Okay. But there's a double standard when it comes to food. Why do fat people get a pass? Why is it legal to eat cheeseburgers and drink soda? The health risks from obesity are statistically just as bad as smoking. It's the leading cause of preventable death in the US. 1/3 of America is obese. It's a larger problem than smoking, statistically.
I don't smoke or vape. But it's a glaring double standard. McDonalds can market to kids, lure them with toys, and people who are 300+ lbs are allowed to eat whatever they want, as much as they want.
Why is it legal for parents to feed a 12 year old Cheetos and Pepsi? It's just as damaging health wise. In my city's public school there are teenagers who have gout. Yet nobody cares.
Downvote all you want. The facts are the facts. Unhealthy eating is just as bad as smoking. If the government is going to regulate our personal health choices, then it needs to be consistent.
Neither is nicotine, necessarily. Neither is smoking if it isn’t done long term and on a regular basis. But of course people who eat Big Macs tend to do it more than occasionally.
People don’t have to intake sugar. They don’t have to intake meat either.
You think I’m being facetious, but I’m dead serious. I’ve lost one family member to obesity and another suffers from type 2 diabetes.
If your Big Mac comes with sliced tomatoes and/or french fries you actually do have to intake some nicotine if you want to eat the whole thing. ;)
I agree with the parent, banning nicotine outright because of its perceived risk/benefit ratio while still allowing Coca Cola to advertise and sell bottled diabetes and tooth decay is a blatant double standard, and the fact that drinking water is essential for survival doesn't change that.
Not that I'm in favor of banning (so called) unhealthy life choices, I think that every adult individual should be given enough information to be able to decide themselves whether the rewards outweighs the risks in each case. I see no reason why drug dealers of any kind should be allowed to run ad campaigns though, so I'm fine with banning that.
Some say debt to GDP does not matter, because we can print dollars. My question to them is: Would a 1000% matter? 100000%?
At some point people will start demanding the government provide everything because they’ve been told debt doesn’t matter and we can print money. It looks like we’re reaching that point because “Main Street” seeemingly realized in 2008 that there was no limit. That it’s a game of chicken with the Fed. Let’s give everyone $2000 / mo and free healthcare and education. Why have any limit on government spending? The Fed will monetize it after all!
Yang might not win this time around, but Yang #2 will be more popular and have bigger demands. Especially when another downtown and another bailout occurs. It’s getting very hard to convince Joe Sixpack that the printing press should only be used for the banks. Yang is the canary in the coal mine.
I’ve experienced it first hand. One day my card was declined while paying for dinner. I paid cash and thought something was wrong with their card reader.
I checked my bank account, and it had $30k in it (my life savings at the time). So I thought nothing was wrong and went to bed.
Next morning I try to pay for groceries and my card is again declined. I call my bank. They say my account has been flagged and it’s frozen. They can’t tell me why, or how to appeal.
I go into the bank. I ask why I wasn’t notified my account was frozen. They said they “oh sorry someone should have called you”. I ask what I did to get my account frozen. They said they don’t know, it’s part of some social security electronic audit. They say it’s all automated and because it’s the government it was out of their control. I ask how long will it take to unfreeze they say they don’t know. They tell me to call an 800 number, and that nobody in the physical branch has any power over really anything.
I tell them my rent check is going to bounce, they said “we’re sorry”.
Long story short: 2 weeks later my account is unfrozen for no reason. I was never given a reason. I missed rent. I couldn’t buy food.
I committed no crime, and was never accused of committing any crime. This was a personal account not involved in any business. I deposited paychecks into it and bought food and paid my rent. That’s mostly it.
Just FYI money in the bank is not yours. If the government wants to freeze it for no reason they can, despite all the people who say otherwise. It happened to me. This was at Chase bank in US. I now keep thousands in cash hidden in various places, and bought some bitcoin as well. At least if the thugs in the federal government want it they’ll have to fucking physically take it.
That really is awful, and I'm sorry that happened to you.
I also moved to hoard a few types of liquid assets, and also have accounts with three banks (and multiple cards) to reduce the risk of a single-bank causing this level of impact to me.
I see, but what I know is that it's allowed to use multiple banks for the purpose of increasing the amount of money under FDIC insurance (which is more like $100k/bank, not $10k/bank).
There are services that split your money between multiple banks just for this reason.
> Long story short: 2 weeks later my account is unfrozen for no reason. I was never given a reason.
it is illegal for the bank to inform you of any AML investigation undertaken whether internally or the FBI or fincen or any of the other federal bodies. if you don't like the way this is done, i suggest you take it up to your congressmen.
That seems like absence of explanation is an explanation in and of itself.
If the bank can give you a straight answer, it's clearly not AML. If they start giving you no answer, it's presumably that. Id' expect if you were seriously in that game, that's one of the clear signs something's awry and you'd better start activating panic measures.
I'm also sort of confused about the concept of freezing accounts during an investigation. If it was late stage and they were saying "okay, shut it down, we'll be sending over the cops with the arrest warrant within an hour", that's one thing, but any sudden movement on accounts is likely to change the behaviour you're trying to monitor and document. The darkweb market seizures seemed smarter in that regard-- they let some of them run with no obvious changes so they could gather data, only taking it down once the case was completely built.
I don’t even know what agency in the government did this. Or that I was part of an investigation. Or anything. Different people at different positions in the bank would say the same thing “the computer says your account is flagged” “the system says your social security number is flagged” etc. When I would ask what “flagged” means they would just repeat nonsensical shit. All they would really tell me is that they had no control because a government system had flagged it.
> you don't like the way this is done, i suggest you take it up to your congressmen.
I wish they would listen. Everyone in congress right now supports an unconstrained federal government that does things like freeze your bank account without any reason or due process. Both parties are hellbent on expanding their power at the expense of liberty in the name of safety or security.
I think US politicians' failure to act effectively in the interests of US citizens is caused more by the concentration of political power than it is by bad people. The US isn't alone among developed countries in having this problem, but there are plenty of developed countries that manage to avoid it. The answer is more democratic accountability, in the form of measures such as proportional representation.
Which is why some (e.g. Bitfinex) use warrant canaries [1]. I would love if we have a warrant canary button tied to all our accounts of any kind (banking, social media, netflix subscriptions etc.)
I think there's a third possibly: namely that Congress has somehow allowed the FBI to make such rules, but could reclaim control in the future.
As I understand it, a lot of things work like this in some unitary (as opposed to federal), parliamentary (as opposed to presidential) democracies. In at least some such countries all governmental power ultimately depends on the elected legislature, but it can be delegated to other bodies (including to the executive and to local government) as the legislature chooses. The legislature can reclaim its power, too, even from directly-elected local authorities.
I would suggest researching how to invest your savings, otherwise it's being eaten away by inflation, and there is no savings account that has enough interest to match that rate currently.
It's harsh to say it, but that statement is a demonstration of your ignorance.
I see this a lot online, but this is not good advice. Savings are meant to provide liquidity in an emergency. If you have $20,000 in a savings account, you can walk to an ATM and withdraw some of that immediately. If you have $20,000 locked up in mutual funds, well... you’d better hope your rainy day has some lead time.
Investing is great. Put $10,000 in something diverse and passive and sit on it. But also keep a savings account for immediate emergencies, and keep some cash on hand for even more immediate emergencies.
Yes, that is called an emergency fund. I didn't want to go into a big explainer of how a typical pre-tax & post-tax index fund savings brokerage works + cash emergency fund in savings works to a random on the internet while there are many other better resources out there.
I can wire money out of my Vanguard (mutual funds) account before 4 PM today and it will be in receiving bank tomorrow mid-day.
I can withdraw money from my ETrade or IB margin accounts using the debit card that came with those accounts (or write a check on them), same as you can with a savings account.
I do keep a few thousand at a local bank and have a separate checking account at USAA that I use for most daily/monthly transactions, but that's for convenience not access/liquidity reasons.
Losing 2-3% per year is better than losing 10/20/30 % or god forbid >50% of your savings - which you cannot recoup.
It depends on what they are saving for - if they need the 20-30K a year down the line it is alright to keep it in the savings account.
If it is for general long term asset building - may be they haven't yet figured out how best to start investing. Again no harm to keep it parked till you figure it out instead of investing in haste and then regret later - for the rest of your life.
I know people who have been sitting on the sidelines afraid to invest in what must be the tail end of the longest bull market we've ever seen.
One in particular has been sitting on the sidelines since before the 2016 election season. They have foregone about a 50% gain that they'd have gotten over that period. That money also can never be recouped.
Yup. You’ve got it right. I am far more interested in preserving capital than chasing returns at this point. So keeping it parked while using it to capitalize cash flow from businesses and real estate is more to my liking than making one giant bet on an index fund over 30-40 years. Don’t get me wrong I’m not knocking index funds they have their place.
May be you can start with small steps to test the waters. Amount that you are ok to lose in an extreme event. Which might cause you some inconvenience but not great distress. Perhaps 5-10% of your savings in equities. Watch how you repond to the market swings (both up and down) and factor that in for your future investments.
Though I am not there yet, the Permanent Portfolio [1] makes sense to me. The key insight is that for the money you have lost, you can never recover the energy/time/life you have spent in earning it. So, capital preservation (wrt inflation) is more important than chasing higher returns - which frankly are not under your control.
This is the loss aversion fallacy. (The irrational belief that losing something you already have is worse than losing a chance to getting something you don't have yet.)
You can never recover the time you spent earning money to make up for missing investment gains.
This is not a fallacy, and certainly not an irrational belief :). It is a very rational response to things you have no control over.
May be this needs some elaboration. For me, the low probability event of blowing up your life's worth of saving beats the ephemeral gains you would expect to get from a higher risk investments, every single time. For me, it is irrational to think otherwise, something I can't understand why people do. I will invest in the riskier investments only so much as I am comfortable to lose completely.
And there is the rub, with the modern banking systems, it is very difficult to achieve that unless you use real hard assets like gold which is becoming difficult, real estate which is quite illiquid.
Is one missing out on potential gains ? Perhaps, but one is ok with that.
P.S
>> You can never recover the time you spent earning money to make up for missing investment gains.
I didn't quite understand this. The investment gains are not certain or guaranteed. You talk as if they are a certainty.
You could also take a look at portfoliocharts.com, which shows you how that and other portfolios have worked out over the past 50 years, in both the US and Japan. You can play around with your own variations too.
The PP does pretty well at limiting drawdowns. A variation that works especially well is the "Golden Butterfly," which just takes the PP and weights a little more towards stocks. In my own experiments on the site, I've found it also helps a lot to include international stocks, and weight towards small value.
In a savings account.That way if the checking account gets compromised, the majority of your money are safe. A common way for a checking account to be compromised is for someone to steal the debit card associated with it. That way is has access to most of your money. There are withdraw limits that kind of limit the impact of such scenario, but you can still loose plenty of money. Also, money associated with a debit card are your own money, so if you loose them the bank can not do many things, in contrast to credit cards, where they can cancel transactions.
The main idea is to keep separate accounts for "everyday life" and savings.
I am sorry this happened to you. In future, at the minimum, you should have 3 accounts.
* In bank 1, a current account, for everyday use. This should not have more money than 1-2 months of expenses.
* In bank 1, a savings account, which is your primary savings.
* In bank 2, a savings account, which has enough money for a few months of rent.
* Stash somewhere in your house, in cash, enough money for a week of outside food and transport to family/friends who can take you in, in case of you losing your primary accommodation.
This all depends on you being rich enough to afford all of this, but I imagine 30K in the bank account is rich enough. Also, as others have pointed out, you should consider investing.
We make a point to have backup accounts with some small but non-trivial amount of money in them for cases like this. Normally when we run into it is if our debit card for our main bank gets compromised.
Nobody knows. HN has downvotes for a secret group of users. HN weights votes using a secret algorithm, so some users may have the ability to grey out posts with a single click.
This is pretty poor behavior from the bank. But for it to be a form of control, their actions must lead to you doing something what they want. And I don’t see that here.
It's an outrageous story, and I'm sure it was bank incompetence, but what triggered it? Law enforcement wouldn't order their account frozen for no reason -- it was probably a stupid reason, but still there's some reason.
I don’t get the fascination with Yurts. It’s a tent. People stopped living in tents as soon as they could, because they don’t stay cool, don’t stay warm, and don’t stay dry. They only work well in gentle, temperate climates.
The one advantage to tents is mobility, but Yurts are pretty much permanent tents. They’re the worst tent.
If you’re a nomadic group in the plains with not much wood around and a herd of animals it makes sense. Build tents with skins, burn the poo for fire.
Your premise is wrong. In all of your analysis, you forgot that people have hobbies, they get bored, and they do things for fun. Don't judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree.
I think Portland is pretty temperate compared to Mongolia, where such dwellings are traditional. Also, they better insulated than the mobile kind of tent and therefore are not Pareto-inferior.
16x40 tiny house built by the amish costs 16k delivered. Includes 2 lofts for beds. Exterior completely done, interior is up to you (that includes wiring, sheetrock, carpet, insulation appliances etc.)
49k gets you quite a lot of interior. Total square footage is 6x this yurt. Pretty though.
The Supreme Court has been a treasonous organization since Wickard v Filburn (8 of 9 justices then of course appointed by Roosevelt)
NSLs are unconstitutional.
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
They did rapidly expand the monetary supply and it did cause inflation. Assets are sky high (stocks and real estate). Properties are priced 10-20x cash flow. Stocks are similarly trading at absurd earnings ratios.
When the Fed monetizes assets (QE) it adds to bank reserves (monetary base) AND adds to demand deposits at commercial banks (money supply) that held those assets. Where does the Fed get money to purchase the assets? They create it. Obviously no “printing” is happening it’s on a computer.
When the Fed buys the assets they add credit, giving the banks more than they need in reserves. Banks then seek to make a profit by lending that extra money, thus “stimulating” the economy.
The whole point of QE is increasing liquidity by increasing the supply of money.
Nothing, except soon there will be annoying legalese on every website form. Just like the GDPR. Large businesses will benefit at the expense of smaller ones. Lawyers will make more money selling these legalese templates, and sometimes when a big company doesn’t pay the right bean counter they’ll end up being investigated by regulators, and paying the state money to continue doing the same thing.
But it will be celebrated as a heroic victory because “privacy good. Business bad. I want a banana.”
The GDPR does a lot to protect user data. As someone that’s implemented stuff at a huge company for GDPR and at my startup, it was waaaay harder at the larger company. The ICO has been beyond helpful with the few questions I’ve had recently and implementation for my startup has been fairly straightforward.
As you proceed to state absolutely nothing. Before GDPR my information was in a bunch of databases managed by other people. After GDPR my information is in the same databases managed by the same people. Except now they have legalese stating this totally fucking obvious fact.
Before GDPR if my information was hacked and used to hurt me, the business was not liable. After GDPR they still are not liable. Oh and if they violate the GDPR the state gets money, but the victims don’t. Such amazing protection of consumer data...
Dude, GDPR's effects just began. Give it time. A sudden enforcement of GDPR would destroy too many business and so it's being enforced gradually. Still, there are beginning to discuss the complete outlaw of the real time bidding in adtech because completely incompatible with the GDPR. That means destroying bilions of dollars of businesses, so they go slow until there's enough political consensus to do so without fear of retaliative lobbying. This is not something that is done overnight.
Yes. There will be recessions and periods of growth. The economy is a chaotic non deterministic system. It is never stable and is not predictable. It’s not homogenous either. Some sectors grow while others contract.
When the next recession comes nobody knows. I think the worry is that when the next haircut on stocks happens the Fed can’t stimulate the economy with interest rates because they’re already zero bound. That could mean a long recession and slow recovery, and possibly catastrophic considering that most Americans choose to put all their retirement savings in the stock market.
Historically, there have been huge stock crashes periodically. You could wake up tomorrow and see a 10-20% drop in stocks for multiple days. It’s happened before.
Car companies know the writing is on the wall with regards to pollution and EV.
> The administration’s plans have been further complicated because major automakers have told the White House that they do not want such an aggressive rollback. In July, four automakers formalized their opposition to Mr. Trump’s plans by signing a deal with California to comply with tighter emissions standards if the broader rollback goes through
> The Justice Department has opened an antitrust inquiry into the four major automakers that struck a deal with California this year to reduce automobile emissions
> Now, the Justice Department is investigating whether the four automakers violated federal antitrust laws by reaching a deal with California, on the grounds that the agreement could potentially limit consumer choice, those people said.
That makes no sense at all. “We will comply with stricter emissions control without government intervention, so we signed a deal with California to formalize it.” Where would better emissions control harm consumer choice?
It has to do with anti collusion laws. Companies are not allowed to all agree to raise prices together, for example. And tougher pollution standards is more expensive to manufacture. So if any one company decided on their own to raise their own standards, they would be at a competitive disadvantage if everyone else was selling cheaper cars. So the only way to do this is to get everyone else to agree to the same thing. But that type of agreement is illegal, which is why companies will often lobby for tougher legal standards because everyone else would have to comply also.
Surely the "consumer choice" argument doesn't apply to the used market? Besides, since LA is the city that practically invented smog why don't they have the right to regulate their air quality as they see fit? An emissions standard that works well in the great plains may not work so well in the great cities.
No it doesn’t. An agreement to make new cars with better emissions does not affect the used car market. Now, a regulation about enforcing those emission standards... that would affect the market.
That's not how these regulations work. There are no controls on the resale market in California. There is an emissions inspection regime but it's for SO2, not CO2.
It’s the market solving the problem without government intervention. Isn’t that the whole premise of the Republican Party? “Let the free market solve itself”?
It is illegal for a bunch of companies to come together and say "we all agree to not sell below this price", or "we all agree to not sell this cheap thing".
Anti trust law is something that both parties support. It is not controversial to say that price fixing should be illegal. And this applies to both Republicans and democrats.
yeah, I think they realize that as soon as someone reasonable is in office again that the rules are going to immediately revert. If they have made design changes to their production lines that aren't immediately compatible with CA's regulations when that happens they are going to have to spend a lot of money to fix those inconsistencies. I imagine that the accountants are saying "just make the cars cleaner anyway".
One little nuance you have to keep in mind there is that many automakers now generally like emission regulations. The reason is because it creates a cycle of obsolescence. Make a car that will be noncompliant with expected regulations in 'x' years and you now have a guaranteed revenue cycle. I'm not saying this is good or bad - it could well be that even if they have bad intentions it results in a good outcome, so who cares? But these little nuances are, I think, important in considering the big picture as you're doing with your statement.
Another example along these lines is asthma inhalers. The reason asthma inhalers cost so much in the US, even though it's for a dirt cheap drug that's long since out of patent protection, is because pharmaceutical companies lobbied to get rid of the CFC based delivery mechanism for "environmental reasons." They lobbied on this hard, for years. And finally succeeded. And once the new rules passed they immediately threw a hoard of patents at the new mandated HFC delivery system and jacked the prices up skyhigh. [1] So you'd think rolling back drug regulations would have the pharmaceutical industry jumping for joy, but in this case they specifically utilized regulations and environmentalism to create a massive profit that would not have otherwise existed.
Ultimately a lot of these issues are a lot more opaque than they might seem at a glance.
Where are you getting this idea from? Most really old cars are exempt from emissions rules, and I've never actually heard of someone failing an SO2 test (smog, which _isn't_ CO2) unless something was egregiously broken with their engine, like a missing cat. They even have state-certified mechanics that can fix your car if it fails smog. It barely affects the used market at all.
Inhalers without CFCs are cheap in every other country in the world. Your problems with the cost of healthcare here have little to do with some rules around CFCs.
> One little nuance you have to keep in mind there is that many automakers now generally like emission regulations. The reason is because it creates a cycle of obsolescence. Make a car that will be noncompliant with expected regulations in 'x' years and you now have a guaranteed revenue cycle
Not sure about other countries, but in the US, emission regulations don't work like that. Cars only must meet the standard that was in place when they were originally sold.
Your understanding of the second-hand car market is incorrect. Promulgation of standards for initial sale of new vehicles has no impact whatsoever on the resale of cars.
> Make a car that will be noncompliant with expected regulations in 'x' years and you now have a guaranteed revenue cycle.
But that's not actually how it works? You can continue driving a car legal for sale under 2019 emissions regs, effectively forever. Yes, every so often they 'have to' redesign the cars to meet newer regs, but nobody's forced to buy them. They buy them because they have cool new features that people want, or a new body style, or whatever.
