Hacker News Reader

Comment by NotYourLawyer | Hacker News Reader

What else is there to buy though, real estate?

Bonds are back. TIPS bonds are now yielding around 2% real (not nominal). Treasury bills/notes are yielding above 4% nominal across much of the yield curve.

Yeah but no one is buying those because yields keep rising.

Do you not look around at the world and see problems in need of fixing? Spend your money on fixing them because then you get to live in a world with fewer problems (it's called investing).

I see a real big problem that needs fixing: How do I save enough to retire and make sure I don't have to work until I die? That problem kind of dominates all other problems for me.

And this is why stock market will keep going up- every two weeks millions of people- and their proxies, via index funds and pension plans- go out and say "welp let's buy some more stocks so we can retire".

Eventually, everybody will get all of their money from the stock market and nobody will have to work anymore. That'll be just swell.

This seems like sarcasm, but I believe this is ultimately the goal.

Call it Star Trek post scarcity, or fully automated gay space communism, or the Culture.

People only work if they choose. Not everyone who wants one gets major capital investment (like a starship) without demonstrating competency but otherwise everyone benefits from the collective automated bounty.

If equities are really just shares of ownership in the means of production, it's basically everyone owning some portion of the means of production. I wonder if anyone thought of that system before?

If the alternatives are:

- spend the majority of my life making things worse so that I can afford retirement, and then spend my retirement dealing with the consequences of having ignored "all other problems"

- die while saving up for my nth attempt to make things better

I think I'd prefer the latter.

the social contract used to be: each generation nurtures a new one and cares for the old one.

obvious problems with childlessness, infertility, accidents, bachelors, orphans.

assuming you live in the US one obvious solution is to move somewhere with a better pension system

the economic trend is that the things needed to live get cheaper (and we constantly raise the bar for what's considered "needed") still as long as efficiency gains are left (and we are veeeeery far from nowhere to look for more gains) it's likely that basic necessities will continue to be provided with higher efficiency.

the question is what society optimizes for? more suburban sprawl, spending more of our economic surplus on building more hard to maintain, hard to heat/cool houses? spreading the population even more thin, requiring even more inefficient cars, more and more miles of pipes, roads and whatnot, or ... (and I'm not saying to have cheap retirement we need to live in a Borg cube).

I agree that it is morally good and proper that you seek to take care of yourself and not be a financial burden to others. "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of property/happiness" (the original wording debated the two versions).

May I ask an add-on? Do you also want to provide for your children?

And as an extension of that, would providing for them include leaving them with a habitable planet?

I'd rather not answer any personal questions, but basically the benefit of not selling out on that front doesn't seem justified, given my marginal impact. My point is not so much everyone should share my position, merely make it clear my belief that the majority of people think the way I do, and any plan without acknowledging that reality is doomed to fail. Doesn't matter how charismatic a leader or airtight scientific studies you show, you are asking a LOT in terms of opportunity cost if you are recruiting for an organization trying to "solve a problem" without a potential windfall at the end of it and you should realize that.

Yeah, I realize that my position goes against the grain in a rather extreme way. But I think that as time goes on it'll become obvious that some problems just can't be solved in a way that culminates in a windfall, and if we leave those problems unaddressed we're doomed anyway.

Alternatively, maybe I'm wrong and some business genius figures out how to monetize the necessary work after all. Who are they gonna invest in, the guy who has been working at it for years even though maybe he'll die a pauper, or the guy who hasn't started because he can't see the payoff yet?

That’ll really help my kids pay for college, thanks for the useful advice.

I'm sorry for being an ass. I'm mad at wallstreet not mad at you.

What do you see? I believe that's what he was asking. You merely threw his same question back

I don't see problems that can be fixed by buying something. Or rather, by buying abstractions in hopes of being able to sell them for more more later on (i.e. gambling).

Personally, I think that the declining state of privacy is increasingly incompatible with democracy. I want to live in a democracy when I'm old, so I'm saving up to take a few years "off" and work on some ideas that I have which I think will help.

So I suppose I will be buying things along the way. Food. Healthcare. Energy. Internet access. But I'll be doing it because I want to live in the world that I'll be creating (i.e. I'm investing time in creating that world). Not because I think I'll end up with more money when it's all said and done.

So maybe I'm putting words in ferdowski's mouth here but I really think that by "buy" they meant "allocate my money under the expectation that it will grow without me having to do any extra useful work along the way".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com