You are supposed to invest and keep the money working for you. Adjusted for inflation, S&P 500 returns 6.5% a year. That alone gets you above the poverty line. Recall, this is inflation adjusted so your $600,000 is growing with inflation and the poverty line income also grows over time. This does not account for any swings.
You can't actually draw down 6.5%/yr, though, because of sequence of returns risk. The number that is actually safe (historically) is something like 3.5%.
Keep in mind that almost all of the FIRE advice available online has been written in a bull stock market that is almost 2 decades long (COVID drawdown is a blip on the 2008-2025 chart).
Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Do you know anyone still running a risk parity 60% UPRO/40% TMF (3x long S&P 500, 3x long 20-year Treasury Bonds) portfolio? That portfolio composition had massive returns, until the Fed started hiking rates.
The annual implied volatility of SPX is around 15-20%, if you want to withdraw 6.5% a year at 40 and have to restart your career at 55, be my guest.
A 40% drawdown on 600k is -240k which puts you at 360k, 6.5% of which is $23,400. Starts getting pretty tight if you need to sell assets for cash which reduces your future returns.
> Keep in mind that almost all of the FIRE advice available online has been written in a secular bull market that is almost 2 decades long
Most of the reasonable FIRE advice (e.g. https://earlyretirementnow.com/ quality) suggests a ~3-3.5% withdrawal rate, which has been measured using historical data way before the current secular market.
Is your take that even such withdrawal rate wouldn't work anymore, moving forward?
Genuine question for people in the field. My understanding is that the cooling effect of trees is primarily driven by evaporative cooling. That is, the shade effect only really exists because the plant does not shrivel up and die due to storing water. How much more effective are trees vs. big swamp coolers? Even in this article, they admit that daytime cooling of half a degree requires 3 times more water.
There is something to be said for the parts about shading the surface too though. You're unlikely to cool an entire desert a significant amount with water you bring in but if that's something that happens as part of keeping the actual surfaces in the city cooler during peak heat times on top of the air cooling effects of evaporation then the sum result is greater than the parts in terms of effect.
Of course it's Vegas, I wouldn't be surprised if we decided to make the downtown completely indoors so we could just run AC in the streets too. It's not exactly the city of practicality.
during the day, trees provide significant shade by intercepting solar radiation, reducing mean radiant temperature (up to 16 °C)
Sadly they work the opposite way at night, they don't allow SPACE to cool the ground. A textil/plastic plate moved automatically can provide more cold, if that's the goal.
It really depends on how broad and high the tree canopy is; you don’t need super high tree density to provide a lot of shade.
The main benefit over other solutions is that properly selected trees require very little upkeep from humans, unlike anything mechanical or requiring movement. Though I imagine that is less the case in Vegas.
>> the downtown completely indoors so we could just run AC in the streets too.
So ... a shopping mall? Many cities do this already, linking various public indoor spaces by walkways/tunnels. Also those cities where the air outside is too cold. A few canadian universities link buildings with tunnels so students can avoid going outside.
Trees excel at harvesting water. When you water a tree, there is evaporative cooling like an artificial cooler but during the night, the dew falls back on the leaves and the ground where some of it finds its way back to the trees (possibly via an invertebrate first). Also the reflectiveness of leaves helps. Then there's the soil where layers of dead leaves, wood and others accumulate, sequester CO2 and create a sponge. Finally, by virtue of making the region cooler, rain is more likely to fall. Humans can probably engineer something better but the bar is high.
Right, but as pointed out in TFA & below the cooling from evaporation is almost negligible compared to that from the shade. Maybe Vegas would be okay with conserving their water too
For reader clarification: accumulating carbon in soil from decaying plant matter still leaves it part of short term carbon cycling, not to be confused with geological-time carbon sequestration. As you know.
Not that simple. When carbon in the soil rises beyond a certain percentage (a tree falls) it'll convert back to CO2 because of the bugs eating it. But if the percentage starts at zero (in a desert) and an ecosystem settles there, the percentage will rise and stay above zero for as long as the ecosystem survives. Basically the plants generate matter as fast as wildlife eats it.
This sequestration can be long term if things go well or it can be short term if plants die in large numbers (because of climate change, diseases...).
Yes, and cities with lots of trees are way more livable due to this. Planners in our town seem to hate trees with a passion, thank god we‘re moving away from this concrete desert.
Trees in cities are expensive to maintain, which is why they're often on the chopping block when budgets get tight. This is especially true in places like Las Vegas where there is little natural tree cover due to the climate. You have to have a staff of arborists to keep the trees alive in such a harsh environment.
Indeed, the town I‘m living in was 80% destroyed during WWII and that still shows in its finances. It’s amazing how long major disaster affects a region. Big drug issues, highest cancer rate in the country etc
The problem is that to get these effects you need large canopies of trees, and to get that to happen the trees have to take the space of something else. For street trees it takes away land from parking or traffic lanes; for properties it occupies both horizontal and vertical square footage since the sky above the tree needs to be clear. These are unpopular with some political affiliations and interest groups.
Even without any evaporative effect, the air cooling of leaves (at least bringing them to the surrounding air temperature) happens more easily than that of concrete pavement due to height and larger surface area. The concrete can easily get heated much hotter than the air at even 10-20ft.
Wrt. water consumption - Mediterranean species like say olive trees are kind of optimized for low water consumption, by for example having leaves covered with wax-like stuff decreasing evaporation.
Trees are also vertical structures. Any vertical structure will absorb some of the light, turning it into heat, then be cooled by rising air. This keeps the heat from getting to the ground, with or without evaporation. In other words, instead of the sidewalk getting hot, something 20+ feet in the air get hot. Hot air rises and the air near the ground stays cooler.
The increased water usage is tough because we're serious about water reclamation here in Vegas, but you can't reclaim water lost to evaporation, which is why there are policies (and serious fines) around excessive landscape watering. It might not be a worthwhile tradeoff, especially if there are alternate cooling methods that don't involve water loss.
Trees are great, but ultimately a pretty ridiculous idea if the goal is to create shade, even if you're not worried about water consumption. Avoiding concrete walls or overhangs is smart because you don't want the thermal mass.. but of course you can build these things out of fabric or thin metal.
The funny thing is, if you build a wall or canopy to avoid the water consumption plus literally waiting a decade for a tree to get tall.. now you're probably in violation of your HOA height restrictions, etc. Desert cities need to basically drop the idea of conforming to the typical expectations of visitors and newcomers by trying to add greenery. It's better to add shade, dig underground, build wind-catchers[1], salsabils[2]. There's tons of basic things like making sure roof surfaces are more reflective, and more strategic architectural things[3] that can be done to improve things and the techniques have been used forever
You know how a lot of classic midcentury modern houses (which you can still find in downtown Vegas!) have those kind of lattice-y decorative walls and panels? Are those actually functional for reducing heat and not just cool-looking?
part of the cooling effect that trees produce is from photosynthesis, the percentage of light converted to plant matter can be as high as 1.5%
more will be reflected, and the shaded area will of course,be shaded, and then there is transpiration of water, which varys greatly with species.other effects will be due to the built environment, where a lot of asphalt and concrete could mostly obliterate the real effects of a few trees.
from wiki "The average rate of energy captured by global photosynthesis is approximately 130 terawatts, which is about eight times the total power consumption of human civilization"
The point of that article is that in many places the evaporative cooling is the main thing but in Vegas the water situation is such that it's more about the shade so the optimal tree is something that gives shade but doesn't need a lot of water.
Right where I am sitting now I have an LED strip above my desk and when I have my shirt off (right now) I can very definitely feel the radiant energy when it is on, so if it is really hot I either turn it off or switch it to green because the eye is most sensitive to green light. In fact, as I'm writing this, I just set the backlight on the 55-inch TV I use as a computer monitor down so I'd feel more comfortable.
"Water harvesting" has been around for a long time. I think I first saw a water harvesting device in the U.S. Army Survival manual in the 1980s. It's an active research area and devices continue to improve.
I wasn't trying to be condescending, just trying to point out that trees might not be the most viable structure. Last time I was in southern Arizona when I wanted some relief I'd just find a solar panel installation in a parking lot and hang out under that.
Trees acts for their little thermal mass and large surface exposed to air, essentially IR radiation from the Sun can't much reach the ground or humans under trees (if they are large and dense enough) and the part of the radiation touching trees get quickly dispersed in the air (climbing the atmosphere).
The limited effect is that cities are dense and can't be made as forest so trees can't do nothing for buildings taller them them.
Conversely, preclearance at Pearson royally screwed up my TN visa after claiming that the other ports of entries were doing it wrong. I have received multiple TN from HOU and, in general, I like the CBP at HOU. EWR was always friendly as well in my opinion. I personally prefer getting my TN at land border crossings because they tend to take the "gather all the facts" approach vs. airports have a procedural approach that feels highly dependent on the agent you get. My most recent TN was I-129 which I think is a waste of money but if someone else is paying for it and you have the luxury of waiting in the US, then it's a seamless experience.
I know this is a convenient meme and narrative but this post is literally the consequence of having to pay more for labor, you get more people trying to automate it. We're talking about logistics, probably the most important component of the economy. Trucking salaries are probably the closest thing to "market clearing wages" that exists. Pay more -> more expensive shipping -> less demand to ship things -> lower wages.
Neural network training is harder when the input range is allowed to deviate from [-1, 1]. The only reason why it sometimes works for neural networks is because the first layer has a chance to normalize it.
Exercising early only makes sense in some pathological examples that do occur but practically never happen. In general, very loosely, a put is worth something for the hedge plus the amount you could get for exercising it right now. Thus, if you want to exercise it right now, you just sell it and get the hedge premium.
Also, the current VIX is the same as January of 2020. If you believe the current state of the world is less certain than the outbreak of a global pandemic, I have some options to sell you.
Yeah, misspoke, I meant selling the option, not exercising.
> Also, the current VIX is the same as January of 2020. If you believe the current state of the world is less certain than the outbreak of a global pandemic, I have some options to sell you.
I don't know if it's more volatile, BUT it it has shot way up since yesterday, and it doesn't seem too weird to think that it will go down to the numbers we had yesterday.
This has been observation about the internet. Growing up in a small town without access to advanced classes, having access to Wikipedia felt like the greatest equalizer in the world. 20 years post internet, seeing the most common outcome be that people learn less as a result of unlimited access to information would be depressing if it did not result in my own personal gain.
I would say a big difference of the Internet around 2000 and the internet now is that most people shared information in good faith back then, which is not the case anymore. Maybe back then people were just as uncritical of information, but now we really see the impact of people being not critical.
> having access to Wikipedia felt like the greatest equalizer in the world. 20 years post internet, seeing the most common outcome be that people learn less
when wikipedia was initially made, many schools/teachers explicitly denied wikipedia as a source for citing in essays. And obviously, plenty of kids just plagerized wikipedia articles for their essay topics (and was easily discovered at the time).
With the advent of LLM, this sort of pseudo-learning is going to be more and more common. The unsupervised tests (like online tests, or take home assignments) cannot prevent cheating. The end result is that students would pass, but without _actually_ learning the material at all.
I personally think that perhaps the issue is not with the students, but with the student's requirement for certification post-school. Those who are genuinely interested would be able to leverage LLM to the maximum for their benefit, not just to cheat a test.
If you cross into the US at a port-of-entry and are admitted as a visitor then you are good whether or not you took Melatonin supplements. If you enter illegally or associate with people who entered illegally, don't be surprised if you are caught up in a raid. However, even if you get detained, if you have no criminal history, you will get released after arrested because there are no more beds [1].
Seriously though, if you are going to make a cheeky reference to race, at least get the reference right. Melanin is responsible for darker skin [2].
