Philadelphia Reflections

The musings of a physician who has served the community for over six decades

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Financial Planning for a Long Retirement

How should individual investors ensure they have enough money for retirement?

Such a person is often a professional or entrepreneur who has worked to accumulate the wealth. Legions of "advisors"line up to take this money and manage it or else to sell "products" that promise to solve some problem or other. Without this background, extra savings will be needed, to buy advice. And advice is not invariably reliable.

A person who has created his/her career and its wealth from scratch, can likely manage investments themselves, or at least supervise the process from a position of strength from observation. Reliable advice is not always cheap.

This collection of articles explains to the individual investor how to take control of their wealth. They may eventually decide to look for help from an advisor but they will retain control of their assets and they will know what to do.

Financial Planning videos on YouTube

Force Justifying the Use of Force

Once a group of people reaches an agreement about governance (or, become convinced that certain specified varieties of force will put an end to unspecified force), the stage is set to impose conformity upon those who prefer persuasion. The justification is almost always the same: force is offered to justify making the use of force unnecessary. Except for the indoctrination of children, the prior use of force is just about the only justification for forcible responses. There's a Quaker sound to that because it introduces an unproven suggestion that all force might begin with the training of children.

Even an approximation of that suggestion seems to fit the facts of fierce tribes like the Vikings and the Romans permanently switching to notoriously pacifist ones and goes on to include others like the Tibetans and the Japanese, and Germans. Unfortunately, it must also mention the early Quakers themselves, who have a history of cavalry troops in the English Civil War, Confederate sympathies in the American Civil War, and conflicted allegiances in the "Good War", World War II. The history may not be an undiluted one, but contains numerous threads of many switches in nature from a revulsion against violence, or reversion to it, nevertheless too rapid to seem plausible as either mutation (on one hand) or pure switches of reasoning, on the other. Conversion by childhood observation and rebellion, at least, seem more plausible mass-change agents.

Originally published: Friday, November 24, 2017; most-recently modified: Friday, May 17, 2019