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Comment by stephenr | Hacker News Reader

It can be 29.99 years less than 30 years, it still doesn’t meet your “10x” scale.

Stepping back for a moment.

The problem isn't that a thing, somewhere, increased 6x in 10 years.

The problem is getting into the mindset where you think, "This is going to increase 6x in 10 years, or 10x in 10 years, or 2x in one year."

Once you start thinking that way, there's no point in putting $500 into the investment and accepting the measly $2500 payoff. You should put in $5000 and make $25,000, or take out a second mortgage so you can put $500,000 into the investment and retire in 10 years on your $2,500,000 gains.

Hell, some of the time your crazy investment will pay off and you will get rich! But most of the time your great investment opportunity will go bust and you will too.

That is the greedy mindset to avoid, if you don't want to find yourself skipping from one get-rich scheme to another, losing money the entire time, but thinking you're just one good payday from an easy life.

I bring it up apropos this thread because any time someone says, "If I had invested in X, Y years ago, I would have Z dollars now!!!", that's the beginning of the road to madness.

> I bring it up apropos this thread because any time someone says, "If I had invested in X, Y years ago, I would have Z dollars now!!!", that's the beginning of the road to madness.

I did say, “I think investing in LEGO is a stupid idea”.

Also, re: 6x over 10 years versus 10x over 30 years, 6x over 10 years amounts to ~200x over 30 years, and 10x over 30 years only amounts to ~2x over 10 years; it is a fantastic return.

Ok I’ll wait here you go invest in legos if you think they’re gonna be worth 200x as much in a few decades.

IMO, the thing about collectibles is that you would need to be way ahead to make money.

GI joes were collectable in the 90s, and I'm pretty sure almost no GI joes made in the 90s are valuable now. Same with baseball cards.

Legos have value now that were bought long ago or in special circumstances, but the vast majority will be worth less in the future than today.

> I'm pretty sure almost no GI joes made in the 90s are valuable now.

More than I thought. $1000+ is pretty impressive:

https://www.cbr.com/most-expensive-g-i-joe-figures/

I could be wrong, but those were all from the 1980s and became valuable in the 1990s. The 1990s gi joes never really gained value because so many people collected them

Case in point; Bitcoin

I've always wondered, when do you round up (or down) for orders of magnitude? For instance, is 6 close enough to 10 to say it's an order of magnitude larger, or does it need to be closer (say 8), or hit a hard floor of being at least 10 times larger before we colloquially say it's increased by an order of magnitude?

Completely ignoring the time variable, I don't think it's crazy to say something 6x bigger is an order of magnitude bigger. I'm curious what other people consider a cutoff for this though.

If we go by log10 of the number, 4 would be enough to round up to "10" as an order of magnitude.

That just doesn't seem right to me, though. My non-rigorous intuition would put the cutoff at 7.

An order on magnitude is a factor if 10. So half an order of magnitude is a factor of a square root of ten, or 3.16, because two half orders of magnitude are a full order of magnitude.

[Edit:] A nice consequence of that limit is that 3.16 and 3.14 are almost the same number, so pi sits nicely on the border between this order of magnitude and the next, so you can approximate it as either one or ten, depending on what makes your estimate look better.

I've always thought of "order of magnitude" as adding a zero, so anything less than 10 is a different order of magnitude.

Gets weird thinking about 9 being both one number less and one order of magnitude less than 10, while 99 is both 89 more and the same order of magnitude, but it's supposed to be a rough approximation.

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