quantdev

You've clearly made up your mind, considering you are just arguing random points -- your opinion on finance is not relevant to the point that there are lots of C++ jobs in finance. And it's not just for some legacy reason: even much of Blockchain infrastructure is build with C++ and many crypto jobs that are open today are for C++.

No one is trying to convince you to use C++. Obviously the data show there are tons of C++ jobs and this is something you can google yourself. And finance is not a "niche", considering it's like 20% of the US economy. I'm in finance and I write high-performance simulations and pricers. These things need to be predictable, fast, and the code needs to be maintainable. And yes, despite what the prevailing Go or Rust bros say, modern C++ is maintainable.

I'm a fan of Emin Gün Sirer and I don't like Bancor's approach in this response, especially in criticizing his informal tone (who cares?), but it does seem that they're right that he's misunderstood two main points: (1) Bancor tokens are automatically created and destroyed as needed and (2) the pool is collectively owned by all the token holders and not the issuing company.

Disclaimer: I don't know whether this makes Bancor great.

It's not the author taking a stock-centric view; it's the author pushing back against the conventional wisdom of the value of property investment.

As Shiller demonstrates and you even agree to, home prices track inflation over the long term. Further, Shiller -- in Irrational Exuberance -- shows that this is largely because of the money some owners reinvest in keeping their homes modern, so this isn't even a passive tracking of inflation, on average.

The arguments about finite land mass, etc, have been said for decades and I suspect one of two things is true: (1) It's wrong: Manhattan continues to build vertically and while it has a high average rent, the median and lower quantiles are actually much lower than on the West Coast, for example. (2) It's already priced by the market.

Finally, stocks also perform very well in high-inflation environments, so this isn't unique to property. The one difference is that most people have 5-to-1 leverage on their homes, so they enjoy outsized gains, but this is a risk as much as a benefit.

I'm glad you had a revelation and took it so well. Although maybe not as extreme as you, I also used to think nicotine/cigarettes had almost no benefits and was surprised to learn otherwise. I'll go so far as to say as nicotine is quite possibly the most successful nootropic, with modafinil a close second.

Worth the downvotes:

Linode Turns 87178291200

That's very strange that you've never felt stimulation or increased focus from nicotine! It's possible that you have some genetic variation that causes that or it's possible you're just not self aware, but I couldn't say which.

For an incredible overview of the benefits and harms of nicotine, see Gwen: https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine

Exactly. Nicotine has mental health benefits (e.g., schizophrenia ) and is a nootropic, stimulant, and feel-good drug. By smoking, the poor are trading years in the future for pleasantness now. Calling them stupid or irrational just makes too many assumptions about their opportunities, situations, and goals.

To your first statement, is this even true of Amazon?

In the US, Amazon Prime has something like 80% penetration into households making >= $100k/year. This move into Whole Foods reaffirms this focus on high-income households, where convenience is often as large a factor as costs.

My hunch is that Amazon has been a massive positive in aggregate, but poor households have been negatively impacted by Amazon, taking into account loss of jobs, lowering of wages, and some positive lower costs for goods.

Tax cuts to the rich increase investable capital, as I said. Trump also proposed tax cuts for everyone else, too, which would increase consumer spending.

Those gains were most likely based on the anticipation of tax cuts (increasing consumer spending and the supply of investable capital), deregulation (allowing higher profits, most notably by banks), and repatriation (allowing share buy backs).

So far, none of those has happened and it remains to be seen if they will. If they don't, I don't expect a market decline, but just a smaller total cumulative growth since November that has nothing to do with Trump's election or the general agenda I outlined above.

Yeah, this is definitely false, as the other guy said -- its value in USD is whatever you're willing to pay for it in USD.

Maybe what you're thinking of is the fact that it's deflationary unlike fiat: there's a finite number of coins that will ever be created. In other words, if you own exactly one dollar, over time, the percentage of total dollars you own will decrease, whereas with bitcoin, one bitcoin represents a constant fraction of the total bitcoin that will be created. This says nothing about how many gallons of milk one dollar or one bitcoin will buy you though.

They "warned" in an SEC filing that is supposed to state possible investor risks. The way this was reported is the problem and not Snap's statement, which any investor should understand is factually correct.

Snap is a volatile play: there's a high chance, maybe bigger than 50%, that it never becomes profitable, as they warn, and there's some small chance it becomes extremely profitable. The real question is, what's the net present expected value?