Glassnoser
2d ago
I guess what I'm confused by is why people have emergency funds. Why not just spend your regular savings or use a line of credit and slowly pay it off, spreading the cost out over a longer period of time? Or if you need a new car, why not finance it?
Glassnoser
2d ago
What do you mean by "losing your car"? Are you saying everyone you know has totalled their car multiple times to an uninsured hooligan? I don't think I know very many people who have totalled their car for any reason. Personally, I have never been in an accident that did more than damage a bumper.
Even if this is your situation, it doesn't make sense to buy insurance for something you expect to happen a few times in your life. Savings and loans are tools that already exist to even out the expense over your lifetime. Insurance adds an unnecessary cost to this.
Now, if you are unusually prone to getting into accidents and your insurer doesn't know that, then it makes sense, but this averse selection is exactly why it wouldn't make sense for most people.
Glassnoser
3d ago
I'm confused. Are you regularly getting into accidents? It is definitely never worth the cost to get insurance for something that regularly happens. Insurance is for things that will probably never happen in your life.
Glassnoser
3d ago
No, I think that in practice, private companies are much more focused on the long term than governments because they have very strong incentives to be. Most real humans aren't paid millions of dollars to run large companies after going through an extensive filtering process disciplined by markets. Most companies don't even survive more than a few years. The market selects for companies that are unusually well-run and mostly only allows them to survive, at least in competitive industries. It's not perfect process but I think it works much better than politics.
Glassnoser
3d ago
The entire value of the company comes from the money it eventually pays out to its shareholders.
Glassnoser
3d ago
Well, the shareholders care about the market's assessment of the long-term profitability of the company, and the shareholders elect the board of directors, so the company has a much stronger incentive to care about the long term than the government does. For the government to care about the king term, the voters need to be able to assess their performance and vote in that basis, and they just don't.
Glassnoser
4d ago
If they're getting something in return, then it's not a subsidy.
Glassnoser
4d ago
This seems backwards. By their nature, private businesses tend to be focused on the long-term, since their value is equal to the net present value of all future cashflows from now until the end of time, whereas governments tend to focused on the short-term, since they just want to win the next election.
Glassnoser
19d ago
I haven't had a haircut since October and have had lots of compliments. It looks fine, so I don't get the salad bowl comment. If I've recently showered with shampoo, it gets in my face, but by the end of the day, it accumulates enough grease to stay out of my eyes after repeatedly brushing it back.
Glassnoser
19d ago
Is there a word for that emotion you feel when you're aware of someone who is naive about a situation and you feel sympathy or concern towards them?
Glassnoser
23d ago
This estimator isn't biased though.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
It's not a scam. A friend of mine did this as a full-time job for about a year, although he didn't do any of the skilled work that pays $40 an hour, since he doesn't have a STEM background. Another friend did it part-time. I've signed up but haven't yet gotten around to doing the programming qualifications or any of the projects yet. If I do, I can let you know how it goes.
The feedback they gave was that it was pretty mentally exhausting. The tasks are not easy and require careful thinking. The friend who did it full-time really liked it though because he could work whenever.
The biggest problem seems to be that the tasks were running out, though the first friend did a lot of qualifications which made a lot of tasks available to him.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
Why are politics in the US so completely dominated by the Republicans and the Democrats, even at the municipal level? In Canada, for the most part, provincial legislatures have their own political parties that have nothing to do with the federal parties, and municipal councils usually don't have parties at all, with the only exception to this that I'm aware of being Montreal. But the municipal parties in Montreal are completely different than the provincial and federal parties.
The fact that everyone has to be either a Democrat or a Republican in the US creates this absurd situation in places like New York City, where the Democratic primary basically determines who will be the mayor.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
What I never liked about Kulak was that, whenever he wrote about something I knew a lot about, it was clear he was making a lot of stuff up and had only a very superficial level of knowledge.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
He had an accident that @FiveHourMarathon linked to once and became deranged.
What are you referring to?
Glassnoser
2mo ago
What do you mean by "analog cyclists"?
Glassnoser
2mo ago
I thought maybe the doctor would explain that her delusion wasn't real. She had been imagining that she could hear her neighbour saying bad things about her through the walls. It had ended by the time she told me about it (maybe because she was on the anti-psychotic), but she told me about this as though it really had happened and no one had ever suggested to her it might not be real.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
I didn't talk much about the personal side of it, but we dated for three months before I ended it for a number of reasons. She did not take it well and blew up at me, getting unnecessarily confrontational and throwing things at me and shouting. She reached out six months later and we had a friendship where I kept her more at arm's length.
When we first met, she was extremely nice, although her behaviour was clearly somewhat off from the beginning. That lasted about two weeks and then it was like switch flipped and she treated me like garbage. There was maybe a month where she got really into some weird cult and stopped doing drugs all the time and seemed to be improving, but then she started doing hurtful things to me again and I ended it.
Overall, it was a pretty disturbing experience. I had never met anyone like that and didn't even have any substantial dating experience, and had no idea how to handle it. I didn't meet any of her friends for a while, but wished I had so I could have asked what in the world was going on with her. The part I found the most difficult to understand was how you could go from telling someone he's the love of your life one day and refuse to talk to him the next. There was all kinds of other cruel behaviour she engaged in and in retrospect, it seems obvious I should have completely cut her out of my life early on, but she was good at manipulating people.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
This isn't even the full story. The full version includes possible sexual assault, possible lying about sexual assault, minor physical violence, inappropriate emotional outbursts, more cheating, more erratic behaviour, and more crazy dating experiences.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
I find it interesting that, despite being an extremely open-minded person who always been interested in finding different ways of doing things, this has never applied to anything regarding sex. I have always been instinctively repulsed anything even slightly aberrant in that domain.
The second girl I met through Tinder was one of these people who cannot manage her own life. She was definitely the most dysfunctional person I've ever gotten to know well. She kept flunking out of college because she hardly attended any classes and didn't do any work. She would enroll in a new college every other semester and immediately flunk out. She couldn't keep a part-time minimum wage job for more than a few weeks because she wouldn't go half the time. She didn't need the money because she lived with her parents, but she desperately wanted it so she could buy MDMA, to which she was addicted, alcohol, take-out, clothes, make-up, and bus tickets. When she was unemployed, she would borrow money from me and almost never pay me back, denying she ever borrowed it. Any money she earned would immediately be spent. She didn't even have $3 for the bus to go home, which she stole from me at least once.
She lied constantly, even about inconsequential things like the names of her parents. She briefly suffered from paranoid delusions, in my opinion caused by the drugs. She was prescribed an anti-psychotic, which she did not seem to understand the purpose of other than she was "sick" and this was "medicine". She did not understand that her delusion had been all in her head. She told me about it as though it had really happened. She didn't seem to have made any connection between the delusion and the anti-psychotic she was on. I could not convince her to tell her doctor about the drug use.
She had no attention span. When we met, she was very talkative and would ask me questions, but I could rarely get two sentences into an answer before she changed the subject. She could not watch a movie without repeatedly skipping parts she found boring, which was always most of the movie. She often got bored of me and then started texting other guys she knew while still in my apartment.
Before long, we were just friends. She treated me really horribly and it was clear she wasn't right for me, but I stayed friends with her because I just felt so bad for her. It looked like her life was going to turn into a disaster if no one helped her. But it turned out to be a totally wasted effort.
She really wanted a boyfriend but didn't know how to go about it. I explained to her that a guy who invites her over to his apartment late at night for a first date is not interested in anything other than sex. When she finally got a boyfriend, I explained that he wouldn't stay if she kept cheating on him. She never took my advice.
She somehow got a guy from another city who was too good for her to propose to her. He was really nice, smart, and had a decent job. I seriously considered warning him off of her as I wished someone had done for me, but decided against it. They seemed really happy together. He would regularly make the nine hour drive each way to visit her. He once even drove up to pick her up and take him to meet his family and then, because she was afraid of taking the train home on her own, she convinced him after much resistance to drive her back, adding an extra 18 hours of driving. But the second he left she was meeting up guys and sleeping with them, which she told him about. She was sometimes having multiple one-night stands a week, one of which resulted in a pregnancy which she aborted. Obviously, it didn't work out with her fiancé, who she seemed to really love, but she just couldn't stand being alone.
Early on, when we were dating and I was starting to realize how awful she was, I went through her text messages and found one from her ex-boyfriend, who she always talked about so positively. He just said, without elaboration, that meeting her was the worst thing that ever happened to him. I might say the same.
I didn't get into it much, but despite the incompetence in the rest of her life, she was quite charming and manipulative. She somehow had a few good friends who seemed totally normal. But I find it hard to imagine how she could ever support herself or get a man to do so long-term.
Glassnoser
4mo ago
The culture has been pushing for later and later ages. Most people seem to assume it's already 18 and I sometimes see people arguing for 25.
Glassnoser
4mo ago
The side that believes more strongly in its case will pay all the legal fees.
Glassnoser
4mo ago
I didn't say he wasn't a hack because he's popular. I said him not liking Trump doesn't make him a hack.
You admittedly knew nothing about but called him a hack. If you want to know if he's a hack, you need to become familiar with him. You're currently in no place to be making the judgment, which shouldn't be based on your impression from a two second Google search.
He's not even an economist at the University of Chicago.
The difference is that the emergency fund is something you feel the need to separate from your regular savings and refill by spending much less money while you do so. If you were spending your regular savings, you wouldn't let having to buy a new car change what you else you spend. The cost would be spread over decades or even generations.
I don't know what you mean by being liable for depreciation.
But less than the expected rate of return of the S&P 500.
This is higher than I would expect. I just got a call from a car dealer offering me about 4%. Maybe that's with insurance. This makes little sense. I can borrow at about 8% I believe from my unsecured line of credit. Why would the interest rate on a car, which is secured loan, be higher than that?
If interest rates are really that high, then maybe it's a bad idea to lease, but still, I don't see the logic in eating rice and beans for six months to recover the expense. You can spread it over your lifetime by just having less savings.
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