I wasn't aware you're not in the US. If your country has high capital gains taxes compared to income taxes, the balance might be different in the US. However, stamps and other collectibles have many problems:

-- Stamps can get stolen, lost, or burned in a fire. It's hard for this to happen to stocks (unless you're behind the times and have them as a pile of paper certificates)

-- If you buy a type of collectibles that you're actually interested in, your desire to keep a co llection of something you're interested in may lead to poor decision-making on a financial level

-- When buying stamps and other collectibles, you generally have to pay retail prices, and when you sell them, you only get wholesale prices. And you can sell a stock any time; selling a collectible is a big deal and takes effort.

Also, I find it very doubtful that stamps aren't subject to inheritance or estate taxes.

Usually I simmer it until there's no flavor left in the feet and they're not worth eating. Occasionally I add soy sauce, ginger, and spices, shorten the cooking time, and eat a few. The texture is very interesting but all the little bones make it take a lot of effort so I may not bother again.

I'm from Germany, here they tax gains in stock trade with a higher rate and the government tried to extend this higher rate on trade with stamps and other "art" formats multiple times, but realized its unfeasible and for now gave up. Currently you pay a whopping 25% in taxes on capital gains over ~1000$ and have other substantial losses. A few years back it could even climb as high as 50% if you were unlucky. Also you don't pay any special taxes here if you simply sell your private collection.

I think the current US tax rate on capital gains is at 0% if you earn little, 15% if your income is in a "medium" range and it can climb to 20% if your wallet is really thick.

This is not based on any personal research but on what my father told me, yet seeing how much time he is (and especially has been) spending in this field, that he keeps up to date, and that generally speaking he is a reasonably smart man, I have no reason to doubt his expertise in this topic. Naturally he's enthusiastic about this but he wouldn't warp facts. Every time I visit I unsually tend to leave with more insight in this field than I really want to. He also keeps close track on how the value of his private collection rose over the past, how it still rises, and I know what the figures look like.

Back on track, I should have made the disclaimer that I'm not really familiar with US tax law. The main point I'm making here however is that it is a very safe long term investment that is practically guaranteed to pay out substantially more than what you buy it for in the long haul. This should hold true regardless of what country you're from.

It's not a formal requirement, but I'm personally impressed by the prior accomplishments of some of the CFAR staff and some of the careers of CFAR consultants. And there is at least one person who somehow has a non-CFAR career while also working full-time for CFAR.

EDIT: Read about them here.

Has this requirement been successfully implemented for CFAR instructors?

Sure: I should have used a different term in place of "beneficial".

People alieve that nothing too bad will happen if they behave well or otherwise follow some set of rules. (I have to fight this feeling myself!) I can well imagine people having a mental picture, which they habitually use to make predictions, in which something justifies this feeling. But do they picture a deity as commonly described? Or do they picture their parents/society/church having (limited) magical powers?

I'm not sure what you mean by ‘assuming’. Perhaps you mean that we see what happens if we assume that the Bayesian interpretation continues to be meaningful? Then we find that it works, in the sense that we have mutually consistent degrees of belief about physically observable quantities. So the interpretation has been extended.

The hack generates money if you invest the "loan" into something that pays interests in less than a month. Not enough money to be worth your time, of course; but it's still infinite free money for a given value of "infinite".

I strongly advise against following this plan. Collectibles are not a good longterm investment, stamps included. That is, they tend to underperform stocks, real estate, and other investment, substantially so once transaction and carrying costs are factored in. The Wall Street Journal recently polled a number of experts about this. Their opinions were essentially unanimous, differing primarily in how bluntly each was willing to say don't do this.

That is true. However according to my experience you don't need to spend much time in the library itself if you know what you're looking for (you can always stay for the atmosphere). What takes time is going to and from the library. The value of this time obviously depends on a lot of parameters: is the library close to your route to/from some other place, are you currently very busy, do you enjoy city walks/bike-rides, etc.

I would also expect that an extremely common name, like John Adams, might have negative consequences that wouldn't be picked up by a study, if the study doesn't distinguish somewhat common names and names that are common enough to sound like cliches.

The downsides are that you have to put some significant time into this topic to know what a good deal is, learn how the market and auction houses operate and to build a diverse or highly specialized and sought-after collection that is very likely to rise in value compared to other possible collections you could compile (which overall will almost certainly rise in value too, but maybe not as much as a collection you put some thought into).

Those don't seem like substantial downsides, and ones that would be incurred already by a lot of smart philatelists.

The efficient markets hypothesis asks: why can stamps be a decent investment compared to something like an index fund? Especially since there are things like hedge funds for collectibles, and stamps are a leading suspect (along with wine and art and comic books).

I remember hearing the story of a mathematical paper published in English but written by a Frenchmen, containing the footnotes:

1 I am grateful to professor Littlewood for helping me translate this paper into English.2

2 I am grateful to professor Littlewood for helping me translate this footnote into English.3

3 I am grateful to professor Littlewood for helping me translate this footnote into English.

Why was no fourth footnote necessary?

In addition, 'John Adams' seems common enough a name that it should be possible to verify whether that specific combination has any correlated benefits.

The biggest flaw in this idea is that almost nothing in your references applies to you! They pretty much cover only black and white names, not Oriental ones. You can't conclude that a white name benefits you because it would benefit a black person. Even in the Swedish study, a quick trip to Wikipedia shows that the number of foreign-born residents from east Asia in Sweden is a tiny percentage.

Furthermore, none of the studies you quote account for switching costs since they just compare people who already have the names, except for the Swedish one, but I would expect that the switching cost as a new immigrant is much less than for someone who has been living with his name for a while.

I agree. It may be easy to avoid paying tax on the gain in value, but that does not mean one is complying with the tax law.

That said, if one is holding stamps as an investment, it is plausible that gains would be taxed at the capital gains rate instead of the ordinary rate (in the US).

Disclaimer to any reader: I am not your lawyer. I am not a tax lawyer. I didn't do any legal research. Don't rely on my opinion for any reason. Definitely don't rely on this opinion to try and pay less taxes. If this is a real issue for you, hire someone to do the research, or do it yourself.

I would say that if you have "tacit" skills but the wrong map, you might instrumentally do well within the narrow domain where your misunderstood skills work, but you have a chance for a catastrophic failure once you venture outside of it.

I agree, and think this explains a large amount of human failure. I believe that nearly everyone relies on tacit skills for nearly everything and that whether "general instrumental rationality" even exists is by all means an open question.

Did you consult a tax attorney on this? I have no idea what you're referring to when you claim you don't pay "extra" taxes on selling your stamps. Selling your possessions is certainly income and would at least be subject to income tax (and the rate would be higher than a capital gains tax rate on stocks).

I thought you might be thinking of nutrition and something like eugenics, but wasn't sure because I didn't think they fitted the criteria that well. Anyway, thanks for indulging my curiosity.