FBXL Social

Are you sure they benefit, or do we just think they do because that's how it's been done in our lifetime?

Especially considering that it's really questionable as to whether the next few generations will be able to retire...

Grabbed a copy, I'll take a look.

I had to write a job ad for a technical position, and instead of asking for a certain number of years experience, I just listed all the things they'd have to do. Compared to previous instances where we sort of went with a job ad that was more fitting with the usual orthodoxy, we got tons of good applicants, and I had to turn away really good applicants which isn't something I had the luxury to do previously.

Fact is, people complain about getting 1000 applicants, but usually you can look at the applications and realize over 99.9% of those applicants aren't really qualified for the job. The key is to try to get the people who are actually qualified to say "Oh! I can do this! I should apply!", since those are the people who will actually add value in the role.

Although I don't follow Confucianism, one important detail of their ideology puts farmers at the top of the civilian hierarchy.

We don't live in an agrarian society like ancient China, but I think the idea of putting the people who actually do things on a pedestal is smart. People who package up financial instruments may make a lot of money, but to consider people who play magic tricks with dollars more important than people who make the things we use every day is a decadent and broken society imo...

Yeah, and that's where I always figured the "everything store" and everything that comes with it is sort of a loss leader. Go ahead and lose money on the store, you're actually selling server space with the store as an example that your server space can do anything you want to do.

I've suspected for a long time that a lot of things we think of as normal are subsidized by all the investment money floating around which causes companies to make all their products loss leaders to drive up revenues.

I've written at length a few times about it, but one example I wrote about yesterday was sending 4 boxes out. It cost me over $100 to ship them out, but amazon shipped them to my house for free. They're selling a $100 bill for free to drive up volumes and revenues, but there's no way you can do that forever. It's a 3 day drive from my house to the nearest fulfilment center!

Maybe that's it then. @cjd made a god tier post thread a couple days ago about banking that I need to get back to that talks a lot about the damaging effects of having all this debt available, but the availability of 30 year fixed terms at anything other than the historical average mortgage rate is sort of absurd.

I dunno. I can't find it, but I was sure there were specific things in US law that made a 30 year mortgage economical whereas in reality it's an absurdity where the bank is taking huge amounts of risk assuming that the interest rates won't go up for 30 whole years.

In Canada, once you get much past 10 years the interest rates are so high nobody would possibly accept such a term. I looked around in England, and it appeared that 10 years was about the maximum there too. The fact that mortgage term and rate term are so close linguistically makes it hard to find information about it...

I could see self-driving working in an extremely limited, tightly controlled context like driving between a handful of known locations. Since everything could be really well known, you could have it gracefully fail if parameters are too far from what's known. Much different problem than "I want to be able to have my car drive me from LA to NYC and I never have to do anything other than sit and read Harry Potter"

(And by "working", I mean safely and consistently. Run over any kids or busloads of people or run any transport trucks off the road and the trial is over)

You can amortize for up to 35 years if you come up with a 20% down payment, but the 30 and 40 year interest rate terms are something subsidized by the US government to help get people into houses. You can get a 25 year interest rate term in Canada, but the premium is so high it's unreasonable to go with it. To give you an example, you can get a mortgage for 4-5% right now if you're 0-5 years, but a 25 year mortgage is 9.75%.

This actually makes sense since prior to the gfc the average mortgage rate was about 9%, but it's awfully expensive insurance!

In my case, I do support limited scope, sustainably funded, competently run government programs. Hell, I support Canada's single payer healthcare where it's competently run, and that's about as far from libertarian as you can get. My city has a bunch of locally funded programs I totally support despite the cost because they're a public good that don't exist when someone needs to make a profit to do a thing (public parks and playgrounds being a good example)

So that's the thing, the world is complicated and because of that you often and up having a variety of viewpoints that are sometimes mutually exclusive but battling it out because those different values despite being contrary are both important to a person.

It's more that you've got to be careful not to get too pidgeonholed into one ideology or another completely, because then people can start getting you to argue for stances you don't agree with just because it's part of the ideology broadly speaking.

Unfortunately, a lot of the problems were caused in the name of preventing harm. A bank would be considered a fairly high risk endeavor but for the massive amounts of insurance that the governments of the world give to banks.

Part of the problem is that they go "The government will pay for it", without asking "Who is paying for the government?"

For most of history, the answer to "who is paying for the government?" was "The people" who were paying taxes, but now it's even worse -- we're paying for government with debt we never intend to pay back, so the answer to "Who is paying for the government?" is "three generations of unborn children", but nobody thinks about that because they act like the money always comes from someone else who deserves to pay for it more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMnicq4w7LM

That makes a lot of sense.

Back in the 80s and 90s, there were lots of shows on TV for black people by black people. They were usually unique stories with unique characters and you couldn't tell the same stories with white people and have it make sense.

Push ahead by 20 years, and now shows with black people are white stories for white people and they replace the white characters with black people who act basically like white people who have been dipped in strong tea.

Meanwhile, anytime a foreigner isn't acting like a southern Californian, they get smashed into the dirt.

I certainly have strong libertarian sympathies, though the world's more complicated than a single data point.

I locked in my mortgage for 10 years, and in my age group only something like 3% of people opted for a mortgage like that. It was an extra percent or two, but much beyond that you're paying like 8%. Which at the rate we're going might be a bargain...

Well... Until they make it my business by demanding the rest of the country bail them out...

That's where a lot of this "it's none of your business" breaks down. Suddenly all these "it's none of your business" types want to make it my business by having the people who didn't make the mistake pay for it.

Unfortunately, something is broken in Canadian culture that makes people think taking out a million dollars of debt at any rate is a good idea.

I mean, imagine paying for a 3000/mo mortgage. For 98% of people that's going to mean all you have is a house. God help you if the water tank or the furnace or something else breaks!

True.

The other side of freedom is responsibility. Responsibility to make sure you understand the choices you make because at the end of the day you're the one who gains for your good choices and loses for your bad choices.

You can sympathize with someone for the consequences of bad choices without condoning the choices themselves.

My brother has a master's in english literature. Almost as bad an idea as a middle class person buying a million dollar single family home in the greater toronto area.