Forget about getting everything right. Most people are so consistently wrong that merely avoiding major errors is enough to set you apart from the pack.

I have been saying this for many years. It’s not important being the very smartest one. It’s far more important not to do the stupidest possible action at the most inopportune time. Unfortunately, that’s just what most people end up doing in this domain.

The Dalbar results for 2018 are especially painful to contemplate. The inflation rate was 1.93 percent, so investors would have had to earn that just to tread water. Instead, the average stock fund investor lost 9.42 percent, for a gap of more than 11 percentage points.

How, just how, do you lose so much money in a year like 2018? Just…what?

Though that’s not really fair to regular investors, as the S&P 500 returned -4.75% that year, including dividend reinvestment. In 2018, though my broker makes it difficult to calculate, my return was 5%, approximately. So I beat the market by about 10 percentage points, which is what I try to average year over year. If you can’t do that, you aren’t even trying.

Looking at it more realistically, then, the average investor was -4.67 percentage points vs. the market, which is still absolutely awful. (And that means many investors likely lost a lot more, which is what makes it an average.)

All of this is a scam, but it’s a scam I am good at.

My resting heart rate is now 46 bpm. Not bad for a 43-year-old who doesn’t really do that much cardio.

Weightlifting works, ya’ll.

Another Life is a work that seems content to explore every single sf TV show cliché, and often two or three of them in the same episode. Additionally, while doing this, it seems to aspire to be Real World: Space Edition. None of this works well, and it works even less well juxtaposed against the parts of the show that are actually good. It turns out that a show that is 10% good and 90% bad to terrible is worse than one that is all dreck because you start to get your hopes up for any improvement and then are sorely disappointed as someone, say, creates a Space Vaccine for a boron-based (I know) virus in an hour.

The writing team seemed perfectly content to do no research at all on any science, or how astronavigation works, or why exposing the entire crew to unshielded gamma rays from Sirius B would not be a great idea. The writing is so shoddy and careless that you get the idea that the authors of this rubbish must actually despise their viewers openly. Nothing in the show would work how it’s depicted, even stretching the science as many other shows do.

And if you think the human relationships would rescue all that, as they do in some shows? Well, no, they only make it worse as crew meetings consist of the cast yelling at each other repetitively while alarms sound menacingly in the background and no one ever seems to do much of anything but flirt in between attempting to kill one another, all while they should be doing other tasks. These people all relate to each other like toddlers in spacesuits, opening their visors on unknown planets, attempting to kill one another over minor slights, arguing over trifles while the ship is nearly destroyed by a heliosphere. It’s baffling, because no humans alive ever acted how the people on this show act. This show might’ve literally been written by aliens for all the verisimilitude it has to how any humans behave anywhere.

I would say that Katee Sackhoff is a bright spot, but even with her intensity and wealth of emotion she can bring even to a tough character, there’s just nothing there for her to latch onto as the world is so implausible. The few good moments, mostly involving her dealing with the aftermaths of crises, are subsumed in the river of garbage this show delivers. (I also enjoyed Blu Hunt and her deep humanity, but once again, she had nothing to work with. Will watch for her in other works, though.)

Another Life is thoroughly insulting as a show, because it does a disservice to its viewers and to the actors who should’ve had better material to work with. The basic premise is a good one, but as is often said there are unlimited ideas and execution is everything. This damned show demonstrates the truth of that assertion.