pashamur

6 ms·

1.
by pashamur 5y ago
It’s a real thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_thrift You get ahead by saving, but everyone can’t do that all together or the economy collapses.
2.
by pashamur 5y ago
Note that this is showing household incomes, not individual incomes. Household used to mean 1 working family member, now it's closer to 2 due in large part by more women joining the workforce. If you had a traditional family with one w
3.
by pashamur 5y ago
Most likely under-reported COVID deaths. Having looked at the Russia data at least, many deaths (earlier on) were marked with "pneumonia" and they didn't even bother testing for COVID.
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by pashamur 5y ago
Isn't there always a contracting option where you can take on as many jobs as you'd like?
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by pashamur 5y ago
The other reason that prices are way cheaper second hand is that the buyer is taking the risk of buying a lemon - versus some sort of guarantee (usually) when you buy new. The seller has more information about the object in question than th
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by pashamur 5y ago
Basic economics assumes a functional and competitive market. The majority of markets in America no longer fit this criteria - today's corporate environment is closer to neo-feudal than capitalist; if we want to return to "true&quo
7.
by pashamur 5y ago
Yes, chess masters at the top actually have groups of coaches (if they're preparing for an important match). Sometimes up to 5-10 people. Though it might not be so much coaches as "preparation team" - one of them might be the
8.
by pashamur 5y ago
Jim Browning (the renowned anti-scammer) recently fell for one of his own, where someone tricked him into disabling his Youtube account. So if the situation is right, almost anyone can fall for it (Gorilla on basketball court experiment)
9.
by pashamur 5y ago
The poorer/richer argument only makes sense in the context of a specific consumption basket. If your main goal in life is to buy as many bananas as you can (for example), then you would measure the house appreciation in bananas. Can yo
10.
by pashamur 5y ago
Big crashes (and fast-drop bottoms) happen not because of panic selling, but because of forced selling (covering margin calls, getting liquidated, etc). Panic selling usually leads to slow grind downs. Shorts usually cover once the rebound
11.
by pashamur 5y ago
I posted an interview about the open-pricing surgery center of Oklahoma which actually goes into how a free market healthcare system would work. A free market system would make for even more uneven differentiation in health care quality - w
12.
by pashamur 5y ago
I wonder if the TSA has some signaling effect though apart from the actual efficacy of the security theatre. Even if it catches things rarely, the fact that it exists makes people more aware and potentially look out more for abnormal behavi
13.
by pashamur 5y ago
Yeah, you pretty much nailed it - this article gives context, but it's pretty much as you said, most people are not adjusting by inflation & interest rate: https://realestatedecoded.com/the-shocking-truth-about-hous
14.
by pashamur 5y ago
Grandparent might mean median individual income instead (since household income graphs can be skewed by more people working - Elizabeth Warren writes about this in the Two Income Trap): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series&#x2
15.
by pashamur 5y ago
No, we simply change the game. Why is their labor not worth the new minimum wage? Is it outsourcing? Foreign tariffs or import controls. Is it robots/automation? Tax robot productivity and provide a general UBI with the output. Why is
16.
by pashamur 5y ago
I'm going to refer to Lyn Alden's guide here ( https://www.lynalden.com/inflation/ ), but not all inflation damages the lower class. In fact, the wealth gap was smallest (relatively) at the end of the 1940s and
17.
by pashamur 5y ago
This depends on how the money is distributed - if we have stimulus checks (and eventually everyone has an account at the FED), for example, it's not true that well-connected interests get access to that money first.
18.
by pashamur 5y ago
Of reported cases*, which is very different than actual cases. CDC actually has a page where they estimate the true number of cases of COVID in the US, and they put it at ~115 million. So that would be 578k deaths / 115M cases, or a fa
19.
by pashamur 6y ago
1) 20 years is a small sample size 2) The US has enjoyed the status of the world's reserve currency since 1945, which literally means the gains of the U.S. stock market are partly financed by the whole world (note that we used to have
20.
by pashamur 6y ago
The most important concept to understand about today's market is not short squeeze - it's gamma squeeze (which can lead to shorts being squeezed). It's about how traders got their hands on an unusual amounts of leverage (when
21.
by pashamur 6y ago
There is a good article by Lyn Alden on this, but basically, the difference is how the QE is targeted. In 2008, the QE was done in order to get rid of toxic assets and recapitalize the banks - most of that money stayed locked up in the fina
22.
by pashamur 6y ago
I think that's the appeal of Bitcoin and/or Gold: it's both cash in that it might act as a safe haven in the case of an asset crash and would retain it's value during hyperinflation (since you can't print more of it
23.
by pashamur 6y ago
Not sure whether it makes sense to average all returns and call it "negative expected returns" across the board. As with any game that mixes luck & skill (like poker), trading has a variety of expected returns. My guess (based
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by pashamur 6y ago
That's not exactly true; market value does not exist in a vacuum, it's the discounted future cash flows of the component companies. You can certainly look at the earnings of the component companies, and see how much growth is bein
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by pashamur 6y ago
This is just the latest version - there was the crypto bubble in 2017, then the MJ bubble in 2018 (and XIV volatility collapse), now this. I think crypto proved to us that you don't need any sort of fundamentals - price action beats al
26.
by pashamur 6y ago
You can actually buy the call back whenever as long as someone is selling (which market makers generally are) to exit the position - you don't have to wait until expiration.
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by pashamur 6y ago
There is a good section on this in the book How Democracies Die where they go into detail as to why fascists could not come to power in America before Donald Trump. Basically their argument was that the party structures performed gatekeepin
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by pashamur 6y ago
Hey, I wanted to respond to your comment from 18 days ago but responses there have already been disabled (so I'm hijacking this comment). The question was about "> Housing market returns are very bad. Between 1948 and 2004 the
29.
by pashamur 6y ago
I think we're in agreement then that the U.S. is more lenient with its bankruptcy laws than Europe (on the whole, although as you pointed out it varies by country)
30.
by pashamur 6y ago
Other reasons for the U.S. salaries not mentioned yet: 0) Banning of non-competes in Silicon Valley (!!) and ease of incorporation / listing on markets back in the 90's and before 1) Foreign investment in the U.S. (Saudi, Chinese,

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