True satanic black metal

Although this video proves the worst nightmares of Ironmistress, these guys are our last, best hope against the imminent coming of Islamic theocracy!

Trip to Norway

A fountain in a park near National Theater.

A street in Oslo.

A haunted soul was trapped to the wall of National Theater subway station.

Flytoget between Oslo and Airport was new and shiny.

When I arrived at 01.00 AM to Oslo railway station, the demographic I saw around me was 50% non-white, mainly young middle eastern and black faces. Why would any country opt to let in such amounts of immigrants from Africa and Middle East, when they are known to increase crime, welfare payments, white flight and in the worst case neighbourhoods where the police can't enter? Especially as demographic changes can never be rolled back once they have happened.

In the daylight it was a beautiful Nordic city, with lots of scenic spots I had no time to tour because the schedule was very busy.

The oil money was visible everywhere. The prices were expensive: The train from Oslo Airport cost 22e, and a tram ticket cost 5e, which is quite much. The train had screens displaying news and stock prices. The train seats had misleading investment ads, where a silver vendor told that silver has produced the highest return on investment during the last few years. There are many investment banks in Oslo.

Compound interest

Early retirement is not my goal, since I don't have these kinds of sums to spare. However, it is a common goal in many investment blogs and a fun scenario to speculate.

This calculation is from Coder's investment blog. You save 10000€ each year and get the historical stock market average return of 8%. It doesn't take inflation into account.

1. year: 10 000,00€
2. year: 21 600,00€
3. year: 34 128,00€
4. year: 47 658,24€
5. year: 62 270,90€
6. year: 78 052,57€
7. year: 95 096,78€
8. year: 113 504,52€
9. year: 133 384,88€
10. year: 154 855,67€
11. year: 178 044,12€
12. year: 203 087,65€
13. year: 230 134,67€
14. year: 259 345,44€
15. year: 290 893,08€
16. year: 324 964,52€
17. year: 361 761,68€
18. year: 401 502,62€
19. year: 444 422,83€
20. year: 490 776,65€

Notes about the series:

• In the end, the yearly gain is 40000€. The tax percentage is about 27% (assuming 1/3 dividend income with tax percentage 20% and 2/3 capital gains income with tax percentage 30%.) This is quite well-off.


• In the beginning, savings dominate. The faster you can save the first 100000€, the better. Speed up the process by living with austerity for some years.


• In the end, interest dominates. Around year 10, interest and savings provide equal boost to capital. At year 15, you might just as well stop saving and concentrate on researching means to increase interest.


• If you take inflation into account, you have to wait a few more years. A comment in the original blog suggests 2% inflation, which would require waiting 4 more years to get the same real income.


• After 10 years, you can already live on 1000€ a month. Then again, social benefits allow that much faster at the next round of layoffs if that is what you want to do with your life.


• At around year 15, getting laid off is a lottery jackpot. With income-based unemployment benefit and stock-market gains together, you earn the desired yearly sum much earlier while waiting the compound interest to work its magic a little slower.


• If you plan to retire to a low-paid meaning-of-life work, the right time to switch is around year 12. At that point, the main thing left to do is to wait. Saving has little effect. You might just as well start the lifestyle adjustment, as long as you don't touch the capital.


• If you are near retirement, you need less. After retiring, you only need to make (desired income - pension). Before retirement, you can eat on capital as long as you still have enough at the point of retirement.

Why this is not my way

Social deprivation and lack of externally imposed structure would drive me crazy. I experienced some of it during the two summers spent writing my own website. I talked to other people once a week and went to sleep at 6am. I am the kind of dog who needs a little whip sometimes.

This calculation horrifies me and falls to the category "be careful what you wish for, since you might get it."

Riches and bitches

Summary: This post investigates myths and anecdotes, which link male wealth to sexual market value.

Suppose I found a way to get wealthy, but it required huge amounts of work.
Would it be worth it? Would it be progress towards my long-term goals in life?

Mere correlation is not enough

Ice cream doesn't cause drowning despite both being common during hot weather. Similarly tallness and good social skills help both popularity among women and promotion prospects to better paid jobs. Instead of correlation, we need to find out the mechanism through which wealth affects marrigeability. That are better described in anecdotes rather than statistics.

You can buy status symbols with wealth

The traditional claim is that wealth enables you to buy status symbols and status signals attract women. This does not stand much closer scrutiny.

On the small scale, signaling wealth by buying women drinks in a bar labels you as an exploitable dupe. I have noticed it myself that I am instantly dubious towards people who insist on giving things away, asking myself "What does he want in exchange? Am I now in an unwritten agreement, where he expects something unreasonable from me, starting drama when he doesn't get it?" Ritualized, reciprocal giving like a house party host making food to guests is an exception.

There is some evidence that big houses are beneficial. Years ago there was an article in NY Times where women rejected potential boyfriends after seeing their apartments. In a later chapter there is a personal anecdote about deriving benefit from a summer cottage.

Regarding cars and watches which lose half of their worth the moment you walk out of the shop we have another type of signaling problem.

Do you signal wealth or future time orientation?

People have different financial future time orientations (FTO). On the one end are the spendthrifts who live from hand to mouth. The other contains millionaire-next-door types who save most of their income and never spend it in their lifetime. Jantunen described the shades of grey last year.

According to research, couples with similar financial FTO have least arguments about money. Although short-FTO and long-FTO persons are attracted to each others as they remedy each others' weaknesses, their marriages are unhappy. If you become wealthy by being a tightwad, it is stupid to signal wealth by flashy cars and expensive clocks, since it attracts attention from wrong kinds of people.

	Short FTO	Long FTO
What to signal?	Wealth	Future time orientation, since wealth comes to the working thrifty in the long run.
What new cars, iPhones, etc. signal	The person is wealthy as he can afford it.	The person will not become very wealthy, if he wastes mediocre income on expensive consumption.
Used car, using coupon codes	The person is too poor to afford a better car.	The person is not wasting money when just as good cheap alternative is available.
Company having headquarters in run-down area	The company is not doing very well.	The company uses its money productively rather than on shiny surfaces.

This chapter concluded that signaling wealth by buying expensive items and services is a sucker's bet, so striving for wealth for this purpose is useless to begin with.

Personal experiences about the wealthy

Once I was in a meeting of relatives, where about 30 persons from three generations gathered for a weekend in a summer cottage. There were two millionaires present. Self-made man was an entrepreneur who had found a company and grown it organically to over 100 employees. His wealth was measured in tens of millions. Nokia millionaire had had a hard life when young. During post-war poverty he had learned the motto "Don't buy what you need, buy what you can't do without." Millionaire-next-door lifestyle enabled him to get into Hymy (a Finnish scandal sheet) list of Nokia millionaires in 2000. He wasn't a fool who puts all his eggs into one basket, so he probably owns a million euros now.

The self-made man also had alpha personality; he hosted the meeting in his cottage, and showed various expensive items in there (which he could well afford, as they took so small % of his income) and was also one of 2 skilled musicians in gathering. Before getting introduced to his wife, I first though she was one generation younger, so much effort she had seen to stay slim and good-looking.

The Nokia millionaire didn't seem to use his wealth to buy anything you couldn't get on average industrial worker's salary. His wife is fat and their relationship is not that good.

It seems that wealth increases sexual market value if you use it to play yourself into higher status positions, for example by hosting a party. Having wealth to put into apartments and summer cottages is an advantage, but we still have no evidence that non-real-estate spending increases male attractiveness. Without social skills, wealth is useless.

Wealth as an abstract measure of human worth

OkCupid Trends is a blog which posts data mining articles about the dating site OkCupid. They showed a correlation between male income and unsolicited contacts. Also in this Feissarimokat article high income in itself is an argument for male fitness. ("Mika tekee yli 100 000e vuodessa plus Nokian bonukset. Kummatkaan eivät olleet mitään tyhjäntoimittajia toisin kuin pari lusmua joita en nyt nimeltä mainitse...")

This is a genuine riddle: Women seem to value high income in itself, while not valuing "beta providers" who use that high income to buy them things.

Maybe what women really value is "millionaire personality" which is characterized by learning alpha behaviour from young age and working at management jobs which both pay well and signal high social skills. This would mean that wealth has to be accumulated at young age in order to have any effect on personality. This is in line with my personal experiences about the wealthy.

You can buy sex with wealth

This post is about attracting a spouse into a long-term relationship, so buying sex for an hour doesn't count.

According to Roissy, paying for sex because you can't get enough for free signals low attractiveness. Done regularly it definitely is a huge waste of money.

However, women's preference for preselection complicates the picture. Married men are twice as likely to visit prostitutes than singles. (Sources: A Finnish prostitute wrote that 75% - 80% of her customers are married while only 56% of men aged 30 - 65 in 2006 were married) It is possible that some character trait both makes men visit prostitutes and also makes them better at attracting spouses.

It definitely isn't wealth, as married men always say that family takes all their money. The character trait may be a well-developed dark triad. Or maybe not being fully dependent on wife for sex makes the husband less needy, making the marriage last longer.

Millionaire couples

Thomas J Stanley gathered statistics and interviews from American millionaries for his book. He found out that 90% of them are married. Marriages have lasted on average for 28 years.

This research is the polar opposite of Roissy. The couples co-operate to accumulate wealth and the men say that they couldn't have amassed the fortune without help from their viwes. It also confirms that the truly wealthy have long-FTO lifestyle rather than need to signal wealth. Instead of dumping the loser, the women tough it out with their men in times of hardship, leading to success in the long run. This is so different from what I hear from other sources that I doubt the honesty of this source.

Conclusions

The link between male wealth and marrigeability is highly muddled. Character traits which enable high earnings seem more important than the money itself. Different signaling systems for short and long FTO compilicate the picture further. Becoming a millionaire seems to get you married with 90% probability, but the anecdotes sound too good to be true, casting doubt on the reliability of the source.

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Before entering corporate world I thought that programmers build the systems of the information society. That the software I develop would have users. This way, my skill and work would have a positive impact on society. It wouldn't be glamorous but it would be meaningful.

Looking back at the last 4 years, only for 4 months did I worked on systems, which were delivered and had reasonable usability. Other projects were discontinued, kept going on and on without shipping date or were prototypes to begin with. One 8-month project was delivered, but with so lousy usability that people probably used other means to access those features.

This means that on average 1 month each year was spent on productive work. The only trace from the remaining 11 months are the numbers on my bank account.

Work with no external impact produces a nasty ethical implication: The duty ethic where you get paid for doing your job becomes meaningless.

Since I am a leech on society's resources anyway, I might just as well leech for maximal personal advantage: raising the generous Finnish unemployment benefit, learning how to transfer logical talent (talent in the biblical sense: advantages which God gave to you at birth for implementing His will on earth) from value-creating positive sum skills into zero sum stock market gambling while listening to satanic black metal and blowing the dividends on frivolous and inappropriate pole dancing hobby. This way, I would become one of those sinister "market forces" which make your life miserable with demands for efficiency, privatize gains and socialize losses, destroy the environment, spike your food with E-codes, make the police shoot demonstrators in Spain and worsen your salary and working conditions in the race to the bottom.