RichardGibbons

Here's some data. If one thinks that Trump is serious and not just blathering, then the way to interpret it, IMO, is that Canada seems basically let anybody into the country and has ineffective background checks (if checks are done at all). So, Trump would want to eliminate people who avoid USA screening by entering the USA illegally from Canada. The argument seems fairly plausible to me--we're only a few years past the time that the unofficial Canadian government position on immigration was roughly, "if you so much as question immigration, you must be racist."

The funny thing about this thread is that Buckeye spent so much time trying to discredit bitcoin and the people who promoted it, and in the end, his Socratic method apparently just came down to: "I like stocks and don't like bitcoin, so bitcoin is a scam."

I mean, he did offer analysis. He said basically that: Last time people thought Trump would intervene, and he didn't. Trump lies a lot, so one should consider that when weighing the probabilities here. This is the same valuation as previously, but the optionality value of the investment has declined because the legal issues have been resolved in a negative way. That said, it was mildly insulting. But also amusing....

I'm curious why you say this. Typically, universal healthcare results in lower healthcare costs than to the USA. And, knowing that your family won't die because of lack of healthcare coverage during your business' startup phase would surely remove one barrier to potential entrepreneurs.

Funny, I do the same for the exact same reason.

I'm both happy and unhappy about it. I'm happy from the perspective that one of the biggest benefits to humanity is what we get for "free" from other people doing great things. Like, it's pretty amazing to me that, when I was young, no households had computers, and now I can have the internet and an incredibly powerful smart phone in my hand at a price almost anyone can afford. That survival rates with all sorts of medical issues have skyrocketed. That so many benefits to my life and others have come without me actually doing anything at all to make it happen. Rather this all happened because resources flow to the people who are able to use them effectively. Those people are incentivized to make billions and everyone in the entire world benefits from their work, without lifting a finger themselves. And then, when billionaires die, those resources largely then flow back into society, to be recycled into some brilliant person making the next amazing thing. So, it makes me pretty happy that this exist--that everyone on earth benefits so much from this system. Joe gets the smart phone, Joe get the cure for cancer, and Joe gets the longer lifespan, even if Joe is nowhere near bright enough to invent a smart phone himself. On the other hand, it makes me unhappy that many people will look at charts like this and say, "the world is broken because some people have much more than others". Such charts encourage envious people to destroy the system that incentivizes humanity to create so many wondrous things that benefit everyone. It makes people think that completely unreasonable and illogical actions are somehow justified.

LOL! I'm awesome!

I don't think you should be surprised at this, John. Luke's been one of the most consistent people on the forum. I don't think I've ever seen him move even a step away from his core position that large authoritarian regimes that crush their own citizens are completely good, and democracies and free markets are completely bad. It's very clear that if Russia invades Germany, his position will be that it's both a good thing and that Germany deserves it.

This is the key flaw in Gates' thinking: "The tax system could be more progressive without damaging significantly the incentive to do fantastic things." He asserts this, but it seems extremely implausible to me. I'd love to actually hear Gates' reasoning about why people's incentives aren't dramatically impacted by the chance to become rich, why moderately successful companies will be equally likely to grow and innovate when they're confiscated from the founders who were responsible for them growing and innovating, and why obliterating the venture capital market won't have an impact on innovation.

I'm not sure if my anecdote is useful, but I'll share anyway. I roughly did this, and though the periods aren't long I suspect the results are statistically significant. In the seven years before retirement, my returns almost exactly matched the S&P 500. In the eleven years afterwards, my compounded annual returns were about 6.5 percentage points better than the S&P 500. (Also, my total returns typically included some cash, fixed income and different currencies, so it's not a total apples-to-apples comparison.) That said, I think it's still pretty hard to determine causality and attribute difference to any one thing. I do try to refine mental models and improve strategies. So, it's unclear to me the extent to which my investing decisions would have diverged over time if I'd chosen a different path and had continued working. (Also, if an all-knowing deity inspected my portfolios and strategies, I'd be pretty surprised if the "expected" out-performance is 6.5 percentage points. I have a feeling that maybe the expected out-performance is a few percentage points, and the rest was luck.)

Well, the thing is, refuting you with an obvious counter-argument isn't actually twisting things. I get that you want to completely limit the scope of the discussion because that's the only way that you can pretend your arguments make sense. But that's not actually how the world, or discussions, work. I mean, look at this: Yeah, the majority of people in Russia didn't get murdered. You're making an argument that because the majority of people in Russia didn't get murdered by the state, it's cool.

This cracks me up. Putin murders a bunch of people who speak out against him politically, then Luke explains that free speech is relatively unnecessary because the large majority is politically relatively uninterested. Can't imagine why the large majority of people would be politically uninterested after seeing their politically interested friends murdered....

Well, there was an unprovoked attack on a European nation by a country historically known for its expansionary tendencies. Not really surprising that European defence spending increased....

Well, that's just because China's strategy is awful. All evidence we have suggest free-market, liberal, rule-of-law economies are the most successful in raising the standard of living of a nation. China isn't doing that, so the evidence we have--and even the evidence we have from China itself--suggests that their outcomes will be poor.

The negative outcomes from having a "victim complex" has substantial scientific support from locus of control studies. People with an internal locus of control have both higher savings rates and higher earnings. In contrast, people who believe that the world is largely responsible for their outcomes or that outcomes are just a matter of luck tend to have lower savings rates and earnings.

This is quite interesting to me, because I'm starting to consider death-related things, but haven't thought about it from this perspective (more from the simplistic "let's reduce probate fees" perspective.) It does make me wonder if I should have a theoretical incremental return hurdle to clear when thinking about adding complexity.

FWIW, this is a misunderstanding of evolution. Lots of stuff gets passed on that didn't aid our ancestor's survival and reproduction. All something needs to be passed on is to not be catastrophic before reproduction.

I think this is the key point for why Jews would say that. Canada and the USA turning away refugee ships is pretty telling. And it's pretty telling that, when asked how many Jews would be allowed into Canada, the response was, "None is too many." With things like that, how could one not believe that the western world largely abandoned European Jews to genocide?

None of these countries has committed genocide in my lifetime. I haven't committed genocide. Nobody I voted for committed genocide. So I'm baffled by how you seem to believe that I'm hypocritical in condemning genocide. My best guess is that you you are viewing all human interactions through identity politics, evaluating people not as individuals, but only on their group identity. And you're implying that people are guilty in perpetuity based on the crimes committed by their countries of origins generations ago. I think it's a huge mistake to view the world this way, because it encourages lots of bad things, including genocide. That said, I think your position that "anyone of European ancestry can't condemn genocide" isn't based on reason. And you think I'm hypocritical for being someone of European ancestry who is willing to speak out against genocide. So I think we've kind of exhausted the discussion.

Who in particular are you referring to here?

Ah yes, the familiar "you committed genocide 100 years ago, so it's cool if I commit genocide now" argument. This is happening today, on our watch, not our grandparents'. I think if you care about people, you probably shouldn't suggest someone's behind in the number of atrocities, and so should therefore get a hall pass on committing genocide.

I mean, even the Luca's "China's raising everyone up rather than just helping rich people" argument doesn't actually align with reality. Pretty well every democratic country on earth has a lower Gini coefficient than China. My guess is what he thinks of as evidence is actually propaganda, and he's ignoring the actual outcomes of the last 150 years of authoritarianism and communism. It's pretty amazing to me that managed economies have been tried since Marx, and not one has even had close to the astounding beneficial results that arise from liberal free-market economies. And even more amazing that many people are so eager to completely ignore that evidence in favor of a story.

That makes sense. Thx, thepupil.

Not disagreeing strenuously with your argument, but is there a reason to believe that the companies in the stock market ought to grow at roughly the same rate as GDP? Like, I imagine a tiny percentage of failing businesses are publicly-traded. And I imagine that higher-growth businesses are more likely to be public (because they can get better valuations), and that businesses that have better competitive advantages are more likely to be public (because they will likely leverage those advantages to grow bigger, and most big companies are public.) I just wonder if you're effectively saying that the average high school student's mark is 70%, so we should expect people who have incomes over $300K/year to have averaged 70% in high school.

Yeah, I think everyone paying attention knows this because of the large percentage of completely nonsensical arguments on this topic.