Vent

No.

Bonds are safe and good for reducing risk if your time horizon (aka the amount of time until you expect to use the money) is short. They aren't good for long-term or chasing even moderate returns. For example, if you want to retire next year and don't want to delay things if the stock market happens to crash before then, bonds are an option. That's why retirement funds tend to shift more into bonds the closer they get to the target date, but it's a tradeoff of growth for a more reliable retirement date.

Precious metals are just plain bad. https://www.macrotrends.net/2608/gold-price-vs-stock-market-100-year-chart

The stock market even outperforms real estate in the long term. Afaik, generally speaking, there isn't an option out there that beats broad market ETFs. Optimal investing, statistically, is basically as simple as regularly dumping money into the same fund every year, no matter what. The earlier you start the better, since compounding returns can mean that 5 - 10 years makes a big difference once you hit retirement age.

It's imperfect, but this helps get the point across. It's an investing game based on real market data. https://buildyourstax.com/

$10/hr for customer support? Any random fast food joint will pay you more if you have a pulse. Maybe if you offshore it...

Well, sure, if we're talking about complete overhauls, money doesn't technically need to exist at all.

I just thought it dangerous to spread the idea that you win the stock market by not playing, because that is demonstrably false and will lead to some very poor outcomes if followed in a realistic sense. I agree that an ideal society may very well not have a stock market, but for the love of god, please don't try to be the change you want to see in this instance.

Inflation is necessary for a lot more than just capitalism. Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production, not trading money for goods and services.

It's really important to understand that money =/= capitalism. That is a widely held misconception that is very effective at stunting societal and economic progress, at least in the US.

For example, inflation encourages people to spend money on innovation and progress rather than simply hoarding wealth, regardless of if an oligarch owns the profits or if the workers do. Yes, there can be other/better motivators for progress than just money, but you can see how it can be beneficial in economic systems other than just capitalism.

I don't think you'll find any reputable/knowledgable people that hate all inflation. It's a widely agreed fact that a little inflation is good for everyone. Politicians/economists are say they don't like high inflation. It's better to target something like 2% yoy.

The only way to win is not to play

Not "playing" the stock market is a loss by default. Your money WILL devalue over time, your savings account WILL NOT keep up with inflation, and if you don't invest in stocks or have some other special financial backing/windfall, you WILL retire many years later (if at all) than you would have if you invested in stocks properly.

Though, you need to be very careful with your definition of "playing". As an individual/retail investor, buying individual stocks and trying to time ups and downs is not the way to go. If you manage to not lose any money that way, you're very very likely to make less money than if you had bought a broad market ETF like the S&P 500. In general, "playing" is bad and simply buying and holding boring funds for 30+ years can 10x your money by the time you retire, if you start young. Market up? Good, buy more! Market down 50%? It's on sale, buy more! Auto-investing is your friend. This is backed by solid math and like the entire history of the stock market.

The thing is, the rich make the rules. They want you to invest in ETFs like that because they can use your money to play their little games, inflate their wealth, and stay on top. As long as you do that, they'll make sure you make solid and consistent (over the long-term) returns, because it benefits them financially and anything else would lead to a societal collapse.

Trying to beat them at their own game by buying/selling individual stocks is a losing battle. They can see your incoming trades and act on them before your order goes through. If you find a big mistake they made, like GME, they'll simply change the rules and steal your money. It doesn't matter if it's illegal, nobody can stop them. They literally make the market.

The admin fee is $0. Can you just transfer all of the money out and keep the account empty?

Yes, and the USA is the only country providing aid to Ukraine 🙄

The election.

I was pointing out the sensationalist headline. The contents of the article are irrelevant. Obviously they've been developing this for longer than 2 months.

Is this headline really trying to imply that Ukraine developed an entire missle in the last 2 months? If that were the case, they'd never have needed foreign aid in the first place.

Neat, more open competitive standards is nice, but it doesn't matter how much your phone/tv "supports" spatial audio, it's not going to sound any different from stereo coming out of the built-in speakers.

Imo, the qualify differences are only really noticeable across these speaker setups:

1. Built-in speakers $0 (mono/stereo, anything above is indistinguishable)
2. Soundbar $200-$500 (mono/stereo)
3. Basic soundbar with auxiliary surround sound speakers + subwoofer $500-$2000k (surround sound starts to matter) 3.5. Maybe speaker towers?? I have very little experience with those.
4. Actual surround sound with near-professionally installed/positioned/calibrated speakers in a properly shaped room $3000k+ (Dolby/DTS:X starts to matter)

In my experience, no audio track is going to break those barriers and ceiling reflected noise is basically placebo. You can fudge it decently well with headphones and fancy spatial audio tracks, but even that isn't quite the same.

I'm no audiophile, though, so your mileage may vary.

This Cybertruck and the F150 from the attack in New Orleans were both rented from Turo. Also the explosion was insanely large. I'm thinking this is likely not a coincidence and the two may even be related.

Nah. It's engagement bait, plane and simple

For now, while we're still under the policies they voted against. Didn't work out too well last time after only a few years.