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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1068 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 1, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Someone recently claimed that people here would greatly outperform the market given their higher-than-average intelligence. So let's run a hypothetical - you've got $1m and your goal is to 5x it (pre tax) in the next 2 years. Perhaps we can look back at replies to this post few years later and see how everyone does. Anything goes, from investing to leveraging your unique skills or connections if you have any.

My plan would be this: 900k into a leveraged Uranium long. 100k dry powder for any other opportunities - long Korean hardware stocks (Samsung, SK Hynix) right now, then rotate to INTC leaps and/or lithium, then try to time crypto bottom and buy a few good coins on spot (LINK, HYPE). I think Uranium position does a 3-4x so would have to do a magical 14-23x with that $100k.

If I had 1m$ I wouldn't bother with investing in markets. Way too many good ideas to pursue in the military industrial complex that will pay off handsomely.

What ideas are those? Every big Euro and most US VCs and a lot of other private equity is super into early-mid stage defense now, the big private companies like Anduril and that German drone company are valued lik AI firms, and the big public companies are trading at tech-level multiples priced to perfection for insane earnings growth over the next few years.

Right now the bom for a sniper style turret is quite cheap. You take couple of 22cal to .50 and the rest is core xy. And combination of AI + classical algorithms could make the governing software both capable and able to fit into modest hardware. Throw couple of sensors for the wind and rain and you should be able to throw a bullet quite far away with nice precision. The west was moving in direction to have dumb guns and smart munitions. I think that the opposite approach is better.

The west was moving in direction to have dumb guns and smart munitions.

That's partly because smart guns (or rather, what smart guns enable, which is "can technically fire automatically") are illegal in the West. That's not so relevant in wartime, but is definitely relevant in peacetime.

And by "smart gun" I mean systems that actually improve the gun's performance- adjustable full-auto rates of fire, computer controlled triggers and optics, ammunition counters (though that's mostly a meme), etc. You see the explosion in development for guns that were functionally banned 10 years ago in the US (short rifles and shotguns with stocks, pseudo-full-auto that's not meaningfully distinguishable from the real thing, etc.); if we went further than that we'd have a better outlook on what the tech can actually provide.

Samsung has made automated turrets for the Korean DMZ for a long time, and armed uncrewed ground vehicles have started popping up in Ukraine. I think you're right about Western moral qualms about such things, but they have started popping up. In applications where they're more clearly defensive and not typically anti-personnel (autonomous CIWS, for example), they have been accepted for decades at this point.

Smart munitions are going to win at longer ranges where gun accuracy starts falling off, though. That isn't always the case, but I think it's another factor in the decisionmaking there.

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