ORH_wxman

Yep pretty much. The larger institutions will find a way to make a boatload of fees off popular trading products regardless if they are fiduciarily responsible investments (see financial crisis). I’m not anything near boomer-age, but I don’t see them as anything but gambling. Esp in the stage they are at now. If they were actually easy to use for small transactions then it might be different...though they will never remove the issue of being non-physical. But who knows, maybe some of these cryptos actually become useful currency outside of a niche market. Nobody’s made a great case for it yet, though.

You're giving a technical explanation for a short term move....that is something that absolutely can happen again. What we're still missing with crypto is fundamentals. It is still a speculative play. Doesn't mean it is an incorrect bet, but this is much more akin to volatile commodities than equities....except crypto isn't even physical like commodities.

We've already seen it crash before....BTC went from 20k to 3k in under a year between late 2018 and 2019...an 85% reduction...it obviously has gone back up now well past it's previous highs, but would it really be shocking if it tanked to like 8k or something? What if the true value of BTC is really just a niche market somewhere in the neighborhood of 5k and not an order of magnitude higher than that? The idea is that we should invest in crypto because it keeps going up even if we cannot explain the fundamentals behind the rise. That makes it speculative.

Oh absolutely...never said you can't. You're talking to a dude who used to count cards in blackjack and got tossed from a lot of casinos, lol. It's just that people should understand the difference between the two. For sure...that's why I mentioned looking at technicals and educating yourself when you pick individual stocks. Individual stocks can be very much like gambling with commodities. Index funds are the safer play and require less knowledge.

The stock market is a good long term investment....so you shouldn't get too wrapped up in the spikes and dips if you are a long term investor. The crashes can be scary....1987 crash, dotcom bubble crash, financial crisis in 2008, etc. But it is different than speculative commodities markets. I would tell people if they want to make a long term investment, then go with some safe index equity funds or do your own research into technicals of specific stocks and invest accordingly. If someone was selling me crypto as a safe long term investment, I'd pass. I would call that gambling....which is fine if you want to try and score a big speculative strike. But it's still gambling and anyone putting money into it should be aware of the high volatility and downside that goes along with the upside.

Huge institutions investing it in it doesn't necessarily mean it's "safe" to invest in. You should still understand exactly what you are doing and gain technical knowledge. It's more likely these institutions are eyeing its popularity to exploit rather than as some great long term investment. Remember, these same institutions "invested" in countless bundles of garbage debt and we all saw the result in 2008......and these institutions all have the advantage of being first in line to dump shares if the bottom falls out.

Yep. You shouldn't invest money in entities that you do not understand (or the person who is investing your money doesn't understand). If you do, then understand that you are just purely gambling which is different from investing.

I blame all generations since I'm in between them all....I think they call us Xennials or Oregon Trail Generation....that 1978-1984 time range or so. We don't quite identify with Millennials since we all grew up still doing book reports on a type writer or by written hand (at least until High school) and most of us didn't have cell phones until we were past college-aged or nearly past it....so we all grew up memorizing phone numbers of friends and family. But our late schooling years were with high speed internet and the age of chat rooms and AIM. We are sort of the linking small generation between analog and digital.

Congrats dude....hopefully you enjoy the new career path and find success there.

I haven't been to one in years but back in the day, it was respectable for a chain. I heard more recent reviews that they burn their food too often nowadays, but back like 15 years ago, I could be generally satisfied going there....and this is coming from a Texas BBQ/steak snob. I do agree there is a bit of cult following to that place though. To me it was just kind of a cheap imitation of an informal Texas steakhouse, but was adequate. I did like that they would cut a steak for you on request if you didn't see one you liked on the menu or display.

Those soundings are pretty close over the interior of SNE/CNE on the GFS for next week. It would take something pretty special, but there's an outsidce shot for measurable.

Yep, the prices are still feeling the wage hike pinch. They try and cut costs where they can but there are employees you have to keep.

This is true, but I often hear rhetoric that is the opposite. "We can't make a living!!!", etc....but then I see everyone's standard of living like 20x better than our parents in the 1970s/1980s.

Automation is already in overdrive....those self-order kiosks are all over the place now so you eliminated a fast food worker with those or a grocery store cashier/bagger. The automation isn't super cheap but once you are forced to decide between paying someone 17 buck an hour or spend the up front capital on automation, it makes sense to do the latter. Contrary to popular belief, a lot of these places run on fairly thin margins and succeed on volume. The volume severely goes down if you have to raise your prices so the numbers stop working.

My most valuable cards from the 1990s are definitely insert cards. I had some good Emmitt Smith insert cards that at the time were going for 50-75 bucks. No idea what they are now. From my uncle's cards, I have a Ricky Henderson rookie card (1980 topps), Andre Dawson rookie (I think 1976 topps), and Ozzie Smith rookie (1979 topps?). The cards were in surprisingly good condition, but no idea whether they would grade out to mint or near-mint by all the psychos who grade these things with an electron microscope.

I used to be obsessed with football cards and baseball cards. I had some older ones from my uncle too...I still have a Wayne Gretzky rookie card. I swear, he bought like 2 packs of hockey cards in his life and one of them happened to be the Gretzky rookie. I still have a ton of football cards from the late 1980s and early 1990s....they aren't valuable as the older stuff, but I did have some pretty good insert cards....I have no idea what they are worth now.

Yeah, land is definitely a problem in more densely populated areas. There is probably going to be some shifting in the coming decade though with remote work being more feasible than ever for some. You'll see people take advantage of the cheap real estate elsewhere while still maintaining their employment from their former area of residence. A good friend of mine just bought a place in Florida after he got sick of Chicago. He is keeping his Chicago job though and just going to work remotely.

There's definitely a chunk of the real estate bubble that is actually real...it's being fueled by inadequate housing supply built. Esp for starter and middle class homes. So much of the construction has been toward the higher income end of the spectrum. They get better margins there and all those middle class developments going belly-up in the 2007-2008 crash spooked a lot of developers so they were slower to come back to building those units. But there's definitely an artificial part of the bubble too. The very low supply isn't all due to lack of construction. A lot of it is due to people just not selling right now which started during the beginning of the pandemic. Once more sellers finally decide to test the waters, there will be a natural correction.

Too many IPAs by Kevin last night.

It’s hard to find but I’ve seen it in a few stores here every now and again. You never see it out at a bar though...only exception I ever came across was sunset grille in Brighton, MA. They had like a million beers there and they actually had 120 min dogfishhead. This was like circa 2007 though and I think they closed down a few years ago.

Snowing here right now with these streamers on radar.

We all can just do exactly the opposite of what lava does with his lawn if we want to avoid a scorched brown mat.

Yeah it is shocking to me that NH isn't legal yet for sales. They decriminalized it several years back, but have lagged on legalizing the sale. At least anyone in new hampshire doesn't have to drive very far to get to a store though since all 3 bordering states allow sales.

Yeah MA took forever to get rid of their sunday blue liquor laws....I think as recently as like '04 or '05 you couldn't buy on a sunday. The finally got rid of it....but they kept strict hours on Sundays until less than 10 years ago when they finally allowed the stores to open before noontime on Sundays.