It hasn’t even been in existence for 15 years, literally any adult with an income can imagine what life without Airbnb is like.
I jumped over to the App Store the second Hades was announced, fully willing to pay full price, even though I could easily get the game for 30% cheaper on Steam.
Subscription required.
Fuck. That.
To be pedantic, they have a navy, just no large ships in said navy.
You overestimate the worth of your inconvenience.
How have the “interactive” features been now that there are fewer players? Is it a wasteland, or does the game still randomly place in user generated content from when the game first released?
Definitely second both of these. Cyberpunk 2077 post 2.0 is very solid, with an engaging, 100+ hour story. Similarly, control is a spectacular single player narrative, easily 20-30 hours of mindfuckery and atmospheric storytelling.
I thought Taiwan was China? Hard to invade yourself, eh, Xi?
Article from last December— not exactly 1:1, but they claim 0.38 injuries per million miles in AZ (vs 1.29 for humans), and 0.57 injuries per million miles in SF (vs 3.79). This is 2.4 million miles per accident with injuries; I couldn’t find similar data on just accidents in general.
Tesla by this same metric is 0.13, for all accidents, not just those with injuries (lower is better).
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/12/human-drivers-crash-a-lot-more-than-waymos-software-data-shows/
Yeah, no shit, you’re the fucking CEO
He would still run from prison, zero doubt. He’d announce a running mate, like MTG, and play the Martyr card all the way to Jan 6, 2025.
He could still be elected and have his VP sworn in while he is “incapacitated”. They then pardon him, appoint him president-for-life, and wage all out war on any remaining political opponents.
It’s not reasoning, or an argument for or against, it is just a statement. I’d admit that it’s probably a tautology.
What the post described is a taxation and societal problem, not a problem with investing or compound interest in general.
I’d easily agree that society is unfair, and that our taxation policies are directly antagonistic to the middle class, but again, this is simply math (and though it is theoretical, microeconomics).
The best description I have seen for single store franchisees is, you’ve paid a lot to give yourself a job. They are not lucrative, and in fact, are capital intensive, and often predatory.
There is a very high up front cost, and you generally do not own the real estate. This means you are locked into 30 year leases, often with complicated terms that are solely beneficial to the land owner.
Next, with regards to liquidity, if you don’t own the real estate, you often can’t get multiple business loans with a single franchise, so you must secure the loan with your personal assets, which means you will go personally bankrupt if you hit a rough patch.
Then, after dealing with the complicated business to business transactions and legal work, you still have to deal with the corporate bullshit, taxes, and supervisory duties, particularly if you do not already have a strong business partner to do this for you.
Pretty much, unless you are independently wealthy, own the real estate in a high traffic location, or already have multiple other franchises, it’s a losing venture that will kill your soul and eat every dollar you have.
Tens of thousands of children, killed or injured. And people wonder how the Palestinians become radicalized against Israel, the West, and the United States, or why there can’t be peace in the Middle East?
Forgiveness is probably the furthest thing from being on their minds.
What does fairness have to do with it? Compound interest is just math.
One could trivially make an argument that we should redistribute the wealth among the population, but there is not a clear way how to do this effectively, or it would have been done already.
The hard part is taking on the appropriate amount of risk in order to actualize those gains; a bank won’t just give you a 10% interest rate, you have to work your ass of for it. An entrepreneur needs to assess the landscape and invest in what the market will want tomorrow, and most people guess suboptimally (3-6%), or end up losing money, whether in fact (negative returns) or relative to inflation (0-3%).
Even pointing to the S&P 500, as most people do, you still need to make the conscious decision to sell and take profits, FOMO be damned. Or alternatively, taking a perceived loss but actual profit (e.g., you didn’t sell right at the peak, but that’s usually okay). It’s not easy, and most people don’t have the time or stomach for it; these people are best served by long term, government-backed bonds, after which you will come out only slightly ahead of inflation.
Using the rule of 72, and a 3% bond rate, it would actually take you 24 years to double your money, not seven. And that, my friend, is why you and I are not billionaires.
And guess what those business have? Valuations. Stock price is just an aggregate indicator of the valuation for a company, for the given percentage of shares that are publicly traded. But private companies have valuations, too, and even if they’re not tied to a public stock offering, those valuations are used to form these Billionaire lists.
Same thing with real estate. The value of any asset is based on what someone is willing to pay. Sometimes, you’ll find some crazy billionaire or investment firm who grossly overvalues an asset relative to their peers, and that insane overvaluation does get rolled into those lists.
But such is the nature of economics. You’ve neither gained nor lost value until someone pays you. Until then, it’s anyone’s guess.
It’s not like these billionaires are spending this money, so it’s just been invested for 7 years. What’s the old adage, Rule of 72? Given a 10% rate of return, they would be expected to double their money in…
…seven years.
While the tax policies certainly aren’t helping the majority of the population, let’s not pretend compound interest isn’t a thing.