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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   25758 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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Why are Americans becoming more anti-renewable?

The share of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who say the country should prioritize oil, coal and natural gas over wind and solar power has doubled to 71% over the last six years. Majorities of Republicans see wind and solar power as less reliable than other energy sources, and decreasing shares of Republicans say wind and solar energy is better for the environment.

With rising energy costs and increased demand, Americans are still more likely to say that renewable energy should be prioritized over fossil fuels. But that share continues to drop: 57% say this today, down from 79% in 2020. About eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic leaners (83%) say the country should give priority to developing wind and solar production, but this share has also ticked downward in the last few years.

Wind and solar attract the most support, with about two-thirds (65%) calling for policies to expand production from these sources. And coal mining attracts the least support, with more saying the government should discourage (36%) this activity than encourage it (27%). Americans have more mixed views of other sources, with none attracting majority support, but also none facing large opposition.

Republicans have long been less supportive of wind and solar production than Democrats. In 2022, a slim majority (54%) of Republicans supported government policies to encourage production of these renewable sources. In four years, that has dropped 10 percentage points to 44%. This is consistent with past Center surveys, which found that the shares of Republicans who say they support more wind power and solar power both dropped by more than 20 points from 2020 to 2025. An overwhelming majority of Democrats (85%) continue to say the federal government should encourage the production of wind and solar power.

The opposite pattern emerges with fossil fuel sources: Republicans have been more supportive than Democrats of federal programs to encourage these sources, and the share in favor of such programs has grown. 62% of Republicans now say the federal government should encourage oil and gas drilling, up 11 percentage points since January 2022. 45% of Republicans say the federal government should encourage coal mining, up 13 points in four years. Much smaller shares of Republicans say the federal government should discourage oil and gas drilling (8%) or coal mining (14%). Just as in the Biden years, Democrats are far more likely to say the federal government should discourage rather than encourage oil and gas drilling and coal mining.

As with other attitudes around renewable energy, Republicans are less likely than they were five years ago to say solar and wind power are better for the environment. Republicans are 14 percentage points less likely now to say that solar power is better for the environment than most other energy sources. Similarly, there has been a 12-point drop in the share of Republicans who say that wind power is better for the environment than most other energy sources. About three-in-ten Republicans (29%) now say wind power is worse for the environment, up 12 points from five years ago. More Republicans say wind (44%) and solar (43%) cost consumers more than other energy sources than say these cost less than other sources (19% and 24%, respectively).

Americans view both solar and wind power as less reliable than other energy sources (though more Americans say wind is less reliable than say the same about solar). Republicans are especially negative about these sources’ reliability. This year, Republicans are far more likely to say solar and wind power are less reliable rather than more reliable compared with other energy sources, while Democrats are more mixed. Democrats are split on the reliability of wind power, and they’re more likely to think solar power is more reliable than less reliable.

Landman really is that popular, huh? Battery tech has only gotten better and cheaper, and the LCOE of renewables even with storage added is competitive with or better than fossil fuels, yet public opinion is backsliding. Gas is still great because the US has so much of it, but the DoE is even trying to force coal plants to keep running at cost to consumers, even when states and operators want them retired. Coal miners can't be that large of a constituency, surely, so what's driving this obsession in particular?

Why are Americans becoming more anti-renewable?

Beacuse they are correctly updated on the reliability issues of renewables, and not at all updated on the fact battery technology is now quite good and cheap. ERCOT is standing up massive amounts of batteries right now.

God bless Texas, in some places capitalism still has a reality bias.

I'm typing this from inside my solar-panel-bedecked house in Texas, so don't take it too critically, but Texas is among the best spots for solar, not the typical spots. I get 300 days a year of good sunlight, and most of my residential energy demand is coming from A/C requirements that spike only a few hours after the solar supply does, so people here can get away with few batteries ... or if you rely on the grid for evening power like I do, no on-site batteries.

If your city doesn't get as much insolation (most of China, for some reason?) the economics look a little different. If much of your home energy demand is coming from a heat pump that needs to be pumping in the opposite direction (what, half the US?), the economics look a lot different. If both are true (half of Europe?) then it's long past time (except for you, France, we're cool) to just go nuclear.

For sure. Renewables aren't something you can just put anywhere. They have pros/cons like all power generation options. The pro/con balance has just shifted massively in the last 10 years and people don't recognize or acknowledge that.

It's just another tool in the belt of an industrial civilization. And to dismiss them because of culture warring is retarded and counterproductive to the betterment of humanity.

Why are Americans becoming more anti-renewable?

Because they monitor the situation, and see that world is getting more spicy and big boog is coming. And in boog times, dispersed renewable power sources are completely indefensible.

If you disagree, show your work, show your plan to protect solar plant or offshore wind farm from attack by drone swarms that are now common in Eastern Europe.

19th century technology is the answer for 21st century problems.

Germany considers ramping up coal power to avert energy crisis

Italy to push back coal plant phase out to 2038

Asian nations push for dirty fuels to ease energy crisis amid West Asia war

The future is not shiny happy solarpunk, the future is combination of cyberpunk, steampunk and gulagpunk. This is not the future you have to like, but this is the future you were promised.

show your plan to protect solar plant or offshore wind farm from attack by drone swarms that are now common in Eastern Europe.

No infrastructure can withstand a coordinated attacker with access to a large number of cutting edge effectors...

If you disagree, show your work, show your plan to protect solar plant or offshore wind farm from attack by drone swarms that are now common in Eastern Europe.

What's the plan to defend refineries and fuel plants? Solar farms are at least widely dispersed. A drone can only knock out a few panels, or a single turbine, at a time.

Russia's invasion didn't save coal and this won't either.

I think the major reason is not anything more complicated than "libs like renewable energy and often get annoying about it, so I like the opposite of renewable energy".

It's not that much of an exaggeration to say that you could get some right-wingers to jump off a bridge if you told them that the libs were against jumping off bridges, and vice versa that you could get some left-wingers to jump off a bridge if you told them that Trump was against jumping off bridges.

Ironically the Orthodox Church has always had a very strong relationship with nature and ecological preservation. Just do an Amazon search for books on Orthodoxy and ecology. If the standard right-winger thinks renewable and clean energy is something that makes you a liberal then they clearly aren’t aware of the threads within their own tradition.

Just do an Amazon search for books on Orthodoxy and ecology.

And then do search on actually existing Orthodox countries environmental practices.

To be fair, the church was suppressed in the majority of their populations for a large part of the 20th century. Not that I really think they would have been great friends of the environment even if the church had not been suppressed. There wasn't really much of a choice, unfortunately. They had to either industrialize hard or be invaded at worst or reduced to economic backwaters at best.

...this seems confused, to me?

Firstly, almost no American right-wingers are Orthodox, because almost no Americans are Orthodox full stop. It is entirely to be expected that Eastern Orthodoxy plays practically zero role in the formation of beliefs on the American right. Most American right-wingers do not feel that Orthodoxy is part of their heritage and therefore pay no attention to it. Orthodoxy is simply not a relevant part of the American political or cultural landscape.

Secondly, Orthodox Christians are not a particularly right-wing demographic. Per Pew there, in 2023-24, 50% of Orthodox identified as Republican or leaning Republican, versus 6% in the middle, and 44% for Democrats. By comparison, Evangelicals are 70-6-24, Mainline Protestants are 52-8-41, Catholics are 49-8-44, and Mormons are 73-4-23. Mainline Protestants are more right-wing than Orthodox!

Thirdly, if I search Amazon for 'Religion X and ecology', I will find a huge number regardless. Just doing it now, Catholicism gets me 108 results, Protestantism gets 63, Evangelicalism 27, and Orthodoxy 22. Orthodoxy, at least on the metric you gave, does not seem particularly impressive.

Fourthly, I'd argue that citing authoritative works from a person's religious tradition is often ineffective in changing a person's mind, especially if the citation seems to be made aggressively or in bad faith. The obvious case study would be Laudato si', hailed with great enthusiasm by liberal Christians of all varieties, ignored by most others, and yet used by the former to try to pull conservative Catholics in their direction. Did this work? Not really. I think when one tries to cite a religious tradition, it's more important to be closely embedded in that group's actual practice.

On a final note, I do not for a second disagree with the idea that Christian doctrine, regardless of denomination, tells us to take care of the Earth and its resources. It very clearly does.

However, I think that Orthodoxy is not especially unique or more active in proposing care for the world than other traditions, I think most American right-wingers do not perceive Orthodoxy to be part of their tradition at all, and I'm not sure Orthodoxy should be seen as particularly right-wing at all.

I wasn’t referring to American Orthodoxy specifically, maybe that’s why it’s somewhat confused. Policy-wise, I obviously can’t speak to the footprint the tradition has in steering the politics of places like Greece or Russia. But if people want to associate environmentalism with left-wing ideologies, they’re fairly ignorant because it has a big impact in the thinking of Christians.

My understanding is that in Greece the church is not particularly mobilised, politically. There is a vague, general sort of sense that it leans right, but pretty much every major party in Greek politics at least puts on a show of being pious, prays publicly, respects priests, and so on.

In Russia, it's obviously a complicated mess, partly due to the communist legacy, partly due to Patriarch Kirill's ties to Putin, and more. Certainly today the Russian Orthodox Church is in alliance with Putin and the larger 'right', but there are significant contingent factors there.

In general it is absolutely correct to say that Christianity, as a whole, has a strong environmentalist message.

Going back to the Pew Religious Landscape Study, one of the questions it asks is whether people agree with the statement "God gave humans a duty to protect and care for the Earth, including the plants and animals". 97% of Evangelical Protestants either completely, mostly, or somewhat agree with that, compared to 90% of Mainline Protestants, 90% of Catholics, 89% of Muslims, 84% of Orthodox, 75% of Hindus, 56% of Jews, 56% of Buddhists, 24% of agnostics, and 3% of atheists.

Obviously the lower numbers are modified heavily by the number who don't believe in God at all - the Jewish number is only so low, I'd guess, because 28% of Jews don't believe in God. Likewise the Orthodox number looks worse than the other Christians, but I'd guess that's because 9% of Orthodox either don't believe in God or did not answer a question about believing in God.

(This is probably because Orthodoxy is an 'ethnic faith' in many cases? There are people who say "I'm Orthodox" but all that means is "I'm Greek" or "I'm Russian". Like the professor or grandfather in this story - "You can't convert from being Greek!")

(I am also comfortable saying that the lower numbers are just because of atheism because Pew also asks people if they support government regulation to protect the environment - Jews support that at 72%, Buddhists at 68%, agnostics at 83%, and atheists at 87%. This is not a perfect measure, because it's possible to believe that humans must protect the environment but that government regulation is not the right way to do it - presumably this is what's going on with evangelicals, who only 44% support environmental regulation laws - but it is nonetheless indicative.)

Anyway, I would be comfortable asserting that among Christians who believe in God, it is overwhelmingly consensus, at 90+% agreement, that God gave humans a duty to protect and care for the Earth. We must kindly steward this marvellous creation.

I was just at dinner at the home of a guy who refuses to recycle aluminum cans. He asked me if I was a "good recycler" so you know he sees the entire thing as moral signalling. He foregoes the refund and just puts them in the trash on principle. I tried to explain that aluminum is the type of recycling that makes the most sense, but he's up to his eyeballs in the culture and he won't do it.

Locally, last I checked:

  • glass "recycling" isn't. It's garbage that you can place in the blue bin. Beer bottle reuse is worthwhile.
  • plastic recycling is mostly split between shipping it to Asia (and hoping it doesn't get dumped in the Pacific) and worse than new manufacture
  • paper is kind of a waste, but I guess it's okay since a fraction of the infrastructure is paid for by the fully-useless ones anyways
  • aluminum is absolutely, definitely worthwhile.

A heuristic of recycling being useless is accurate for 75% of those material categories. He's wrong about the last one, but I find it hard to blame someone for not knowing about how energy-intensive refining aluminum from bauxite is and how much easier it is to recover from cans and other scrap.

I think a lot depends on whether he puts the aluminum in the trash because he has a heuristic that recycling is useless or whether he puts it in the trash because it's a symbolic way to attack the libs.

There's one particular plastic -- clear polyethylene -- for which recycling makes sense, and recycled material costs MORE than virgin (presumably because of government incentives to recycle).

The thing is, from the context I suspect that it's less like the guy had checked how useless various types of recycling are and just pattern-matched aluminium with the rest of them, and more like he has a rock that says "recycling is fake lib shit".

Yeah, I'm guessing he didn't do a full cost-benefit analysis before deciding on a simple strategy he could use in everyday life, but there's still a reason why he has that heuristic.

I’m sure he’s excellent with managing money too.

Or, say, get urban IPA-drinking millennial libs to buy Bud Light, or the alt right to listen to Kanye West.

Not many people remember years ago when there was debate about how automotive EV’s will ever become mainstream and you’ll never get people to switch over to using them. Next thing you know Elon (or rather the marketing department) came around and made it look “cool” to own a Tesla. Now you see them almost everywhere in the big cities. My mechanic however recently told me there’s something of an undercurrent of desire among people looking to go retro and away from all the bells and whistles. A lot of people want older cars little more advanced than a decent radio and power locks and windows; and I’m with them on that. I shook my head in disbelief years ago at the thought of “firmware,” or having to install a software patch on my car. Just give me something affordable, reliable and industrial; and that can be maintained. That’s all I need.

Just give me something affordable, reliable and industrial; and that can be maintained. That’s all I need.

I think you are looking for a "fleet vehicle". Its what companies buy in bulk to serve their business needs. They usually have a minimum of creature comforts (suck it up employees, you are on the clock). They are usually built to be properly maintained, but also survive long periods of "severe" use. Think taxi cabs, cop cars, rental cars, plumber/electrician vans, etc.

I have no idea how you actually buy one of these vehicles, but I strongly assume it is possible.

Downside for you is that these vehicles are probably still built up to spec for safety regulations. And certain computer based driving features are increasingly being considered safely enhancements. Like rear view cameras, auto brakes, etc.

I know very little about cars. What is it about highly computerized cars that makes automobile manufacturers want to manufacture them? I doubt there was ever much demand for computerized cars before the manufacturers began to make them, but I could be wrong of course. Do customers actually get some extra value out of their cars being computerized? Is it more that the manufacturers like being able to easily get data from their cars and change the cars' behavior without having to modify hardware?

I doubt there was ever much demand for computerized cars before the manufacturers began to make them, but I could be wrong of course.

I think you are wrong. Regardless of vibes, many customers have been and probably continue to be willing to pay more, sometimes a lot more, for smarter cars, for extra features, for added convenience and performance. People definitely do get extra value from the infotainment, from all the power options, from the different driving modes and driver profiles, from automatic functions and driver assist systems. Not everyone, but the customers who don't get value from any of those things are extremely niche, and probably so cheap they're not going to buy a new car anyways.

The main advantages to carmakers is that it's a lot easier to make and especially to scale across multiple products and that it's easier to make changes after production, etc, even if you don't add any new functions or telemetry vs, say, 90s cars.

For a car to drive smoothly requires a lot of things to happen just right at the right times, in the right way, like a complex ballet performance. You can get there with exquisitely engineered mechanical parts, electrical parts, electronics, discrete computers or centralized computers (and yeah in a physical way, computers are electronics which are electrical parts, but the degree of complexity and flexibility is different). Having mechanical parts do all of this complex ballet is possible, but difficult; tolerances have to be extremely precise, the materials quasi perfect... It's slightly easier to fudge some of the things with simple electrical parts. For instance, instead of smooth high quality gears and cranks just put an electric motor and limit switches to control a window (it's also easy to make a cheap, bad window crank tho). It's even easier to have electronics like purpose made chips do some of it instead; a servomotor doesn't need to have as much complexity built into it to avoid decapitating a child whose head was out of the window when it started closing. And a computer makes it all even easier, you can start producing the car first and worry about how much strength the motor for the windows are able to push after, and if a regulatory agency changes it (or if different jurisdictions have different limits) you can still use the same part and just change the programming.

The big change from the 90s and early 00s to now is that we're going from multiple discrete computers, which can be limited and hard to access, to less, but more powerful, central computers. That's easier for the dealership to access (according to the industry though, giving independant mechanics access will get women raped in parking garages*).

For consumers, there's some advantages. You can have "modes" that change the throttle response of the car, you can have simulated shifting on CVT transmissions, you can have more complex features for controls like locking window controls for the back row from the front row, more complex security and safety features, a mechnical or electrical car is trivial to hotwire. You can also have features like accident detection that can, on top of calling emergency services on your behalf in some of the more advanced cases, in simpler cases it could automatically unlock the door so it's easier to evacuate. The cases where the consumers are (rightly) complaining is when manufacturers, following Tesla's lead, are replacing physical controls that are easy to use without looking with modal touchscreens (which require more attention from the driver to use). Part of this from the manufacturer is because it's cheaper, part of it is because there's the impression that futuristic means clean means no buttons.

And then of course, they like getting their telemetry data.

*Sadly I can't find the actual ad anymore.

Computerized car engines give you more efficiency, more power, less pollution, and more reliability than mechanical ignition and injection systems did.

Computerized driver controls I'm much less sanguine about. Nothing I might want to fiddle with while watching the road should be controlled by a modal UI, much less by a touch screen, rather than by a knob or button whose function is determined by a shape and position I can actually discern by touch.

get data from their cars and change the cars' behavior without having to modify hardware?

Well, this is perhaps the source of the design problems, not just the design decision, isn't it? Some of the common examples of risk compensation are claims that car drivers take more risks when they know they have anti-lock brakes or seat belts partially protecting them from the consequences, but software producers, including car software producers, also have incentive to take more risks when they know they have automatic patch application partially protecting them from the consequences. Do you really need to fix all the bugs before launch now, or can you just fix the worst of them and then try to get to more of the rest before buyers get too pissed?

If my theory here is right, then computerized car engines could actually get worse as cabin computer connectivity gets more popular. If your buyer can't do an ECU firmware update without going into the shop, they're going to be pissed if they ever need an update, and you'd better make sure that engine computer is solid from day one, whether or not there's a bug in the radio UI. But if you have an internet connection that lets you slip an ECU firmware update in without the buyer even noticing? Getting software solid is expensive, and you could probably save a lot of time and money by just getting it mostly solid and then waiting for the diagnostic data and the bug reports...

When you put it that way, I guess there's some investment ideas I could probably get from it.

It's really just people applying the "There must be a balancing downside" just world heuristic. Same reason people think strong people must not also be fast or smart because it violates some kind of int/str/dex rpg assumptions. It just wouldn't be fair if solar had stats in every category vs coal, there must be a trade off, especially because it's politically contentious. And there are the obvious ones like not being reliable when the sun don't shine or the wind don't blow, which are real but have had engineers and scientists working on them for decades now with some good work arounds. But fundamentally people are suspicious of something that seems too good to be true.

SP’s can be good for serving very local requirements that don’t depend on supplying energy on a massive scale. If you want to provide electricity to a particular household, then fine. A general problem with the energy intake however is as you said, with wind and solar it’s highly intermittent and varies all over the place. Who knows though, maybe with climate change fucking up the whole stratosphere maybe the opportunity’s there for SP’s to harvest 10x the amount of energy. That sounds like Beavis and Butthead physics to me (“let’s just keep polluting so we can trap more energy in the planet…”), but it’s the only way I could imagine solar to work at any large scale. (No, that isn’t how that works.)

Solar already works at pretty large scale, it's already deployed and working. You connected it to a large grid with a variety of sources and storage. We don't have to speculate on whether solar panels work at grid scale.

Certainly solar can provide power at scale. But unless your demand is variable-on-demand, or you have truly massive amounts of storage, it's not adding capacity, it's just reducing fuel costs. Because not only does solar only work part of the time, those parts of the time are well-correlated.

And there are the obvious ones like not being reliable when the sun don't shine or the wind don't blow, which are real but have had engineers and scientists working on them for decades now with some good work arounds.

They still get handwaved and/or completely ignored in most treatments of the subject outside the trade press. Don't play a drinking game with a rule of "take a drink every time they compare fossil and solar nameplate capacity as if they're equivalent" if you value your liver.

  1. Cultural war over climate change, which in some ways is also a religious argument for many conservatives who think saying humans can change the world is ridiculous.

  2. the increasing nostalgiafication of politics and media leading to older jobs like that being seen as better just by default

  3. General "Working class" fetishism, similar to factory labor.

  4. Half of conservative culture now is just being reactionary for "liberal tears"

Good news is that in an open market, it really doesn't matter. The best decisions economically will win out over time, and as wind and solar becomes increasingly more viable, it's going to win out more. Texas of all states is the new leader of renewable energy and battery capacity, past even the most left leaning ones because their market is far more free and the electricity companies are making their choices without spending years on bullshit environmental studies or zoning disputes or whatever. And it's not just Texas, four of the top five clean energy states are conservative leaning

Good news is that in an open market, it really doesn't matter. The best decisions economically will win out over time, and as wind and solar becomes increasingly more viable, it's going to win out more.

This seems correct and, along with your bullet points above it, indicates that any sort of renewable-focused activism in the past was a complete failure, and in the future would be a complete waste of time. I wish I could hope that those people who were complete failures in the past would learn from this so as not to waste their (and our) time and resources in the future, but I'm not that naive.

which in some ways is also a religious argument for many conservatives who think saying humans can change the world is ridiculous.

I can't speak for all conservatives, but I don't think this is an accurate summary. If you want to put a religious spin on things, I would say that global warming hysteria is perceived as the pagan shaman who is demanding sacrifices to appease the weather god.

The best decisions economically will win out over time, and as wind and solar becomes increasingly more viable, it's going to win out more

In principle, that's fine with me. My sense is that there has been a regulatory thumb on the scale, but if wind and solar are genuinely more economical, I have much less of an objection to them.

Landman* really is that popular, huh? Battery tech has only gotten better and cheaper, and the LCOE of renewables even with storage added is competitive with or better than fossil fuels, yet public opinion is backsliding.

I don't believe this. This particular document is clear nonsense. It is assuming only 4 hours storage. Which means you're going to need a LOT of fossil fuel standby capacity -- almost the same as your solar capacity. All you're saving is fuel. If you want to save any capital costs at all, you either need enough battery to cover the longest dark period, or you need to spin up your generators before your battery gets low (which lets you save somewhat on capital costs, but gives higher fuel costs)

It is assuming only 4 hours storage.

I've never seen an earnest accounting of solar with storage accounting for (1) seasonal variation and (2) a full transition to heat-pump heating. Combined, they mean that peak energy usage north of the sunbelt is going to be in winter, where solar flux is at best a fraction of summer peaks. This requires either (1) overbuilding solar to handle peak heating demand in mid-winter, (2) storage that handles months, not hours, (3) long-haul interconnects to sunnier climes, or (4) mass-migration toward temperate climates with low winter heating loads.

But I'm open to someone sharing data suggesting this is actually becoming feasible.

I've never seen an earnest accounting of solar with storage accounting for (1) seasonal variation and (2) a full transition to heat-pump heating.

And electric cars. (and ranges and water heaters, though those are likely insignficant) "Get an electric car, bro, you can just charge it at night when demand is low, bro." "Now with solar power electric supply is low at night too bro, you can't charge your car bro".

The last few percentage points of reliability are the costliest for power storage (see page 31). So peaking gas or some other dispatchable will still probably be necessary.

The dream: I live somewhere hot and sunny. I get a solar panel attached to my house or carport or neighborhood. The money I was already spending on energy goes into paying for the solar panel.

The reality: subsidies go to the enormous concentrated solar farm in the middle of the desert. Birds and lizards keep getting burnt to death from the heat, and it looks terrible over much larger areas of land than an equivalent fossil fuel plant and oil pumps. They pay less in taxes than the oil extractors, and maintain fewer roads (I care about this in a large, net oil producing state). Are the giant desert solar farms supplying energy to one of the desert data centers that's competing with traditional chile farmers? Is it running air conditioners somewhere? Where? I could look this up, but neither have most of the people taking the poll.

Result: Meh. It's a good idea to develop the technology, I guess. Not especially "green" in implementation, though.

There have been a lot of green energy initiatives in my area. Every time, the initiative claims that it will create jobs and lower utility prices, and do so with minimal disruption to the local environment and community.

This is, inevitably, bullshit. The jobs never materialize. Our power bill goes up even faster than it had been rising before. Entire sections of forest get torn out and replaced with a few half-assed plantings of non-native softwoods. Even us dumb, cousin-fucking rednecks catch on to the game eventually.

Beyond that, I've noticed that "green energy" is for the peasants. For the things that actually matter to the neo-aristocracy right now, like data centers, we're burning fossil fuels like never before with local gas turbines.

At this point, I'm thoroughly fatigued by it. Whenever somebody hectors me about installing grid scale renewable energy, my default response is "you go first".

This is, inevitably, bullshit. The jobs never materialize.

Good, the more jobs necessary for power generation the less efficient it is for society (the workers can now go do something else people want and utility rate increases!) and the more costly it will be for people who need power.

Unfortunately due to NIMBYism, companies have to convince the local shortsighted idiots who don't understand the point of a job is to get something done and not to just give random citizen Joe some money so they'll often over promise on that.

Our power bill goes up even faster than it had been rising before.

Yeah, there's been a huge surge in demand for electricity now what with the data centers and whatever else. New power generation is like a +10 while power demand is a -20 right now and we need to get even more power so it can be like a +25/-20 situation instead. Unfortunately state regulations and local zoning laws are hostile to new construction of basically any kind, so electricity NIMBYism is fucking us over just like housing NIMBYism is screwing over homebuyers and renters.

Entire sections of forest get torn out and replaced with a few half-assed plantings of non-native softwoods.

All energy production is disruptive, so is it much worse than other methods is the important question.

Ideally the point of a job is to get something done.

The problem is, the message that our society sends people through both words and actions is that hard, productive work is for idiots and if you want to ever escape the rat race you should hustle and cut corners and only focus on your own bottom line no matter what.

The average person might actually be most likely to succeed in life by doing good, honest, productive work. But even if that's true, the data that supports it being true would be buried in dry statistics somewhere. Meanwhile, we see an endless parade of people like Pelosi with her remarkable investment acumen, Trump the narcissistic bully who was born rich and genuinely does not seem to know any way of life other than corruption, and all the Kardashians of the world who are famous for being good at being famous.

Which is not to say that politics and entertainment can't be productive work. Politicians can do a lot of good to organize society. Entertainers bring joy to people. But the most visible exemplars of both politicians and entertainers are people who charismamaxxed their way to the top and/or are corrupt.

Meanwhile, we see an endless parade of people like Pelosi with her remarkable investment acumen, Trump the narcissistic bully who was born rich and genuinely does not seem to know any way of life other than corruption, and all the Kardashians of the world who are famous for being good at being famous.

To be a successful politician for this long does take some genuine skill somewhere. Tons and tons of people try and fail. There's tons of competition and political threats to you and getting away with such brazen corruption like Trump or Pelosi requires continued popularity and support. Often the skill is the same sort of thing that the Kardashians provide, taking short term victories and turning it into their long term empires. They easily could have been like the many many people who only see minor fame for a few years (or even just a month), but they took it and turned it into a greater opportunity. They might seem trashy to us, but that doesn't change that they're providing entertainment or hope or whatever to tens/hundreds of millions of people worldwide and those people are willing to pay money/watch commercials/etc other forms of profiting off that. The Kardashians are getting stuff done too, even if I don't personally enjoy them.

Or another way to look at it. I think religion is mostly hogwash, but I can still understand what the point of churches and pastors and religious movies and music is. Other people do believe in it, and thus those things are still getting stuff done

Politicians and entertainers are people who charismamaxxed

Yes. Of course politicians and entertainers are people who generally appeal to some meaningfully sized subset of the population. Trump has basically formed a roughly 30-35% cult of personality around him, where like the only thing I can think of where he didn't manage to control his followers brains around in circles is with vaccines. This helps make him very successful against any would be conservative challengers or criticism.

The only renewable energy that's indefinitely sustainable on a large enough scale is nuclear.

People forget that manufacturing SP's pollutes the hell out of the environment. It’s also economically more expensive. The amount of energy that goes into both making and maintaining solar panels is so enormous, that the net gain we get back from those panels before they expire is paltry. There's also specialized maintenance costs even when you subtract the fact that they lose about 1% of the ability to capture per year. Extrapolate that out on a long-term national scale. There's also the hidden costs in power storage. They only generate during the day and batteries or any other storage system also entails economic other costs in waste: mining, manufacturing, transportation, disposal, recycling; etc., and they also lose a lot of what they hold (no battery system is 100% efficient; especially when you count the energy cost to make them, and their variable efficiency at temperature), so they waste energy, too (and hence, they're also consuming energy).

Nuclear though outperforms every other source of electrical power. It pollutes 'way' less, kills less people, and generates far more energy in proportion to input. Most nuclear plants today are old and it's the old plants are the most dangerous, which the public doesn't take into account. New plants implement safety and security and efficiency advances that vastly reduce the dangers and risks of nuclear power, and also greatly reduce the amount and potency of nuclear waste as well.

We have today a much safer plant design. It's way harder to damage with natural disasters or terrorist attacks, and producing much less waste material with a much lower radioactivity or lifespan. The newest designs actually consume nuclear waste and burn it into electricity. And further investment will only lead to more improvements in these respects. The most contemporary version is the molten salt reactor, which has been around a long time, but it's also been upgraded into the most advanced nuclear reactor in tested use. It has numerous safety advantages (e.g. it's meltdown proof; it consumes no water; etc.); and by actually consuming nuclear waste as a fuel it reduces the environmental impact of even old reactors, and produces less environmental impact itself.

The amount of energy that goes into both making and maintaining solar panels is so enormous, that the net gain we get back from those panels before they expire is paltry.

Can you show your work here? Just googling "solar panels lifetime EROI" gives me tons of papers that come to the exact opposite conclusion, even including storage to make it more comparable. Given that EROI figures are easily manipulated that's not strong evidence either way, but a great many countries have rolled out solar at scale so I tend towards believing it to be roughly true. If it were not, what would those countries' motive be to do this? I've heard arguments to the effect of "China is subsidizing the panels to hide their ineffectiveness as a scheme to wreck their opponents' economies", but they're building out solar capacity massively as well, so if energy-wise solar is a long-term zero sum scam, they've fallen for it too.

The amount of energy that goes into both making and maintaining solar panels is so enormous, that the net gain we get back from those panels before they expire is paltry.

Nuclear does have the best EROI, but that doesn't really matter in a comparison if both sources manage to stay above the required threshold of 3 or 7 or whatever. The additional energy costs will be subsumed into LCOE anyways. Which also incorporates all those maintenance and construction costs. Batteries obviously add cost and reduce EROI but it's also getting better every year.

China's doing some interesting work with pebble bed/molten salt reactors, but it's still going to be years before large scale deployment and renewables just keep getting better in the meantime.

Datacenters use gas turbines because it's the fastest way to bring online a shit ton of reliable power. The goal is first to AGI, costs (and disruption to neighbors) be damned. That being said, some companies have already signed contracts with renewable farms for next year.

This survey is structured so that not supporting subsidizing renewable energy counts as pro-coal (See question 2 about the role of government). I don't think it is surprising that when energy prices go up many voters care more about increasing whatever form of capacity is cheapest than subsidizing greener options.

Even with the subsidy phase out, >50% of new power generation will be solar this year. Seems like good evidence that green energy isn't more expensive.

You also have to account for restrictions and regulations on coal and other sources. If coal and oil plants were allowed to burn as dirty as their 18th century equivalents, there would be no beating them on cost per kwh. Whether or not that would be a good thing is a separate question, but the comparison isn't a completely fair one because even without subsidies it's not a completely level playing field.

Do you have numbers on that? The entropic (fuel) efficiency of modern plants is much better than their 18th century equivalents. Are the emissions control costs really dominant here?

Was hard to find any hard numbers (most sources just talked about how much coal plants emitted, but not how much the tech to limit emissions costs per kwh). I did find this though: https://about.bnef.com/insights/industry-and-buildings/us-coal-plants-face-new-rule-capture-co2-or-shutter/

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids renewable and coal alike to produce lung-killing particulates, heavy metals, and excess CO2".

The EPA has rolled back a bunch of these measures but it won't change the trendline. The last coal plant started was in 2013 and it still hasn't come online.

Or it just outsources the pollution to China. Not saying to pollution from making solar panels is equivalent to the pollution from burning coal, but clean energy isn't quite as clean as many of its proponents like to portray it.

In my experience green energy and rail always ends up being a waste of money that serves to enrich the Democratic stronghold employees above anything else.

If you want my support let's start with something like a revenue neutral carbon tax (pay a citizens dividend annually with everything collected and reduce means tested support by the amount of the dividend) and let people choose how they want to respond and don't subsidize anything.

After that's working we can add sensible subsidies like insulation heat pumps and such.

reduce means tested support by the amount of the dividend

This makes the carbon tax revenue positive.

Coal miners can't be that large of a constituency, surely, so what's driving this obsession in particular?

Coal miners are a symbolically massive constituency. There aren't that many coal miners, but there are quite a lot of people who view coal miners as representative of a particular vision of America (sort of like how there aren't that many cowboys or farmers). Specifically, a mid-century vision oriented around stereotypically "manly" industries like manufacturing and resource extraction. Conversely, opponents of clean energy will raise practical objections, but there's a heavy undercurrent of aesthetic distaste for green energy. Like caring about the environment more broadly, it's hippy and lib-coded. It's not a coincidence that the non-fossil fuel most attractive to anti-environmentalists is nuclear power, with its massive engineering requirements and historic status as bete noire to environmentalists. There is, of course, also the broad self-interest question. Red states are heavily intertwined with the oil and gas industry, so there's interest in portraying renewable energy sources as inefficient or outright pointless while downplaying the costs associated with fossil fuels.

Of course, there's a tension between peoples' personal views and the legal environment in which these systems exist. Thus, e.g. Texas installing more solar than California despite Texans thinking that solar power is gay.

nuclear power, with its massive engineering requirements and historic status as bete noire to environmentalists

...and its ability to provide power when we tell it to, rather than when the weather feels like it.

The intermittancy of certain kinds of green energy isn't quite a fake problem, but it is close. Solar especially has consistently made fools of skeptics, and the technical obstacles that were supposed to render it impractical have proven extremely surmountable.

And on the other side of things, Nuclear has a whole raft of its own problems. It is theoretically a "proven" technology, but it is extremely expensive and slow to deploy, with a break-even time measured in decades. The waste problem, while not technically difficult, is politically radioactive (hah) and imposes security problems that Solar and Wind do not have. It is not a coincidence the genuinely successful nuclear-dominated power systems that we (e.g. France, Eastern Bloc) see came from top-down political systems that had the power to tell objectors to suck it and which were only marginally sensitive to economic concerns. There is also the stated preferences vs outcomes issue I alluded to in my first post - Nuclear is deployed more as a rhetorical deflection from other green energy sources than as a serious alternative, and given conservatives' affinity for the fossil fuel industry I think it is very likely that if decarbonization advocates were pushing Nuclear they'd be against it.

Remember "learn to code"?

Years of being talked down to by someone who was smugly wrong has done a lot of damage.

Pretty much everyone is smugly wrong all the time, so it's not a strong explanation for anything in particular. Right-wing anti-environmentalism predates any sort of SE-related retraining push. Environmentalism is lib-coded in the US because libs are generally the ones worried about the commons and proposing trading off economic growth for QoL improvements, while red states are more likely to have a direct interest in the fossil fuel industry.

--

Separately from that, the problem with "learn to code" was not that it was it was wrong, but that, like every other kind of bootstrap rhetoric, it wasn't actionable. It's one step up from "git good" in terms of life advice. If they were capable of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, they wouldn't be rotting in a central PA town. However, the underlying concept was correct: "The mine/paper mill/meat packing facility/whatever isn't coming back and you/your community is going to have to reinvent itself or (more realistically) die. Anyone telling you otherwise is scamming you."

Of course, telling a bunch of middle-aged rural conservatives "change or die" didn't go over great, no matter what positive gloss was put on it. But no one was quite willing to bite the bullet and tell them their options were to get pensioned off while their kids moved away and their way of life slowly died or to get none of that and have their way of life still slowly die off. Not that it would have made much difference. Nobody gracefully accepts extinction, so it was pretty much a given that they'd fall for any conman willing to promise to turn back the clock.

Environmentalism is lib-coded in the US because libs are generally the ones worried about the commons and proposing trading off economic growth for QoL improvements

Liberals have also never satisfactorily rooted out the watermelons in the movement, nor the plainly misanthropic. Maybe now that Ehrlich is finally dead they can move on from their human culling fantasies.

God that phrase chaps my ass.

I have coal miners in my family. There is no way that they would be able to learn to code with enough proficiency to find a job. Even if they could, they live in East god-damned Kentucky. After the return to office mania of the last 18 months, where the hell would they get a job doing it?

There is no way that they would be able to learn to code with enough proficiency to find a job.

Yeah one big problem we're facing especially now with AI potentially is "what do we do with the morons who can't or won't do something else that is needed/wanted when their job is no longer necessary". During the Great recession, the answer was put the old idiots on disability like it's early retirement as a band aid solution, but this has awful aesthetics and doesn't work when technology might soon be making larger and larger portions of the population into useless morons who can't compete with automation.

Like it makes sense to put them on disability to some degree. Like if you think of some mentally handicapped man who can only understand things at the level of "pick up bucket, go to river, fill bucket, come back" and has been doing that for 30 years, and then piping gets invented and he's no longer needed, he suddenly goes from able bodied to disabled. He could work, now he can't.

That it's a 59 year old former factory worker or coal miner or other laborer who can't meaningfully adjust to a new job after they got automated out doesn't change the underlying logic here. But still, bad aesthetic.

Years of being talked down to by someone who was smugly wrong has done a lot of damage.

For me, this touches on a big issue. I strongly suspect that the people who are pushing wind and solar are the same people who are wrong about George Zimmerman, Kyle Rittenhouse, Duke Lacrosse, Global Warming, gender ideology, HBD, third-world immigration, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Black Lives Matter, gay marriage, and probably a bunch of other stuff I can't think of at the moment.

What all these things have in common is that they are a magnet for people who are far more interested in following what's fashionable, i.e. virtue-signalling, than anything else.

This is interesting to me, because one of those is just a plain brute fact that is true, that can't be argued with, and yet you choose to deny it and package it up with all the other culture war shibboleths that are part of the culture.

I wonder to what extent everything someone believes is received from the air their breath with no reference to how the world actually is? Is it the same for every population, or do some groups actually have more of a connection to cause and effect?

It's global warming by the way. There is room for debate on some other yes/no propositions you have up there interspersed with the axiomatic statements, but that one is just a thing that is real, but some people don't want to be real so they close their eyes to it/believe the grifters and woowoo peddlers instead.

It's global warming by the way. There is room for debate on some other yes/no propositions you have up there interspersed with the axiomatic statements, but that one is just a thing that is real

Well when you assert that "global warming" is "real" and a "plain brute fact" what exactly do you mean by "global warming"?

That average temperatures across the globe taken over the course of year X, are higher than x-1, and x+1 will be higher than x.

Eg, the globe is warming.

Less snarkily, that the models popularised over the last 50 years or so have been mostly correct, and all show a warming trend. That is the thing that is a plain brute fact that can't be denied: that climatologists in the 70's said "Hey, it looks like it's getting hotter" and then it did.

That average temperatures across the globe taken over the course of year X, are higher than x-1, and x+1 will be higher than x.

Well, this one's just not true; e.g. 2021 was cooler than 2020. Even x to x+10 failed for 1998 vs 2008. I'm not sure if we'll ever see a decadal drop again without some major change, but the trend is still only something like 0.025C/year, and year-to-year variation of ~0.1C still regularly swamps that.

Less snarkily, that the models popularised over the last 50 years or so have been mostly correct, and all show a warming trend.

Remove "popularised" and this one's true. But the way we (well, the news media and the most salacious academics) popularize a model is to take whatever the most extreme possibility is at one p<0.01 end of the predictions, turn that into a "it will never snow in Britain again!!" headline, and so convert tomorrow's credibility into today's paycheck. Current measured warming since 1990 is pretty much right on the "Business-as-Usual"+"Best Estimate" line from the 1990 IPCC report, which puts it way above the "weather just changes, it'll probably revert to the mean again" null hypothesis, but "we're up nearly 1C and it's still accelerating" feels anticlimactic to people who vaguely think they remember that coastal cities were supposed to be flooding or something by now.

The models are not mostly correct. The IPCC report includes out a whole bunch of estimates... which have on some occasions ALL been high, but just the fact that there are a lot of them suggests chicanery. Unless the same model consistently hits, which is not the case.

I don't respect the nibbling at the edges, god of the gaps vibe from these sorts of arguments against climate change.

When people say global warming, what the mean is: Is the Globe Warming? And the answer is: Yes!

Re. old models: First google result. You can get better graphs and data, but i'm not trying to dig it out of a paper: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-analysis-finds-exxonmobil-internal-research-accurately-predicted-climate-change/

The Exxon internal predictions in the the 70's have been about 75% accurate. Good enough for horseshoes and climatology.

That average temperatures across the globe taken over the course of year X, are higher than x-1, and x+1 will be higher than x.

Eg, the globe is warming.

This is what I would call "motte global warming." And yes, there is little room to doubt that motte global warming is "real" and a "plain brute fact."

But when I said that a certain group of people was wrong about global warming, that's not what I meant. Because they push what could be called "bailey global warming." The idea that (1) if unchecked, mankind's CO2 emissions will cause significant warming; AND (2) that warming will be magnified by water vapor feedback; AND (3) that this magnified warming will have a devastating impact on the climate, i.e. it will cause major harm.

To be sure, when these people are on the defensive, they do what all motte & bailey types do: They pivot to the motte. "It's indisputable that global surface temperatures have risen measurably over the last 100 years" or "basic mathematical calculations show that an increase in CO2 levels will lead to measurable increases in global surface temperatures" All true, but later they pivot to the bailey: "We must substantially reduce CO2 emissions or else there will be a disaster!!"

Less snarkily, that the models popularised over the last 50 years or so have been mostly correct, and all show a warming trend.

I can't really comment on this since I don't know what specific models you are referring to. That being said, I would challenge you to find a prominent climate model which (1) made bona fide predictions which were interesting, correct, and were actual (i.e. not retroactive) predictions; and (2) also predicts dangerous warming for the Earth.

There is no bailey, it’s all motte. There’s an extremely strong scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to global warming and there’s no credible alternative explanation for the rise in temperature. The only thing that tracks the rapid temperature rise is human causes.

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How can you be “wrong” about gay marriage? You can be for or against gay marriage, but it’s not a fact that you can be empirically right or wrong about, unlike global warming.

You’re committing the exact same sin of picking your worldview based on what’s fashionable to the red tribe. Why can’t you accept global warming and HBD at the same time? Be against third world immigration and for trans rights?

How can you be “wrong” about gay marriage? You can be for or against gay marriage, but it’s not a fact that you can be empirically right or wrong about, unlike global warming.

Briefly, gay marriage is a policy. Proposed policies have predicted positive and negative consequences, and supporters of proposed policies are staking a position that the positive consequences will outweigh the negative consequences. People are wrong on a policy if, when the policy is enacted, their prediction is falsified because the positive effects end up being outweighed by the negative effects. You can be empirically right or wrong about the consequences of a policy, including gay marriage.

Whether the positive effects are outweighed by the negative effects is a value judgment, not something you're right or wrong about.

But specific predictions about positive or negative consequences can be wrong. Not in terms of "outweighing", but in terms of materializing or not.

How can you be “wrong” about gay marriage?

That's a good question, because yeah, it's largely a question of values. To me, it's somewhat clear -- but not indisputably clear -- that the costs of gay marriage significantly outweigh the benefits. That being said, if the people supporting wind and solar were supporting gay marriage but none of the other nonsense, I would be less skeptical.

Because that alienates my potential allies and prevents me from forming strong in-group bonds, which is what all humans aspire to accomplish?

This mindset is what put us in this mess in the first place. Do you not think perhaps many on the other side are the same?

Personally, I believe rightwing populist movement started off with valid grievances. But this mentality of refusing to contradict your allies empowers extremists, grifters and manipulative sociopaths that distort your movement, make you deny reality more and more, until one day you’re fighting in the service of a monster that bears no resemblance to your original beliefs.

To me this is what’s happening to the right in America and the West in general. There is no rightwing ideology anymore. The “leaders” of the movement are abandoning all of its core principles and the only thing you’re left with is vibes, bonding with your allies in saying more and more grotesque untruths, and needing to beat the “other side” at all costs.

This mindset is what put us in this mess in the first place. Do you not think perhaps many on the other side are the same?

Of course I think that. I even said so! See:

which is what all humans aspire to accomplish?

Although I admit it isn't rare to see dehumanization of political opponents, so I guess I wasn't explicit enough.

Coal miners: "This job is hell on earth"

Politicians: More coal mines, gotcha

Of course, there's a tension between peoples' personal views and the legal environment in which these systems exist. Thus, e.g. Texas installing more solar than California despite Texans thinking that solar power is gay.

I'd expect that to be more related to Texas being at a lower latitude and also having more sunny days.

I’m surprised there was near bipartisan support for renewables in the first place. Solar panels and wind power always felt like a green/lefty thing while the right loved their oil and gas. Caring about the environment is definitely left-coded, although ironically, rooftop solar, batteries and an electric vehicle make you a lot more self sufficient energy wise than depending on big government’s power grid.

Maybe it’s to do with the waning influence of libertarians and tech industry CEOs on the right? They had their moment to get the populists in power, then were discarded the moment they were no longer useful, and then the right could go back to disseminating pro-fossil fuel views to their audience and line the pockets of the oil and gas industry.

Caring about the environment is definitely left-coded, although ironically, rooftop solar, batteries and an electric vehicle make you a lot more self sufficient energy wise than depending on big government’s power grid.

The 8-Bit Guy is a youtuber I follow, he makes videos on retrocomputing. He got semi-cancelled a few years ago because he's a Texan gun guy who used to have an airsoft channel and once open-carried a rifle at a shopping mall (which is legal in Texas). But he's also a big EV guy, and he did a whole series of videos about adding a solar system to his house as an emergency backup, after the Texas grid blackout a few years ago caused his heating to die, a pipe to burst, and his house flooded.

He said he didn't like the "sell your electricity back to the grid" solar deployment mechanism, because that requires you to be on the grid and doesn't have the opportunity to run independently -- if the grid goes down, so does your solar, to avoid backfeeding in an outage. But apparently you can set up off-grid electricity as a backup if you install a specialized switch in your breaker that forces the grid connection off when your solar is on.

I guess it's like you said; libertarians and tech people are pro-renewables, but also pro-nuclear, and there's not much of a place in the Republican coalition for anything but fossil fuels.

Polymarket removes prediction market on when the downed F-15 pilots would be rescued.

Yesterday, a two-seater USAF F-15E was shot down over Iran. One of the crew members was successfully rescued. The other is still unaccounted for. This was big news in the United States, and probably across the whole world.

Polymarket, being Polymarket, put up a prediction market on when the pilots would be rescued. United States service members are a sacred class in our society, and so this market got a lot of heat, including from congresspeople.

Polymarket responded by immediately removing the market, citing “integrity standards”.

We took this market down immediately as it does not meet our integrity standards.

It should not have been posted, and we are investigating how this slipped through our internal safeguards.

Of course, the market doesn’t violate Polymarket’s integrity standards. No specific policy or clause is cited. Anyone browsing the “geopolitics” section on Polymarket knows that war markets are allowed. They even provide a helpful note on Middle East conflict markets to let you know what their position is:

Note on Middle East Markets

The promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events to society. That ability is particularly invaluable in gut-wrenching times like today. After discussing with those directly affected by the attacks, who had dozens of questions, we realized that prediction markets could give them the answers they needed in ways TV news and 𝕏 could not.

It goes without saying that removing the pilot rescue market flies in the face of the principles stated above. Maybe Polymarket never believed in them, and markets on foreign wars involving Eastern Europeans and Middle Easterners was a cynical way to get eyes on their website.

So if the stated rules are fake, then what is the real rule? I don’t think it is, “respect American servicemen,” exactly. I suspect that, “do not jeopardize American combat operations,” is a much better fit for what is and is not allowed in a de facto sense.

There are two ways to gain an edge in a prediction market. One is to just be exceptionally good at condensing the publicly available information into probabilities. The other way is to have insider information.

Nobody is worried about the former. Iran can certainly hire foreign superforecasters to predict all kinds of things, which should work just as well as a prediction market without insider info. This is certainly useful, and presumably every military is doing something like this, but at the end of the day you will only get quantified uncertainty, just like a prediction market for a poker hand might contain a broad range of possibilities.

With insider trading, you get something like a poker market which settles at 90% full house because some of the bettors have seen the hand.

Of course, with this administration, it feels like the primary purpose of Polymarket is to get paid for leaking classified intel. Of course, there are different levels of despicableness. Betting on Trump announcing tariffs an hour before he announces them is bad, but the demonstrable harm is limited. Leaking military secrets regarding ongoing operations tends to be the thing which gets you executed.

From a purely amoral point of view, I would not risk it. A gain of a few tens of thousand dollars seems insufficient compensation against any unknown risks, and if someone close to you makes even more than that, the deed becomes blatantly obvious. Not only would the USG have every incentive to block the payout, even if they could not convince a jury of your guilt, you would still destroy your career and get on the shit list of the USG.

Still, pushing for a ban of that market is basically admitting: "people who have classified intel have the incentive to leak, and we can not fix that."

Given that the US lost a 115M$ Hercules in the rescue, the obvious way to handle this would have been for the CIA to just take over the market. Spending a million on making bets which seem well-informed but are wrong to feed wrong intel to the enemy would probably be worth it.

There are two ways to gain an edge in a prediction market. One is to just be exceptionally good at condensing the publicly available information into probabilities. The other way is to have insider information.

There's an implied third way of actively swaying the outcomes being bet upon. In sports, this is uniformly against the rules (see federal charges against MLB players recently), but it's less clear how the rules work for other prediction markets: there's lots of discussion about whether "predicting" deaths is functionally an assassination market, but I'm not sure where I'd want the boundaries to be in the general case. Futures markets look a lot like (some) prediction markets, but it's downright encouraged to look at long-term oil futures pricing to decide whether to invest in new drilling and exploration, and it's not "unfair" that futures market members raise production elsewhere and at least temper the futures pricing impact of Gulf shipping woes.

A bet on sunshine next week and the electric grid spot price are pretty related, but the ethics of engaging in (legal) cloud seeding to change it isn't a clear "wrong", IMHO.

I suspect that, “do not jeopardize American combat operations,” is a much better fit for what is and is not allowed in a de facto sense.

Uh, no, I think the obvious fit is "do not do shit that will get the people who decide if your operations become illegal hate enough to nuke you from orbit". This prediction market can almost certainly not impact American combat operations.

Related to that, there's a rule "don't be autistic. Understand what normies hate and why." If you can't do that, you have no business running any sort of a market in the first place. It doesn't matter how much you say "betting against something doesn't mean you oppose it", only a couple of weird guys either think or behave that way.

And not only will normies think that people who bet against the US military don't like the US, that will actually be true because not only are the rulemakers and public normies, the bettors are normies too. The number of bettors who are just disinterested rationalists trying to help the world by increasing information flow will be dwarfed by the number who are enemies who specifically wish to profit from the country's misfortune.

(And if you ask "what's wrong with letting enemies profit from our misfortune, they didn't cause it after all", you a) are a quokka and b) definitely need to talk to some normies.)

There's also the secondary question of keeping operations secret. The whole reason prediction markets like this are supposed to work is that people with accurate information can make money from them, and this is reflected in the market. This is equivalent to "prediction markets leak insider information to the public through the market". Leaking insider information about US military operations to anyone is a bad thing.

And not only will normies think that people who bet against the US military don't like the US, that will actually be true because not only are the rulemakers and public normies

In the context of the existing, adjacent sports betting market, I suspect most betters are fans of a team betting on their guys, not crunching spreadsheets of game stats. And it's probably a continuum: there are a few die-hard Jaguars fans convinced that this will be their season (with apologies to Jason Mendoza). So I'm not sure the connotation is unfair.

The number of bettors who are just disinterested rationalists trying to help the world by increasing information flow will be dwarfed by the number who are enemies who specifically wish to profit from the country's misfortune.

Is that so? Do you suppose that many Iranians (or Chinese) who have the statistical illiteracy of your 'normie' Americans (who apparently can't grok the difference between that what is and that what you want to be) have accounts on Polymarket and gleefully bet against the US military?

Among the statistically literate, there is also the option to bet on things which will be bad for you to mitigate them. For example, a Greenlander might bet on the US invading not because they want the US to invade, but because they anticipate that they will require funds to relocate if Trump invades, similar to how Catastrophe bonds (which sadly are not available for US adventurism) works for their sponsor.

Also, I will come out and say that I would have preferred the outcome where the crewman was taken PoW by Iran not because I am an Ayatollah fanboy (I am not), but purely from a utilitarian perspective, because it would raise the probability of a negotiated peace as opposed to Trump deciding to just bomb the shit out of Iran, which seems unlikely to get the regime to budge but will certainly kill a lot of Iranians. If that makes me your enemy, then your world must be full of them. FWIW, I did not bet on it though.

--

More generally, your rule "don't be autistic. Understand what normies hate and why." is a fully general counterargument for anything from the enlightenment to LW.

A lot of raising of the sanity waterline pissed off normies. The Copernican model. Evolution. HBD. Abolitionism. Suffragettes. Human rights. Pacifism. (I will grant you that there are plenty of horrible things which also piss of normies. We can't conclude anything about the morality of baby murder or Nazism purely from the fact that it pisses normies off.)

It does not help that your straw normie in your post displays all the sophistication of a sports fan betting on his favorite team. That is barely a step up from the small child who decides to close his eyes to make a scary situation go away, or the imbecile blaming his doctor for having cancer after a screening test.

If you run a society in a way which does not offend the 20% with the least cognitive capability, I think what you might get in the long run is something like Afghanistan. If people want to make a prediction market about things which normies find distasteful (and which might be genuinely distasteful, like when some serial killer will strike next), the liberal answer is to tell them that unfortunately, they are living in a free society where there are limits to imposing their sentiments on speech acts.

Also, speaking of things which normies hate, I recon about 30% of the country would think you a terrible person for describing a voluntary behavior as 'autistic'.

Do you suppose that many Iranians (or Chinese) who have the statistical illiteracy of your 'normie' Americans (who apparently can't grok the difference between that what is and that what you want to be) have accounts on Polymarket and gleefully bet against the US military?

If they were allowed to do so, I don't see why not. Of course that would get Polymarket shut down. I would guess that it currently is mostly insiders and anti-US Westerners. There might be front groups or pro-Iranian NGOs betting, but I'd expect that to eventually get Polymarket shut down too.

There was a run on put options on airlines in the stock market just before 9/11.

Among the statistically literate, there is also the option to bet on things which will be bad for you to mitigate them.

Normies don't do that. You get a couple of weird people betting based on statistics, and everyone else betting based on who they like or hate. (Plus insiders, if applicable.) The way gambling has worked in practice does not show statistical literacy among the vast majority of people who bet. (And it isn't just the 20% with the lowest cognitive capacity, either.) The only cases where most people who bet on something bet based on statistics (without being insiders) are those which have huge barriers to entry that prevent everyone else from betting.

I recon about 30% of the country would think you a terrible person for describing a voluntary behavior as 'autistic'.

I reckon you think that normie tolerance for autistic behavior is a lot higher than it really is. They may be offended by the word, but they hold autistically based opinions in contempt.

Profiting from the country's misfortune does not make you an enemy, you are just earning money. It is not a hostile action in itself.

But given the way normies behave, you'll get a couple of weird rationalists doing it and everyone else who does will be enemies or insiders.

The kayfabe behind Prediction Markets is that they're somehow allowing 'superforecasters' to battle into creating stronger opinions through the use of pure logic and whatnot. Actual out-and-out insider trading isn't something that's encouraged or especially healthy for the marketplace..

i think robin hanson pushed the idea that insiders trading in prediction markets was a feature

People thinking about what they'd think prediction markets should be == functional actual product

It is, the point is to make better predictions, not to create a fair competition ground.

"do not do shit that will get the people who decide if your operations become illegal hate enough to nuke you from orbit".

Agreed. Prediction markets are trying to go mainstream and be respectable (even if right now they seem to be going for sports betting as the way to get the general public to use them) so pissing off the government is not going to help them. "Oh, you want a licence do you? Well remind me why we should do you any favours?"

this is such bullshit. Kalshi did the same thing about Khomeini's death. Because he died instead of vacating, the trades were voided even though his death had the same outcome. Markets "work" because there are rules that everyone agrees on ahead of time. When these rules are changed arbitrarily when money is at stake then people lose confidence in markets. Also, there is not even anything disrespectful about this. A betting market does not imply people do not want him to be found. It's possible to be pessimistic about an outcome in the short-term, while still hoping for an ultimately positive outcome. They may as well just put a huge disclaimer on their site "we reserve the right to void any market for any reason we deem fit"

This is the arbitrary moral posturing that makes people hate and distrust "big tech "companies. But this is where money is at stake. These prediction a markets are huge, with billions in funding. They can afford to take a stand. Caving to moralistic pressure will mean users losing trust in them.

Kalshi did the same thing about Khomeini's death. Because he died instead of vacating, the trades were voided even though his death had the same outcome.

This is something I have wondered about. Did Kalshi advise people that death doesn't count? If so, was it done in a reasonably prominent way or was it buried in the fine print, so to speak? As long as people were notified in a reasonably prominent way that they would not win the bet if the guy left office as a result of dying, this seems fine to me. Otherwise, yeah,

Khomeini one was more absurd IMO since it also raised a bunch of edgecases (like what if he's say injured badly by drone strike and doesn't die but relinquishes the position) and even puts into doubt stuff like if I'm betting into a market and somebody randomly gets taken by a traffic accident or heart attack.

Agreed, this is absolute total bullshit, both the Khamenei market and this pilot rescue market. If you want to take a policy decision that no markets are allowed on people dying (which I'd agree is a sensible policy) then you do it by refusing such markets permission to be set up in the first place, not retroactively voiding them. This breaks people's chains of trades where they attempt to squeeze out edge from multiple correlated contracts and also leads to higher spreads and more inefficient markets because now both buyers and sellers have to price in the risk that the market will get voided when quoting prices.

I can understand why people dislike markets on people's deaths (theoretically it can be used to pay for contract killings in a totally decentralized way) and why we might not want to allow them, but what's the reason to remove the market on the missing pilot?

If you want to take a policy decision that no markets are allowed on people dying (which I'd agree is a sensible policy) then you do it by refusing such markets permission to be set up in the first place,

I think it's reasonable to have a death exception, but it should be extremely clear. I just checked the "Donald Trump out as president" market on Kalshi, and it actually has a disclaimer on this point:

If Donald Trump leaves solely because they have died, the associated market will resolve and the Exchange will determine the payouts to the holders of long and short positions based upon the last traded price (prior to the death)

Presumably the pronoun is screwed up because Kalshi added this provision hastily after the Khamenei fiasco.

Anyway, the thing about the Khamenei situation was that given his age (85) and position (supreme leader of Iran or whatever) the most obvious way he was going to leave office was by dying. So if Kalshi didn't include a prominent disclaimer about death, that's lousy of them and they should be on the hook to pay out all the contracts in full.

It's sort of like those life insurance policies you used to be able to buy at airports. If they don't cover death due to plane crashes, you really should make it very clear to your customers.

Reality giving them a lesson. If they want to go mainstream and grow and involve real money, then they need to realise that they are not, in fact, going to be the mass market wisdom of crowds how to set policy and govern society due to truth seeking oracle they started off with ideals of being, they're just one more big bookies and people make bets to win money and not find the optimum source of agreement on how to steer the economy via real-world feedback from superforecasters.

Prediction markets are a casino in a top hat and a monocle, but with added opportunities for insider trading. Once they grew beyond an niche thing for eccentric techies, it was always going to turn out this way.

They may as well just put a huge disclaimer on their site "we reserve the right to void any market for any reason we deem fit"

This is literally every sports betting company. They can ban you if you win too much.

I actually think its such bullshit. If you want to provide bets and be a market maker, you should have to take the wins as well as the losses. Someone is beating your odds? Get better at providing odds or close up shop.

You're betting against other people though. The marketplace/exchange doesn't care how much you win.

Not polymarket sports betting

Draft kings sports betting

Having worked at betting exchanges before you kinda don't want people who win too heavily for ecosystem maintenance. Generally that's gonna impact result knowers most of all, whether inside information or latency

Someone is beating your odds? Get better at providing odds or close up shop.

Minimum requirement all gambling companies should be required to adhere to.

It's funny since they could but they'd have to dramatically pare back the menu. So majority of people who complain about limits are picking off relatively niche markets which are only offered due to being able to limit counterparties

The problem is that if they're limiting counterparties to losers, then it's inherently fraudulent - they're selling a service specifically, and only, to those for whom it's of negative utility, and thus are reliant on explicit or implicit deception to actually get business.

So yes, it is better that those betting options not exist than be run in that manner, much like how shell games are bad and shouldn't be allowed.

Ok, make them pare back the menu, they won't be making as much money then with their reduced offering which naturally gives them an incentive to get better at pricing their odds so they can access more markets. Accurate gambling odds provide benefits to third parties who can now use them to see what the probability of some future event is. It's the minimum societal good which we should expect from these companies in return fr the societal harm thry cause.

I agree the menu is bloated way beyond sanity by the arms race between the majors (though most of the liquidity still goes to the liquid markets funnily enough). Accurate gambling odds vis a vis the PM thing is a completely different thing since the big PMs are barely moving any money on their original political markets.

They may as well just put a huge disclaimer on their site "we reserve the right to void any market for any reason we deem fit

Isn't that basically what the insurance companies are doing now with Force Majeure? But yes, i agree that sites like Polymarket are at a pretty low level of respectability right now. Its like gambling in some underground mafia-owned casino.

I think people wrongly assume that because it uses crypto that it is more decentralized . this is not the case.

Force majeure is pretty rare and reserved for exceptional circumstances, not that they don't want to pay on a policy. If that's the case, they'll usually find another reason not to pay.

Unilateral declarations of Force Majeure (or Frustration, depending on exactly which class of rules governing the insurance contract you're talking about) can usually be challenged by the other party under arbitration or via litigation where the declaring party risks being under a very serious breach of contract if the case goes against them, hence insurers and others have strong reasons to not declare Force Majeure unless something really serious has happened to the point where they're reasonably convinced that an independent arbitration body would agree there actually was a Force Majeure. None of that exists for these prediction markets.

It's an American company with American founder, American customers, and American employees being paid in American dollars. The principle is to live in the greatest comfort and not be bothered by others.

Americans, am I right...

  • -15

This is becoming tiresome, and you're very close to a permaban already.

I'm loathe to ban you for such a petty, low-effort comment that from anyone else would just be an eyeroll, but you have exhausted all slack and charity. Yes, I know, you were joking. (But not really.) You do not have the leeway to throw jibes like this.

You are duly warned. Next time, I will ban you. Yes, even for something as minor as this.

So if the stated rules are fake, then what is the real rule?

  1. make money

  2. don't lose money

Polymarket exists in a legal grey zone, so they can't take pressure from Congress, because Congress could end their operation. If their operation ends, it's hard to follow rules 1 and 2.

In other words, the real rule is to follow the whims of Congress and the American political apparatus.

No, the real rule is more along the lines of what @Jiro said above "Understand what normies hate and why."

Attracting the ire of the government is down-stream of understanding (or failing to understand) what people are likely to object to and why.

If they set themselves up as legal gambling companies, they wouldn't have as much of a problem. But they don't want to deal with the regulation, which includes being banned in a lot of states, including some big ones, so it's worth it for them in the short term to insist that they're in some vague category that can't be regulated and do the minimum to appease the people who have the power to sic attorneys general on them. If they can stay out of the headlines it's better for business.

tl;dr: It seems almost impossible to judge the validity, reliability and authenticity of the goals and states principles of those outside of your circle. Do they actually believe it, do they actually think it's true, will they actually do it? Eg, "No new wars" and the Kamala deadenders who run the D's to pick an example from each ruling tendency.

I come here to-day to humble brag about my money, but in a culture war way; and to share my sure to succeeded investment system. This is financial advice, and you can trust it! (This is not financial advice, do not trust me.)

I've recently made a bit of a small amount of a fuckton of money based on starting amounts; took my fuck around money and plowed it into you guessed it, oil futures and related industries before it became clear that no, he really is that stupid. I'm up a lot on top of my previous gains from betting (read: instructing my investment guy who tells me which southeast asian restaurants are for real) to bet as if the various Trump economic policies would:

Not meaningful increase productive employment in the US.

Not help the balance of trade issue.

Not hem china in in any way, and in fact increase their gravity as an economic center.

Not lower the debt at all, public or private; and in fact increase the debt massively. (This one didn't amount to much, there isn't much money to be made here until the US starts to go downhill for real, so it's just positioning for now.)

This compounding my gains during the Biden boom times, I am up quite a bit, so much in fact that It no longer is fun gambling haha stonks money and now I'm worried about what it does; so I'm taking it as far out of the US economic sphere as it is possible (which isn't that far) as a hedge. I would buy gold with it, but I kinda think that it might not be a good idea right now, I don't know.

As to the culture war angle: If by merely assuming that the ruling party will fail at all it's stated goals and betting against them no matter how flimsy the reasoning gets, I make a killing; how does it keep on rolling? How do people wake up and see the all the red arrows, all the "I'm warning you!"s becoming "I told you so!"s and stay hype?

It would be one thing if there was some sort of big social project that the party was ride or die for; but even it's most sacred commitment (deporting non-whites) was limited in scope (non white, but not the ones the boss or his friends or his allies rely on, H1Bs for all and Farm Scut work for everyone south of the border!) and on the optics chopping block after all.

Where is the there there? It is it all vibes, or do people really, truly believe that there is a plan?

And the actual point of the whole post: Would it be possible for such a person to convince me, even if they truly ment, and even if they were right? It's hard to imagine anything but events changing my mind at this point, especially since my fuck around money is too ballin' for the FDIC to handle anymore off of them being wrong so far.

I'm concerned I've fully closed my mind to my opponents here, but I'm also concerned that if I opened it an inch more my brain would fall out.

Not meaningful increase productive employment in the US.

Not help the balance of trade issue.

Not hem china in in any way, and in fact increase their gravity as an economic center.

Not lower the debt at all, public or private; and in fact increase the debt massively. (This one didn't amount to much, there isn't much money to be made here until the US starts to go downhill for real, so it's just positioning for now.)

What's the actual position you can take that tracks any of this.

Investing in sin stocks that go up when everything else goes down; investing in companies that either provide or service debt until the recession hits, investing not in the RMB directly because damn those currency controls hit hard, but yes investing in chinese indexes and chinese growth growth stocks (fees are killer, but growth was really good so it evened out), gutting out of USD and investing in things that track weakening in USD relative to RMB and the euro, all the normal shit.

I know some things about it, but I have my guy do most of it. He has similar opinions to me and does this as his job instead of just doing it for fun.

I've recently made a bit of a small amount of a fuckton of money based on starting amounts

Congratulations! I am always happy to hear about a fellow Mottizen prospering.

It would be one thing if there was some sort of big social project that the party was ride or die for

There are several major administration priorities, including (1) beefing up immigration enforcement (such as by increasing integration between federal immigration authorities and local law enforcement), (2) going after racial and gendered DEI policies and set asides (e.g., the VRA's "majority minority" districts, which SCOTUS seems likely to strike down and federal contracting laws), and (3) clearing state voter rolls and voting policies of tactics amenable to machine-style vote banks (e.g. the practice of receiving mail-in-ballots after election day)

It's just that a lot of this stuff is being done in quiet backrooms with a lot of very unsexy administrative law wrangling, and so doesn't make headlines.

However, on the broader point about there not being some sort of "plan," I completely agree with you. Trump clearly plays things by the seat of his pants, and there simply isn't the personnel infrastructure around him, either qualitatively or quantitatively, to carry through some sort of grand bizarro-Great Society-level legislative initiative. Plus, Congress is very close to becoming a completely vestigial organ, and so is in no fit state to draft, amend, approve, and push through such legislation anyways.

It's just that a lot of this stuff is being done in quiet backrooms with a lot of very unsexy administrative law wrangling, and so doesn't make headlines.

I just don't believe any of that is real, I guess. DEI to me was always a pride flag on the lockheed martin float type of situation; the only population that REALLY got anything out of it was women, specifically white women, specifically white upper middle class women, and they are still going to get exactly as much preferential treatment (deserved or not; I'm not even making a value judgment here) as before.

On top of that, until I see movement on actually enforcing use of E verify with universal fines, It's all immigration theater. We know what actually stops people from coming, we simply choose not to do it because it hurts the bottom line for the people in the R coalition with the juice.

Attributing one's own win in one of the many money lotteries that exist is a form of the fundamental attribution error. Most of the time, such a win is just a lucky windfall, although most people nonetheless claim they „deserve“ their luck due to being a „predictive genius“ by winning at gambling or a „hard worker“ by spending a lot of time buying figurative lottery tickets, which can take the form of oil futures, polymarket bets, or cryptocurrency. If money were distributed on a „deserving“ basis, the correlation between wealth and age would be near-zero, since existing longer does not make one morally better and therefore more deserving. But lotteries have entry fees and take time to play, so they produce a positive relationship between age and wealth.

Attributing one's own win in one of the many money lotteries that exist is a form of the fundamental attribution error.

I think centrally, the fundamental attribution error is more the inverse, the attribution of outcomes to character traits in others while blaming the situation for one's own outcomes. "He is late because he is unreliable, whereas I am late because I got stuck in traffic." Or, more on the theme, "She lost money because she gambled irresponsibly, whereas I had really bad luck with my stock portfolio."

What you describe here is something along the lines of "my good fortunes come from being hard-working and smart, whereas she merely got lucky."

That being said, I think this bias exists. Anyone can win a hand of poker, or double their investment with some financial instrument. Someone being good at investing would be them making many appropriately-sized bets over a longer period and winning enough of them.

If money were distributed on a „deserving“ basis, the correlation between wealth and age would be near-zero,

Wouldn't it be the opposite? People who have worked longer are deserving of more?

I don't see most work that is done in reality today as being related morally to its wage, and consequently to whatever savings are accumulated from it. For example, a lot of San Fransisco 50 year olds made way too much money in a software boom, often being head button style changer for Google for 10 years. I don't see this as entitling them to the $1 million they probably saved from that career. Yes, it's how they made their money and got it to be legally recognized as theirs, but morally they did nothing to „deserve“ it. Another way of looking at this is that I think the correlation between market wages for an occupation and deserved wage is zero, or maybe even negative. Someone who works for decades in cargo driving has done a lot to fuel the actual economy, but since their job pays close to subsistence wages, they will not have a lot of wealth at the end of a long career. But by the labor theory of deserving, they deserve a lot more than an ex-Googler.

But I reject the labor theory of deserving too, because it assigns preeminent value to people who happen to exist right now. The cargo driver may have fed his neighbors, but why do they deserve that? Why would that entitle the feeder to anything? Through the preeminent value of the people who are alive right now? How do we justify that?

If you do not take egalitarianism as an axiom, then people have different moral worths. And these worths precede anything they do, including labor. And also, serving the labor market does not actually fulfill a duty to people of higher moral worth, since the labor market is a mixture of random (in the case of the Googler's wage) and egalitarian (in the case of the trucker deserving a lot of wealth).

Either moral worth does not change with age, or it does. If it does, I think it seems the most sensible to say that it peaks during the reproductive window. This is when people need the most resources, so they can have children, and when they are the most capable in all aspects of life. So again, it seems off that old retirees would be the most deserving class of people when it comes to having wealth. They are definitely not the highest value age group, and whatever they spent their career doing probably did not increase their moral worth.

If we take a consequentialist libertarian perspective then wages are heavily correlated morally to wage. That is, whenever two people transact in a mutually consensual exchange, profit is generated and split between them in some way. That is

Total Value Produced = Consumer Value - Producer Cost

If producer can produce good X for $10 and consumer values it at $30 (subjective internal evaluation), then them buying the product generates $20 of value, distributed between the two depending on the price. If the producer sells it for $20 then both of them profit $10. If the producer sells it for $29 then the producer pockets $19 and the consumer profits $1 (in terms of getting a thing that they wanted more than they want the money they spend)

There is some ambiguity about what a fair/reasonable split should be, which is not automatically identical to the ultimate market price, but for any level of split the amount of profit someone earns will be proportional to the value created by their transactions. Which in turn means that the value someone creates is heavily correlated with the amount of money they earn. One exchange which produces 10x as much value as another exchange will result in 10x as much profit to be distributed, and likely result in both the producer and the consumer(s) getting approximately 10x as much. Google probably generates trillions of dollars of value for consumers (though the exact amount is subjective and hard to measure), and in turn earns billions of dollars of revenue. Which they deserve, because they create value. A button engineer who works at Google and does their job competently helps generate this value, in that Google would not be as convenient and usable without their work, and would have outages or errors if they messed up. The difficulty of their job is one component in the cost, but the dominant term in the moral desserts is the consumer value. The Google button engineer has done a LOT to fuel the actual economy, it just doesn't seem like a lot because the indirectness of the value they produce is hard to parse as a human, and the amount of actual labor they needed to leverage to this effect was low.

Working hard at a fixed task will create more value, so on average moral desserts will correlate with working hard. But it would be silly to Goodhart this by thinking that working hard IS moral desserts. Value created is what actually matters. Any system of moral desserts which rewards people for being inefficient is absurd.

Now, obviously there are tons of counterexamples where people get paid despite not creating value. If Google hires 30 employees for a team and one of them does the actual meaningful labor and provides $100 million of value while the others do stupid stuff, and each gets paid $1 million, then the competent one deserves more than they got while the other 29 deserve less. But somewhere in that system the $100 million is actually being earned.

Even a step up, you can have an entire company which is rentseeking, bullying competitors, squatting on legal loopholes, etc, and earns lots of profit despite not providing value to anyone. But by necessity this is rare because someone somewhere has to create the value for them to earn. I'm not saying the correlation between moral dessert and wages is 1. But it's high, even when the value someone creates is indirect. A lot of white collar work is incredibly important and impactful, which is why selfish greedy investors are willing to pay for it in the first place.

You're just assuming my trucker logic applies ten-fold to a Googler. But that begs the question of value and moral worth: the Googler only deserves what he has in that case if the trucker does too. But I was skeptical that even the trucker deserves it. Because why should economic productivity determine moral worth? This is implicitly egalitarian, because productivity is defined as serving anybody, and privileges people who have simply been alive longer, because they will have more total lifetime productivity. I think it's more fruitful to debate egalitarianism and elderly privilege directly, instead of assuming that economic productivity as normally defined in 2026 is a perfectly just way of determining who gets what.

Your total net worth is not equivalent to your lifetime productivity, because people spend and consume things. Your per-moment income is (or should be) equivalent to your lifetime productivity, because that's inherently fair. You do things for other people, other people do things to you. You get what you do. Your profit is equivalent to the amount of value you've provided to others that you have not yet been compensated for. If you provide labor which is worth $1000 of value when consumed by other people, and they pay you $1000 for it, the $1000 is literally pieces of paper. You have done good in the world and you haven't yet received a real reward for it. You deserve to have other people do stuff for you, because you've done stuff for them. Until you spend it. If you buy $500 worth of food, that represents farmers in the world doing labor on your behalf, in exchange for you having done whatever it is that you did, which is either directly on their behalf, or more likely on the behalf of someone else who did labor on the behalf of someone else who... eventually somewhere along the chain the farmer benefits from labor that someone did who benefited from labor that you did. But half as much. Because you earned $1000 and only spent $500. If you eat $500 worth of food and save $500 in your bank account, that means you have provided $500 worth of value that you still haven't been rewarded for. You're a net moral positive, in that you've created more than you've consumed. Money represents favors owed to you by society because you (or whoever legitimately earned the money you currently possess) did favors for society and hasn't received the equivalent reward in real material goods and services yet.

If someone legitimately* earns $10 million and then spends all $10 million on themselves, they're a net neutral. They produce and consume in equal measure. They do good by stimulating the economy by the consumer surplus that other people extract on top of what they themselves earn from their work. It's not an exact science, but it's proportional. On average, people who do this are probably fine, and we should consider them to be neither a saint nor a monster.

If someone legitimately earns $10 million, spends $1 million on themselves, and then donates $9 million to charity, that represents $6 million worth of real value they've provided to someone and then chose to give the rewards to someone else. This person is a saint. They create value and keep only a fraction of it for themself.

If someone legitimately earns $10 million and then spends $1 million on themselves and keeps the $9 million in their bank account to spend later, that represents $9 million worth of real value that they have provided to someone and have held the remainder in abeyance for the moment. They deserve $9 million worth of goods from society because they have done work that society has deemed to be worth $10 million, and society has promised them $10 million in exchange for their work, and they probably only did the work in the first place because they were promised this $10 million. And they've only used up 1/10 of that promise, they are entitled to the remainder. In truth, due to consumer surplus they have enabled more than $10 million to society as a whole, with the rest being captured by their employer, customers, business partners, and taxes. The $10 million is the remainder they've been promised themselves for their contributions.

If by "moral worth" you mean "is this a good and kind charitable person who sacrifices things for other people at their own expense" then no. But I reject that entire premise. Economics is not zero sum. If you are clever and efficient there's no reason you have to sacrifice your own good for other people when you can both mutually profit. A person who creates $10 million over the course of 20 years has done 10x as much for society as a younger person who has created $1 million over the course of 2 years. It's not that the former is a "better person" than the latter. Both are providing $500k to society every year, both receive $500k per year. It's that the former has chosen to behave like an intelligent long-term thinker and stockpile their rewards over time. Someone's net worth represents the total contributions they've made to society that they haven't yet cashed in. They've produced more than they've consumed. Someone who is older has had more time to do more good.

*Note that my use of the word "legitimately" is doing a lot of work here and almost begging the question. There are exceptions where people get paid money for not creating value. But, on average, as a rule of thumb, this is the case for most people. If everyone involved is mutually consenting and there aren't weird monopolies, government regulations, excessive taxes, government waste, subsidies, or rentseeking distorting things, the base case capitalist exchange creates legitimate profit for everyone involved, in which case people do morally deserve the fruits of their labor.

Two different issues are here, the nature of the economy and the moral question. Regarding the first, you take simple deterministic equations seriously. Balance = Promise Given - Promise Spent, Total Value Produced = Consumer Value - Producer Cost. I think this is a mistake. It's too simple. Econophysicists showed that random agents trading randomly will end up with exponentially distributed net worth. Income among people who are not in finance or entrepreneurship can be modeled that way. Those in entrepreneurship and finance play multiplicative games with their money, so they get a Pareto distribution which has an extremely fat tail. Those who end up at the far right edge of the Pareto distribution can just be repeatedly lucky; the model does not require intrinsic talent differences. In other words, the economy is largely a stochastic process, not a simple equation. So the person who ends up with more „promises from society“ probably just won a hidden lottery. Their luck in crypto, web software, their career, their business, does not at all trump a good moral claim to their excess wealth. You can see this in the person of Elon Musk. He ran twitter into the ground. He bought Tesla and got lucky. He originally made his money riding his wave on a fad with a company that went no where except to the typical old merger and acquisition murder-execution (t. Patrick Bateman) of a company. He won some hidden lotteries 2 or 3 times, which is expected given the size of the population, and that's why he's the richest man in the world. He's actually not smarter or harder working than a lot of FAANG developers who didn't get so lucky and who have 1/100.000th or less of his wealth as a consequence.

On morality you mention „fairness“ and „society.“ But this is more assumed egalitarianism. What if fairness and society matter less than the best individuals? Why not? I think fairness and society stand against the true, beautiful, and just. We currently have a very fair and society-approved system. Some people noticed it was not as fair as it could be, but it turned out trying to make all wealth equal, which was super fair and society-approved, actually made everyone worse off, because modest meritocracy with a lot of random slack actually brings up the median wealth a lot more than setting variance to exactly null.

What has never been tried is progressive redistribution of wealth. We currently have a moderate amount of regressive redistribution (based on progressive taxation). You know how IQ and income correlate at .4? What if we cranked that up to .9? Society would hate it, and it wouldn't be fair, but I think it would be just.

I aknowledge that there is quite a bit of randomness in the realized outcomes of money, but note that the expected value is still pretty close to average production. Lotteries in the economy are not the zero sum scenarios set up by a greedy casino in order give you negative expected value and enrich themselves in the process. They are a complicated mess of scenarios with different expectations. Some of them are good, some of them are bad. Someone who chooses good lotteries, invests in promising companies, dissolves unprofitable money sink companies, will on average end up winning more often than someone who chooses bad lotteries. Therefore the actual people with lots of money will tend to be people who had both luck AND intelligent choices that benefited the economy. Once again, this leads to a "money held" to "value provided to others" with a correlation solidly between 0 and 1.

But this is more assumed egalitarianism.

Where did that come from? Money earned is money deserved is very unegalitarian, unless you're a blank-slatist who believes that equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are the same thing, which you clearly aren't. When I use the word fair here, I mostly mean something pretty similar to what you mean by just. This is a pointless strawman nitpick on language use, and doesn't matter.

What has never been tried is progressive redistribution of wealth. We currently have a moderate amount of regressive redistribution (based on progressive taxation). You know how IQ and income correlate at .4? What if we cranked that up to .9? Society would hate it, and it wouldn't be fair, but I think it would be just.

This is absurd. Why would we favor intelligence like this? Intelligence only matters in-so-far as it allows you to make better choices and thus accomplish more stuff more efficiently. To that effect, making a meritocratic system that rewards economic output measures the actual thing that we care about. And is easier and more direct that some Goodhart measure of IQ. Your idea makes about as much sense as observing that cows eating more grass are correlated with producing more milk, and then selective breeding cows to maximize the amount of grass they eat and ignoring milk production. Why would you optimize a proxy for the thing you care about, when the proxy is actually harder to measure and select for, and only vaguely correlated with it. Someone of average intelligence who works really hard is more valuable to society than someone of great intelligence who doesn't do anything with it. The latter might as well not even exist. And it's not like high IQ people are necessarily good people who do good things, there are plenty of intelligent sociopaths who leverage their great intelligence to commit more evil. If an intelligent person is 3x as powerful as an average person, able to accomplish 3x as much at whatever they try to do, then an evil intelligent person sabotaging society is 3x as horrible as an evil average person. You might as well award the Medal of Honor to powerful enemy soldiers who were especially horrible and slaughtered your own side's soldiers. Good people do good things for other people. We want to incentivize more good things, so we should reward people proportional to how much good they do.

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Someone submitting code that broke the Google search button would cost the company on the order of a million per minute; it's only natural that Google would pay a lot to minimize that risk. Of course, there are automated processes in place to prevent and mitigate those kinds of mistakes, but that makes the work more complicated than messing around with some CSS. And even that doesn't cover all the work involved in something as seemingly simple as maintaining a button--accessibility, brand consistency, i18n, framework migrations, etc. This work is very lame but also very necessary, and not something a random trucker could do or even (unfortunately) the average CS grad could do.

Also, just informationally, as others have pointed out it's pretty much impossible for any SWE (not even the head button changer, who's probably some L7 taking home a million per year) at Google to take a decade to accumulate a million. Maybe five years or so, depending on your career progression, especially with the bull market of the past decade.

Someone who works for decades in cargo driving has done a lot to fuel the actual economy, but since their job pays close to subsistence wages, they will not have a lot of wealth at the end of a long career. But by the labor theory of deserving, they deserve a lot more than an ex-Googler.

The "I hate knowledge workers theory of value". You've said elsewhere that you are a libertarian, does that cash out to anything? You don't think people are entitled to the wage their employers have freely elected to pay them? You instead think, almost exactly, "to each according to their need"? You can make a case for communism, but this isn't really what it looks like.

I don't see this as entitling them to the $1 million they probably saved from that career.

$1 million? Were they a janitor?

their job pays close to subsistence wages

This is untrue and easily checkable.

The "I hate knowledge workers theory of value".

You read into it too much. This is not Marxism. I like knowledge workers at least as much as truck drivers. I am a knowledge worker, and I am trying to make Google-tier funny money. But I would never justify my entitlement to that money with the mere fact of acquiring it. A lot of people acquired it who did not deserve it, and some people who deserve it did not and will not acquire it.

I don't see this as entitling them to the $1 million they probably saved from that career.

You seem to be using "entitled" and "deserve" interchangeably, but I think the distinction is very important. You can have your judgements about the desert of someone who got a lucky position at the right time, but if they had an employment contract they're damn well entitled to what that contract stipulates.

Are you operating under the assumption that our economic system should be set up to give people what they deserve? We have a system that (sorta) entitles people to the products of free exchange of goods and labor. This is a good system to have in place, as it provides prosperity and forms the foundation of a complex interactive society. I don't care if people deserve it or not. The reason the Googler makes more money than the trucker is because of the value they provide above the next-best guy they could hire to their employer, regardless if how much the truck driver "fuels the actual economy" (and you're kind of question-begging here: if people are paying for the Google guy's work, how's that less real than the cargo driver?)

Your argument is is one that proves too much, unless you are a skeptic about morals in general. Does a person who just happened to be taught good morals and suffered through just enough adversity and had the natural disposition to go out and be [your definition of a saint] deserve praise for the good they've done? Or were they just lucky in the same way the Google employee or even the cargo driver was?

You seem to be using "entitled" and "deserve" interchangeably

They are interchangeable. You seem to confuse being entitled to with having. They certainly have what the contract stipulated. Are they morally entitled? Not necessarily. A lot of people are overpaid morally speaking, a lot are underpayed, a lot make money doing something morally wrong.

Are you operating under the assumption that our economic system should be set up to give people what they deserve?

I suppose so, it seems to follow from the meaning of should. I certainly don't think it is set up that way.

The reason the Googler makes more money than the trucker is because of the value they provide above the next-best guy they could hire to their employer

Tangent; nobody is that good at hiring. Hiring is messy, noisy, arbitrary, feels based, not a science. Googlers were good enough, not the best just because they were paid the most. To think otherwise assigns supernatural abilities to hiring personnel, which they clearly don't have. They don't even use the best scientific techniques available for measuring talent, much less are they supernatural. But this isn't core to the main issue of moral economics, since software engineering skill isn't necessarily a moral quality anyway.

if people are paying for the Google guy's work, how's that less real than the cargo driver?

Why should a heroin trafficker go to jail if people naturally pay him more than the Googler? How is his work less real or important than Google's?

Your argument is is one that proves too much, unless you are a skeptic about morals in general.

How did it prove too much? I'm not skeptical of morals in general, I'm applying morals to the economy. It seems obviously that the current system is not a moral one.

Does a person who just happened to be taught good morals and suffered through just enough adversity and had the natural disposition to go out and be [your definition of a saint] deserve praise for the good they've done? Or were they just lucky in the same way the Google employee or even the cargo driver was?

Yes, someone born with superior moral qualities deserves praise (and wealth) while somebody who merely wins a lottery does not deserve their winnings.

For example, a lot of San Fransisco 50 year olds made way too much money in a software boom, often being head button style changer for Google for 10 years. I don't see this as entitling them to the $1 million they probably saved from that career. Yes, it's how they made their money and got it to be legally recognized as theirs, but morally they did nothing to „deserve“ it.

Since this seems like the subthread for this sort of thing, I'll point out that if they only saved $1M from 10 years at Google, they were absolutely terrible with money.

But also, if you don't think people deserve the wages paid for their labor, you're basically at odds with almost everyone. Even Marx wouldn't say workers didn't deserve their wages.

you're basically at odds with almost everyone.

I think Nietzsche would agree. But yes, I definitely hold a minority view. Isn't it the more logical view, though? It seems obvious to me why cognitive bias would lead most people to be wrong on this topic.

I think I agree with you; given my experience making basically nothing doing productive labor, then making lots and lots actively making the world a more hostile place to the average human, and now making at least a bit of my money eg from people ruining their lives gambling.

At no point in my life have a felt there was a meaningful positive connection between what I did, the societal value of what I did, the economic value of what I did, the moral value of what I did, and how I was compensated; if there was any correlation it was the anti-type.

A bitter pill for me, I got indoctrinated early into the cult of hard work and moral capitalism, it was a real shock to the system when I realized I was the only one who actually believed it.

Isn't it the more logical view, though?

No. First of all, the idea that those with the most "moral worth" should be the wealthiest is bizarre. You then connect moral worth to "need", which is also rather strange (I guess this borrows from Marx). Then the resulting system is incoherent; as long as you're working you should be wealthy, but if you dare to retire you should not be. You could certainly build a (totalitarian) system based on these ideas, but I don't think the thing would be called "wealth" -- it would be a form of status granted by the state, not an accumulation of value.

You then connect moral worth to "need", which is also rather strange (I guess this borrows from Marx).

It is need in the since of something being required for reproduction of moral people, so that there are more moral people afterwards. It's not borrowed from Marx at all. Not need in the socialist sense, as in feeding the hungry.

Then the resulting system is incoherent; as long as you're working you should be wealthy, but if you dare to retire you should not be.

I did not say that, but it is also not incoherent. „He who does not work, neither shall he eat.“

You could certainly build a (totalitarian) system

It would not be any more totalitarian than the income taxes and old age pensions of the current West. It would simply tax different people and afford pensions to different people.

but I don't think the thing would be called "wealth" -- it would be a form of status granted by the state, not an accumulation of value.

Actually it would be more like wealth than now. Many wealthy people today are weak and rely on the state to defend their wealth from the strong through granted ownership status. Under my idea, wealth would shift to a degree from the old and weak to the young and strong. My idea would be more libertarian because it would involve the state recognizing the natural order to a greater extent, which requires less energy to defend from exogenous shocks like individual crime and market crashes.

the idea that those with the most "moral worth" should be the wealthiest is bizarre.

How so?

Either moral worth does not change with age, or it does. If it does, I think it seems the most sensible to say that it peaks during the reproductive window.

Perhaps (past life)1 × (expected future life)3.

whenever I see these "I got so rich now i'm retired" posts all can I wonder is not "how do I emulate you" but rather "what is your advise for the mass of peasants with some money to their name who are not you, and cannot become you"

Be born in a booming economy to wealthy families. Go to extremely cheap college when college graduates a rare enough to be valuable.

I don’t think most people really benefit from most financial advice simply because until you have enough generational wealth to invest, you’re stuck in the lower middle class or below where you have nothing but the income you can get from working for someone else. I just sort of laugh at retirement advice simply because if you have enough money to be able to invest a substantial sum of money, you already have enough experience with money to do okay. If you don’t, the advice of “just invest 10,000 dollars” kinda assumes a person having a spare ten grand laying around. Most would struggle to find enough to save for emergencies, and have no money to invest on the idea of retirement.

I just sort of laugh at retirement advice simply because if you have enough money to be able to invest a substantial sum of money, you already have enough experience with money to do okay.

There are some pretty depressing statistics on "people who just leave money in their corporate 401k as cash", even amongst smart people. A lot of people really do need that advice.

Honestly that was me until like a year ago, and I'm a mid-30's lawyer. Not proud of it, but facts are facts.

I consider myself fortunate that my dad taught me "always contribute at least enough to get the company match; it's free money" and my first company automatically picked a target date fund as the default. Meant I was in a good spot by the time I finally did become a bit more financially literate.

The ability to become wealthier or at least improve one's financial salutation is one of the few things anyone has some control over, unlike talent or traits (e.g. HBD). Anyone can invest in the S&P 500 or not waste money on frivolous purchases.

Sadly, as time goes by, I've become more and more convinced that finance is one of those realms that you either get or you don't, and alot of people - even ones that are highly intelligent in other fields - simply don't.

You just need to get your head straight. It's a game of probabilities. A casino may lose 5 rounds of blackjack in a row, but over the course of a month or a year they rake in the money. One bet or a few bets comes down to chance. A thousand bets? That's never down to chance.

If the results were random, there wouldn't be any consistent winners. But there are. Believing the market moves randomly gives individuals an excuse to not take full responsibility for their own actions and long term results. Those who take responsibility, and review their mistakes regularly and learn from them, will become consistent winners as long as they're willing to keep doing what 90% of people are unwilling to do.

Keep in mind I'm speaking as someone who actually 'gets it'. To a degree.

Maybe I'm expecting to much, but when you're hashing stuff out with an actual medical graduate on managing their college loan payouts and they're more than a little clueless while a friend of mine and I are just going 'No... this is easy', it kind of makes you re-think alot of things.

Granted, you seem to be less talking about financial acumen and more market management strategy. I would say they're a little bit different, and good market management strategy is alot harder than learning finance. IMO, and from my observations.

Maybe I'm expecting to much, but when you're hashing stuff out with an actual medical graduate on managing their college loan payouts and they're more than a little clueless while a friend of mine and I are just going 'No... this is easy', it kind of makes you re-think alot of things.

I’ve heard colleagues grouse about needing to do mathematics when “the reason [they] got into medicine was to get away from maths!” I’ve also seen frankly shocking levels of statistical ignorance in the doctor population.

One thing that stuck with me is an informal experiment a friend of mine did many years ago — he asked a few dozen consultants what a p-value indicates. I think he got a grand total of one correct answer. And these are people who are supposed to be regularly reading (and sometimes writing) academic papers!

That tracks with what I've been told. I've half-joked about somehow finding a medical Doctor Sugar Momma to get married to, in exchange for managing her financials.

The 'somehow' in that sentence is doing alot of heavy lifting, though. Among other things.

The 'somehow' in that sentence is doing alot of heavy lifting, though. Among other things.

To be fair, you probably would be doing a lot of it too, if you managed to wrangle such an arrangement.

Maybe I'm expecting to much, but when you're hashing stuff out with an actual medical graduate on managing their college loan payouts and they're more than a little clueless while a friend of mine and I are just going 'No... this is easy', it kind of makes you re-think alot of things.

Gellmann's amnesia comes to mind (possibly not quite the right term here). Most people have only studied a select few things in any depth at all, but we still assume that the smart doctor will know a lot about many things for some reason. Status and authority confers construals of wider credibility and competence in the observer's head. The actual polymath or renaissance man is rare, it seems.

Granted, you seem to be less talking about financial acumen and more market management strategy. I would say they're a little bit different, and good market management strategy is alot harder than learning finance. IMO, and from my observations.

Do you mean facts and foundational knowledge versus applied action here? Financial acumen = knowing what EPS means and how to read a balance sheet, the difference between price and value, etc etc?

What most people miss is how much of investing is a mental game, requiring an adoption of new beliefs and discarding many old ones. The person born into a family of highly successful investors would know this, while most of the rest of us chumps seem to pick up more misinformation and limiting beliefs than any sort of solid mentoring.

Do you mean facts and foundational knowledge versus applied action here? Financial acumen = knowing what EPS means and how to read a balance sheet, the difference between price and value, etc etc?

What most people miss is how much of investing is a mental game, requiring an adoption of new beliefs and discarding many old ones. The person born into a family of highly successful investors would know this, while most of the rest of us chumps seem to pick up more misinformation and limiting beliefs than any sort of solid mentoring.

Pretty much. I've seen a bunch of egregious attitudes in regards to, for example, day trading, where alot of people fall into the attitude that they have to trade, despite the market not matching thier models, which turns what should be good tactics into basically betting on the market.

Or, for another example, people who flock in after a boom has occurred, asking if they should invest in your material of choice. (Looking at you, gold.)

Much like in comedy, timing is everything. That's a thing most people think can't be done. They'll parrot platitudes like "time in the market beats timing the market" and talk about how it's basically impossible to do it.

'Sitting out strength' is part of the mental game. I've come to believe that having patience before placing a trade is perhaps even more important than having the patience to wait for the flower to bloom afterwards. Trades are like farts: if you have to force it, it's probably shit.

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If the results were random, there wouldn't be any consistent winners.

Are there consistent winners who (1) win consistently with short-term plays; and (2) don't rely on inside information? Based on my limited knowledge that such people are either extremely rare or non-existent.

I do think that there are people who win consistently with long-term plays. With "winning" being defined as either making a good return, like in the neighborhood of 8 percent, or outperforming the market indices in general. By all accounts, people who can consistently outperform the markets in general are very rare, but I am willing to believe that some exist.

People who consistently make money on short term swings? That's something I'm extremely skeptical about. If I hear about a short-term player consistently making money, I think he's either a liar or a cheater. But I'm open to evidence to the contrary.

And by the way, I myself made a bunch of money a few months back on a short term play. I bought QQQ right after it tanked due to a Trump tariff announcement and it seemed obvious that the market had overreacted. I've never tried anything like that before and it paid off very well. But I think that kind of situation is extremely unusual.

I think a strategy of keeping most of your investments in SPY, and then occasionally (every couple of years, but only when a real opportunity presents itself) making strong, reasonable bets during major events where you have high confidence can get you outsized returns (e.g. I almost doubled my net worth during the first couple months of COVID).

The issue is that psychologically, waiting around for those types of events is really boring. And success begets failure, as you really want to start looking for opportunities where your edge is smaller or realistically non-existent.

I'd add the qualifier consistent high volume winners.

It's one thing to take a chance where you see one, it's another to produce enough ideas to run a fund.

Probably related to getting math, right?

Before I took my finance courses, I would have told you I was horrible at math.

Now, I'm just convinced that math teachers are horrible at their job.

And worse comes to worse, that's what excel spreadsheets are for.

Math teachers in general are bad at their jobs, because they're people who 'just get it' and don't need much teaching, so they assume everyone else is like that too. The best math teacher I ever had was a seminarian randomly assigned by his superior to teach high school algebra- clearly very intelligent, but had needed to actually study to learn the material.

You don't need more than arithmetic.

You can't be dumb if you're going to become a consistent winner in the markets. But you don't need to be smart.

Eh, I'd say at least a decent grasp of algebra helps quite a bit

In what situations?

If you have a target retirement (or investment or whatever) amount you need to solve some fairly simple algebra to figure out how much you need to invest per month etc. But I also think algebra is generally useful in a lot of different circumstances and knowing it makes a lot of financial planning easier.

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It takes money to make money, as they say.

The ability to become wealthier or at least improve one's financial salutation is one of the few things anyone has some control over, unlike talent or traits (e.g. HBD). Anyone can invest in the S&P 500 or not waste money on frivolous purchases.

I agree, but it's pretty hard to use that strategy to get to the point where you have "fuck you" money, i.e. enough money so that work is optional. Which makes sense, because having "fuck you" money means you can sit back and live it up while other people work for you. It's logically impossible to be in a situation where anything more than a small minority of the population gets to sit back and live it up while other people work for them.

Basically, for most people it will require (1) being born in a wealthy country; and (2) a lifetime of careful saving and investing.

They should simply have been born a couple years earlier and gotten luckier; given that they haven't done either of those things by Working Hard (tm), they should instead fucking die.

For real though, I think all they can do is not waste money on things like new cloths, meat, restaurants, child care, medical expenses, any food that costs more than 3$ a pound, getting their car fixed, having hot water, etc etc. They must learn how to make everything, fix everything, where to buy everything cheaply, and live a buddha like existence of self denial until they reach escape velocity, which they probably will never reach.

If you want to get out of the low income section of the economy, it isn't enough to work hard and smart, you have to also be lucky and have the knowledge that it's all zero sum until you get about 75,000 in free, un-earmarked cash in the bank. If you can't buy yourself a decent car in cash RIGHT NOW / you don't have at least 1 entire years worth of housing lined up, either by owning or having the rent to hand, you are still poor.

This is why I think I should be taxed way harder; I make more money from having money than I ever did doing productive labor.

If you don't have the income you can't save yourself rich. Contrariwise, if you do, you don't need $75,000 or anything to not be poor -- though you CAN spend yourself poor at any income.

Income comes and goes, is the thing. Your income is never guaranteed, credit is an illusion of the false world which will disappear when you need it most, and expenses can scale infinitly.

I would say if everything you 'own' is leveraged and you are reallying on income/returns/debt to finance your life in exchange for having more exposure to the market; you are trading security for potential profit, and the thing that makes you not poor is security, not some arbitrary number.

75k in the bank + a decent income is a good level of security, enough to feel like you are no longer poor. That is ONE car blowing up and ONE roof blowing off and ONE leg getting broken without the need to sell the farm.

Income comes and goes, is the thing. Your income is never guaranteed, credit is an illusion of the false world which will disappear when you need it most, and expenses can scale infinitly.

Nothing is guaranteed. Unless your wealth is in non-perishable food, weapons, and the loyalty of fighting men, you're already in a finance world rather than a primitive physical one -- anything dollar-denominated is. In that world -- which is fortunately the one most of us live in, because it's a lot less harsh than the primitive one -- you don't need any particular amount to not be poor.

For real though, I think all they can do is not waste money on things like new cloths, meat, restaurants, child care, medical expenses, any food that costs more than 3$ a pound, getting their car fixed, having hot water, etc etc. They must learn how to make everything, fix everything, where to buy everything cheaply, and live a buddha like existence of self denial until they reach escape velocity, which they probably will never reach.

I know you mean this as snark, but also this, unironically.

To benchmark - I currently have enough in tax advantaged accounts that I can retire comfortably at 65 even with a great depression-scale market correction in between now and then, and depending on how things go, I might be able to retire in as little as two years.

I was born into a poor family. I grew up so poor that I got in trouble at school more than once for not wearing shoes because my existing pair fell apart and we couldn't afford new ones. Even food wasn't a guarantee.

I managed to get from there to where I am now by pretty much doing what you described above. I worked 15-20 hours a week all through high school. I smoked the SATs, which got me accepted into several different schools. I chose to go to a fairly pedestrian state school rather than a prestigious engineering college because they offered a much larger aid package. I chose a major that wasn't my passion because I estimated that it would represent my best chance at not being poor. I learned how to cook my own meals and fix my own car.

When I graduated, I took a job at a relatively "safe" employer and I've been there for over 20 years. I kept my head down during the global financial crisis and did what I could to be at the bottom of the layoff pile. For the first three years I worked, I lived like a monk in a busted-up apartment that didn't even have hot water half the time. I used every spare penny I had to pay off my student debts.

Once I paid off my debts, I started putting 15% of my income into a 401(k) and maxing out a Roth IRA. It meant that I couldn't afford a nice car and I wasn't going to go on a vacation every year, but starting early meant that my gains had a chance to compound.

Even today I try to live simply. I try to keep my entertainment cheap. I don't take extravagant trips. I only have beef a handful of times a year because it's expensive. I live in a low cost of living area and have kept the same small, simple house for the last fifteen years.

I did what you suggested above, and it's working pretty well.

It was snark but also real for me as well.

I did my own cooking, plumbing, car repair, everything; and if I couldn't do it myself it simply didn't get done. Can't fix the water heater? Simply take cold showers, you won't die.

I just think that isn't sufficient; you also need to get lucky.

That said like you, have that shit baked in. I have the same old 99 camry I bought when I had no choice, and I can't bring myself to get rid of it until it finally dies. I do have the hybrid second car because there are two people who need cars, so that softens the urgency.

do you see 75k as "you now have enough money to avoid living wildly inefficiently, you can now start putting the extra into the market" or as "if you've already saved up to this point, 75k compounding with everything in VTI will keep you safe for the rest of your life. even if you're incapable of picking stocks"

A combo. The efficiencies that come from never paying interest, always being able to wait for your moment, having money to cover whatever happens when it happens instead of letting it become more expensive with time add up.

On top of that, once you get to a big floating cash pile, you have developed the mental habits that help you not lose it.

Also Also, the missing stress from knowing that if three big problems happen back to back you won't be on the street is worth any amount of money. You don't know the weight of that monkey till he's finally off your back.

Blessed is he who can avoid lifestyle inflation

I come here to-day to humble brag about my money, but in a culture war way; and to share my sure to succeeded investment system.

If you are telling the truth, congratulations. But of course anyone can claim after the fact that they predicted something. If you want the boost in credibility which comes from having made a correct prediction, I would ask you to (1) make your predictions in advance; and (2) share with the group some trades you made in which you lost big.

seconded. create a blog or post on twitter predictions

1: the advanced predictions are displayed in my big pile of money and

2: I lost out big in AI boom stocks. I just refused to get on board half for ideological half for practical reasons, so I only made a lot of money with my weighted index funds instead of an unimaginable amount of money by going in hard.

Possibly sounding like sour grapes, but I wonder about the feasibility of investing in AI. Yeah, right now it's booming, but I do think a crash (or at least a readjustment) will come, and how do you predict just precisely which day the market wakes up and decides SELL SELL SELL and not BUY BUY BUY?

It's the same problem with crypto: some people rode it and timed it right and made a killing, some people held on too long and lost whatever they gained, and some people regret they got out when they did and didn't stick around just that bit longer when the price went even higher.

I think if you ended up with "made a ton of money but not the yuuuuuge amount I could have done", you ended up ahead of the game. That's a better complaint than "god damn it, I sunk every cent into AI and the bloody market crashed on me".

I'm just talking about my risky bet fuck around money, is the thing. My borring "Don't starve when I'm old" money is locked down for the long haul.

I'm out of it now because the pile got too big and I got scared; but this was the type of money I was willing to take a 100% loss on, so not having the stomach to bet it all on AI related areas before it took off was a major failure on my part.

The key, like with silver booms, is probably not to try to ride it to the absolute peak- yes you don't make the most profit selling when there's still room to go up, but you get more than if it's started to decline.

Ultimately, that's the rub. The greater the return, the greater the risk, and there isn't a reliable way to make high return investments without the risk. Only 10% of the best who best know the market on the planet reliable do better than them over a 20 year window, and most of those folks do worse the 20 years after that statistically. There is no non-luck way to hit a jackpot.

the advanced predictions are displayed in my big pile of money

My apologies, I have no idea what this means. Are you referring to some kind of online portfolio document? If so, can you link it?

I lost out big in AI boom stocks. I just refused to get on board half for ideological half for practical reasons, so I only made a lot of money with my weighted index funds instead of an unimaginable amount of money by going in hard.

That's pretty great if your big loss was that you "only made a lot of money" when you could have made an "unimaginable amount of money."

Most people who "go in hard" have the occasional loss.

Maybe you should consider opening up some kind of investment fund? It seems like you are right up there with guys like David Lynch and Jimmy Buffet.

I can only do it now when Trump is in office making everything weird, is the thing; and I'm not confident enough to bet the farm. If I keep making these bets I'm going to lose eventually; That's what I got out (as noted in the post). I don't have the sauce that dudes like Buffet do.

Jimmy Buffet

I don't think he made his money from stock picking so much as guitar picking...

I don't think he made his money from stock picking so much as guitar picking...

I think you are confusing Jimmy Buffett (the musician), with Jimmy Buffet, the legendary investor who partnered with Charlie Hunger.

I had no idea there were two Buffets in the investing business, so yes, apparently I was!

Which one of them is Warren's cousin? 😁

You're thinking of the 29th president Warren G Hunger, who also appeared on Snoop Dogg's early recordings.

Ah, a spinoff of the comic "Peanuts", was it?

Not lower the debt at all, public or private; and in fact increase the debt massively. (This one didn't amount to much, there isn't much money to be made here until the US starts to go downhill for real, so it's just positioning for now.)

The US has seemingly defied every prediction of its debt being unsustainable. GDP keeps going up,so the debt is inflated away. Those who keep predicting collapse or other crisis keep being wrong.

I've recently made a bit of a small amount of a fuckton of money based on starting amounts; took my fuck around money and plowed it into you guessed it, oil futures and related industries before it became clear that no, he really is that stupid. I'm up a lot on top of my previous gains from betting (read: instructing my investment guy who tells me which southeast asian restaurants are for real) to bet as if the various Trump economic policies would:

The second trump term has been a huge boon for me investment-wise: correctly shorted Bitcoin, anticipating Trump would not follow-through on the widely anticipated or hoped BTC reserve.

Bought dips during Liberation-day selloffs ('TACO' meme)

Continued to trade various dips and rallies by selling various option spreads anticipating quick recoveries from selloffs and inflated implied volatility, and rangebound markets

The anticipated post-tariff inflation surge never came to be, so I profited by being invested in tech stocks and the overall economy doing well.

Also made $ on polymarket betting against Trump mentioning Bitcoin (these are called "mention markets") and against the Bitcoin reserve.

I think it's possible to make $ following whales on Polymarket/Kalshi who possibly have insider info, but haven't looked into it much. I noticed on the 28th, the eve of the attack on Iran, someone placed a $20k bet on the contract "strikes in the next 24 hours", an hour before it jumped off. The contract surged from 14 cents to 20 cents almost instant and the stayed at 20 cents for 40 minutes until finally going to $1.

The US has seemingly defied every prediction of its debt being unsustainable. GDP keeps going up,so the debt is inflated away. Those who keep predicting collapse or other crisis keep being wrong.

Looking historically, sovereign debt crises generally are less "things get gradually worse" and more "the fundamentals get worse without affecting day to day operations too much, then a crisis hits and immediate consequences are felt." Generally its multiple different factors gradually building up until you get a polycrisis that makes the debt unresolvable. Will this be the time the bears are right? Looking at their previous predictions, probably not. Without course correction, or a spanner in the works like AGI, will the US in the medium term face a debt crisis? I think quite likely.

The bears may be right eventually, but the market may have gone up so much in the interim it will not matter. If the Nasdaq gains 20% year for the next 10 years , that is a 6x return I am leaving on the table waiting for something which may never happen in my lifetime.

I'm a bogglehead, so I agree with the approach that in the end, the market will increase. My argument is there likely will be a debt crisis that will cause pain in the future. The pain it causes will be less than the benefits of market growth, however.

The US has seemingly defied every prediction of its debt being unsustainable.

To his credit, Trump is working on that. The oil trade was long denominated in dollars because the US had an outsized influence on it. Being readily convertible to fossil fuels is one of the reasons why the US$ made a good reserve currency, which is a reason why many countries are stockpiling it and thus subsidizing the US debt (as inflation slowly eats up the value of their dollar reserves).

Under Trump, the US has not been a good steward of the global oil trade. When Iran predictably closed the Strait (because this is the one way they can exert pressure on the rest of the world), Trump loudly declared that this was not his mess to fix. Let Europe deal with it if they want the oil. And I am sure that Europe will deal with it eventually, though not through military means. At the end of the day, we will probably just pay Iran to let the ships through. But at that point we might decide to trade the oil in yuan instead.

After all, China seems like a sane, reliable superpower. Sure, they are troublesome for their neighbors (Taiwan first and foremost, though Venezuela might claim that their regional superpower does not respect the autonomy of smaller states), but unlikely to invade Spain or Germany. So far, China has refrained to wreck the world economy in some military adventure.

But at that point we might decide to trade the oil in yuan instead.

Come on man, at least ask an AI if this is plausible before suggesting it. China exercises capital controls, if they allowed free convertibility then Chinese people could invest overseas and earn better returns than their horrific internal market which would collapse their whole investment model. And you can see how China has treated Australia or Lithuania using their economic influence when the nations displeased them, the devil you don't know is hardly some stable partner.

You could maybe make an argument for a euro swap but it has its own problem, like that there isn't one unified euro bond market, each state has its own so there is no equivalent to a US treasury. And to be a reserve currency you need to have a huge amount of outstanding accounts, There literally are not enough euros in existence to make this kind of thing work and the process of printing and spending them would very likely wreck the European economy.

Finally Who is protecting the rest of the seas? Who owns the other straights? If we're going to enter a US isn't responsible for foreign shipping protection and in fact being able to threaten shipping entitles you to extracting rents from shipping then I know of an entity that is able to threaten every ship everywhere.

The US dollar, bond yields, and S&P 500 have held up well despite oil having gone up so much, suggesting market participants are not concerned.

https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/TVC-DXY/?timeframe=1M

People again have made this argument of the US losing the petrol dollar and it has not borne out

GDP keeps going up,so the debt is inflated away.

But the debt grows even more, hence the ratio of debt to GDP is increasing. And the tiny bit that was inflated away after COVID part was also not so free, the bondholders are no longer willing to give their money for peanuts and the interest rates are much higher than a few years ago.

The problem with debt is that it can be meaningless for a long time and then it can matter a lot. Like the famous Lenin quote "There are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen".

The problem with debt is that it can be meaningless for a long time and then it can matter a lot. Like the famous Lenin quote "There are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen".

This can be true , but when people make this prediction every year and nothing happens, it comes off as crying wolf. This is much more applicable for smaller economies which do not have reserve currency status, which cannot inflate their debt as the US can.

This can be true , but when people make this prediction every year and nothing happens, it comes off as crying wolf.

If there's a clear indicator that's getting worse all the time but disaster hasn't struck yet, it's hard to see this as the same as crying wolf. You'll recall that in the fable it was, in fact, not clear that there was even was a wolf. We can all agree that debt to GDP is increasing.

Is it crying wolf to be concerned about a small moon on course to collide with the earth? It gets closer every day but nothing has happened yet!

If you are making a prediction about a small moon on course to collide with the Earth, hopefully your predictions are going to be "the moon will collide on so-and-so day". If you predict that the moon will collide next week, and it doesn't, and you predict that it will collide the week after that, and it still doesn't, and you keep that up, people will be justified in ignoring you.

Orbital mechanics permit a degree of certainty that's rare in most other human affairs.

We can pick another metaphor. If you keep OD'ing on fent on Market Street and people keep narcaning you from the brink of oblivion and telling you that you're gonna die if you do this again, but you haven't died yet and you've done this tons of times should you ignore them?

The laws of physics are much more reliable than economic forecasts or the relation between debt vs. sustainability. Since 2008 there has been no shortage of smart-sounding people who make this type of prediction invoking charts and other data. It sounds persuasive, but it's of no actionable value. Sitting out of the market in the expectation of a crisis means loss of real wealth as inflation keeps growing at 2-5%/ year, and homes become more unaffordable. Ask people who waited to buy a home in 2010 fearing things would get worse or in 2020 during Covid.

The laws of physics are much more reliable than economic forecasts or the relation between debt vs. sustainability.

Agreed.

Sitting out of the market in the expectation of a crisis means loss of real wealth as inflation keeps growing at 2-5%/ year, and homes become more unaffordable.

I am long the market, so yes, agreed. But presumably there are ways that the national debt can become a problem without the S&P500 crashing.

Nevertheless, looking at the countries that had a higher debt to GDP ratio than the US right now, it's not a great collection - Japan, post-WWII UK, Sudan, Lebanon, Greece. Maybe it's not the debt that made these places suck, but it seems reasonable to be concerned about where this road leads.

Indeed, the debt/GDP ratio reaching problematic levels is a very recent development (post-covid, getting much worse in Trump 2).

a bit of a small amount of a fuckton of money

I'm a bit confused whether you're just being humble here and downplaying it, or if you're just talking about a relatively modest gain. The stock market has been going gangbusters for the past 10 years, so lots of people have made great returns as long as you're not panic selling everything.

He means an actual ton of money.

You could have 50x'd your money before/at the start of this Iran war.

How? Oil futures are up 82% over the past 3 months, very good, but hardly 50x.

By leveraging the hell out of it.

Fair enough, I have zero risk appetite for options.

That applies to any possible market movement.

Yeah, this. You can get massively rich on anything with enough leverage. Like what WallStreetBets calls "Faggot's Delight" options- very far out the money options with short expirations. You have to completely nail the timing and price point to make any money that way at all, its not enough to just say "turmoil in the mideast will make oil prices go up."

its not enough to just say "turmoil in the mideast will make oil prices go up."

Hmm actually it was.

Trump announces something insane and then the stock market hits an all time high after a brief freakout, which may or may not involve a backpedal. It's been like 9 times so far. Did you predict that?

so predictable, like free money at this point, hence TACO meme.

I mostly only saw Trump announce insane thing, people sold off expecting the crisis to deepen and then lock in a loss when Trump backpedaled.

At some point the rubberband is gonna break, though. Like the stock market has decoupled from anything beyond worship of the number but 'I'm just gonna bid any pullback no matter what' can't work forever.

The thing is, tech stocks are actually quite cheap. META's PE ratio is under 19, for example. So it's not as if they have decoupled from fundamentals.

Funny, my real net worth dropped during the "Biden boom times" and increased significantly during the first year of Trump's second term, enough that I retired in January.

No, the biden times were actually really good if you just had a normal ass portfolio and normal ass hedges; just buy the index, secure with bonds, hedge with precious metals. The standard 101. If you were out here doing wall street bets tomfoolery there was less for you to bite on.

Now that trump is back you can make some real money off the fact that shit is crazy and moving in a bad direction.

The thing that seems to let someone make money is movement in general; it doesn't matter if the movement is up or down or real or bubble; if people are jumping in and out of investments in a panic or in a stratagem, if you pick right twice you can part a fool (retirement fund, old person, degenerate gambler) from his money (what they need to not die).

Because Trump is so inconsistent but in a consistent way, and so many people with conservative leanings gaslit themselves into thinking "He won't actually do it, it wasn't that bad in the first term" some cynical hater moves really payed out.

Or you just YOLO into AI stocks and try to time the bubble, and make the same or more money without all the maneuvering; I'm just too much of a coward to put it all on 00 at the table.

It's a a good point, number went up during Biden's term, but in real terms it mostly treaded water for us. It has gone up significantly during Trump's second term (not through any particular investing insight, mostly own broad funds plus some extra in oil/resource stocks and tech stocks). We have also 'retired', if involuntarily (both got laid off), which prompted looking at our finances and realizing that under any non-extreme-blackpilled assumptions there is enough there (and in those situations the skills are probably worth more then any extra money), which hadn't really been on the radar given we are in our mid-40s with 3 kids. 'Retired' is in quotes though as within 6 months old colleagues began bugging us to take on some contracting projects which we did to help out folks, stay up to date, make some side money, etc. My wife ended up making more last year doing that then she did working full time and I made about 1/2 so we'll just see how it goes. Congrats on retiring.

Contracting does seem to be where the money is, if you can get enough work on the side. Sorry to hear about the lay-offs and glad to hear you guys managed to get something going. Mid-40s with 3 kids is a hell of a time for both parents to be laid off.

if you can get enough work

That's the part that absolutely terrifies me when contracting otherwise sounds attractive. I don't know how people find business. Is it networking? I'm awful at that!

Funny, my real net worth dropped during the "Biden boom times" and increased significantly during the first year of Trump's second term, enough that I retired in January.

As the saying goes, congratulations and Go Fuck Yourself.

had trump been reelected in 2020, do you think the 2022 selloff would not have happened? I think it still would have happened.

My point is that including the "Biden boom times" in this makes it less likely to be true politically motivated gloating and more likely to be false politically motivated gloating.

I think that part of OP's point here is the availability of very specific TACO/horrible policy trades under Trump 2. Personally, though, I'm not sure how one figures out that tariffs will be a TACO dip opportunity and that the equally horrible idea of Iran not - seems like a lucky guess to me.

In contrast, the Biden correction was broad-based in response to the rise of interest rates due to the post-pandemic inflation. This seems harder to take levered retail bets on that would turn screw-around money into screw-you money.

You could make money on Iran by selling oil futures when they spiked; I think there were several spikes which dropped within a day.

While obviously any volatility creates trading opportunities, it seems like OP is just trading big picture ideas. Here, it means "expensive oil" rather than some fundamentals-bases idea of "oil price target is X" because of impact of policy on supply, so they are not really in a position to take wins on moves down since they don't really have a thesis beyond "closer to $95 than $75".

Yup. I do this shit for fun on the side when I'm tired and don't feel like reading, I'm gonna spend more time woodworking and model building than situation monitoring.

I just tell the guy who actually Monitores "I think it will be like that, so put this amount of my money in the maximum risk 'like that' pile and let me know if it doesn't go to zero".

I'm making this post because it went up enough that it's scaring me, the hoe, too much to not have it in something boring.

I would say that it you have reached fuck-off money it is probably time to put the amount of money that it takes for that back into target date funds or something. One consequence of your various theses is that Treasury interest rates are going to remain pretty high for a while...


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