I also remember drivers ed. It was this enormous class of like 90 people over February break packed into the tightest room you can imagine. I sat in the same spot near the back every day. The girl in front of me also sat in the same spot every day, in front of me. She was extremely attractive and she wore a thong every day that stuck out of her low-rise jeans.
It drove me crazy. Absolutely insane. Every day, trapped in this stuffy room, with this insanely hot girl that drove me crazy. I couldn’t think.
On the last day, I asked if she wanted to go to the arcade or movies sometime. I had to take my shot. She said “No” with no emotion or any thinking really.
That is my overwhelming memory of drivers ed. The sexual frustration of my 16 year old body followed by embarrassment and failure.
I like how other than being triggered by the word rich fucks your reply has nothing to do with universities being remote or in person, just you bragging about personal accomplishments? I mean congratulations, but universities are still going to charge more by requiring you to go on location.
There is a bizarre reverence and worship for China I have observed with some Americans. Yes, you can build things faster and have smooth 5% YoY growth if you don’t have property rights and manipulate the statistics
There's also a bizarre need to simultaneously downplay them and fear them in other Americans. If they're so weak, why the fear?
They have high speed rail connecting the whole country, and lots of other stuff which is real and not a number in a spreadsheet. They crashed their housing sector by building too much.
The very reason that China can bulldoze thousands of homes for a new highway or train, are the very things that would make an American scream “fascism” at an authoritarian government
> Moses's critics charge that he preferred automobiles over people. They point out that he displaced hundreds of thousands of residents in New York City and destroyed traditional neighborhoods by building multiple expressways through them. The projects contributed to the ruin of the South Bronx and the amusement parks of Coney Island, caused the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants Major League Baseball teams to relocate to Los Angeles and San Francisco respectively, and precipitated the decline of public transport from disinvestment and neglect.
There used to be an entire road and tenement houses in Seattle where I5 is now. They’ve also taken all or part of many properties abutting the new rail project.
For us Westerners our highway system was already pretty much complete by the 1980s so none of us actually remember how it went.
But when we see pictures in historybooks you will see sprawling construction sites with bulldozers...
There have been several posts on HN in my recollection about the building of highways in urban areas in the USA over the objections of local residents, it's just if they are poor or minorities they historically do not have the political power to stop these projects, and the private sector makes a bundle, which is the recipe for a lot of things that go wrong in the USA.
Exept that in reality the US bulldosed cities as agrssivly as China and still does many idiotic projects. The reason it doesnt happen as often today is that less is invest and the lesser amount that is invested doesnt go as far as it did before.
The differnece today in the US is not that they dont bulldoze its that before they bulldoze there is years of political battle.
I follow various groups around the US that try to fight highway expansions and the almost always lose in the end.
I don’t think I have any illusions. I’d never want to live under Chinese censorship, lack of civil rights, the weird errors caused by centralized economic control.
But I can also acknowledge some of the things they do well.
Having a nuanced view of a complex topic is probably essential for proper understanding.
Also, if many western countries don’t get their shit together, their lives will be greatly influenced by China at current trajectory. Which particularly involves the negatives. China's success should be motivation to many western ex-empires, excellence nostalgia hubs and industrial graveyards.
And yeah, credit where credit is due, I think no observer seriously doubts the great feat China pulled off in such a short period of time, even if the stats are not reliable. People travel there, Jobs warned about this years ago.
And between US, Russia and Israel, China is the least obnoxious villain in my news feed. They somehow conquer the world without cringe overdrive and the undignified post-pretending social media executive memefare. China does not make me wanna drive a dining fork into my frontal lobe, it’s more like the cough that doesn’t go away.
Well, Russian, Hebrew and English are not my country's languages either and yet here we are.
Listen, I am not at all celebrating Chinese politics as absolute, their grave human rights violations, minority suppression, the Uyghur genocide or imperialist ambitions. I am not even saying they are the least, in fact they are probably the most dangerous. But they contribute little to the erosion of political dignity in my reality.
I've been talking so much shit on China over the years I decided I'd come over when the opportunity presented itself to visit. I'm in Shanghai and mostly it feels the same as any capitalist city except it's super clean. Everyone is shopping, living their lives. All of the Chinese I've interacted with are super pleasant. What really struck me was the decency and patience of the border control and security control folks coming over. In western countries I'd typically get exasperated annoyed calls to do this or that.
Anyway, it got me thinking that mostly the freedoms we are afforded, which are very precious to me, seem to come at great cost. A cost people under countries like China would rather bear when the affordances are clean streets, no or little homelessness and the freedom to consume luxury assets.
Every time I visit the US (frequently) I'm just assaulted by its continual, very visible rot. Cities like Seattle and Los Angeles are just fundamentally unsafe places to walk around in. The huge climb of school shootings over the last decade should have everyone alarmed. Americans appear to be stuck in the race to the bottom of who can be the greatest victim and the truly extreme painting of the Left or Right depending on which side you're on because people would rather obsess and come into conflict over what gender they can identify as or race guilt (or its opposite if you're a minority) rather than unite over common class struggles that are eating the country alive.
I think most people would rather pick comfort and safety over the freedom to say what you want and a right to privacy. I'm not sure I blame them when the alternative is getting sexually assaulted trying to walk to your car in LA (speaking from many many second-hand stories of American friends) or having your kid shot and killed in school.
It's a lot easier for China to limit the homeless problem in Shanghai when they have the hukou system to keep them out. But it is a shame that we have allowed failed progressive policies to wreck some of our cities.
I’ve lived in the USA, China (Beijing), a Switzerland (Lausanne), and I’m not sure what your point is. Guess the only place where riot police stormed my apartment because I wasn’t registered correctly?
There is much to love about authoritarian states. Clean, safe cities, and a suppression of news and other information to keep (naive) people comfortable. Draconian law and migration enforcement (eg, the hukou and propiska systems, and external borders) have their advantages, and looking at Singapore and Japan you don't necessarily need the rest.
Luckily if enough Americans agree with you in a few more years you can vote him out. Can you say the same for Winnie the poo (xi)
I have a feeling however, that since the leftist priorities these days are so ridiculous to the regular voter that you'll just get another republican president
> Luckily if enough Americans agree with you in a few more years you can vote him out. Can you say the same for Winnie the poo (xi)
You are weirdly naive about thinking Trump has any respect for democracy and that his camp isn't going to do everything possible to maintain power at all cost.
American relationship to China is frankly weird on every sides.
Between the ones who apparently can’t fathom a world where other countries are as economically successful as the USA and see it as a threat and the ones who are fascinated by its authoritarian policies, it’s really hard to have a dispassionate conversation involving China.
90% of Chinese own their own properties vs 65% of Americans, so there's that. Regarding property rights, I'm not sure how it works there but we've all seen the malls and highways that diverted around homes where owners were unwilling to sell out. Also, they actually have functional public infrastructure and have brought something like 800 million out of abject poverty. Are ahead of us in several spaces and about to pass us or at least equal us in others. Obviously I'm not arguing for that type of top down authoritarian system, but this is the objective reality. What's bizarre actually is all the denialism and copium over China - should we not be glad that they are doing better than they were 30 years ago and much more liberal than before?
By "own" you mean 70 year leases with ??? renewal conditions?
> Urban land use rights in Mainland China were typically granted for fixed terms: 70 years for residential, 50 years for office or industrial, and 40 years for commercial purposes. As these terms approach expiration, the question of renewal becomes paramount. The legal framework, primarily the Property Law and the Urban Real Estate Administration Law, provides a general outline but leaves specific implementation to local governments.
> Mainland China’s Property Law (Article 149) and The Civil Code of Mainland China (Article 359) guarantee automatic residential land use right renewals but provides no specific arrangement in respect of non-residential terms. Currently, without detailed implementation guidelines, local governments devise varied approaches, skewing valuations and unsettling investors. This uncertainty hinders market efficiency.
If you follow the public policy discussions in China, you’ll likely notice more complication surrounding the 70-year leases. Basically everyone already feel they own the property, the government’s forceful attempt to reclaim property would be counterproductive and unlikely to succeed. Additionally, many government officials are not particularly fond of this policy. They prefer property tax like US. Individuals currently do not pay property tax in China, they are reluctant to pay property tax and argue that they have indirectly paid them when purchasing property. Consequently, the property tax and ownership restructuring are essentially stuck in a stalemate.
I agree that that is a meaningful difference, but since I expect to be be on my last legs at best 70 years from now, it really doesn't make much of a difference to me, especially when contrasted to here where my home owning plans amount to little more than "hopefully the housing market will collapse"
Give the average person in china the opportunity to move to America, and vice versa, there is no comparison. China has done some things right but to pretend it is some model for America is absurd
I would absolutely take a chance to live in China, but I wouldn’t expect to be welcomed there. Their tech, disposable income, food costs, etc are so superior to what we have today in US.
The average person in America is living paycheck to paycheck and has negative equity.
20 years ago you couldn’t see in Shanghai. Trump pulled back the clean air act, it’s not hard to see a trend. It’s also not hard to buy a ticket and see it yourself.
Great point, I almost wrote that they’ve cleaned up pollution (of all types) by a lot and also are accomplish some impressive feats by regreening and pushing back desertification. Amazing things can happen when you get your peoples basic needs met (ie, they can focus on higher level stuff).
60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. It depends on which Americans you are looking at if you want to understand who capitalist ownership is benefiting.
> There is a bizarre reverence and worship for China I have observed with some Americans.
No. There isn't. It's just that we've gotten sick of the bullshit and lies from the anti-china propagandists like you.
> Yes, you can build things faster and have smooth 5% YoY growth if you don’t have property rights and manipulate the statistics
If they can build things faster, what need is there to manipulate the statistics? If the chinese don't have property rights, then how come they own so much property?
When you and your kind spout such nonsense over and over again, people tend to get sick of it.
> If they can build things faster, what need is there to manipulate the statistics?
A lot to unpack here. You completely blipped over the part about “no property rights” which is pretty clear when you look at, for example, how their rail construction projects go. Choochoo, rail is coming through, time to move this village, no eminent domain payments necessary.
> If the chinese don't have property rights, then how come they own so much property?
If ownership of a half-finished concrete shell by a bankrupt construction firm on the 33rd floor is counted as “owning property”, then the statistics will look pretty good.
My great-grandmother’s home, those of her neighbors, and their church was bulldozed for the US75/I45 rebuild/connection in Dallas in the 1950s. They were given the choice of new public housing built nearby in an industrial area (around Fair Park where State Fair of Texas is held) or figuring it out on their own. Being Black and low-income meant whatever rights they “had” were hard to come by.
I guess my point is rights and freedoms are unequally held, regardless of a nation’s stated values and laws. What makes/made the US great is not that things happening in China couldn’t happen here. It’s that we (used to?) aspire to greater ideals about individual freedom even if it isn’t present for all. CCP and I think Chinese citizens are under no such illusion, and in some cases reject the individual for the collective. (I’m hedging a bit since my understanding is limited second-hand anecdotes from Chinese American friends).
> You completely blipped over the part about “no property rights” which is pretty clear when you look at, for example, how their rail construction projects go. Choochoo, rail is coming through, time to move this village
Better than exterminating the natives to build railroads? Using your logic we don't have property rights in the US either.
> If ownership of a half-finished concrete shell by a bankrupt construction firm on the 33rd floor is counted as “owning property”, then the statistics will look pretty good.
Yes. 1.4 billion people live in half-finished concrete shells.
Come up with something better. You guys are getting boring repeating the same nonsense over and over again.
Yes owning appartments is propery. I know that people in the US have an absurd glorification of the single family home but things other the single family homes are a thing in most of the world.
LoL what the actual fuck are you going on about? China is extremely particular about market rate eminent domain payments. The only difference being it's often a take it or leave it offer, but they make prompt payments nonetheless.
"China" isn't "China". Like everywhere else, there's a maze of conflictiong incentives. The CCP measures regional governments on their stats. Gaming there. Regional governments measure administrative areas, ditto. More gaming. No stats can be trusted in a society that does not prize allegiance to the truth above all else.
Let’s say it how it is, this is the cost of freedom. Yes, China can build more quickly and has advanced more technologically, but it came at the cost of freedom. The degree of freedom is not something I’m fit to argue.
Now, there are those they believe the difference in freedom is worth that technological advancement. I’m not so sure.
COVID was a great example of this. China was able to slow the virus spreading faster than the US since they were literally locking people into their homes. In the US, this didn’t happen because of the rights we have.
Strange to me that the US has fallen behind is supposedly due to its commitment to freedom. The ownership class sold out the industrial base for profit, beginning with Reagan. They’re the ones who have driven policy - and continue to do so in the current turn to naked authoritarianism. The freedom the US supposedly stands for is the freedom of the capitalist class. Is it any wonder we haven’t seen investment in public infrastructure that prioritizes public good over private profits? That would have be financed by taxing the private interests that determine our policies. Instead we finance wars and a police state.
The problem is that people use all kinds of alternative methods to measure GDP. Stuff like light emissions. Import and export volumes and so on. And broadly speaking those are not that different from the offical stats. So just claiming its all lies doesnt really work.
How is that relevant to the accuracy of their economic data?
Finalnd's long border with Russian and recent joining into NATO means they are actually relatively geopolitically important.
It’s easier for small countries to do certain things that’s much more difficult for large countries to do. And by your logic, North Korea is relevant too, and it is and Finland is too, but in very narrow areas; and not really relevant when talking about economics of big countries.
Okay…but I’m not going to say North Korea’s economic data is fraudulent, therefore implications for the economic data for large countries. Also, read the thread before replying to random phrases you see.
Finally, the best and brightest minds in the world can stay in their home countries and improve them, rather than brain drain the nation that raised them. What a blessing for those of us who care about the world!
Amen, in fact to help the best and brightest even more I would encourage to enforce this for even existing visa holders. Let the world be a better place sooner!
Isn’t it obvious that a heart attack could be caused by a myriad of issues? Sure a bacteria could be a cause. So could be genetics, or an excess of cheeseburgers. A heart ceasing to pump blood effectively is not a singular cause
"we found some bacteria in people with heart disease, let's try killing the bacteria" is really bad logic.
Like another commenter posted it's similar to saying a lot of house fires had fire trucks in front of them, let's do some trials where we destroy some of the fire trucks to see if that helps.
> Isn’t it obvious that a heart attack could be caused by a myriad of issues?
I think you not only missed the point but also are doubling down on your mistake by conflating correlation with causality. You don't conclude that burger craving is caused by owning a car by observing drive-through restaurants.
I remember once going on the way back a work trip on a whim, and regretting not checking that the weather was >100 degrees. That step outside was an oven.
It's also kind of far and inconvenient to get to. It's like the inverse of those shuttles that take you from the arrivals loop of the airport to the ass end of the casino loading dock of your hotel (and 10 other hotels. So, unlike Uber, not even remotely worth it).
Interestingly Vegas is the only place I will use a cab over Uber or Lyft or (preferably) Waymo. Using the Curb app to pay electronically you avoid most of the BS with cash and "their card machine being broken", and once you've done it a few times you know the actual correct routes between places.
Why wouldn’t I want a school to be able to kick out bad kids? Violent and disruptive kids need to be warehoused away from actual future productive members of society, rather than forcing 90% of kids to have their education ruined by 10% of bad kids
Prepare to build a fuckton more prisons then. Most kids can get turned around from a bad path if they get the right support early on. I don't want to live in a world where we write off 7 year olds forever.
There was a famous study that tried to test this - the Perry Preschool Study. [1] Basically they enlisted a number of high risk children - black, low iq, low income children. Half were placed into a high quality specialized preschool program (that lasted two years for 2.5 hours a day) with small class sizes, half were not, and they followed what happened over the next 40 years. The results were definitely impactful, but not the sort of major turn around one might hope for.
So for instance 55% of the control group ended up being arrested 5+ times by age 40, while 'only' 36% of the experiment group did. I think the thing this demonstrates is that intervention can help, but is also insufficient alone. Students who are in a sufficiently high risk scenario need ongoing support and treatment that they're not going to receive at a normal public institution. And not only that but they will remain disproportionately disruptive to other student's educations at normal institutions, even with years of ongoing care.
In Germany children only spend between 5.5 to 6 hours at school per day. You‘ve raised that amount to 8 hours now and the outcomes are not that much better since the number represents being arrested at least five times. If you get arrested four times, you would be considered a model student.
Reading the actual study, this appears to be a preschool program of 2.5 hours minimum, not adding on to an existing school day. There are also a lot more details about outcomes and they're wildly positive for an intervention period of just two years. The authors estimate the ROI (from increased productivity and savings on various costs) at an astounding 16x.
There are way more metrics in there, including more crime stats. The one somenameforme chose to highlight has a ton of ambiguity, leaving it open to the reader to guess that maybe all the program participants were arrested merely four times by age 40, so in fact this program sucks (plus somenameforme's scare-quotes on "only"), but the paper itself contains far more information and paints a clear picture of outstanding success for a relatively small intervention. Somenameforme's characterization of the study doesn't match the contents.
If that's the evidence a person's citing, the evidence they've cited is screaming "this works great", not the opposite, as implied. It may still not be true, but if so... cite different evidence to support that, because this study says this intervention was wildly successful.
Make sure you're reading the study and not just glancing at their charts. They try to present their data positively to the point that it can be quite misleading. For instance you might see things like 67% of the experiment group having an IQ of 90+ at age 5, contrasted against only 28% of the control group.
But read further down on the details and that difference disappeared almost immediately after the end of the intervention. It follows in line with a well known fact that childhood IQ is primarily driven by environmental factors whereas adolescent and especially adult IQ is primarily driven by the IQ of your parents - paradoxically, strengths or deficiencies in earlier life notwithstanding.
And their decision to set the baseline for arrests at 5+ is obviously doing something akin to p-hacking. It makes it clear that near 100% of the entire sample (males at least) ended up in prison, likely multiple times. The ROI from the program had nothing to do with increased productivity - it was driven almost entirely by less time spent in prison. It led to the interesting fact that 93% of the ROI came from males, precisely because the females had a much lower baseline criminality rate.
In a nutshell, the main benefit of the program was reducing the criminality rate of the experimental group to a level that is still orders of magnitude higher than for society at large. That is a good thing, but it also emphasizes that something like this would only be the beginning of special care needed to try to ensure these sort of people could live remotely decent lives.
The person who wrote that site spent quite a lot of time writing, yet unfortunately little reading. Heritability is, by definition, the degree of variation in a trait, within a population, due to genetic variation. The heritability of an accent is zero.
One clever way this is measured is twin studies, which also are not what most people, particularly those who prefer to write more than read, think. You don't search for twins separated at birth, but instead compare the differences in a trait between identical and non-identical twins. If the variation is greater, then the trait is generally significantly heritable. So for example - height would be an obvious one. By contrast the variation in accent between identical and non-identical twins would be zero.
The person who wrote that site is Cosma Shalizi, who very certainly knows what "heritability" is. Unfortunately, you appear not to. "Heritability" is simply the ratio of genetic variance to phenotypical variance. It's not genetic causality. Whether or not you wear lipstick: highly heritable. The number of fingers on your hands: not heritable.
So it's a blog from some guy with no background in genetics. Your definition is correct, as is your statement that it's not genetic causality. But to discuss heritability you need to understand the most typical, and reliable, way it's assessed. That would immediately clarify to you why lipstick wearing (or your accent) is not heritable, yet the number of digits you have (at least at birth) most certainly is. Here [1] is Wiki's take. You can also pick up any textbook on genetics.
I don't think "Cosma Shalizi doesn't know what he's talking about" is a good hill to die on, and you've now expanded your portfolio of opponents to Ned Block, from who I shoplifted the heritability point.
Direct genetic causality is not the only mechanism through which genes select for phenotypical traits. Genes also select and interact with the environment.
A person you respect in one field is not necessarily all-knowing within that field and, most certainly, not outside of it. This is especially true on topics that become politicized. This is not just because of the 'our side' vs 'their side' stuff, but because these issues can and have destroyed the careers of high profile people who adopt the wrong opinion.
Unlike the individuals you have cited, James Watson is a geneticist, spent his entire life studying and working on genetics, and in fact was even the person who discovered the structure of DNA. But because of his views on the genetic aspects of IQ (which inherently becomes intertwined into race, as race is just shared genetic ancestry), he was completely demonized, his career destroyed, and various honors revoked. Higher profile people speaking on these topics publicly know this all too well, so it mostly just turns into cheap virtue signaling as opposed to adding some genuine insight.
In your case, the examples they've offered are simply wrong, as would be immediately apparent with the most typical method of measuring heritability!
You're irritated because I gave you an output of the broad-sense heritability statistic that conflicts with your intuitive understanding of what "heritability" means. Now you understand how people feel when commenters randomly throw around the term "heritability" with respect to cognitive ability.
This is a "not even wrong" situation. Is cognitive ability significantly genetically determined? Maybe, maybe not. A broad heritability statistic from a twin study isn't going to resolve the question.
I promise, the author has studied and thought more carefully about the question than we have.
Fair warning: you would not be happier if I cited a molecular geneticist on this subject. Your argument gets even harder to sustain once you bring GWAS into the picture.
I'm not at all irritated besides the fact that you're relying on examples that simply are incorrect, and instead of responding to this issue in any way you're linking to walls of text from somebody who (1) has made plainly false statements on the topic already and (2) has literally 0 qualification in the field whatsoever.
It'd be akin to arguing to somebody who wants to claim the Moon landing was faked, and after the rather straight forward rebuttal of their argument links to some blog in the tens of thousands of words from some statistician they claim is "very smart." It's silly.
For the experiment, you don't want it to be a "moral dilemma" at all.
If the group-splitting decisions are made by humans, it inevitably introduces a systematic bias. That bias then will show up in the outcomes, and confound the very data you got out of your way to gather.
The easiest way to avoid that is to split the groups randomly.
If anything we need to double the amount of money paid to build high-intensity “schools” for those kids, and then reduce the amount of money needed for the good kids, because honestly all of that money is wasted now on the bad ones. We should also imprison criminals but that goes without saying. If we don’t have enough prisons to house violent criminals then we simply need more prisons, or release them only into communities that vote for such a thing (maybe rich liberal communities only etc.)
> We should also imprison criminals but that goes without saying.
Obviously we need effective justice.
But since we are on the topic of ineffective schooling, there is an argument to be made that US prisons are more effective at punishment than rehabilitation. Which seems to please some people, but just adds another undertow to society.
A loss for criminal inmates, and everyone they impact, family or stranger, after they are released.
Education is worth looking at with respect to an entire culture, with many important contexts beyond/outside school. From before school age (huge), onward.
There's a great early TED talk from a Lawyer trying to stop death row inmates being executed.
He realises that the simplest and easiest intervention is to stop the violent crime happening in the first place, and the cheapest and easiest way to do that is to intervene in the future murderers childhood. The specific example he gives is a client with a schizophrenic mother who needed more support.
If I was going to buy art as an investment I would only buy the absolute best - old master, Picasso, ancient artifacts with absolutely no question to their authenticity or provenance that would restrict its resale.
Collectibles are very tricky. You want to buy something that isn't a fad. Like a movie prop, you'd want to buy the 100% most legendary movie that is timeless, like something from Casablanca, that has been appreciated decade-after-decade as worthwhile and valuable across many generations and fads. I wouldn't buy an expensive sports or trading card. Something related to Western culture is much safer, like the Magna Carta, or a founding US-related historical document. It's very hard to predict what will remain valuable decades or centuries out, so if something is still valuable now after centuries, it is likely to remain valuable
The problem with your strategy is that the items you listed have very little upside; yes, the prices won't collapse, but they also wont go up a ton. Their prices have reached somewhat of an equilibrium.
A lot of collectors are trying to find something they can buy for cheap and then sell when it goes up in price by a lot. If you want that, you have to pick something that hasn't had its price hit an equilibrium yet. You need to take a risk on something new.
Collectors are different from speculators or investors. Collectors want something for personal reasons, whatever they are.
Speculators are just trying to buy low and sell high. Investing has overlap with speculating, but it's generally more long term.
I think this is important to understand when considering buying collectables. You have to know the different types of people you're bidding against, whether it's an out of print magic the gathering card or a painting.
When buying etchings, beware of fakes. Since Rembrandt is very popular, people have found ways to make additional prints, by using the same copper plates in or after his lifetime.
The Rembrandt House in Amsterdam sells new prints that are made with copies of the original plates. They do add a big sign on the paper, but they are genuine prints, and look very pretty indeed. But the original works are made by the master himself and once you get into etching you get to see very minor nuances in the print that you may grow to like.
One thing to look for is whether the paper is original, but even here people use old paper from his period, for instance by ripping the first empty page from an old book.
Another interesting thing is that Rembrandt often reworked his plates, so there are multiple "states" of his etchings. If you ever find a non-final state of some print, you can be fairly sure that he or a student of his printed it. Which adds to the value :)
Collectibles have a lot of friction, and being physical they have a lot of middlemen and questions. If I want to speculate on an investment, even property would be far more liquid, let alone something disambiguated like company stock. I think investing in physical collectibles for a quick flip is pretty dumb. Why not buy domains related to the same subject? Far easier
Ok, then I guess I don't understand your point in your first comment. You seemed to be explaining what approach you would take to invest in collectible in your first comment, by saying you would only buy something that has established value.
I agree that trying to make money from collectibles is not the best way to make money. But then if you aren't buying collectibles for money, your first comment doesn't follow; you should collect things you want to collect yourself, which means it shouldn't matter their ability to hold value.
I'm saying as an investor, collectibles are very difficult and highly speculative, and the friction makes them even less attractive. I disagree that buying old, consistent collectibles cannot themselves be speculative - if you wait for the right moment they can make significant returns. But the downside is significantly reduced if you restrict your investments to something that has been consistently valuable across the longterm.
If you are into something, buy all means buy it. I just mean if you are a dispassionate investor looking for a return it is a pretty poor area to invest in. But if you like something - art, pokemon, whatever - just do what you love
When I had that level of friends the ones that collected art very much wanted to be part of a fad with some of their collection. It was the intro to getting to show the rest of their collection off to people. It was the piece that guests would know the artist of, or were able to get excited about when giving the current story.
Online poker died because having 1 other person at the table sharing cards surreptitiously drastically increases the odds in your favor, which ruins cash games. Let alone AI which has mostly solved the game if you have a bot making your decisions.
Poker must be played in person, otherwise it’s a dead game
None of this is wrong, but anecdotally, I will say that there are still human beings playing poker online, and a better human being can still win in the long run. (Though, live poker is much more fun)
It drove me crazy. Absolutely insane. Every day, trapped in this stuffy room, with this insanely hot girl that drove me crazy. I couldn’t think.
On the last day, I asked if she wanted to go to the arcade or movies sometime. I had to take my shot. She said “No” with no emotion or any thinking really.
That is my overwhelming memory of drivers ed. The sexual frustration of my 16 year old body followed by embarrassment and failure.
The driver’s license was great though
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