Well, as somebody who bought a lot of stock between October 2008 and April 2009, I have to point out that there is a disciplined approach to doing this: (a) set up your finances so you don't have to sell during crises (live below your means; set aside an emergency cash fund; have good insurance); (b) have a well-defined asset allocation plan (e.g., 25% bonds, 75% stocks with 40% US and 35% international); (c) when one asset class falls drastically, sell off one of the others to bring the portfolio back to plan (this is called rebalancing).

That way, if stocks fall 40% and your portfolio ends up at about 35% bonds/65% stocks, you sell the extra 10% in bonds and buy stocks to restore the 25/75 target. More generally, this forces you to sell off investments that have risen to buy those that have fallen—a strategy that's made of pure win...

Actually, not this either, because the S&P was designed before index funds too, and isn't ideally suited to them. The S&P has a committee that unpredictably handpicks which stocks go into it, and when a new one enters the index, a lot of people buy them up because the S&P index funds are forced to buy it.

A better simple idea is just to buy an index fund that invests on the whole US stock market—e.g., Vanguard's Total Stock Marked Index funds. It's also more diversified—3,500+ stocks instead of just 500.

No, a market-cap weighed portfolio has the advantage that it doesn't need to be rebalanced when the prices of the stocks change.

The Dow isn't a fund. It's an index—and it's over a hundred years old, which is the reason why it's so antiquated.

...no, it's not an adjective phrase. If it was, you'd expect to be able to use it as a predicate. You can say both "a very large house" and "The house is very large." You can say "the 50-year anniversary" but not "*the anniversary is 50-year."

"50-year anniversary" is just a noun-noun compound, like "systems engineer" (where, likewise, you can't say "*That engineer is systems").

Imagine if New York hadn't been allowed to have paved roads until there was a plan in place to pave the entire Western frontier.

Well, we actually did build not just one, but two highway systems that were designed to connect the whole country from the beginning. So yeah, actually, a lot of freeways in New York were not funded until there was a plan in place to build counterparts throughout the country. (Fun facts: first state to sign a contract to build an Interstate highway: Missouri. First state to start actually building one: Kansas. First state to open a segment of one: Pennsylvania. First state to finish all of its route: Nebraska...)

I remember back in 1995 or so when a hurricane warning was issued for Hurricane Luis (Cat 5). Governor Rosselló held a live press conference on TV, and you could tell from his face that he was scared shitless.

...and what killed 1,464 people is that neither the city, nor the state, nor the feds had any freaking plan for evacuating people out of the city who couldn't do it by themselves. And that would've never happened in Puerto Rico. I mean, (a) classify the areas of the city beforehand by their vulnerability to a flood, (b) when the hurricane warning is issued, send out dudes in vans and buses to the most vulnerable places to order the residents out and take to shelters the ones who can't get out on their own.

Bullshit. I was there for Hugo and Georges. Hugo when it hit PR was a category 3, but it barely scraped the northeastern tip of the island (close to Fajardo). The Vieques and Culebra islands got hit the hardest, followed by the eastern municipalities, and the rest of the island got off easy. My street was without power for over a month afterward.

Georges was category 3 when it hit PR, too, not a 5. That did cut diagonally right through the middle of the main island. My parent's house lost a crappy zinc roof used in an extension that they should've never made to the house.

Dude, 22 years ago when Hugo hit I was without power for a whole damn month. And I lived in a middle upper class neighborhood.

When it comes to hurricanes, the guys in PR who've got their shit down are Defensa Civil—the government emergency preparedness agency.

Eh, there's no lack of poor country folks living in houses built on flood zones in PR, and they're terrified of hurricanes.

The government however is very good at going to the most dangerous flood zones and actually evacuating people. If the PR government had been in charge of New Orleans, there would have been only a few dozen deaths from Katrina...

Yup. The most recent comparable earthquake I can recall here in the San Francisco Peninsula was the 2007 Alum Rock Earthquake, a 5.6. It was very noticeable, many people stopped working and spent the next 10 minutes chatting about it and browsing the web for information about it. It was a minor nationwide news story, meriting an AP story and brief mentions in CNN and the likes, and there were a few local stories the next day about the minor damage close to the epicenter. But then after that nobody really talks about it anymore.

A 5.9 in the east coast, well, that's a modest quake, but it's also a "Man bites dog" story.

Except that if RAII frees the memory the pointer points at, and something else is using that memory, you've just broken your program.

There are two solutions to this problem: (a) avoid sharing object references, which means that you're deep copying object graphs all the time and using more memory than you should need; (b) use a smart pointer that does reference counting—which is like GC, except crappy.

"Intent to kill" is too strong in this case. Your intent in firing a gun at somebody should be to use lethal force to prevent them from using the same. Lethal force is force that you should reasonably expect to kill the target (you can't say "Gee, Your Honor, I didn't think that shooting him would kill him"), but such force is not always guaranteed to kill them; people survive being gunshot wounds at a non-trivial rate.

Basically, you're allowed to do things that fatally endanger your attacker's life, and nobody expects you to wear kid gloves while doing it.

I think you guys are mostly just disagreeing about terminology. The thing is that using guns in self defense is shaped by both of these facts: (a) shooting somebody is always deadly force, (b) you have a right to defend yourself from deadly force with deadly force, but you don't have a right to prevent the attacker from surviving; taking an extra shot just to make sure the attacker dies is murder.

Saying that guns are deadly force means that there is no "safe" way to shoot somebody, like the "shoot him in the leg" meme would have you believe. If you shoot somebody, that person may die, period. If you shoot somebody in the leg and they die, no court will take it seriously any defense where you say that you only meant to wound them and used only wounding force and the death was a freak accident so please give me involuntary manslaughter only please. No; once more, shooting is deadly force, and you should expect the target to die.

Yet shooting somebody doesn't guarantee that they will die; a sizeable portion of gunshot victims survive. The law places a huge value on life, even the life of the attacker. If you defend yourself with deadly force, you're not allowed to prevent your attacker from surviving.

So what do you do, concretely? (a) You aim at the center of mass, because that's basically the only reliable way to hit in a high-stress situation; (b) you shoot until you can see that they are no longer a threat; (c) you're done; call 911. If the attacker lives, they live; if they die, they die.