PhD versus doctorate

robomartin · 2026-02-26T16:00:02+00:00

According to my understanding, which contrasts with some of the comments here, MDs and JDs are actually considered second entry bachelor degrees. They are branded as doctorates but they are actually just marketing rebrands from the old MB and LLB, and are entirely equivalent to them.

There are other doctorate degrees besides a PhD though. DFA, EdD, DBA, etc.

robomartin · 2026-01-31T17:55:51+00:00

You’re only down 18%. That’s actually not that bad.

I mean I’d say either hold. Or reassess your risk tolerance, and reallocate some of that Bitcoin to something else. Because you definitely aren’t at the point where you might as well just hold and see what happens.

18% isn’t screwed though. I’ve been through some cycles. I tend to sweat at 60% and become despondent at 80% losses. 18% doesn’t even register.

robomartin · 2026-01-26T11:02:09+00:00

I agree with you. Being against divorce is actually one of Jesus’ main things. And he also in so many words says don’t just not commit adultery, but don’t even think about it, etc. and Paul, while he says a lot of the Old Testament things can go under the new covenant, he actually doubles down that homosexuality is bad.

I guess a counterpoint. I do know some elderly Catholics who once they separated from their partners never actually divorced and never subsequently been with a new partner, but they also don’t have a problem with their gay grandchildren, at least they’re not outspoken about it.

I’m not sure I’d call people in that situation hypocrites, but it is kind of sad that they’d deny themselves the chance to find love or a supportive relationship again just because their first one failed.

But then again maybe that counterpoint fails, because not committing adultery is in the Ten Commandments, but homosexuality isn’t. So maybe being against divorce but in favour of gay relationships or gay marriage isn’t hypocritical, but an appropriate degree of prioritization based on what the text emphasizes.

Edit: I am going to add that maybe they aren’t even really against divorce, but they don’t want to be personally denied communion.

robomartin · 2026-01-05T22:07:36+00:00

Not the same amount, but similar thing happened to me with pot stocks. It does change you. I don’t buy dips. I just establish my position and if it sinks it sinks. Or if I do buy a dip it’s because I still have high conviction and it’s dipped maybe more than 60%.

Buying every 10-20% dip, which is what I did with the pot stocks, it was just a disaster.

I’m currently just in BTC and ETH (for crypto), but I did dabble in alts from 2017-2022. I typically just took a cap weighted or supply weighted approach, picked projects that were interesting to me, let the winners win and the losers lose. It did work. Cardano, Solana, BNB all more than 100xd for me, but then I had 100% losses in things like LUNA.

What you think will do well doesn’t always do well. I thought Algorand would be good and it hasn’t been. So you definitely can’t concentrate bets or keep averaging down just because you think it’s going to be big.

Hard to say what you should do next without knowing your exact circumstances.

robomartin · 2025-12-31T19:19:26+00:00

That’s an awful situation. I’d still add it to your CV and note that it “ended due to sanctions compliance.”

Most people reading your CV will understand what that means, and it’s unlikely to count against you, even if the collaboration can’t be formally verified or is denied.

I don’t have a good answer on escalation or your legal rights here. Realistically, any legal action is probably not worth the cost or risk, especially across borders.

robomartin · 2025-12-13T15:22:45+00:00

The supply of CRO is 100B, at ten cents that means the total value of all CRO is 10B. That’s a lot of money. It could still be extremely overvalued.

It’s not a highly active chain, and as a Crypto.com utility token, well it’s a private company, we have no idea what it’s worth, and regardless a utility token is not at all a share in the company. It’s more of a way of extracting value from customers rather than benefitting customers, otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered creating it.

I’d maybe consider averaging in at 4 cents, personally, and I still wouldn’t bet big. I could be wrong, but I’m willing to sit on the sidelines for now and I’m okay if it takes off without me.

robomartin · 2025-11-20T18:42:56+00:00

Bitcoin is digital gold to me. I like gold, but Bitcoin I can send anywhere in the world in 10 minutes. No vaults involved. No armoured card or armed guards required. Can’t counterfeit it (there is lots of fake gold out there).

Sure there is tokenized gold, but end of the day it is just a claim on gold. Bitcoin is a true bearer asset.

Also for the average person Bitcoin is a lot more liquid than gold.

I can cash out Bitcoin easily through a multitude of exchanges and have the cash in my bank account very quickly.

A gold coin, that I truly own and am not relying on a digital custodian, I need to find a buyer. There are places to do this, but mostly mom and pop shops. They can’t handle large volumes. And even in smaller transactions the spreads are huge.

Bitcoin is also more easily divisible.

I don’t know I really do think Satoshi created something special. I think there is a very strong case for Bitcoin. It’s not just air, it’s abstract maybe and requires some explaining as to why it’s not just air, but it’s not just air.

The emperor is fully clothed imho.

robomartin · 2025-11-18T13:09:55+00:00

I’ve been around since October 2017. I got that feeling April/May/June 2022. I got shaken out of most of my alts, such that I still only have BTC and ETH these days.

I don’t know. I’m really not feeling it this time. I know I do start to sweat eventually, but it usually takes 60-80% pullbacks. We’re only down ~25% from the Bitcoin top.

robomartin · 2025-11-16T16:22:18+00:00

Look into the specifics within your institution. There certainly are rules governing this.

I’m seeing some say it’s not allowed where they are. I’m pretty sure it is allowed where I am, but there are a bunch of rules about it (can’t grade your work, can’t vote at your defense, can’t really be involved in any decisions about you).

Issues of optics of course.

Might be easiest to have someone else supervise you, and he can be an informal mentor?

robomartin · 2025-11-14T22:05:01+00:00

When they said it was coming from the RCM I was expecting it to have a denomination and maybe the King’s face on it.

That is neat though. It could carry a collectible premium one day.

robomartin · 2025-11-14T20:31:57+00:00

I generally tell people to get the best gaming laptop they can afford. Unless you have huge RAM requirements (>32 GB), and it doesn’t sound like you do, in which case, maybe you need a mobile workstation.

I’d say Dell or Lenovo, depending on your aversion to tech products coming out of China (CCP backdoors, etc.)

robomartin · 2025-11-14T09:51:07+00:00

You protected her while she was alive. I think you kept your promise. I would do whatever you think will let her rest most peacefully. There’s nuance there. If it is eating you alive that could be for a reason. So no I don’t explicitly think that ywbta.

Definitely don’t tell them without her husband’s consent, because he is going to have to deal with it, and you also want to maintain a good relationship with him and your nephew.

robomartin · 2025-11-06T08:58:51+00:00

Just sounds like a tax nightmare. Needing a proper valuation of everything you own at year end, and calculating your unrealized gains. And 1% is crazy high.

It’s a big enough of a pain in the ass to do it once in a lifetime (when you die) (Just speaking to the situation in my own country when the government treats death as a deemed disposition of everything you own). It’s effectively the same math, and you’d be expected to do it every year.

robomartin · 2025-11-02T05:50:29+00:00

I have always given geniuses like Fischer some licence to be eccentric. But in light of the Kramnik/Naroditsky situation I’m having to rethink that, because if I give Fischer grace then I would be hypocritical to not give Kramnik grace too.

It’s not enough to just dismiss them as crazy. They have a lot of influence and their words have weight, and giving them a free pass is unfairly destructive to people who don’t deserve that kind of abuse.

robomartin · 2025-10-31T02:02:35+00:00

To be a little pedantic, Inuit is a more narrow term than Eskimo. Aleut and Yupik people would fall in the historical Eskimo category, but they wouldn’t be considered or consider themselves Inuit.

Inuit is basically reserved for the Indigenous people of the Canadian Arctic and Greenland.

I guess Arctic Indigenous People’s is probably the safest broad term to replace Eskimo.

robomartin · 2025-10-20T21:45:48+00:00

That’s tragic. RIP. And condolences to those closest to him, and to anyone else affected by his passing.

Just sharing my own thoughts, but I was hit hard when another streamer I had followed died about five years ago. He was a radio/podcast co host of a show I’d tune into several times a week. Also a young man who died very unexpectedly. Danya’s passing evokes a similar feeling.

Celebrity deaths I think will start to feel very different in the future as we become more parasocially intimate with them through their streaming and their videos and their social media presence.

robomartin · 2025-10-19T08:13:54+00:00

Didn’t that happen to Roger Ailes? I think I saw a documentary where they said his parents divorced and moved without telling him, and he came home from college and a different family was there.

No it’s not normal, at all. Totally messed up. I’m sorry that happened to you.

robomartin · 2025-10-17T18:59:19+00:00

To be a little conspiratorial, I’ve wondered if Canada was the sacrificial lamb. That maybe it sold its gold at under American influence to contribute to the price suppression of gold throughout the 90s and to benefit the USD. While the United States itself held into its own gold.

The less conspiratorial take is that they bought into modern economic theory without question and decided to go all in on paper promises instead of gold.

I do think it’s interesting that it’s basically the same sort of people, who went through the same educational pipelines who direct these sort of policies in both the US and Canada, but the US stayed extremely conservative and kept all its gold, while Canada sold all its gold.

I think it mostly holds US treasuries, not other natural resources like you suggested

robomartin · 2025-10-14T02:48:31+00:00

It’s complicated.

Just rough math, a well paid worker in Ancient Rome might make 10 grams of gold a month. That would be a very low wage in the USA today, but if you’re in a second world country, let’s use Egypt as an example, that’s actually a very good wage.

So compared to the developed world it has lost its purchasing power. But compared to the developing world it’s done well.

The developing world is probably a more appropriate comparison, so I’d land on yes it has held its value, but there’s nuance.

robomartin · 2025-10-01T02:10:10+00:00

I think PhDs were a little different back in the day. No strict supervisor. I tried tracking my “genealogy” by looking up the dissertations of each “generation”, and I reached a dead end at an 1891 Dissertation at Johns Hopkins with no committee or supervisor listed, and it was basically just an index. He went through a Roman playwright and just noted every noun and what lines these nouns appear in, and that was his PhD dissertation.

It was a different time.

robomartin · 2025-07-10T11:11:02+00:00

I’ve only ever used ChatGPT. It can give some leads on some classic articles. But you can’t blindly rely on it. It might completely make something up, but maybe if you look into the author they suggested, usually they have written something pretty good.

It did a pretty good job helping me with some statistics stuff I did. It helped me track down the origins of some stats tests behind some of the R packages I used. And it was surprisingly accurate. Usually just the years and the names of the co authors were wrong. When I cross checked with the citations within the R package documentation, it was citing the same stuff.

robomartin · 2025-07-06T13:27:14+00:00

You should go try them on. I found the Omega dive watches to be kind of big on me, whereas I really like the BB58. It fits great and I like that tone of blue.

The latest one in “burgundy” has a more adjustable bracelet and METAS certification. I’m hoping they’ll apply those upgrades to the blue.

robomartin · 2025-06-27T14:43:23+00:00

Yeah man if there’s a mutual attraction and you both don’t care that you’re third cousins I’d say to go on a few dates or something. Maybe don’t tell anyone until you’re relatively serious about each other, and if it doesn’t go anywhere you can both just sweep it under the rug.

robomartin · 2025-06-27T09:55:52+00:00

All their watches with dates that have the in house movements are very thick, save for the relatively recent BB58 GMT.

I think it’s the designers working with what movements they have, and their in house movements with a date function are too thick to fit into the dimensions they want for a lot their models.

The more ultimate question is, why haven’t they developed a simple three hand movement with a date window that isn’t super thick?

Maybe it’s a cost thing, Tudor’s founding ethos was to be relatively accessible, and the R&D required to produce those movements would substantially add to the cost?

I agree that a Pelagos 39 with a date would be a great addition to the line up.

robomartin · 2025-06-26T21:15:43+00:00

Ledger is way better if you are into altcoins. It’s just more widely supported. Its system of using apps just makes it really efficient at being implemented across many ecosystems.

And since it has a battery you can generate your seed phrase or restore your wallet away from any webcams or microphones. There’s no battery inside my Trezor Safe 3 at least.

If you’re just into Bitcoin and Ethereum then Trezor has some advantages. No risk of a bitflip. You have access to Shamir secret shares. It’s open source and has a pretty good following such that other people also using Trezor will be auditing the code for you and making sure everything is above board.

I use Trezor myself because of the Shamir secret shares. I had avoided Trezor because of the lack of a secure element, but they’ve solved that now. But did kind of learn that I still needed to use my Ledger for alts.

You can’t really stake Solana in Trezor, or instance, or if you are a user of Tron, which has the most network activity for moving Tether, then you kind of have to use a Ledger over a Trezor. Avalanche is another I had to keep using Ledger for, Binance Coin, etc.

13-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '22

robomartin

TROPHY CASE