Psychology

Term invented by Ciro Santilli, it refers to Richard Feynman, after helping to build the atomic bomb:

And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless.

Some good mentions on Inside Job (2010).

Depicted at: Len Sassaman tribute.

Won 2022 Nobel Prize.

He beats the The European Union is a failure drum pretty well.

You need separate accounts for different countries: money.stackexchange.com/questions/73361/two-banks-in-two-countries-is-it-possible-to-have-a-unique-paypal-account it's a pain.

This is a good company, first they truly helped reduce international transfer fees. They they continued to morph into a decent challenger bank.

Their Wise Interest account was amazing as of late 2023: wise.com/gb/interest/

Instant access with representative national interests and 0.29% fees.

Brick and mortar banks were way way behind in that regard!

E.g. October 2023, Wise was doing 4.87% interest after fees, while Barclay's best option was 1.16% above 5k pounds on the Rainy Day Saver (5% below). Ridiculous!

Update: On November 2023 unfortunately they more than doubled their fees from 0.19% to 0.46%:but it still was a good option to keep cash in.

This is a good concept. For the ammount most people save, having a simple and easy to apply investment thesis is the best way to go.

A person who gives financial advice, notably personal finance advice. Some of them are questinable guru-like beings, and many are on YouTube.

The financial industry does not serve society nowhere near its magnitude (London of course being the epitome of that). It serves only itself. It just grows without bound.

Dude took down a bank.

Good documentary about it: Nick Leeson and the Fall of the House of Barings by Adam Curtis (1996).

One is reminded of Annie Dookhan.

Ciro Santilli once talked to a man who had been working on high-frequency trading for the last six years.

He was quite nice.

Ciro asked him in what way did he feel his job contributed to the benefit of society.

He replied that it didn't contribute at all. It was completely useless. More than that, it so completely useless, that it was even pure. A bit like advanced mathematics, but not even providing beauty for anybody outside of the company, since everything is a closely guarded trade secret, unlike mathematics which is normally published for the vanity recognition.

And so, Ciro was enlightened.

A great mind can work in the most useless branches of finance, without the desire to improve the world, nor make it worse. Not to compete, nor be afraid, nor anxious. A Sand mandala.

Only being. Being, in the exact fraction of moment where bid meets ask.

Nirvana.

To Ciro Santilli, a key observation is:

The rich are more easily able to avoid the harm than poor and middle-class people [...] they are more likely to have large amounts of non-cash assets to shield themselves from inflation.

Clearly the rich will be much, much more shielded by keeping large parts of their wealth in shares... from this point of view, it is insane to print money!!! Tax the rich instead...

Mentions:

Ciro Santilli is extremely passionate about this issue, partly due to Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality.

Ciro Santilli's main approaches to reduce it:

One of Ciro's most direct experiences with social inequality is described at: São Remo, the favela next to USP.

We have to be careful not to make everyone poorer when trying to reduce inequality.

But as things stand as of 2020, increasing taxes on the very richest, and notably wealth tax, and investing it in free gifted education, seems like a safe bet to achieve any meaningful level of equal opportunity and meritocracy.

Ciro Santilli is against all affirmative action, except for one: giving amazing free eduction to the poor.

Notably, Ciro is against university entry quotas.

Grew tremendously since the 1990's, likely linked to the Internet.

www.cbpp.org/wealth-concentration-has-been-rising-toward-early-20th-century-levels-2 shows historical for top 1% and 0.5% from 1920 to 2010.

TODO why is it so hard to find a proper cumulative distribution function-like curve? OMG. This appears to be also called a Lorenz curve.

This is some fishy, fishy business.

A brain orgasm.

Ciro Santilli's eulogy: effortless effort