exclusiv

Joined 13 years ago

Karma
1,324
Submissions
1,011
Member since
Nov 11
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago
I agree and Michael Burry has warned about it. There's no real price discovery on these index funds. Money comes in - buy all in the fund regardless of any fundamental. And many of those stocks aren't that liquid so in an exit and a dump, they will get destroyed.
Comment · 2 years ago
Sounds nice but it's because community resilience is not a thing almost anywhere that people prep.
Comment · 2 years ago
Bold statement. Based on what? Being better at tactics everyone would have used in the past if they had the might?

Fast forward to today and you can still come up with an easy list of 20 countries that exhibit human rights abuses on their own people on a day to day basis.

Comment · 2 years ago
IANA but I understand CLRA in California is very strong for this type of stuff.
Comment · 2 years ago
That was a gimmick that made the rounds to get around a debt ceiling. It doesn't escape the debt spiral the US is in.
Comment · 2 years ago
Ok now add in the $210 trillion in unfunded liabilities that aren't part of the national debt. And mix in a little wage gap, AI impact, political divide, foreign conflicts, wars and military spending. Oh and the current annual interest expense is about 38% of all federal individual and Corp tax revenue.

How do you service the debt? You print and print. And then that causes more unrest. You can't default and you can't keep rates high enough for long to matter on inflation. Because you have to print to service the debt which only grows with higher rates and time, which you have less of when unrest grows.

Comment · 2 years ago
Not alarmist at all. The can was kicked in 08. We are in a debt spiral. Government spending is a component of GDP, % of GDP is NOT the context. We are insolvent. 210+ trillion in unfunded liabilities! And about 70% of spending is mandatory.

The USD as world reserve currency is the biggest sword the US has.

At current rates or higher we just piss off every country as they trade in eurodollars. They have started the process and will move off USD unless we get back to a favorable rate for their debt loads.

With our debt load, it's either lower rates and continue to print and inflation (traditional and/or more asset bubbles). Or elevate rates and boost our interest expense and suppress the economy while fighting inflation until entities quit buying our debt and we lose significant power. And then, we still need our money printer and more inflation occurs.

As for me, I'm going with keeping recent "elevated" rates so big banks can scoop up smaller ones in short term and inflation has some check, then back to lower rates after election. I'll hold inflation hedging assets indefinitely.

US is screwed financially. Still better than most economies, but still screwed. Unfunded liabilities, AI, wage gap, education and housing costs, populism, political divide, geopolitical battles. There is no thesis that is great for the US unfortunately. It's best pitch is other countries are just as screwed or more.

There is no way out of the debt load. All solutions require printing like crazy. Or defaulting but you cannot give up the world reserve currency and the fallout would be catastrophic.

Comment · 2 years ago
Not a lawyer, but maybe a CLRA suit if you are in California. As I understand it - you may be able to get attorneys fees and punitive damages.
Comment · 2 years ago
Seriously. You can also buy a Firewalla or similar and activate the auto-blocking of porn sites with a button. I also block Roblox for a good chunk of the day too haha. But my 6 yr old figured out he could hop of wifi and use the cellular connection to get around the Roblox ban.

You can't prevent adolescents from accessing porn. I used to dial-up to playboy.com. Magazines were available too as dad's just left them out. Kids know VPNs nowadays too.

Their idea of having everyone submit government ID to view website content is ridiculous.

You can join the military at 17. But in Texas, I guess you can't look at porn for another year.

Comment · 2 years ago
> And yet, the vast majority of American language, culture, law, civil institutions, etc., come from the British. That’s why there are deep similarities between the Anglo countries on a variety of dimensions.

And yet the English language is a West Germanic language.

Culture is objectively NOT a vast majority British.

Law - so what. Civil institutions - not really. Country was inspired by Parliament and Magna Carta but devised a better foundation.

The US is nothing like Great Britain. There's vastly more impact from Italians, Irish, Germans, French, Spanish, Mexicans and Blacks in our cities than British. Almost nobody celebrates anything British in any city lol. We celebrate our victory over them and that's it. California and Texas alone are bigger than the entire UK. British descendants are just a blip on the 330M+ population.

Yet you find celebrations and cuisine and other cultures and impact from many other ancestries and heritages. US Infrastructure - Irish and Chinese built railroads. Highway system was derived from the Germans. The British are irrelevant and again, your people back home are just wrong in their understanding.

I'm not playing a word game. You have a very antiquated perspective and I don't think you quite understand America. That's not abnormal. Many you might consider way more American than you don't either.

I understand what you are saying though. I truly do. I just think it's a non-productive perspective for this country. What point does it serve to alienate and put people in a box?

I have Muslim employees. They don't partake in things that others do. It's ok. I know Bangladeshi & Indian men share a bunch of values and perspectives with southern US men over northerners in general too. They also share values with regard to hierarchy/age/position with many New Yorkers and Chicagoans.

No American citizen needs to feel so insecure because they might have different values or don't share a certain culture. People that have never left America don't share the same cultures or values either (north vs south, right vs left). We have distinct regional cultures and we have anomalies even within states (Miami, Vegas, Austin, Chicago).

Your original statement "If my ancestors had shaped the America that exists today it would look very different!"

That's the point of America. At some point there were Blacks, Mexicans, Irish and Italians that felt like that.

Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. And a general belief in exceptionalism is a tradition.

E pluribus enum - out of many, one. That's what happened. And what will continue to happen. Your British narrative is just false.

Comment · 2 years ago
100%! I posted data on American ancestry below which is pretty eye opening.

My grandfather was an American of German ancestry and served in the 95th infantry fighting in Europe in WW2. He's just as American as the wagon trail people. And Arnold Schwarzenegger is just as American as both of them too.

Comment · 2 years ago
> When people in my home country think of an “American” they think of people of British descent.

Your home county is just completely wrong in their understanding.

Top 3 Ancestry groups (2015 Census) are actually 1) German, 2) Black/African-American and 3) Mexican. English comes in #5. [1]

If you tally English/Scottish/Welsh, you are only talking about 10% of the US population is British descent. And that was from the Census in 2015. In 2020 they had a White category which was #1, and only 8.2M identified explicitly as English and 1.75M as Welsh.

> if you relocated the population of say Bangladesh to the US, and gave everyone US citizenship, they wouldn’t suddenly become “American.”

They would. You don't have to adhere to some sort of defined American culture or fully assimilate into it, it's not Denmark. If you travel to NYC, Miami, Atlanta, New Orleans, Iowa, LA, San Fran, Dallas, Seattle, you are going to get different people and experiences and cultures. I can assure you they are all very much Americans.

I'd argue that those that worry about a scale of Americanism and where they'd place their own fellow citizens are actually the least American if anything. We can call it the American Culture Paradox. Those that think they are the most American and categorize or judge others are actually the least American!

> The American founders clearly recognized as much when they created a distinction between native-born citizens and naturalized citizens and wrote it into the Constitution.

Yes because they had such massive distrust for the monarchy they didn't want outsiders infiltrating and taking over their new government and country.

[1] https://www.infoplease.com/us/race/ancestry-us-population-ra... (2015 Results)

Comment · 2 years ago
> As long as the keep rates where they are or higher, we should recover.

This is not the case and is actually impossible. Impossible they will maintain them or higher. And impossible we would recover.

The US is headed towards $1T in interest payments alone annually.

$34T in national debt AND $213T in unfunded liabilities. 2/3 of the budget is non-discretionary

The longer they stay elevated the more the average interest rate on debt goes up. For the US and the world since it's the reserve currency. This pisses everyone off.

Rates will go back down to around 2% because the US AND the world cannot sustain an expensive dollar. There's 65T in eurodollar debt (US dollar denominated debt) globally. [1] I've seen higher estimates too.

"Approximately half of all cross-border loans, international debt securities, and trade invoices are denominated in U.S. dollars, while roughly 40 percent of SWIFT messages and 60 percent of global foreign exchange reserves are in dollars." [2]

We aren't going to end up back around 2% because the Fed wants to. It's because we have to. You cannot maintain the world reserve currency at these rates after everyone got drunk off the lower rates for decades. And you cannot have the debt load we have and maintain these rates or higher. There's no easy way out of a debt spiral.

Just my opinion but rates will go lower. Printing will go into hyperdrive. Inflation will rip. There will be more unrest. Personally, I'm holding inflation-hedging assets.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/01/65-trillion-debt-bank...

[2] https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2022/07/the-u-...

Comment · 2 years ago
You never even commented that it can be expensive just said it's a terrible idea because it's "lose-lose" and a "traffic problem".

Anyway, I refuted ALL of your points and even supplied angles for keeping costs down while driving value to defined audiences.

I personally scraped and ML'd all AirBnB listings and calendar data every day for over a year to build a product. It didn't cost that much in time and $. Got a shit ton of value out of it. Someone even built a nice business doing exactly what I was doing.

If you look on the other thread for the OP, someone had done 100m products for $550/mo. You also must not understand that shopify and woocommerce have structured data available because you are talking about people being needed to keep product data up to date. They aren't scraping the frontend.

Personally I'm a riches in niches guy and a more defined audience and product set would be the way to go off of what they've started.

The ocean doesn't need to be boiled to provide value to consumers and to merchants here.

Comment · 2 years ago
Finding products that aren't on Amazon or other top sites is a problem for consumers. Google Shopping is pretty bad. Connecting buyers direct to merchants is a win and something they all want.

Every single entity that sells online is trying to boost their revenue share for direct to consumer as a mandate. Because they get more margin and they get to know their customer for ongoing marketing. The pandemic exposed many product manufacturers and brands that had such a high % in brick and mortar partners. They frantically tossed inventory onto Amazon. The only problems with that are

1) amazon tax on sales and

2) they don't get to know their customers.

Indeed aggregated job postings until it had traffic and then it became the place to post jobs.

Google was nothing against other providers until it did better search. And then they got traffic and built a solid ad product that providing bidding on effective cpc not highest bid like competitors were doing. They rewarded better peforming ads and rewarded themselves ($$$) at the same time and the rest is history.

Your thesis is not accurate. This can work. Typically though, these things require a lot of capital until they make real money. Tech costs and then marketing which is really education can be expensive.

Most users originate ecomm searches from Amazon (60%) [1]. Next highest is Google

If the search works really well though, word of mouth can be everything.

I'd probably focus on the audience that has income and would prefer to buy direct from merchants and not search and buy from Amazon which can be painful (too much crap, fakes, bad reviews, doesn't always have high end products, not always cheaper, etc). Maybe even focus on higher priced items first ($250 or $500 and up). They'll likely have better content associated with them, there's typically more margin, and there are a lot of high end products not sold on Amazon, only direct.

Hacker news has a good launch audience for this. Also probably Etsy buyers and merchants.

Not that you would be interested in this - but ecomm search for influencer sponsored products would probably do very well as a niche product. About 11% of searches originate on TikTok. Younger people are into who is hawking what for some reason lol. You could even rank most popular sponsored posts for the celebs too as a leaderboard for the biggest shills haha.

[1] https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/online-shoppers-...

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton