domain:aporiamagazine.com
The whole point of an index fund is that it's basically always better than guessing which companies are "solid and growing" and this advantage is only more obvious, not less, as time goes on (in part because index funds inherently re-weight on a mechanical basis as companies enter and exist whatever toplist they track, though minor differences especially within index ETFs exist in implementation). Turns out that judgement is way more subjective than often appreciated, according to the data.
There exist some speculative, theoretical reasons why index funds especially in their modern iterations might backfire in the future, but these remain wholly speculative, would mostly affect all investors roughly in aggregate together, and are not worth the time of day for most investors.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4hr ago
Red tribe defection doesn't look like random acts of terror.
It demonstrably can: look at Oklahoma City. But I think you're right in the general case.
I feel like that article's example is chosen more for shock value than truth, though. Practically, they only invest a single time for almost 15 years, even though it's a big amount, does that really reflect true investor behavior (saving in the meantime)? Not only staying put for a while, but your income won't stay the same over time, so even though they inflation-adjusted the core stock market measure, it's not going to be anything remotely like "I have 40k right now or I could strategically invest it over time in equal lumps on the dips" since that 40k is already inflation-corrected, you'd never have that to start with, so to me something feels a bit wrong in the setup. At any rate most people aren't debating between saving until a major dip and investing each month. Most people are debating between investing a lump sum all at once, or doing a structured investment. That is, I have 10k in savings, do I buy now or do I split it up into some number of equal parts over days/weeks/months? Notably both this more limited entry strategy and investing your extra every month ad infinitum are both sometimes referred to as dollar cost averaging, confusingly, since they represent two quite fundamentally different use-cases and setups.
Although a similar logic applies in the structured investment case, where the lump sum technically wins out mathematically, and the longer the time horizon the more this is true (somewhat counterintuitively), it's still worth noting that a structured deposit does offer both a decrease in risk as well as some emotional benefits (provided you actually stick to the structured deposit schedule without overthinking, which is a major doubt considering they're more also probably more risk-averse and overthinking in the first place). Overall I think the math says the risk decrease is overstated, so really it just comes down to emotions. Consider the worst-case scenario and if your precise entry strategy would have made an emotional difference or not, and then consider the best-case scenario and if you'd feel substantial regret not earning more. Only the investor themselves can say, but e.g. this Vanguard paper makes the claim that assuming you don't have loss aversion (which is to some extent irrational for most investors) only "very conservative" risk tolerance people should bother to DCA and also puts some numbers to it (see page 6 for some sexy money curves).
ninja edit: fixed objection about inflation
Gaashk
4hr ago
Thanks! That is pretty interesting. I did like the few Lovecraft stories I read more than I had expected as well.
anti_dan
4hr ago
Many people get very uncomfortable with frank and honest discussions about voting and voting rights (one may hearken back to SSC's Civil Rites post for more elaboration). My con law professor had a Roko's basilisk-esque response to our 1L Federalist society secretary (or maybe it was treasurer) pointing out that "voting is just pointing guns at people with more steps." I don't find something along that line uncommon.
philosoraptor
4hr ago
the only state that is plausibly a nation is Texas
Hawaii?
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
Pilots and doctors are very different crowds.
phailyoor
4hr ago
Red tribers don't need to believe that Gaza is the outcome for it to be an effective deterrent. Red tribers could think that rebellion is sunshine and rainbows, and the deterrent would still work because the actual outcome of rebellion would be Gaza. And that Gaza would extend to blue territory as well.
As long as the elites in charge are smart enough to understand MAD, the dumb boomers who think rebellion is easier actually contribute more to MAD.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
In Texas no you did not before constitutional carry- a car was reckoned as your personal property and the same rules for firearms applied as inside your own house.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5hr ago
I will tell you that this is definitely true for pilots, however, in full agreement with the popular perception. Of course the barriers or demonstrably lower (spending time in hotel rooms already, far from home) on top of the similarities (long work hours, mix of boredom and stress, an abundance of young female lower-ranked coworkers).
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
Red tribe defection doesn't look like random acts of terror. It looks like loss of full civilian control of the military. It looks like cops saying they 'can't figure it out who did it' a lot. It looks like general refusal to cooperate with the federal government, even by people for whom that is their actual full-time day job.
Would Greg Abbott have succeeded in preventing the border patrol from holding the border open if they hadn't been Texans who strongly disagreed with the Biden admin's policies?
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
Most of us refer to the relative laxity of US covid restrictions due to the heavy armament of the US anti-covid restrictions crowd. Ain't nobody gave me shit over a mask while I was open carrying.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
I think there's a further epicycle here- the blue tribe would, when facing government oppression, roll over, lawfare, and flee to Canada. The red tribe is the one that might go kinetic(still very unlikely). And they staff the security forces.
The black tribe also might go kinetic but its internal problems prevent that far harder than anyone else.
To have a brutal authoritarian regime in the US requires red tribe buy in. And you can do it through rum millet, I suppose, or cleruchic grants. But realistically red tribe ethnogenesis is more a thing that needs to be taken into account than a thing that can be really controlled so you can't get too oppressive to red interests without losing state capacity towards the uncooperative fast.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5hr ago
I mean, it's practical for the government to police unlawful speeches after the fact insofar as they would be justified in doing so (i.e. rarely). But you only buy a gun once, and the government needs to know you bought the gun to run the check. Are you proposing letting someone buy the gun, and then doing the check? Seems obviously flawed. I'd add that of course such a check should be done in a reasonable and timely manner, or the law is invalid/illegal/wrong/not to be enforced. For similar-ish reasons, although I view the right to protest as pretty fundamental right, it's also a realm where requiring a permit is not baseline illegal to me, or trampling on any rights. There's plenty of other stuff that, while not as hallowed as a right, are still bureaucratically necessary to approve in advance instead of retrospectively, from food handler's permits to driver's licenses to becoming a schoolteacher. I will cop to supporting short (think 1-7 days) mandatory waiting periods, but wouldn't really be too sad if they weren't a thing (and wouldn't be bothered in principle by smartly implemented mandatory waiting periods for other things, either, like major medical decisions or whatnot). All of this is in a background of not being too bothered by guns themselves floating around society like they always have, and like really quite a lot of Americans (even borderline brainwashed ones if you interrogate them closely), I'm no closet abolitionist, far from it.
erwgv3g34
5hr ago
Well, no, I don't want to live in Gaza, but the threat of Gaza can keep governments from turning (more) tyrannical.
Sometimes you have to be willing to punish defectors even at great cost to yourself, otherwise nobody has an incentive to play nice with you. That's why we evolved the revenge circuitry in our brains; a deterrent is a deterrent.
Or, as the meme goes, "I swear to God I'll kill us all if you fuck with me".
aqouta
5hr ago
You've convinced me to give this a whirl with some of my secret smut writing and man, I had heard people complaining about the em dashes, and maybe I just didn't notice them on my more back and forth QA style questions but it managed to deploy not one, not two, not three, not even four but five em dashes in just 700 words.
WandererintheWilderness
5hr ago
The threat of turning the place into Gaza is the deterrent.
Is it? I mean, sure, that's the steelman. It works. But is it actually the mainstream Red Tribe belief? I feel like most gun owners who cite the "safeguard against tyranny" argument think of it in terms of the Spirit of '76, not mutually-assured destruction. And I don't think support for one necessarily implies support for the other.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5hr ago
Ah, spending your vacation in the best way!...? :)
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
5hr ago
I've ended up writing such a long response that it's best submitted as it's own post. Standby, I wasn't going to get much sleep anyway haha.
OliveTapenade
5hr ago
I'm still not sure how any of that changes the question any?
I didn't mention death at all, so I don't know why you bring it up, and everything else there is just... irrelevant. Okay, sure, the posthumans can have bigger numbers. We can posit that the experience is arbitrarily more entertaining. How does that change any of the ethical questions? What ethical difference does it make whether we're talking about playing Crusader Kings or an arbitrarily more complex super Crusader Kings? What is the relevant ethical difference between regular tennis and nuclear tennis? It seems like zero to me.
You can, as you do at the end of your post, just dismiss the question and assert an answer. But why should that answer be compelling? If your position is that there are no external criteria for a good life and the only thing that matters is self-approval, I think it's reasonable to reflect a bit on why you feel that's the case.
phailyoor
5hr ago
The threat of turning the place into gaza is the deterrent. And the power to go nuclear is important.
The Soviets and Americans didn't want to live in a nuclear wasteland yet they still built thousands of nukes.
Not an OP in this chain, but I think that's where we disagree. I'm somewhat friendly to the idea of high vs low trust societies, but I don't think that trust is inherently entropic and decaying or else we wouldn't ever have high trust to begin with. I also don't think technological or social movements from the last century or so are inherently corrosive to trust either (maaaaybe algorithmic-driven news but I am hopeful this will self-correct). I think any variation contributed by immigration is within the variation that already exists in the natural ebb and flow of trust insofar as it exists, it's not inherently directional. As an example, some immigrants might even raise institutional trust because they have a vision of America that is more rosy than Americans themselves believe. Or, of course, sometimes they bring prejudice with them, but it's not some broad brush, and it's not some inevitable march to decay. Civilization is not dying, and although history never repeats, I feel like the rhymes are there to justify humanity's continual adaptation and loose progression. As clarification, I think the 'global march of progress' narrative often parroted on the Left is super-duper wrong, but civilization itself has a stubborn tendency to stick around. Empires, of course, do not; mind you don't mistake the two!
Contra MaiqTheTrue, I think I draw the opposite conclusion from similar facts. Even though many individuals may not have full awareness or be capable of navigating balances and tradeoffs and knowing the fine details, we can still accomplish positive and clever execution because the intensities of belief act as "weights" on the system as a whole. Work tends to happen in the middle near the fulcrum, and directional pressures - even if vague by themselves! - lead to a convergence on a balance point actually quite close to the ideal in many cases. The more lower-d democratic a system is (caveat: actually a degree of representative government is also needed, policy is written by individuals after all), the better this tends to work. That is, I think wisdom of the masses theory is broadly true, and that even intelligent individuals in power often respect these counterbalances, even unconsciously, more than is often appreciated. A local administrator might tell you plenty of superficial rationales for choosing certain zoning restrictions, for example, but ultimately there is a lurking calculus of the big players in the city and what kind of things the voters like that has more often than not pre-determined the smaller range of plausible outcomes before they even start drafting them up.
Under this model of the world, even cynical, loud, and evil people who wield principles like a weapon and view politics as a blood sport often act more as weights on the scale than actual participants. Moving the Overton Window and living on the extremes provides a degree of additional leverage, this is true, but that's not a bug it's a feature! The 'intensity of belief' should affect the balance of things (and even pure cynics are downstream of this intensity, not the actual upstream source). Furthermore promoting more lower-d democratic behaviors helps quite a lot, indirectly, to expose them for what they are, and re-weight the balance over time.
roystgnr
5hr ago
That would be a devastating demonstration of the difference between "fargroup" and "outgroup", and you're probably right. But on the other hand, it's harder to profit from being rough with people when their sympathizers are a decent fraction of your soldiers and your family isn't ten thousand miles away.
To this day you can start typing "fort h" into Google and its recommendation before you get any farther will be the "fort hood shooting", with the 2009 one on top of the results. Taliban fighting other Afghans in Afghanistan had about a 1-to-1 kill ratio, and were an order of magnitude worse at killing Americans, but it just took one Taliban sympathizer in Texas to rack up 13-to-1 (well, 13-to-0 so far, but as of March 2025 it looks like he's now more likely to die of execution than old age). Like most military bases, Fort Hood has way more Red Tribe sympathizers than Taliban sympathizers, and it's a very good thing that we've never pissed off the former nearly as much.
But doesn’t that require that the population be willing to actually fire back? That might be easier with guns, but modern suburban Americans are not the same stock as Muslims in MENA. Insurgency works if you have a population willing to fight. Arabs in the Middle East sure, they’re raised to fight, to wish for tge deaths of their enemies. White suburban Americans are not made of that stuff. They’ve been tamed from birth, raised to be nice, to prize comfort and safety and peaceful living. I just find it hilarious that people expect suburban professionals who meekly obey every dictate from corporate America and schedule their two week vacations during which they do work emails are suddenly going to rebel and shoot government workers. It’s not going to happen because most of us would be under the bed afraid of the cops.
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