RichardGibbons

I think Biden's different because things like that matter to his supporters. It's irrelevant what Trump does or says--he'll be cheered on my his supporters regardless.

FWIW, I agree that your analysis is pretty solid, both in the political domain and investing. It leads to some fascinatingly creative responses, which is also entertaining.

Thanks--I don't think it'll affect my strategy, but I appreciate you sharing your reasoning.

In an inflationary environment, how are bonds paying 5% nominal any better than businesses? Do you see 20x earnings with no chance of nominal growth being better than 30x earnings with a high chance of nominal growth?

You should take it as a huge win that nobody is capable of answering this. People are willing to jump up and down, squawk, insult you, and try to change the topic, but they aren't at all willing to even start trying to frame an honest response to a relatively straightforward question. Well done. It proves your point nicely. (FWIW, my answer to the question is: nobody was taking advantage of anyone. It's just that Trump wants an import tax. That might actually be a reasonable way to raise money--a sales tax on goods and services made a big difference in reducing Canada's deficit in the 1990s, and this is pretty similar in many respects. The main downside is that it pisses off all America's friends, and there will be an ongoing cost for that.)

I think due process is a good idea, and it's a mistake to get rid of it for convenience. However, I feel like your above comment doesn't show the full extent of how things can be broken. In Canada, courts will now sentence criminals to lesser sentences because the appropriate sentences will result in their deportation. i.e. if you commit a crime, judges will deliberately give reduced sentences, just so that those criminals can stay in the country. This isn't a theoretical thing. It now happens over and over again in Canadian courts. (Which is ironic in many different ways, because presumably when politicians decided that criminal immigrants should be deported if they have certain sentences, it was because they thought that Canada would be hurt from having those people in the country. But instead, the court system has decided to go easy on them to keep them in the country.)

Yeah, philosophically speaking, I disagree in that I think property rights should be a right. Like, I think people ought to have the right to own whatever they create without others taking it away from them by force. And, while I agree with you that unequal programs like DEI are a problem, I don't think that is the full extent of the problem, and rights can be infringed even if everyone is treated the same. Like, one could mandate a free-use society where nobody "owns" their own body, and others can do whatever they want to your body, including murdering it. Everyone would be treated the same, but I think that is still a violation of people's rights. So, I think equal treatment by government is an insufficient criteria. However, that's purely from an abstract point of view. In practice, I think there are actually very few real absolute rights, and creating a functional society is actually an exercise of figuring out roughly what people's rights are, and when it's OK to violate those rights. (e.g. pretty well everyone thinks it's OK to violate a murderer's right to freedom of movement by locking them up.) Philosophically, I think societies ought to attempt to minimize the vagaries of the genetic lottery for people when they are children or incapable adults, but not for capable adults. But again, in practice, I think society functions better if there are mechanisms to reduce envy. So, I'm fine with a degree of overriding rights to do that. As with everything, the question is what degree is sensible. I actually think our positions aren't that far apart. It's just that in my head, I structure things as "these are the theoretical rights, and we have to decide how far the government can go in violating them", while in your head it's more like "rights are absolute, but those absolute rights are much more limited than the broad theoretical rights that Richard sees." The funny thing is that I think at the core, mostly good government isn't about this stuff at all. Rather, it's about examining the natural experiments that have happened throughout human history that have resulted in different outcomes for societies, and implementing the successful policies and not the unsuccessful ones. (And rights spring out of that in the sense that societies with good outcomes generally are the ones where people have rights.)

Yeah, but if you actually believe that is the right position to take, then you have to be an extremist Libertarian. Like, taxes certainly diminish the property rights of almost everyone, let alone one man. It's hard to think of things governments do that don't diminish the rights of someone. Hmm, maybe stuff that's 100% empty virtue signalling like "Farmer's Month" might not diminish anyone's rights.

I agree that Trump isn't likely to be someone ushering in a golden age--that was what my last paragraph was about. It's much more likely that his long-term results will be bad for both Americans and the world. I think Hitler isn't a great counter-example because I think it's hard to justify murdering six million plus people and several tens of millions on the battlefield for wealth. At some point, the ends don't justify the means. If the means is, say, a handful of people's lives ruined for hundreds of millions to prosper, then that's a good deal (and a trade-off that federal politicians are evaluating frequently, whether they realize it or not.) When the means is literally killing tens of millions, then I don't think you can justify it unless you're helping a whole pile of people. Say, trillions of people, which isn't actually possible right now. It's also worth noting that I don't believe in the idea that it's completely fine to murder "others" to help my tribe prosper. I'm much more into the idea that we should be helping everyone prosper, or at least not actively screwing people just because they are others. (And I think that's actually the correct long-term strategy for prosperity if one recognizes that humanity isn't at all zero-sum--it's postive-sum.)

The thing I find curious about the Epstein debate is that I think anything involving Epstein is almost completely orthogonal to being a good leader. Like, would you rather have a leader that is upstanding morally but has such poor leadership that the country's standard of living plummets to Venezuela levels, or a completely repugnant pedophile who is able to usher in a golden age? It's clear to me that the latter is orders of magnitude better than the former, and the huge positive difference in outcomes for almost anyone in the country should make the latter a clear choice. So, I find it curious that people seem to believe that the Epstein stuff should be the thing that changes everything. Of course, Trump is also clearly an awful leader who is much more likely to result in Venezuelan-like outcomes than a golden age. But that's what should be the focus of debate--the long term consequences of his policies. Pretty well everyone already knows Trump's a liar with repugnant morals, so why should piling on more repugnancy matter?

Ah, I think I understand. For you, there's a big difference between a country killing its own citizens, and one that kills others, plus the religious aspect. Thanks for the clarification. I get where you're coming from now, and understand the reasoning.

I'm genuinely curious. Which is the one that does not value life and holds an ideology of death and destruction? My guess based on context is that you mean Iran, but I find it fascinating that you see a stark difference.

Oh, I can help you understand. It's likely because Sanjeev thinks the MAGA folks are the ones likely to ignore, defend, or whatabout it and the non-MAGA folks are not likely to do the same. It's fun to see the really creative contortions people go through when "their side" does something horrendous. It's only interesting hearing answers from MAGA folks, because non-MAGA folks likely won't take one of those approaches.

I got 13/20. Most of the answers I didn't get right were silly trivia. (Like, how many Prime Ministers Canada has had is a silly question, and if someone thinks this is an important question for being considered "Canadian" then I question their judgment.)

That said, I'm cool with the term "cultural genocide", to refer to the things like what Canada attempted to do to its Indigenous people. I think that's a meaningful and useful derivation on the word "genocide".

Yeah, I don't think it's actually slippery. It only becomes slippery if people start claiming all sorts of horrible but non-genocidal things are genocide.

I mean, your source says Israel is supplying food aid. If they're committing genocide through starvation, they're really doing it backwards and are quite incompetent. There is a difference between genocide and horrific side-effects of war.

No, you weren't. You were posting on a message board, not sending a private message. Good luck!

I know it's cool with certain kids these days, but it isn't a good strategy to call something a genocide when it isn't. It's very obvious that if Israel wanted a genocide, at this point there wouldn't be a single Palestinian left alive in Gaza. So, when you pretend that it is a genocide, you lose a lot of credibility with anyone sensible--people who might support many of the same goals, but basically dismiss you because they don't want to be associated with crazy. I think I get why people do it--they want their cause to appear much larger and more important than it actually is. But in practice, it just dilutes the idea of genocide, and that's quite a bad thing, I think. It's good to have the word "genocide" actually mean what it does, so that when there's an actual genocide, people don't have to say, "no, this time I mean it. This is an actual genocide."

Well, I should add "unless that group is all humans." If you think all humans are evil, then that's just a statement on the humanity. The issue is when you label a subgroup of humans.

I mean, yeah. No doubt.

This just means that you don't actually understand capitalism. Forty years ago, about 1 in 10 homes in the most prosperous country on earth had a computer, and that computer was pretty useless. Today, pretty well everyone has a computer that's at 10,000 times more powerful than the most powerful computer in 1985 (and I'm not talking PC. I'm talking CRAYs.) And that computer is in their pocket. And they can access pretty well any data they want anywhere at any time. And video conference with anyone anywhere, anytime. Use almost any application for basically free. And that's even before AI, healthcare, and trade advantages. This is trickle-down wealth that has given people today capabilities that far surpass even the most wealthy from the 1980s. But you don't care about that because reasons. As for "hoarding the wealth", it should be so overwhelmingly obvious to anyone on this message board that nobody's actually hoarding wealth that it's not worth addressing. People who don't understand the market have an excuse for believing that. Not those who do. And, FWIW, I strongly agree with you that the younger generations are being completely screwed by the older generations. It's just the political policies that are screwing them over, not capitalism or the people who profit by making more and more desirable products that raise everyone's standard of living ("hording their wealth" by investing it in creating things that improve everyone's lives.)

This is a bit of an odd thing to say. I find it challenging to think of assets with a value of $X with an actual guarantee to be exchangeable whenever you want for $X dollars.

The sad thing is that there isn't actually anyone politically who believes in truth. The right wing is pretty happy just making up stuff, and the left wing believes in saying things like "my truth is" to represent something that isn't objectively true.

I think if one's been following AI at even a superficial level for the past five years, one has to be pretty simple not to recognize that AI will be revolutionary. In fact, it may already have met that criteria.