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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Assuming legally married or sufficient confidence to not have a break-up be a risk factor here. Gotta say that part.

    To me, 4.5% and 5% (taxed) is not sufficiently different to be worth the mind space. If the world was perfect, you should do the CD thing. In real life, there could be a glitch or a mistake of timing that causes an issue with payment of a loan or an auto draft or something, you have to think about it and make sure it’s still paying and your CD is re-upping at a high enough interest rate etc. Not worth it in the slightest to me.





  • Why are 50 percent of prisoners minorities?

    Because the system is racist and bad and minorities are disproportionately imprisoned. Nobody here is arguing against that. They are just pointing out that if 50% of the “enslaved” are white, that is a different sort of thing than the race-specific enslavement of black people. Things can be not-literal-slavery while still being bad.

    What happens if you refuse to work?

    I assume you can’t refuse without a medical exception of some kind. These are imprisoned people, they also can’t leave. Not trying to excuse everything about prison labor but as a society we have decided the state has the capacity to remove rights from people as a punishment after due process has been afforded to them. We can argue that it’s not right or humane to force labor on an imprisoned population without saying it’s literally slavery. “It’s not literally slavery” is not a defense of the system.

    We’re not arguing “well prisoners can’t be sold to other prisons so that proves it’s not slavery” because that one difference doesn’t prove anything, just like one similarity doesn’t prove anything.

    It may not be inherited at birth but is the system setup to capture successive generations of prisoners from the same families?

    …no? Even if you include Capitalism and wealth inequality and racist policing as part of “the system” maybe members of the same family are disproportionately likely to be imprisoned because they are the same race and likely similar economic status, that isn’t because a parent was imprisoned. There’s nothing targeting children of imprisoned people. And even then, you’re trying to compare disproportionate odds to be imprisoned to literal 100% ownership of slaves’ children by slave masters? What are we talking about here?


  • It’s also time-bound for the length of the sentence. So like sure it’s slavery…temporarily, non-inherited, non-race-specific, as a punishment for a crime, at least sometimes paid.

    Which is just a lot of caveats.

    Similarly, having a job is just temporary, non-inherited, non-race-specific paid slavery where you get to pick your slave master. Sure you can make that argument but it’s not a very good one.

    A lot of stuff about the US prison system is really bad, including this part, it’s just not literally slavery, and it doesn’t have to be slavery to be really bad and need changing.





  • It’s doing fine. There are many free trade deals in the works around the world, the WTO is still chugging along as normal.

    I’d actually say the idea of minimal government control over the economy is still the majority opinion in the US, Biden’s Child Tax Credits are tax cuts, Trump had tax cuts. UBI which has been growing in popularity on the Left is really a neoliberal solution to welfare.

    And on trade we just renegotiated NAFTA and kept it and we’re working on a trade deal with the UK. You think the trade barriers to China are this big turn against neoliberalism but nobody has even had the ability to pass a law about it, the sanctions law is all repurposed from the Cold War.





  • Say you have $7000 day 1. Option 1 is to invest it all immediately. Option 2 is to invest only a portion and just keep the rest in cash until you invest later.

    In the long run, the invested side always does better than the cash side, interest rates on a savings account by definition never match the long run gains in the stock market. You get a premium for your money in the stock market because it can go negative in the short term.

    There is a reason to do Option 2, if you’re saving for a house or a car or something you probably don’t want to risk the market going down right before you want to make that purchase. Or if you are very sensitive to losses and you would he anxious or devastated if you put the money in and saw the value drop.

    But for retirement funds, you want to maximize long term gains so it makes the most sense to put it in Day 1.





  • It’s basically the gold standard. The country not having the ability to devalue is exactly the point.

    The monetary trilemma is that you have to choose 2: monetary independence, exchange rate stability, and free capital flow. Dollarizing picks exchange rate stability over monetary independence. There are downsides but it’s a legitimate choice, there are upsides too.