GAME05

Just finished Schitt's Creek on Netflix. Started slow but it grew on me, and they did a good job slowly developing the characters over time. Every time Hollywood portrays a middle-of-nowhere town, it's amazing how many beautiful people are walking around.

I'm amazed Modern Family has lasted so long. The characters are all so one-note and lack any real depth at all. I liked the Big Bang finale, though. Or maybe I'm still sour from How I Met Your Mother that I was just happy the writers didn't do anything crazy and kept everyone on a reasonable path. It was a nice nod to how they were all friends and I don't think it needed anything more.

I've been listening to more rap music since I'm starting to work out. Ordinarily don't like rap because of the content and language, but I like NF a lot, too. Really smart lyrics and clean. Propaganda is another guy you might want to check out.

Eh, modern country isn't anything like the classic stuff, anyway. Modern country is just regular rock music but with the words "tractor" and "beer" thrown in every now and again. And the branding of it all is more insulting than anything, as if rural folks can't even show up to formal events in anything better than blue jeans and your best Tuesday button-down. But I guess that's what happens now that all music is made in a factory somewhere. The Tallest Man on Earth came near me, but I didn't feel like driving four hours to see a concert by myself. But he's probably become my favorite if you're into alt folk or folk-acoustic stuff.

Sure seems like the case with so many shows. As soon as some main character gets married, the show loses its edge.

Yeah, only one headset on a console and there's basically no games where one uses the headset and the other uses a regular controller. But yes, what the person sees in the VR headset gets displayed on the tv for anyone else to see. Five square feet of space is roughly what you'd want playing a VR game. I've been able to reign that in the more I play. I've also seen brand new people to VR use a good bit more room because they move around more--it takes some people a bit to realize they don't have to physically walk toward something in a game. I've seen people fall, so take the coffee table away until you get your legs. It's more fun to stand up and play, but you can also put a chair in front of the camera and sit on that if there's worries about falling. I've bumped into my overhead lamp once, lightly touched a wall, but haven't hit anything hard or broken anything. But I have heard of people punching their televisions playing Creed. Unless you're in a space that is particularly cramped, injury or punching things isn't a tremendous concern. I've begun standing on a bath mat so that I can tell when I've stepped off my mark without looking. Since you can't have dual headsets, I can't think of too many games off the top of my head which would be particularly competitive against another person in the room. If you don't care about regular video games at all, something like the Oculus or the Vive might be a better VR unit instead of the PS4 because you wouldn't have to buy a pricey video game console just for VR. I'm not sure about the particular computer processing requirements for those headsets, though.

"Rule #1" by Phil Town is a favorite book of mine. There's a lot of "Get rich in minutes per day!" nonsense he peppers in throughout, but all in all it's a good intro on analyzing a company and evaluating its value vs. list price. Dataroma is a great website I like to use, which tracks the buys and sells of $100M+ investors since they have to report them to the SEC. There was a study done by UNLV which tracked Warren Buffett's buys and sells for 30 years when they first became public. If you just copied him and bought that stock at its highest price that day, and then sold it when the sell again became publicly available, at the worst sell price that day, you'd still have had a return of 20%. On the site I don't like to use the investors who own a lot of companies because they're more active than I want to be, but instead follow the folks who only own a few companies because they are more buy-and-hold people. I also like to use Graham Number calculators for an initial quickie valuation. I'll also note which I've probably done on this thread before, that oftentimes public libraries have subscriptions to financial sites. For Town's book you need 10-year data, and free places tend to just give you 5 before they want money. But I go through Middleton's library and use their subscription to Morningstar at no cost to me.

When it was released, Firewall Zero Hour was the best game on PSVR. But players have now discovered, that if they're the host for their team, they can leave the console on and just walk away, accruing points for themselves on a winning or losing team, even though they never participated in the game. It's been happening a lot. Astro Bot just came out for the PSVR and a lot of people are calling it the game that finally starts to sell VR units, it's supposed to be that good. Though PSVR is two years old now and it would seem that people have already made up their minds whether they're going to get one or not. I like mine and barely ever play 2-D games anymore, but at the same time I play games much less now. You have to be so much more active playing VR and usually I just want to sit and relax. The next iteration is expected to come out in two years with the PS5, but it's going to be a tough sell to be spending $800 for both the new console and the new VR headset.

A thought came up after I just got a "Your password has been blocked" email from Fidelity (I haven't used it in a long while). But if you've got many thousands of dollars in an online investment agency like them, you've just gotta trust that the double-authentication you have on your account is secure enough? If for whatever reason someone was able to access your computer, isn't that a really big risk with that much money?

After Bravo Team was a total bomb for Playstation VR, Firewall Zero Hour has come out and has been an immediate success, especially being basically the first FPS game on a VR platform. Good to see. We'll see in a month or so, though, as VR servers tend to become deserts immediately. Only one game style right now, but I hear the developers already have another game type built, but they don't want to fracture the playerbase until they know for sure if there will be enough people online. I've only played a little bit of it so far, and nothing online yet. I tend to get jumpy when I see an enemy with every new FPS I play, and it's been especially so in VR, so I want to play against the computer some until I relax more. Still hesitant about what the online commentary is going to be like, because I've quit playing games like Call of Duty because the people online were so terrible. Hearing a young kid yell racist stuff the whole match or having to listen to someone's music, or bad players getting called out after every match really takes the fun out of online play.

I've seen news articles which said the same thing, that the top top people make six figures. But it also means playing 12-14 hours per day on Twitch and maintaining an active Youtube account. Also helps to be good at the game, have a good personality and/or be female. I've watched a little bit of Twitch. Battlefield is a favorite game of mine, so there's one person on there who streams daily but also doesn't cuss while playing. It's neat watching someone play who is a world better than me. Or I'll use it to watch a stream of a game I'm thinking about buying to see what it's really like.

Playstation VR has a new virtual DJ game out called Electronauts. I don't normally even like that kind of music, but darn that was fun!

I'd heard you can pull the principal out of a Roth for a home purchase. So maybe the best bet is to do that, accept whatever debt it takes to pay for the remainder of the purchase, and then buy the rest in full once I'm 59.5. I invest the minimum in the work 401k, which amounts to 12% plus a 5% work-throw-on. But I plan to do the rest myself, though that won't happen for another year because of a car purchase.

I have a question for anyone who might understand taxes better than I do. I will have to buy a home/condo or rent when I retire, which will be before 62 years old (maybe 56?), which means I can't pull from an IRA to pay for it. What would be the best way to save for this while paying the fewest taxes? All I can think is regular savings, but yearly capital gains would really cut into the total savings.

So far it's looking like Hulu will pick up Last Man for an abbreviated final season.

During Police Academy someone asked a detective if she watched COPS. She said she did at first but now it was like turning on the tv only to be right back at work. I still like those shows, though. Especially Appalachian Outlaws because the locations are a 20-minute drive for me. BTW, you touch the back of the car for two reasons: One, because if you get killed your prints are on the car, and two: to check that the trunk is shut in case of ambush. I'd play Reno 911 24/7 if it ever came to Netflix.

Well, I'm about finished with the book Rule #1 by Phil Town. The first 30 pages of the book is a lot of "Only 15 minutes per week! Make money guaranteed!" and the usual bad salesman nonsense. Common sense says none of that is true, as with the example he gives of a couple buying a stock conveniently at a low point, selling at all the peaks, and repeating. But to his main points, I like the approach to evaluating a stock for the long term, what to look for and how to value a stock based on those numbers. Ideally, Town requires 10, 5, 3 and one-year numbers in EPS, Sales, Equity, Cash and ROI in order to look at the moat of a business. He notes that having less than this increases the risk and lessens probability. I won't be in a position for many months yet to be buying anything, but I was spending a long time this morning just going to many different sites and at least trying to find those numbers. I could find five-year, and Fidelity had 8-year numbers on AAPL, but 10-year numbers are all locked behind paywalls. But I found a blog post which mentioned many public libraries have subscriptions to Morningstar's Premium services. And sure enough, it looks like my parent's home library does, and offers it from home computers using the card number. So check your local library and see if it does and not pay $30/month. Town also has you look up Future EPS Growth Rate and Estimated Future PE (along with current EPS, which is easy to find). I haven't attempted to look for those yet. Once I finish Rule#1, I think I'll pick up The Manual of Ideas by John Mihaljevic and Active Value Investing by Vitaliy N. Katsenelson

The Good Place--very engaging storyline. The Season One finale was a great ending. I thought it dipped a little bit the next season, but it's picked up again. Superior Donuts--Ever have one of those shows you watch but don't know why? One you fully recognize is garbage but for whatever reason you still use it as a time-killer? Don't get me wrong, if you haven't seen it yet, don't bother. Baskets--It's a good show, though I haven't bothered with the last couple of seasons for some reason. Bob's Burgers--The best comedy on tv. The characters really grow on you. Fresh off the Boat--It's a decent show. The Last Man On Earth--I hated the first season apart from the finale, but since then it's been really good. I haven't liked many of these current Mexican house episodes, but all in all it's been really good. To a degree they're stuck trying to have celebrity episodes to boost ratings and try not to get cancelled, when the writers would otherwise be moving the story forward more.

Can someone correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there an exception to the early withdrawal penalty of a Roth IRA in order to purchase a house? I've finished paying my total debt, but don't yet have enough to start investing with. So I'm devouring investment books and also trying to figure out just where to put my savings. Challenging part is I'll retire somewhere between 55-60, so not old enough to start pulling from an IRA, but I'm currently in work housing, so I'll need to rent/buy a place to live. Also thanks for the advice Nate82. I think as I learn more I'll become more confident in how to do things myself along with how to do it that I suppose I wouldn't really need an analytics tool to do what I should be able to do myself. Plus if I don't know how to do it myself I shouldn't be using a tool to self-invest in the first place and at that point an Index fund would be the better option. Buffett has said "You should invest as if you can only do 20 trades in your entire lifetime," so I don't plan on being crazy-active buying and selling in the first place. And just to have it posted, here's a link to Buffett's annual letters to his shareholders, which are all a must-read and included the one written last week: http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html

My folks rent out their second house when they're not there. They pay to have it listed on a site, pay for the property manager, and pay for the cleaning lady to come in after. For the most part it pays the monthly mortgage but isn't any real profit-earner. I'd also imagine the insurance is pretty steep since you've got to replace damaged furniture. I think if I were going into property, it would be purchasing a larger plot of land to hunt on, camp, and for firewood. You take the hit from the property taxes but the value increases as nearby towns grow larger. I see rental property as one of those things where it isn't much of an investment if I can't somehow add value to it, myself, whether that's from knowing how to fix things yourself or other tricks to avoid higher costs. ---------------- I was looking at the stock analyzer Old School Value yesterday. Not cheap at somewhere around $30/mo, but I think when I start being able to put real money away per month, that would really help me to figure out stuff like the Graham Number without near as much work. My usual route is to start with DataRoma, find some interesting recent buys, and then analyze those myself. The downside to it is I lose some time in waiting to see what the Superinvestors have done instead of noticing something right away on my own, but the upside is I'm letting smarter people than me make the initial decision, and I think that's still an overall plus.

One of Charlie Munger's basic rules for investing is not to invest in an industry you don't understand, so that pretty much puts me out of Bitcoin. I could see it succeeding if the dollar starts to fail as the world's standard currency, but I'm not betting my own money that that's going to happen anytime soon. My father made a pretty quick $1k off of SiriusXM. I don't think he has much faith in it long-term, but it's one he seems to keep an eye on and just noticed it was undervalued.

I've also heard Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare has a great single-player campaign. I actually own the game but haven't played the single-player yet. I've played the campaign for Black Ops III and it wasn't anything special. But you've got older iterations like Ghosts which you could probably get for a decent price. --------- I brought my Playstation VR machine home for Christmas and it was pretty fun to see the reactions people had to it. Everyone thought it was pretty neat and a lot of funny moments. I went into YouTube and loaded up some VR roller coaster videos and my brother had the idea that we should all stand up and watch it. It wasn't easy to keep your balance.

TooLiveBrew, you may also want to check out Battlefield1 and maybe Battlefield4. BF1 is a WW1 shooter. I used to play COD but I wasn't any good and didn't like the insults with the online community. With Battlefield, kill/death rate isn't crucial and certain classes get a a good amount of points for helping teammates. If you want to see how a game plays, download Twitch (free). I know I mentioned it earlier in the thread, but see Captain Shock's youtube videos if you're into Call of Duty. Great for strategy and map awareness which will definitely help your kill/death rate.

I have a lot of job-bouncing on my resume, too. At one interview the guy looked at it and said "You sure have a lot of jobs here, but I can see they're all working toward something and you're advancing." I think that's appropriate if you've got a lot of jobs and the direction I'd take with explaining. You've bounced around because you're working toward something, every new job was some kind of advancement toward that goal, and it just so happens that this job I'm interviewing for is my end-goal. So you'd still be able to talk about sticking around even though your history doesn't show it. But I totally agree with nate82, loyalty isn't a factor anymore. Companies no longer see layoffs as a last resort and won't hesitate letting someone go, so employees coming and going is only fair. Like telling your wife you really enjoy going clothes-shopping with her, "I could see myself retiring here" is just one of those things you're expected to say but everyone involved knows it's a lie.

That comment really stuck out to me. I don't know how many people could really say that about their job. When you talked about your current job you went right into what you like about it and didn't really mention any negatives. When you started talking about the new job the first things you listed were the negatives. I get it if the pay raise represents a significant boost to your lifestyle, but if it's not enough to make for any real change, I doubt you'll be factoring that into your "Did I make the right choice" decision later on. You mentioned neither job is in your long-term future. Do the new and additional duties of the new job make you more marketable for your future career? SuperCollector makes a good point about the money, which would make the decision come down to additional job responsibilities and how much those are worth vs. a job you already enjoy. And if neither company is permanent, how much can those new duties really be worth? The other option, though not always wise to do, is if you really start to lean toward the new position, present the option to your current boss and use it as leverage to get another benefit. Maybe it's a slight raise, or maybe you can ask them for more tuition help to cover (in some part) classes which would benefit you in your next career.