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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 11th, 2024

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  • My knee-jerk reaction is to agree with you, because it seems like this policy would punish money hoarding and therefore keep money circulating.

    Then I thought about what I would do if I had a sudden large influx of expiring cash, and quickly decided on buying illiquid assets (stocks, bonds, property, a couple fast food franchises in an underserved-but-growing area, etc) which is pretty much what the wealthy already do. The World’s Richest Manchild doesn’t have $300 billion in cold hard cash sitting around, he has maybe a few million in easily-accessible funds and the rest is tied up in investments (that’s why he had to borrow so desperately to get the $44 billion to buy twitter - he couldn’t quickly cash out his stock investments without cratering their value).

    If money expired, the rich would continue to do what they already do - turn their money into long-term investment vehicles. The worst off would be the people who are in the middle - not doing so bad they have to spend every penny they make right away just to stay afloat, but not doing so well that they can invest in illiquid assets (either because they don’t have enough left over after the bills are spent to realistically be able to invest or because they need a safety net in case the car needs to be replaced in a hurry or a tree falls through the roof or the hot water heater busts and ruins the floor).

    ‘Expiring wealth’ is something that would do society good by forcing the wealthy class to re-invest in their communities and peoples, whereas ‘expiring cash’ would just hurt those who would otherwise be on a path to being able to retire someday



  • He’s not trying to save it. He’s simply creating market fluctuations and buying the dip. He creates conditions that cause investors to worry and stock prices to fall, then he buys when the prices are low and finally he announces that the tariffs are being postponed for 90+ days (that is, into the next financial quarter). Stock prices start to rise again and eventually they return to where they started, like it never happened.

    In the meantime, people are losing jobs and their houses, but that’s a small price to pay to make him and his inner circle wealthier.







  • There are a couple fundamental differences between the US and North Korea - in NK, you can’t travel without governmental approval and also you get shot if you try to leave.

    In the US, you can walk to a different state if you so desire (or drive or fly, but those require gov’t ID) and the only thing you need to have if you want to leave the country is paperwork that the other country accepts.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more fundamental differences between the two countries, but those are two big ones that I thought of off the top of my head.


  • Listen, if you have to jump through hoops to stretch the meaning of a phrase, just to raise the idea that the phrase might not be completely asinine, it might be a better use of your time to just let it be. You shouldn’t have to do mental gymnastics and word judo just to squeeze a non-obvious semi-literate meaning out of something the leader of the free world said. Don’t do their work for them (unless you are being paid to do their work for them, of course… but get paid up front, because they aren’t very good about honoring contracts).









  • I just realized that in something like 200 years, no one is really going to understand the difference between George Bush and George W Bush. Like, they’ll know they were two different people, but mis-attributing something that one Bush said to the other Bush will be seen as an easy mistake to make (much like how nowadays, John Adams and John Quincy Adams are seen as two different people but are not really that different in the average person’s eyes).

    Like, there might be memes of 41 saying “…fool me -can’t get fooled again. Heheh” and no one will realize what’s wrong with the picture.


  • When I was stationed at Camp Pendleton around 2003-ish, one of the barracks I was at had a pizza vending machine. It made cheese pizzas (maybe pepperoni too, but I am not sure) that were a little smaller than a frisbee and cost around $5 (at a time when the priciest McDonald’s value meal was almost $5). I never had any myself, but it did take a couple minutes to make and (if I remember correctly) the crust was mostly pre-made. Being able to watch the process (a crust drops onto the conveyor, a robot puts the sauce on, another robot puts the cheese on, another robot puts the toppings on (if any), the pizza is conveyored through the oven) would help occupy the customer’s time. If the crust is pre-made, you’re really just broiling the cheese and toppings to get them melty and hot.

    I don’t think the pizza was too tasty or popular, but it was a convenient option if you were drunk.


  • In USMC boot camp, this specific topic was addressed very early on. It’s “Good Morning” up until noon, after which it is “Good Afternoon” up until you eat evening chow, then it is “Good Evening” until midnight (at which point it becomes “Good Morning” again).

    Of course, it’s all up to personal preference in the real world. If you’re out with your friends at a club and it’s after midnight but still very much dark out, you’re not going to be greeting people of the gender that you prefer to look at with “Good Morning”, because it is still ‘evening’ to you and them.