DavidV

Oh - new feature. You can now enable 2FA on your account.

In our third move in 21 years, I moved Objectivism Online to a new web server. It's now running on faster hardware and the latest versions of Ubuntu (24.04), nginx, and PHP. I use WordOps to automate server admin, in case you're wondering.

20 years ago, I came back from my internship at the Ayn Rand Institute's OCON conference excited to meet other Objectivists. This was a year before Facebook when IRC Chat was still the most popular venue for Objectivists to chat. So I decided to start my own Objectivism Forum - Objectivism (then ) Here is the post announcing the new site: After I graduated college in 2004, I handed off management to a series of admins and moderators, continuing to this day. I've continued to host the forum over that time, accumulating the following totals: 10,160 members 31,374 discussions 337,656 posts The site was most popular for the first few years, hosting events such as a live chat with Onkar Ghate, all sorts of features like The Objectivist Metablog, hosting for Ayn Rand clubs, event calendars, hosted email accounts, photo galleries, and much more. At live events, we would have hundreds of people participating and hundreds of posts per day. After Facebook became popular in 2009, traffic dropped off a lot, but as you can see, the site is still active today.

If you would like to be a moderator, please send me a message here or on Facebook.

Submit data deletion requests to [email protected]

With the switch to HTTPS. That is all.

Done!

Although I am no longer active on this forum, I was recently sent a moderation request. I decided to post this brief introduction to my involvement with the site in case it is of interest to some of the current users. I created Objectivism Online in February 2003. The original vision was much more ambitious but has gradually narrowed in scope and various social media platforms have superseded some of the original features. The initial membership came largely from connections I made at the 2003 Objectivist Summer Conference. For a number of years, this site was the primary online community for students of Objectivism on the Internet. I have not been active on the site for over 10 years, but it has continued thanks to a succession of administrators: RationalEgoistSG - he helped complete the original vision for the site in 2003. AshRyan - he organized live events and supported the forum through the rapid growth phase in 2005. softwareNerd - he has been the de-facto leader of this forum since 2006. JASKN - has been running the site since softwareNerd retired in (2015?) I'll close with some other sites that I run on the server which hosts this forum: WalletRecovery.info, my Bitcoin Wallet Recovery business Vellum Capital , a cryptocurrency hedge fund (in which I am a partner) The Free Capitalist Network, a WordPress blog network with a few dozen (free) blogs. RationalMind.net , my own blog, which was active from 2001-2013, until I co-founded Liberty.me , and set up my blog there. In addition to these projects, I am the Director of Marketing and Technology for the Foundation for Economic Education, a free market think tank founded in 1946. As I'm not currently active on the forum, if you want to contact me, you can find me on Facebook. Let me end with a plug for The Objective Standard (I've been helping Craig run the site), and the TOS-Con 2018 conference, where I will be presenting content from my forthcoming book on personal finance. It's in Richmond, VA August 16–19 2018.

Let's do that now: I split my portfolio into 3 equal parts at start of 2009. Gold: 86 to 183, down to 128 : 49% up International securities: 29 to 52, 45 now: 55% up S&P 500: 825 to 2173 : 163% up I would have done better if I had gone 100% S&P 500. It's fair to say my doomsday predictions were quite wrong (or at least too early). I did quite a lot better than the markets in 2009 and 2010, but did not sell when gold crashed in 2013+, and slightly trailed the market from 2011 on when foreign markets stalled while the USA boomed. In conclusion, while I had some good and bad luck, I mostly matched the overall market. My superior returns were mostly due to luck. The one smart thing I did was to invest every penny I had when the market was worst, specifically in the assets which suffered the most. I that again in January 2016 with similar success. This post and the upcoming one cover the lessons I learned from investing on my own.

Test test...

How about now? Better?

cost.

Update: Just updated to PHP 5.6 and tuned the settings. Let's see if it's more stable.

FYI The forum has not been very stable since the move. I am trying to host it on Windows/IIS, which requires some tuning. If it does not work after a week, I'll have to move it to Apache and/or Linux. Please IM me if you notice that it's down.

Sorry guys, I screwed up big time. I migrated the nightly backup, whereas I should have taken a snapshot before migrating. I thought it would be OK because it was the middle of the night, but because of the time zone difference (I'm in Bangkok) I did not realize that the backup was done on the previous day. Then, because I did it at the last minute, the hosting account is expired. I cannot access the latest backup without paying for another six months. Would it be a huge deal to give up on the last day of posts? They are probably in Google's cache.