Not for the same audience but for much the same idea I made a progressive visualization of saving and compound interest in a blog post about pension saving:
A few years ago I was determined to practice, and it was hard, and then it became easy, auto-relaxing, like a cheat.
I lost that practice and now it's hard again.
I think GP is right to question technique vs. attention - I think we don't know much about the answer.
But a point I recall in Nestors book is that there isn't really a lot of scientific study on breath - there is much more study on specific diseases, and e.g. teeth have a full profession of study and development that the everyday act of breathing doesn't have (even though these might be highly related!).
<Opinionated> Some of the best references about breath today are not scientific, but written in the oldest books that survived in different cultures - and anyways, how much does the specific mechanism matter?
Watch this space though - science is catching up! </>
I was blown away by the little functions at first and I too made a clone to experiment with calculang [1].
I added an evaluation feature (F9) so you can select sub-expressions and see what they do, which was helpful to figure out some patterns (video in [2])
Really pretty outputs! And impressive that the code is shown so elegantly and also interactive.
This algorithm is one I use to demo some features in a language I'm making called calculang [0][1]
I like the way you step through the logic.
My only suggestion would be to include a raycasted scene because you can really grab a wide(r) audience (and I'd love to see how you get to voxel scenes!).
Either way - thanks for adding a neat new resource for this algorithm and I'm definitely taking notes Re your clean presentation of the details!
> Even when there is tax relief to save for a pension, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t taxes on pension income after retirement
and the footnote to it is:
> often there are taxes on pension income - so that it might be better to say that tax is deferred rather than relieved whenever we save↩
I'll consider bumping the footnote since it's important.
I might try to capture the more complete picture including post-retirement separately - a problem is that there are so many different configurations of this (e.g. in Ireland there are tax-free lump sums permitted at retirement, then there are a few specific options about the rest - and I'm probably still simplifying). But when I get comfortable about something relevant to describe, I might.
Hi - author here - these compound returns are not guaranteed. I reinforce this point under health warnings.
Here the 6% compound returns is an assumption. If that's good or bad to use depends on the purpose of the projection. For long projections in medium-risk funds this might be a reasonable value - but it can also be far off, especially in the short-term.
I made a separate post that surfaces results from an assumed distribution of outcomes rather than a single value, called Visualizing Risk: https://calcwithdec.dev/posts/viz-risk/ (basically a monte carlo simulation)
Yeah didn't mean it as a critique of you or the article! More just kinda speculating about society
I do think we try very hard to keep it as guaranteed as possible, if something would happen to stocks as a whole the government is willing to pull a lot of stops
> I do think we try very hard to keep it as guaranteed as possible, if something would happen to stocks as a whole the government is willing to pull a lot of stops
As a matter of policy, the government explicitly doesn't set policy in attempt to influence stock returns.
However, the government does try to prop the broader economy up. Rightfully so, because if that collapses you have people without jobs or rapid inflation. Neither of which are good for society.
It just so happens that stock returns are indirectly coupled to overall economic performance, so a healthy economy (generally) means a healthy stock market.
This blog post is a 'narrative visualization' to show some nice savings incentives visualized in a chart.
I think these are important to have a good understanding about when they are relevant, but the bigger reason I made this is to explore the communication style applied to models and to get closer to the technical patterns to create them.
Since I make calculang [1], all the savings projection calculations are described using it [2] (including income tax calculations: here an example of composition in calculang models).
calculang transpiles into a pure functional JS module, and here I interact with it using reactive OJS and the closeread extension for Quarto [3], plus a reactive Vega visualization.
The programming logic mostly is: Vega signals and calculang parameters condition on a `progress` value that updates as the user scrolls.
It was nice to make: minus no fast reload I would say. I'm considering streamlining some tools with fast reload to facilitate building this type of output for calculang models - like I said I'm interested in the narrative style applied to models, and pure FP calculang and reactive FRP tools around it help a lot.
The harder part to visualize is how the value changes as you draw money out of it after retirement ... And especially how much you should withdraw per month since that requires guessing how long you'll live (I don't have this problem).
Post-retirement is definitely harder. There are also usually rules about what's allowable with the money that built up with tax relief and such. Since these rules differ from country to country even the starting point of deciding what to model is hard.
Here in Ireland I think in order to get some flexibility with a reasonably sized pension you need to buy an annuity - a guaranteed income paid from some insurance company, up to some amount.
Some day I might settle on some scenario/s to model and take on the visualization challenge... For now hopefully people - especially those who provide the services, can assess if it can be helpful!
https://calcwithdec.dev/posts/pictures-pensions/
I intentionally didn't include numbers at all - they are a bit more effort to interpret.
A visualization might be a nice feature for kids (but it probably depends on the kid!)