nerdspeak

I know someone close to Vance. Hearsay, but apparently his economic nationalism and motivation to re-shore industrial jobs to the US is genuine. They describe his views as basically corporatist and aligned with the Christian Democrats in Germany or Belgium. If you want a US reference point, it's Compact Magazine. We're seeing a realignment in US politics similar to what happened in the 70s after the oil shock. People screamed "fascism" then about Reagan and they're screaming "fascism" now about Trump. I don't like either, and I especially don't like the race-baiting used by both Reagan and Trump to mobilize their base (part of Reagan's appeal to the white working class was cracking down on black "welfare queens" supposedly free-riding on their labor). But it's a re-alignment, and it's necessary because finance-driven globalization (from, say 1980-2008) had run its course and become a kind of zombie system.

Are you able to share how you calculate that? Using M1 or M2?

If you think we're due for a correction and want to position yourself, then switch to short-term treasury funds or money markets, wait for everything to drop and then buy. I did this in March 2020 and made a lot. I'm starting to do this again now although I'm not as bearish as Leo overall. The multiples are high but there are various factors that favor stocks. The shift from manufacturing to services means there will be more local monopolies and oligopolies that achieve higher returns than manufacturing-centric firms that operate in a competitive global market AI is a bubble, but it's a good tool for labor discipline and keeping wages low. Managers will threaten replacement of course, eventually the workers will realize it's a bluff. However, even when that happens, while it's bad at doing most work, it's good for employee surveillance. If Trump is elected, he will do some populist gestures but his financial base is regional capital and extractive industries (rather than the big banks and tech that donate to Biden) so he will likely at least try to give another corporate tax cut, which of course will boost earning and thus stock prices If Trump is elected he will continue to press the Fed to keep interest rates low which will prop the market up If Biden is elected, a lot of the infrastructure investment and onshoring he's been pushing for will boost earnings in the short term Basically, the S&P is a bit overpriced based on P/E ratios, but we also don't really know what's going to happen. There is so much political involvement, that basically by buying and holding you’re just betting on US empire continuing. You can keep buying S&P 500 or total market index fund now as long as you plan to keep buying it after it drops so you also buy equal amounts at the bottom. For most people this works better than trying to actively invest. All this said, anyone prudent must avoid putting themselves in a position where they are forced to sell at the bottom. Bear in mind, if we get a 2020 or 2008 type of big drop -- which wlll happen quite soon, in the next 1-5 years --you'll quite possibly also become unemployed or otherwise suffer a big hit to your income -- which might force you to sell stock to meet basic expenses. So you want at least 6-12 months of savings in something like money markets or T-bills -- they pay like 5% it's not that bad. Don't try to be a genius and pick individual stocks. Professionals from MIT and Wharton are spending 16 hours per day doing this. It's like challenging a pro boxer to fight and betting money on it. Even timing the market the way I do, is pretty dicey -- I've been wrong before and sold too early and missed a couple years of good returns in the mid 2010s. I would have probably had better overall returns doing the automated index fund route although I would always keep $40-50k liquid and unexposed. If that's out of reach for you, then really you shouldn't be investing and should focus on making more money at your job.

The Warren Buffett recommended strategy is that if you don't need the money in the short-term and you're in something diversified like VOO you can just hold out and wait. Timing the market is really hard. But seeing your net worth drop by 50% -- even if it's just on paper -- is stressful, and this is guaranteed to happen from time to time if you follow this approach. Since big crises seem to be more frequent now, you can instead keep your money in low-risk govt bonds paying 4-5% and wait for the next COVID/banking crisis/Ukraine war and buy a lot when blood is in the streets. That is more my strategy even though someone like Buffett would yell at me for trying to be too clever. An important thing to realize is, we don't live in a free-market society like before WWII. We live in a managerial society that uses markets as a tool for managing people and resources. What that means is, if there's a big stock market crash, the US govt will step in and over a few years pump it back up. Of course that doesn't apply to individual stocks let alone crypto. Leave individual stocks to professionals and I would stay out of crypto completely...

She doesn't know you so why would she reply promtly to you. Girls will make out with anyone decent-looking when they're drunk. The fact that you made out actually makes it harder for her to agree to go on a date with you. I get that it's a fun wild thing and if you're at a bar you don't have any guarantee to see her again. But in general you don't put things into an explicitly sexual context until you an do something about it.

I don't like Trump but I think expanding presidential immunity back to what it was like before Nixon -- maybe not this far -- is proper to avoid nonsense lawfare, like what happened to the Clintons and even certain aspects of what happened to Trump. They should have gone after him for Jan 6 and election interference, not this Stormy Daniels nonsense. . Political leaders need some immunity from prosecution because by going into public life they become much bigger targets for prosecutors, and minor crimes everyday people commit everyday get turned into big deals. Members of congress have much wider immunity than the president. Explicit constitutional legislative immunity (the president has no such explict immunity in the constituion), and they can only be arrested during scope of their duties for treason -- the president has no such arrest immunity. Legislative immunity - https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/legislative_immunity Arrest privilege - https://law.justia.com/constitution/us/article-1/21-compensation-and-immunities-of-members.html Given the extent of the lawfare used by both parties, expanding the scope of presidential immunity to some extent makes sense, although of course it should not be absolute.

“These photos will be rallying points for thousands of years to come” lmfao Owen get out of town

I know you didn’t ask me, but: 1. Those guys are mostly coming from a very low-value place 2. They are meeting these women in places where they have no status, so they need to make themselves emotionally relevant very quickly 3. When these tactics work well it’s done playfully, like extreme flirting. With Julien it was always obvious he was playing around off the open. When I was doing this, what worked well was being playful and fun and then being very hard to reach afterwards. But it’s still way harder than meeting women through your real interests where you already have some status. At this point I won’t go on a date unless a woman works in my area, otherwise we aren’t relevant to each other. PUA teaches a lot of unnatural toxic behavior because what they’re trying to do is unnatural and toxic lol.

Accurate. We should not generalize too much from women in the ONS/casual dating pool, or experience from college when girls are still immature. Many women with secure attachment styles want to bond with stable secure men. If most of your experience are from Tinder, college, or big city nightclubs, your reference points are girls who are either in a party stage or are generally party-oriented people with high need for emotional stimulation. This is not all or even most women.

These people always “kind of make sense.” If they were totally incoherent, no one would vote for them. What makes them effective is they mix legitimate grievances with a lot of toxic appeals to anger and scapegoating.

Officials in each branch of government (executive, legislative, judicial) should have limited immunity to avoid political prosecution from the other branches.

I’m a lefty. If by “deep state” you mean career prosecutors and law enforcement agents who have their own esprit de corps and agenda, which is often anti-democratic, you can’t seriously dispute that this exists. It got much stronger after 9/11. If we could proceed in a more scientific way, instead of making broad generalizations or constructing straw men to demonize, the discussion will be a lot more productive.

"Trump claims Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution — the Lockean executive prerogative to break the law in order to preserve it. There is already legislative (parliamentary) and judicial immunity, to prevent abusive exercise of the law by the executive — which in Locke’s moment was that of the hereditary monarchy and its appointed Majesty’s deputies (including judges). What is usually overlooked is the need to prevent the reverse, the legislative (and judicial) abuse of the executive function of government." Worth reading in full. While the far-left has diverse views about Trump, some figures are on board with Trump's unitary executive theory. https://platypus1917.org/2024/05/01/why-not-trump-again-2/

You let them keep doing their thing. If people want to believe the earth is 6,000 years old that's fine as long as they don't try to impose their beliefs on everyone else. Of course they will try, but it won't work long-term.

You can’t help people get out of it quickly, it takes years. Like it’s really not worth it, they have to already suspect there’s something wrong with it from the beginning, get burned by it, and then have a friend or therapist who can help process the emotions in a way that helps them move out of it, rather than reinforcing the belief that it’s necessary. I’ll talk about my experience in Kyiv. It’s not a traditional society by any means but gender roles are more traditional and women are encouraged to be very strategic about their dating to improve their material security. I started to see that it wasn’t good for me and then started gathering evidence that it wasn’t necessary. Yes, more women in those cultures are superficially nice to Western men because they perceive us as high-status and potentially helpful in a crisis. But if the woman knows I’m playing an arbitrage game, and I know I’m playing an arbitrage game, there’s always a transactional element. And transactional people are not deeply loyal — if someone gives them a better offer they’ll jump ship. They will also keep escalating their demands to see what they can extract. This always feels kind of shitty, and the only way to win this game is to stop playing it. As a side note, even quite dumb Western expats in Ukraine are aware of this transactional bent and complain, often blaming it on Ukraine being unusually unstable, or Western influence, and say that women from Russia or Belarus are much cooler haha. After the war started, the demands from my Ukrainian partner escalated beyond what I could offer without feeling resentment and I just felt a strong desire to get out of these transactional relationships and be around people I could learn things from.

@Danioover9000 There is no going back to traditional society. Women are not going to suddenly decide to go back to staying at home as unpaid domestic servants raising 4-5 children. Moreover, the high (male) wages required to support that model no longer exist. @mrPixel The US "left" talks itself in circles around cultural issues because it cannot directly challenge finance capital while it's still tied to the Democratic Party. That said, the Biden administration has made some strides through investment in domestic manufacturing, This is not a permanent solution but it's a band-aid for 10-15 years.

I would sort of agree with this. Five years ago I was on-board with the neo-traditionalist ortho-bro stuff but if you actually go and live in these supposedly awesome based red-pilled countries you see that the patriarchal structure really limits people's freedoms a lot. I started to ask myself, do I really want a relationship to be more durable with a woman just because there is a huge power imbalance pressuring her to stay with me? For me, the answer is no -- I'd rather live in a society where she is free to go find someone else if she wants. I am not so scared of being alone or going back into the dating pool that I want my partner to feel trapped with me. The problem with the West is not the decline of traditional based patriarchal values. The problem is free market fundamentalism gone completely rampant, due to legalized corruption. When people lose all semblance of material security they start to go crazy.

This would mean no more federal student loans. All of higher ed would collapse. The harsh market-based system in the US is only legitimate (to the extent it is) because it provides cheap loans on very lenient terms to people to get educated. So, yeah, we have extreme inequality, but at least make gestures at equality of opportunity. More broadly, I skimmed the program and I don't think it's feasible. It's political technology designed to mobilize his base. To implement radical overhauls like this requires some degree of latent support, or extreme terror. In terms of support -- okay, maybe it's there in some regions. But California and the northeastern cities -- where all the money is -- not to mention large portions of the security services, would just not accept it. In terms of extreme state terror -- I don't see it happening. Going back to mass support, you could say, only 30% of Germans supported the Nazis in the early 30s. But Germany had only been a democracy for 15 years, you had huge numbers of people with PTSD and combat experience from WWI -- the context was completely different. What's more likely than implementation of this program is that continued erosion of US republican institutions and civil rights -- which eroded under Obama and Biden too, just not as fast -- will accelerate. The outcome will be more like Poland under Law and Justice, Hungary under Orban, or Serbia under Vucic. And in fact, the US is not so different from those places already in terms of domestic politics, with opinion tightly controlled through corporate control of the media and tech platforms.

It’s not possible to govern a capitalist economy without the alphabet agencies. I don’t think there is a serious intention to do this, it would be bad for the capitalists too.

Were they horny, greedy, and caught up in their egos? Yes of course. But society was going in this direction anyway. Look at hip-hop culture and reality TV from the early 2000s. Pickup was a surface symptom of broader cultural and economic changes in rich countries that started in the 80s.

Extroverts can learn some techniques and become good in a few months. Introverts take a lot longer and usually drop out before getting good, because it takes so much energy and they’re fighting their nature. Owen is really complicated and neurodivergent so I wouldn’t base your dating strategy off of modeling him. I wouldn’t follow any of his strategic advice either, although his tactical advice is okay.

About five years. Anyone can build their skills to be worth $100-$150 per hour. I could have done it in two years but was a bit timid. By welfare states, I mean places like the Netherlands, Canada, and Germany, with free healthcare, generous unemployment insurance, free job retraining and education.

I solved this by just doing work that’s fun for me. As basically a freelancer so I don’t have a boss pushing me around, and I control my hours. What I do now is not as fun as being a graduate student / lecturer (the job I left to try to get rich), but it’s still fun enough to do 10-20 hours per week. A savings buffer of 6-12 months is good in case you get sick or need to pivot. I also have invested enough in a retirement account so that by the time I’m 70 I’ll have $800k or so if the economy keeps growing. I’ll keep contributing, but there’s also social security, medicaid, etc. Obsessing beyond that just isn’t worth it. You could be dead in a couple years, or the government could seize your assets, or this whole thing could just be a dream. Another approach if you’re too neurotic for what I just described, is to immigrate permanently to a welfare state. This takes planning but is surprisingly easy.

The problem with this approach is you’ll probably fail to get free quickly. Making lots of money is really hard even if you have initial success. And after grinding after money for years, you’re not the same person afterwards. In my first shot, I dropped out of a low-paid passion job to sell out, and become a millionaire in 3 years of grinding. But then I lost it all, and took years to recover. Now I figured out how to work 10 hours per week in a lucrative thing and spend my remaining 40 good hours on passion projects, but I would have been better off just sticking to the low-paid passion job in the first place. Putting off doing what you like to make money first is like saving sex for your old age. Some people just like making money for it’s own sake and that works for them, but if you’ve got something you like that fulfills a need, you’re better off sticking to that even if it only makes a lower-middle-class income. I would go back to my lower-middle-class passion job if I could but I’m no longer competitive in that career track, so I have to settle for being an amateur crank.

Bribery is necessary to simply survive in Ukraine. To get any public service, including healthcare and university exam results, requires bribes. You could argue it’s just cultural difference though, as it’s done in a very systematic and organized way.