On the other hand after that decade you'll be without money, without a job

Yes, true. It would probably not be a good idea to attempt to retire with only one decade's worth of funds and plan never to work again. On the other hand, you could see how things go for the first 5 years and then go back to work if needed.

The problem is that you're looking specifically at the US stock market

So would you expect a US + international market cap-weighted index fund like Vanguard's Total World Stock Index Fund (bonus: available as an ETF) to have more variance or do worse than the US stock market by itself? That would surprise me.

Or were you just saying you think the US was exceptional during the 20th century, and investors should not expect similar returns (either by diversifying across nations, or reliably picking a winning nation) in the 21st? Hmm, now I am curious what stock market returns looked like for the whole world in the 20th C.

there is the issue of survivorship bias

Unfortunately I wasn't able to determine whether that particular chart took into account survivorship bias, but I did find this blog post written by the author of the book the chart was taken from, suggesting that he's at least familiar with the issue.

It depends on what you mean by "job". It seems like you're saying that not having a job is equivalent to not working. I'd argue otherwise. You still do a lot of work. It's just that the work that you're doing doesn't fit into the traditional capitalist view of working for an employer, so you don't see it as a "job".

You bring up a number of examples: the Argentinian who left graduate economics to travel the world. Puneet Sahani. The Uruguayan couple. They don't have jobs in the traditional American sense of working for an employer for money. But I'd argue that their lifestyle is no less arduous than someone who does have a job. They still have to make arrangements for food, clothing, shelter and travel, and presumably they're doing something of value to earn those resources. That's work, even if it isn't a job, as traditionally defined.

Moreover, such a lifestyle requires a certain type of personality. It requires a personality that is willing to accept extreme levels of uncertainty, in some cases to the point of not knowing where one is going to sleep the next night. For that reason, I'd argue that getting a job is the rational decision for most people. It makes sense to trade a certain amount of freedom for the certainty of knowing that when you go home, you'll have a home to go to, with food in the fridge and clothes in the closet. The fact that some people are able to be happy without having that certainty doesn't mean that everyone will be happy in such a lifestyle, or even that you will be happy in such a lifestyle.

A job is truly an instrumental goal, and your terminal goals certainly do have chains of causation leading to them that do not contain a job for 330 days a year.

This is true, but the uncertainty around those other chains of causation is considerably higher than the chains of causation that do involve having a job. Sure, I can scrape by without a job, hitchhiking my way along to where-ever I'm trying to go. Or I can travel with relative certainty in a train or a jetliner with tickets that I purchased with money from my job. Which route you choose depends on your tolerance for uncertainty and risk. I, for one, am glad for my job. It provides me the resources by which I carve out a tiny bubble of relative certainty in an uncertain world.

I can't even get past the introduction:

1. your header should not take up an entire screen
2. "its", not "it's"
3. you capitalize 'i' when it's a pronoun
4. you punctuate the end of sentences, even in parenthetical comments
5. spaces are a Good Thing

You are the reason Paul Graham made that comment.

This may be exactly what you are looking for:Minimal Reading Sequence for Philosophy of Mind and Language

You may want to change the title to "Analytic Philosophy" or "Contemporary Philosophy" since Modern Philosophy usually refers to something far removed from anything related to "Good and Real" by Drescher.

I'm not enjoying it as much as I thought I might. It seems basically competent, but the writing doesn't propel me along. (The rationalist MLP fic does so propel.)

One site that was recommended to me is Trello. It's a very flexible project management/to-do/brainstorming tool. It's organized as a number of boards, each of which has one or more lists or cards. You can move these cards between lists and between boards.

The general workflow I've established is to create a board for each project I'm working on, and have three lists: to-do, doing, and done. As you might suspect, cards start out in the "to-do" list, move to the "doing" list when I start on them and go to the "done" list when I finish. However, the tool, as such, does not force you into any particular workflow. That's an important consideration for me, because I've abandoned other task management software when its theoretical workflow model failed to match my real world needs. Trello is flexible enough to allow me to easily construct my own "pipeline" for tasks, with as many or as few steps as necessary, and have different pipelines for different projects.

Trello is a hosted application. However, they have a fairly easy-to-use export function that exports your boards and cards to a JSON document, so you're free to walk away with your data at any time. They also have an API, which you can use to further automate your task management.