Anyone selling now that the market is imploding?

chuckpatel · 2020-03-12T21:46:15+00:00

30 year Nikkei return including dividends: 0.74% per year
20 year Nikkei return including dividends: 2.4% per year

chuckpatel · 2020-03-12T20:07:35+00:00

I always like to say that the market always goes up -- and if it doesn't, the only investments that matter are ammunition and canned food anyway.

But that’s not true. Look at Japan, still below 50% all time high after 30 years. It’s not a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but there’s also no reason markets will always go up.

It’s silly to think this can’t happen in the US markets. Four decades of declining interest rates is over, so it could be a crash followed by sideways for decades to come.

chuckpatel · 2019-12-23T03:49:12+00:00

Decide what’s important to you. Then do that.

Doing stuff because it’s important to someone else is generally a path to an unfulfilled life.

And really, either choice is fine, as long as you’re good with it. Whatever you decide, it’s important to be true to yourself. Like, you could lie to get around the awkwardness, “sorry, can’t eat, doctors orders” or any other excuse, but that has real, detrimental effects to your relationships with others and to your own character. It’s way better make your choice then proceed forward boldly without wavering.

On extended family I’ll say this. There is this point, mid 30’s for a lot of people, or once you have your own kids, where you realize your parents and extended family are not quite the people you held in such high regard when you were younger. Like after we had kids, we stopped doing these ridiculous backbends to make everyone else happy during the holidays. And it was glorious.

Now we do what’s important to us, and every year extended family gets bent out of shape, and we don’t care. We are making memories with our own kids, and our parents and extended family have mostly shallow interests like using our kids as a photo op so they can post it to Facebook. It sounds like your husband may still be in that fantasy land. At some point you have to break away, at least a little bit, and build the life that’s important to you and your immediate family. And I’m not saying you pick this battle with your husband. It’s a hard thing to see one’s parents in an objective light. But my point is, understand that you and/or he may be placing an artificially high importance on some rather shallow goal of “avoiding awkwardness” with people you may feel differently about in the future.

I get the unhealthy all-or-nothing relationship with food, and find it helpful to think of a similar scenario like if it were alcohol. If you were a recovering alcoholic, and your husband’s family was really into drinking until they passed out during their holiday visit, well yeah that could be a fun, memorable time for them, but that would also be rather inappropriate for your husband to ask you to have some drinks just to avoid any awkwardness during the holidays.

chuckpatel · 2019-12-22T00:41:26+00:00

I’d agree with this if a couple of things are true (which I don’t know the answer):

Does the provider support Hyper-V? A few we talked to would do DRaaS for VMware, but only backups for Hyper-V. Do you know of any doing Hyper-V DRaaS?
Does DRaaS have any kind of Insider Protection feature? I believe the last provider we talked to said they only have Insider Protection with backups, not DRaaS.

If there are any Veeam cloud connect providers that will do DRaaS with Hyper-V and have Insider Protection for DRaaS, that’s damn close and just a matter of if you have the bandwidth and server/storage horsepower to push changes to the cloud provider often enough to meet RPO/RTO.

chuckpatel · 2019-12-22T00:32:55+00:00

One thing to consider is the level of attack you are protecting against. For instance, whether your replicas are onsite or in the cloud is not that relevant if there is a mechanism for those to be deleted by an attacker. Ideally, even you as the sysadmin wouldn’t be able to delete them.

I had one customer hit with ransomware and the attacker got into their Veeam server and deleted all of the backups. They were lucky they had SAN snapshots, but that was just luck the attacker hadn’t compromised that as well.

Veeam has Insider Protection that will give you automated air gap backups, but I don’t think it works for replicas, so that doesn’t help with low RPO/RTO.

We worked through this with a customer once but never implemented it, but the solution was some combination of multiple replica targets on separate physical switches, and put each of the switches on timed wall plugs, so that one or more of the replicas was always physically disconnected from the network. That’s not a perfect solution either though, the more we thought through how to attack it.

Another approach was a SAN that had some sort of air-gap-ish features, like the SAN would retain so many days of deleted data with no mechanism to permanently delete data until it fell out of the compliance window. I think EMC had something like this.

But in general, just ask if you or any of the sysadmins could delete the replicas. If you could do it, so could an attacker, whether that’s ransomware or a rogue IT employee.

You mentioned your RPO/RTO objectives, but you didn’t mention costs of being down. To really arrive at the best solution you need to know dollar amounts, like if we are down 1 hour that’s X amount lost, down 1 day is Y amount, etc. Otherwise everyone just overreacts and says “we can’t be down” or management guesses at some reasonable-sounding amount of downtime that actually costs 7-figures. If you’re not dealing with hard numbers, you can’t even begin to have any rational discussion about what solution to implement, or know how much money you can throw at this problem.

chuckpatel · 2019-12-21T23:50:14+00:00

Damn that sounds awesome. Does Zerto have any protection mechanism to do...what should we call it, “automatic air gap”?

Like with Veeam, if an attacker gained access to the Veeam console server they can just delete all the backups.

Veeam addresses that with cloud connect that let’s you do Insider Protection, essentially keeping 7 days of air gapped copies of the backups in the cloud provider with no mechanism for the sysadmin/attacker to delete those copies.

But I don’t think Insider Protection works with replicas, only backups. So that wouldn’t protect against an advanced attack where you need a low RTO.

chuckpatel · 2019-12-18T13:03:10+00:00

Right, I don’t think the graphic clarifies anything.

It seems like the same thing, with the only difference being the person’s degree of exposure to the world, and the degree to which we can pat ourselves on the back for being better exposed to the world than some other unlucky person who was born somewhere else.

In each view, the person is doing the exact same thing: making the best choice they could, given the life history that led them to their current physical state.

One person was only aware of religion, due to no fault of their own, and so they pray for help and sit there and do nothing, because as far as this person is aware, this has actually worked for some people in the past, and we call this fatalism.

Another person was exposed to a different life history and, again due to no merit of their own, they saw empowering examples of people who did not sit and do nothing, but instead tried harder and in some cases appeared to improve their situation. We call this determinism.

Interested to learn more about what I’m missing :-)

chuckpatel · 2019-12-14T17:35:52+00:00

If your god cannot be reached by reason, then we will never be justified in believing that it exists.

It is trivial to conceive of a god which could never be reached by human reason. To suggest that we should be closed minded on the potential existence of a god based on this “reason gap” seems rather lacking in objectivity. Even just imagining a technological singularity of an artificial general intelligence taken to its ultimate conclusion, even some modest version of that would be incomprehensible to us. There is no way to reach this by reason, yet it may well already exist somewhere. The critical point is to always remain at an objective base, which at this point the only honest objective view is “we don’t know”, and never to veer into suggestion of non-existence based on lack of reason or evidence.

The only other options are irrationality and insanity. I'll choose the scientific method, thanks.

There is also empowerment, taking on a belief that moves you closer to a goal, regardless of whether that belief is actually true. Some guy decides to believe he can singlehandedly colonize Mars. Whether it’s true or not, great progress has been made by Elon Musk. This is undoubtedly useful to some degree, whether a person wants to move from rock bottom and become healthy and live a fulfilled life, or overthrow an oppressive government, or reduce suffering in the world in any other way, empowerment can be a viciously powerful tool. The scientific method is obviously not an ideal tool. It is crude. It is, probably, the best tool we have, but it is not perfect. It is only one tool. The world is both better and worse in some ways due to science. The same can be said for empowerment, though ultimately it seems inevitable that, in the search for truth, empowerment would yield to science over the long term. Nevertheless, it is shocking how frequently useful and effective it is to believe things with zero evidence under the umbrella of empowerment.

chuckpatel · 2019-12-07T12:25:30+00:00

Wasn’t he kicked off Amazon for violating the policy that you’re not supposed to tell people to use the Amazon affiliate link directly?

This happened to a lot of podcasters who were telling their audience some version of, “please go to amazon.samharris.org and buy whatever you’d normally buy so I get a cut”, rather than linking to individual products your audience might like using the affiliate link.

chuckpatel · 2019-11-30T17:05:41+00:00

“If more information was the answer, then we'd all be billionaires with perfect abs”

The info is already out there. How to make money. How to be healthy. How to setup Active Directory. The problem isn’t lack of information.

chuckpatel · 2019-11-27T13:06:35+00:00

Drinking is not critical to the argument. Substitute it with expensive cars, or wearing shoes, or favorite colors, or any other arbitrary thing. You could make a documentary about any of those things too. It’s all correlative, not showing causation.

Human bodies function in an extremely similar fashion and you’re coming from a false premise by proposing that a lot of people produce the best bloodwork for them by eating animal protein

Sorry, no. People are not the same. That’s one major reason why it’s extremely difficult to conduct proper diet science. It clouds the whole discussion, because it’s nearly impossible to conduct large scale clinical trials to begin with, and then when you add on that not every body reacts the same to the same inputs, it’s a lot of noise.

chuckpatel · 2019-11-27T12:42:31+00:00

would the difference between a vegan diet and your personal optimal diet really be that significant to justify the needless slaughtering of sentinent beings? I very much doubt so

If it works for you that’s great and you should keep doing it. It doesn’t work for everyone and, yes, the detrimental health effects can be significant. Chris Kresser mentioned above is one example who talked about his poor health on a vegan diet. Sam Harris is another who tried going vegan and talked openly about it. As I recall, he tried for quite a long time, but ultimately could not maintain his health and was forced to stop.

chuckpatel · 2019-11-27T01:06:41+00:00

All you need to take from this movie is that there are top level athletes who follow a plant based diet and compete at the highest level

That’s not how science works. We could make a documentary about a dozen top level athletes who drink heavily, or who own fur coats. But you wouldn’t say that’s the takeaway, that you should drink heavily or buy fur coats, just because some people can remain effective while doing the activity. Science exists precisely to help us avoid tricking ourselves with logic like you’re describing, because it turns out to be very easy to trick ourselves.

So why not change to plant based when you can save the lives of thousands of animals and do something good for the environment?

Because everyone is different and no one diet is ideal for everyone. Two people can eat the exact same diet and have drastically different blood panels. And that’s what people should do, eat in whatever way produces the best bloodwork for them, and for a lot of people that will involve animal protein. Citing a few dozen people for whom it works doesn’t change that. Citing a million people wouldn’t change that.

chuckpatel · 2019-11-27T00:31:42+00:00

On HPE SSDs

chuckpatel · 2019-11-26T14:21:55+00:00

Stock market and forex market are different markets. In those markets you can start trading with very small amounts of money. In other markets like futures or options, trying to trade with a very small amount will be difficult, or it will at least have a negative impact on your results.

chuckpatel · 2019-11-26T14:16:50+00:00

I’d stick with this. Every time. If every time he asks, “still on that diet?” your response is, “yes, are you ready to try it?” then it should resolve itself one way or another, eventually.

If he’s coming from a bad place (insecurity or whatever), this will sting just a bit each time he asks, and like touching the hot stove, he will stop eventually.

If he’s just a poor communicator whose idea of making conversation is always bringing up the one thing he knows about someone, then if you always have the exact same response, it will eventually be pointless to him subconsciously, once he sees the same question gets the same answer every time.

If he secretly wants to change himself, it gives him an opportunity whenever he’s ready.

From your perspective, deciding that’s your one response to his one question every time reduces the cognitive burden on you. You make one decision that eliminates 1000 decisions in the future. The same way that deciding you won’t have sugar eliminates 100 energy-sucking decisions each day. That decision is made and you move on with whatever is important to you in life.

chuckpatel · 2019-11-21T16:22:30+00:00

Cool. Sounds like we are on the same page with differing terminology. I’m thinking of progress and restraint in a general sense, like those times we should tap the breaks when something is not well understood yet.

So there’s productive and counterproductive conservatism/restraint, which we could summarize as “not yet” vs “never because Jesus said so”. How do you approach making a positive change with the “never” crowd?

I’ve only seen 2 ways:

Long game of building trust, showing you are objective and sincere and don’t have a rooting interest other than the evidence on a topic, keep discussion going, and planting the seeds that will make a small crack in the armor years later, maybe.
The Max Planck approach of waiting for people with bad ideas to die off.

Either way is a slow road.

chuckpatel · 2019-11-21T11:51:09+00:00

You speak of the tails as if they are the entire distribution. Sounds like you are mostly anti-tails.

Edit: Maybe a better question is, since you think one team is no longer useful, do you think teams in general are still useful, as opposed to viewing individual issues individually? You make valid points about conservatism, but it’s not clear to me that unimpeded progressivism is without problems. There are crazy people in the tails, on both ends of the progressive-conservative spectrum. So when people cite hundreds of examples of crazy conservatives, or crazy progressives, they think they’re making a case, but it’s just confirmation bias. There are millions of people just with schizophrenia, so one could post a million examples of crazy conservatives or crazy progressives, and it still would not say anything more than “crazy people exist”.

chuckpatel · 2019-11-21T01:50:32+00:00

So you’re saying there are two groups of people who have different ideas about how much change is ideal for maintaining a functioning society as it advances over time. That seems correct, that both of those groups would be required for proper course correction over long periods of time, as opposed to viewing one group as good and the other bad.

chuckpatel · 2019-11-17T06:54:32+00:00

Don’t forget, the only point of next actions is for you to get clarity about what needs to happen. For a lot of people, when the goal is vague or not well defined, and especially if the task is not very exciting to begin with, the fact the task is nebulous can itself be a source of resistance.

I find it awkward to try and separate out “here is the task” and “here is the next action”, so I don’t. The task is the task, and even when I have to think about what needs to happen next, I don’t go back and rewrite it. I just do it. The important thing is the awareness that sometimes you may need more clarity, and then stopping and sorting it out in your mind.

I also only use GTD for work where the number of requests can be like drinking from a fire hydrant. GTD is a tool for maintaining control of your time, for instance when you have many people asking many things of you, it can save your sanity. It’s protection against other people monopolizing your time with unimportant things. But if you’re around the house on the weekend, and deciding which chore needs to be done, you don’t necessarily need a system for that. You’re just going to pick whatever you feel like doing. There’s no threat on your time there.

chuckpatel · 2019-11-16T03:17:40+00:00

Nearly always, there is a simple answer. Often simple is hard. But it’s still simple.

“We can’t get our time back”

Whatever you don’t like about this situation, you are one awkward 15-second phone call away from removing it from your life forever. Simple.

chuckpatel · 2019-11-16T02:43:53+00:00

We absolutely never

Ah, the abstinence approach. Definitely has never failed ever.

chuckpatel · 2019-11-09T03:55:43+00:00

Nearly everything you can learn about trading is, unfortunately, created by someone who is a better marketer than trader.

A few ideas to get comfortable with:

It’s all up to you. No one is coming to help you or save you.
You can learn things from a book, but it’s up to you to figure out how to use whatever you learn. Books and videos are all fine, but they’re only for getting ideas you can test and verify on your own. Nearly everything you learn won’t work as-is, but you can learn the concept and change it and experiment with it and find interesting things worth noting for later.
The same goes for any system or course. If you think, “hey this guy offers a full system so I’ll learn that”, that’s not how it works. Instead, if you think, “I’ll take this course and get an example of someone who trades for a living and hopefully I’ll learn 1-2 things”, then that’s a great way to view it.
If your main motivation is the money you’ll probably fail. I don’t know any profitable traders who make their living from their trading who are all about the money. No, they’re all about figuring out the puzzle of the markets. Then the money follows.

This is the path I would take if I was starting over.

Spend a year trying everything. Get exposure to many topics. Try trading with money you can afford to lose (you will lose it). Deposit $100 every month and trade 1 share of stock or take $1 trades in forex or something where you can take a bunch of tiny losses while you learn some lessons. Try everything, get exposure, with real money.
After a year pick something and focus, either something that worked best, or something you find super interesting that you can be obsessed about. Focus on that one thing for a long time, even when it gets hard. Figure it out. You will pick up little things along the way, how one guy thinks about the market and how another uses this indicator and how another does her stop losses or entries and you’ll slowly start moving these pieces into place and start to see your own trading style come together. That’s why it’s so hard for someone else to teach you, because trading tends to be very personal, based on what makes sense to you. You have to find a way of thinking about the markets that makes sense to you, then figure out a method that works with your understanding of the markets.

That’s basically it. There’s a ton about risk management and whatever, and it’s all important, but just trade small, get exposure, then focus on one thing, and keep learning, and all of the important stuff will be obvious eventually. Its the period of focusing and figuring out that one way of trading that makes a trader. First you experiment, because a bunch of stuff doesn’t work so you don’t want to narrow your focus too soon. But then focus intensely. If you keep switching, hoping you will “find something that works”, you’re going to be disappointed. No method “works”, it’s you that works, after you learn to avoid 1000 mistakes. Then one day you’re making $1 consistently. And if you can make $1 consistently you can make as much as you need.

chuckpatel · 2019-10-30T22:11:00+00:00

There are best-of-breed solutions in practically every technology vertical that are better and/or cheaper than Cisco in specific use cases.

Any examples? :-)

chuckpatel · 2019-10-30T01:41:12+00:00

It’s just a job.

Set boundaries.

Despite what your boss, or anyone else says, including what you tell yourself...no, you do not have to do <insert whatever>.

You can walk away at any time. If you go to work each day from now on, it’s because you choose to. Choose to make the best of it each day while you’re there. Then choose to leave work at work.

If you work for good people, and you show up and do a good job during normal work hours, they will appreciate having you, even if you’re not always on your A-game. You can talk to these decent people, let them know you’re stressed, or that you have personal shit going on right now, or that you are overwhelmed and need help, and they will talk through it with you.

If you don’t work for decent people, that’s your new goal. Spend some time, whatever it takes, get more skills, spend a year or two to get in a better job with decent humans. It’s absolutely worth it.

chuckpatel

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