rkbabang

I'm all for this. As long as it's paid to anyone who has every personally been a slave and paid by anyone who has ever personally owned a slave. No one should be responsible for the actions of their ancestors. And even if you think they should be, my ancestors where literally dirt poor. My father grew up with no education, no electricity, no plumbing, in a dirt floor hut his family shared with his aunt and her family. His father grew up homeless and familyless on the streets by himself at age 10. None of my ancestors were responsible for anything to do with slavery, so I shouldn't ever have to pay a penny in taxation for anything like this. Imagine being held financially responsible for the actions of your ancestors? Now imagine being held financially responsible for the actions of someone else's ancestors? Some people have the nerve to call all of this "justice". I call it theft.

My advice is try to consolidate everything to one brokerage. I have almost everything in Fidelity. Way back we used to have accounts at a number of different firms, and I found it too hard to keep track of, so I consolidated everything over to Fidelity where my 401K was. I rolled my wife's old 401ks over to a Fidelity Roth IRA at one point so even her accounts are there now too. I set her account giving me permission to view from my account, so I can view everything on one page. So now we have my 401k, our IRAs, our brokerage accounts, and we even use a Fidelity cash management account as our checking account. So I just track everything there in one spot. I also have other stuff but I track it all separately. I've got crypto (about 18% of net worth right now) which I track separately with a spreadsheet and I have real estate (around 35% of net worth) which is separate and I have one small account (about 1.5% of net worth) at Interactive Brokers which is managed by someone else for me and that I just look at separately. So when I figure out what my performance for the year is I ignore crypto, real estate, and the managed account and just look at Fidelity. Crypto bounces around like crazy and real estate you never really know exactly what it's worth anyway until you try to sell it.

1) Slavery is not okay with me or you (I think by your comments it is safe to presume). But in a society who thinks it's ok then slavery will be treated as if it's ok. The people who think otherwise will be called all the things I am now called when I say taxation isn't ok: Naive, dreamer, doesn't know how the world works, foolish, doesn't understand history, doesn't understand economics, etc, etc, etc. I still think that slavery would never be ended if it weren't for the industrial revolution. Once slavery was largely not needed, it was easy for people to be convinced to get rid of it. Without mechanization, people would never have admitted that making someone do work for you was wrong. It was just too convenient. The same way we all use our phones and ignore the children mining cobalt in the 3rd world. This will look barbaric in future generations. So if the industrial revolution hadn't happened you would either support slavery right now or most of the people around you would and you would be thought a fool. 2) Same with murdering natives. In that society you would be a lonely voice in opposition and you wouldn't matter. 3) Yes, even an individual can be correct with the entire world wrong. I look at morality as something that can be discovered by reason. Reason tells me that slavery is wrong and taxation is theft. Both of those things would have been laughed at a few hundred years ago, now only one of them is. A few hundred years from now? Who knows. Most people don't reason though, they adopt the morality which they are taught and always simply accept the things which are common in their society as good and necessary. If you want to change the world for the better you need to somehow convince people that you are correct. There is no other way. God certainly isn't going to do it for you. Although it is probably easier to package your opinions up into some religion then go out and proselytize for converts. People will believe anything if they think their religion requires it. Which is why Mohammad claimed to talk to god in a cave and Mr Smith claimed to find the golden plates, and some 3rd rate science fiction writer created scientology. Religion has always been one of the best ways to brainwash people (politics being the other).

It seems like you have a good sense of what you think is moral and what you think isn't, but that isn't good enough for you. You want something in a position of authority to tell you that you are correct. I'm perfectly fine knowing that there is no greater authority than my mind. The only thing that enforces any moral code is society itself. When a large number of people think the same thing is correct than for that society it IS correct. And when a large number of people think that some action is wrong, then for that society it IS wrong. That really is it. We ARE just tap dancing to the chemicals in our brains and in the brains of those around us. That bothers you for some reason. It doesn't bother me at all.

Thanks for the video. I think he's eventually going to be correct. I just don't think he's got the timeframe right. He thinks the dollar dies quickly in the next few months. I think it will happen gradually over the next few decades. I certainly hope that I am correct, because what he is predicting would be extremely messy and will certainly evolve much death and destruction world wide. I think (hope) the can keeps getting kicked down the road for a long time yet.

This is so true. I remember a story my parents told me about buying their 1st house in the mid 1970s (the house I grew up in). They ended up in a bidding war with another couple and ended up with the higher bid. Their purchase price was somewhere around $34k and the realtor told them after closing that they beat the other couple by $200. We lived in that house for 18 years and they sold it for 6 figures in the early 90s. In the end that $200 was completely insignificant.

What, did they forget to include the disclaimer? *This is not financial advice to buy or sell any investment, please do your own research before investing. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Blah, blah, blah, don't sue me.

I agree. K-8 is the only thing that should be required. Learn how to read and do basic math. High School should be more rigorous and not be for everyone. College should teach you your field of study for your career. Get the bellow average students out of school and into the work force to start learning a trade at 14yrs old. This will make high school more valuable for someone who wants a general education and be knowledgeable about the world. And removing the unnecessary fluff from a bachelors degree could give people back a year of their lives to enter the workforce as a professional and start earning/contributing a year earlier. It also gives liberal arts professors intent on brainwashing an entire generation of young adults far less power.

Exactly. The US is the absolute worst country, except for all the others. I can go on for hours about what is wrong with the US, but I'm still here and not going anywhere else. You can pick and choose within the US as well which is one of its great advantages. Living in NH, FL, or TX is much different from living in MA, CA, NY, or NJ. Unless you are taking a STEM program, college is mostly BS anyway. What we need is a school that removes all the humanities/liberal arts crap from the curriculum and prepares someone to become an engineer in 3 years rather than 4.

Exactly. Instead of deciding on what is moral and what is not on an issue by issue basis, he looked at all the organized religions and picked a pre-packaged morality from what was available. But it was still him making the decision, not some external being. He hasn't given us any indication that he had a discussion with God about any of this, just that he himself made a decision about what is true (Christianity) and what isn't (literally every other religion that has ever existed). He picks and chooses just like atheists do, only atheists are flexible enough to pick issue by issue, where he picked a package deal. It reminds me of the party system in politics. You pick a side then you can stop thinking. I picked blue so I'm for gun control, expressive taxation and regulation, gay rights, and the environment; or I picked red so I'm for lower taxes, no new gun control, no immigration, no trade with China, and bombing the shit out of the third world.

So you yourself are the final arbiter of what religion is true or not? Had you settled on Islam then that would be true and not the whole Jesus is god nailed to a cross thing? Interesting. You have the ability to decide what created the universe and what this being wants, but you have no ability to decide for yourself what's right and wrong? I just skip the whole god on a stick thing and go right to deciding my own morality.

Yes, I forgot. Theory 3: Out of all the religions any human has ever believed in, yours just happens to be correct. Ok.

Theory 1: god doesn't exist and they are both delusional. Theory 2: God's the universe's best troll. I'm partial to theory 1, but I do get a chuckle thinking about God messing with the minds of the faithful and LOL at the results.

Eventually maxis will realize crypto doesn't equal BTC. Not everything needs to have a monetary premium to be useful. You just restated what I said, but for different reasons. I said BTC != crypto and you said crypto != BTC. (BTC!=Crypto) = (Crypto!=BTC) Yes. I agree. Only BTC will have a long term monetary premium which makes it a completely different animal than anything else in crypto. Crypto (not including BTC) will also be tremendously valuable, but there will be lot's of money lost as well as a lot gained. There will be hot crypto assets which will eventually crash. It will be more akin to investing in companies, you will need to research what it does and who or what is running it, analyze its addressable market and what its competition is, what the roadmap looks like for improvement, etc. And right now, this early in, it is akin to investing in startups not mature companies, in an industry which hasn't existed very long. It is highly speculative, even if the potential rewards are immense. But my point was that no particular crypto, nor crypto in general, should trade with any correlation to Bitcoin.

Eventually people will realize that BTC doesn't equal crypto. I think it's prudent to have 10-25% of your net worth in BTC, but absolutely insane to have that much in dogshitmemetothemooncoin.

Most people DO think Nazis are bad. I think Nazis are bad too, but I also realize that if I lived in a Nazi society my thinking that Nazis are bad wouldn't matter. You said "is that fair?" earlier. No its not fair, the universe isn't fair and never has been. If you live in a society where most people have the same moral compass that you do then you are simply incredibly lucky. Ask someone starving in North Korea if life is fair. Ask the hundreds of millions tortured, starved, or murdered by Hitler, Stalin, Moa, Pol Pot, etc if life is fair. It isn't. There is no god doing these things, stopping people from doing these things, or making life fair. It's just us.

Have you brought it to an Apple store to see if they could look at it for you? I've still got an iPhone 10 and I've had no problem with ios 16

Yes exactly. Rape is wrong because we think it is. Again, what's your point? If you live in a society where most people disagree with what you think is wrong, then you are out of luck. For example I think taxation is wrong. In my opinion it is violent theft of property not morally different than someone putting a knife to your neck and demanding your money at an ATM on a dark street. But most people in my society think it's just fine, so I just have to live with it. There is no god making these decisions, just people.

Yes, what is your point? You could have been born a conjoined twin or with a cleft lip, or with a love of rape and murder. It IS pretty random. You inherit half your genes from your mother's side and half from your father's, but the specific genes you have from each is pretty much luck of the draw. Then there is random mutations of which we all have some (some more than others) which is also just random. So yes, you could have been randomly born without a sense of empathy and be someone who enjoys killing others. This only bothers you because it isn't how you were born, if you were born that way it wouldn't bother you at all.

Exactly. Also it might not even be that our repulsion to rape and murder gives us an evolutionary advantage (although I think it does), it could just be a side effect of something else that gives us an advantage. If trait A gives a massive evolutionary advantage, but causes trait B which is a small cost, it would still be worth it. So, say having the ability to put ourselves in another beings shoes and understand what that being is thinking and feeling, and thus what it will likely do, gives us a huge advantage, that "empathy" also comes with a revulsion to rape and murder may just be an insignificant side effect, evolutionarily speaking. Either way the universe is what it is and we have evolved the way we did.

You don't understand evolution very well. It isn't by sheer chance that we don't get high off of murder or rape. If wiring us that way gave us an advantage that's the way we'd be, the fact that most of us aren't wired that way tells me that having the moral compass we have is what gave us a survival advantage. There is nothing in the universe that cares about humans, except for humans.

Oh well, you win some and lose some.

+1 @nafregnum. As I said in my last post in the DIS thread. The only way to end something you think is immoral is to convince your fellow humans to agree with you. Slavery was opposed by a minority of people all throughout human history and no god or gods ever did anything about it. Once it was opposed by a large enough number of humans it ended. That is the only way progress in human rights is ever made, one human mind at a time. Zeus isn't going to strike anyone down with a lightning bolt and Yahweh isn't going to smite you dead for enslaving someone. Your neighbors who think it is wrong and will try to stop you.

I'm just going to hold my 2025's and not add anything. By then this will have played out one way or the other. It is a small enough position that I'm prepared to just consider it a total loss if that's how it turns out.

I wish I had the time to read every post to this board. I tend to follow certain topics, basically stocks I own or are interested in + some general topics that interest me. I probably miss a ton of good discussions and ideas in the topics I don't read, but there is only so much time in a day. My goto link is "activity -> unread content" then I click on the topics of interest.