JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
9hr ago
"Bulletproof hosting" is a thing, and they specialize on that kind of clients (and there's no reason for another kind of clients to pay the premium they'd necessarily charge). I don't know what kind of host rdrama used, but this certainly is a real thing.
JarJarJedi
17hr ago
I read it as "the datacenter owner lost access to the whole data center", which would be extremely eye-popping event. But it looks like in reality, the data center owner just decided to kick those folks out. Which is always a risk, especially for high-drama platforms.
JarJarJedi
17hr ago
Can't you do the same with, I don't know, your chest or belly? Why it has to be the penis?
And, of course, how hilarious would be the countermeasures? Are they all going to have their penises inspected before the jump now? Or maybe required weekly inspections for a year before the event, to establish the baseline and prevent the anomalous inflation?
JarJarJedi
17hr ago
Not sure how it relates to gold though. I mean yes, bad investments (and fraudsters) exist and existed since primates invented money and lying. But this does not lead to gold investments, I don't think investing in something like industry-benchmark index would expose me to SBF-Madoff types any more than buying physical gold.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
This sentence scares the shit out of me.
Why? You can't expect be perfectly happy all the time when dealing with other people - or anything, really. If the dog vomited on the carpet, somebody has to clean up. Nobody likes to clean up dog's vomit from the carpet. Somebody will be unhappy about it. There's no option to avoid it - just to minimize the unhappiness.
But then what happens? It's a very nice and good and smart modernist idea to think that when a married couple realizes they aren't good for one another that an amicable and professional divorce takes place.
Hopefully you can figure it out before marrying each other. If that didn't happen, it sucks. Hopefully, you can recognize what happened and cut the losses. If you can't, it really sucks.
I want discourse around relationships to actually be helpful to them instead of milquetoast generalities
Don't underestimate milquetoast generalities. They are generalities because they are often true. And a real lot of people dismiss it too readily before actually examining them properly. They feel like "oh surely I do this, everybody does this" - but everybody doesn't do this, and to do this requires untrivial amount of work and attention. Including how to negotiate things with your partner that it won't cause you both being worn down to dust and ashes.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
because it hasn't really happened yet,
Oh, "take your money and gtfo" debanking is happening all the time now. It started with "undesirable businesses" - payday loans, pawnshops, firearms dealers, porn, legal marijuana, that sort of thing. The feds strongly "encouraged" banks to cut them off from the banking system. See 'Operation Choke Point". Then after the Great Awokening and Summer of COVID Love happened, it spread from generic "shady businesses" to political undesirables. Trump businesses were kicked out of many banks. Same happened to various Trump-adjacent people. This is a "soft" variety though - it may destroy a smaller business and make life very inconvenient for you for a while, but as long as you stop being annoying to Powers and hide under the rock, you can survive. In fact, if you're billionaire, it probably would be just an annoying inconvenience for you - there always will be some bank willing to hold your billions.
What hasn't happened in the US, but did, say, in Canada (which of course is using the abovementioned debanking widely, but moved on to more severe approach) is full asset freeze, where you are just told "your money is now ours, good luck living without money". And with most woke countries (Canada, EU, etc.) increasingly trying to delegitimize cash, it may be very hard to maintain any semblance of normal life in that scenario. Which is exactly the point of it.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
For United States, we're not there yet for confiscatory debanking yet, all the debanking cases I've heard of were of the sort "take your money and gtfo", not "we will now take your money". If the US ever gets there, and you upset people that want and are able to disconnect you from financial system, your only alternative will probably be cash, but how long can you hold out on your gold reserves, without the ability to hold any non-shitty job (there are probably jobs that don't check IDs but I don't think there are any non-shitty ones) and without access to pretty much any place that checks ID. But yes, for this scenario having a substantial gold reserve in small denominations would work, if you know people who would buy it from you without turning you in.
That said, if you look the part, probably moving to California and pretending to be illegal immigrant would also work. You may get yourself an entirely new identity eventually, get a bank account and even vote (which ironically wouldn't be illegal if you were a citizen before).
if Fidelity suddenly and irrecoverably lost all its data, a little stock certificate isn't going to save you, ammunition will be the new currency.
That said, internal corruption is also a plausible scenario. It's not hard to track if the company is willing, but large bureaucratic corporations are very lazy so it's not impossible that they may refuse to deal with the problem until given the undeniable proof it exists. So downloading statements once in a while and keeping them somewhere on the backup drive may not be a bad idea.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Frankly, I don't see the point of gold-linked assets outside of short term gambling.
As I noted in other comment, my gold investment produced a solid 11%/y over the last 10 years. No civilization collapse, no drama, just buy and hodl. I don't think embezzlement and fraud will be an issue for funds like GLD. But if you feel touching physical gold makes you feel better, sure, why not.
Much like with crypto, if you don't have the wallet it's not really yours.
I'd argue it's not like crypto. In crypto, math is the only thing you can rely on. In traditional assets, the legal system is the thing you rely on - if, say, Fidelity suddenly decides to zero-out my account, I rely on US legal system to make me whole. If US legal system collapses to the point bank accounts are irrecoverable, then we're in the prepper scenario, which is properly served only by a bunker with multi-year stock of basic vital supplies. Having couple of bars of gold won't do - you will just get bonked over the head (in the best case) and relieved of it at the first opportunity.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
Yeah I mean if you're serious prepper, with the bunker filled with canned food, gas and ammo, then having one shelf there dedicated to gold and silver makes total sense. If that's your model of the world, physical gold fits it well. But doing just physical gold without anything else is just a recipe for losing money, IMO, if you're doing it for the financial reason.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
I've held a small part of my assets in gold/silver ETFs for about last 10 years, and it tripled since then. Which gives a solid 11% yearly return. But it was I wild ride, it was underwater for a bit and had pretty mediocre return for a long time, and only my laziness prevented me from selling (unfortunately, the same laziness prevented me from buying more in the dips). But in the hindsight, for a disciplined investor who is better at it than I am, it'd probably be a good investment. I don't see a fundamental change now which would change that for the next 10 years (but then again, I am not very good at it...)
Looking at the long term graph, we're sitting at the top of a pretty sizeable mountain, so not sure "historic crash" is the right way to describe it.
JarJarJedi
3d ago
I'm not sure what's the point of buying Costco gold tbh. It's overpriced (usually not by a lot, but noticeably), if you'd want to sell it you will inevitably pay a commission, you need to store it somewhere in secure place and not lose it, and frankly excluding the scenario where the civilization collapses, I do not see any advantage over holding gold-linked assets. At least I don't run a risk of losing those if I move...
Am I missing something important here?
JarJarJedi
4d ago
expelled the
bankersJews
Of course they did. But it's hardly a thing you can repeat too often... And turns out, kings still need the loans after that, too.
JarJarJedi
4d ago
Someone recently claimed that people here would greatly outperform the market given their higher-than-average intelligence
I am not seeing why. It presumes the market is some kind of rational mechanism, akin to a puzzle, that needs to be figured out for guaranteed superior return. I know I have higher-than-average intelligence, and I am shit at predicting markets. I know many people who are way smarter than me and still are shit at predicting markets. OTOH, some people with pretty average intelligence become millionaires on the market. I don't think it works the way it's implied here.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
A lot of historical rulers did pretty much the same, except there was no console cheat.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
In US now I think there are laws now in many states that require the loaners to tell you how much you will be paying in interest (and therefore overall) at least at some point of the process, and have you sign on that. So theoretically it shouldn't be a surprise, but practically of course not all people read that anyway.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
I have to say each time I see that $0 in the "non-recurring debts" in my financial dashboard I feel that little warm fuzzy feeling inside. I realize that not all debts are bad debts, rationally, but some part of my brain just insists "neither a borrower nor a lender be" and I can not fully deny it.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
That only makes sense if you paycheck keeps up - I guess if your job is connected to extracting or selling natural resources (oil, gas?) it could be real. But I think actually Russia has subsidized mortgages: https://realting.com/news/russian-mortgage-market-analysis I imagine that's what people actually do.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
I have my house paid off. I mildly regret it from time to time because the interest on the loan when I paid it off was about the same as today's interest on the savings account, so I probably lost some money on that. On the other hand, the peace of mind it gives is not to be discounted. I have lost (and found) jobs twice since then, and in both cases I could feel much less stressed because questions like "could I be in a situation where I'd have trouble paying my mortgage because of cash flow issues" never bothered me. Whatever happens to my job, whatever happens to the market, stock or real estate, my house is mine - that may be a bit irrational financially, but still feels good.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
Everybody who has an Android phone is technically a "Linux user". So it's about as much of an alternative lifestyle as driving a Honda Civic.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
Oh damn, I missed the best part: this guy is literally named Shahid Butt. They are going to have a terrorist named Shahid Butt on the city council. If I lived in Birmingham I'd vote for him (I would never live there so I can say whatever I like).
JarJarJedi
7d ago
Possible but I don't see why would they suddenly stop announcing it. What changed?
JarJarJedi
8d ago
That "Asian" category Brits use is very annoying. As if Japanese and Pakistanis are exactly the same and it's not worth differentiating between them.
JarJarJedi
8d ago
Maybe the drug smugglers got the message and stopped using that route, or reduced its usage, at least in the places where they can easily be intercepted and blown up? I mean, those people are not dumb, they should be used to adapting quickly.
JarJarJedi
8d ago
A Muslim activist who served a prison sentence for his role in an overseas terror plot is now seeking elected office in Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, as local elections approach amid heightened communal tensions. Is there something special going in Birmingham, or it's just how things are in UK now?
As sure as the rest of the market. Which is enough for me. Again, if the market as a whole collapses, then we're in "canned food and ammo" scenario, that's a different discussion. But until the society has not collapsed, being as safe as the rest of the crowd is enough.
That depends on the kind of crisis. If it's the crisis like 2008, then I think FDIC and similar mechanisms worked as intended. Surely, some risky investments caused losses, but as expected, the government went out of its way (and some say, way too far, but that's beside the point) to preserve the market and not let it fall too deep. If it's the crisis like 1917 in Russia, then yes, people who own property are fucked, and lucky if they get out alive, and may forget about such insignificant things as property. And having a couple of bars of gold won't help much, rather gets one more viable candidate for being murdered.
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