“I graduated high school, got a good job at the Mill, married my high school sweetheart, had five kids, bought a second house with a boat, retired at 60, went insane reading Facebook memes and watching FOX News, then decided to shoot up the Harvest Music Festival in 2017. Why can’t you young people do that?”
My wife graduated law school in 2010, Summa Cum Laude, and just barely got a job at a low rent firm.
Five years later, she’s earning twice the money at a much nicer place for not much more work, because the glut of students from '08-'10 caused grads in '11-'14 to look elsewhere. Suddenly there was a huge supply gap and you could write your own ticket.
Moral of the Story: Get good at something and stick with it. Markets go up, markets go down, but skills pay the bills in the end.
Reminds me of the movie “A Serious Man”
Larry Gopnik: A divorce-what have I done! I haven’t done anything- What have I done!
Judith Gopnik: Larry, don’t be a child. You haven’t “done” anything. I haven’t “done” anything.
Larry Gopnik: Yes! Yes! We haven’t done anything! And I-I’m probably about to get tenure.
Judith Gopnik: Nevertheless, there have been problems. As you know.
Unless you work in this sector and have detailed knowledge, youd be delusional to believe to be able to answer that question
The decision by Intel to forgo investment in next-generation chip fabrication for over a decade and coast on a spec that capped out at 7nm was something techies and investors had been ringing bells about for a long while. Similarly, the swell in demand for future high performance chips has been ongoing since the pre-COVID days. You can read the briefs on Intel and make an informed guess as to whether they will be able to outperform a company like TMSC, which is hedged in both politically and geographically, but riding the cutting edge of chip fabrication.
The great thing about making investment decisions is that you don’t have to be exactly right every time. You can be marginally right, or even wrong, and still see your portfolio grow. The baseline you’re competing against is the index returns. And - especially with Blue Chips in a heavily monopolized environment - the difference between the index and the individual business isn’t particularly large most of the time.
Also i’d say Palantir isnt as much of a secret tip but rather capitalizing on wanting to live under Fascism.
That’s not investing, that’s wishcasting. If you think betting for or against Palantir is the difference between Liberty and Tyranny, you’ve got bigger problems with your portfolio than diversification.
Avoid individual stocks.
If you’re a new retail investor, sure. Putting all your chips on the S&P is probably the safest bet. But these indexes are, themselves, often overweighted by the MAG7 anyway. So you’re still heavily exposed to certain sectors and even individual firms. Tesla, for instance, is explicitly 3% of the NASDAQ composite. And because of the way it is interconnected with NVIDIA and Toyota and a few other large cap companies, a sudden downturn in Tesla value can drag down the rest of the index quickly.
Don’t try to time the market, in or out. DCA. Don’t touch the money.
That’s fine from a very rudimentary savings strategy. But as you learn more about individual equities, you’ll see opportunities. Palantir is a great example. It was trading at $10/share a year ago, despite Thiel having a direct line to national security spending budgets and a very friendly relationship with both Trump and Harris. Severely undervalued in the security sector in a way that a simple S&P or NASDAQ investment can’t take advantage of. Meanwhile, domestic natural gas is severely hindered by the US trade relations with China - which is the fastest growing market for petrochemicals. Simply having a chunk of the DOW won’t yield growth consistent with specific areas of the international market.
Watch P/E ratios. Watch EBITDA. Watch what the economy is doing, generally speaking. Fuck day-trading and options plays. But you can absolutely find opportunities in the market long term with a conservative buy-and-hold strategy, if you can pick out equities that are undervalued and positioned for future growth.
Solar is a great growth sector atm, as energy prices rise and O&G supply chains become overexposed to international conflicts. Bank stocks are enjoying a new wave of deregulation that promise high growth potential. Meanwhile, certain sectors in the MIC are stumbling - Boeing and Raytheon, for instance - because they can’t actually produce units to meet global demand for killing machines. There’s an arbitrage opportunity in smaller competitive startup firms - particularly in drone and electronic warfare.
If you’re serious about investing, it’s worth asking the question “Is Intel in a position to compete with TMSC?” rather than just dumping all your money into an index.
if people stop flying they will go out of business
They won’t. That’s the rub. We have played this game over the decades. Whenever the industry is on the verge of bankruptcy, the feds bail them out. When the profits are flowing, the executives/shareholders are free to cash out without concern for the future of the company, and the people who need to travel are never given any kind of alternative even as the process of flying becomes more expensive and emisserating.
It’s not that complicated.
The central arterial system for civilian and commercial rapid mass transit is enormously complicated. Just shouting “Don’t use planes!” doesn’t address logistical alternatives.
There is no “floor” to air travel
There is. I just linked to it. We had empty planes flying because airlines were not contractually permitted to run fewer flights without having their routes monopolized by their competitors.
Some of the most powerful and influential men in America fought tooth and nail to protect the railroad industry
They didn’t. They fought to consolidate the industry decades ago. But more recently they’ve turned it over to vulture capitalists to scrap for the real estate value. One of the biggest jokes of the modern era is how Union Pacific and BNSF Railway have fumbled the bag or straight up handed it off, so a handful of senior executives could reap a few enormous windfalls.
market forces (and, yes, to a lesser extent government policy, but mainly just people buying cars) eventually led to the near-collapse of the industry
Freight rail has never been more profitable, in large part because the number of routes and the regulations on transport have hit rock bottom. Firms are charging record prices, paying minimal labor costs, deferring maintenance, flagrantly ignoring the law, and absolutely cleaning up in the free market.
They’re eating their own seed corn. And in the end, the system will fail. But when you’re an executive making tens of millions in compensation, with an eye towards retirement in years rather than decades, it’s Not Your Problem.
A knock-on consequence of this management style has been to hold up passenger rail (specifically, Amtrak, a federally owned company also plagued with underinvestment and technical debt), as points at which freight and passenger cars share lines are choked with traffic such that passengers can’t arrive in anything resembling a timely manner. THIS IS NOT AN ACCIDENT.
Corporations can resist change but that doesn’t mean they are always successful.
Civilians boxed into a failed mass transit system who are told “Just stop using the system” are not being provided with functional alternatives or support to leverage those alternatives.
Worm eating the powdered bones of a dead animal: Am I a joke to you?
That’s a bit of a gimmick related to airlines betting (correctly) that flight demand would rebound after covid ended and wanting to keep their spot in line.
It’s an illustration of a market incentive that doesn’t reflect consumer demand. It was also a prelude to a bunch of federal and state bailouts for the industry (much like after the crashes in '08 and '01), intended to keep businesses that can’t stay profitable in the black.
If there was a true societal shift and people flew less
The societal shift would need to be a reduced demand for travel not a reduced desire to fly on a plane. That’s what COVID created (temporarily) but it still didn’t drop plane flights to the point of consumer demand, because of these private contractual arrangements intended to keep airports profitable.
I fucking hate flying. I know lots of other people who hate flying. It’s stressful, it’s expensive, it’s obnoxiously bureaucratic (especially as we switch to Real ID / tighten security at borders / etc). But it is also the only practical way to get between big states in less than a day.
If you want a True Societal Shift, you need to present alternatives to air transport. HSR was supposed to be that alternative, but it never got delivered. For some mysterious reason, passenger railroad companies that had crisscrossed the country a century ago just evaporated. Cities grew increasingly hostile towards municipal bus depots and rail terminals. Highway expansion and airline construction dominated the priority of municipal and state governments.
Also, there WERE a lot fewer flights during covid, ghost planes notwithstanding.
There was a floor below which the number of flights could not drop due to - what are functionally - political reasons. Similarly, there were restrictions on travel that were lifted far too soon, and reignited the rapid spread of the virus, for political reasons. And there was further M&A of smaller airlines intended to monopolize the supply of travel, because finance capital demanded air travel receive priority over other civilian alternatives.
These are not personal consumer choices. These are corporate and state policies.
Corporations aren’t evil
At least from the perspective of “evil” as an all-consuming selfishness that comes at the detriment of your neighbors, Corporations are explicitly designed to be evil.
The airline industry as it exists today - a poisonous, clumsy, alarmingly fragile, wasteful, gluttonous dinosaur of a mass transit system - is the consequence of a few cartelized industrial leaders bribing and strong arming key public sector bureaucrats into subsidizing itself, as the senior executives and investors plunder the cash flow on the back end.
Announcing that you will be bicycling from LA to NY in protest does not change any of their economic calculus.
If you can provide her with 1960s health care and living costs, she might be willing to sell you her house for 1960s real estate prices.
Would you be replacing her hip for an authentic 1973 mint edition Jefferson Nickel?
Grandma is not the problem.
You can’t go blaming the institutions for the high cost of living when it is very clearly this one anonymous old person who isn’t giving this other anonymous young person a sweetheart deal out of misplaced nostalgia.
Fun Fact: There are 16 million vacant homes nationwide.
Okay, but a bunch of them are in the Rust Belt, where de-industrialization eviscerated the economy and caused a mass exodus to the Gulf Coast and the Mountain West in pursuit of lower wage service sector and sales employment.
I suppose you’re going to claim that the wholesale restructuring of the manufacturing economy was the fault of a handful of 90s-era Wall Street bankers and Corporate Executives, rather than millions of Boomer-era suburbanites with pocket change in their retirement accounts 40 years ago?
Likely. Fucking. Story. This is just bigotry against the 1% is what it is.
No politician is ever gonna run on a “no meat” platform lol.
Plenty do, in countries where the agricultural industry isn’t dominated by animal farming.
When meat over-production threatens the general quality of life, the issue flips from an anti-consumer issue to a luxury waste issue.
Just like with private jets and super yachts, the issue only becomes untouchable when your slate fills up with anti-populist corporate flaks.
when covid hit a and fewer people where buying plane tickets there where a lot fewer planes in the air
Thousands of Planes Are Flying Empty and No One Can Stop Them
In January, climate activist Greta Thunberg tweeted her disbelief over the scale of the issue. Unusually, she was joined by voices within the industry. One of them was Lufthansa’s own chief executive, Carsten Spohr, who said the journeys were “empty, unnecessary flights just to secure our landing and takeoff rights.” But the company argues that it can’t change its approach: Those ghost flights are happening because airlines are required to conduct a certain proportion of their planned flights in order to keep slots at high-trafficked airports.
They aren’t producing that meat for the fun of it
They’re overproducing because they’re heavily subsidized and operating under a functional price floor thanks to the wholesale market and industrial application of their products.
Grocery store ground beef is practically a waste product. Agg Business produces far more of it than they can ever hope to sell retail.
Its still true that less meat would be produced if less people purchased it
Less people in a single dense region, sure. If half of New York went meatless, you’d see a sharp drop in beef sales to the Five Boroughs.
But if you distribute those 4M people across the entire Continental US, there’s no market mechanism to reduce distribution that granularly. All you’re impacting is relative expected future profit margins per venue. No single business has an incentive to reduce wholesale purchases.
When populations are starving to death in 2044
You don’t have to wait. Sudan, Yemen, Gaza, Haiti, Chad, Afghanistan, Syria… All undergoing starvation level famines right now.
when I buy from them, they’re polluting on my behalf.
But that’s just it. The plane doesn’t burn less fuel because you didn’t buy a ticket. Hell, I’ve been on planes that were half full (in the wake of COVID).
They’re polluting whether you are on them or not. The only remedy is regulation / downsizing / nationalization. There’s no future in which people individualistically shrink the industry. No more than you could have saved someone’s life in Iraq by not paying your taxes.
Sure. Vote with your wallet.
But 52.4 million tonnes of edible meat are wasted globally each year. Roughly 18 billion animals (including chickens, turkeys, pigs, sheep, goats, and cows) are slaughtered annually without even making it to a consumer market.
This is a systematic problem that can only practically be addressed at the state level. Meatless Monday isn’t actually reducing your carbon footprint because you’re not actually the one emitting the carbon.
This isn’t like saying “I’m going to burn less fuel by driving less” it’s like saying “I’m going to burn less fuel by not taking the bus”.
Silicon Valley turtleneck was just the Mao Suit of its era.
Jeff Bezos saved hundreds of billions of dollars by downsizing his wife.
Inflation, in absolute terms, is a larger benefit to people with higher interest rates.
Fair enough. I’m more thinking in a discrete sense… “saving money” versus “owing money”… rather than implicitly how much less are you paying.
Have a friend who was a sort-of perpetual grad student - bouncing from Sweden to Italy to Australia - over about ten years, pursuing a degree in marine biology. Along the way, she contributed thousands of hours of labor to various research teams. Eventually, she got burned out, married a neurologist, and moved to a small house in Queensland. Now she mostly just gardens and raises bunnies, which she is extraordinarily good at thanks to her education.
Was this money wasted or did the universities get exactly what they paid her for? Idk. But it seems a far better way to employ people than what we’ve done with The Pentagon or ICE.