Certanily makes it really difficult to focus on skill development and improving as a coder. I get that some people can handle it and I'll probably be selected out from the field for my lack of ability to ignore the macro distractions if this keeps going though.

> It will be as true 50 (or 1,000) years from now

Ah! An optimist who believes humanity will exist 1,000 years from now!

The alternative to blindly living a normal peaceful life is having and exercising meaningful agency, which the modern state really doesn't want you to do.

When you buy a home -- the largest single purchase one makes in the middle class -- you lock in the purchase price, but not the interest rate. Housing prices still haven't recovered in Japan to their 1990 highs. So if you don't pay attention to the macro environment, you could be costing yourself a great deal. Fortunately, other asset purchases like mutual funds in retirement accounts are DCA'ed in by the paycheck, and not done all at once.

All asset classes are down though, both low and high-risk balances are seeing about the same contraction.

My grandfather was born in 1909 in China. When he was 3 years old, the Emperor fell. When he was 7, the Warlord Period began. When he was 17, the country was unified under Chiang Kai-Shek; when he was 18, it fell apart again and the Chinese Civil War began. When he was 22, the Japanese invaded, and he emigrated to the Philippines. When he was 32 (and my dad was 2), the Japanese invaded the Philippines too. When he was 35 (my dad was 5), the Americans invaded, and his house was bombed, and he had to move up to a camp in the mountains and shit in the river. A year later the Americans had won and he made a fortune off occupying G.I.s, opening the only restaurant with a slot machine in the city. When he was 40 the Nationalist government that had been, well, "the government" when he grew up fell to the Communists, and he was left stateless. He ended up sending his kids to North America, one by one, and finally emigrated in the early 80s and lived out his last years in peace, but my dad's obsession with geopolitics is in retrospect pretty justified by world events.

Yes, there are limitations to the tools available to the Federal Reserve and what can be done with monetary policy. At the end of the day you are trying to control individual's behaviors with gravitational pulls of satellite objects, and that doesn't really work. The analogy continues as even astrology enthusiasts might do things because of the believed influence of a celestial body's location, but can really still do anything they want.

They aren’t expected to always prevent busts. Boom and busts are expected.

This.

It depends, an individual may be affected financially or emotionally.

I used to say what you just said, and then somebody replied to me that there is value in our time and life too, and sure they could be financially fine in 5-10-15 years but what if they had other plans in the short term? Now those life plans are disrupted. Eventually, will they be fine financially? Probably. Have they lost the one shot they had in their life to do something they really wanted? Without a doubt.

No airborne spread.

Transmitted through sex.

We're safe as houses. :p

Reading Wikipedia on monkeypox, there have been multiple outbreaks before, outbreaks that we never heard about.

Supposedly, we're better at tracing now, if it really blows up we're better prepared than ever before.

This is fear-mongering. You cannot predict the future and the CDC tracks dozens of novel virus outbreaks each year that never go anywhere. It’s less transmissible, and responds to vaccines that we already have.

And we will create yet another mess for our children. Or at least what's left of them because we decided not to have any, which is a problem in itself.

The current government spending sprees are not your parents' and grandparents' fault.

Pointing fingers isn't going to help with anything, whether its your parents or your next door neighbor. At some point we just need to take ownership and work towards a better future, but accountability seems to be pretty rare these days(whether its your issue or not).

Covid impacted most people around the world. Professionally and socially. The Ukraine war started as a local war, but now it's affecting Europe and third-world countries who depended on Ukraine for wheat.

These last macro-events caught many people by surprised. This inflation cycle is also affecting most of the world (since import prices will factor in lots of goods).

Presumably you don't live in an urban area then?