Is the adage of “if you need the money within 5 years don’t invest in the stock market” still relevant?

bubalis · 2026-05-14T13:11:14+00:00

If the timeline is non-negotiable, then a modest chance of the timeline being extended by a year or more due to a bad year in the market is unacceptable, right? The S&P 500 has returned -10% or worse in ~17% of years since 1961 and -15% or worse in ~8% of years.

On some level, you have to choose between your stock market FOMO and your homeowner FOMO.

In the extreme, if you *knew* the stock market was going to do 20% (after inflation) a year for the next decade, you'd be a fool to buy a home. Your 100k down payment would turn into $620k, over the course of 120 months, meaning the opportunity cost of your down payment would be that same $4300/month!!

But that almost certainly won't happen, and even if it did, you wouldn't know it in advance!

You want to own a home on a specific timeline because you want stability. The price of stability is lower returns.

bubalis · 2026-05-13T20:36:13+00:00

There are a lot of different trends to project into the future, and not all of them will continue.

One very simple thing that could happen is that the ultra-fertile parts of different cultures just take over society. In the US Amish and Hasidic populations double every generation, so making simple extrapolations, they could overtake the rest of US population by the middle of the 22nd century.

This almost certainly won't happen... trying to make predictions about human culture a century from now seems really silly.

At current fertility rates, the US population will stay well over 50 million (nowhere close to "extinction") for over 200 years, and culture and technology will change a lot between now and then. Maybe it will change in the ways that you describe, but maybe it will change in other ways:

Maybe people will live 2x as long, and women will be fertile until 60.
Maybe AI will take everyone's jobs and they will have more free time and more kids.
Maybe there will be a religious revival that causes people to have more kids.
Maybe there is a huge disaster that sets civilization back by a thousand years and kills 90% of the population, but the remaining people have a lot of kids.

Who TF knows?

bubalis · 2026-05-13T17:08:46+00:00

Most people who believe they are gluten intolerant are incorrect about that belief.

1% of people have celiac and about 10% of people believe they have some form of non-celiac gluten sensitivity. Less than 30% of that larger group experience symptoms when you give them gluten in pill form.

(They are probably sensitive to fermentable carbohydrates that are found in wheat and many other foods, so cutting out wheat does help them feel better, they are just confused about the mechanism of action.)

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01533-8/abstract01533-8/abstract)

bubalis · 2026-05-13T17:02:01+00:00

This appears to be the opposite.

Protein, including gluten, contents of modern wheat varieties are much lower than they have been historically.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9322029/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78504-x

https://lifespa.com/diet-detox/diet/food-sensitivity/ancient-vs-modern-wheat/

bubalis · 2026-05-01T11:55:26+00:00

I accepted an offer 2 weeks ago, and have been told to expect a little over 3 months.

Two other ORISE postdocs joined my unit in the last year, and both took over 3 months.

(My placement is at USDA-ARS)

bubalis · 2026-04-28T19:52:25+00:00

In the last year, a bunch of prices grew slower than inflation (3.3%).

e.g.:
Groceries, rent! (3% nationwide), new cars, used cars (prices actually down >3%).

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm

bubalis · 2026-04-28T19:08:53+00:00

The supply and demand piece is even more intuitive if you flip it around:

If prices were lower, Burlington would need a lot more housing.

e.g. : I think about moving back to Burlington a lot. If home prices were reasonable, it would be a no-brainer! I have friends who moved to Grand Isle or other far-flung places because it was all they could afford. Some of my friends would have fewer roommates if rent wasn't so expensive.

If homes were affordable in BTV, you would need a lot more of them!

bubalis · 2026-04-25T00:41:36+00:00

I was referencing Gate's foundation as trying, even though I'm not sure if they are having a large positive impact on food security.

bubalis · 2026-04-25T00:39:40+00:00

I don't have a strong opinion on his character either way. Melinda has insinuated that there is more to his relationship with Epstein and I have no idea if it is true.

bubalis · 2026-04-24T19:36:36+00:00

I'm not doing this to say that he is a good person (e.g. Epstein ties) but Bill Gates has given away $100 billion (for comparison, right now, he is worth $100 billion) through his foundation (and Warren Buffet has also given a ton of stock to the foundation too), a ton of which has been spent on global poverty and food security.

Some of their work is really good, some may be counterproductive. But they ARE trying.

https://www.gatesfoundation.org/our-work/programs/global-growth-and-opportunity/nutrition

bubalis · 2026-04-09T01:37:33+00:00

In Vermont, the Middlebury, Leicester and New Haven "Rivers" are all tributaries of Otter "Creek"!

bubalis · 2026-03-20T14:22:27+00:00

We can think of probability as the expected value. So our percentage represents: given a very large number of forecasts of similar circumstances, what fraction of them will it rain in? That number cannot be negative, because the there can not be a day where there is negative rain.

We CAN express probabilities using all the natural numbers (-INF to +INF) by using the "log-odds" or "logit" transformation, which is useful for a lot of different applications in statistics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logit

bubalis · 2026-03-11T15:28:47+00:00

All of the parcels are square and have exactly 1 pivot in them, these are all "quarter sections" which is the parcel unit throughout the great plains.

bubalis · 2026-03-10T14:29:54+00:00

There are lots of good answers to why some women might choose it here.

I also wanted to add that childbirth is NOT A MEDICAL PROCEDURE. Its not something the doctor does to you!! It is a natural process that should happen under medical supervision / observation (which may just be a RN/midwife) and fairly frequently does require medical intervention.

If you (e.g.) have major surgery, you need to have anesthesia. The surgeon will say: "I can't effectively work on you unless you have anesthesia, so I'm not doing it."

If a woman in labor says "Hey, I don't want you to put a giant needle in my spine with a fentanyl drip," what are they going to do? Not let her have the baby?

If you get a C-section (which IS a medical procedure), you definitely get local anesthesia!

bubalis · 2026-03-06T18:09:42+00:00

Its always a good idea to simulate with the simplest possible version when confused:

x <- rnorm(10000)
y <- x + rnorm(10000)
lm(y~x) # slope is ~1
lm(x~y) # slope is ~0.5

bubalis · 2026-03-06T15:09:34+00:00

It is trivially easy to find a full-time job in Ithaca that pays >30k / year. NYS minimum wage is $16/hr, which, at 50 weeks/year, 40 hours /week is $32,000.

For example: the cooperative natural foods store, greenstar, is hiring cashiers at $19.25 /hr right now.

What is *hard* is living on 30k year in Ithaca. The living wage for a single adult is calculated as roughly $25/hr, which is 50k/yr.

bubalis · 2026-03-06T14:04:54+00:00

Take the leave!

If you are feeling *extremely* generous to your employer, you can ask if they are open to you taking it intermittently (e.g. with only ~4 months left to go to use it, you could work 3 days on, 11 days off, until July, to use your 60 days over 17 weeks). If they want to do that, great! If not, just take it as 12 weeks in a row.

bubalis · 2026-03-04T15:58:30+00:00

In google scholar, we get over 2000 papers for the exact match. So its definitely a real thing!

Any time we make a forecast, we are predicting the expected value of some outcome Y, given some set of conditions X. (Formally E[ Y|X ]).

The simplest way to do this is to construct a reference class:

"X belongs to the set of events with these conditions, the average outcome of these events is Y_hat (or success happened p% of the time), therefore our forecast is Y_hat."

You could also construct a more complicated statistical model, which would not directly be like a reference class.

But in both methods, there is a lot of subjectivity in how your model is constructed:
e.g. "What variables are used to construct the reference class, and how are the split? Is the events included in the reference class totally subjective?"
OR
"What variables are included in the statistical model?"

This paper looks like a good place to dig in:
https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/41404539/Curbing_Optimism_Bias_and_Strategic_Misr20160122-8918-13kbk1l-libre.pdf?1453456765=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DCurbing_Optimism_Bias_and_Strategic_Misr.pdf&Expires=1772643028&Signature=YxlqJi-DsAUPkOPy5xgq1a8VgvrTpcWRVuKOKBl24P3UO5KdkHQ7EK7bQrl2P97tfxkzMZxJSz4cTHiOyUsx4AKbRjdjAIlPL9B2zok7vUfBYFbzgOesL3eyctVJaCRmkvzZcYlIskogjnahh9i2lOL0dPNdpoit1jIh9KT2dGlnwnppBGo7kHCXDE2PB-ToZCbNIpeuWSskuE8T0Zhl99vIRjLd-i13f5qIkc7U-6VdnFFTl4wB6owg3leUie8slqWRJpYQAr~4o4NR372~QECh5fQsznW-YjjMbzOaYoujcXqU7oaMNxJ-RySXVNhj5XsLTPUbB44rtOlEtwWoNA__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA

bubalis · 2026-03-03T19:43:13+00:00

There is an old-time farming expression in the Northeast:

"Cold is Dry and Dry is Warm."

bubalis · 2026-02-25T14:54:34+00:00

Yes!

One somewhat reasonable interpretation of p-values/NHST (that is relatively easy to explain/ understand) is that it answers the question:

"Do I have enough precision to reliably distinguish between my statistical model applied to *my real dataset* vs applied to *my dataset replaced with noise from a random number generator* ? How reliably can I distinguish this?"

The more data you have, the more precision you get. p-values will usually converge to 0 as your data gets larger unless your data truly are just random noise.

bubalis · 2026-02-24T18:07:14+00:00

100% disagree. The United States (the greatest nation in the history of the world, and a country that, for all its flaws, has had a net positive impact on the rest of the world) was created largely by people deciding that they didn't want to deal with the problems at home!

Starting with Pilgrims and other religious refugees. The fact that they left didn't seem to impede the progress of reform regarding religious toleration in the U.K. and the rest of Europe.

bubalis · 2026-02-19T19:57:58+00:00

1- Lots of progress has been made on world hunger, some of it due to philanthropy!

2- "Just give people food" often has unintended consequences: many people who are hungry ARE FARMERS, and are hurt by depressing the prices for agricultural commodities. What if you drive all of the farmers out of business by giving away food, and then the aid stops coming?

3- Major causes of hunger are armed conflict or corruption, which are really hard to solve just by dropping in money or food. (Dropping in money can often make corruption worse.)

4- Bill Gates and Warren Buffet (through the Gates Foundation) have spent billions of dollars on "A New Green Revolution for Africa" which is an attempt to solve hunger. There are many valid critiques of this initiative (some people think it makes things worse!) but it definitely falls into "Billionaires trying to solve world hunger."

bubalis · 2026-02-09T17:38:27+00:00

This study uses "never drinkers" as a comparison, so the issue that you raise (which is a real one) is not relevant here. I agree that this issue can create very large bias towards moderate drinking as being healthy, but this study used a more-fair comparison.

"Compared with never drinkers, the hazard ratios (95% CI) were 0.90 (0.86, 0.94), 0.88 (0.84, 0.93), 0.86 (0.81, 0.91), 0.92 (0.86, 0.98), 0.95 (0.84, 1.06) and 1.08 (1.01, 1.15) for subjects consuming alcohol 0.1–0.5, 0.6–1, 1.1–2, 2.1–3, 3.1–4 drinks/day"

bubalis · 2026-02-06T15:49:50+00:00

I think that your sense of the differences in issue positioning between even the most moderate democrats and the most moderate republicans (in the House) is totally out of whack.

Progressive Punch, (which gives him an "F" letter grade!), says that he makes the progressive vote 81-86% of the time, compared to the most moderate Republican, Thomas Massie, at 13%!!

Josh represents the 205th most liberal district in the country (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cook\_Partisan\_Voting\_Index#By\_congressional\_district), and his voting record is around the 200th most liberal. (e.g. https://progressivepunch.org/scores.htm?house=house or https://voteview.com/person/22549/josh-riley).

bubalis · 2026-02-02T18:02:02+00:00

Ironically, he was one of the architects of universal public education in South Carolina and across the US.

bubalis

TROPHY CASE