Yes, I find it amusing how one style would be insistent that strikes should be on an exhale, and another style would be just as insistent that the only right way to strike is on an inhale :-)
And, yes, tense-up-and-stop-breathing is one of the first things novices need to be trained out of.
Having tried half a dozen styles, I've met to find one that suggests striking on the inhale. Citation? Unless it was a joke and I missed it.
Emphasis on kiai varies tremendously, but one of the common themes is that you breathe out for pushing and breathe in for pulling - in/out as an analogy both breathing and movement to help keep your whole mind and body focused on a coherent action. Also, exhaling when you get hit (or just before) tightens muscles in the torso which can be protective.
Basic question: if every stock, bond, and government debt investor started actually believing the obvious advice and buying index funds and holding for the long term, where would the stock prices themselves come from?
Yes, but don't forget to put the expected costs of home repair in the spreadsheet (repair costs are implicit in rent).
Very true. I did. I forgot to mention that; The rule of thumb people give seems to be to assume you'll spend 1% of the home's value per year on maintenance. I assumed 2%, on the assumption that at first there would probably be lots of little things cropping up and I have no handy skills at all.
An excellent list, agreed on all points.
On homes: yes, assuming you buy with a mortgage, these are short-term risky, but they are also long-term safe. This also means they are short-term high-expected return and long-term lower return. On average home prices rise at just slightly above the inflation rate (in my area a little faster right now, about 3%). So when I bought a $335k house with 5% down (<4% interest, 30 yr mortgage), that means my equity (initially ~17k) rose by close to 80% in the first year. Factor in closing (read: transaction) costs and it's still an expected 50% return. But that will fall to 3% over 30 years once my equity rises to 100%. And in my case, the mortgage payment + taxes was already hundreds of dollars less than my previous rent (and the mortgage payment will never go up), interest and property taxes are tax deductible, and my state has programs to significantly reduce the costs of PMI. I stared at a lot of spreadsheets before pulling money out of my brokerage account to buy a house.
Sure, the problems with the physics are right in there with bothersome things that Harry says that you could still justify, starting with the non sequiturs about conservation of energy when McGonogall turns into a cat.
I disagree with su3su2u1 (the tumblr author) about levitation; that doesn't violate conservation of energy if it's mediated by a force, and why shouldn't it be? On the other hand, turning into a cat violates conservation of mass (or would appear to, and that should be easy to check with a bathroom scale), which (via E = mc²) translates into a huge energy violation. But bringing up the quantum Hamiltonian? FTL signalling? Su3su2u1's analysis is correct.
The justification for this is that Harry is 11 and has only a vague idea about how physics actually works. But then it's hard to tell what we should learn from Harry and what we should ignore. (For that matter, I don't even know if Eliezer knows better than Harry or not.)
"But bringing up the quantum Hamiltonian? FTL signalling? Su3su2u1's analysis is correct."
Is it? Noether's theorem implies the Hamiltonian is conserved. The Hamiltonian is the quantum operator that give you the energy of a system. If energy conservation is violated, either the basic equations of quantum mechanics don't hold, or (magical) physics is not time invariant. I'm not saying Harry is being technically precise but he's not completely wrong, either.
As a point of interest, wasn't it Merlin's original intent that, at minimum, everyone mentioned in a prophecy should have access to it? It was only centuries later that the Unspeakables sealed the prophecy records away, so why does the Line of Merlin Unbroken have a function for bypassing that seal, how does anyone know this, and why is using it forbidden?
The Line may not - in ch 86 Dumbledore hints he got in via phoenix travel:
"You took James and Lily there? " Minerva said.
"Fawkes can go to many places," Albus said. "Do not mention the fact."
Harry has to some extent undone the work of Merlin. Merlin's interdict ensures that the most powerful magics slowly die out of the world as wizards and witches die with their secrets. Harry's scheme for immortality in the magical world puts a stop to the losses, and allows magical knowledge to be kept as it is re-discovered, however slowly. Previously the loss rate exceeded the discovery rate. I think that is about to be reversed. And the Interdict of Merlin was put in place to avoid a prophesied destruction of the world.
Ch. 80
And when (the legend continues) the Seers continued to foretell that not enough had yet been done to prevent the end of the world and its magic, then (the story goes) Merlin sacrificed his life, and his wizardry, and his time, to lay in force the Interdict of Merlin.
Recent chapters make me wonder what "and his time" really means, as well as "the world and its magic."
I can understand destroying the world, but how can the Interdict make the loss of the world's magic less likely? Actually, are "magic" and "the world's magic" likely to refer to the same thing? Is the source of magic a physically embodied thing, and if so is it on Earth?
My guess is that he ignores this site completely these days, except for the Main posts, so better post what you want him to see there. Also, he replied to this particular point in r/hpmor.
About 10-15 chapters ago he responded in these threads to a similar "he doesn't read this anymore" comment. I think what he wrote was something like, "ahem"
As further evidence that the vow blocks killing all the people consider this.
The vow blocks Harry from telling muggels about magic and starting mass healing. At the time it blocks him the ideas he thought of were transfiguring nuclear weapons and plagues that could replicate before the transfiguration wore off. Neither of those poses any danger to "the world" but they pose great danger to the worlds people. Harry doesn't think of up quarks until after he has already been blocked. So the vow seems to be interpreted as killing everyone being the end of the world. Which is quite possibly how Harry understood it.
He also thought of antimatter, negatively charged strangelets, black holes, and up quarks, any one of which could, potentially, physically destroy the Earth.
Note also that if the vow interprets the words to mean the physical Earth, then future starlifting Harry could make a replica Earth and move all the muggles there, then tell them about magic.
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As far as I recall, wIthin the world of LotR orcs are defined to be creatures of evil. Quite literally, the only good orc is a dead orc. Even if someone in that world compassionately regards the orcs as victims of the powers that created them by perverting the nature of the Elves, still they are evil, and always and everywhere it is praiseworthy to kill one, regardless of what the orcs have to say for themselves.
A world in which good people owe orcs any sort of rights or fair treatment is not the world of LotR, but a different world borrowing some of the same names. Indeed, orcs appear to be but more or less intelligent tools, guided by the mind of Sauron and of little use without it, and I think one could make a case that to kill an orc has exactly the same lack of moral significance as to destroy an enemy drone in the real world.
There were other gods than Sauron (and Morgoth before him). The Maiar and Valar could probably have un-corrupted them, if they had deigned to bother to try instead of just accepting the gradual decline of the Good in Middle Earth. Maybe when the last of the elves got to Valinor they could have persuaded them to do so.