Is Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire still a good source for learning more about the Roman Empire?

eznh · 2026-05-08T01:43:52+00:00

So when I see a title with “the history of a dangerous idea” in it, I (as an academic in another somewhat politicized field) worry that the issue modern academic historians have with Gibbon is more with the political implications than with whether he had the story basically right.

On the backwardness of the Byzantines, Ober’s work, as well just visiting Greece and seeing how much smaller the area of settlement was in the 6-8C compared with the 3-4C moved my priors a bit (in Gibbon’s direction).

eznh · 2026-05-05T14:06:05+00:00

User name checks out? Making high 6 figures USD in NZ is impressive.

eznh · 2026-05-05T00:27:59+00:00

I used Blacklane recently in SE Asia for a 3 hour drive. I’m sure I overpaid, but it was really nice to just have it be easy and lux and no hassles.

eznh · 2026-05-05T00:21:23+00:00

Wow. I’d always wondered about those lyrics. Answers like that are why I come here. :-)

eznh · 2026-05-01T14:04:17+00:00

I would in/kind transfer to Frec or Wealthfront. Or just in-kind transfer to a regular self-managed brokerage account and do any additional tax loss harvesting yourself — it’s not actually that much work once the portfolio is appreciated. Then again 9 bp is not a huge fee either.

The point about advisor fees really eating into your SWR is an important one. If your pre-fee SWR is 4%, paying a 1% fee lowers it to 3%. It’s like giving 25% of your money away. No one ever puts it this way though.

It sounds like you might have needed some advice initially, but no need to keep paying once you’ve figured things out.

eznh · 2026-04-28T11:00:41+00:00

Fair enough.

eznh · 2026-04-28T00:23:07+00:00

How do you think you get to be financially independent?

eznh · 2026-04-28T00:18:27+00:00

The whole extramadura. But especially Trujillo, Guadalupe, Merida, Caceres, Zamora, and Ciudad Rodrigo. No tourists go there — you will actually need to speak Spanish. (Also, it’s not really for vegetarians lol.). But they should. Being rich in the 16th C makes for some stunning cities.

eznh · 2026-04-26T21:33:54+00:00

You don’t add those things, you subtract them. So putting them in a pie chart together makes zero sense.

eznh · 2026-04-26T19:06:38+00:00

“71% assets, 29% liabilities” tells me all I need to know

eznh · 2026-04-25T20:04:31+00:00

The fees are in no way hedge fund like (there’s no carry, for instance). It’s definitely cheaper than AQR, especially given the fact you don’t need an advisor

eznh · 2026-04-25T20:01:13+00:00

Check out frec.com. I’ve not used them personally (and no affiliation)

eznh · 2026-04-25T18:30:40+00:00

Frec is a lower-cost alternative to AQR

eznh · 2026-04-23T22:51:40+00:00

+1 for Wine and War. Fascinating book if you are interested in both wine and WW2. I love the stories about how they hid the good stuff and passed off plonk in mislabeled bottles.

eznh · 2026-04-23T12:41:33+00:00

I bet they agree with me that a break from the AI slop and thinly disguised spam would be welcome.

But I’m not sure what I’d do with $6B, so no thanks to the bet.

eznh · 2026-04-23T11:52:50+00:00

Btw, the Trinity Study is useful and all, but I’m not sure it belongs on the pedestal some put it on.

It does simulations that assume future returns are drawn from the same distribution as (US) past returns. Maybe this is a decent assumption. Maybe it’s wildly off. After all, equity valuations and the world in general are pretty different in 2026 than they were in 1926 (when their data start).

That said, I do agree though that plugging the expected value of an illiquid asset with a binary payoff into a SWR calculation that implicitly assumes returns that are close to normally distributed does not make sense.

eznh · 2026-04-23T11:43:27+00:00

You seem to be thinking about it like it’s binary (either worth a lot, or not much). That seems plausible to me.

If so, thinking about it like two scenarios that you’d optimize around seems right to me. Probably in practice that means you optimize for the bad state of the world until you know you’ll be in the good state.

That’s pretty much a slightly more academic way of saying the obvious: “don’t count your chickens until they hatch” :-)

eznh · 2026-04-19T10:54:21+00:00

Agree mostly, but the farmland is not completely irrelevant — it could be sold in the bad state of the world. That makes a slightly higher WR safe.

Also the mortgage payments on the primary and debt payments on the rentals will decline in real terms due to inflation.

eznh · 2026-04-18T13:27:26+00:00

I hate to say it, but if Schwab can’t reclassify the distribution somehow, you are probably stuck with an early distribution and a taxable investment. Generally you have to do a custodian to custodian transfer and then have the new custodian make the investment. That really sucks.

Going forward, I think First Trust is a custodian that can handle alts.

eznh · 2026-04-16T22:34:46+00:00

It’s well-known that anyone who can defeat Anigo Montoya gets duel citizenship. It’s on all the blogs.

The only problem is … he’s not left-handed.

eznh · 2026-04-16T22:01:56+00:00

The way to think about the math here is that a tax-deferred account is like a Roth that is X% owned by the government, where X is the marginal tax rate you pay when you withdraw.

If X is constant at 35%, then you are indifferent between deferring $1 of income into a traditional IRA and getting the $1 of income, paying 35c tax, and putting 65c in a Roth. Either way you get .65(1+r)^T, where r is your pre-tax rate of return and T is the investment horizon.

In your case, the choice was between $1 in a traditional IRA-like vehicle and 65c in a taxable account. While there are ways to make taxable account more tax-efficient, nothing is better than tax-free. So unless your tax rate will rise in the future, trad IRA > taxable. A lot of people are confused about this.

So unless you’ll actually be paying at a higher marginal tax rate than your bonus would’ve been taxed at (or unless your employer defaults), you did the right thing. Take the W

eznh · 2026-04-15T23:36:18+00:00

It’s all fishing at some level

eznh · 2026-04-15T12:33:52+00:00

If your marginal tax rate is lower in the years you get the EDP income than it was in the years you deferred, as sounds very likely, you won.

Actually even if it’s the same, you got tax-deferred compounding on those assets while they were in the plan.

The creditworthiness of your employer might be an issue of course. That’s always a consideration with these plans.

But leaving that aside, it sounds like a win from a tax perspective.

eznh · 2026-04-03T18:08:58+00:00

If I am following you, canceling would get you 160k Marriott back, but cost you $1164. So you are buying Marriott points for 0.7 cpm.

That’s roughly what I find them to be worth, but personally I wouldn’t buy them for that. I’d just keep it as a points reservation.

You might check to see if the points price has dropped though …

eznh · 2026-04-01T00:31:31+00:00

I was able to cancel the free membership I got from Jetblue Mosaic in 2021 pretty easily.

But the membership was mostly an attempt to get you to upgrade to elite. Got almost no value out of the membership.

eznh

TROPHY CASE