rockbier1218
No bio...
User ID: 1794
rockbier1218
3mo ago
It’s coming. You can’t just nuke the market in America and expect to survive politically. It will take time but nothing Trump has done up till now has really been bad economically, so it’s easy for GOP to hang on because he kept the money flowing and people remember Trump 1 as a great time for the economy. But if all of a sudden we have GFC Part 2 and it’s 100% attributable to his actions he will be toast.
Not sure how trustworthy this is as a proxy but the comments section on Wall Street Journal articles was a MAGA shithole up till a few weeks ago. Now it’s full of people with regret and complaining about their investments and how Trump is a buffoon, etc. Once the mass layoffs and 10-20%+ inflation hit it will be over
rockbier1218
11mo ago
Hot take but in my mind Federer is still the “better” player, at least from an aesthetic and “legacy” perspective.
I think decades from now people will still be reading about Federer’s forehand and watching his highlights, whereas they’ll just read about Novak’s insane trophy case but not actually watch him play.
rockbier1218
1yr ago
Surprised not to see Tuesdays With Stories here (Mark Normand and Joe List).
Do you not like it or (I’d be surprised) have not heard of it?
rockbier1218
1yr ago
I would not say Greenwich Village is meaningfully better than the rest of lower Manhattan on this issue. The crowded parts closer to Washington Square Park are full of psychos. The park itself has a corner that is essentially Hamsterdam and the only place that’s worse in lower Manhattan is the area around the Bowery and Grand Street station in Chinatown
rockbier1218
1yr ago
Any of the reasonably wealthy countries/cities that are also highly authoritarian, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Singapore, etc. I would assume China too but I have no first or second-hand experience of this.
A college friend from Luxembourg and I were in Montreal once and a homeless man asked us for money. He was shocked and said that would be unthinkable in Luxembourg.
I’ve also spent a lot of time in Istanbul and while there are a lot of Gypsy beggars and post-Syrian civil war a LOT of refugees, I do not recall ever really seeing a “homeless” person. I think there are a couple of reasons for this:
- Turkish police do not give a fuck about civil rights. Obviously this varies by class but I mean to say that if you looked like the classic American zombie psycho homeless person, they would happily beat your ass and chase you away or throw you in jail and be lauded for it.
- Much stronger familial ties, way less likely that you will end up as one of these zombies in the first place. Related to this there’s still a strong element of social shame in the culture.
- I may be reaching here but there is a near-total absence of Christian slave morality and its woke ideology offspring. No risk that you will end up on TikTok for beating or chasing a homeless person away and getting cancelled. In fact probably the opposite will happen.
rockbier1218
2yr ago
I'm planning to start one of these next year but have run into confusing information regarding how to handle taxes (on a taxable brokerage account, not an IRA).
Is it better for the completely lazy investor (me) to put the money into ETFs vs the index funds like VTSAX? I want to minimize any time spent dealing with paperwork or tax bullshit and it seems like index funds aren't as "set and forget" as I thought in that sense.
rockbier1218
2mo ago
If these two powers enter into a non-meme war I have to imagine the west will get completely drowned by a tidal wave of immigration. RIP my chill software engineer job
rockbier1218
3mo ago
There’s certainly a never-say-die subset of true believers but I doubt that’s even the majority of the coalition that elected him in November. I think most people were voting against democrat incompetence on inflation and illegal immigration in that order.
If trumpflation ends up being even worse than Biden’s and comes with stagflation and layoffs to boot, I can easily see a new GOP coalition that unites around “Trump but minus tariffs”. And there’s a very clear and straightforward process to make that happen, just need the veto-proof majority in congress to take away tariff powers and let Trump do whatever else he wants
rockbier1218
10mo ago
This comment resonates with me. I come from a culture where elders are respected almost to a fault, and people are expected to defer to the whims of the oldest people in the family at all times.
This kind of setup was probably fine and maybe even made sense for most of human history, but now that people are being kept alive into their 80s and even 90s with ease, it leads to a lot of material and emotional burden on the rest of the family.
To give an example, I live in an apartment with my wife and my mother is the landlord. My mother charges me MARKET-RATE RENT with the stated reason being to help her support my grandfather and pay for his rent and living expenses. In a previous post I mentioned family planning with my wife, and the fact that we’re paying rent to support my grandfather is a non-trivial stressor on our discussions about having kids. Now what kind of fucked-up arrangement is this? The family unit is sacrificing its future material prosperity to care for somebody who probably shouldn’t even be alive except for modern medicine and is an active burden on the rest of the family?
Until me and my generation, essentially nobody in my family has had to worry about supporting their grandparents in old age (not just financially, but emotionally and in the sense of having to defer to their wishes and antiquated opinions) and often their own parents would be dead by the time they became productive members of society ready to build wealth.
At least from my anecdotal perspective this kind of absurd arrangement of transferring wealth from the young to the very old and infirm (I haven’t even mentioned social security and medicare) is a major cause of declining birth rates. How many more families would we have if people died at a natural age, they passed on their wealth and estate, and the next generation could focus on building wealth and supporting their own children?
rockbier1218
11mo ago
Agreed the sequels are not worth your time. I found Hyperion to be excellent and the sequels quite mediocre, surprisingly so.
rockbier1218
11mo ago
I don’t think these crime statistics really capture the picture. How often are things even reported? In NYC many quality of life offenses have blended so deeply into the noise of city life that nobody will report it because it’s not a serious crime.
If a psychotic drug zombie is screaming at me on the subway platform about wanting to stab me and how he could kill me, is that a crime? Actually yes, it’s technically an assault under NY State law. Will anybody report it? LOL
Repeat this ad nauseam and you see how crime statistics are low but there is a massive degradation in quality of life
rockbier1218
11mo ago
Hocam is this in Turkey or a western country? Advice will vary based on your answer
rockbier1218
11mo ago
It's interesting to read your perspective on family relationships. I couldn't stand to be around my family by the time I was 17 and went away to college, never to return. My remaining grandfather, a similar age to yours, has always been a classic holier-than-thou ignorant religious prick and I also come from an eastern culture where filial piety is THE virtue of all virtues, and as a result everybody bent over backwards to kiss his ass and not upset him. I can't even imagine a universe where I would be in your shoes and missing my grandfather at all. I actively dread every time I have to go to my mother's house to visit him and the rest of my family.
All of that to say, you are lucky to have a family that you will actually miss when you are away from them. In that sense "everything will be okay" is already your reality. The material circumstances will come and go, but being able to carry that kind of family in your heart is already the endgame ideal. You already won, just enjoy the ride.
Good luck to you in Scotland!
rockbier1218
11mo ago
Lol that is amazing. Sounds like the most plausible explanation, but maybe even worse because it seems like that should have been caught in a dev or staging environment
rockbier1218
1yr ago
What are the finance books? Anything interesting you’d recommend?
rockbier1218
3mo ago
one other interesting twist on all of this is that Trump is extremely old. This is not a charismatic 40-year old who has the potential to cement his rule for a decade+. Trump is inherently a short-term politician, and if he starts being a short-term loser then it’s a lot easier for people to jump ship. There is little chance he stages some kind of comeback in the future after this which would cause people to doubt if defecting now will come back to bite them later.
rockbier1218
3mo ago
Certainly possible. My prediction rests on the assumption that we are about to see economic catastrophe worse than 2008. That’s my take at least.
If that doesn’t end up happening and we instead just have something like Covid or an average recession then absolutely he will ride out the term.
But I simply don’t see how if we have financial oblivion Trump survives. There are too many powerful elites that will also be impacted and even the average GOP voter will revolt and turn on Trump if the bread and circuses are gone
rockbier1218
3mo ago
Up till now MAGA has been neutral to positive for the average American. Trump didn’t really do anything that’s impacted Joe Six-pack and if anything has delivered some wins on woke and DEI. And his tax cuts broadly benefited Joe Six-pack in the short-term as well.
So the only real reasons to oppose Trump have been “he’s vulgar” or political games like Jan 6 that democrats also played. Or you’re a woke lib who hates him on principle.
But now all of a sudden people are staring at GFC part 2 with the potential for much much worse. Joe Six-pack will get annihilated with inflation and might get laid off too. And whose fault is it? It’s 100% on Trump and everybody knows it.
All of a sudden even conservatives are like “wait a minute wtf” and that will lead to political pressure on Trump from essentially all of America except the most diehard of his base (and how many of them are diehard enough when they are about to lose their homes and a t-shirt is $50?)
rockbier1218
4mo ago
I didn’t vote but probably leaned his direction. Mainly for immigration control, tax relief, and what I thought were some interesting foreign policy plays (Greenland, Panama Canal).
He definitely is doing worse than I had anticipated. The cuts to medical research in particular are absolutely galling. Who gives a shit if there is some administrative bloat in world-leading cancer research that has undeniable economic benefits? It’s all a drop in the bucket compared to entitlement programs, which he is not touching at all.
In general he is continuing to perpetrate this unbearable gerontocracy where old people hoard the wealth and kneecap younger generations through incredible housing prices, NIMBY, and parasitism from social security and Medicare.
rockbier1218
11mo ago
It’s a tricky one and I think it could easily be argued that Shapiro would have been the better choice. Nate Silver had a ranking of swing states by importance to probability of winning the electoral college, and in both cases whoever wins Pennsylvania has a ~90% chance of winning the election.
Shapiro is popular in Pennsylvania and that’s probably enough to tip the state to the democrats.
But yeah there does seem to be one too many skeletons in his closet and I’m sorry, the IDF thing (whatever you want to call it, it’s at least a conflict of interest) is fucking “weird” and probably should disqualify him from any kind of national office dealing with foreign policy.
rockbier1218
11mo ago
I can forgive the testing errors. It’s hard to test every possible thing and I’m sure the developers were under a lot of time pressure to ship “features features features” because tech management just keeps asking for more every year.
But the lack of a canary rollout is unforgivable and would seriously make me question the software running on my machine (if I’m a customer). You can’t even rollout locally to some virtual machines you have in a staging environment to ensure they run before YOLO pushing to every customer? Even if it’s not “code” and it’s just a config you’re pushing, you absolutely must must must stage and canary rollouts. Not doing it is catastrophic incompetence, and I actually thank Crowdstrike for proving the point because now I have cover for a few years to tell managers to suck my dick if they ask for a YOLO rollout.
rockbier1218
11mo ago
OP if you are high IQ as you claim, you will stop reading after this post. Unless you have a candidate ready to swap to immediately, as in you are currently having an affair with a high IQ high-class woman who wants to have your babies, you are embarking on a fool’s errand. Or are you very attractive and confident that there are many women willing to sleep with you? In that case maybe your thinking is sound.
For what it’s worth yes IQ is clearly heritable, but my dad was the “smart” one (bootstrapped out of poverty and worked as both an engineer and in finance) and my mom was below-average, in both cases the grandparents were peasant serfs with no more than a 5th grade education. And I am smarter than my father. So it’s not written in stone that your kids will be an exact average between 125 and 110, you might have a me and pop out a 130-135.
rockbier1218
11mo ago
I’m not sure there’s any lesson to take here other than don’t let openly senile people run for president?
Yeah it was a great move, but was very clearly the obvious one for a very long time, in the same way that telling an ugly fat guy to go to the gym and lose some weight is a great move if his goal is to attract women.
rockbier1218
11mo ago
Agree that we’d be way better off as a society if these psychopaths decided to target politicians or shady businessmen or something.
I can imagine that this religious/secular divide will only continue to get worse. The ultra-orthodox are projected to be 25% of the population by 2050, apparently.
How will the body politic handle 25% of the population being exempt from military service and essentially living off of the productive capacity of the other 75%? Especially with Muslim birth rates outpacing the secular Jews?
The secular Jews of Israel will probably experience a massive leftward shift and true coalition with the Muslim population once the ultra-orthodox drag on GDP and military becomes too big to ignore.
Just my two cents, but I think this rightward shift won’t last beyond a decade at most.
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