about 2 non-trading days and what might happen while you can't do anything about it, come back Monday to start again.
Have you ever seen someone who was completely sober, had gotten 2-3 hours of sleep per night for weeks, and talked reallyreallyfastliketheywereonmeth? That was me for a few weeks.
This is not a leisure job. You don't lay back, masturbate some while checking out Playboy Asia, idly click on a few things, buy, sell, mmhmm... It's not World of Warcraft. It is a vicious game of absolute timing, of completely predictable behavior that requires mountains of knowledge to actually predict, of a complete lack of those mountains of knowledge, of strife and fear and reflexes and reaction and bounds and calculations. It's chaos theory: the random element is what you don't know. Insider traders get to look at all the cards, high-level traders look at some of the cards and do card counting, and the fish are there just throwing down chips and hoping they can get a full house.
I don't care to work that hard. I got an honest job instead, and worked on minimizing my mandatory expenses and enhancing the stability of my financial positi
How would it lead to OpenSSL crashing over and over again?
Yes that's the result of giving women rights. You don't think anyone really cared about that whole "Women's Suffrage" thing, do you? It went like this: heyyyyyy... maybe we can convince women they're equals.... yeah, and heyyyyyyyyy then they can get jobs! And then... they'll have MONEY! And then, when couples want to buy a house, settle down, have kids like, ya know? Then, we'll milk them for all they're worth! Yeahhh! /zephod
If women had just stopped at "right to vote" and not gone on to "right to be men and have careers as steel workers and go to college and all get jobs", we'd have been better off. Women already had jobs. Have you ever been a bachelor? Have you ever worked a 40 hour work week, then came home and had to do your own house work so you don't live in an unkempt shithole? THAT SHIT IS HARD. Women were cooking and cleaning and doing mildly complex manual labor (look, I don't know about you, but my biggest problem with cleaning house is WHERE THE HELL DO I PUT SHIT THAT ISN'T TRASH?!), and then we told them, oh, you should get actual jobs.
Are. You. SERIOUS?!
A married woman has a job. If you bang her the right way, she'll have three jobs. If I ever had kids, I'd do the housework and tell the woman to deal with the babies. Fuck that. I can handle dishes and vacuuming and ironing, she can get up at 2 in the morning to change diapers.
So yeah. If you want to buy a small house, you need two people working at least three jobs.
Home prices are artificially high right now. Like when furbies were $400.
Why? It actually condenses a large amount of risk management and situational considerations. Maybe not well, but it's fundamentally sound analysis.
What's your take? Just run in guns ablazing with everything, firearms are the best at all things?
Who is that? Is he like David Helkowski?
The amount of tax deferred income you can contribute to an IRA is not dependent on your salary,
See IRS.
if you made smarter choices, like using a home equity line of credit instead of credit card financing to do your insulation work you'd save even more.
My credit card costs me $80.
I'm serious. I don't pay interest. And no, I'm not on any introductory rate. I simply don't pay interest; I have two credit cards, and I constantly get promos to pay 1%-4% for a balance transfer, so I run one card up like hell when I need a few grand and then pay it off with a balance transfer. $3000? $120. If I have some cash on hand, I just pay down the first card partly before doing the balance transfer. Then it's like... oh you transferred $2500 in March 2014? You have until November 2015 to pay it off. Yeah uh, it's going to be paid off in 2014 (but I stack cash in a separate bank account and pay it off all at once when it won't totally drain my liquid funds, in case I suddenly need CASH).
Trust me, there's nothing obvious that's going to save me money. I'm not aggressively leveraging debt; I'm just aggressively looking for ways to minimize the impact of debt when leveraging cash is either not possible or actively bad (i.e. would I rather have $0 or would I rather pay $80 to have $3000 still on hand, but be $3000 in debt for the moment? Uhh... I'll take a little debt).
It's not really much like poker, because it's not a zero sum game. Stock value has gone up fairly steadily over a century.
Oh my god are you KIDDING ME?! This again?!
Let's say you have 100 stock WORTH A DOLLAR. $100 = 100 x EAX. You go on the market and sell 100 stock, get $100 from the only other person in the market.
Now the market has $100 and 100 stock. Jake has $100, and Tim has 100 x EAX he bought.
Valuation of EAX goes to $2. Jake spends $50 and buys 25 x EAX. Jake now has $50 + 25 EAX, Tim has $50 + 75 EAX.
Tim tries to sell Jake more EAX. Jake has $50, Tim has 75 EAX. Tim sells Jake 50 EAX for $45, taking a loss. Tim: $95 + 25 EAX, Jake $5 + 75 EAX.
Now Tim tries to sell Jake 25 EAX.
Jake has $5.
How many EAX can you sell when there are $5 in the market?
The answer is simple: Jake's $5 start to become much more valuable than EAX, because dollars are scarce. Eventually the price comes down to 20 cents per EAX, Jake gives Tim $5, Jake has 100 EAX and Tim has $100.
We can change this dynamic by bringing more dollars into the game: Jake or Tim pony up more money in the bidding war, or Alex shows up wanting in on the action and brings us money. But here's my point: If you have $100 and 100 x EAX @ $10/share, you aren't going to sell 100 EAX and get $1000. The price of EAX is going to come down as there's less money in the market, thus less trading, thus the market crashes.
Yes, it's a zero sum game. Exactly as much CASH DOLLAR CURRENCY as you put in comes out. Exactly as much of each individual security as you put in come out. There's a lot more money on paper than there is actual, accessible money; and for you to get your money on paper, somebody has to give you their actual, real, physical dollars.
But eventually, you'll almost certainly want money in the stock market if you're ever going to retire.
Except when the big correction comes and you lose 90% of it, and 10 years later still have not recovered. I know quite a few people who have taken to working in old age because their 401(k) funds became worthless. That's a black swan event, but it happens. The market was simply overbought.
If I had $500,000 right now, in cash, I could simply retire. I'd make it until age 85, although I have luxury models that make me a pauper at 72 and frugal models that take me to 90-ish.
Well at least one person in the whole fucking world gets it besides me.
I know about inflation. You seem to not know about interest. I'm getting, currently, around a 70% return on my money--this will scale back as I pay down my loan balances, of course. But essentially, I pay $220 in principal and $150 in interest per month; every extra $220 I pay on my loan balance (roughly--that number gets bigger each payment or pre-payment) saves me $150 (roughly--that number gets smaller) in total.
My employer will match 50% up to 2% of my paycheck. So I get a 50% return, which is smaller. I put my money into HSA, which gives me a 33% return (which is still smaller) due to skipping taxes; but I spend the HSA on toothpaste, bandages, and dental work, expenses I'd have anyway, and I have 33% more money free to put into knocking down my loans. I can go for Traditional IRA, which will give me an even smaller return: it appears to be 33% (pre-tax), but when I withdraw I will pay taxes. Also I can get a 1% raise out of my employer? Fantastic.
If you are saving money, and qualify, you should be putting the money into a ROTH IRA if you're just saving it post-tax anyway. You can withdraw up to the amount you contributed at any time with no penalty and you pay no tax on the interest and the money is tax free when it is taken out.
If you have a ROTH IRA and you place post-tax money into it, you pay full tax. Say you pay 30% tax overall, you take $5000 and pay $1500 in taxes, store $3500. You can pull that $3500 when you retire, with no tax penalty.
If you have a traditional IRA and qualify for the tax rebate (I almost don't),it's different. Instead of paying 30% tax, you stick $5000 in. When you withdraw, it's income. If you withdraw, say, $15,000 per year, you only pay 15% tax. So from that $5000, you pay $750 and keep $4250, which is $750 more than the $3500.
But wait, there's more! Taxes are bracketed. Income below some $8925 is 10% taxed. Up to $36250, it's 15% taxed. So for your $15k, you'd actually pay $892.50 plus 15% of $6075 ($911.25), meaning you pay roughly 12.025% taxes if you withdraw $15k/year in retirement.
It floats around, but the point is that you can expect roughly 15% total immediate growth from your pre-tax contributions. Post-tax contributions are for people who expect to spend more in retirement than their income while working, or who expect to play the market hard and win. Neither applies to most people.
And honestly, what would you do if you spent all this money and found that, in the end, you're 30 years old with $500/mo expenses and $3200/mo post-tax income, with a full $3500/year going into HSA on top of that? Time to have kids? I mean you can certainly afford it (not to mention getting married would give you a huge tax payout with that $11500 standard deduction and 15% tax rate). Honestly I could have done this 5 years sooner, I'm just slow and it took me a while to figure out how to handle finances.
You cannot assume that.You don't know how long this vulnerability has been exploited, and it is reasonable to expect that some high-profile targets that use OpenBSD in their stack may have been compromised.
Netcraft reports BSDs as 1% or less of the servers out there, OpenBSD being a fraction of that, FreeBSD being another, NetBSD and other such probably being a smaller fraction than either. I would expect OpenBSD to be the bigger fraction--who uses BSD on a server?--but FreeBSD appears to be more popular as a desktop OS, and that may carry weight. Of course we're talking about the tastes of the 1% so who really knows?
Thing is we know a lot of high-profile targets are straight Linux or they have dedicated appliances that were vulnerable (FortiNet products, SonicWall products, Cisco and Juniper gear even). When making conjectures, I take the larger probabilities--look up Operational Risk Management and related analytical techniques--and draw likely conclusions. "OpenBSD isn't vulnerable" would not have convinced me (or likely anyone) that the situation is any different from a practical standpoint, except that a few machines somewhere would theoretically escape vulnerability, and even then you may be able to modify the attack (i.e. take less than 4k?).
The problem is, on top of the fact that no boundary check was performed on a copy operation, this passed a code review and was incorporated in the most widely used SSL library, that reads and process sensitive information.
Yes I've said this a few times about "better coding practices". Cleaner code would have helped, heartbleed was very self-contained, the process of review and clean code *may* have increased the likelihood of Heartbleed not making it past a review, but it did make it past several manual reviews as-is, etc etc. Part of my larger argument has been that Heartbleed isn't exposed by technical runtime countermeasures until exploited, and apparently nobody thought to look for this particular kind of bug, so it was never tested.
That actually sounds interesting. What happened to it?
Well besides that I am not the world's best programmer--I do have a certain strength in the area, but it's vastly outweighed by my weakness in larger architecture and I always had this perfectionist thing going on with no real code discipline so I was always frustrated with my own bad code--I could never get the allocator tested. You do understand why it might be hard to test a memory allocator as it's incrementally written, right?
The basic plan was to implement parts of malloc(), and fall back to glibc's malloc() for cases I don't handle. I used a staged design, with arbitrary object sizes based on some research papers I read--16 byte objects are common, so I have a "picoheap" or whatever I called it that's just a collection of mmap() areas for holding 16 byte objects. For larger (128 byte-256 byte?) objects I had separate mmap() areas which used canaries to detect write overflow (too much overhead to do that with 16 byte allocations, just made them 4k pages with a bitmap). And so on. I tried to implement one class of allocation, and fallback to malloc() otherwise... and the interposing wasn't something I knew how to do.
I'm sure Peter Gutmann would have something to say about me replacing malloc() with something much better I invented one morning over coffee (and the Web site part is now defunct... I still have the design docs somewhere, probably the schizophrenic rantings of a child).
Eg. acessing odd memory positions is a stall in most modern CISC cpu's (and some ancient ones too), so your code will actually run slower. In some cpu's, the stall is everything that is not 16-byte aligned.
Yes of course, it's all very complex. My point is, however, that the secondary market is a big money pump to move money from idiots to smart JP Morgan investors. I know because I've moved money from idiots to me, on purpose. It's not exactly easy, either; rocket science is what I would call easy.
The stock market is an exercise in chaos theory. Stock market movements are 100% predictable; however, you have less than 100% information, so you cannot predict them 100% reliably. The stock market is rather transparent, and a combination of technical analysis (stock trends), knowledge of current events (business acumen, awareness), and fundamentals (awareness of fundamentals applied to any information that leads you to think focus will be moved onto those fundamentals) allows you to make fairly reliable judgments about what is good to buy and what isn't. You can take this all the way out to dividing market sectors by the market as a whole to find out what is growing faster than the market, and dividing stocks by the sector as a whole to find out what are the hot stocks, and then doing further analysis, and picking winners nearly every time.
The average person trades on news, on "this stock is doing well", on "this is a good company". The amount of analysis an investment banker makes is huge. That means an investment banker has significantly more wins, has an understanding of how much they can lose, and can assure continuous average growth over a period. Day traders play entirely on technicals (day trading is round-tripping repeatedly in one day on minor fluctuations; it's the same as long-term trading, but is less influenced by news and major current events, so requires much less information to pull off successfully--but requires more money and/or margin leverage).
Think about it this way: You're playing poker, 5 card stud, with JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and three of your buddies. JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs can see 3 of the 5 cards of everyone's hand and the first card on the top of the deck. You and your buddies can see one card of everyone's hand, and can't peek at the deck. None of you knows how many cards each person is going to hold, or which. Who is going to leave the table rich, and who is going to leave dirt poor?
I actually did some funky math and found out that it works out better for the banks too, to the tune of twice as much profitability with 14% interest rates. It turned out that they would get half as much money from interest if people started aggressively paying down loans for a 10 year mortgage cycle; but it would be half as much money in a third as much time, so about 50% more profitable. Meanwhile, the individual paying their way out of debt has to make about 30% larger payments to get the mortgage paid off in 10 years (with 2.25% interest rates, it's 150% larger--you pay $2700 instead of $1150 to get a 10 year payoff on a $425k house with a $310k price tag, versus a $450k house with a $110k price tag), but shave about half the cost off the house.
That means house valuation is complex. House valuation isn't just sticker price, but total payment on the house. Problem is that itself depends on what people are willing to pay per month and how long of a loan they're willing to pay--30 year loans because nobody wants 45 year loans and nobody will pay up for 10 year loans. But at higher interest rates, you start talking that $425k house gets stickered at $110k and in 30 years you pay $425k from $1150/mo ... but $1500/mo payments get you out of it in 10 years, $200k less total payment, so now it's apparently a $225k house--at least, it's a $225k house on a 10 year payment plan, because people are willing to pay that much per month to get out of debt in 10 years, but they won't pay that much per month for 30 years.
Complicated market forces at play.
But this is of course from years of research and some unimpeachable scientific subject called "Mathematics". It's hard to explain in simple terms.
401(k) is a place to play the market, which is a lot like playing poker: it's not the cards and the luck that make you win or lose, but rather the other players shaking your inexperienced ass down so you make bad decisions and lose all your cash.
I'm already financially ahead, I no longer have any 401(k) investments, and I've not yet had a job reaching $70k salary. I've got a mortgage--it's going to be paid off 3 years after its inception--and my mandatory expenses are less than 1/3 of my salary. I killed off a car loan and now have additional money to put toward my debt. I saw those $500/mo utility bills and leveraged credit card debt to do some insulation work; when I pay the cards off, I'll take my $350/mo savings on heating and AC (pays for the insulation in a year!) and get some medium-low to medium range windows (mine actually got wet on the inside last night, condensation).
So you see, by the time I'm 30, I'll have a house paid off, I'll have $500/mo of expenses, no credit card debt, and just piles and piles of thousands of dollars being shoveled into savings. I spend a lot in discretionary spending, for example I'm expanding my knowledge base out of IT and into project management--that will open my career path, but I'm not banking on big salary jumps. When I get them (I'm not stupid--if I jump to a PM career, I'll get at least $80k), I'll look at my finances again and decide what to do. Notably I won't be able to get a tax deduction for IRA contributions AT ALL after that; I do get a tax deduction for HSA contributions, which I maximize because I USE THAT TO PAY FOR HEALTHCARE. That's not even a savings thing; that's a projected expense, which I just got a 30% discount from.
So others my age have $50k or so in their 401(k) by now. So what? I can stick that much in savings in under 2 years. Your move.
They're not saving. They're playing a game they fundamentally don't understand. A game of strategy, group psychology, numeric analysis, graphical analysis (shortcuts through visualization--"I can just see it"), tracking the news (HEY MARKETWATCH!), etc.
When I was last into it, I had a coworker arguing with me about how the S&P grows 10%, so he just buys SPY with all of his money. I told him that's a bad idea and S&P was about to drop. It did. He delayed his retirement by 5 years, and came out with a little less money than he started with.
The S&P growing 10% was never true. Averaged over 80 years of volatile movement, it's been shown to grow by 10% per year on average. The market is a hellish place where you don't belong if you are not ready to face dragons and Forbes telling you false things about the market and claiming they are "debunking myths".