Bonds only give you certainty to the extent that inflation remains certain.
Stocks generally rise with inflation, whereas bonds continue paying out the same nominal amount, which buys you less over time.
As a retiree I'm 50/45/5 in stocks/bonds/cash, having opted for a conservative portfolio. The stocks are the only reason I haven't lost buying power. But the bonds have performed so poorly that I've barely kept up with inflation despite the amazing bull run in stocks.
Are we talking about bonds or government bonds here? The former will beat inflations assuming you don't just buy AAA rated ones. Investment grade perpetual bonds in US dollars yield over 6.5% on a Yield-to-call basis.
It depends on the goal / priority. In most financial / retirement advice they are focused on average middle class Americans. They tend to have too little savings, and not a lot of options.
If you have more than enough saved to meet your basic needs, it does (IMO) make sense to give up some total income for lower variance.
I sleep on certainty. I feel bad for the people based their futures entirely on a trajectory from a time we'll look back on as "utterly unsustainable".
I think some of us are witnessing brain rot spreading accross our peers already so I am pretty sure some people won't recover if one day their token quota/limit is removed/reduced for a reason.
Not the same person, but in the event of an AI collapse I think those that relied on it will be at a disadvantage. The rapid deskilling that happens with AI usage is becoming more documented.
Atrophy of your basic skills can still be a problem. Like someone relying on a dozen specialized triangle angle calculators found on Google rather than understanding what SOHCAHTOA is.
> This is happening despite the fact that both public and private school teachers strongly discourage math outside of school!
Do you have more info on this? Where is it coming from and what does it look like?
Because this is actually crazy if true.
Like, just compare to a situation where they strongly discourage Reading outside of school.
Not to mention that math is just a basic life skill and it gets exercised just going through normal every day stuff (at least middle school level math)
> The bases got attacked and destroyed with basically zero effort whatsoever, local militaries had to step up to defend the US bases on their own dime and with their own people putting their lives on the line
As a US citizen, I hope more countries come to this realization and start rejecting these.
It's such a lose-lose for everyone
The establishment and maintenance of these bases cost the tax payers so much....
If only we could refocus this massive expenditure of resources to internal domestic infrastructure...
The America First MAGA people fail so hard to understand that these expenditures on things like foreign bases and US Aid resulted in far greater returns for us. It's never been about altruism or the greater good.
I say this as an anti-empirical leftist with no great sympathy for the effort, but for those proclaiming to put America's interests above all else it's just such an obvious and idiotic short-sighted self-own.
US Aid has probably been the biggest ace the US ever had in its hand.
US farmers growing otherwise unprofitable crops with no buyer? Check.
US exporters being able to export crops? Check.
US Aid workers being able to give food to starving people in countries that have huge deposits of rare earth materials? Check.
US intelligence apparatus having advanced knowledge of developing situations in strategically important countries? Check.
US Aid workers being able deliver tremendous goodwill to countries that China or Russia would love to have their tentacles in? Check.
Everyone's happy, everyone makes money, everyone eats.
Yet Donald Trump and Elon Musk don't like it, so away it goes. And there's no adult in the room to say "no, you're not cutting it, here's why".
I know, this makes me crazy. The response should have been "... and?! You mean the intelligence community has a worldwide network for raking local information that also accrues goodwill to the US, and you want to end that?"
And not only accrues goodwill, it keeps American farmers growing crops that are otherwise unprofitable. US Farmers are too stubborn to keep up with the times, insist on growing crops that there's no domestic demand for (and are heavily subsidized), yet vote in jackasses that are going to take away the only market there is for their crops.
USAID somehow managed to get everyone paid and kept everyone happy. Who gives a shit if it was a CIA front?
Investing in domestic infrastructure would generate even greater returns. Yes, through some financial hand waving, we may funnel money spent on bombs back to US military contractors, but imagine if that same money was spent on a high speed rail system. It would unlock greater efficiency and logistics with the same money staying with US contractors. That's a purely financial take and not even touching on humanitarian or ecological costs of imperialism.
I’m very much for infrastructure spending in the US. The point of our international geopolitical scheming is to give us greater wealth and power in the end to then apply to whatever ends we’d like.
The dollar being the world’s reserve currency gives us the ability to print dollars for infrastructure projects with relatively little consequence.
This is now being threatened by our best attempts to get everyone in the world to hate us and see us as hostile, unstable idiots and unreliable partners.
I’ll also note that the America First MAGA crowd seem to also be against funding public infrastructure projects, especially the radically socialist notion of high speed rail.
Greater returns for whom, and what would we gain geopolitically?
I don't disagree that money should be spent here. But instead of billions spent on military contractors, using some of that money in developing countries through USAID gets us some incredible returns...such as our work in the Congo securing our rights to the largest Cobalt deposit on the planet. Or our work in Namibia giving us access to the 4th largest deposit of Uranium on the planet. The top 3 countries for Uranium exports are either under the Sino-Russian sphere of influence (Kazakhstan) or are nations that could get there due to the fact that they fucking hate the US due to the genius words of Donald Trump (Canada and Australia).
You want America's sources of Cobalt and Uranium cozying up to China and giving the US the finger?
>The establishment and maintenance of these bases cost the tax payers so much....
They supported USA's hegemony, extension of soft powers - essentially (not a quote) 'we trade with USA because they're our partner, they help us with defence against tyrants'. Except, when USA vote in a fascist tyrant.
Many bridges have been burned.
USA is just like a company taken over by venture capitalists, and just like such a company those capitalists look like they'll run it into the ground and make off with all the money.
Let's look at Almonds which _could be_ produced where water is not scarce, maybe, but instead is grown in central valley CA based on quickly depleting ground water.
Let's be generous and say that the Almond farmers hit all of their future efficiency goals, so each almond only takes .5 gallons, and that the drop/gallon math is off by a factor of 2.
That means eating 1 almond is about ~4,000 google searches.
Presumably you care about the quality of your marketing. Otherwise why do it at all. Worst case scenario, your marketing turns people off to your music, who would have otherwise been listeners.
Actually there’s some interesting problems here because a huge part of music marketing is in a visual medium, like a poster or album cover. It is literally impossible to include a clip of your sound.
So you should be really interested in how to capture the “vibe” of your music in a visual medium.
But if you don’t care at all whether ppl actually listen to your music, then yeah you don’t have to deep dive.
"Actually there’s some interesting problems here because a huge part of music marketing is in a visual medium, like a poster or album cover. It is literally impossible to include a clip of your sound."
The term you are looking for is 'aesthetic'.
And indeed.. music is far more than just a sound or whatever simple thing one tries to boil it down to.
Im convinced many (especially here) really dislike that - they want it just be a case of typing in a few things in an LLM and bam... there you go. They have zero clue about the nature of the economy, what's really going on in various markets etc etc.
"We shall trust 27 different sets of 3 to 10 guys in garages and ensure they never become large enough to blackmail a large percentage of the world's governments safe in the knowledge we can in fact arrest them for illegal bs" does have an appeal however.
It's more trusting something you can audit and control (e.g. open source) vs trusting something you cannot audit and control (e.g. proprietary service by BigTech).
That's right. And also just like the missing epstein footage.
Because it's a social problem, not a technology problem.
At the same time, just because these instances of "missing" tape happen, does not mean that body cams and jailhouse CCTV are useless. We would not take those away. Likewise for the future drone footage
> Or the people who absolutely refuse to give up Chrome, despite the whole adblock situation. "But I don't like the way Firefox tabs look!"
Or have yourself a learning moment and recognize that how things look matters to a lot of people. And It’s not wrong that they value it differently than you.
Of course, I just have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that these people are complaining about ads everywhere and value the aesthetics of the tab bar over that.
Yes, you lose money (or more precisely you lose opportunity) but you gain certainty. Which is what you want for retirement
That’s pretty much the definition of risk premium.
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