birb_cromble
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User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
13hr ago
I've been reading up more on the federal personal savings rate and it's a pretty interesting concept.
https://www.bea.gov/data/income-saving/personal-saving-rate
The U.S. personal saving rate is personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income. In other words, it's the percentage of people's incomes left after they pay taxes and spend money.
I haven't found an exact definition of what is included and what isn't, but that link is probably a good starting point.
Do you think it's a useful metric? On one hand, it's fairly coarse grained, but on the other hand, it seems like it's very difficult to game for exactly the same reason.
The fact that it's trending from a peak (excluding COVID) in the 1960s is interesting. I haven't found many explanations for why that is occuring. I've seen arguments that it's due to the real cost of living increasing faster than wages, and I've seen arguments that cheap debt and easy mobility make saving less important. I'm not sure if I believe either of them. I'd be interested in any other theories you might have.
I haven't read anything in the original koine Greek, so I didn't want to overstep my knowledge.
I can conclusively state that none of the gospels say "and lo, there was a great clapping of cheeks" in them.
The apocrypha are probably another matter. They get wild.
birb_cromble
14hr ago
I saw these comments as I was scrolling through the firehose feed, and thought that while my tribal knee-jerk reaction is against them, I suppose I can't deny that people often use the "doing the meme" quip to avoid addressing the actual argument. It's not like these things have no comeback
There's a symmetry of effort here. When somebody writes a badly-supported shitpoast, there's really not much value in spilling gallons of ink to pick it apart. It's clear that such discourse was not the author's goal. As such, an accusation that the author Did The Meme is is a comparable, tit-for-tat response that carries roughly the same amount of semantic signal.
You, on the other hand, have made an effort to explain your position in what seems like good faith. As such, I'll take a moment to explain my problems with this xweet.
I'm not a Christian, and other than a few exposures to Charismatic and Catholic churches when my mother was having one of her episodes, my only real exposure to the Faith has been from reading the Bible in its NIV, KJV, and Vulgates translations. I'm ashamed to admit that I don't read Greek, so my understanding may be incomplete. That said, even with only that book knowledge as a foundation, this is a bad take.
First off, let's talk about the Pilate thing. Pilate didn't particularly give a shit about Jesus. Hell, he wanted nothing to do with it. He famously stated that he washed his hands of the matter. It was the Jewish priesthood of the era that wanted him dead. Does Scott really want to extend that comparison to the modern day?
Moving on from that, the prostitute comparison is terrible. Three minutes of searching would make it clear that Jesus and his apostles were, shockingly, not regularly running a train on Mary Magdalene. The word "consort" is doing an enormous amount of rhetorical work.
Moving on from that, my first intuition when I read this post was that Scott was claiming that Yudkowsky was the antichrist. The way he framed it makes just as much sense as a Jesus comparison.
Put together, my problem here is that Scott is a thoughtful, well-read, smart guy who understands nuance and second order effects. I can either believe that he had a momentary lapse in every single one of these traits, or he full and well understood what he was doing. Charity is a useful concept, but it is not a concept with infinite elasticity. Eventually it runs up against priors.
birb_cromble
1d ago
The formulation in my head was more like "if you think you need to be in the top ten percent of men, go somewhere where you are that".
This works remarkably well. I do a lot of theater, and being a straight guy immediately puts me in the top 20% simply by virtue of availability. That last 10% got me my partner of 13 years.
birb_cromble
2d ago
I think a lot of it stems from the fact that he did the meme.
birb_cromble
3d ago
Spending is $1,863.17 less than this day last year. I hit my deductible for health insurance, so that might help moving forward.
birb_cromble
4d ago
professional training on and off the racetrack
What kind of racing do you do? I used to love doing dirt track. I have some friends who are deep into autocross these days and have been trying to get me involved, but I really don't want to buy a car for it.
birb_cromble
5d ago
I don't trust the IRS not to reclassify BOXX. The tax treatment is using some tricks that I don't think will stand up to regulatory scrutiny.
birb_cromble
5d ago
The hype of a mostly-successful launch is at war with the broader market anxiety about data centers and the cost of debt right now.
Remember that per their S-1, SpaceX is an AI company with rocket side business, not the other way around.
birb_cromble
5d ago
I maintain a twelve month emergency fund, and I recently got over my various trauma-responses to the point where I was able to roll half of that into a six-month CD that's offering 80bps over my HYSA.
While I know I could probably do "better", sometimes you have to have to take the small victories.
If anybody out there is reading this, don't get so hung up on the difference between"better" and "perfect" that you do nothing at all. Every improvement is a stepping stone.
birb_cromble
6d ago
An acquaintance of mine who lives closer to the city got a Tesla last year and took me for a ride to show off its FSD functionality. It mistook a crack in the asphalt for the median line and sent us swerving into the opposite lane. Thankfully it was a back road in fuck-off nowhere so we were the only ones on the road, but it did make me hesitant to rely on the technology right now. It probably works better in places closer to the core.
birb_cromble
6d ago
I appreciate you walking through your rationale on this. This is a huge topic and I'm still trying to learn as much as I can.
birb_cromble
6d ago
We should probably be cutting rates instead of raising them.
Isn't that what Burns tried back in the 1970s? What do you think is different about the current era such that it would lead to a different outcome?
birb_cromble
7d ago
How the hell did she get money from the supposedly rich and canny, the kind of hard-nosed business people whose job it was to sniff out frauds and schemers, who made tons of money by making the right decisions on investments and trades?
A lot of hard-nosed business people are actually pretty bad at sniffing out fraud even if they try. Furthermore, a lot of them simply don't give a fuck. Venture capitalists make a lot of bets. They expect most of them to not pay out, and for the few that do pay out to more than cover the bad bets. Mahayoshi Son of SoftBank is probably the best example of that. If the reason the bet didn't pay out is because of fraud, that's not really much different than it failing to pay out because of internal failures or acts of God. After all, you did your due diligence. You met with the founders and they made all the right mouth noises while pointing at a hockey stick graph projected onto the wall. You couldn't have possibly known there was a fraud going on, so you face no unique downside.
My financial news feeds this week have been blowing up about the 10 year Treasury yield and the effect that it's having on mortgage rates
The average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage hit 7.49% on Friday, leaving rates a bruising 30 basis points higher than where they started the week, according to Mortgage News Daily.
Rates remain some distance from late 2023's peak around 7.8%, but the latest rise is nonetheless jarring and could easily be enough to chill home sales ahead of the market's typical winter slowdown.
As somebody who's considering relocating, watching these movements has been a rollercoaster. Looking at housing prices vs rates, we're not seeing the usual negative correlation between the two. Single family detached dwelling prices seem to be unusually sticky in the face of rate increases this year. It's reaching the point where I might legitimately be better off saving for a cash payment than trying to take on a mortgage.
The rates I understand, but I'm not 100% sure what's going on with prices. Is it simply that people who are sitting on 2% mortgages from several years ago aren't motivated sellers? It feels like there has to be more going on than that.
It's also been interesting watching my holdings in a state municipal bond fund get kicked in the balls. The average weighted duration for a bond in the fund is 8 years. I'd expect a 25bps increase in rates to drive a 2% drop in share value. I could understand a 4% drop, if the market was pricing in another 25bps home this year. However, it's down 9% on share value. The fund hasn't had any notable failures in their holdings, so I'm guessing the market at large is expecting 3 more 25bps hikes instead of one.
birb_cromble
8d ago
I'd go the other way, and positively reinforce the idea of putting things where they belong. This would have advantages ranging from reduced toddler deaths to fewer shopping cart-induced auto insurance claims.
birb_cromble
8d ago
I know women who have published mil-sf.
I'd keep them away from your carburetor.
birb_cromble
9d ago
This is why I only submit to mil-sf outlets anymore. If you can't bench press your body weight, march ten miles in full kit, and fuck a hole through the carburetor of a 1963 Chevy Impala, you're not even going to get out of the slush pile.
birb_cromble
10d ago
Spending is $2,130.86 lower than the same day last year. I just mailed the check for the last part of my home repairs, so next week won't look as good. I think I'm still on track, though.
birb_cromble
10d ago
They care about you. Asking about all those little things is their way to make sure that you're healthy and safe. If you're not eating right and your car's on the fritz, the "important" things get a lot harder.
birb_cromble
11d ago
I should expect a significant amount of people freaking out trying to figure out some sort of solution to a major issue.
Go through the archives here and on /r/themotte and you can find precisely that.
birb_cromble
11d ago
If one very seriously believes that the world was attacked by an artificial bioweapon
You're engaging in a rhetorical sleight of hand that I've repeatedly decried in the past. A lab leak doesn't necessarily have to be a bioweapon, and immediately reaching for that term limits the discussion space in a lot of ways. It also doesn't imply there's an attack.
"Lab leak" could mean "accidental release of a natural virus"
"Lab leak" could mean "accidental release of an engineered research virus".
"Lab leak" could mean "accidental release of a weaponized virus strain".
"Lab leak" could mean "intentional release of any one of the three aforementioned categories".
"Intentional release of a weaponized virus strain" represents one sixth of the possible scenarios that can be described as a "lab leak".
The other five don't necessitate the kind of response you're describing, so why are you instantly privileging the one case that you can discard and not engaging with the others?
I don't disagree with any of that.
The point I'm trying to make is that even if the Confederates were to try and disrupt Union supply lines, they'd be trying to interrupt those supply lines while Union troops were merrily burning down entire cities. They simply couldn't be in both places at once, and like you said, the Union could ignore the pain longer than any Confederate force could maintain the pressure. Sherman was not shy about pillaging the countryside, so supply chain interruptions would have been even less effective.
As for the guerilla warfare aspect, you're probably correct in the tidewater, but the battle of the Wilderness and... basically everything that happened in Kansas makes me think that a more ruthless Confederate approach probably would have had legs further inland. The Confederacy could have potentially maintained a rump government for several years.
birb_cromble
13d ago
Most historical accounts suggest that the segregated Colored Troops performed bravely and reasonably well, given their limited battlefield experience. Their high casualty rates seem to stem from how they were employed during battles, and a general take no quarter and ask none attitude between them and Confederate troops.
At least a few of the zizians took courses at CFAR, and their the root of their schism derives from arguments with Michael Vassar.
If we take your argument at face value, this is closer to a student of Paul McCartney going on a killing spree because he didn't like Paul's performance in Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
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