zacherates

They were trying to get Republican votes so that the law would be bipartisan. In the end it passed on a party line vote, so maybe the compromises were a mistake...

  Location: Seattle (current) / Toronto (looking to move to)
  Remote: Open to remote.
  Willing to relocate: Yes, around the GTA.
  Technologies: C++, Java, C#, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, SQL, debugging, performance
  Résumé/CV: http://aaron.maenpaa.ca/resume.pdf
  Email: aaron@maenpaa.ca

I'm a software engineer with about 15 years of experience. I excel at working at the boundry of developing software and running it in production. For instance, identifying and fixing performance and correctness issues or adding telemetry to help understand what the software is doing when it's running.

Make no mistake, all companies are one leveraged buy-out away from full private equity ruthlessness. Even if the current owners are great – people get older, they'll want to retire... and we all die. Eventually the ownership can pass to someone who really wants to turn the screws.

The biggest tax benefit of living in an owner occupied home is that nobody pays income tax on the rent you would pay if you were living in a house someone else owned.

... but most places don't have the stones to tax imputed rent [1]: Belgium, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland being exceptions.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imputed_rent

If the thesis of the thread was "Gee, it sure sucked to grow up in Argentina in the 70s with no access to high-quality financial products." that would be extremely relevant... but the thesis is much more expansive than that ("Prepare for a fantastic lesson about the power of inflation." / "Takeaway: may the sign of the exponential be ever in your favor. Positive, you own the world. Negative, you get diluted into nanoparticles.").

The folks getting spooked about inflation right now and reading this thread (it is written in English after all), almost certainly can invest even very small amounts in high quality investment products. There's no need to get fatalistic about saving ("you get diluted into nanoparticles."), it has never been easier for normal people to put their money to work productively.

1228 pesos in 1976 was worth about $4.50 in 1976 USD [1].

... and if he'd bought into the S&P 500 (Vanguard launched the First Index Investment Trust now the Vanguard 500 Index Fund in 1976 [2]), it would be worth about about $190 in today's USD. Which you could sell to buy about 2.99g of gold today (3 trillion times as much as reported).

While obvious you'd have to be extremely prescient to put your money in a completely different type of fund that had launched only just that year and at the time they would not have touched such small dollar investments.

... but today we now know that Bogle's idea was actually pretty good and you really can make such small dollar investments (eg. Fidelity's no-fee, large cap fund has no minimum to invest (FNILX), or you could buy a fractional share of a variety of large cap ETFs: SPY (SPDR), IVV (iShares), or VOO (Vanguard) from a variety of brokerages). Of course, a minor wouldn't be able to own shared directly... so, get your kids a UTMA account [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_exchange_rates_of_A... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanguard_Group#Growth_of_c... [3] https://fundresearch.fidelity.com/mutual-funds/summary/31591... [4] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/utma.asp

DOL = Washington Department of Licensing: https://www.dol.wa.gov/

> It was only a few decades ago when Tokyo was famous for having the most expensive real estate in the world.

Yes, but then they did something about it [1] instead of pulling up the ladder behind them.

[1] https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-...

Isn't that because normal people are heavily encouraged to put all their money into buying a house? Culturally ("rent is just throwing money away" / "the stock market is a casino"), with financial incentives (mortgage interest deduction, SALT deduction, Fannie/Freddy insured 30 year mortgages), and quality of life (school districting/social services or lack thereof), we get people to put every dollar they can into buying a house. Or more than one (apparently everyone aspires to be an amateur landlord). Consequently, you need to have a lot of money before you've bought enough house to move onto buying stocks.

If renting and investing were more normalized and encouraged, I'd expect a different ratio of real estate : financial asset ownership.

The author has an essay arguing why we shouldn't allow the humanities to go back to being the purview of the idle elite: https://acoup.blog/2020/07/03/collections-the-practical-case...

I think this is the talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_the_ghastly_...

> But when we propose raising the standards, we get complaints from conservatives that "the free market will take care of it" (even though it obviously doesn't).

The free market approach would rely on drastically looser zoning and other land use restrictions so that tons more housing gets built resulting landlords actually have to compete and thus start caring about a wider range of issues.

... because FAANG was about compensation and MS is not competitive (at least for mid-career hires).

Take a look at levels 62 / 63 at MS vs. comparable roles at FAANGs: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,Facebook,Micro...

> The emperor really has no clothes on: your* degree really was a waste of money....

I mean... my degree is why I can work in the United States and has been (and will continue to be) worth an unbelievable amount of money.

More seriously though, a university education can be very valuable (we can measure the wage premium [1]), but the cost matters. A 4 year degree at in-state state school prices is almost always worth it (provided you graduate). It is difficult to tease out how much of the value is selection effects vs. signaling vs. credentialism vs. networking vs. exposure to challenge/opportunity vs. skills vs. knowledge vs. stepping stone to a professional degree (medicine/law/engineering/nursing). Thinking about my own experience, obviously the credential was a huge deal, but so was my school's co-op program that got me my first software jobs, and there are still classes that shaped the way I think to this day [2].

Where things go off the rails is when people think they can buy their way into the upper classes by getting a degree from a prestigious school (and spend way too much doing so), or people get snookered by for profit colleges or people who don't have a good chance of completing get pressured into going to a four year program and end up with the debt, but not the credential (you mostly don't get partial credit).

You could argue that the wage premium is just class discrimination through credentialism. Maybe it is... but then that's the thing that needs to be dismantled. As an individual if you have a good shot at finishing a 4 year degree and can afford it, you should probably play the game unless you happen to have much better options.

[1] Eg. $640/week median college vs. high school in Q4 2020: https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2018/07/is-college-still-wor...

[2] The crash course in epistemology in my Evolutionary Biology class, the complementary rationalism of my Discrete Mathematics Course, the Econ 101 perspective from Introduction to Micro-Economics. Not to mention the tour of data-structures and algorithms from my Computer Science classes so I can do leet code interviews :). Maybe I could have picked the stuff up on my own, but would I have if I was working in a factory back home?

> Today Quebec has the lowest provincial birthrate in Canada.

Not remotely true. As of 2016 Quebec has a fertility rate of 1.59 children per women which is higher than the Canadian average (1.54), Ontario (the largest province by far, 1.46) as well as BC (1.40) and the Atlantic provinces (1.42-1.58).

See https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/91-209-x/2018001/article...

Smaller tomatoes taste better because they are easier to ship without damaging (they're lighter and have a much lower mass to surface area ratio). As such, producers and supply chains don't have to go to the same extremes (breeding them to be tough rather than flavorful/picking them completely green) to get them to the supermarket shelf intact.

Similarly, canned tomatoes taste great[1] because they are picked ripe and packaged.

[1] Canned tomatoes have a slight cooked taste so they're never going to taste fresh, but are great in anything you're going to cook.

From context, likely a professional engineer.

Too bad they didn't adopt the "Dumb investment certificate" [1] instead.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-09-24/earnin...

1. Stock markets are forward looking. Prices reflect expectations about the company going far into the future, not just right now. So yeah, this year and next year are going to be bad, but we expect that five years from now things will be back to normal or better and prices reflect that.

2. Companies in the S&P 500 (which is what people often mean when they talk about Wall Street/the market/etc) are by definition are big and have easy access to the capital markets. Consequently, they are the best positioned to whether the storm and seize the opportunities as they come. When things start recovering companies with money/easy access to the bond market are going to be the ones who can open new locations and capitalize on pent up demand.

3. There are a bunch of big companies that have actually done well for the last six months. The obvious ones are companies like Amazon, Netflix and Zoom, but for instance Target and Walmart have benefited from being allowed to stay open because they sell essentials while also selling everything else so they were often the only option other than Amazon.

4. When people talk about the S&P 500 recovering unbelievably fast, they often mean vs. the lows in March. Those lows were not reflective of the reality of what was happening (definitionally: nobody knew the reality of what was happening, lack of testing, etc.), but there was some concern that the actual apocalypse might have occurred... and everyday as merely bad news poured in that actually restored confidence because the news was not apocalyptic. So, the prices rose.

5. There really are a bunch of bored people buying stocks on their phone because they can't bet on sports anymore [1]. It's not clear how big an effect this is, but there really does seem to be extra retail demand for stocks.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2020-07-09/inside-the-m...

Townhomes, duplexes, triplexes, etc are substitutes for single family homes (not for everybody, but for some people... like me). You'd expect that allowing them to be built would make single family homes more accessible not less as the people who currently are forced to buy SFHs but would be happy in a townhome would stop competing for them.

More supply of a substitute (in this case, townhomes) should result in lowered demand/price of SFHs.

I'm pretty sure decadence is older than the 1850s... Yeah, it would seem Martin Luther died in 1546.

Decadence requires power, and capital is the most obvious way to acquire it in our society.

From the Hertz bankruptcy motion (via Money Stuff/Matt Levine): "246,775,008 shares of common stock" or another way "Hertz could potentially offer up to and including an aggregate of $1.0 billion of common stock"

... so, a lot.

Just because you can change the lenses on your camera, doesn't mean you have to. There are zoom lenses with pretty extreme ranges that are even pretty compact like the Olympus 14-150mm and slightly pricier 12-200mm for Micro Four-Thirds. Now, I have a soft spot in my heart for MFT, realistically, it's a system that probably doesn't have too much of a future unfortunately (though not currently defunct at the time of this writing).

If you're more concerned about the future of the system than compactness, there are full frame superzoom lenses like the 18-400mm from Tamron (for Canon EF or Nikon mounts). One of the big benefits of interchangeable lens systems is not necessarily the ability to collect a bunch of glass and swap it out constantly (that's more of risk actually), but rather to figure out the glass that suits the shooting you do and use that. When I was getting started, I bought a bunch of different primes, and it took me a while to settle down, but since I got the Canon L-series standard zoom (1993 vintage), it's just the lens that's on my camera that I use all the time.

Camera sales have fallen off a cliff in the last ten years as people increasingly rely exclusively on their smartphones. This has lead to camera companies simplifying their product lines (or simply going out of business).

That being said: Interchangeable lens are great. Join us on the dark side :-)

That strategy is discussed in footnote #2. Though one of the interesting things about such a physical oil fund is it makes it clear that you're just frittering away investor money on storage costs (discussed in footnote #4), which are more abstract/less obvious when you're spending the money trading futures rather than on a big bin to hold the oil.

From the email sent to Alaska milage plan members: "If you’re a family or large group who wants to sit together, feel free to make the request with reservations or at the airport."

... so, if you talk to a person when you check in they should be able to sort it out for you.

A couple recentish, quick games I quite like:

Just One: word game kind of like Taboo, but it's cooperative and there's no time pressure.

Kingdomino: quick tile placement strategy game with a fantasy theme.

... Also Euchre: A card game like bridge, but way simpler, that's popular in the Midwest and Canada (Ontario anyway). My sister and I learned to play with my grandparents when we were in kindergarten.

... more relevant than Oregon: "Washington State votes by mail." [1]

[1] https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/faq_vote_by_mail.aspx

This is actually the beauty of a carbon tax. Instead of trying to figure out all the costs, you tax pumping the carbon out of the ground and then let the prices flow through the economy.

That way you don't have to try to figure it out as an individual you just end up comparing Amazon's delivery prices to a tank of gas, which you're doing anyway because you already have to manage your own budget.