But we’re not talking about getting money in the future. We’re talking about getting full ownership of a house in the future, while being able to live in it for the full 50 years that it is being paid off.

The bank also isn’t talking about getting money in the future, they’re getting a steady revenue stream for 50 years.

So, I don’t see how this really applies to 50 year mortgages.

Poor timing? You bought at the absolute peak of something known as The United States Housing Bubble. Your experience is not typical. You’re one of the unlucky people who had the absolute worst timing possible.

The idea of using a home as part of your retirement should be a lie, but unfortunately for the vast majority of people it isn’t. The world would be much better off if people only got what they paid back when they sold their houses. But, the reality is that most people have been absurdly lucky and their homes have been going up faster than all but the best stocks on the stock market. You just happened to be someone who jumped on the ride at exactly the wrong time.

Normally that only works if you have DRM that locks the games to your platform, so that people don’t get the hardware at a discount then use it to run someone else’s software.

But, in Valve’s case, it really has no competitors in the PC gaming space. That might not last forever, but it almost certainly will last as long as this PC / console is around.

And you insist you’re an adult.

Hmm, very childish.

You sound like a child who is so desperate to sound like an adult that they obsess over meaningless things like using the correct emojis.

What about the reed instruments where you have to give your instrument oral, and it’s your tongue and lip control which determines the note you produce?

You also make music nose by beating animal hide with sticks.

Not “Public Domain”. That has a specific meaning in copyright law. It’s about creative works that are owned by the public and not subject to copyright.

What the judge decided is that their outputs are Public Records: “qualified as public records subject to the state’s Public Records Act”.

Put a license plate reader indoors?

Are people also using eggplants improperly? And, you’re proud to never have said thank you?

You can also type “thanks” or “please”. Both of those show the hands together emoji.

Unless that man was on call and was paged because something broke.

We may have to wait for another three years.

Which is also a clue that he isn’t short selling.

There are two ways of making money when a stock goes down. One is to sell the stock short. The other is to buy a put option.

A short sale is extremely risky. Say the shares are at $50 and you think they’re going to go down, so you sell 1000 shares you don’t own (short selling) and agree to buy them back by some date in the future. If you’re right and the stock tanks to $20, you can buy the shares and pocket $30,000. But, if the stock doesn’t sink, you might have to buy the shares for $60 each, so you lose $10 per stock, or $10,000. If there are tons of people shorting the stock, you can get a short squeeze, where everybody needs to buy shares to close out their short position, and because everybody needs to buy, the stock price rockets up, so you get people having to buy a stock that used to be $50 for $200, leading to $150,000 in losses for a 1000 share short where the maximum possible gain was only $50,000.

An option is much safer. There you’re buying the option to sell the shares at a certain price at some time in the future. Say you think a stock is going to crash. It’s currently trading at $50/share. You can buy 1000 put options at a strike price of $40 with a date 1 month in the future. It will cost you something to buy those options, say $1 per share, so $1000. If the stock goes up or stays at $50, your bet didn’t work out. You don’t have to sell the shares, you just tear up the options contract. You’re out whatever you paid for the option, say $1000 here. But, say the stock tanks and it’s now at $20/share. Now your bet did pay off. You can buy 1000 shares at $20 each for $20,000, then immediately exercise your option and sell them for $40,000, netting you $20,000. With put options the upside is significantly smaller, but the potential downside is tiny. It’s just the cost of the options.

Someone predicting a crash within 3 years isn’t going to short sell the shares. Between now and then the shares could continue to rise for a while, and they’d be on the hook for a huge payout in that case. If they buy options the down side is much smaller. They may have to re-buy new options a bunch of times. But in the worst case they just have to let the options expire unused and eat whatever cost they paid for them.

For the coming AI crash, I don’t think it will be very soon. I think there will be a crash. But, I think the government will try to keep the bubble from bursting. Too much of the US economy is now invested in AI. So, even under Biden, or Harris, or Obama they’d try to prevent a catastrophic crash by using taxpayer money to prevent the most damaging bubble burst. With Trump, there’s going to be even more government interference in the market. His backers are crypto bros. They’re the ones making him billions on his meme coins. They bankrolled JD Vance’s political career. If they demand that he rescues their failing companies, he’ll do it. And, since the GOP does whatever Trump wants, they’ll just fork over literal trillions in taxpayer dollars to keep things from crashing. But, eventually there will have to be a crash, because there’s just not a sustainable business model in any of this, at least not at anything like the current scale.

Also, the way short positions work is that the people who are most successful at shorting a stock are the ones who have a megaphone to announce they’ve shorted the stock. They go on as many podcasts, news shows, interviews, etc. as possible to say things are going to crash. Because, the more people who hear about it, the more hesitation there will be to invest, which means the more chances of their prediction coming through.

So, he’s not just some guy who is betting on the bubble bursting, he’s a guy who is now heavily incentivized to cause the bubble to burst so he can make his investors a lot of money.

but it never spilled over into politics quite to this degree.

Sure. But, look at the media environment. From the founding of the US to the invention of radio, there were newspapers. Sure, there was a strong element of yellow journalism, but to print a newspaper you still needed a printing press so it wasn’t a free-for-all. Then with radio, and then TV in the 50s there were only a handful of sources of information for everybody to follow. It’s only really since the 2010s that the media environment has been a free-for-all with anybody able to put up their own podcast, or put up videos on YouTube, or have their own blog, or post on Twitter, or whatever.

Politicians used to be able to do backroom deals. Those used to get a bad name, but to a certain extent it was a good thing, because at least they were dealing, instead of causing things to come to a deadlock. Now, if anybody dares to talk to someone on “the other team”, they get raked over the coals.

Russia was found to be sponsoring the NRA

Sure, they spent some money, and had some success. But, they hardly needed to push. The NRA’s goals were already aligned with Russia’s. The NRA has over 5 million members, and they were hardly upset with the direction Russia was pushing.

the rise of evangelicals as a voting group seems to be a co-ordinated world-wide phenomenon.

Not to me. There doesn’t seem to be much coordination there. There are just grifters seeing an opportunity.

I’d argue that those same elites thrived more under stable economic growth than an unstable one

It’s hardly the first time that an elite and powerful group tried to use a movement or a politician to further their interests and then found out that they couldn’t control what they’d unleashed.

I think you’re overestimating the influence of Russia and China and underestimating the dysfunction in the US.

Civilization is doing pretty well outside the US. If the US disappeared tomorrow, the rest of the world would do significantly better. I don’t know how the world will deal with climate change, but without the US it would be easier to make progress. The tech firms blowing up the AI bubble, and invading our privacy are nearly all American. A lot of the private equity firms destroying the world are also American. If the US could hurry up and finish collapsing, the rest of the world’s civilization could just move on.

Which bubble was that?

AFAIK none of the previous AI bubbles really had much investment. There was hype, but it was hype within the computer science, or cognitive science fields. But, maybe there’s a financial bubble bit that I’m missing.