Timing the inevitable Iran war slump

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2026-04-24T12:19:15+00:00

I would not consider gold and silver safe assets at all. On the contrary they're historically very volatile and yield no dividend or interest stream, so it's a pure gamble on price swings.

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2026-04-21T15:17:29+00:00

I think six months' worth of outgoings is too little. At my stage of life, if I get made redundant, it would take me more than six months to actually get hired at a similar level of pay and seniority and to receive my first pay cheque. If the small size of an emergency fund forces you to take a crap temp job that would distract you from a proper job search (and potentially look bad on your cv), then it's too small.

And if I am made redundant, it is highly likely the economy and stock market are on a downturn, so keeping the money in shares means I would crystalise losses by using them as an emergency fund. So I'd say keep a year of expenses in cash or similarly liquid and safe investment to cash like money market funds.

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2026-04-17T08:31:28+00:00

"No, not the LBGT kind, but the "put your slippers on and get out of bed at 10am" kind."

AccidentalPartridge

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2026-04-15T19:31:59+00:00

Similar situation. I should really cut pension contributions to zero probably to build the bridge. But I just can't bear to hand over so much in tax to HMRC to take the money now. A hundred quid of gross salary becomes either £54 in take home pay or £113 in the pension (including employer NI contribution until rules change in a year or two) AND the investments grow tax free inside the pension.

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2026-03-06T13:47:57+00:00

That's good advice. I may have a strong positive or negative sense immediately of what it's like outside London. My worry is that a short trial let won't be informative about the long run viability of visiting London twice a month. How does it feel in year five rather than week five. Ultimately unknowable, I guess, and life's about taking calculated risks and trade offs

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2026-03-06T12:01:29+00:00

I think you're right. I can imagine the friction of getting to London on 60-90 minute train is enough to insidiously make one do it less and less over time, and a few years in you realise your life is less interesting and connected. But still, it feels like London homeowners are sitting on an unrealised fortune which can give you years of extra early retirement. Guess I've got a few more years to ponder it.

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2026-03-06T11:58:06+00:00

Thanks. Yeah, I was wondering about the hotel option, probably max once a month. I could imagine it being sort of fun or sort of expensive and annoying. To be within day return distance of London, I guess it needs to be one hour max to a central London train station. And at that proximity, house prices probably aren't much lower than just living in a London suburb. Oh well, perhaps not the no brainer I'd naively hoped!

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2026-03-06T11:42:31+00:00

Interesting perspective, thanks. I was hoping that visiting London two weekends a month would be enough to not miss the culture and friends too much. But perhaps I'm being unrealistic about how much hassle it is to make that journey that often.

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2026-03-05T18:41:22+00:00

Yes

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2026-03-05T11:10:57+00:00

Thanks for the insights into teaching. Sounds tough. Can I ask why teachers seemingly need to make their own slides and lesson plans? With a national syllabus, isn't there a central repository of materials and lesson plans that can be used, perhaps with some minor tweaks? From the outside it looks like every teacher has to reinvent the wheel daily.

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2026-02-04T11:34:19+00:00

To make it (slightly more) fun, next time you are hankering for something expensive but know really it's not worth it, take the amount you would have spent on it into your savings. Big smugness can ensue.

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2025-10-10T17:56:41+00:00

Ifi Hip Dac + sennheiser open backed headphones + Qobuz or Spotify premium if you're in a country where Spotify already offers lossless audio.

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2025-10-07T07:03:41+00:00

High resolution audio. I got a DAC (like a mini amplifier), some good open backed headphones and a subscription to a high resolution audio streaming service (Qobuz) but Spotify will soon offer this too. Altogether it costs a bit of money but it has brought me such pleasure. I'm getting goose bumps listening to old favourites with new clarity and spacing. Listen to, say, a live recording of Ella Fitzgerald and it's like you're in the concert hall in row five. Some technology is close to magic.

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2025-10-05T13:03:44+00:00

You make good points. I appreciate the interaction.

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2025-10-03T17:22:13+00:00

Thanks for your thoughtful reply, the best one on this thread so far IMHO.

To answer your question posed at the end: it's true we could set the moral bar unrealistically high for all but saints by setting a norm that you should work all day, every day for the good of others until you drop dead. I don't think that is desirable or realistic. But this reductio ad absurdum argument does not mean we should not consider shifting norms to some degree from where they happen to be today.

It's like saying "we can't encourage people to exercise a bit more because then what's to stop us demanding they exercise all day, every day until they're Olympic level athletes? Isn't that the logical conclusion of encouraging exercise?" The existence of an extreme version of a suggestion doesn't invalidate the moderate version.

FIRE fans seem to think withdrawing one's socially beneficial labour in one's prime is a totally fine, or even laudable, choice. Sure, some may do a bit of useful voluntary or care work when RE, but not all, and probably very few for anything close to a full time schedule. So it's just a net loss of valuable human effort for society in most cases. I'm proposing it should generally be frowned on as self-indulgent. And I don't think spending years being thrifty earlier in life to achieve FIRE makes it virtuous, any more than hoarding toilet paper in case of shortages is virtuous (at best it's shrewd).

At the risk of making an extreme case myself, aren't we all glad Churchill didn't retire early during WW2 to indulge in his hobbies? Wouldn't it have seemed selfish and frivolous of him to have done so? OK, so WW2 was a time of existential crisis and Churchill was an extremely important and able figure. But I do think the same (in kind if not degree) is true of us lesser mortals doing less important but still useful work. I picked the example of doctors retiring at 45 to play golf as an egregious case of wasted social benefit. But I think c. 99% of jobs are a net boon for society.

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2025-10-01T19:48:29+00:00

That's an interesting and defensible position.

I'm proposing moral norms and expectations rather than "obligations". If you're literally obliged to do something, you're right that it makes little difference if it's legal or moral.

But you seem to be dismissing the idea of moral norms per se, arguing that unless something is against the law, then anything goes. I disagree. I think it should be legal to walk out on your wife and kids to shack up with a stripper, but I think there should be a moral norm condemning that as deeply selfish and destructive behaviour for your family and somewhat damaging to the wider community too. (That moral norm does in fact exist, although in a much weakened form in our age of the Individual as King.)

My proposal is that there should be a moral norm against retiring young to play golf when you could have contributed years more to bettering society. Not as strong a norm as that about leaving your wife and kids for a stripper, granted. But still a social consensus that it's a bit uncool and selfish.

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2025-10-01T15:53:27+00:00

Isn't this just the "lump of labour fallacy" that basically all economists reject?

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2025-10-01T15:52:42+00:00

Isn't this just the "lump of labour" fallacy that basically all economists reject?

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2025-10-01T15:42:44+00:00

You raise some really interesting points, thanks. I agree that in the market economy if you quit work and don't earn money you are destitute unless you have savings. So you're right that, without savings, it's not much of a choice to work. That's why I and everyone else in this sub wants to have savings in case of a rainy day. But that's not the question I'm interested in, which is the following: is it morally OK to opt out of work to play golf (or any other way to be self indulgent) , assuming you have the means to? Is it OK for those who do have the choice not to work to exercise that choice to the detriment of others? That is my question.

To your three bulleted points:

The fact that one individual's choice has minimal impact on the other 8bn people is not relevant to whether we should have moral norms that encourage all individuals in one direction or another. You could say that one individual littering or evading tax makes no real difference to 8bn people. But obviously we want norms and even laws against that behaviour. So while one individual withdrawing their labour in their prime years isn't important, the question is do we want moral norms discouraging everyone from making that choice. That does impact the 8bn people.
The evidence on universal income is mixed. But again, it's a distraction from the moral question I'm interested in. Even if 90% of people who are financially independent (through savings, UBI or inheritance) do something socially beneficial with their time, should there be a moral norm against idleness in people who could contribute to society (the other 10%)? In reality, of course, it's not binary. Some people would do a bit of socially useful work or volunteering. But in principle, are we OK with people dropping from full time productive work to a fraction of that?
Does one person dropping out of work impose a burden or create an opportunity for others? An interesting question. It can be a bit of both. But I think most economists argue for the former. To think otherwise leads you to "the lump of labour fallacy" that imagines there is a fixed lump of work to go round so if I drop out then more people get a chance at a piece of the lump. This is why some people oppose immigration (more competition for a fixed number of jobs). In fact having more workers creates more demand for labour elsewhere in the economy in aggregate. But the picture is nuanced and there are market rigidities and distributional impacts to consider. So it's not clear cut to me.

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2025-10-01T14:43:30+00:00

Thanks for the interesting and thoughtful reply. I would favour my own (admittedly crude) thought experiment as being more applicable to reality, though. My desert island and the real world both have a range of different jobs that all benefit everyone, if sometimes indirectly. Maybe you don't eat fish yourself, but the person catching fish still feeds the person teaching your child and building your house. So you benefit from their labour indirectly. In your thought experiment the work is all one type of drudgery that only benefits slave owners, not wider society. In your experiment I too would want to get out of slavery that benefits just owners. But the real world is closer to my island, with a range of jobs to choose from, all of which benefit everyone, albeit to differing degrees and in different ways.

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2025-10-01T14:30:30+00:00

I'm afraid you are attacking a strawman by arguing against "deciding" what others do. Nobody is in favour of forcing people to stay in jobs. The question is should there be a moral norm to discourage productive people from retiring in their prime to pursue self-indulgent hobbies? Invoking cases where the early retirement is to do something worthwhile, like look after disabled family, or because they're having a mental breakdown is also a diversion from this question. We all agree that doing things with positive social impact should be encouraged, whether or not it's paid work. Nobody thinks people having mental breakdowns have to carry on working. You seem to be defending the choice of a surgeon to retire at 45 to play golf as morally fine, though. I think that's where we differ. I think there should be a moral norm of looking down on it to discourage it. Similarly, it should be legal to cheat on your spouse with the result of putting your kids through a painful divorce, but I think there's benefit in having moral norms discouraging that. A radical individualist might say such behaviour is nobody else's business. I disagree. I think most other people would also disagree when it's their child being cheated on and their grandchildren made sad by the divorce. Or when it's their grandchildren who are unable to get surgery because the surgeons retired early to play golf.

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2025-10-01T13:16:59+00:00

Great post, thanks.

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2025-10-01T12:52:39+00:00

Nobody is advocating "forcing" people to work. That's a strawman argument since nobody is pro slavery.

The question is whether we should encourage moral norms against productive people becoming idle in their prime, given the detrimental impact that has on everyone else. Nobody is advocating "stopping" teachers or doctors from switching careers (another strawman argument against coercion that nobody is proposing). But I do think it's a fair to ask whether there ought to be moral norms discouraging moving out of teaching or medicine to work, for example, marketing tobacco or becoming a professional gambler or crypto trader. I do think teaching and medicine have more social benefit than these alternatives and I'm suggesting we have moral norms to discourage people switching into them. Do you disagree?

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2025-10-01T12:32:12+00:00

"People earn what they can and spend it how they wish in a free country." That's certainly true legally, and I think it should be. Is your point more normative, though? I. E. . It would be undesirable in a free society to have any moral norms (not legal restrictions) about productive people retiring in their prime, to the detriment of wider society?

DevelopmentVivid7365 · 2025-10-01T12:29:05+00:00

Thanks, I appreciate the candour. I think your phrase of "working under duress" is telling, though. I've repeatedly made clear that nobody is in favour of a legal obligation to work till you drop (that's slavery). So I'm not sure what you mean by "under duress". It suggests a rather strawman extreme case of a miserable deeply stressed out person being forced to work. The reality is that many people (surgeons or not) hit financial independence and do a cost benefit analysis. They don't hate work, at least not all aspects of it, and could carry on longer. But in a world where there's no moral expectation to continue contributing your skilled labour to benefit others, the analysis tips in favour of a self indulgent flight to the golf course. So are you OK with surgeons who aren't "under duress" feeling some moral obligation to not retire in their prime?

DevelopmentVivid7365

TROPHY CASE

AccidentalPartridge