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Hornbeliever

Burnt Ends
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Posts posted by Hornbeliever

  1. On 4/11/2024 at 2:01 PM, Pimphand said:

    Jay Koehler was my statistics prof at UT and one of my favorite teachers.  He was on OJ's defense team...

    Didn't realize he made it into law and teaches at Northwestern now.  Good for him

    https://www.law.northwestern.edu/faculty/profiles/JonathanKoehler/

    He was also my stats professor in late 90s and I remember he said that he most definitely did not prove OJ was innocent but that the sample that was proclaimed as a million to one was more like 75,000 to one.

    I remember he said how masterful a job OJ’s lawyers did because they kept proving how wrongly inflated the odds were and how clearly wrong the defense was….all so that no one would notice how ridiculous 75,000 to one (still way guilty).

  2. On 4/10/2024 at 11:23 PM, billfromlaketravis said:

    The original Roostar is off of 10, north on Gessner. They serve a chopped ribeye banh mi that is terrific.

    A lot of people like Cali Sandwiches in Midtown, but I’ve watched them microwave my sandwich before. Just a turn off for me. 
     

    I’ll defer to the board for Asiatown recommendations. 

    Many days over the past seven years, I’ve eaten lunch somewhere near 10 and between Heights Blvd and the Beltway (I don’t cross as Niko Niko is my limit).  I also love Vietnamese.

    how did i not know about Roostar?  Will need to check out next week.

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  3. On 4/3/2024 at 9:33 AM, Frank Drebin said:

    Just got a place there.  Going to be up there from Memorial Day to Labor Day.  Going to be a big change from the Roaring Fork Valley.  But I am so looking forward to it.  Really loved skiing there for first time over Spring Break.  My house is on a manmade water ski lake in between Kalispell and Whitefish.  Going to spend a lot of the summer on that lake, Flathead Lake, and Whitefish Lake. Montana is beautiful.  And the people I have met so far, our neighbors, are awesome.

    I am done spending summers in Texas.

    Sounds great and this is our plan starting in a couple of years.  If renting, how did you find your house to rent for that long stretch?

  4. I started the ag exemption process last year as a first time beekeeper.  Here was my first year journey:

    April 1, 2023:  hired someone to set up three hives at my ranchito.

    may 2023:  two hives looked to be thriving so put honey supers (small boxes for bees to make honey and not to make more bees) on top of the regular boxes.

    July 2023:  1 hive produced 30 lbs of honey so I harvested all of it.  1 hive had some honey but not enough for me to want to take.  1 hive just looked weak so figured it was dying.

    Dec 2023:  hive that was strongest got wax moths so died and I had to torch it all.  Weak hive now looks ok.  Middle hive still going ok.

    April 2024:  the two hives survived the winter and were so full of bees that I added honey supers on both.  Also, three hives being installed this week by same guy who set up my first three.

    it was a lot of fun to learn a bunch and hope my hives live and thrive this year.

  5. Anyone watched Criminal Record?  Halfway through and don’t know if I like it or don’t like it…so I guess either way I would out it at not fantastic.

  6. 28 minutes ago, TreatyOak said:

    Here is a fun website/newsletter that takes a critical look at Web 3/crypto world. Molly White is a very smart tech worker who shares the stories you might not get in the mainstream market. Her coverage of the Sam Bankman Fried trial on Youtube is fantastic. 

    https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/ 

    Can you spoiler if her critique means we are taking BTC to the moon?  If not, all her logical thoughts are dead wrong.

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  7. 2 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

    Check out honestmath.com for retirement Monte Carlo simulations. I can’t validate the accuracy of the site but some retirement gurus on YouTube have referenced it. You’re right that small percentage changes can mean the difference to running out of money or having several million left in 2-3 decades.

    i would be cautious about using your real email address or any self identifying info on a site where you’re entering your finance numbers. I don’t mean in them stealing your money but you may see unsolicited emails, calls or whatever. People don’t need to know your business.

    As for retirement I see a key element is having more than enough to easy cover your fixed costs which allows you to adjust discretionary when uncontrollable factors occur.

    That’s a great idea (monte Carlo simulations).  I need to build that into my little model but that requires dusting off my skillzzzz which I might have lost in my twenties.

    This is how old I am and CSB: my first investment banking internship in NYC was a summer of building Monte Carlo simulations on bankrupt regional cellular firms and running simulations on how many people in America would buy cell phones and then turn around and buy all-you-can use bandwidth plans versus limited minute and text plans.  Difference in those assumptions for all these little shitty companies was insolvency versus enough life to be bought out by a big boy.  A fuck ton of money was being made in buying their junk debt at 25 cents on the dollar and then betting on that junk co. being bought out by someone like AT&T where the bond would now be rated at the purchasers underlying rating.  

  8. I just turned 48 and feeling I’m 5-6 years out from retirement so I built out a retirement excel model for myself.

    I say damn does what you assume for inflation and for average investment return mess with the numbers.  The difference between inputting 3 and 4% inflation is huge, as is selecting between 6 and 7% investment return.  Compounding, yo.

    Anyways, yall put in similar ranges?  Or more conservative/aggressive?

    I said I’d die at 87, 4% inflation and 7% investment return.


     

     

  9. 3 hours ago, closetojumping said:

     

    I've got some time right now and many of the stupid tangents that all of the threads are taking have bored me, so I'm pondering topics that might be interesting to me and some of you non-idiots posting here. 

    What about a deep dive on Super Blue Chips?  And on how many calories four Arby's sandwiches have in them?.......sorry, just saw those are covered by someone elsewhere.

    I wish there was some easy to understand metric that amounts to something like stars per win during their sophomore to senior years.  I only care about NFL future because that implies they were great players during college, in theory, and that should have led to wins. Super half baked since I know attrition and transfers and injuries mess up the class calcs.  I guess I'd one day like to see something that relates overall class stars to wins since one could define how well players played to the win-loss column and not to how many had brighter future post-Texas.

  10. Just got a Pro-ject record player and decided to build a table top organizer after my first month of frustration dealing with the records and where to store them.

    Decided on cherry wood and like the teak above, surprisingly expensive.  Definitely nowhere near scale of @Spaulding Smails’s nice new table but still $.  

    Now that it’s in use, wish I had done 5 storage sections instead of the 3 with the middle section being very skinny to only fit the record that is playing at the time.  Live and learn.

    IMG_1271.jpeg

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  11. A couple weeks ago, I finally sold out of one of my bitcoins on coinbase for two reasons:  (1) to lock in a certain positive return from my 2017 complete dumb gamble and (2) to see if me selling actually meant I would get that cash in my real world account.

    I knew nothing about crypto in 2017 when I bought bitcoin and still know nothing about crypto but I do know that I like to make a small, stupid, high risk investment each year with a long holding period for said gamble.  Even through all the ups and downs of this ridiculous investment, a piece of me always thought that when it was time to sell, coinbase would ask me for some password that I forgot to write down in some "wallet" or some other nerd term and I would get no money back.

    Well, that almost happened.  Took me two weeks to prove who I am after having  to take a pic with my drivers  license and then a week later with my passport and my cash was restricted the whole time.  I had to write on sticky notes what they told me to write like I was a hostage with today's date and Russell Crowe was coming to save me.   Finally, yesterday I ended up on a three hour chat with some Indian customer service agent and thanks to Shiva and Ganesh, he unblocked my cash and I was able to successfully transfer those funds from my fantasy account at coinbase to a real bank today.

    Anyways, success.  And let's keep taking bitcoin to the moon,whatever the fuck bitcoin is.

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  12. Thanks for that.  They will be 8 and 14 and luckily, we did Acadia NP last year and the then 7 year old killed it on hikes so she won't as much of an anchor as we thought she would be....I would say anything moderate she can do so would appreciate those recs on hikes as well.  I read all your posts above and super helpful already.

    We also want to do another few days somewhere in Montana so any recs on if Bozeman or billings or something else is best would help out too.  We did Yellowstone two years ago and loved it so will do that on way down but want max Montana time.

     

  13. On 1/8/2024 at 7:06 AM, Orale said:

    This past year I put in a new well and new septic on raw land we have in the hill country. I'm happy to share whatever you want to know. We have power from the county, but I have a large grid-connected solar system on my primary house in the city so I know a bit about that. Our well is on a hilltop, so we had to go 800 ft deep which cost about $50k. The septic was pretty reasonable at $15k. Because our land has hard rock a foot under the soil, we had to do an aerobic (electric/mechanical) rather than a conventional passive septic system which is ideal. Permitting for both was pretty straightforward. If you can find land with an existing water source, that would save you a lot of headaches as water is key no matter where you find land imo. 

    @OraleNot sure how advanced you are on building and such but feel free to post your construction journey.  This stuff always interests me and I'm sure some others.

    I posted about buying raw land on hornfans or shaggy many years ago.  I remember leaving thread not as motivated and over a decade later, I'm super displeased I stopped looking (and partly because of that thread).  I ended up buying some land with a house in Fayetteville that I love years later but I was looking at winchester/round top area for raw land around 2010 and all that area has blown up in that time. 

    I even thought about buying lots of land in Tahitian village after the fire in 2011 but talked myself out of it so f me because that place is back to being nice and the $ returns would have been crazy.  

  14. Completely agree with many of the cons to owning as second home.  For example, had to drive to place yesterday to prepare pipes and the water well for the freeze.  And then I get to do that at my regular house today.  Double the fun!

    On the flip side, we did a proper American firework show for NYE that we could never do in town….obvi with all Chinese made fireworks.  And no Mom was bitching about the kids lighting bottle rockets and Roman candles and then some of the big shit (pic below).    

    Also,  I made an outdoor movie set up a couple years ago and this is where we all watched the Sugar Bowl around a huge campfire.  Great way to watch a shitty 3rd quarter.

    So my point is that this house gives us an ability to do stuff we just can’t in Houston and the cost of that is definitely a bit of work (and $).

    As for traveling and locking ourselves into one location, this is a second home and we spend roughly every other weekend here and not where we take vacations. If house was further (and more of a vacation house), we might not have same mindset.  And this place being in Fayette County, we want to get the f out of Houston and here in summer and fly north.


     

    IMG_1145.jpeg

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