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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • I think we can put a specific maximum for a comfortable western lifestyle. You can certainly argue that a comfortable western lifestyle is already far and away better than most of the people on Earth will ever see. This is something of an arbitrary point where past this, most of us are going to agree that it’s excessive.

    It’s USD 10 million.

    Why? Let’s start with the Trinity study:

    https://thepoorswiss.com/updated-trinity-study/

    The original looked at a standard retirement portfolio and asked how much you can withdraw over a thirty year retirement. It took market data from 1925 through 1995 (the updated version linked above goes to 2023) and then checked a thirty year window over that entire period with various withdrawal rates.

    What it found is that if you withdraw 4% of the portfolio the first year, and increasing it by inflation each subsequent year, it’s highly unlikely the portfolio will run out in the 30 year window. The time period covers has market ups and downs, high inflation and low, and this 4% stays.

    The updated study above says a 3.5% withdraw had a high chance of lasting 50 years.

    Lets play it ultra safe and put it at 2.5%. With $10M, we’ll have $250,000/year to play with, and our rules adjust that for inflation.

    (Median household income in Manhattan is $128k)[https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/NY/Manhattan-Demographics.html]. We’re pulling almost twice that. I feel comfortable saying a person can live nicely in any city on this income.

    So there you go: $10M. If you want a 100% tax bracket, that’s a good place to put it. Any more money past that is just a game that hurts everyone else.














  • I am absolutely certain that experts have looked at it, and come to different conclusions.

    I’ll even go as far as to accept that there is no scientific consensus.

    And what reference do you have for that? A recent one, because as I said, the economics have totally changed in the last 30 years.

    Nuclear power doesn’t really produce co2

    Concrete does. Reactors need a lot of concrete. A lot.

    Renewables are still not ready to deal with base load in a power grid long term

    Which doesn’t matter. Base load exists because it’s cheap to make power plants that stay at the same level all the time. The economics of that don’t apply to renewables.

    Nothing, nuclear power will buy us time

    Utterly untrue. It’ll take 10 years to deploy a single new GW of nuclear. That’s not buying time.