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Not connected to any current culture war, but this dead bird thread is nevertheless interesting.
What is missing from nearly all HBDIQ discourse is how modern society is one big incomprehensible Kafkaesque prison for the left part of bell curve. Dealing with omnipresent bureaucracy and jumping through constantly changing hoops is hard for any of us here, who mostly can claim the title of elite human capital.
Now try to put yourself in the shoes of high school dropout, and imagine to deal with car or health insurance (or health care in general) or other things you need to live. And it is getting worse and worse, with no end in sight.
I am increasingly sympathetic to the idea that systems too complicated for stupid people are deeply unfair, even if I personally have no trouble understanding and even benefitting from these systems. When we look at something like credit cards, smart people can gain an edge in convenience and even a net profit from gaming the points systems. People in the middle with sufficient executive function will get the convenience benefit without too much trouble. People that either don't really understand what credit is, don't understand how interest works, or lack impulse control will purchase things they can't afford, accumulate more debt with compounding interest, and ruin their lives. In my previous, more callous thinking, I basically thought, "well, tough shit for them, it's not that hard to understand and they should just do better". Observing people's behavior, that's just not true. No matter what they do, they're not capable of understanding how compounding interests works, even if they grasp it during a conversation, that's going to be right out within a couple days.
This also extends to student loans. While I still have antipathy for people that absolutely can grasp what they're signing, it's just obvious that many people really don't understand what they're signing up for and don't understand the basics of financing. We can see people posting stories about how shocked they are that they've already paid the amount they owe, but the principal is still the same. People think "cancellation" is something that can be done without any impact on the other side of the ledger; they have no idea that there even is a ledger, they literally believe that the only reason their debt isn't cancelled is because some people are just mean and hate them.
I've been trying to help someone figure out their student loan situation through the latest round of presidential office attempts to put various plans in place, and it just comes across as gambling at this point. We're both about as smart as the average non-technical collage graduate. First a bunch of people were saying to consolidate, because (reasons that I found rather obscure having to do with an executive order?). So they did that, but then the numbers fluctuated wildly for a while, and they got a bill for more than they've ever owed in their life. So they tried submitting some paperwork, which was ignored for a few weeks. Then they tried calling, and the person said they would put it on hold while the paperwork was processed, which might take three months or so, they weren't really sure. Meanwhile, there seems to be a bunch of law fare going on between the president's office and (states? banks? state created financial entities?). It doesn't seem so much like people are stupid, as that the system is wildly unstable, leading to a student loan decisions as gambling situation.
I have a general rule that I do not make big changes regarding financial situations or anything else that are predicated on assumptions about future political or legal actions.
For example, there is a fairly common strategy of converting IRAs and 401ks which are pretax (meaning that you have not yet paid taxes on them but will need to do so upon withdrawal) into Roth IRAs and 401ks (which will be tax-free upon withdrawal). To do this you need to pay taxes today to attempt to save taxes in the future; as such it is basically a bet on your tax rate today vs. at retirement. However the hidden assumption is that Roth vehicles will never be taxed, and I put the odds of that at much lower than 100%. We're going to need to get that UBI money from someone.
That being said I didn't think I'd ever sniff Social Security and I now have <20 years max left (pending changes to retirement age). But I have found that eking out small +EV in life tends to be dwarfed by variance. At the poker table sure, but not when dealing with the vicissitudes of fate.
I've always felt similar about Australia's Superannuation system. There's definitely ways of deriving a tax advantage, but as a 29 year old now I'm not super confident in the withdrawal ages and sanctity of the product for the next half-century.
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