greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
User ID: 68
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
1d ago
The problem is that parents want their kids to leave and are happy to pay the tuition, availing themselves of the generous aid and other programs too. It's a win for students and parents. Boomers and gen-x parents have tons of $ specifically earmarked for college.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
1d ago
Online communities are capricious things, and so are voting patterns. I recall many times on reddit providing good, correct answers to questions and being downvoted and stupid/silly stuff gets up-voted. no rhyme or reason sometimes.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
1d ago
I wish people would post more top-level comments. I'm trying to be the change, but I also feel like I tend to argue too much so it would be better if others did.
A lot of people do not want to try to summarize the post, but just drop a link with a blockquote. This has to do with the barelink repository debate a while back.
it is much more restricted:
Thanks to this Administration’s efforts more than one out of every 10 federal student loan borrowers has now been approved for some debt relief. This action builds on President Biden and his Administration’s efforts to provide debt relief to as many borrowers as possible as quickly as possible.
just one out of 10. Originally Biden tried to invoke the 2003 HEROES act to cancel debt, which was much more comprehensive and entailed an near-unconditional $10-20k of loan forgiveness. This was an egregious arm-twisting of the original legislation so it didn't have much footing. The new proposal is more restricted, requiring 10 years of repayment to qualify, and falls under the PSLF Program, which was established under the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007. The first one was much more like a handout compared to the second.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
1d ago
When I graduated in 2014 from a large state university (not my undergrad, mind) I was already wondering how much further it could go.
Tuition will keep rising, as will debt, as long as college grads continue to earn a significant wage premium, which they still are. The gap stopped widening since 2021 or so, so that is some progress finally . There is so much aid , scholarship, discounts and other programs. Parents are happy to dump their kids off at a university whilst taking advantage of these many generous discounts. If college tuition were like any other big-ticket consumer good, maybe things would change.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F2VANdobQAAVTvl.jpg:large
heavily subsidized items in which there is a the greatest disconnect between the price and what is actually paid, have seen the most inflation
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
1d ago
those who fail to get jobs or only get low-paying jobs simply do not pay anyway. the bulk of payments is by people who get decent jobs.
Even if you subscribe to 3, there’s a possible justification; the government does have an interest in an educated populace.
credentialism is not the same as education. Below-market rate loans with extremely lenient repayment terms are the only way to make it affordable without having to impose price controls or controlling credentialism. Both sides like credentialism: employers get a large, prescreen population for hiring purposes, and the left gets to force their courses and ideology on the population. So the result is a distorted market.
Tax cuts represent income that was already earned, whereas student loan foreverness is more like a gift. But, agree they are similar in spirit
@ HlynkaCG would sometimes drop in with snarky replies to my posts and it was annoying not being able to return fire in kind. Rhetoric is a part of arguing. Being limited to dialectic is like fighting with one hand behind one's back. His time had long come to face the consequences of his incessant rule-skirting. He had gotten so many exceptions.
One suggestion is to form a tribunal of sorts of 5 or so top Motte users. This group would convene every month to award or remove strikes assigned to users based on conduct for the preceding month. The voters would anonymous and contain comments or feedback about what rules were broken and how to improve. If someone accumulates 5 or so strikes they are banned. Anyone can view how many strikes they have. For example, if someone has 4/5 strikes that would be an indication of a need to improve.
There was some positive feedback in the news article I read. I found it a bit surprising just how much the rural/urban divide has grown. I've often lived between the two areas with my schools often having kids living in high density housing along with kids raising barn animals. My parents preferred living rurally, but still had to live close to cities to find jobs.
I posit the greatest post-war cultural divide in America is along educational attainment, not race or ethnicity or even politics. College-educated Americans and everyone else may as well be distinct species for all practical purposes. They live in different neighborhoods, hold different values, their children attend different schools, etc. This is could be related to the so-called 30 point IQ communications gap, but also cultural capital and literal capital. Charles Murray has written a lot about this.
Had a shower thought today about how some people (like Joe Rogan) thought Covid would bring us closer together as we worked to solve and fight a collective problems.
I cannot recall anyone ever believing this. From the onset of the virus it had a dividing effect as policy was split almost perfectly along political lines.
I'd predict that a widespread solar flare that knocked out communication networks would probably leave us all a little happier than Covid.
I would depend on the initial message or response. 911 was an exception in that it had the effect of bringing people together of opposing ideological lines, but the over-politization of Covid policy had the opposite effect. Had the left not immediately defaulted to masks and lockdowns and was so unyielding or unwilling to compromise, maybe it would not have been as polarizing. This shows the importance of the initial message after a catastrophe. Bush and others were smart to jump on a message of unification right after 911 instead of "you must comply".
OTOH, a pandemic is multiplicative and sensitive to initial values, hence the need for a swift and rapid initial response, but this also makes people want to push back, too, at the imposition, especially when social distancing and masks may not work as well as initially advertised.
The alt-right lost in the sense it has been subsumed overtaken by the trad/norm-core right and aesthetic on twitter, especially since 2022. The alt-right became associated with low status behaviors and mannerisms, like LARPing or the archetypical basement-dwelling keyboard warrior, and subsequently fell out of favor. Few things convey low status like neck-bearded neo Nazis bulging out of their uniforms out of breath as they plod down the street (even if this hardly describes every alt-righter, being associated with it hurt the brand badly). It also did not help that its members kept being arrested and its online communities, social media accounts, and payment processing accounts shut down, making it hard to raise funds or coordinate.
Elon's Twitter buyout and restructuring in 2022-2023 made the alt-right less relevant too, as everything became viewed through a woke vs. anti-woke lens. But the alt-right does not as readily fit within the woke vs. anti-woke paradigm, being that it also has intellectual roots in critical theory (e.g. Frankfurt School), fusionism, accelerationism, Durkheim theory and the like. The most popular accounts on post-Elon Twitter are more interested in owning the libs and posting viral clips of societal decay, like shoplifting footage or Apple store looting, than deep intellectual discussion or critique of society.
The norm-core right combines anti-woke and far-right trad values with 'normie' aspects of socialization, hence 'norm-core'. Whereas alt-right sought to subvert or exclude itself from mainstream society, the norm-core reconciles the contradiction between holding anti-woke views but ingratiating oneself and even thriving in a mainstream woke society, like good-paying careers, attentiveness to physical appearance (hence the importance of lifting and gym), civic participation (elections are very important) and family.
The norm-core right also tend to care much more about activism and political participation, in opposite of the alt-right that relies on memetic warfare like anonymous shit posting accounts on 4chan or twitter. The norm-core tend to use real names online and embrace civic participation and the democratic process, like voting for local elections and participation in school boards and meetings. Christianity is also very important, with a 'white pill' message of revival or hope, as opposed to the nihilism, secularism, or paganism of the alt-right. This also contributed to the norm-core being higher status.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
Because "three-dimensional characters" are key, and I'm too autistic to get into another person's head well enough to write believable human beings
writing advice is useless, so do not worry about things like character development and the like. no one who writes a great story originally set out to check those boxes of what constitutes good writing, and following such advice will not make a story any good.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
Main point is that the houses were not that much cheaper relative to now, and the interests rates were murderous. Enjoy!
I agree 100% with this. Shameless link plug: The Myth of Wealthy Boomers (why they are not much ‘better off’ compared to later generations)
The boomers were not as exceptionally lucky or fortuitous as commonly assumed. Like any generation, there is a lot of variance or variability in terms of SES, as we're talking large populations of people . Despite having 50+ years of post-war prosperity and a supposed head start, still, many boomers live in poverty or don't have enough for retirement.
True, homes were a lot cheaper in the '80s and '70s, but interest rates were much higher, mortgages more expensive and shorter duration, and much lower inflation-adjusted salaries. No 6-figure white collar jobs for boomers back then. Adjusted for inflation, a competitive boomer job may have paid the equivalent of of 60-80k today, not $300k + comp.
Moreover, home ownership rates are unchanged over the past 60 years, at around 60-65%.
How is it a glitch having access to new medicines? Expensive drugs but more drugs is better than options only being limited to Tylenol or Asprin, which is what you'd get if there was no profit incentive. No one pays out of pocket for life saving drugs anyway. I am perfectly fine with the makers of Ozempic and Mounjaro making billions if it means reducing obesity and making people's lives better. Americans have high expectations for healthcare; they want some cutting-edge drug that costs tens of thousands of dollars a month to add maybe a few months of life for terminal cancer. Much of healthcare is for end of life spending.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
Domestic brands are not thriving, but not doing that badly either . I think the post-2013 era big, luxury trucks and SUVs, which have high markups and became especially popular post-Covid, saved them from certain demise in the early to mid 2000s. Japanese brands cannot compete on size.
This isn't true. The stock prices of the Big 3 have limped along. GM, once the 2nd most valuable U.S. company, now has a market cap only 2% the size of NVIDIA. And, if the Big 3 haven't gone bankrupt again, it's only by jettisoning high-paid union labor. Michigan, once a well-off state, now ranks 39 out of 50 in household income, falling well behind former hick states like Texas and North Carolina.
A lot of this can be explained by valuation, which is not the same as earnings. Tech companies tend to trade at higher valuations/multiples compared to auto.
The big news this weekend was that Trump had a rally and said that, should he not be elected, the U.S. auto industry would be overrun with cheap Chinese imports. He used the word "bloodbath".
This is smart rhetoric by Trump to help win those swing voters , like Michigan. Similar to wall and other promises, not much will come of it should he win though.
Trump to his credit does not flip flop too much on abortion. He has never been pro-life, and will not cave to this issue despite pressure from religious organizations. Trump is right to ignore this issue and focus on immigration and the economy, as is Richard Hanania that abortion hardliners turn off moderates.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
People on twitter shit on woke American universities and lowered academic standards in the humanities, and rightfully so, but other countries have different but possibly even worse problems too-like massive amounts of academic fraud that goes unpunished or ignored. This includes plagiarism, auto-generated papers, and citation rings. Same for STEM, which is not immune to this trend of dilution seen elsewhere. I have evidence of citation rings on the arXiv computer science categories, in which there there seems to be very little value or research being produced--just authors citing each other's weak papers and collaborating in the production of said papers to pad CVs. This way more common in the computer science section compared to those 'soft' humanities, in which it can still be reasonably assumed that the putative authors still write their own papers without needing 10+ co-authors for a 10 page paper with 50 citations. It is ridiculous.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
compared to being in jail for rest of your life? that is probably worse for your kids
you only know those who get caught, i guess. Not uncommonly the feds will take over mixers or dark markets to see the money flow. The govt. is very dogged though.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
Monero is fine if your adversary is not that determined or does not have much resources. The feds however have demonstrated some capability at tracing Monero. Criminals do this and they are still caught. They use all sorts of strategies, like you describe, of mixing through Monero, other chains, back to Monero, etc. Of course, we only hear about the guys who get caught. It may be possible there is some way to do it.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-men-charged-operating-25m-cryptocurrency-ponzi-scheme
Saffron and Mazzotta also allegedly conspired to obstruct official proceedings by concealing assets, concealing or destroying evidence, and falsifying records. The defendants also allegedly conspired to conceal the source and location of victims’ cryptocurrency investments through various means, including using methods known as “blockchain hopping” and through services known as “mixers” or “tumblers” that are designed to prevent cryptocurrency tracing.
A sufficiently determined adversary can trace the origin of coins passed through tumblers. Also, tumbers can 'dirty' crypto by mixing them with fraudulent coins, making them blacklisted in the processes by merchants who refuse to accept tumbled coins.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
There is evidence federal agencies have reconstructed Monero transactions. Monero is better but still has holes. https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-seizure-record-doj-crypto-tracing-monero/
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
sorry, i meant to post this in culture war. I originally made a brief post and then i kept adding to it and hit submit before realizing i had posted it in the Friday thread.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
It can be traced. the only fresh bitcoin is coins direct from miner or major exchange.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2mo ago
this is what an NFT accomplishes . it is why it has been accused of being used for money laundering.
I think it lends credence to the argument that most of education is a waste. these tribes cut off from Western norms are able to catch up to speed instantly, almost through osmosis.
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