JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
15hr 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
17hr 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
17hr 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
17hr 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
1d 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
1d 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
2d ago
A lot of historical rulers did pretty much the same, except there was no console cheat.
JarJarJedi
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
4d ago
Possible but I don't see why would they suddenly stop announcing it. What changed?
JarJarJedi
4d 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
4d 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
5d 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?
JarJarJedi
6d ago
I think I have to disagree here. I have no idea if I'm qualified to give any advice here, all I have is N=1 data point of 20+ year long marriage. But I don't think it requires KPI goals. I mean it's cool if you run marathons together, but it's not a requirement. People being comfortable together and genuinely interested in each other's happiness is a requirement. That's where the compromise comes from. If I want to do something, and I suspect my wife may be not ok with it, I ask, and she can say no. Or she can say yes. Or if she says no, and I really feel like I need it, we can talk about it. The key here we want to find that point where we're both happy - or at least, the least amount of unhappy - about the outcome. It's not a mathematical formula and it's not a ledger, if you start keeping balance on it, you're going to get in trouble. But it's totally about sometimes just doing something you otherwise wouldn't do because your partner wants you to. If you're going to be good long-term partners, you will be able to find a way to figure out how to negotiate those things, everybody does it in a different way. If you can not find a way to do it, then probably the partnership is not going to work out.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
Unglamorous jobs have their audience too. I am pretty close in my career to the point where taking a boring, well-paid job would suit me just fine. I am not there yet, but likely in another 5 years I will be. I mean, I am not averse to glamorous and exciting ones, just it's not the only acceptable option for me anymore. Of course, it has to be worth it - if it's boring and pays peanuts, no thank you. So maintaining legacy system is not that hard, if you are willing to pay for it. Of course, top management in BigTech Inc. wouldn't want to, why would they.
JarJarJedi
7d ago
It may be cheap on the scale of Amazon/Facebook, but it's usually not how it works. It's on somebody's budget, that somebody is a middle manager, and he should show how much money his work is bringing to the company, to earn bonus and promotion. Telling his boss "Shut down this service and save $X/month" is one way to do it. And any service that is not championed by somebody important and not producing cash is always under the sword of Damocles. Google is doing that all the time, shutting down very popular services, just because.
JarJarJedi
7d ago
At what point is this no longer just people exercising their first amendment rights?
I think a lot of people misunderstand what First Amendment means. It protects the freedom of speech, but it doesn't mean anything you do with speech is now outside the law. It means you can not be prosecuted just for speaking, but if you speech was part of another crime - fraud, murder, insurrection, conspiracy to obstruct law enforcement, any crime - then you can be punished for that crime, and 1A would not shield you just because your participation used speech as a medium. It's of course more complex, but the point is - you can exercise your 1A rights and still be prosecuted, if conspiring to attack ICE officers is a prosecutable offense. It'd be probably hard to upgrade it to felony murder because the prosecution would have to prove direct causal link between what somebody said and the actions that led to death - which will be very hard to do, since nobody probably told them explicitly "now go and drive over ICE officer that is standing on the corner of This and That!" (though Good's partner, saying "drive baby drive!", could be in legal jeopardy for that, if the feds would want to go after her). But if feds can establish the causal link between something said on the char and some lawless action, like attacking ICE officers, then they have a basis for prosecution. If they find an organizational structure (which is almost certainly there, the question is whether the feds can find the hard evidence for it) then they could also employ RICO which doesn't even require causal links. But Republicans, for whatever reason, have been very reluctant to use RICO against the militant left.
JarJarJedi
7d ago
I wonder how this process actually works? It does not feel scalable. It would take a person likely a couple of days at least to go through 100k+ page text, especially if they want to pay proper attention. From what I read online, agents receive thousands submissions per year. Clearly, there must be some filters. I can guess "previously famous author" and "the guy I know or that somebody I know vouched for" are the obvious ones, but what comes next?
JarJarJedi
7d ago
I never really realized how much work goes into post-processing photos. I usually just click on my phone, upload it and forget about it. And the quality is not bad, modern phones have pretty decent software. But compared to something done by somebody who knows what they're doing, you can really see the difference.
JarJarJedi
7d ago
Thanks! I was just looking for a new set of skiing socks. My favorite ones are very close to turning into gauze. They have pretty generous return policy for an online clothing manufacturer, I'll try them out.
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).
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.
More options
Context Copy link